The Dilemmas of Destalinisation A Social and Cultural History of Reform in the Khrushchev Era (Basees Curzon Series on Russian & East European Studies)

The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization

Stalin’s death in 1953, and Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin in the ‘Secret Speech’ of 1956, ushered in years of upheaval in Soviet society and party policy. Many of these changes were linked to the desire to ‘de-Stalinize’ the Stalinist state, reducing its emphasis on terror and regimentation, whilst also reinvigorating and revitalizing the socialist project. This volume reveals the many meanings and consequences of the de-Stalinization that was carried out under Khrushchev, with a particular focus on popular opinion, Soviet identity, and social and cultural change. The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization provides a comprehensive history of Khrushchev-era reforms, about which a great deal of information has become available since the opening of the former Soviet archives, casting new light on how far official policies correlated with popular views. The volume considers wide-ranging, but interlinked, developments in Soviet culture including the renunciation of Terror, the denunciation of Stalin, aesthetic experimentation and changes to the private lives of ordinary Soviet citizens. Overall the book appraises the extent of ‘de-Stalinization’ and whether developments in the period represented a real desire for reform, or merely an attempt to fortify the Soviet system along different lines. Particular emphasis is placed on the varying interpretations of the aims and extent of de-Stalinization that were advanced by different social groups, suggesting the creation of a new, post-Stalinist relationship between the party and the Soviet people. This book presents the first wide-ranging and archivally based appraisal of the social and cultural impact of de-Stalinization, and will be of interest to scholars and historians with an interest in Stalin, Khrushchev and the Soviet Union. Polly Jones is Lecturer in Russian at SSEES-UCL. She has published articles on the Stalin cult and de-Stalinization in the journals Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Genèses and Forum for Modern Language Studies. She is co-editor of The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc (Palgrave, 2004).

BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies Series editor: Richard Sakwa, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent Editorial Committee: George Blazyca, Centre for Contemporary European Studies, University of Paisley Terry Cox, Department of Government, University of Strathclyde Rosalind Marsh, Department of European Studies and Modern Languages, University of Bath David Moon, Department of History, University of Strathclyde Hilary Pilkington, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham Stephen White, Department of Politics, University of Glasgow This series is published on behalf of BASEES (the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies). The series comprises original, highquality, research-level work by both new and established scholars on all aspects of Russian, Soviet, post-Soviet and East European Studies in humanities and social science subjects. 1 Ukraine’s Foreign and Security Policy, 1991–2000 Roman Wolczuk 2 Political Parties in the Russian Regions Derek S. Hutcheson 3 Local Communities and Post-Communist Transformation Edited by Simon Smith 4 Repression and Resistance in Communist Europe J.C. Sharman 5 Political Elites and the New Russia Anton Steen 6 Dostoevsky and the Idea of Russianness Sarah Hudspith 7 Performing Russia – Folk Revival and Russian Identity Laura J. Olson

8 Russian Transformations Edited by Leo McCann 9 Soviet Music and Society under Lenin and Stalin The baton and sickle Edited by Neil Edmunds 10 State Building in Ukraine The Ukranian parliament, 1990–2003 Sarah Whitmore 11 Defending Human Rights in Russia Sergei Kovalyov, dissident and Human Rights Commissioner, 1969–2003 Emma Gilligan 12 Small-Town Russia Postcommunist livelihoods and identities: a portrait of the intelligentsia in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 1999–2000 Anne White 13 Russian Society and the Orthodox Church Religion in Russia after Communism Zoe Knox 14 Russian Literary Culture in the Camera Age The word as image Stephen Hutchings 15 Between Stalin and Hitler Class war and race war on the Dvina, 1940–46 Geoffrey Swain 16 Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe The Russian, Czech and Slovak fiction of the changes 1988–98 Rajendra A. Chitnis 17 Soviet Dissent and Russia’s Transition to Democracy Dissident legacies Robert Horvath 18 Russian and Soviet Film Adaptations of Literature, 1900–2001 Screening the word Edited by Stephen Hutchings and Anat Vernitski

19 Russia as a Great Power Dimensions of security under Putin Edited by Jakob Hedenskog, Vilhelm Konnander, Bertil Nygren, Ingmar Oldberg and Christer Pursiainen 20 Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940 Truth, justice and memory George Sanford 21 Conscience, Dissent and Reform in Soviet Russia Philip Boobbyer 22 The Limits of Russian Democratisation Emergency powers and states of emergency Alexander N. Domrin 23 The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization Negotiating cultural and social change in the Khrushchev era Edited by Polly Jones

The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization Negotiating cultural and social change in the Khrushchev era Edited by Polly Jones

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2006 selection and editorial matter, Polly Jones; individual chapters, the contributors

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-415-34514-6 (Print Edition)

Contents

Notes on contributors Acknowledgements Glossary Introduction: the dilemmas of de-Stalinization

ix xii xiii 1

POLLY JONES

PART I

Responses to the Thaw(s): de-Stalinization and public opinion 1

‘Show the bandit-enemies no mercy!’: amnesty, criminality and public response in 1953

19

21

MIRIAM DOBSON

2

From the Secret Speech to the burial of Stalin: real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization

41

POLLY JONES

3

‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? How the Secret Speech was translated into everyday life

64

SUSANNE SCHATTENBERG

4

Naming the social evil: the readers of Novyi mir and Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone, 1956–59 and beyond DENIS KOZLOV

80

viii

Contents

PART II

Forging old/new identities: de-Stalinizing the Stalinist self 5

Forging citizenship on the home front: reviving the socialist contract and constructing Soviet identity during the Thaw

99 101

CHRISTINE VARGA-HARRIS

6

De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood: the quest for moral rebirth, 1953–58

117

ANN LIVSCHIZ

7

The arrival of spring? Changes and continuities in Soviet youth culture and policy between Stalin and Khrushchev

135

JULIANE FÜRST

8

From mobilized to free labour: de-Stalinization and the changing legal status of workers

154

DONALD FILTZER

PART III

Rewriting Stalinism: in search of a new style

171

9

173

Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography, 1953–64 ROGER D. MARKWICK

10 The need for new voices: Writers’ Union policy towards young writers 1953–64

193

EMILY LYGO

11 Modernizing Socialist Realism in the Khrushchev Thaw: the struggle for a ‘Contemporary Style’ in Soviet art

209

SUSAN E. REID

12 ‘Russia is reading us once more’: the rehabilitation of poetry, 1953–64

231

KATHARINE HODGSON

13 Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia: science in schools under Khrushchev

250

MICHAEL FROGGATT

Select bibliography Index

267 276

Contributors

Miriam Dobson is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Sheffield. She completed her PhD at SSEES-UCL in 2003, entitled ‘Refashioning the Enemy: Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of Destalinisation, 1953–64’. Donald Filtzer is Professor of Russian History at the University of East London. He has authored four major studies of Soviet workers in the Stalin, Khrushchev and Gorbachev periods: Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928–1941 (London, 1986); Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953–1964 (Cambridge, 1992); Soviet Workers and the Collapse of Perestroika: The Soviet Labour Process and Gorbachev’s Reforms, 1985–1991 (Cambridge, 1994); and Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System After World War Two (Cambridge, 2002). Michael Froggatt is Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Durham. He has recently completed his doctoral thesis at St. John’s College, Oxford, on the portrayal of science and scientists in the propaganda and popular culture of the Khrushchev period. Juliane Fürst is a Junior Research Fellow at St. John’s College, Oxford. She completed a PhD at the London School of Economics on youth and youth cultures in late Stalinism. She is the author of several articles on youth in the Stalin era, and is currently completing a book titled Stalin’s Last Generation: Youth, Culture and Identity in the post-war Soviet Union 1945–56. Katharine Hodgson is Senior Lecturer in Russian at the University of Exeter. She has published books on the twentieth-century Russian poet Ol’ga Berggol’ts, and on Russian poetry of World War II, as well as articles about twentieth-century poetry and women’s writing. Polly Jones is Lecturer in Russian at SSEES-UCL. She completed her DPhil at Oxford in 2003. She is the author of several articles on the

x

Contributors Stalin cult and de-Stalinization, and joint editor, with Balazs Apor, Jan Behrends and Arfon Rees, of The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships. Stalin and the Eastern Bloc (Palgrave, 2004).

Denis Kozlov is a SSHRC postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation, ‘The Readers of Novyi mir, 1945–1970: TwentiethCentury Experience of Soviet Historical Consciousness’ (University of Toronto, 2005), focused on the intellectual history of late Soviet reading audiences. He has published articles in Kritika and Canadian Slavonic Papers and co-edited, with Lynne Viola, Viktor P. Danilov and Nikolai A. Ivnitskii, The War Against the Peasantry, 1927–1930 (Yale University Press, 2005). Ann Livschiz is an Assistant Professor at the History Department at Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne. She received her PhD from Stanford University for her dissertation ‘Growing Up Soviet: Childhood in the Soviet Union, 1918–1958’. Emily Lygo wrote her doctoral thesis, a history and analysis of Leningrad poetry 1953–75, at Wolfson College, Oxford. She is currently translating a collection of Tat’iana Vol’tskaia’s poetry and prose, entitled Cicada (Bloodaxe, Spring 2006). Roger D. Markwick lectures in history in the School of Liberal Arts, University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography 1956–74 (Palgrave, 2001), which in March 2003 was awarded The Alexander Nove Prize in Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies. He is also the coauthor, with Graeme Gill, of Russia’s Stillborn Democracy? From Gorbachev to Yeltsin (Oxford University Press, 2000). Susan E. Reid is Senior Lecturer in Russian Visual Arts in the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies, University of Sheffield. She has published widely on Soviet visual culture and gender from Stalin to the 1990s, with a focus on the Khrushchev period. She is editor, with David Crowley, of Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe (Berg, 2000); and Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the eastern Bloc (Berg, 2002). Susanne Schattenberg is Assistant Professor of East European History at the Humboldt-University at Berlin. Her PhD at the EuropeanUniversity Francfurt-on-Oder concerned engineers in the 1930s, and was published as Stalins Ingenieure. Lebenswelten zwischen Technik und Terror (Munich, 2002). Since 2002 she has been working on a project about the culture of foreign policy and the communication of diplomats at the end of the Tsarist Empire. Christine Varga-Harris completed her PhD in history at the University of

Contributors xi Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2005. Her dissertation is entitled ‘Constructing the Soviet Hearth: Home, Citizenship and Socialism in Russia, 1956–64’. In an earlier article published in the Canadian Journal of History, she addressed daily life and public discourse during the postwar Stalin period. She is currently Assistant Professor of History at St. Thomas University in Canada.

Acknowledgements

Permission from Palgrave Macmillan is gratefully acknowledged to use material that first appeared in Roger D. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956–1974 (2001, Palgrave).

Illustrations Figure 11.1 Aleksandr Laktionov, Moving into the New Apartment, 1952. Permission to reproduce granted by Donetsk Regional Museum of Art (Donetskii oblastnyi khudozhestvennyi muzei) Figure 11.2 Nikolai Andronov, Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Station, 1957. Permission to reproduce granted by Arkhangel’sk State Museum of Art (Gosudarstvennoe muzeinoe ob’’edinenie ‘Khudozhestvennaia kul’tura Russkogo Severa’)

Glossary

Note: archive name abbreviations can be found in the bibliography Byt way of life, often carrying strong moralizing overtones. Komsomol Party’s youth wing. Kolkhoz Collective farm. Lakirovka ‘lacquering’, ‘varnishing’, a key term in the debates about Stalinist art in the Khrushchev years, accusing art of embellishing reality and concealing problems. LITO (literaturnoe ob’’edinenie, literary association) A literary association or grouping below the level of (and sometimes independent of) the Writers’ Union. Orgnabor Labour recruitment. Pioneers Party’s organization for children. Sovnarkhoz (sovet narodnogo khoziaistva, council of people’s economy) Regional Economic Councils set up by Khrushchev in 1957 to reorganize the economy, switching from ministerial to regional administration. Partiinost’ ‘party-mindedness’, the reflection of party principles in, for example, behaviour, writing. Samizdat Form of publishing documents not publishable under Soviet censorship, often using hand-typed or hand-written copies of documents, circulated informally and secretly. Secret Speech Khrushchev’s speech about Stalin, ‘On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences’, delivered to a closed session of the 20th Party Congress, 25 February 1956. Shestidesiatniki ‘Men/generation of the sixties’, a term usually used to designate prominent cultural figures of the ‘Thaw’ years. Stiliaga A term used to describe the loose phenomenon of fashionhungry youth in post-war USSR, translatable as ‘teddy boy’. Tamizdat Publication of work not publishable under Soviet censorship abroad. ‘Thaw’ One of the terms often used to designate the liberalization in the

xiv Glossary Khrushchev years, especially in Soviet culture. Taken from the title of Il’ia Ehrenburg’s 1954 novel, The Thaw (Ottepel’). Vospitanie Upbringing, with implications ranging beyond parenting (e.g. school, party). Zek A Gulag prisoner (a colloquial abbreviation of zakliuchennyi, ‘imprisoned’).

Introduction The dilemmas of de-Stalinization Polly Jones

The Khrushchev era was a time of enormous changes, some contained in the reforms of the post-Stalinist leadership, others spontaneously welling up ‘from below’ after the end of Stalinism. The negotiations of the Stalinist legacies bequeathed to Stalin’s successors after his death in 1953, until the end of the Khrushchev era, are the subject of this volume. The dilemmas of de-Stalinization encompassed all realms of Soviet life, from party politics to the economy, from art and literature to the writing of history, from criminal justice to the maintenance of social order. In each of these realms, the sudden absence of Stalin, whose charismatic authority had substituted for real political legitimacy, forced his successors to sift the legacy of Stalinism to determine how much of it should be preserved, and how much discarded.1 These dilemmas were both positive and negative. On the one hand, the passing of Stalin made it easier to justify and then implement reforms which were long overdue, but had been largely held in check by the petrified system of late Stalinism.2 By 1953, the Soviet system was in a state of economic, social and cultural crisis.3 The death of Stalin permitted, and indeed compelled, a discussion of the reasons and possible solutions for this catastrophic state of affairs. On the other hand, the new leadership either knew, or came to acknowledge, the dangers of excessive reform. Characteristic of the Khrushchev period were repeated swings in official policy, as the new leadership attempted to maintain a tense balance between enthusiasm for discarding the past, and uncontrolled iconoclasm, between mobilizing the energy of ‘new forces’, and giving in to anarchy, between maintaining the Soviet system, and causing its implosion.4 Yet to recount only the swings in official policy is to simplify the complex, shifting social context to which these reforms were directed, and within which they were received, discussed, and reinterpreted. The essays in this volume examine not only the dilemmas of reform, as negotiated in the sphere of high politics, but also the reception of these policies by the Soviet public, comparing the ‘reform agenda’ of the Soviet leadership with that of the Soviet population. These case studies demonstrate that the zeal for reform on the part of the Soviet leadership – which was itself far from

2

Polly Jones

consistent – sometimes corresponded to that of the Soviet public, whilst at other times it responded to desires for change emanating from ‘below’, whether by encouraging or suppressing them. At the same time, the essays here demonstrate that the Soviet population was riven by its own dilemmas of de-Stalinization: the mentalité of post-Stalinism was an unstable compound of conservatism and radicalism, and ‘friends’ of reform within society could easily transform into its ‘foes’.5 The Stalin cult and the mentality of demonization and denunciation characteristic of the Terror were just two aspects of the Stalinist habitus which lived on into the Khrushchev era.6

Defining de-Stalinization The term ‘de-Stalinization’ (destalinizatsiia) never appeared in the public rhetoric of the Khrushchev era. Instead, the process of raking over the Stalinist past, and especially the rejection of the Stalin cult, was designated by the impersonal, purportedly objective expression, ‘the overcoming/ exposure of the cult of personality’ (preodolenie/razoblachenie kul’ta lichnosti).7 Although before the Secret Speech, there was no overt admission that the ‘cult’ was linked to Stalin, after the revelations of the 20th Party Congress, and especially after the second wave of revelations about Stalin in the early 1960s, the cult of personality would often be attached specifically to Stalin’s name. This generalizing terminology aimed to maintain an air of historical objectivity and impeccable Marxist credentials, whilst also reducing Stalin’s semantic, and therefore political, dominance of the postStalinist scene.8 At the same time, however, the closest equivalent of ‘de-Stalinization’ in the contemporary political lexicon was most often used in the Soviet context to denote a fairly narrow process: the de-mythologization of the leader cult. Gradually, the elliptical expression ‘the era of the cult of personality’ came to substitute for, and in some senses to curtail, a deeper exposition of the complex ramifications of Stalin’s authoritarian regime.9 When reforming state policies such as citizen welfare, the new authorities did not generally refer specifically to Stalin or the cult as the reason for previous delays in such long-needed reforms. Nevertheless, the authorities strongly emphasized the novelty of those reforms, clearly indicating their eagerness to dissociate themselves and their policies from the past and to rejuvenate the Soviet system. Recent archival materials make it clear that strong criticism of Stalin(ism) featured much more frequently in discussions behind closed doors, especially in Khrushchev’s speeches at Central Committee presidium meetings and plenums, than in the public discourse of the post-Stalin era.10 By contrast, the term ‘de-Stalinization’ has appeared widely in postSoviet Russian and Western journalism and scholarship, and in this context it has possessed a wider range of connotations. Often, and espe-

Introduction 3 cially during the Khrushchev era, it did signify the direct criticisms of Stalin made during the series of revelations instigated by the Secret Speech.11 Here the emphasis on Stalin was usually intended as a corrective to Soviet attempts to ‘objectify’ what was in reality a highly subjective, ad hominem attack on the former leader. The persistence with which Western political and scholarly commentators dissected ‘de-Stalinization’ also sought to focus the debate on Stalinism, and on the systemic enquiry which domestic commentators were forced to avoid, or, if they had mistakenly strayed into it, to disavow.12 The primary meaning of ‘deStalinization’, and its opposite, ‘re-Stalinization’, therefore remains the process of historical revisionism which deconstructed the Stalin cult. Historical revisionism is crucial to our understanding of the period, not least because the debunking of Stalin’s authority was a prerequisite for rethinking a whole range of Stalinist priorities and practices in other domains. Accordingly, many chapters here are directly or indirectly concerned with the modifications of Stalin’s image, and especially the significance of major junctures in the ‘anti-Stalin campaign’, such as Khrushchev’s Secret Speech (1956), in advancing or retracting waves of reform. However, ‘de-Stalinization’ has also come to denote more diffuse processes of revision and reform, and these secondary implications are also important to our approach. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have appeared studies of the ‘de-Stalinization’ of the Soviet armed forces, labour relations, the Soviet consumer, design and architecture and criminal justice, amongst other topics.13 The heterogeneity of these fields suggests that an equally heterogeneous definition of de-Stalinization must be sought. Without seeking to simplify these case studies, they suggest that important real or imagined elements of de-Stalinization included liberalization of the authoritarian political culture of Stalinism, a greater emphasis on individual welfare and material well-being, ‘Thaw(s)’ of the Stalinist freeze on freedom of expression, and modifications to the autarkic chauvinism especially characteristic of Cold War Stalinism. This is not to suggest that all, or any, of these aims were achieved during the period, but they were important landmarks in the discursive territory on to which post-Stalinism was mapped in public rhetoric and debates of the time. Of course, the term ‘de-Stalinization’ is potentially problematic when applied to processes not directly linked to the figure of Stalin. How much change has to be desired, or achieved, before it constitutes deStalinization, and when does change stop being evolutionary, and become revolutionary? Can we deem a process ‘de-Stalinization’ if the desire to break with Stalin(ism) is not explicitly articulated? Or, lastly, if a policy claims to constitute de-Stalinization, do the outcomes, which might well end up still being ‘Stalinist’, matter? In exploring the reforms of the Khrushchev era, we must remain aware of the rhetorical constructions of ‘Stalinism’ and ‘post-Stalinism’ (or ‘anti-Stalinism’) on which they often, tendentiously relied.

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The following chapters seek to convey the very real problems that the new leaders inherited after March 1953. They also explore the multifarious dilemmas which attended every stage of the subsequent reform process, from defining these problems (and who or what might be to blame, whether Stalin, his cronies, or the very nature of the Soviet system), to trying to solve them, to defining the limits of change. These dilemmas, like the term ‘de-Stalinization’ itself, and its homonyms, such as ‘Thaw’ (ottepel’), were complex and plagued with indeterminacy. However, in our view, this indeterminacy reflects well the difficulty of measuring or delimiting the enormous impact of Stalin’s death, and the depth and breadth of its ramifications into Soviet life. Accordingly, this study does not seek unduly to limit the meaning(s) of ‘de-Stalinization’, and in so doing, seeks instead to convey the manifold uncertainties and hesitations of this turbulent time, in which the very ideas of stability, control and authority were thrown into question. This volume does not cover all of the reforms of the Khrushchev era; studies of the content of Khrushchev-era policies already exist, although doubtless these too will continue to be modified by the ongoing, accelerating, stream of archival materials from the fondy of the Central Committee and Khrushchev himself.14 The personality of Khrushchev, his leadership struggles with his Central Committee rivals, and similar Kremlinological questions are not considered at length here. Despite the relative paucity of archival information and the unreliability of many available sources about these topics, such questions have long dominated studies of the era, and continue to do so in much post-Soviet scholarship.15 Clearly in a one-party system, with inherent tendencies toward producing leader cults, the role of the Central Committee and the personality of Khrushchev himself should not be understated.16 However, elite negotiations of party policy tell us only one part of a more complex story. The present volume instead focuses on topics which have been underrepresented in studies of post-Stalinism, despite the superior provision of ‘lower-level’ sources: the social and cultural history of the reform process, its impact on Soviet people, and their impact on it. In presenting a series of case studies of the social and cultural aspects of de-Stalinization, we have mostly excluded areas of policy whose implementation did not directly affect the Soviet population, such as foreign policy.17 At the same time, for reasons of space, this volume does not cover in detail some important domains in which de-Stalinization exerted a significant impact, notably agriculture,18 film19 and gender.20 However, through presenting a selection of case studies of some of the most important aspects of de-Stalinization, where the Stalinist past was most clearly at issue, amongst them the antiStalin campaign, the renunciation of Terror, the increased attention to individual welfare, and the ‘Thaw’ in Soviet culture, we focus on the dynamics of the reform process, in order to develop a new framework for our understanding of social and cultural change in the Khrushchev era.

Introduction 5 The studies here urge us not to reduce the dynamics of de-Stalinization to either a bottom-up, or a top-down, explosion of reform, or even a series of swings from left to right. Rather, they indicate that the cardinal dilemma of de-Stalinization, and what remained the focus of negotiation throughout the Khrushchev era, was the prerogative to direct and control social and cultural change. This prerogative, which had belonged to Stalin until his death, was disputed within the Central Committee, as it sought to resolve the post-Stalin power struggle in its own midst. Even in its most populist, radical moments, however, the party continued to believe in the party’s unimpeachable authority over the people. This belief was usually not matched, however, by a stable image of the rights, freedoms and duties of the Soviet citizenry. This struggle for authority had its counterpart outside the corridors of Soviet power, as the Soviet population grappled with potential new forms of interaction between state and society, and between individual citizens. The present volume is divided into three parts – public opinion, identity and style – which broadly reflect the primary focus of the chapters contained within them, although every chapter to some extent considers all three of these intertwined themes. The substance of these themes, and the dilemmas of de-Stalinization which they elucidate, are described below.

Public opinion Like many of the reforms of the Khrushchev era, changes to public opinion came in many guises. Official visions of post-totalitarian channels of communication between people and party – responsible criticism and whistle-blowing directed toward the greater party good – did not often coincide with the reality of a restive, and sometimes rebellious, population. From the literature on dissent in the Khrushchev years, we know that the curtailment of terror and the revelations about Stalin radically changed the boundaries and forms of public opinion.21 These changes led to the first emergence of dissidence (inakomyslie), and recurrent manifestations of more widespread and violent social discontent, such as repeated Gulag revolts (Kengir, Vorkuta) pro-Stalin demonstrations in Georgia (1956) and the riots about food prices in Novocherkassk (1962).22 This emphasis on resistance and repression can, however, mask the fact that the Soviet authorities’ commitment to opening up the public sphere after Stalinism was genuine, and even radical. Although very diverse popular responses to party policy did survive even in the most repressive moments of the Stalin era, the quantity and quality of popular communication with the regime significantly increased in the post-Stalin era, due in part to the ‘freer’ atmosphere often noted by foreign visitors, but due also to specific appeals made in the new party rhetoric.23 Calls for criticism ‘from below’ (snizu) of, for example, despotic managers, negligent or incompetent local party authorities, inadequate provision of consumer

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goods, unsatisfactory child-care and housing were a frequent feature of the public rhetoric of the Khrushchev era.24 They served a variety of aims for the leadership, from exposing the local defects of the economic and political system, and perhaps hastening their rectification, to re-engaging popular energies, and underscoring the new leadership’s commitment to the people, its central claim to legitimacy. This populist appeal, one of the most important changes from Stalinism, induced many more Soviet citizens to write, or otherwise openly respond, to the authorities than had dared to during the Stalin era.25 More of these criticisms found their way on to the pages of the Soviet press, and even occasionally into the body of policy documents, than previously, although vastly more remained unpublished in the archives, and some still spurred aggressive investigations into their authors.26 At the same time, as the chapters in Part I demonstrate, at many junctures in the post-Stalin period, this optimism about public opinion transformed into distrust, anxiety and pessimism about the reliability and benevolence of the people (narod). Additionally, as well as proving to be unreliable objects of the authorities’ experiments in de-Stalinizing public opinion, Soviet citizens as subjects of de-Stalinization did not always welcome the desired changes. As the chapters here make clear, the reluctance to de-Stalinize was common to sectors of the Party authorities and some sectors of the public whose responses indicated the persistence of several key features of the Stalinist mind-set (even as they generally exploited distinctively post-Stalinist norms of communicating with the authorities). Part I begins with Miriam Dobson’s study of one of the earliest episodes of de-Stalinization, the amnesties for Gulag inmates declared in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. Her study of the conflicts in public opinion, and the uncertain discourse of rehabilitation which framed the amnesties, suggest that de-Stalinization may not have been so readily welcomed by the Soviet population as is often thought. It also suggests an uncertainty surrounding the de-Stalinization project from its very inception which, like the conflicts between popular conservatism and radicalism, would not dissipate over subsequent years. Following this case study of early de-Stalinization, other chapters in Part I go on to explore the exceptionally turbulent response aroused by more explicit forms of ‘de-Stalinization’, such as the overt criticisms of the Secret Speech and subsequent anti-Stalin campaign. Polly Jones’ chapter traces the evolution of public opinion over the course of the anti-Stalin campaign, as both a real problem and imaginary category for the Soviet authorities. Even the Secret Speech, (semi-)secret as its dissemination was, contained some hopes for a docile reception amongst the Soviet populace. The chapter describes how these hopes were dashed by the extraordinarily diverse, and mostly undesirable, responses aroused by the speech. It then goes on to examine the second wave of de-Stalinization, in 1961 and after,

Introduction 7 in which the desirable forms of public opinion were not only more clearly imagined, but also more effectively policed, by the authorities. In this sense, the ‘success’ of de-Stalinization depended, paradoxically enough, as much on containing potential forces of iconoclasm and disorder amongst the population as it did on iconoclastic critiques of Stalin’s cult. This is also shown in the case study by Susanne Schattenberg, whose chapter illustrates how the discourse of the 20th Party Congress played out in the space of the factory. Whilst, as in other places, the Secret Speech evoked a wide variety of responses amongst workers, the curtailment of discussions about Stalin did not lead to more exemplary responses. Even more apparently benign discussions of the congress’ economic implications featured harsh criticism by some workers, such as engineers, who debunked the party’s propaganda about ‘democratic’ technical innovation by describing the real difficulties faced by inventors. In this sense, as Schattenberg points out, life began to imitate literature, in this case, the less ‘orthodox’ aspects of Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone, a novel concerned with the struggle between innovators and the dead weight of Soviet bureaucracy. Part I concludes with Denis Kozlov’s more detailed study of Dudintsev’s text, which uses a vast corpus of readers’ letters concerning this banner work of the Thaw to demonstrate some broader features of ‘Thaw psychology’. Kozlov argues that Not by Bread Alone, which critiqued many weaknesses and outright injustices of the Stalinist system, did not, despite its publication in the liberal Novyi mir, evoke an entirely ‘deStalinized’ reader response. Instead, readers’ discourse occupied a paradoxical position between repudiation of Stalinism, including Terror, and the perpetuation of a distinctively Stalinist mentality of social exclusion, directed at the villainous bureaucrats of the novel. Kozlov’s chapter serves as a suitably ambiguous conclusion to Part I, in which de-Stalinization is shown to be a highly unstable, and de-stabilizing, force in the Soviet public sphere. Not only were the Soviet authorities’ own discourses and policies of de-Stalinization extremely fragile and prone to change, but popular sentiments for or against de-Stalinization did not emerge as stable social cleavages in post-Stalinist society. As such, deStalinization emerges as a process, and dialogue, rather than a finite policy initiative. The negotiation, and sometimes competition, over the meanings of de-Stalinization continued throughout the period. Indeed, these multiple fissures in public opinion may have been the most lasting legacy of de-Stalinization.

De-Stalinizing the Stalinist self In addition to these intended and unintended changes to public opinion, de-Stalinization carried broader populist commitments; it meant renewed attention to citizen welfare, shown, for instance, in the increased emphasis

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on consumerism,27 housing28 and more ‘democratic’ working practices.29 Each set of reforms was predicated on a negative view of Stalinism, in order to emphasize the new regime’s legitimacy. In a broad sense, the reforms often implicitly caricatured the Stalin era as neglectful of the individual, and Stalinist society as a horde of faceless masses (in Stalin’s own formulation, vintiki) ignored or abused by Stalin. The re-orientation of the economy toward group B industries, for instance, implicitly cast the Stalin era as neglectful of the consumer and the daily needs of individuals, whereas the economic plans for the Khrushchev era insistently reiterated its commitment to the ‘good of the people’ (blago naroda).30 Images of housewarming (novosel’e) were one of the defining tropes of the Thaw, suggesting a liberation from the overcrowded indignities of the communal apartment, and the possibility of ‘making a home’ in spacious, modern surroundings, with the new home serving as a metaphor for the more benign post-Stalinist society.31 Lastly, the changes to worker welfare – including higher pensions, better maternity provision, shorter working days, and a more egalitarian shop-floor culture – pictured Stalinist managers, especially after the Secret Speech, as ‘mini-Stalins’ with their own cults of personality, which had prevented them from letting workers have their say, and blinded them to their welfare issues. These local misfortunes stood, of course, as metonyms for the brutal Stalinist state as a whole. Dilemmas attended each of these reforms, which bruited their commitment to rescuing the Soviet citizen from Stalin’s dismissal of them as mere screws in the larger state machine, but never resolved the issues of individuation and privatization that they inevitably implied. Having dismissed the cult of personality (kul’t lichnosti), the regime found it difficult to accept the new Soviet individual (lichnost’) which emerged from its de-Stalinizing reforms. Christine Varga-Harris explores the paradoxes of post-Stalinist identity formation in her study of housing policy during the Khrushchev era. On the one hand, the shift to mass housing construction did represent a radical break with foregoing policies, and doubtless improved the lot of many thousands of individuals and families hitherto forced to live in communal accommodation. On the other hand, the policy’s emphasis on quantity, not quality, perpetuated many of the systemic failings of the Stalinist economy. This raised popular expectations without fulfilling them, and such failings in the Khrushchev era, as discussed above, provoked much more vociferous and bold criticism than in the Stalin era. The uniquely close connection between identity and home, emphasized in the rhetoric of the time, spawned in letters about housing a new discourse in which a new Soviet self gradually took shape. Citizenship, privacy and a more reciprocal relationship between state and people were key concerns in these communications, as letter writers actively engaged in re-shaping the official rhetoric of de-Stalinization, investing it with their own meanings. As with imagery of the home, popular appropriations of the new official

Introduction 9 cache of identities also affected the workplace. As Susanne Schattenberg and Donald Filtzer argue, the official discourse (and substantive policy innovations) concerning worker rights provided a platform from which workers could demand further freedoms. These could include the freedom to propose economic and technical innovations over the heads of factory bureaucrats (Schattenberg), or, more ominously for economic productivity, the freedom to move jobs, even though conditions on the shop floor had improved since Stalin’s time (Filtzer). The Soviet authorities were only too aware that its discourse of individual identity might also appear to condone a retreat into the private sphere, and disengagement from collective pursuits. An understandable, although paradoxical, feature of ‘de-Stalinization’ which ran concurrently with its emphasis on individual well-being and private freedoms was therefore a renewed attention to mobilizing the population to participate in public initiatives and collective life.32 In practice, this often entailed intrusive violations of privacy at least the equal of any Stalin-era surveillance.33 The proposed reconciliation between a citizen contented in his private life and engaged in publicly useful work, an ideal forcefully propagated in the Third Party Program (1961), was supposed to result from an erasure of the boundaries between public and private. Citizens were accordingly urged to engage in all manner of collective pursuits just over – and ideally, beyond – the threshold of their new private apartments, including beautifying (blagoustroistvo) their neighbourhood and organizing leisure pursuits for its inhabitants.34 In a broader sense, although the period saw massive reforms directed specifically at the educational system, to allow the inculcation of socially useful skills (especially production skills) and Soviet morality, the official rhetoric increasingly imagined the whole of Soviet society as a ‘state school’. This educative rhetoric, like so many tropes of the ‘Thaw’, was Janus-faced. On the one hand, it imagined Soviet people, especially the fresh-faced youngest generations, as perfectible. Within the prevalent discourse of upbringing (vospitanie), children were often optimistically viewed as blank slates, on which the Soviet system could inscribe its ideal characteristics.35 At the same time, as Ann Livschiz describes, when the debate about children’s upbringing was re-opened in the freer postStalinist context, it revealed the staggering scale of child immorality and juvenile delinquency, problems which only persisted and even increased in the Khrushchev era, defying the utopian hopes of reformers. Similarly, as Juliane Fürst argues, youth, another key trope in the rhetoric of the time, and a central focus of many policies, including the nurturing of young artists (see Lygo) and the Virgin Lands campaign, proved in reality to be, at best, a disappointment, and at worst, a major concern for the party authorities. Alternative youth cultures and high rates of juvenile delinquency had generated problems in the Stalin era, and they only worsened within the post-Stalinist context of greater leniency in criminal justice, and

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increased exposure to Western (youth) culture. Accordingly, both children and youth peopled the new Soviet imagination as ideal bearers of communism, yet also as incorrigible wrong-doers, resistant to propaganda and a threat to the socialist project. Similar ambiguity surrounded the older generations, who could be – in reality and rhetoric alike – dangerous remnants of the past (perezhitki proshlogo) with bad habits (including poor parenting), which might nevertheless be ‘liquidated’ using the correct propaganda.36 The prominence of vospitanie in the party’s dealings with all generations, especially in the 1960s, with the introduction of the new Party Program, indicated that post-Stalinism would not dispense with the moral interventionism characteristic of Stalinism.37 At the same time, the period saw, as Livschiz and Fürst argue, greater defiance of the party-state’s entitlement to subject its young citizens to vospitanie. This might partially explain the new legislation on parasitism and hooliganism, which was introduced at the same time as the optimistic party program, as Miriam Dobson describes in her chapter. In the early 1960s, and arguably throughout the entire Khrushchev era, party discourse was caught between optimism about the headlong rush into communism and excoriation of the persistent forces of backwardness which held the party back from reaching its ultimate goal. This ambiguous discourse, and the contradictory impulses toward persuasion and coercion in party policy, indicated that a sense of pessimism about human nature, and quasi-Stalinist methods of enforcing (rather than merely inculcating) Soviet morality, still underlay the path to the glorious future.

De-Stalinization and style Peripheral as it may seem to the welter of pressing socio-economic problems which faced the Soviet leadership in the 1950s and 1960s, the question of style was in fact central to the party’s search for legitimacy in the post-Stalin era. One of the principal and most public dilemmas of deStalinization was how to revitalize Soviet culture, to make it a relevant and exciting means of communication between party and people, replacing the dogmatic, repetitive and patently idealized propaganda of the Stalin era. At the same time, the quest for a new de-Stalinized style – one that was variously coded as more ‘sincere’, ‘truthful’, ‘lively’, ‘inspiring’ or, sometimes, simply ‘stylish’ – took many forms, and involved many different interpretations of the parameters of the new style, and indeed the parameters of freedom of expression, which collided over the course of the decade.38 In the debates over ‘style’, the stakes were high: these negotiations raised questions about party prerogatives in culture, the nature of the socialist project and its guiding ideology (and the appropriate forms, if any, of Socialist Realism), and, fundamentally, the possibility of ‘truth’ and freedom of expression in a one-party state. Although the Khrushchev era

Introduction 11 has traditionally been identified as a time of ‘Thaw’ (ottepel’) which helped to defrost the static and soulless culture of the Stalin era, it is more apt to speak of several ‘Thaws’, of varying origin, duration and temperature.39 The origins of the ‘Thaws’, it is argued here, lay not only in the longsuppressed desires of writers, artists and teachers for greater creative expression, but also in the overt encouragement of stylistic reform – albeit within strict limits – by the highest party authorities in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death. This was evident in the earliest moves against the cult in the media and against ‘varnishing of reality’ (lakirovka) in art, the deliberate fostering of youthful creativity by the cultural authorities, as a counterweight to the conservative Stalin-era cultural bureaucrats (see Lygo and Reid), and public exhortations, especially in 1956 and after, to the cowed historical profession to cast off the shackles of Stalinist dogma, such as the paradigm set by the Short Course (see Markwick). Whilst the party’s definition of the Stalin cult was notoriously opaque, the kul’t lichnosti was consistently blamed for suppressing debate, both academic (especially in the social sciences) and more broadly public, as well as for encouraging a dogmatic acceptance of Stalinist thinking (nachetnichestvo).40 Ideally, the cultural intelligentsia, grateful for the party’s partial lifting of restrictions on censorship, was to spearhead a union-wide discussion of the drawbacks of Stalinism, revealing some harsh truths about the past and pinpointing areas for improvement in the present. Additionally, and more importantly, they were to move on from this episode of retrospection and begin to create heroic new Soviet myths, drawing on the best traditions of the past and the stunning achievements of the present. Predictably, the party’s faith in the goodwill (construed as political obedience) of the creative intelligentsia waxed and waned over the course of this turbulent decade, in part due to Khrushchev’s own unsophisticated and inconsistent views on culture.41 It is also true, as the authors here argue, that the party’s modest hopes for controlled liberalization were more often than not confounded by daring attempts ‘from below’ at revisionism, iconoclasm and what the party termed ‘anti-Soviet’ radicalism, such as the defiance of party controls over culture.42 However, for all that, it would be a mistake to discount the role of ‘top-down’ forces in instigating cultural de-Stalinization after Stalin’s death. The duration and temperature of the various Thaws, as well as of the freezes punctuating them, can also only be determined if we take both official policy and unofficial practices into account. Most of the chapters here concur that the end of the Khrushchev era did mark a decisive shift away from liberalism, however restricted these partial freedoms may have been. On the other hand, from several chapters, including those by Lygo, Reid and Markwick, it is apparent that trends toward a harder line in culture can be discerned much earlier in the period. Cultural policy was punctuated by a number of pendulum shifts, notably the upsurge of liberalization in 1956 (after the 20th Party Congress) and 1961–62 (the 22nd Party

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Congress and its aftermath), and its decline in late 1954–55, late 1956–57, and 1963. However, a much harder freeze does appear to have set in as early as late 1962, resulting in the trial of Iosif Brodskii, the Manège affair, the ideological plenum of summer 1963, and a continued hardening of the stance on hooliganism and parasitism.43 This problematic, tortuous chronology suggests that we should not view the Khrushchev era as exceptional, much less unique, in the history of cultural policy. Khrushchev himself was no liberal in matters of culture, and the Soviet cultural apparatus – the interlocking system of censorship, unions and patronage which had taken form in the Stalin era – remained unscathed by de-Stalinization. Although numerous ‘children of the 20th congress’ have in retrospect considered the Khrushchev era a halcyon period of relative freedom, the essays here argue that there was no consistent commitment to liberalization on the part of the authorities, nor even within the various cultural communities, where the conservative opposition to de-Stalinization remained formidable.44 Rather, the ‘Thaw’ and substantive ‘de-Stalinization’ took place, against fierce opposition, only within certain sectors of the cultural community, many of which were forced underground even before the end of the Khrushchev era. Rather than recounting the successful implementation of deStalinization, therefore, the chapters in Part III document instead a growing diversity of forms of de-Stalinization, which grew out of the initial impetus to dissociate from the Stalinist stylistic and cultural heritage. As Roger Markwick argues, for instance, de-Stalinization portended many changes to the historical profession, from the re-thinking of the professional identity of the historian (a generally agreed prerequisite to revisionism) to the re-thinking of the Stalinist past (useful to the party within limits), and sometimes the entire post-revolutionary era (emphatically off limits). The commitment to one or other of these forms of revisionism tended to deepen the divisions between ‘official’ historians, and those who would gradually emerge as dissident, samizdat history writers. A nascent dissident culture is also foreshadowed in the conclusion to Emily Lygo’s examination of the short-lived concordat between young writers and the party-state, whose curtailment propelled many former ‘young hopes’ more firmly into ‘alternative’ creative activities. Even the ‘old guard’ of writers examined by Katharine Hodgson, who might have been more reliable companions along the path to de-Stalinization, often transgressed official limits in their meditations on the Stalinist past; many of their thoughtful attempts to de-Stalinize their own memories and artistic identities were not published, and this, again, abetted the emergence of an alternative ‘culture of de-Stalinization’.45 This culture of samizdat and unofficial groupings, which started to probe the deeper systemic problems sidestepped by official narratives of de-Stalinization, was a significant force in the dissident movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, re-grouping to oppose ‘re-Stalinization’ under Brezhnev, for example.46

Introduction 13 What, then, prevented the party from accepting this more coherent culture of de-Stalinization? All the chapters here indicate that ‘partymindedness’, or the centrality of socialist ideology, remained the fulcrum of party policy throughout the period. Michael Froggatt’s chapter on the culture of science illustrates the ways in which the liberalizing tendencies of de-Stalinization were consistently tempered by the intense ideological tenor, even utopianism, of the Khrushchev years. Whilst science undoubtedly became more ‘open-minded’ in the period, re-thinking some Stalinist and Lysenkoist dogma and accepting some Western influences, it continued to be the handmaiden of ideology, providing the materialist foundation for intensified anti-religious campaigns in the education system and wider Soviet society. Meanwhile, whilst the literary, artistic and historiographical communities were encouraged to slough off the dead hand of Stalinism, dispensing with dogma, cant and ‘varnishing of reality’, it was clear that Socialist Realism and ‘party mindedness’ (partiinost’) were to be preserved and even strengthened as guiding principles. The period saw some genuine debate about the forms of Socialist Realism, in which reflections on the ‘new style’ for the self-proclaimed ‘new era’ were not only allowed, but also encouraged. Susan Reid shows that, despite the deep divisions within the artistic community between conservatives and radicals, there was some consensus on the need to create a rejuvenated style to reflect the achievements of the revolutionary present. There were concurrent debates in other cultural forums about narratives and images which might best reflect the optimism and heroism of the surge toward communism heralded by the Third Party Programme (1961).47 However, radical revisionism was not to be countenanced, whether in the form of interest in Western modernism (Reid), interrogations of the origins of the Soviet system, including the revolution of 1917 (Markwick), excessively personal poetry (Lygo, Hodgson) or, indeed, any tendency which the Central Committee might deem to fall outside the bounds of Socialist Realism. For, ill-defined as Socialist Realism remained,48 at no time in this period did the party relinquish its prerogatives to define what it was, and was not. In this lay one of the principal continuities with the Stalin era.

Conclusion Viewed through the prism of the ‘re-Stalinization’ which succeeded it, the ‘de-Stalinization’ of the Khrushchev era appears exceptional, an anomalous and unique episode in Soviet history. Certainly, looking for precedents for glasnost’ and perestroika, the intelligentsia and party in the Gorbachev years concurred in their praise for the bold reforms of the Khrushchev years.49 Yet how bold were these changes? And to what extent can they be attributed to Khrushchev and his regime? The reforms to criminal justice, especially the amnesties, and the debunking of the Stalin cult in the Secret Speech stand as lasting

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achievements of the period, for they ensured that full re-Stalinization – of the Gulag, and of the Stalin cult – would never again be possible. Despite the party’s best efforts in the latter years of the Khrushchev era, the ‘Thaw’ in culture and the de-Stalinization of the public sphere would also exert a lasting influence; never again could state–society relations be meaningfully described as totalitarian, and the freedoms which sectors of the intelligentsia tasted in the 1950s and early 1960s were transferred into dissident culture, where they continued to present a serious challenge into the Brezhnev era. Arguably, in a wider sense, the shift from the aggressively public culture of the Stalin era to the more ‘normal’ privacy of the Khrushchev years inadvertently initiated the ‘privatization’ and even deideologization of Soviet culture which would continue into late socialism. In view of the real and potential dangers of ‘de-Sovietizing’ the system, the dilemmas of de-Stalinization did not therefore end with the renunciation of the coercive mechanisms of the Stalin era. Indeed, these initial reforms threw up more questions than they answered. What, now, would ensure popular participation in the efforts to boost economic productivity, arguably the central goal of these reforms? Would mobilization, based on persuasion and enthusiasm, be a sound basis for economic success and social control? And where did the limits to iconoclasm and liberalization lie? These were profound dilemmas, deepened by the party’s unchanged commitment to the strengthening of the Soviet system. They led to the paradoxical combinations of liberalism and conservatism, iconoclasm and preservation of Stalinist norms in party policy which the chapters here delineate. These paradoxes were mirrored in the uncertainty which gripped the Soviet population, as it held its own debates about the Stalin cult, terror, post-Stalinist identity and the post-Stalinist system, unsure of the limits of discussion, and of the uncertain answers which emerged. Therefore, although 1953 undoubtedly constituted a pivotal moment, the paradoxical outcomes of de-Stalinization problematize the very idea of a turning point. Much post-Stalinist change had its origins in pressures that had accumulated before 1953, and it all too often perpetuated the values and practices of that earlier time. ‘De-Stalinization’ was improvised from a mixture of old and new mentalities and policies, belying the sense of finality implied in both the Russian and English renderings of the term. In this sense, the idea of ‘Thaw’ might better capture the fragility, the potential for reversal (or ‘freeze’), which each tentative forward step carried. Both terms appear in the chapters which follow; let us now turn to their detailed exposition of the dilemmas of de-Stalinization.

Notes 1 On the Stalin cult as a form of legitimization, see B. Apor, J. Behrends, P. Jones and A. Rees (eds), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc, London: Palgrave, 2004, esp. chapters by Benno Ennker and Jan Behrends; c.f. J. Brooks, Thank you Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public

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Culture from Revolution to Cold War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. E.g. Y. Gorlizki, ‘Party Revivalism and the Death of Stalin’, Slavic Review, vol. 54, no. 1, 1995, 1–22; M. Zezina, ‘Crisis in the Union of Soviet Writers in the early 1950s’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 46, no. 4, 1994, 649–61. See, for example, Ibid.; E. Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. and ed. H. Ragdale, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1998; D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. For the fullest account of these ‘schizophrenic’ swings, which links them to Khrushchev’s own manic depressive personality, see W. Taubman, Khrushchev. The Man and His Era, New York: W. Norton, 2003. S. Cohen, ‘The Friends and Foes of Change: Reformism and Conservatism in the Soviet Union’, in S. Cohen, A. Rabinowitch and R. Sharlet (eds), The Soviet Union Since Stalin, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. On the mentality of Stalinism, see Brooks, Thank you Comrade Stalin! and Kh. Kobo (ed.), Osmyslit’ kul’t Stalina, Moscow, 1989, passim.; On the syncretic post-Stalinist mentality, see M. Dobson, ‘Re-fashioning the Enemy: Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of Destalinisation 1953–1964’, PhD Diss., University of London, 2003. The term appeared in the title of the Secret Speech itself, O kul’te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh (‘On the cult of personality and its consequences’) and in the July 1956 resolution, O preodolenii kul’ta lichnosti i ego posledstvii (‘On the overcoming of the cult of personality and its consequences’), as well as in the period preceding the Secret Speech, where the idea of the ‘kul’t lichnosti’ appeared frequently in the press, without being linked to Stalin (on early impersonal criticism of the cult, see R. Conquest, Power and Policy in the USSR, London, 1961, p. 278). On the vagueness of the term ‘kul’t’, see L. Maksimenkov, ‘Kul’t. Zametki o slovakh-simvolakh v sovetskoi politicheskoi kul’ture’, Svobodnaia mysl’, no. 10, 1993, 26–44. E.g. ‘Leninskie normy – osnova partiinoi zhizni’, Pravda, 18 August 1961, p. 4; ‘K predstoiashemu izdaniiu mnogotomnoi istorii KPSS’, Pravda, 22 June 1962, pp. 3–4, 24 June 1962, pp. 2–3; ‘Geroicheskii put’ Leninskoi partii. Vtoroe izdanie uchebnika “Istoriia KPSS” ’, Pravda, 15 November 1962, p. 2; ‘Torzhestvo Leninskikh printsipov’, 29 November 1961, p. 2; ‘Rech’ Tov. Il’icheva’, Pravda, 19 June 1963, p. 2. E.g. Prezidiium TsK, Moscow: Rosspen, 2003, pp. 399–400, 470, 512, 605, 634–6, 799. The descriptions of Stalin, and Stalin’s time, are invariably derogatory, implying amongst other things that Stalin underwent a marked mental deterioration during the latter half of his rule. R. Tucker, ‘The Politics of Soviet De-Stalinization’, in Id., The Soviet Political Mind. Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change, rev. ed., New York: W. Norton, 1971, pp. 173–202; H. Achminow, ‘A Decade of de-Stalinization’, Studies on the Soviet Union, vol. 5, no. 3, 1965, 11–20. For an overview of these foreign interpretations of de-Stalinization, see E. Zolina, ‘Destalinizatsiia v SSSR v otsenkakh politologov’, Mezhdunarodnaia zhizn’, no. 7, 1993, 138–44. Iu. Abramova, ‘Destalinizatsiia sovetskogo obshchestva i vooruzhennye sily v 1953–1964 gg.’, in V.S. Lelchuk, G.Sh. Sagatelian (eds), Sovetskoe obshchestvo: budni kholodnoi voiny. Materialy ‘kruglogo stola’, Institut Rossiiskoi istorii. RAN 29 Marta 2000 g., Moscow-Arzamas: Institut Rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2000, pp. 203–20; S. Reid, ‘Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev’, Slavic Review vol.

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Polly Jones 61, no. 2, 2002, 211–52; D. Filtzer, The Khrushchev era: De-Stalinization and the Limits of Reform in the USSR, 1953–64, London: Macmillan, 1993; Id., Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization. The consolidation of the modern system of Soviet production relations, 1953–1964, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; A. Van Goudoever, tr. F. Hijkoop, The Limits of DeStalinization in the Soviet Union: Political Rehabilitations in the Soviet Union since Stalin, London: Croom Helm, 1986. Earlier accounts in e.g. E. Crankshaw, Khrushchev’s Russia London: Penguin, 1962; R. Medvedev, Zh. Medvedev, Khrushchev. The Years in Power, New York: W. Norton, 1978; M. McCauley, Khrushchev and Khrushchevism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Archivally based accounts include A. Gleason, S. Khrushchev, W. Taubman (eds), Nikita Khrushchev, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000; Iu. Aksiutin, A. Pyzhikov, Poststaliniskoe obshchestvo: problemy liderstva i transformatsiia vlasti, Moscow: Nauchnaia kniga, 1999; Taubman, Khrushchev. Document collections include Prezidiium Tsk; Istochnik, esp. no. 6, 2004; Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich 1957. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond ‘Demokratiia’, 1998; Reabilitatsiia. Kak eto bylo. Dokumenty, Moscow: Rosspen, 2003. Contemporary ‘Kremlinological’ accounts include Conquest, Power and Policy; C. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957–64, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1980. More recent studies include Iu. Aksiutin (ed.), Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev. Materialy k biografii, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1989; R. Pikhoia, Sovetskii soiuz. Istoriia vlasti, Moscow: RAGS, 1998; V. Naumov, ‘K istorii sekretnogo doklada N.S. Khrushcheva na XX s’’ezde KPSS’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 4, 1996, 147–68. Taubman, Khrushchev. Although, of course, increased international contacts, due to tourism and events such as the Moscow Youth Festival, certainly helped to internationalize the Soviet mind-set, see e.g. K. Roth-Ey, ‘ “Loose” girls on the loose?: Sex, propaganda and the 1957 youth festival’, in M. Ilic, S. Reid, L. Attwood (eds), Women in the Khrushchev era, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004, pp. 75–95. On agriculture, see I.E. Zelinin, Agrarnaia politika N.S. Khrushcheva i sel’skoe khoziaistvo, Moscow: RAN, 2001; A. Strelianyi, ‘Khrushchev and the Countryside’, in Gleason, Khrushchev, Taubman, Nikita Khrushchev; M. Pohl, ‘Women and Girls in the Virgin Lands’, in Ilic, Reid, Attwood (eds), Women in the Khrushchev Era, pp. 52–74. See J. Woll, Real Images. Soviet Cinema and the Thaw, London: Tauris, 2000. See Ilic, Reid, Attwood (eds), Women in The Khruschev Era. On public opinion, see e.g. B. Grushin, Chetyre zhizni Rossii v zerkale oprosov obshchestvennogo mneniia: epokha Khrushcheva, Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2001; Iu. Aksiutin, Khrushchevskaia ‘ottepel’’ i obshchestvennye nastroeniia v SSSR v 1953–1964 gg., Moscow: Rosspen, 2004; c.f. M. Gorshkov, O. Volobuev, V. Zhuravlev (eds), Vlast’ i oppozitsiia: Rossiiskii politicheskii protsess dvadtsatogo stoletiia Moscow: Rosspen, 1995. On dissent, see Ibid., and E. Kulavig, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev: Nine Stories About Disobedient Russians, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002; L. Alexeyeva, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin era, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993; V. Kozlov, Massovye bezporiadki v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve (1953-nachalo 1980), Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 1999; A. Applebaum, Gulag. A History, New York: Penguin, 2003, pp. 435–76; V. Kozlov, S. Mironenko (eds), 58–10. Nadzornye proizvodstva Prokuratury SSSR po delam ob antisovetskoi agitatsii i propagandy. Mart 1953–1991, Moscow: Mezhdunarodnaia fond ‘demokratiia’, 1999. On public opinion in the Stalin era, see e.g. S. Davies, Popular Opinion in

Introduction 17

24 25

26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33

34

35

36 37

Stalin’s Russia, Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; L. Viola, Contending with Stalinism. Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002; eyewitness accounts of the Khrushchev years include H. Salisbury, Moscow Journal: The End of Stalin, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961; L Fischer, Russia Revisited, London: Jonathan Cape, 1957; On the post-totalitarian mindset and atmosphere, c.f. L. Brusilovskaia, ‘Kul’tura povsednevnosti v epokhu “ottepeli” (metamorfozy stilia)’, Obshchestevennye nauki i sovremennost’, no. 1, 2000, 163–74. E.g. ‘Pis’ma chitatelei’, Pravda, 3 February 1961, p. 3, ‘Za pis’mom – chelovek’, Pravda, 22 March 1961, p. 1; ‘Chitatel’skie razdumiia: rastet u menia syn’, Pravda, 27 February 1963, p. 4. S. Bittner, ‘Local Soviets, Public Order and Welfare After Stalin: Appeals from Moscow’s Kiev Raion’, Russian Review, vol. 62, no. 2, 2003, 281–93; C. Kelly, ‘Retreat from Dogmatism. Populism under Khrushchev and Brezhnev’, in C. Kelly, D. Shepherd (eds), Russian Cultural Studies. An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 249–73. Where letters were anonymous and/or harshly critical of Soviet power, investigations were assiduous e.g. RGANI 5/34/2/47-53; RGANI 5/30/140/161-70. Reid, ‘Cold War in the kitchen’. E.g. S. Harris, ‘Recreating Everyday Life: Building, Distributing, Furnishing and Living in the Separate Apartment in Soviet Russia, 1950s–1960s’, PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2003. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization. Very prevalent; a few examples are Ogonek, no. 44, 1955, p. 2; ‘Kommunisticheskii put’ pod’’ema narodnogo khoziaistva’, Pravda, 22 November 1961, p. 4; ‘Dlia blaga cheloveka’, Pravda, 27 October 1962, p. 2; ‘Dlia blaga naroda’, Pravda, 4 November 1963, p. 1. E.g. Ogonek, no. 49, 1954, p. 1; Ogonek, no. 52, 1961, p. 2. See D. Field, ‘Communist Morality and Meanings of Private Life in PostStalinist Russia, 1953–64’, PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1996. As argued in V. Buchli, ‘Khrushchev, Modernism, and the fight against petitbourgeois consciousness in the Soviet home’, Journal of Design History, 1997, vol. 10, no. 2, 1997, 161–76; O. Kharkhordin, The Collective and The Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, pp. 279–328. C. Varga-Harris, ‘ “At Home as at Work”: Popular Initiative and the Revival of Socialism in Russia under Khrushchev’, unpublished MS, paper delivered to the 35th Annual Convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Toronto, 2003. ‘Pochemu nado vospityvat’ detei s pervykh let zhizni’, Doshkol’noe vospitanie, 1960, no. 2, 10–14; ‘Rabota vospitatelia s det’mi rannego vozrasta’, Doshkol’noe vospitanie, 1960, no. 10, 15–20; ‘Vospityvat’ cheloveka budushchego’, Doshkol’noe vospitanie, 1961, no. 10, 8–12; emphasis on co-ordinated efforts by school and family was very common in the specialist and non-specialist press, e.g. ‘Uchitel’ i sem’ia’, Pravda, 3 December 1962, p. 3. ‘Plenum TsK VLKSM’, Pravda, 28 February 1957, p. 2; ‘Vospitanie chuvstv. Iz zapisnoi knizhki pisatelia’, Pravda, 12 November 1961, p. 6; ‘Partiinaia organizatsiia i shkola’, Pravda, 11 June 1962, p. 2. Examples of vospitanie of all generations: ‘Vospityvat’ liubov’ i uvazhenie k trudu’, Pravda, 29 August 1963, p. 1; ‘rech’ idet o vospitanii cheloveka’, Pravda, 23 September 1957, p. 4; ‘uchit’ i vospityvat’’, Pravda, 17 June 1961, p. 2; ‘vospityvat’ novogo cheloveka’, Pravda, 15 September, 1961 p. 3; ‘moral’nyi kodeks strotelia kommunizma’, Pravda, 24 September 1961, p. 1.; ‘Zhizn’, kollektiv –

18

38

39

40 41

42 43 44

45

46 47 48 49

Polly Jones luchshie vospitateli’, Pravda, 11 January 1963; ‘vospityvat’ aktivnykh bortsov za kommunizm’, Pravda, 8 June 1963, p. 2; ‘Rech’ Tov Il’icheva’. On sincerity and truth, see V. Pomerantsev, ‘Ob iskrennosti v literature’, Novyi mir, 1953, no. 12, 218–45. The concern that propaganda should be lively and inspiring was reflected in recurrent calls to overcome the ‘divorce from reality’ (otryv ot zhizni) supposedly typical of Stalin-era propaganda and education at the 20th Congress (see Iu. Aksiutin, O. Volobuev, XX s’ezd KPSS: novatsii i dogmy, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1991) and in the press, e.g. ‘Nazrevshie voprosy narodnogo obrazovaniia’, Pravda, 6 September 1958, p. 2, ‘Samoe vazhnoe, samoe glavnoe v vospitanii novogo cheloveka’, Pravda, 15 April 1964, pp. 2–3. On ‘style’ as an important category in the era, see e.g. L. Brusilovskaia, Kul’tura povsednevnosti v epokhu ‘ottepeli’: metamorfozy stilia, Moscow: URAO, 2001. Ottepel’. Stranitsy russkoi sovetskoi literatury, 3 vols, Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1989–90; Alexeyeva, Goldberg, Thaw Generation; A. Pyzhikov, Khrushchevskaia ottepel’, 1953–1964, Moscow: ‘Olma-Press’, 2002. C.f. Vladimir Bukovsky’s cynicism about the extent of liberalization (V. Bukovsky, To Build a Castle. My Life as a Dissenter, New York: Viking, pp. 108–13). E.g. Pravda, 4 February 1962, p. 3; Pravda, 20 June 1963, p. 3. See H. Swayze, Political Control of Literature in the USSR 1946–59, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962; P. Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts: the Politics of Soviet Culture, 1963–64, Cambridge MA: M.I.T. Press, 1965; G. Gibian, Interval of Freedom: Soviet Literature during the Thaw, 1954–1957, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960; M. Zezina, Sovetskaia kudozhestvennaia intelligentsia i vlast’ v 1950–60-e gody, Moscow: Dialog MGU, 1999; V. Lakshin, Novyi mir vo vremena Khrushcheva: dnevnik i poputnoe (1953–1964), Moscow: izdatel’stvo ‘knizhnaia palata’, 1991. Reabilitasiia, pp. 208–14; Pravda, 19–22 June 1963. Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 589–602. On the mythology propagated by the ‘children of the 20th Congress’, see e.g. N. Barsukov, ‘Kak sozdavalsia zakrytyi doklad Khrushcheva’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 21 February 1996, pp. 1–2. Documents released from the creative unions and from party cultural bodies document these fights within cultural communities, and between artists and party, e.g. Kul’tura i vlast’ ot Stalina do Gorbacheva. Apparat TsK KPSS, Kul’tura i vlast’ ot Stalina do Gorbacheva. Ideologicheskie kommissii TsK KPSS, 1958–1964. Dokumenty, Moscow: Rosspen, 1998. C.f. Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsia. C.f. Bukovsky, To Build a Castle, p. 111, where he alleges that ‘there was a Thaw and a melting at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, only it took place not because of Khrushchev and not at the top, but in the hearts and minds of ordinary people’. See Alexeyeva, Thaw Generation; c.f. Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2, pp. 485–8, 491–3, 505–15. E.g. ‘geroi nashikh dnei – geroi literatury i iskusstva’, Pravda, 2 April 1961, p. 1. On the indeterminacy of Socialist Realism see e.g. K. Clark, The Soviet Novel. History as Ritual, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; R. Robin, Socialist Realism. An Impossible Aesthetic, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Aksiutin, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev.

Part I

Responses to the Thaw(s) De-Stalinization and public opinion

1

‘Show the bandit-enemies no mercy!’ Amnesty, criminality and public response in 1953 Miriam Dobson

‘The end of the war and the transition from war to peace placed new tasks in front of the Soviet Union’, wrote G. Safonov, General Procurator of the USSR, in Pravda in 1948. He continued: ‘The successful completion of the five-year plan will be an enormous step on the path towards completing the construction of a classless socialist society and our country’s gradual transition from socialism to communism’.1 Safonov’s millenarian approach seems typical of post-war rhetoric. Under Stalin’s guidance, the party’s ideologues and theorists promoted the fourth five-year plan not only as a chance to recover from the devastation of war, but also as a means for the country to advance to the next stage in the revolutionary journey.2 Yet the party was far from complacent. According to Stalinist doctrine, the revolution’s advance and the imminence of communism only served to make their enemies ever more deadly.3 Safonov’s article contained a cautionary message. In order for communism to be achieved, he claimed, the ‘reinforcement and the strictest adherence to socialist legality’ was imperative. He argued that the successful transition from socialism to communism necessitated a new campaign against crime. He produced an impressive catalogue of the criminal activities still plaguing Soviet society, which included theft of state property, substandard factory work, speculation, the divulging of state secrets, lapses in revolutionary vigilance, and violations of labour discipline. With no distinction between political, criminal, and labour offences, all were presented as actions of Soviet enemies that would prevent the building of communism. The General Procurator argued that the key to the revolution’s advance lay in the concept of ‘socialist legality’ (sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’), which he defined in terms of universal vigilance, intolerance towards transgressors, and strong state power. In the first post-Stalin decade, the new party leaders became even more convinced that communism was within their reach. Khrushchev, in particular, was persuaded that within two decades the Soviet citizens would be enjoying life in the world’s first communist society. Like Safonov, Stalin’s successors also promoted the concept of socialist legality as the key to building this future paradise; however, the meaning they assigned to the

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term was to prove radically different. In a major shift, the new leaders seemed to suggest that the criminals and miscreants vilified within Stalinist culture in fact posed a much lesser threat to the revolution’s advance than had been feared. No longer invoked in order to attack wrongdoers, the notion of legality instead became associated with the regime’s new commitment to rescuing those who had erred. As early as March 1953, Stalinist doctrines were tacitly revised. Three weeks after Stalin’s death, the modified version of ‘socialist legality’ was used to explain and legitimize the launch of major criminal justice reforms. On 27 March 1953 an amnesty was decreed and as a result, a total of 1,201,738 people were granted release; in one sweeping move, 48 per cent of the Gulag population was set free. The first clause of the decree released those with sentences under five years, while later clauses amnestied pregnant women, mothers with children under ten, children under 18, men over 55, women over 50, those convicted for certain offences committed at work or during military service, and those sentenced by laws now under review. The decree also halved sentences over five years (though some of the gravest crimes were excluded).4 In a subsequent editorial, K.P. Gorshenin, Minister of Justice, encouraged Pravda readers to view the amnesty decree, and the promises of further criminal justice reform that accompanied it, as evidence of ‘Soviet humanity’ and he suggested that this new, more compassionate, brand of ‘socialist legality’ was the correct way to ensure the country’s ‘transition from socialism to communism’.5 The coverage was not extensive, but the press did offer the Soviet public some guidance in making sense of this important shift. The first claim was that many criminals had been reformed during the term of their sentence. At least in theory, the prisoners to be released had shown a ‘conscientious attitude towards their work’ and no longer represented a danger to the state. According to Gorshenin, the amnesty decree was evidence of the fact that Soviet laws helped those who committed errors ‘to correct themselves’ (ispravit’sia) and then to return to the ‘path of honest labour’.6 Gorshenin’s comment piece thus revived the notion of redemption, so celebrated in the press in the early 1930s. Under Maksim Gor’kii’s tutelage, writers and journalists had once passionately embraced convict labour as a means to transform the erring individual, producing accounts of how social aliens were despatched to hard labour within the camp system, given intensive reeducation, thereby being ‘reforged’ as decent citizens; by the mid-1930s, however, the motifs of transformation and re-education retreated as prison sentences grew ever longer.7 Now in the spring of 1953, newspaper readers were once more encouraged to recognize the individual’s potential for conversion. They were encouraged to view Gulag returnees not as dangerous criminals, but as reformed characters. The second claim concerned Soviet society itself. Readers were told that this massive release of prisoners was possible as a result of the ‘con-

Amnesty, criminality and public response 23 solidation’ of Soviet state and society (uprochnenie obshchestvennogo i gosudarstvennogo stroia). Soviet citizens had progressed: they enjoyed a better standard of living; they had become more ‘conscious’; they now displayed an honourable attitude towards their public duty; and their ‘cultural’ levels had been raised.8 Over the past decades of Soviet power, society had allegedly matured. Where once society might have been endangered by the presence of a few questionable elements in its midst, it was now healthy and robust.9 Having reached a new stage in its revolutionary development, Soviet society could now be trusted to deal with former offenders and deviants (admittedly, not yet all. In 1953, political prisoners – considered one of the most dangerous categories by the authorities – were not included in the releases, though they would be by the following year). Despite the upbeat note of the press in the spring of 1953, the amnesty was to prove a major challenge for the Soviet regime. Returning zeks did not re-integrate into the Soviet family as easily as had been hoped; by August, senior officials were ready to identify the amnestied prisoners as the cause of a soaring crime rate.10 Perhaps more worrying still, Soviet society did not prove particularly receptive to the regime’s new commitment to ‘Soviet humanity’ and its policies of correction. While some intellectuals greeted the amnesty decree as the first indication of the reform they sought,11 many Soviet citizens responded uneasily to the rapid and large-scale repudiation of the Gulag monolith and did not share the regime’s confidence in their ability to withstand the return of Stalin’s outcasts. Drawing on the language they inherited from Stalinism, members of the public aggressively articulated fears over the ‘bandits’, ‘gangsters’ and ‘enemies of the people’ who now threatened Soviet society. I will first focus on the ex-prisoners, examining both the rising crime levels and the incidents of political unrest created by the returning zeks. Second, I examine the public response to the amnesty and argue that many citizens were resistant to the new beliefs promoted by the postStalin press. Finally, I suggest ways in which the state responded to the problems generated by the amnesty and argue that the crisis of 1953 was highly significant in shaping the policies of the Khrushchev era.

The Gulag return From the outset, the police realized that the mass exodus from the Gulag would be difficult to control. On 4 April 1953, an internal circular from the Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs, I.A. Serov, announced several measures to ‘safeguard social order and to prevent displays of criminal behaviour in places with a concentration of prisoners released by amnesty’. Local authorities were instructed to provide sufficient boats and trains so that those released did not congregate at stations and ports; police were to have a strong presence on trains carrying large numbers of ex-prisoners

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and at stations where prisoners transferred, so as to prevent them assembling in the parks and markets nearby; station buffets were to refrain from selling them spirits. Even before the releases were fully underway, returnees were regarded as a major threat to law and order. The measures enacted revealed a clear concern that the returnees would not go ‘home’ but would remain a migrant, menacing mass. The police were told to set up surveillance measures using the services of railways officers, local housing committees, caretakers and other trusted people. Special attention was likewise devoted to places where there was a concentration of returnees, including ‘apartment-traps, dens, doss-houses’, ‘attics, cellars, empty places, stairwells and entrances in large buildings’, and warehouses, dacha areas, and the ‘outskirts of towns and villages’.12 In the authorities’ imagination, the returnees occupied liminal areas – on the edges of towns, up in the attics, down below ground. Although prisoners were in theory welcomed back into the Soviet family, Serov’s instructions suggested even leading government figures regarded them as outsiders destined to remain on the peripheries of society. In the spring and early summer of 1953, the Council of Ministers realized the problem was still acute, and in late May 1953 a resolution was issued on ‘the elimination of inadequacies in the resettlement of citizens freed by the amnesty’. The challenge they faced was not insubstantial, for there were large numbers of new arrivals every week. A period of just ten days might see as many as forty or fifty thousand newcomers. Reporting to Khrushchev on the progress made by the beginning of July, officials acknowledged that all the returnees had not been resettled by the 15 June deadline set by the Council of Ministers.13 Even as new and more vigorous measures were adopted, a core body of unemployed ex-prisoners remained. Pronin, the most senior official working on returnees, acknowledged the crisis was ongoing and that 16 per cent of those arriving back from the camps had still not been resettled. He tried to provide explanations for this apparent failing. It was, he said, partly due to the sheer volume of arrivals every week, partly to local sluggishness, and he acknowledged that in some areas party organizations continued to work unsatisfactorily and continued to refuse ex-zeks both jobs and official living space. Yet despite acknowledging some glitches, Pronin nonetheless believed that the problem of unsettled zeks did not lie primarily with the local authorities. Indeed, the reports Pronin was receiving from the regions informed him that most of those who were not yet in employment had in fact been offered work and refused it. He said these were mostly people aged between 25 and 30, and he described them as ‘fallen people [opustivshiesia liudi], thief-recidivists, not wishing to work honestly, but once more to take the path of robbery, theft and other crimes’.14 By this point, Pronin had come to believe that the problem was not merely administrative. The amnesty had freed a cohort of ex-convicts who had spent much of their youth within the Gulag and who were reluctant to

Amnesty, criminality and public response 25 establish the kind of settled, productive existence advocated by the Soviet state. We may, of course, wish to question the alacrity with which Pronin exonerated the Soviet system. Indeed, the archives contain ample evidence of the local authorities’ reluctance to find the necessary resources for Gulag returnees and of the personal tragedy such hostility might engender. Some returnees were so distressed by their failure to find employment and accommodation that they even sought a return to the camps. One of those amnestied, an accountant, wrote to the KGB laying out the difficulties returnees faced and asking either to be found work or be sent back to the camps; when no response was forthcoming, he composed antiSoviet leaflets and pinned them directly on to the wall of the local Ministry of the Interior building – the definitive act of a condemned man.15 For those wishing to re-establish some kind of ‘normal’ existence, the obstacles faced upon release were undoubtedly enormous. This does not, however, mean that Pronin was entirely wrong to identify a second type of returnee. Wending their way back from the camps were not only broken figures like this former accountant, but also, it seems, a significant body of more committed criminals. The root of the crisis that was to grip the nation in the summer of 1953 lay not only in the magnitude of the amnesty, but also in its composition. By reducing sentences by half for all prisoners, the fourth clause of the decree meant that even those given the most severe 25 year sentence, might be set free if 12 and a half years had already been served. In fact, over a third of those released by the amnesty had sentences of over five years and were amnestied in accordance with this fourth clause.16 In the seventh clause of the decree the regime had sought to filter out those it deemed most dangerous by excluding prisoners serving sentences for counter-revolutionary crimes, large-scale theft of socialist property, banditry and premeditated murder, but it was not entirely effective. Commenting on this, Roy and Zhores Medvedev suggest Beria deliberately engineered the closing of entire camps in order to allow a massive return of recidivist criminals, thus ensuring a crisis in the capital requiring the presence of large numbers of MVD troops in Moscow, answerable directly to him.17 The explanation may be simpler: many recidivists might have been released in accordance with the decree’s prescriptions; clause seven only listed some categories of serious crime, and only excluded them from amnesty if this was the sentence currently being served. Either way, recidivists who had already served many years inside the camps, establishing their own extended networks and imbibing the subculture of the criminal underworld, were now heading back from the Gulag en masse. Across the summer of 1953, the Soviet Union experienced an unprecedented burst of criminal activity. In the second and third quarters of the year the number of crimes registered showed increases of up to two-thirds in comparison with the same period in 1952: violent attacks had increased

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by 66.4 per cent, murders by 30.7 per cent, rapes by 27.5 per cent, theft of personal property by 63.4 per cent and hooliganism by 19.3 per cent.18 Reporting to the General Procurator at the end of 1953, Krasnopevtsev and Gol’st, senior officials within the Procuracy, had no doubts as to the causes of these dramatic increases and emphatically blamed the scale of the amnesty. They provided compelling statistics to make their case: in Leningrad, a full 40 per cent of those arrested between April and September 1953 had been beneficiaries of the March amnesty; in Penza oblast’, 45 per cent of those convicted for theft and 40 per cent of those sentenced for murder in the same period had come almost directly from the Gulag. Of particular concern for the authorities was the organized nature of the returning zeks’ crimes. ‘There are many cases of these criminalrecidivists organising criminal gangs’, wrote Krasnopevtsev and Gol’st, before graphically describing their activities. In Chkalov province, for example, two men named Tupitsyn and Rastsvetov – both released by the amnesty of 27 March 1953 – had organized a criminal gang and in the course of one summer night alone had carried out eight armed attacks on the village of Kuvandyk. In the provincial capital of Chkalov, a certain Nazarov, having arrived from the Gulag, formed a gang that then attacked and robbed a passer-by, stabbing him 26 times. In the village of Degtiarka, Sverdlov province, a group of eight ‘bandits’, all amnestied over the preceding months, descended on the local courthouse as the case of Gogoberidze, a particularly notorious criminal ringleader, was being heard. The trial was disrupted and could continue only behind closed doors. The same evening, the bandits attempted to murder the key witnesses; even when the police arrested their leader, Morozov, they remained undeterred and went on to attack the convoy transporting Morozov to prison and set him free. Later in the same eventful night, they executed raids on a holiday home and the village store.19 Detailed descriptions of these incidents were used by the Procruracy officials to drive home the very disturbing nature of the crime wave. According to the report, the escalating crime levels were not simply the result of hungry and unemployed former criminals resorting to crime to eke out a living. The Gulag had created criminal networks of ‘uncorrected recidivists’ (neispravimye retsidivisty); once released the members of these bands continued to view themselves as outsiders to Soviet society and intentionally adopted a violently anti-social way of life.

The zek as radical heretic In a chapter of The Gulag Archipelago entitled ‘Zeks as a Nation’, Solzhenitsyn describes how prisoners developed their own economic system, a shared psychology, and their own language, known as matiorshchina.20 Over the long years of Stalin’s rule, a unique camp culture had been created which continued to set its inmates apart even after their

Amnesty, criminality and public response 27 release. In the aftermath of the March 1953 amnesty, the nation saw not only a rise in violent crime, but also a spate of ‘political’ offences committed by former zeks. Long sentences had apparently equipped some of these convicts with unique ‘mental tools’ that made their re-integration back into Soviet society remarkably difficult.21 In the briefing paper he circulated on 2 April 1953, Serov had urged the camp authorities to spend time with those to be released explaining to them the meaning of the amnesty and impressing on them the might of the Soviet state, but the success of this eleventh-hour educational work seems doubtful.22 It has recently been argued that the potential for ‘unbelief’ was negligible within the Stalinist system. Claiming that people lacked ‘an outside frame of reference’, Jochen Hellbeck has argued that even when an individual did articulate dissent, he would do so by using the regime’s own doctrines. Thus while the state might be condemned for failing to deliver on its promises, the ideology on which the regime was founded could not be challenged.23 It seems possible, however, that the ‘other’ world of the Gulag did provide an alternative set of values. While it did not offer a coherent or independent worldview, Gulag weltanschauung seemed to embrace all that was despised by official Soviet culture. Camp etiquette valued drinking, violence and swearing – all acts that clearly challenged the Soviet commitment to ‘cultured’ behaviour. Moreover, the Gulag produced its own radical politics. Here all that was demonized in the official Soviet belief system was passionately venerated. Those who devised the amnesty had done their best to exclude potential heretics from the release. Although by the following year the release of political prisoners would begin, the 1953 amnesty was designed to prevent those serving time for anti-Soviet activity benefiting, with clause seven explicitly stipulating that the decree could not be applied to those guilty of counter-revolutionary crimes. Yet such pre-emptive measures were not entirely effective. Against all the regime’s proclaimed faith in ‘reeducation’, it seems that experience of the Gulag often had the reverse effect. Even those sentenced for acts such as hooliganism and petty theft might now themselves espouse views radically hostile to the Soviet regime. Transformed by the Gulag, they did not necessarily exit camps as exemplars of the ‘new Soviet man’ so desired by the authorities, but instead emerged bitterly alienated by their time in the netherworld of the prison camp. Three judicial cases offer insight into this Gulag counter-culture. Imprisoned initially for theft or hooliganism, these men – whom we shall call Aleksei Smirnov, Viktor Zhukov and Boris Nesterov – were all released by the amnesty of 1953; they were then re-arrested in the period 1953–55 for their allegedly anti-Soviet activity.24 Although their first offences had been of a non-political nature, their statements in 1953 demonstrate the radically different ‘mental tools’ with which the Gulag had equipped them. Invariably under the influence of alcohol, some

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former prisoners aggressively denounced Soviet power by embracing its nemesis: the USA. Aleksei Smirnov, a young, semi-illiterate Russian originally from Leningrad with three previous sentences for non-political crimes, was released in late May 1953 by the amnesty. Unable to find work, he was still roving across the country when he was arrested at Manzovka station in the Far East five months later. According to the witness Koshelev, he appeared on the station platform drunk, tried to commit a theft and then brandished a knife. He was arrested by the station police and escorted to their unit for further questioning. Asked to state his profession, he replied that he had a good speciality – robbing and ‘killing citizens’. Complaining that in the Soviet Union he was refused work, he announced: ‘I hate the Soviet Union, I would sell it for one kopeck. I love America and Truman. Soviet power ‘rewarded’ [nagradila] me with tuberculosis. In the Soviet Union young people are hounded into camps and prisons’.25 He articulated a fierce contempt for the values of Soviet society such as productive labour. Even more subversive was his admiration for America and the President. Rejecting Soviet power absolutely, Smirnov welcomed America and Truman as the antithesis of everything Soviet. Viktor Zhukov shared Smirnov’s binary worldview, in which the paradise of capitalist America opposed his Soviet hell. In September 1953, as a 24-year-old recently released from the Gulag, Zhukov was drinking beer with a new acquaintance at a station buffet in Kuibyshev oblast’, when he became rowdy, attracting the attention of the police. When the police hauled him into their office to check his documents, Zhukov spat in the face of one police officer, kicked another, and shouted ‘Down with Soviet power!’ and ‘Long live capitalism!’.26 With its ubiquitous slogans, the language of revolution had created the template for Zhukov’s protest; the Gulag – itself the mirror of the Soviet world – had taught him to invert those official values. The case of Boris Nesterov, another young man in his early twenties with several years’ Gulag experience under his belt, provides another example of this violent pro-American and pro-capitalist sentiment prevalent amongst former prisoners. In court in May 1954 on a further count of theft, and facing a 25 year sentence, Nesterov began cursing Soviet leaders, shouting that he had been sentenced unlawfully. According to a witness, he went on to claim that Truman would come to free him and slaughter everyone, and, finally, that ‘the Trumanites will come and they’ll hang everyone’ in the Soviet government.27 The parallels between the cases are striking. When goaded, these exzeks rallied behind the same idols – America and capitalism. All incarcerated within the camp system during adolescence, they were raised in a radically anti-Soviet environment. Released back into society, they projected themselves as atheists, radical non-believers. Though Harry Truman vacated the White House in 1953, the name ‘Truman’ continued to res-

Amnesty, criminality and public response 29 onate in the cosmogony of the zek as a mythical figure, an avenging angel who would come to save Soviet unfortunates. In Stalinist culture, change was only imaginable through a violent showdown between opposing forces; Smirnov, Zhukov and Nesterov chose to embrace the ‘pole’ that had been officially rejected and demonized. As Stalinist ideology had divided the world into a set of pairs – the new versus the old, Russia versus the West – it provided, in the form of the rejected values, ready-made formulas for dissent. Although the amnesty, and the surrounding rhetoric, suggested that the regime wished to modify the Manichean nature of Stalinist culture, the events of 1953 suggest that a hard-core of Gulag prisoners continued to view the Soviet world as violently divided. Their actions severely undermined the regime’s claim that the prisoners released by amnesty had been ‘corrected’ in the course of imprisonment. Indeed, quite the opposite; the Gulag had successfully nurtured an insubordinate worldview, which some ex-convicts publicly articulated upon release. Initially imagined as a site of redemption, the Gulag seems instead to have become a place of radical alienation.

The public response Empathy for the returnees was rare. One citizen, a certain A. Popov, did write to Molotov condemning the government for its failure to find the returnees jobs and homes and blaming this lapse for the thefts and murders committed in the spring and summer. Yet this kind of support for the returnees was limited, and the overwhelming mood was one of suspicion and anxiety.28 Citizens’ concerns were articulated in a sudden burst of letters addressed either to local authorities or to central bodies, such as the Supreme Soviet.29 At a central committee plenum called in early July, Kliment Voroshilov paid tribute to the growing public hysteria, explaining that ‘there is much talk, and many letters – both signed and unsigned – have been written about the murders, rapes and so on that are supposedly the result of the amnesty’. Although Voroshilov believed that the rise in crime had been exaggerated, he acknowledged that Soviet citizens were distressed and that ‘alarming accounts’ were coming from regions across the Soviet Union.30 For the party leaders therefore, the public outcry was highly significant. Close reading of four letters written over the course of 1953 suggests that the public resisted and even derided notions of humanity and legality used in the media to legitimize the amnesty. In these letters, all addressed to Molotov, citizens went on to demand a more hostile attitude towards those who violated public order, expressing fears that the city was becoming a site of criminal and deviant behaviour. With two letters coming from Moscow, one from Leningrad, and a fourth from the city of Kazan’, these texts articulate an escalating urban anxiety.31

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Throughout the Soviet period, the trope of ‘hooliganism’ – first emerging in ‘Russian national discourse’ at the turn of the century – embodied the nation’s ongoing struggle to bring order and respectability to urban space.32 The discourse of hooliganism was one possible way to understand the disruptions to Soviet life in the summer of 1953. In May, a Leningrad mother penned Molotov a very tentative letter.33 Asking him repeatedly to forgive her for taking up his time, she felt obliged to ask for his help. In Leningrad, citizens were fearful, the police powerless. Emphasizing her suffering as a mother, she evoked the collective anguish of the war: Dear Comrade Molotov, you know how hard it is for children to lose a father, and for parents to lose children. This isn’t the war after all. But every day, parents mourn their children [. . .] Dear Molotov, we mothers ask you, beg you, please make the police more vigilant, and keep people safe. The letter spoke for an imagined community of respectable Soviet citizens who cherished family values and survived the war, but now felt targeted and threatened by an unnecessary danger. This threat was personified by the figure of the ‘hooligan’. By calling for greater police attention, she hinted at her own fear that a lack of vigilance was threatening the community. Other letter-writers were more belligerent, however. In contrast to the rather lachrymose tone of the first, a second letter to Molotov manifested a far more aggressive opposition to the amnesty and labelled the returnees ‘bandits’. The anonymous letter-writer claimed that ‘night and day, the returnees, these jailbird-bandits [vernuvshiesia tiuremshchiki-bandity] kill and slaughter peaceable citizens, carry out armed break-ins at warehouses, and murder guards and policemen’.34 A third letter, from a Moscow tramconductor called Antonova, employed similar terms, claiming that ‘such disgraceful horrors happen in Moscow, without even speaking about the Moscow suburbs, where the bandits reign [tsarstvo banditov], especially with their lairs in Nikitovka and Obiralovka, stations on the Gor’kii railway line’.35 According to Antonova, the bandits had created their own mini-kingdoms within the confines of Moscow. If in modern cities, certain areas to be identified as ‘unsafe’, these tend to be the poorest and most run-down quarters;36 in 1953, however, the danger-spots were not identified by their poverty, but as points on railway lines. Whereas the hooligan tended to be a figure emerging from within the urban landscape, the bandit was a man in transit, arriving by train as an outsider and an alien in the city. Constantly reappearing in the course of 1953, the term bandit branded criminal returnees as outsiders to the Soviet metropolis. Letters to Molotov not only labelled returnees from the Gulag bandity, but also adopted many of the rhetorical devices developed by the Soviet press to cast out enemies. The anonymous letter cited above had opened:

Amnesty, criminality and public response 31 Dear Viacheslav Mikhailovich! Your gracious [milostivyi] decree of the 24 March of this year about the release of criminal-recidivists, degenerates, the dregs of humanity, has turned into a bloodbath, into carnage, inflicted on the workers of the towns and countryside.37 Like any good Soviet journalist, the writer piled on layer after layer of insult. The creation of compound terms like ‘jailbird-bandits’ indicated enemies so vile that no single word could do them justice. Later in the letter, the writer invoked one of the great enemies of Russian cultural memory, rating the horrors Soviet citizens were currently experiencing as greater than those ‘the blood-thirsty Ghenghis Khan inflicted on his enemies’.38 Meanwhile, tram-driver Antonova proved equally eloquent in her attack on ‘bandits’: Indeed this dirty water, these Russian ‘gangsters’ [‘gangstery’] are without conscience [sovest’] or honour [chest’]. We conquered Germany when she was armed to the teeth, can it really be that our state is without the strength to conquer these parasites [darmoedy]?39 By invoking Germany, she categorically branded the criminals enemies; by labelling them ‘dirty water’ and ‘parasites’, she additionally warned of their contagious nature. The term ‘gangster’ was more unusual. A more recent borrowing than either ‘bandit’ or ‘hooligan’, the word ‘gangster’ was still regarded as a foreign word, and indicated her desire to brand the returnees outsiders. Choosing to label them ‘Russian’ rather than ‘Soviet’, she dismissed the returnees as part of the old, uncultured past that the Soviet world had supplanted. Antonova was grappling to find an effective rhetoric with which to repel the contingent of ex-convicts as a phenomenon completely alien to the respectable realm of Soviet society. Exposed to Stalinist newspeak for the last quarter of a century, Antonova and the other letter-writers manipulated established invective to condemn and vilify the unwanted returnees. While Pravda editorials claimed that those released from the camps had shown a conscientious attitude towards work during their time in the Gulag, readers were more suspicious. Challenging the claims made in the press, one correspondent from Kazan’ asked: ‘Why didn’t Stalin – who so valued the people’s labour – do this? In the month or so since Comrade Stalin’s death, have the criminals really become ‘conscious’ [soznatel’nye] citizens?’.40 Distraught that the people had lost their most heroic defender, the author questioned the notion that a criminal could so easily be brought to consciousness. The revived notions of ‘correction’ and ‘humanity’ were also contested. One letter-writer wrote that ‘these “corrected” [“ispravshiesia”] down-and-outs use their knives to strengthen the forces of darkness in the country’; placed in inverted commas, the term ‘ispravshiesia’ was clearly a

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source of derision.41 The tram-driver Antonova was equally distrustful of the word, reminding her readers that ‘only the grave corrects the hunchback’ (gorbatogo ispravit mogila). She also employed the term gummanichat’ (a pejorative variant on the idea of being humane) and advised Molotov that there had been quite enough of this already. Gorshenin’s promotion of Soviet humanity and correction had clearly failed to convince Pravda readers, and the terms were either rejected or mocked by angry members of the public. Antonova ended her letter with some suggestions for how the authorities should deal with criminals. She wrote: We ask you to decree a law, which says that a thief who is caught will have five fingers cut off from his left hand, they should be branded, so that people will know that these are thieves and can beware of them. Merciless and severe measures should be taken.42 If the Gulag was no longer to ensure the geographical exclusion of offenders, physical mutilation was – in Antonova’s mind – the only way to retain clear boundaries between respectable society and its deviants. If the crime wave undercut the regime’s claim that those amnestied were reformed characters, then the venom of the public outcry challenged the assertion that Soviet society was ready to cope with the massive return of ex-convicts. Using terminology drawn from Stalinist rhetoric, letterwriters continued to view those who had committed errors as irredeemable enemies and insisted that it was the state’s duty to protect Soviet citizens from these dangerous hordes.

Ambiguity in the Soviet press Close study of the Soviet press suggests that newspaper editors experienced some uncertainty in dealing with the difficult events of 1953. On their front pages, the newspapers continued to praise the regime’s newfound humanity and trumpeted the regime’s commitment to this modified version of ‘socialist legality’, which was also used to explain two other important political events: the retraction of the Doctors’ Plot in April and the arrest of Lavrentii Beria in July. On the back pages, however, a slightly different story was emerging. The summer of 1953 saw the Soviet press radically increase the inches of newspaper print dedicated to law-and-order news.43 On 18 June 1953, the back page of Pravda contained the rubric ‘From the courtroom’ and, under the simple headline ‘Thief-recidivist’, the reader learned how the criminal Kotov was tried for pick-pocketing and sent down for six years – his sixth sentence.44 One week later, Pravda reported that the organizer of a gang of armed thieves working in the Moscow suburbs had been sentenced for 25 years.45 Local newspapers took the cue, and there was a

Amnesty, criminality and public response 33 dramatic rise in the number of ‘From the courtroom’ (Iz zala suda) articles over the coming months.46 The back-page crime reports provided ample evidence of the criminal activity afflicting Soviet society. Mirroring the rhetoric of letters addressed to the government in the spring of 1953, these articles employed the term bandit, with the headline ‘Bandit punished’ repeated many times over the coming months. In September 1953, Leningradskaia pravda reported the case of Vinogradov, released from prison by the amnesty in 1953. Although sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for theft and not banditry, he is called the ‘bandit’ throughout the text.47 Similarly in December, L. Reinberg and V. Shangin, also beneficiaries of the amnesty, were identified as bandits, though they too had been sentenced only for theft.48 The articles firmly portrayed offenders as outsiders newly arrived in the city. Even where the amnesty was not directly mentioned, references to ‘return’ served to identify the offenders as aliens: one article began, ‘Having returned from places of imprisonment several years ago, Kazimir Krukovskii . . .’; a second mentioned that the criminals ‘returned last spring to Moscow’; a third that they arrived in Leningrad in early 1953.49 In the media’s representation, the criminals worked in bands, preying on the city, but not a part of it. According to Moskovskaia pravda, four criminals met on the platform of the Moscow–Kursk–Donbass rail depot one day in October 1953; they drank heavily and then set off for Moscow with the intention of committing a robbery at Kursk station. Once in Moscow, however, they decided to ‘travel’ (puteshestvovat’) around Moscow on the tram – and robbed the conductor.50 By identifying trams as places of danger, the article substantiated the claims made by Antonova, the letter-writing tram driver from Moscow; moreover, by presenting them first on the platform of a provincial station, and only later in Moscow, the narrative also supported Antonova in her desire to portray the source of crime as external to urban Soviet society. Challenging the state’s new commitment to correcting criminals, the crime reports included biographies in which the offenders appeared as incurable sinners. Journalists described how these reprobates had taken to a life of delinquency from a very early age, and implied that as born criminals they could never be transformed into decent Soviet citizens. In one such report, the biography of a criminal named Vinogradov was given: ‘His biography is simple. He was born in 1928. He didn’t want to study, nor to work like all the others in his generation worked during the war [. . .] At sixteen, Vinogradov was sent to prison for the first time. Since 1944 he has been sentenced six times and to a total of 28 years in corrective labour camps’.51 No excuses were offered, no extenuating circumstances put forward to explain his crimes. In contrast to the promises of greater humanity and legality promoted on the newspapers’ front pages, these biographies seemed to reject the possibility that a criminal might be reformed or ‘corrected’. Indeed, the articles derided the idea that a

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criminal might return as part of the amnesty to become a valued member of society. After recounting the sad facts of his life, the report on Vinogradov’s case shifted from the court scene to an imagined family scene: The amnesty offered Vinogradov the chance to start a new life – to become an honest worker. Work? No way! – Vinogradov told his mother, when he arrived in Leningrad last summer. By juxtaposing the offer of a ‘new life’ with Vinogradov’s scorn, the article undermined the official reading of the amnesty and questioned the belief that offenders could be redeemed through labour. Crime reports thus used a combination of rhetorical strategies to cast criminals as marauders ravaging Soviet society. It is significant that in doing so, crime reporters employed terms that were extraordinarily similar to those found in citizens’ letters. Although the Soviet press is usually seen as a tool for sculpting the thoughts and beliefs of its readers, here it seems almost to echo public opinion. The result was the highly dialogic quality of the press over the course of 1953: on the one hand, newspapers promoted the party’s desire to re-educate those who erred; on the other, they hinted at the incurable nature of the criminal. Official rhetoric was thus far from univocal, and this pointed to the party’s own uncertainty about the future course of the socialist legality campaign.

The party response Doubts were clearly emerging in party circles by the summer. Continuing the ‘socialist legality campaigns’ of the spring, the party and state apparatus devoted huge energies to drafting reforms in many areas of criminal justice.52 Yet they simultaneously decreed more stringent policing measures to deal with the problem of violent crime.53 At the end of August 1953, R.A. Rudenko, General Procurator, tried to clarify the situation. In a statement explaining the implementation of the new measures, he blamed the crime wave on the incompetence of the Ministry of the Interior, which until recently had been led by Lavrentii Beria, now disgraced and under arrest. He reassured his readers that criminality would soon decline and he reiterated the position put forward in the amnesty decree, repeating almost verbatim earlier assertions about society’s high levels of ‘culturedness’ and ‘consciousness’.54 Ultimately, the party stayed committed to its decision to downsize the Gulag, and by January 1956 the total number of prisoners held in camps and colonies had fallen to 781,630, approximately a third of its size on 1 April 1953.55 Although it continued the policies begun on 27 March, however, the ‘cold summer of 1953’ had forced party leaders to realize that long-term solutions were needed to tackle the double problem of rising crime and public outrage.56

Amnesty, criminality and public response 35 By the following year, it seems, the party had decided upon a course of action intended to remedy the crisis created by the amnesty; 1954 saw the launch of a broad public campaign to promote correct byt – a term that translates as ‘way of life’, ‘everyday life’, ‘domesticity’ or ‘life-style’. The Yearbook of Soviet Publications included the category of byt for the first time in 1954, with 14 new titles in that year and a steady increase recorded over the decade.57 The new publications included titles like Communist Morality and Byt, Towards A Healthy Byt, The Culture of Correct Behaviour amongst Soviet Young People.58 This renewed attention to ‘everyday life’ marked the state’s attempt to change the way citizens thought and behaved. Despite the bold claims made in the amnesty decree – and later reiterated by Rudenko – the levels of ‘consciousness’ and ‘culture’ were found wanting. Not only targeting those whose own behaviour was undesirable, the campaign sought to mobilize the ranks of ‘decent’ (chestnye) Soviet citizens in the fight against criminal, deviant or improper conduct. This new emphasis on byt was reflected in an important shift in crimereportage. If in 1953, reports had consistently portrayed criminals as bandits and incurable sinners, such depictions – though they did not entirely disappear – became more rare. New sorts of offenders began to populate the ‘From the courtroom’ column in 1954. Rather than strangers from the alien world of the Gulag, aggressors might be members of the Soviet community who had been allowed to lapse into an unhealthy and un-Soviet way of life. Culprits were no longer presented as members of a prison subculture, but instead as members of Soviet youth who desperately needed society’s assistance to ensure their healthy byt. In August 1954, for example, an article headlined ‘In drunken intoxication’ opened by telling readers that a young joiner named V. Eroshin was often seen drunk, and that rather than spending his free time with his family, he preferred to hang out with his drinking companions. With neighbours cast as witnesses to his debauched ways, Eroshin was identified as a member of the Soviet community, not an outsider. The reader was given to understand that Eroshin’s problems began with the kind of anti-social behaviour that some might – erroneously, of course – consider insignificant. Eroshin’s transgressions soon escalated. While drunk one summer evening, he insulted a young girl on the street, and when one of her young companions tried to reason with him, Eroshin stabbed him. In a second article entitled ‘Hooligan’, an 18-year-old from Leningrad was sentenced for attacking a young girl. Again the roots of the problem lay with the protagonist’s daily conduct. Preferring ‘hooligan’ behaviour to hard work or study, Gennadii Fedorov drank, insulted passers-by on the street, and organized parties (deboshi) at home during the night. The reader was to infer that it was only one short step from these hooligan acts to violently assaulting a schoolgirl. Neither Eroshin nor Fedorov were presented as members of a prison subculture, yet their dissolute life-style led them to commit heinous crimes.59 Replacing the marauding bandit of 1953, the press now presented

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the ‘hooligan’ who was a product of an urban habitat. Bad behaviour such as drinking, swearing and hooliganism were thus to be taken seriously, for they apparently indicated that the individual was on the path towards fullblown criminal activity. Instead of simply lamenting the rise in crime as they had done in 1953, citizens were taught that they must play a positive, instructive role in preventing the emergence of new deviants. Members of Soviet society were invited to take an active role in raising moral, healthy citizens of the future. The 1950s thus saw the regime take a two-pronged approach to crime. First, the party sought to correct offenders, instead of vilifying them. Second, extensive propaganda sought to persuade ‘respectable’ Soviet citizens that they could play an active role in these re-educational practices. By joining volunteer brigades, comrade courts and other civic initiatives, or simply being on the look-out for erring youths, they were invited to play a leading role in the fight against crime.60 Yet the public responses of 1953 were early indicators of the problems which these initiatives would encounter. Public resistance to the notions of ‘correction’ and Soviet ‘humanity’ remained high. Commenting on the influx of letters the Supreme Soviet received from outraged citizens on the subject of crime, one official wrote in December 1955 that ‘after a significant rise in the numbers of these letters in 1953 and the beginning of 1954, the numbers gradually decreased until the present time when it has started to grow again’.61 Two years later, Voroshilov forwarded a letter from employees at the Mining Institute in Moscow to all the leading figures in the government. The letter detailed the many attacks suffered by their colleagues over the past two years and asserted that many crimes went unreported because the victims feared reprisals. Having demonized the culprits as ‘unreformed bandits’ and the ‘the dregs of society’, the letter concluded with a slogan worthy of any Bolshevik agitator: ‘Show the bandit-enemies no mercy!’ (Banditam – vragam naroda – ne mozhet byt’ poshady!).62 Once again, offenders were imagined not as sinners awaiting salvation, but as dangerous bandits and deadly enemies of the Soviet regime. By 1961, the motifs of redemption and re-education were again under threat. The introduction of anti-parasite laws saw the government swing once more in the direction of exclusion, not inclusion.63 Assemblies were to be formed in each street or housing-block, and on their collective ruling citizens deemed to lead a ‘parasitic’ life could be exiled for periods of up to five years. This new act allowed Soviet communities to rid their neighbourhood of those whose behaviour they considered anti-social. Although the branding and mutilation coveted by the tram-driver Antonova in 1953 were not to materialize, the new decree granted community activists significant new powers, enabling them to eject undesirables from the Soviet ‘family’.

Amnesty, criminality and public response 37

Conclusion The problems engendered by the amnesty reveal the difficult legacies of Stalinism. The new leaders wished to downsize the enormous, inefficient and unruly Gulag, but they had to find ways to rehabilitate and reintegrate over one million men and women who had been isolated from society, some of whom continued to resent their alienation. Perhaps surprisingly, they also faced an aggrieved public. Rather than welcoming reform, many citizens seem to have found the process disturbing. In response to the mass exodus from the Gulag, they expressed violent opposition to the notions of ‘humanity’ and ‘correction’ promoted in the press, and derided the regime’s claims that society itself was sufficiently robust to withstand this return of the banished ‘other’. Initially uncertain how to resolve the crisis, Stalin’s successors came to believe that renewed attention to byt was the key to creating a wellordered and self-regulating society. Desperate to keep the Gulag population low, they claimed that it was possible to reform offenders within society by means of new campaigns for correct byt. Yet for such initiatives to be successful, high levels of social activism were required, and these were to prove elusive. In a world where crime and delinquency seemed increasingly prevalent, Soviet citizens continued to envision offenders and criminals as enemies, evincing little interest in ‘correcting’ them. Public responses to the amnesty of 1953 and the campaigns that followed point to the embedded nature of the Stalinist worldview and indicate the problematic nature of reform in the post-Stalinist period.

Notes 1 ‘Vsemerno ukrepliat’ sotsialisticheskuiu zakonnost’’, Pravda, 20 June 1948, p. 2. 2 A. Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 33. 3 In a keynote speech in 1937, Stalin proclaimed: ‘The further we advance and the more success we have, the more embittered the defeated remains of the exploiting class become, the more treacherous their attack on us will be, the more dirty tricks they will play against the Soviet state, and the more reckless the weapons they will use, as the last attempt of the doomed.’ This interpretation of revolutionary eschatology was to prevail until 1953. I.V. Stalin, ‘O nedostatkakh partiinoi raboty i merakh likvidatsii trotskistkikh i inykh dvurushnikov: Doklad na plenume TsK VKP(b) 3 March 1937 g.’, in R. McNeal (ed.), I.V. Stalin: Sochineniia, vol. 1, Stanford: Hoover Institution Foreign Language Publications, 1967, pp. 189–224 (213). 4 ‘Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR ob Amnistii’, Pravda, 28 March 1953, p. 1. 5 ‘Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ na strazhe interesov naroda’, Pravda, 17 April 1953, p. 2. 6 Pravda, 17 April 1953, p. 2. 7 Katerina Clark identifies a transitional period between 1931 and late 1935 in which a combination of rehabilitation and isolation prevailed. Gor’kii’s

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22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31

Miriam Dobson Belomor was the guiding model, but similar accounts were common in the Soviet press. See K. Clark, The Soviet Novel: History As Ritual, 3rd edn, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000, pp. 118–19; M. Gor’kii, L. Auerbach, and S.G. Firin (eds), Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea, trans. Amabel Williams-Ellis, London: John Lane, 1935; S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 78. Pravda, 28 March 1953, p. 1. See Daniel Beer, ‘ “The Hygiene of Souls”: Languages of Illness and Contagion in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia,’ PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2001, on how, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Bolsheviks articulated deep anxiety about the contagious nature of crime, fearing that their new society was at risk of infection. GARF, 8131/32/2386/2. Kornei Chukosvskii, for instance, wrote in his diary that the amnesty had ‘filled his days with happiness’. See K. Chukovskii, Dnevnik 1930–1969, Moscow: Sovremennyi Pisatel’, 1994, p. 197. GARF, 9401/1a./521/14. Between 20 and 30 of June 1953, for example, 45,400 ex-convicts arrived in towns and cities. RGANI, 5/30/36/35-7. RGANI, 5/30/36/35-7. GARF, 8131/31/7141/8. GARF, 7523/89/4408/79. R. Medvedev and Zh. Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 9. GARF, 8131/32/2386/28. GARF, 8131/32/2386/32-33. A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, trans. Thomas P. Whitney, vol. 2, New York: Harper and Row, 1975, pp. 502–33 (505). In his study of French culture of the sixteenth century, Febvre frames the question of unbelief in the following way: Did individuals have access to the necessary ‘mental’ tools needed to express an alternative worldview? L. Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, trans. B. Gottlieb, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982, p. 355. GARF, 9401/1a/521/14. J. Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931–9’, in S. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 77–116 (105). To protect the identity of the individuals involved, and to reflect the private nature of the materials consulted, pseudonyms have been used in this section. GARF, 8131/31/43332/18. GARF, 8131/31/60332/5-8. Zhukov came from a peasant family near Omsk and had been sentenced for various non-political crimes, including theft and attempted escape from the Gulag. Back in the Gulag in 1954, he became an active participant in a camp riot. GARF, 8131/31/50509/22-25. RGASPI, 82/2/1456/2. GARF, 7523/107/189/65. RGANI, 2/1/42/12. Molotov’s personal fond (RGASPI, f. 82) contains a wealth of correspondence

Amnesty, criminality and public response 39

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

from Soviet citizens in the 1950s. A great many letters were anonymous, some were composed collectively, and some were individually signed. The authors came from a wide variety of backgrounds. J. Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. RGASPI, 82/2/1466/72. RGASPI, 82/2/1466/71. RGASPI, 82/2/1440/78. Neuberger views hooligan behaviour as a response to the relentless poverty experienced in some of the slum areas of St Petersburg. Neuberger, Hooliganism, 216–78. RGASPI, 82/2/1466/71. The anonymous correspondent mistakes the date of the amnesty decree. RGASPI, 82/2/1466/71. RGASPI, 82/2/1440/78. RGASPI, 82/2/1466/58. RGASPI, 82/2/1466/71. RGASPI, 82/2/1440/78. The rubric ‘From the courtroom’ (Iz zala suda) was not in itself a new invention. Not only had it been common in the pre-revolutionary boulevard press, the column had also appeared in the Stalinist press. See L. McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991. ‘Vor-Retsidivist’, Pravda, 18 June 1953, p. 4. ‘Khuligany-Grabiteli’, Pravda, 24 June 1953, p. 4. This section is based on a close study of Pravda, Leningradskaia pravda, Moskovskaia pravda and Prizyv (the local newspaper for Vladimir oblast’) over the course of 1953 and 1954. Leningradskaia pravda published three ‘From the courtroom’ articles in late June, while Moskovskaia Pravda, which had not contained a single crime report between March and August, published six in the final four months of the year. Prizyv published four reports ‘from the courtroom’ between October and December, compared with one article in the first half of the year. ‘Bandit nakazan’, Leningradskaia pravda, 27 September 1953, p. 4. ‘Grabiteli poimany’, Leningradskaia pravda, 4 December 1953, p. 4. ‘Bandity nakazany’, Leningradskaia pravda, 23 June 1953, p. 4; ‘Shaika vorovretsidivistov’, Pravda, 4 December 1953, p. 4; ‘Grabiteli’, Leningradskaia pravda, 27 December 1953, p. 4. ‘Bandity nakazany’, Moskovskaia pravda, 2 December 1953, p. 4. ‘Bandit nakazan’, Leningradskaia pravda, 27 September 1953, p. 4. For a detailed survey of the debate surrounding criminal justice reform, see Y. Gorlizki, ‘De-Stalinisation and the Politics of Russian Criminal Justice, 1953–1964,’ PhD diss., University of Oxford, 1992, pp. 93–4. On 27 August 1953, the Soviet of Ministers issued a decree ‘On Measures For Strengthening The Protection Of Public Order And For Intensifying The Struggle Against Criminal Behaviour’. GARF, 8131/32/2386/1-7. On 1 April 1953, the figure was recorded as 2,466,914. See GARF, 7523/89/4408/82. The term ‘cold summer’ refers to a perestroika era film which depicts how the natural rhythms of an isolated fishing hamlet in northern Russia were shattered when a band of criminals, granted freedom by the amnesty, attacked and ransacked the village. See Kholodnoe Leto 53, directed by Aleksandr Proshkin, 1987, USSR.

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57 On the growing publication of advice literature from 1954 onwards, see C. Kelly, Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. For details of the publications on byt see Ibid., appendix 5. 58 Ezhegodnik knig SSSR 1954: II-polugodie, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vsesoiuznoi palaty, 1955, p. 256; Ezhegodnik knig SSSR 1955: II-polugodie, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo vsesoiuznoi palaty, 1956, p. 294. 59 ‘V p’ianom ugare’, Moskovskaia pravda, 7 August 1954, p. 4; ‘Khuligan’, Leningradskaia pravda, 5 June 1954, p. 4. 60 This is explored in further detail in chapter 4 of my PhD dissertation (M. Dobson, ‘Refashioning the Enemy: Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of Destalinisation, 1953–1964,’ PhD diss., University of London, 2003, pp. 173–224). 61 GARF, 7523/107/189/65. 62 GARF, 7523/89/7272/7-8. 63 The law passed by the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR on 4 May 1961 gave collective assemblies the power to resettle the ‘parasite’ elsewhere. Similar laws were passed in May and June 1961 in Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, Estonia and Moldavia. See H. Berman, Justice in the USSR: An Interpretation of Soviet Law, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963, pp. 291–8.

2

From the Secret Speech to the burial of Stalin Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization Polly Jones

The campaign of de-Stalinization, or ‘overcoming the cult of personality’, was a unique episode in the history of Soviet public opinion. Never before had the party been, and rarely would it be again, so indecisive in its approach to the Soviet past, propagating contradictory views of Stalin(ism) in a series of advances and retreats unprecedented in the party’s history.1 And never again would the party unleash such a torrent of conflicting and controversial views from the Soviet public. Whilst the campaign intentionally set out to emancipate the popular consciousness from the Stalin cult, it also inadvertently risked the ‘de-Sovietization’ of public opinion, as swathes of the Soviet population reacted in violent, unpredictable and ‘anti-Soviet’ ways to de-Stalinization. Over the course of the ‘decade of de-Stalinization’ (1953–63/4), the party failed to delineate a strict party line, whether on de-Stalinization itself, or on the myriad problems of party and social discipline which were its unintended consequences. However, as this chapter will argue, distinct stages in the anti-Stalin campaign can be discerned, and they suggest a growing confidence on the part of the Khrushchev regime in the management of public opinion. Comparing the forms of public responses to the 20th Party Congress (1956) and the 22nd Party Congress (1961), this chapter contends that, despite the rhetoric of ‘advancing’ or ‘completing’ de-Stalinization which surrounded the latter event’s more public revelations about Stalin, the 22nd Congress in many senses signalled a retreat from radicalism and a retrenchment of party restrictions in the Soviet public sphere. The progress of the anti-Stalin campaign indicates a fundamental dilemma of de-Stalinization: as the party grew more confident in publicizing its iconoclastic narratives about the Stalinist past, it also, paradoxically (although perhaps necessarily) reduced its commitment to de-Stalinizing the Soviet public sphere, setting strict limits on popular iconoclasm and further public debate about the Stalin question.2

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The 20th Party Congress: information management? If, in giving his Secret Speech, Khrushchev achieved a significant ‘breakthrough’ and ‘crossed a rubicon’, he and his party almost immediately started to repair what had been broken, and to redraw the boundaries separating Soviet from anti-Soviet responses to the campaign.3 Aleksei Adzhubei aptly captures these successive retreats: ‘the truth of the XX Congress was very quickly limited to a half-truth, and later, by the mid1960s, the “secret” stamp was placed on the whole range of problems again’.4 By charting some of the problems which de-Stalinization threw up, and the party’s responses to them, it becomes clear that public opinion at home was a significant influence on this tortuous journey through deStalinization. What quickly emerged from the bruising experience of disseminating the Secret Speech was a blueprint for the management of public opinion which would be deployed in a more timely and efficient manner during subsequent episodes of de-Stalinization. As an exercise in historical revisionism, the Secret Speech was at best a partial success, lacking theoretical rigour and historical accuracy.5 As a campaign meant to mobilize unanimous public opinion, it was an unmitigated disaster.6 The party meeting was supposed to be the ideal setting in which to propagate de-Stalinization. Once the party had decided to reveal its ‘Secret’ Speech, it was envisaged that at each successive level of the party hierarchy – regional, city, district and primary party organization (PPO) – the speech would be read out and collectively approved by those present.7 Yet in reality, even the most practised members of the aktiv could barely conceal their distress, outrage and confusion upon hearing the Secret Speech. Apart from the evident ‘shock’ of the revelations, the problem also lay in the fact that the party, at least initially, apparently encouraged a passionate, outraged response. Central Committee (CC) presidium meetings where the speech was drafted were themselves highly emotional, and emotive, as ‘Stalin’s heirs’ grappled with the leader’s legacy.8 The speech ranks amongst the most dramatic ‘performances’ in the history of Soviet speech-making.9 The controlled way in which the speech was to be disseminated to the party at large might have been intended to minimize disruption and controversy, but it in fact provoked frenzied speculation and frustration. Most importantly, within the speech, there were numerous projections of the ideal ‘popular response’, and in the version circulated around party organizations, applause was even added in at strategic points, which stressed the positive, rather than the negative aspects of deStalinization, such as the return to Leninism.10 The speech therefore swung between mobilizing feelings of vengeance and disgust at Stalin’s wrongdoing, and encouraging optimism about the neo-Leninist future. Reports about party meetings sent to the centre tried their best to imitate this mentally taxing combination of sentiments. One report from

Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 43 Leningrad, which typified the search for an ideal ‘script’ of public opinion, claimed that audiences across the oblast’ had greeted the ‘Leninist’ and other positive segments of the speech with the traditional stormy applause.11 At the same time, audiences had also reacted ‘with a feeling of condemnation and agitation’ (osuzhdeni[e] i vzvolnovannos[t’]) to the revelations about Stalin’s wrongdoing.12 To synthesize these two antithetical reactions, it was usual to highlight speeches which claimed that the party had successfully resurrected Leninist traditions, remaining undamaged by the Stalin revelations.13 One speaker, at the Mari obkom meeting, claimed to be experiencing two feelings simultaneously: happiness and satisfaction that the subject of the cult had been brought up, along with ‘bitter indignation’ (gor’kaia obida) at the party’s past sins.14 The truth (pravda) about Stalin was, ideally, only temporarily disturbing and disheartening; it was ‘difficult, but it had to be told’.15 The honesty with which the party had tackled the subject of its past, depressing as it was, meant that party members could react with ‘pleasure’ to the grisly revelations of the speech.16 Needless to say, many more speeches – not to mention questions and notes – diverged seriously from this script, even at obkom level, and to an even greater degree at raikom and PPO level. The mixture of emotions which the Secret Speech stimulated was a volatile, heady compound. There were numerous ways in which even well intentioned speakers could get it wrong. Hyperbole – exaggerating the criticism of Stalin beyond Khrushchev’s, ultimately rather ambiguous, criticisms – may have reflected the desire to mimic the speech’s discourse, but it is more likely that such ‘sharp speeches’17 derived from genuine shock and disgust at the new revelations. The former possibility is contained in the purportedly reassuring claim from the head of the Party organs department of Komi obkom, that, ‘I assure you that communists . . . after they find out the truth about what Stalin did, will turn away from him and forget about him’.18 The latter tendency, toward spontaneous revulsion, is exemplified in the response of one Sidorov, a senior engineer at a factory in the Krasnoiarsk, for whom ‘all the greatness of Stalin, about which so much was said for more than twenty years, has evaporated into thin air’.19 This was echoed in another ‘sharp’ condemnation of Stalin in Leningrad by a Hero of the Soviet Union, who claimed that knowing even the tiniest fraction of all the evil which Stalin had committed was ‘enough . . . to erase memories of him forever’.20 Gory imagery featured in the unequivocal condemnations of Stalin which frequently accompanied requests for changes to the mausoleum and other symbols, alleging that Stalin had ‘covered his hands in blood’ or was ‘bloody and dirty’ (krovavo-griaznyi).21 Meanwhile, other speeches contained detailed witness testimony of repression.22 Old Communists – members of the party who had joined in the Lenin era – exemplified the precarious balance sought in responses to the speech. Whilst they represented the path back to Leninist purity,23 they also embodied a dangerous pre-occupation with the past, seeing their

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mission as the independent exploration of the Stalinist past, well beyond what the party envisaged.24 In Saratov, for instance, it was reported that many victims of the Terror spoke about their memories, including one farm director who ‘with great agitation announced that communists of the older generation cannot forget the repressions against honest people’.25 In Stalingrad, one communist who had been in the party since 1917 deplored the ‘epidemic of the cult of personality’ in the city.26 In Sverdlovsk, the aktiv of the city’s Old Bolsheviks enthusiastically condoned the Secret Speech (with one saying that he ‘literally felt 50 years younger’), yet also seemed determined to continue to focus on the Terror, pledging their assistance to the city’s museum in creating exhibits about the cult.27 Such acutely critical and passionate statements about the past were especially hard to interpret, or condemn, and they were often simply reported, for the Central Committee to process as they wished.28 At other times, such statements, especially unflattering comparisons with Tsarist times, were noted as angry, or ‘extreme’ (krainosti).29 These iconoclastic discourses were, at least initially, seen as excusable excesses of emotion. To use Katerina Clark’s formulation, these reactions were the first stage on the journey from spontaneity (an emotional initial reaction) to consciousness (a more rational view of the Stalinist past).30 However, where party meetings seriously overstepped the line, the party was forced to come up with a clearer statement, if not on the increasingly vexed question of the Stalinist past, then at least on the regulations governing public opinion in the present. Numerous closed party meetings, often at PPO level, played host to ‘anti-Soviet’ comments and discussions, which passed from the criticism of Stalinism to criticism of the Soviet system. Amongst the most famous examples, which quickly achieved nationwide prominence, were the discussions of the Soviet system’s failings at the Thermo-Technical Laboratory in Moscow,31 the Academy of Sciences’ Social Sciences, Oriental and Ethnographic Institutes, and the Leningrad Writers Union.32 However, the criticisms voiced here had their counterpart in other places not in the Soviet intellectual heartland, as ordinary listeners voiced their outrage or incomprehension at what they had heard.33 In all cases, what seemed to bother the central authorities reading these reports was not so much the individual misdemeanour, as much as the fact that local authorities were too slow to pick up on anti-Soviet opinion.34 The problem of inadequate rebuttal (otpor) of the first glimmers of antiSoviet thought was ubiquitous, affecting each level of the party authorities, and having a ‘knock-on effect’ on the policing of dissent, which often happened after the fact and within a different setting from where it first occurred. No-one was immune from transgression. There were, for instance, many obkom meetings which had to be diverted away from celebrations of the 20th Congress, toward correction of controversial speeches by high-

Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 45 ranking members. In Bashkiriia, for instance, speaking at the obkom aktiv meeting, Kovrigin, director of the oblast’ party school, spoke at length about the mentality of the cult (‘the cult of personality . . . is lodged in our brains’) and blamed it on Stalin’s entourage. Summing up the meeting, the obkom secretary criticized Kovrigin, claiming ‘one might have expected a different, more elegant and clear speech’ from him, as one of the main figures in the local party organization.35 Meanwhile, in Kalinin, a leading figure in the local organization for the dissemination of political and scientific knowledge, Gerasmeni, made similar allegations, blaming Molotov, Mikoian and Voroshilov for not speaking out against the cult, calling the Stalin era ‘a black page in our history’.36 Discussion of Gerasmeni’s speech dominated subsequent proceedings. Speakers cautioned against revealing what he said to the population at large, and the director of the oblast’ party school claimed that Gerasmeni had distorted the true optimism of the people, concluding derisively, ‘what kind of black page is this?’. Lastly, at the Tatar obkom aktiv meeting, a factory director claimed that ‘each of us is guilty to some degree for the flourishing of the cult of personality . . . we were not able to protest and say what we thought’. The speaker, Smirnov, was reproached by the meeting chair for blaming the party; the error was put down to a ‘slip of the tongue’ (ogovorka), in an attempt not to derail the party meeting completely.37 There were many more cases, however, where the party line was not effectively enforced by others present. These proved especially worrying for the central authorities, and the post facto solutions improvised to these local crises in March and April 1956 set a blueprint for pre-emptive strikes against future dissent. One case in Sakhalin, investigated by the department for party organs, is illustrative of these evolving mechanisms of control.38 Here, a raikom aktiv meeting had played host to a number of ‘demagogic’ speeches, in which speakers alleged that the ‘disorientated’ party had made serious mistakes in not tackling the cult earlier, and that Stalin had done more harm to the party than any other leading figure.39 Although many of those present condemned these ideas, others suggested that the meeting should draft and pass a resolution condemning the Secret Speech as mistimed (ne svoevremennyi). Although this was rejected, the raikom authorities still came under fire from the obkom, for not moving to condemn the speakers or punish them.40 Meanwhile, the obkom in its turn was criticized by the central authorities for its failure to punish the wrongdoers in question.41 In other cases, where the central authorities were not directly involved, the same pattern could be observed, with authorities bringing organizations lower down the hierarchy to order. For instance, in Tuva, a non-Communist who claimed, in conversation with a Party organization secretary, that ‘now you don’t even know who to believe’ and accused the Politburo of self-interest (‘they were saving their own skins’), was summoned to Tuva gorkom after undergoing ‘insufficient’ punishment at the PPO where he had heard the speech.42 In Kaliningrad, finally,

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several komsomol members at a school administration meeting about the Secret Speech criticized the Soviet electoral system in quasi-Trotskyist terms. At the meeting itself, their ‘anti-Soviet’ speeches were not met with the necessary rebuttal (otpor), and only after intervention by the gorkom were the main culprits expelled and their accomplices given formal warnings.43 Whilst these allegations of negligence were clearly a form of scapegoating, shifting the blame from the authors of the Secret Speech to the hapless local bureaucrats disseminating it, they also pointed to a real defect in the management of public opinion. What made it so difficult for these organizations to pre-empt dissent, or at least to quash it at the earliest sign? One answer is that many of those who could usually be relied on to enforce the party line were themselves embroiled in criticism (kritika) and self-criticism (samokritika) as they grappled with genuine feelings of shock and outrage. Additionally, local authorities were often simply at a loss as to how to classify, and then to discipline, the range of responses to de-Stalinization. The variety of terms used to describe criticisms of the system in local reports – from ‘anti-social moods’ and ‘anti-Soviet statements’ to ‘slander’ (kleveta), and ‘demagogic’ (demagogicheskii), ‘hostile’ (vrazhdebnyi) or ‘incorrect’ (nepravil’nyi) statements – partly reflected the habit of combining several terms of abuse to describe wrongdoers.44 However, it also demonstrated the local authorities’ predicament: in trying to describe the problems which had arisen, they were faced with a situation where, in Maria Zezina’s apt formulation, ‘the boundaries of the permitted were blurred’.45 Comparing party reports from different regions yields a diverse range of assessments of some of the most common controversial reactions. The frequent comparisons made between Stalinist and Tsarist times, to the detriment of the Soviet era, would in some places be deemed incorrect,46 whilst in others such sentiments counted, more seriously, as ‘demagogic’.47 Allegations that the speech had come too late usually counted as ‘incorrect’, or ‘misguided’, but were sometimes suppressed more forcefully.48 Party authorities also had a variety of approaches to the frequent calls for Stalin to be excluded from the party, from letting the resolution pass (only to be stopped at gorkom level), to immediately ‘correcting’ those who espoused the idea.49 It was usually easier to discern when respondents had strayed into distinctively anti-Soviet territory, but even in clear cases of ‘anti-Soviet’ or ‘hostile’ reactions, punishment often occurred some time after the event, with the original meeting failing to put a stop to such sentiments. This occurred, for instance, at a meeting of the Stalingrad pedagogical institute, where anti-party statements made by several students were not rebuffed at the original meeting.50 It was only the intervention of the gorkom which ensured that students were forced to repent, and received the appropriate punishment; by this time, however, the incident had achieved notoriety throughout the oblast’ as an example of the suppression of criticism (zazhim kritiki).51 This scenario, which also occurred at

Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 47 the Thermo-Technical Laboratory, embodied the party’s worst fears, suggesting communities of dissenters, rather than individual rogue voices. However, in subsequent CC resolutions, such as those on the ThermoTechnical Laboratory, and the later articles and circulars about the cult, this same accumulation of critical terms gradually came to reflect a growing confidence at the centre in asserting the boundaries of public opinion, defining, and then anathematizing and excluding anti-Soviet conduct. The language of demonization reverted to its familiar Stalin-era functions (although now it no longer portended physical annihilation), emphasizing the party’s firmer stance on dissent. The terminology of dissent – ‘demagogic’, ‘slanderous’ and ‘anti-Soviet’ – was attached, in the July resolutions (and other published criticisms of dissent), and in the secret June circular, to specific culprits and specific types of behaviour.52 Local authorities were told in June that: Isolated anti-party speeches are not so much dangerous in and of themselves, but rather the fact that they didn’t receive the necessary rebuttal, including from leaders . . . The CC draws the attention of party organizations to the fact that a section of communists doesn’t understand correctly the freedom of discussion and criticism in the party, as a result of which they aren’t in a position to discern when freedom of discussion transgresses the bounds of partiinost’ and criticism becomes slander.53 Having offered this assistance in categorizing dissent, and placed the focus on the vexed question of otpor, the central authorities now placed responsibility for the containment of dissent firmly with the local authorities. Dissent certainly did not cease as a result of these secret circulars and published documents. However, reports of anti-Soviet and demagogic responses monitored at meetings about the cult (including meetings held to discuss the July resolution) recounted a growing number of successful cases of expulsion or decisive punishment of wrongdoers.54 At the same time, it was precisely the premature silence that descended on the Stalin question which piqued curiosity. Students and young people became, if anything, more vociferous in their interrogations of the komsomol authorities after the Hungarian crisis; the authorities reported despairingly in November that student curiosity about the cult had only increased since the party had tried to curtail debate by enforcing disciplinary measures and delineating a more balanced view of Stalin’s character.55 The party circulated another warning to dissenters, mentioning youth in particular, at the end of 1956. The language of the circular again reflected the confidence with which denunciatory terminology was now employed; dissenters were ‘rotten’ (gnilye), ‘hostile’ (vrazhdebnye) and ‘petty bourgeois’.56 Meanwhile, ‘communists and leaders’ were also at fault because ‘they don’t decisively put an end to anti-Soviet propaganda, don’t

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repudiate hostile outbursts, and trail along in the wake of incidents’.57 As a result of the fall-out from the Secret Speech, the party rapidly learned to anathematize dissent, retreating to familiar Stalinist discourses and strategies of social exclusion. However, the full restoration of order was slower to be achieved.

Policing de-Stalinization: iconoclasm and criminality The violence of de-Stalinization in 1956 was not merely verbal; physical violence against the symbols of Stalinism was also exceptionally widespread. Even in the chaotic weeks which followed the Secret Speech, many witnesses looked to proximate authorities to provide clarity and stability, peppering the local and central authorities with requests for guidelines. For instance, one question submitted to the authorities in Stalingrad enquired, ‘are people acting correctly in tearing portraits of Stalin?’ and, more specifically, ‘did they act correctly in the Zelenovskii farm, knocking down a monument to Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, will someone be subjected to punishment for this?’.58 In Leningrad, meanwhile, ‘iconoclasm’ was to be found higher up: one listener asked the visiting historian, Pankratova, whether ‘people are behaving correctly in the party raikoms, where they have first of all taken down Stalin portraits. Were there CC instructions about this?’.59 Finally, party authorities were themselves perplexed, asking for guidance in ‘how to act in those circumstances when workers themselves take down portraits of Stalin[?]’.60 It would take some time for these answers to emerge. Such actions were located on a shifting boundary between mobilized emotion and uncontrolled, disorderly passions. The fact that many of these actions were public and demonstrative suggests that their perpetrators saw them as their entitlement, if not as their duty to the party. The interpretation of iconoclasm as a ‘duty’ could be seen at a meeting of the Odessa sailing school Party organization, where one member eagerly announced to the secretary that, ‘this very day [segodnia zhe], I’ll throw all the portraits of Stalin out of the apartment’.61 Meanwhile, people frequently asserted their ‘rights’ to dispose of visible signs of Stalin. At Moscow’s ‘Frezer’ factory, for instance, ‘the inhabitants of one room took down the portrait of Stalin and gave it to the supervisor, saying ‘take it away, it is no longer needed by us’.62 Schoolchildren in Moscow took down a Stalin portrait and put it away in a cupboard, explaining to their teacher that ‘Stalin committed many mistakes in his work, and for that reason they had taken down his portrait’.63 A similarly defiant act was recorded in Lvov oblast’, Ukraine, where an old Communist, Utkin, was lying ill in bed at the time when the Secret Speech was publicized. Upon learning of the speech, the report records – ‘[he] got up out of bed, took down the picture of Stalin from the wall, put it in the corner and warned his wife never to hang the portrait again’.64 Such

Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 49 ‘private’ acts of de-Stalinization were, apparently, left unopposed, perhaps because they were thought to constitute reasonable responses to the revelations of the speech. However, where these acts were more public, or ‘demonstrative’,65 the party was less sure, haunted by the thought that these acts could be dangerous, subversive acts threatening public order and the Soviet system as a whole. The emerging tendency to criminalize such acts paralleled and reinforced the party’s emerging definition of anti-Soviet verbal responses. People often reacted to the Secret Speech across the RSFSR and most of the USSR (except Georgia) by breaking, tearing and assaulting Stalin pictures and statues in factories, schools, squares and a variety of other public institutions. Statues were knocked down, beheaded, defaced or daubed in paint, and portraits were removed, ripped, graffitied or burned.66 One interpretive paradigm brought to bear on these acts by anxious local authorities was that of spontaneous, ‘elemental’ behaviour (stikhiinost’). One report from Kalinin, for example, recounted that ‘at some enterprises and collective farms and institutions and schools, people have started to take down Stalin portraits spontaneously [stikhiino]’.67 In a similar vein, the authorities in Vladimir oblast’ reported that in a factory in Gus’Khrustal’nyi, at the meeting to discuss the Secret Speech: Some workers were allowed to engage in spontaneous removal [samovol’noe sniatie] of Stalin portraits and bas-reliefs from the honour board. In the ‘Red Labour’ artel’, a Stalin portrait was taken down by non-party member Bratskii, and burned in the stove.68 This report was mirrored in other reports of workers spontaneously disposing of portraits, or abusing them in the aftermath of meetings.69 In most cases, the emphasis on ‘spontaneity’ or emotion was ambiguous, suggesting on the one hand an excusable venting of emotion by people not ‘conscious’ enough to know any better, and, on the other, the fear that such acts could portend a more serious breakdown of social order. The latter concerns were voiced less ambiguously by individuals who imagined themselves to be above such behaviour, such as Moscow academics (who asked ‘why didn’t the CC foresee the anarchic actions by the masses [nizy]?’)70 and observers deploring the anti-Stalin violence in schools.71 What, then, was the solution? If iconoclasts could be made to see the error of their ways, to move from ‘spontaneity to consciousness’, the damage could usually be contained. For instance, when a senior technician at the firm ‘Tokhogres’ in Lvov ‘tore a Stalin portrait off the wall, tore it up and threw it in the rubbish bin’, he was rebuked by the factory manager. However, when he ‘begged forgiveness for his act, and said that he could not calmly react to Stalin’s anti-party actions’, punishment went no further.72 His response indicated that his act was only a temporary aberration, grounded in a (justifiable) outrage against Stalin’s wrongdoing.

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However, the barrage of violent incidents soon swept away this emphasis on forgiveness, and notions of hooliganism and criminality started to creep into party discourse about iconoclasm. Perhaps, this violence was, as the academics had warned, ‘anarchic’, deserving punishment rather than indulgence. In April 1956, one report from around the Union noted that in the aftermath of the Secret Speech, ‘there had taken place many incidents of public destruction of portraits, busts and monuments of Stalin, which went as far as overt hooliganism in many cases’.73 The particular incidents singled out for attention included book and portrait burning (Tallinn), a hammer attack on a bust of Stalin outside Brest public library, and an incident in Petrozavodsk, where the face of a Stalin statue had been smeared with paint.74 This choice of representative incidents perhaps reflected the fear that anti-social behaviour in these marginal territories would be contagious, seeping into the heart of the Union (although in fact it had taken hold at the centre as strongly as at the periphery). One of the first cases to be criminalized concerned two roving iconoclasts, a pair of drunken Lithuanian soldiers, who on their way to Leningrad, ‘had removed from its pedestal and smashed a clay bust of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin, by the city’s dramatic theatre’. Apprehended by the police, the report concluded, ‘the hooligans were arrested and investigated’.75 The sailors had clearly transgressed a number of rules, by being drunk and assaulting public property in a town they did not even inhabit, but the case is noteworthy as one of the first indications of a shift from excusing violence toward criminalizing it. Another example of this transition was the case of a group of schoolchildren in Belgorod who were responsible for ‘a manifestation of hooligan activity, when, on the evening of 1 April, during a showing of a film by young people and pupils of the school the head of a bust of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin standing in the square opposite the school, was knocked off with stones’.76 The fact that young people, rather than the town authorities, were responsible for this act transformed potentially innocent iconoclasm into an ominous sign of the breakdown of social order. These deviant youths, placing themselves in opposition to the ‘good’ youth of the town, were doubly deserving of the epithet of ‘hooligan’; using the ‘pretext’ of de-Stalinization, they had smuggled deviant social norms into a space intended for their education and edification, just as anti-Soviet feeling had seeped into party meetings ‘in the guise of’ (pod vidom/predlogom) criticism of Stalin.77 By November 1956, as the party celebrated the first anniversary of the revolution to fall after the Secret Speech, there was no longer any leniency shown to those who assaulted any Soviet symbolism. Violence did not abate in honour of November 1956, but now, if the perpetrators could be caught, they were harshly punished, as is demonstrated by an incident at an electrical factory in Chuvashiia.78 In November, a non-member of the party named Zolotov cut the head off a Stalin sculpture in the factory

Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 51 courtyard, describing his actions as ‘the struggle against the cult of personality’. Unlike the party, however, Zolotov also alleged that the dictatorship of the proletariat had died out under Stalin and that bourgeois ideas had been allowed to take the place of Marxist–Leninist theory. Zolotov was subsequently condemned by the factory Party organization and by a general meeting, and was arrested on the charge of ‘political hooliganism’. His actions, even more explicitly than those of the Belgorod schoolchildren, combined unsanctioned violence and political views, in this case verging on Trotskyism, which the party had anathematized as early as summer 1956. The shift from ‘correcting’ iconoclasts to viewing them as potential ‘enemies’, whose violent acts portended violent intentions to the Soviet system, again set a trend in the management of reactions to deStalinization which would resurface when the party returned to the Stalin theme in 1961.

The 22nd Party Congress: suppressing dissent? The 22nd Party Congress (1961) was primarily intended to advance Khrushchev’s vision of communism. After the tumultuous revelations of the 20th Party Congress, and the political in-fighting of the anti-party group episode (1957) and the 21st Party Congress (1959), the party badly needed to present its vision of the future, unencumbered by fresh revelations about its sordid past. Yet the palpable optimism which was promoted in Soviet public life in 1961, during the discussions preceding the ratification of the Third Party Programme, carried an undertow of pessimism.79 The past had its part to play in the 22nd Party Congress, not merely in terms of the pure Leninist traditions which the new programme would embody, but also in terms of the ‘unfinished business’ of the Stalinist past. Discussions of the Third Party Programme provoked some suggestions from ordinary people that the programme itself ought to contain a clear statement of the party’s position on the cult of personality, indicating that, for some at least, the issue had not been satisfactorily resolved.80 The congress therefore returned forcefully to the Stalin theme. The congress concluded with an orgy of criticism of Stalin, which acted as a well-orchestrated crescendo toward the final symbolic act of iconoclasm, the removal of Stalin’s body from the mausoleum on the night of 31 August 1961. It was precisely this kind of overt, easily interpreted, public condemnation of Stalin, and iconoclasm of his cult, which earlier texts and symbolic gestures of de-Stalinization had lacked. Yet how was this, apparently more iconoclastic, wave of de-Stalinization received by its wider audience? And how far was ‘spontaneous’ iconoclasm to be tolerated in this final stage of public response to the revelations about Stalin? In fact, the 22nd Congress both provided and enforced a far more stable image of Stalin, and of popular response to de-Stalinization. The congress, and subsequent materials about it in the central press, provided a very

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extensive public text about Stalin, which also contained a much clearer guide to suitable responses for listeners. Moral outrage (vozmushchenie)81 was encouraged, to dispel any remaining doubts about Stalin (or deStalinization), dissolving them in a wave of cathartic emotion. Khrushchev’s concluding speech to the congress, for instance, encouraged the people to take revenge on Stalin: Any leader who forgets this pays a harsh price for such errors. I should say – pays during his life, or the people will not forgive him after his death, as happened with the condemnation of Stalin’s cult of personality.82 These guidelines for the new role to be played by the people (narod) encouraged posthumous and passionate criticism of Stalin, which would not, unlike in 1956, be reversed or retracted. Let me now turn to the question of how successful these texts about Stalin were in controlling local discourse about de-Stalinization.

Replicating de-Stalinization Where, in 1956, the party had been cautious in encouraging popular narratives of Terror, discussions at party meetings in the wake of the 22nd Party Congress made such ‘memory work’ obligatory. Now, local narratives about instances of the ‘cult of personality’ – its local perpetrators and victims – formed an integral part of the performance of the final act of deStalinization.83 ‘Old Communists’ and rehabilitated survivors of the Terror played a far more prominent role in the dissection of the Stalin era at a local level, just as they had during the congress itself. At the same time, by assigning leading roles to party members of long standing, or to current local party leaders, these meetings reflected the hierarchy which still governed the narration of terror. For example, at the meeting of Kostroma obkom, held in midNovember, one of the keynote pronouncements was given by a member of more than forty years standing, who remembered that ‘many Bolsheviks, underground conspirators and komsomol workers were subjected to repressions and destroyed during the cult of personality. It was a gloomy time’.84 Like the congress itself, where Khrushchev and his fellow leaders had recounted the fates of purged Politburo members, and republic leaders had echoed them, narrating their local experience of terror, meetings also tended to publicize the unjust fates of local party leaders. In Tula, it was revealed that some 24 figures from the local party organization had been arrested, and 22 shot, during the Terror.85 In North Ossetia, an industrial manger recounted his own sufferings in 1937 and further tales of highranking party figures who had been ‘groundlessly’ repressed.86 In Volgograd, at the meeting of the oblast’ aktiv, several old communists

Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 53 recounted their sufferings at the hands of the Stalin regime.87 The ‘keynote address’ highlighted in the report about this meeting sent to the central authorities was delivered by Stepaniatov, a member since 1918, who recounted that ‘I was made to experience a lot of sorrow, and to spend a long time in prison during this cult’; this involved being arrested while serving as head of the city soviet in 1938, being imprisoned due to the ‘lawlessness’ of Stalin and his cronies, and then exiled to Siberia. The fact that Stepaniatov had survived and been rehabilitated allowed him and his fellow survivors to act as ideal vehicles for de-Stalinization. Possessing both the moral authority to condemn the cult from personal experience, and yet also happier memories of the pre-Stalinist party, and their ‘preStalinized’ city, they represented the ideal discursive nexus from which to condemn the past and anticipate the de-Stalinized future. These carefully orchestrated narratives of Terror by old Bolsheviks emphasized that passionate moral outrage was now an acceptable and indeed the only appropriate, response to the cult. As such, resistance to de-Stalinization was usually coded as a form of emotional and intellectual immaturity. The meeting of the Traktorozavodskii raikom, in Stalingrad/ Volgograd, was full of eyewitness and victim testimony, offered as a reproach, and further propaganda lesson, to those who resisted the fight against the cult, particularly those young, naïve inhabitants who had not yet renounced their feelings for Stalin.88

Responding to de-Stalinization The greater concordance between central and local texts of deStalinization described above represented a considerable advance on the chaos sown by the Secret Speech. However, it constituted only one sector of the response aroused by the congress. Other important forms of response to party policy were questions submitted to party meetings, and letters sent to the party leadership. In contrast to the thousands of questions concerning Stalin which rained down on the heads of party officials in the wake of the Secret Speech, the Stalin question evoked much less confusion, and even interest, in 1961.89 In Sverdlovsk, for instance, questions about the 22nd Party Congress submitted to raion authorities showed far more curiosity about the apparent controversies involving China and Albania, and the fate of the anti-party group, than about Stalin.90 If any sentiment about Stalin could be gleaned from these notes, it was a sense of impatience that the party continued to hark back to the question of Stalin’s cult, or more often, to the anti-party group.91 There were almost none of the kind of probing questions about culpability which had so troubled the authorities in 1956. A listener who enquired ‘why the members of the Central Committee had not fought against Stalin’s cult during his life’ was a lone voice; the reduced number of questions about Stalin either reflected a relative lack of interest in the issue,

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or, as one note pointed out, may have indicated that the congress had dispelled any remaining confusion (neiasnosti).92 In Stalingrad, on the other hand, a greater diversity of opinion was reported, perhaps linked to the controversy over changing the city’s name. The population of Stalingrad had many questions about the cult of personality, asking how it had arisen, and why Stalin had been praised for so long (‘Stalin’s name was praised, they sang him dithyrambs, raised him up on to the pedestal of an idolized leader [kumir-vozhd’], but now we’re . . . toppling him from his pedestal’).93 Criticism of Stalin here also targeted specific failings of Stalin’s character, claiming, inter alia, that Stalin had a ‘mania for greatness’ and ‘lack of humanity’.94 None of these criticisms necessarily outstripped those of the congress, but the claims, echoing those of 1956, that the party had hypocritically praised Stalin for its own benefit certainly did.95 Letters sent to the authorities after the 22nd Party Congress, on the other hand, as in 1956, usually came from more impassioned correspondents with a particular emotional stake in the Stalin question. In 1956, these had been dominated by fervent supporters of Stalin who leapt to his defence, penning angry diatribes to Central Committee members.96 In 1961, on the other hand, letters to the authorities usually expressed passionate gratitude for the new revelations about Stalin, suggesting a cathartic release of memories and emotions. For, despite its grisly revelations, ‘for the section of Soviet society who counted themselves as anti-Stalinists, the XXII Congress became a festival for the soul’.97 Several writers refused to identify themselves, not because they feared party reprisals (as in 1956), but so as, in the words of one person writing anonymously to Pravda in November 1961, to avoid giving the impression that they harboured ‘self-interested aims’.98 For these writers, there was apparently a qualitative difference between the semi-secret, and ultimately half-hearted, condemnations of Stalin in 1956, and the public, dramatic performance of the party’s tragic past that had just taken place at the 22nd Congress. According to reports sent to the Central Committee, relatives of Stalin’s victims formed a large proportion of those who wrote letters to Pravda during this time.99 Khrushchev’s assertion in his concluding speech that ‘every person represents a whole story’ was borne out in the minibiographies which emerged from these letters.100 One woman writing from Alma-Ata, for instance, was overcome by emotion upon hearing Khrushchev speak at the 22nd Congress: When I heard Khrushchev’s concluding speech on the radio, I couldn’t hold back my tears. Involuntarily, the image of 1937 rose before my eyes, that terrible year when my children and I were deprived of a father, a husband.101 Her testimony suggests that it was only the party’s public performance of this narrative of the Terror which could legitimize and release her own

Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 55 private memories; the correspondence between the state’s historical narrative and her long-suppressed personal history was traumatic, yet also validating. This sense of the ‘authorization’ of personal history could also be found in another letter, from a Muscovite, who wrote of his own personal tragedy, the loss of his father in 1945 after his arrest (he was subsequently posthumously rehabilitated in 1957).102 The conference’s proceedings had not led to understanding: ‘I’m agitated and outraged by the fact that the best people in the party and state were destroyed en masse’. However, this subsumption of his father’s death into a larger countrywide (or partywide) narrative of unjust sacrifice, in which ‘the best’ had fallen victim to mass terror, did allow the writer to feel like a ‘legitimate citizen’ (polnopravnyi grazhdanin). The author went on to praise Khrushchev’s promises to construct a monument to the victims of the Terror, vowing that he would ‘try to be one of the first to place flowers at the base of that monument’. Again, the inclusion of the writer’s personal history, for so long a source of shame and social exclusion, into a collective ritual (and site) of remembrance was a highly emotional experience.103 The public revelations about Stalin therefore went some way to expanding the boundaries of inclusion in the Soviet public, confirming once and for all the rehabilitation of Stalin’s victims. However, beyond expressing gratitude and outrage, what was the imagined role of the Soviet public in the process of de-Stalinization? It emerged that the limits on popular participation in deStalinization were quite draconian. The de-Stalinization of the symbolism of the Stalin cult, in contrast to the half-hearted ‘official’ iconoclasm of 1956, was thorough, eliminating every trace of Stalin’s physical and textual presence. However, the violent reactions of 1956 had no counterpart in 1961. The removal of Stalin’s body from the mausoleum provided the earliest template for this wave of the ‘overcoming of the cult of personality’: participation in the verbal demolition of Stalin was welcome, even encouraged, but the physical demolition of Stalinist memory sites remained the preserve of a small elite, who accomplished their task secretly and swiftly.104 The congress’ calls for Stalin’s body to be removed from the mausoleum, framed in discourses of (in)compatibility and sanctity, were echoed in indignant appeals for removal in regional meetings. At Kostroma obkom, the ‘popular desire’ for Stalin to be removed was publicly staged in the reading out of a letter calling for Stalin to be removed as an ‘unworthy’ neighbour for Lenin, in an echo of Dora Lazurkina’s climactic speech to the congress.105 At a meeting of the Kaliningrad town Party organization, one timber worker claimed – ‘Stalin all his life taught us to live in a Leninist way, but himself violated Lenin’s commandments. There is no place for him next to Lenin!’.106 A report on reactions in Tula oblast’ described worker approval of the removal of Stalin from the ‘holy of holies of our party and people – the mausoleum of Vladimir Il’ich Lenin’.107 Nevertheless, popular desires

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to find out more about the implementation of this decision went unsatisfied; a question submitted to the Volgograd oblast’ aktiv meeting after the burial, asking whether Stalin had been cremated or buried received the curt reply, ‘they buried him in a grave’.108 Similarly, party meetings saw impassioned calls for the removal of Stalin’s monuments, but those present were never informed how these removals had taken place, much less invited to take part in these rituals. Consequently, numerous anecdotes, and occasional questions sent to the authorities, either wondered how statues had been taken down, or asked why this so often took place after dark.109 Some letters to the authorities accordingly seemed content to enact verbal iconoclasm, leaving its physical enactment up to the party bosses: violent urges were sublimated into violent prose. A letter from Bashkiriia sent to Pravda just after the 22nd Congress exemplified this sense of selfrestraint: [Stalin’s] monuments, sculptures, busts, portraits pop up everywhere . . . in our little town their cold stones stick out all over the place, causing revulsion amongst the oil-workers and all the good people of our town. Now it’s no longer possible to look at Stalin without feelings of repulsion – the principal culprit of all those disgusting deeds, the principal culprit for human grief, it’s impossible to pronounce the names of the cities linked to his awful name, without calling to mind all his evil deeds, which went on for decades. All of them must be renamed as a matter of urgency, so that Stalin’s name no longer poisons the life of our Soviet people.110 The melodramatic fervour, faced with the spectacle of Stalin’s continued presence, was purely textual. Despite the visceral evocations of nausea, the author turned to the authorities to relieve the sickness of confronting the (signs of the) past, rather than acting himself. This sense of the limits on individual agency could also be found in a letter from Kharkov: The people will remember Stalin well enough without the monuments that he erected to himself during his lifetime . . . the people gave him authority, and now they’ll take it back . . . the people say: ‘Stalin’s death saved Russia!’111 This letter represented the destruction of Stalinist symbols as a popular act of demotion and punishment; it would symbolize the refusal to accord the memory of Stalin the respect necessary to sustain a cult. The letter evidently viewed the new wave of de-Stalinization as a complete reversal in official attitudes, for it openly revealed to the authorities the former, and formerly outlawed, discourse of popular dissent against Stalin by

Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 57 updating the impudent re-writings of the ‘SSSR’ acronym, from the 1930s version (smert’ Stalina spaset Rossiiu) to the posthumous version (. . . spasla . . .).112 The letter presented a text of popular iconoclasm intended to prompt those in power to authorize an act of iconoclasm. Thus, although there were few restrictions on the iconoclastic fervour that it was possible to express verbally, the authorities remained in charge of iconoclastic actions.

Resisting de-Stalinization Whilst verbal participation in the final wave of de-Stalinization was encouraged, therefore, physical participation was discouraged. Yet what of those who wanted neither type of participation: was resistance to deStalinization permitted? The available evidence suggests that open resistance to de-Stalinization in 1961 and after was far less prevalent than it had been in 1956. There are several possible explanations for this. First, the 22nd Congress’ revelations about Stalin, for all that they did represent a qualitatively new step for some respondents (including the letter writers examined earlier), in no way approached the ‘shock therapy’ of the Secret Speech.113 Second, the revelations of 1961 differed markedly from those in the Secret Speech. Unlike the Secret Speech, the speeches of the 22nd Party Congress and the subsequent reports in the Soviet press provided a coherent narrative of Stalinism, which dispensed with the moral ambiguity of the Secret Speech and couched key facts about Stalin within clear interpretive guidelines for its listeners. Lastly, the greater clarity with which the Stalin question was posed may indeed have meant that supporters of Stalin ‘under the force of the new revelations about Stalin at the congress were forced to fall silent’.114 Thus, outrage and confusion, the dominant tendencies in responses in 1956, were less likely either to arise, or to be expressed. Nevertheless, this did not preclude certain instances of resistance, and these provide further insights into the party’s paradoxically repressive response to dissent. The decision on the mausoleum was the touch-paper which ignited much of the disapproval of the party’s course expressed in 1961. A report from the Moscow oblast’, written after the issue of the mausoleum had been discussed, but before the decree had been carried out, for example, recounted several workers’ objections to the plans, with one saying that – ’Stalin’s ashes [sic] should be taken to another place, but with a sense of respect, since after all he has great merits’.115 There were also, perhaps predictably, reports of dissatisfaction in Georgia, Chechnia and Dagestan, where certain people still thought that Stalin’s merits meant that he should remain in the mausoleum.116 The Georgian Central Committee reported individual instances of resistance, involving Georgian soldiers in an artillery batallion.117 There were also reports of unrest amongst the youth of Georgia.118 Some kept quiet, out of a sense of expediency, with one

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student in Batumi, probably recalling the 1956 crackdown, claiming revealingly that ‘people are hardly going to speak out against such a decision’. Others were less cowed – anonymous notices were found in Tbilisi’s university campus, calling for protests on 31 October, and on the revolution anniversary. However, at least some of this pro-Stalin sentiment extended beyond Stalin’s homeland: according to Western press reports at the time, and more recent sociological data, the issue of the mausoleum produced some surprisingly frank and open debate which revealed a wide spectrum of views on the removal.119 Renaming was the other ritual of de-Stalinization which aroused at times quite serious popular discontent. The party’s disingenuous calls for ‘discussion and approval’ of name changes inadvertently provided a forum within which the iconoclastic discourse and actions of de-Stalinization could be criticized.120 In Georgia, workers at enterprises renamed so that they no longer bore Stalin’s name were described as harbouring ‘sentiments directed against re-naming’.121 This kind of concern was also to be found in other, less predictable places, however. In Perm’ oblast’, at a midNovember meeting of a cell of a postal factory in the city to discuss (or rather, to consent to) removing Stalin’s name from the factory’s title, the deputy director of the cell, a certain Petrov, disagreed with the idea of renaming, ‘and proposed leaving the old name, justifying this by the fact that under Stalin’s cult of personality, workers had been better fed’.122 His contention received the support of two other technicians, and all three opponents were not sufficiently rebuked. In the vote on renaming, 19 supported it, but there were 14 protest votes and 17 abstentions. The factory authorities then held another meeting, evidently taking Petrov aside in the interim, since he then repented of his behaviour at the second meeting. Responding to the signal that dissent on the matter of de-Stalinization was not to be tolerated, the participants of the second meeting unanimously signed up to the factory’s resolution to rename the factory after Sverdlov, and the matter was closed. Lastly, in Stalingrad, the decision to rename the city met with widespread objections, based both on continued respect for Stalin, and also – more commonly – on protest against the disrespect for history and local memories and traditions which the name change implied. This protest was quelled using a number of methods, including forceful propaganda, such as meetings where protesters were forced to listen to gruesome tales of the Terror, and the curtailment of ‘votes’ on renaming if protest looked likely to derail the vote, as happened at the city’s Pedagogical Institute.123

Conclusion The Secret Speech marked a radically new stage in de-Stalinization. Not only did it debunk much of the hitherto canonical history of Stalinism, propagated by the Short Course and the Stalin cult, but it also generated

Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 59 an unprecedented crisis in the management of public opinion. Whilst criticisms of Stalin made in 1956 were largely retracted in the period between the 20th and 22nd Party Congress, leaving his public image ill-defined, the party permitted no such uncertainty on the issue of public opinion and dissent, asserting its prerogatives to define and punish dissent with growing confidence from late Spring 1956. Therefore, when the party returned to de-Stalinization in 1961, bringing the critique of the Secret Speech into the open, and elaborating on some of its revelations, the real purpose of the latter stage of the campaign was not to destabilize further the old imagery of Stalin, but rather to stabilize popular opinion about the erstwhile leader, and about his successors’ policies of de-Stalinization. Having learned a hard lesson from the previous phase of de-Stalinization, the authorities provided and enforced a clearer script about Stalin. Criticisms were more open, but discussion was closed off, and dissenting voices were silenced more forcefully than in 1956. Although the aftermath of the 22nd Party Congress saw some further deStalinization – more open critiques of Stalin, and some new narratives about the Terror – this remained at the discretion of the party, who, even in this context, still preferred to use the elliptical short-hand, kul’t lichnosti, implying that the issue had been closed for discussion, just as the party had ‘overcome the past’ to move to the glorious future. The party’s commitment to opening up the discussion of the past had been superficial and short-lived; it would be left to dissident historians and writers to continue these explorations in the 1960s and 1970s.

Notes 1 Still one of the best accounts of the changing official views of Stalin, a topic outside the scope of this chapter, is S. Cohen, ‘The Stalin Question since Stalin’, in Id., Rethinking the Soviet Experience. Politics and History since 1917, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 93–127. 2 These observations about the contrasts in public opinion between 1956 and 1961 can be compared with a similar argument concerning rehabilitation and punishment (M. Dobson, ‘Sign-Posting the Future, or Reconstructing Old Divisions?: A Re-assessment of the XXII Party Congress’, unpublished MS, paper to the 35th convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Toronto, November 2003). 3 Terms from Iu. Aksiutin, A. Pyzhikov, Poststalinskoe obshchestvo: problemy liderstva i transformatsiia vlasti, Moscow, 1999, p. 91, and Vol’noe ekonomicheskoe obshchestvo Rossii, Kruglyi stol, ‘40 let zakrytogo doklada N.S. Khrushcheva XX s’’ezdu O kul’te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh’ 24.2.96, Moscow, 1996. 4 A. Adzhubei, Te desiat’ let, Moscow: Interbuk, p. 127. 5 See chapter by Roger Markwick in this volume. 6 The literature on reactions to the speech is extensive, see e.g. Doklad N.S. Khrushcheva o kul’te lichnosti Stalina na XX se’’zde KPSS. Dokumenty, Moscow: Rosspen, 2002; Iu. Aksiutin, ‘Popular Responses to Khrushchev’ in A. Gleason, S. Khrushchev, W. Taubman, Nikita Khrushchev, New Haven:

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9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

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Polly Jones Yale University Press, 2000; P. Jones, ‘From Stalinism to Post-Stalinism: Demythologising Stalin, 1953–1956’, in Shukman, H. (ed.), Redefining Stalinism, London: Frank Cass, 2003. RGANI, 1/2/17/89-91; RGANI, 3/14/4/66. Doklad N.S. Khrushcheva o kul’te lichnosti Stalina, pp. 165–255; Analysis of these documents in Iu. Aksiutin, A. Pyzhikov, ‘O podgotovke zakrytogo doklada N.S. Khrushcheva XX s’’ezdu KPSS v svete novykh dokumentov’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 2, 2002, 107–18; N. Khrushchev, Vremia, liudi, vlast’ vospominaniia, Moscow: Moskovskie novosti, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 176–94. For a full analysis of the speech’s rhetoric, see P. Jones, ‘Strategies of DeMythologisation in Post-Stalinism and Post-Communism. A Comparison of De-Stalinisation and De-Leninisation’, DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2003, pp. 52–63. RGANI, 1/2/18/3-90. RGANI, 5/32/43/62. Reabilitatsiia. Kak eto bylo, vol. 2, Moscow: Rosspen, 2003, p. 22. Ibid., pp. 22, 46. RGANI, 5/32/43/73. RGANI, 5/31/53/101. Reabilitatsiia, p. 38; RGANI, 5/32/43/6; RGANI, 5/32/43/54; RGANI, 5/32/43/145. Reabilitatsiia, p. 22. RGANI, 5/3/43/8. RGANI, 5/32/45/18. Reabilitatsiia, p. 23. RGANI, 5/32/46/8; Ibid., 5/32/44/51, 59, 60; RGANI, 5/32/44/175; RGANI, 5/32/43/91. Additional examples of sentiments about the mausoleum in Reabilitatsiia, pp. 173–5. RGANI, 5/32/43/133; RGANI, 5/32/43/89; RGASPI, 556/1/25/255. Speeches highlighting old Bolsheviks’ Leninism include RGANI, 5/32/44/17; RGANI, 5/32/44/50. TsDOOSO, 161/27/26/54-8. RGANI, 5/32/45/60. TsDNIVO, 119/20/41/83-4. TsDOOSO, 161/27/26/58. Reabilitatsiia, p. 35; RGANI, 5/32/46/110. Reabilitatsiia, p. 47; RGANI, 5/32/43/6; RGANI, 5/32/44/188. K. Clark, The Soviet Novel. History as Ritual, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981, pp. 15–24. Reabilitatsiia, pp. 52–7, 63–5, 47–9. Reabilitatsiia, pp. 41–3, 45–52, 49. For more on these cases, see Pikhoia, Sovetskii soiuz: istoriia vlasti, Moscow, 1998, pp. 147–53, the earliest analysis of the documents from the Presidential Archive now re-printed in Reabilitatsiia. C.f. V. Naumov, ‘K istorii sekretnogo doklada, N.S. Krushcheva na XX s’’ezde KPSS’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, 4, 1996, 147–68. F. Burlatskii, F., Vozhdi i sovetniki. O Khrushcheve, Andropove i ne tol’ko o nikh, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1990, p. 98. RGANI, 5/32/45/3-4; RGANI, 5/32/45/54; c.f. TsDOOSO, 4/55/120/13. Reabilitatsiia., p. 48; c.f. RGANI, 5/32/44/1. RGASPI, 566/1/124/57, 156. RGANI, 5/32/43/43. Full stenogram in RGASPI, 556/1/362 (Speeches at ll. 60–2, 69, 90). RGASPI, 556/1/1072/148, 163. RGANI, 5/32/44/135-7.

Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 61 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82 83 84 85

RGANI, 5/32/45/135-6. RGANI, 5/32/44/134-5. RGANI, 5/32/44/137. RGANI, 5/32/46/176. RGANI, 5/32/46/171. Reabilitatsiia, p. 47. M. Zezina, ‘Shokovaia terapiia: ot 1953-go k 1956 godu’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 2, 1995, 121–35 (129). RGANI, 5/32/46/60, 63–4. RGANI, 5/32/45/113. RGANI, 5/32/46/60, 68, 181; RGANI, 5/32/46/8. RGANI, 5/31/54/6; RGANI, 5/31/54/6. TsDNIVO, 594/1/15. TsDNIVO, 113/52/20/284-85. Reabilitatsiia, pp. 157–62. Ibid., p. 158. RGANI, 5/31/54/13-21; RGANI, 5/32/46/244. TsKHDMO, 1/32/810/10-17. Reabilitatsiia, pp. 208–14. Ibid., p. 210. TsDNIVO, 113/52/103/164, 196; the attack on the statue was deemed ‘unhealthy’ by the Stalingrad authorities: TsDNIVO, 113/52/110/9. RGANI, 5/16/746/108. RGANI, 5/31/54/8. RGANI, 5/31/54/60. TsKhDMO, 1/32/810/12. Reabilitatsiia, p. 40. RGANI, 5/31/53/134. Reabilitatsiia, p. 23. Reabilitatsiia, p. 39; RGANI, 5/32/43/153; RGANI, 5/32/46/58. RGANI, 5/32/45/38. C.f. Reabilitatsiia, p. 47. RGANI, 5/32/46/64. RGANI, 5/31/54/127. RGANI, 5/30/139/5. TsKhDMO, 1/32/806/111; RGASPI, 82/2/1470/64. RGANI, 5/31/53/133. RGANI, 5/31/54/6 (my italics). Ibid. RGANI, 5/31/54/127. RGANI, 5/32/43/143. This trope appeared in the July resolution, and also in the periodical press, e.g. Partiinaia zhizn’, no. 6, 1956, p. 20. RGANI, 5/30/140/194-95. On the anniversary, see RGANI, 5/30/141/67. A. Genis, P. Vail, 60-e: mir sovetskogo cheloveka, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988, pp. 12, 218; M. Fainsod, ‘The Twenty-Second Party Congress’, in A. Brumberg (ed.), Russia under Khrushchev. An Anthology from ‘Problems of Communism’, London: Methuen, 1962, pp. 127–52, esp. pp. 126, 138. RGASPI, 586/1/235/24, 30; Ibid., d. 305, ll. 200–4. ‘The sixties rejected Stalin as an amoral person’, Genis, Vail, 60-e mir sovetskego cheloveka Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988, p. 219. XXII s’’ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii, vol. 2, p. 593. Multiple examples in RGANI, 5/32/174 (entire), 175 (entire). RGANI, 5/32/174/68. Ibid., l.135.

62 86 87 88 89

90 91 92 93 94 95 96

97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

Polly Jones Ibid., ll.202–3. TsDNIVO, 113/65/76 (entire). C.f. TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/16, 23. TsDNIVO, 116/1/603/187. On questions in 1956, an analysis of which lies outside the scope of this chapter, see Jones, ‘From Stalinism to Post-Stalinism’. On 1961 questions, see general report on USSR, RGANI, 5/32/174/1-10, which recounts that there were many questions submitted to party meetings after the 22nd Congress, but most of them concerned the issues outlined below, or outstanding questions about remaining Stalinist symbolism. TsDOOSO, 161/34/40/10, 15, 20, 42. They were also dominated by the separate issue of economic hardship (Ibid., ll.10, 14, 15, 20, 21, 26). Ibid., ll.5, 27, 3, 34. Ibid., ll.15, 28. Knowledge accumulation also stressed in Ibid., ll.29–30 (‘until now there was a lot we didn’t know’). TsDNIVO, 4120/3/172/126. Ibid. Ibid. P. Jones, ‘ “I’ve held, and I still hold, Stalin in the highest esteem”. Discourses and Strategies of Resistance to De-Stalinisation in the USSR 1956–62’, in P. Jones, B. Apor, J. Behrends, A. Rees (eds), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships. Stalin and the Eastern Bloc, London: Palgrave, 2004. M. Gorshkov, O. Volobuev, V. Zhuravlev (eds), Vlast’ i oppozitsiia: Rossiiskii politicheskii protsess dvadtsatogo stoletiia, Moscow: Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia, 1995, p. 223. RGANI, 5/30/173/13; RGASPI, 599/1/183/3. RGANI, 5/30/173/108-19 (svodka of letters to Pravda, compiled 12 November 1961). XXII s’’ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii, vol. 2, pp. 585–6. RGANI, 5/30/173/110. Ibid., l.111. C.f. letter praising the idea of a monument (yet also pushing for more de-Stalinization) from the Fourth International in Paris, RGASPI, 17/96/16/3-7. Details of burial procedures in RGASPI, 558/11/1487/129; ‘Kreml’ – istoriia v bolezniakh’, Stolitsa, 1994, no. 41, 11–14; V. Strelkov, ‘Svidetel’stvuiu’, Argumenty i fakty, 1988, no. 50, 3. RGANI, 5/32/174/69; XXII s’’ezd, pp. 119–21. RGANI, 5/32/175/84. C.f. RGANI, 5/32/174/69; RGANI, 5/31/160/10. RGANI, 5/32/174/135. C.f. RGANI, 5/31/160/10, 73; RGANI, 5/32/161/98. TsDNIVO, 113/65/76/100. RGANI, 5/32/160/261; RGANI, 5/32/175/206. Anecdotes in Iu. Borev, Fariseia. Poslestalinskaia epokha v predaniiakh i anekdotakh, Moscow: Konets Veka, 1992, pp. 52–5. RGANI, 5/30/173/117-18. Ibid., l.118. S. Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–41, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 177. Zezina, ‘Shokovaia terapiia’. Gorshkov et al., Vlast’ i oppozitsiia, p. 224. RGANI, 5/31/161/98. RGANI, 5/31/160/13, 42. Ibid., l.56. RGANI, 5/31/60/59. New York Times, 3 November 61, p. 8; c.f. Ibid., 3 November 61, p. 8 and Ibid., 5 November 61, p. E3; Iu. Aksiutin, Khrushchevskaia ‘ottepel’’ i obshch-

Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 63

120

121 122 123

estvennye nastroeniia v SSSR v 1953–1964 gg., Moscow: Rosspen, 2004, pp. 339–41. Renaming resolutions at all levels of the party hierarchy always claimed calls for renaming had come ‘from below’, and formal meetings were held to endorse the decision: GARF, 385/17/3702 (Stalinogorsk); GARF, 375/17/3661 (Stalinsk); GARF, 259/42/6770/1-7 (chemical factories formerly named after Stalin); GAVO, 2115/6/1713/160 (railway station, Stalingrad). RGANI, 5/31/160/42. RGANI, 5/32/175/367. For more details, see P. Jones, ‘De-Stalinising “Stalin’s Town”: Dismantling the Stalin cult in Stalingrad, 1953–1963’, unpublished MS.

3

‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? How the Secret Speech was translated into everyday life1 Susanne Schattenberg

Il’ia Ehrenburg’s novel The Thaw (Ottepel’) contains a significant scene, in which the chief engineer Egorov is asked by his colleague Brainin about the fate of their director Zhuravlev, called to Moscow a week earlier. Egorov replies, ‘They dismissed him, no doubt. I heard that was long overdue, they were only looking for somebody to replace him’.2 Zhuravlev and his friends in the local party committee belonged to a generation of ‘formalist’ and ‘cagey’ bureaucrats who did not welcome changes in the production process. Rather than introducing new inventions in production, they would start smear campaigns against their engineers, criticizing their proposals as ‘dangerous adventures’.3 As a contrast to these ‘Zhuravlevs’, Ehrenburg presented the young engineers, who believed in truth, love, justice and technical progress. This constellation, in which the ‘bureaucratic’ official was pitted against the ‘democratic’ and committed technical specialist, became a common trope of the Khrushchev era. It was introduced by Ehrenburg’s novel in 1954 and then continued in Pravda in 1956. It served as a parable both of Stalin’s demise and post-Stalinist political change, and also of the beginning of a new chapter of technical progress and economic growth. But whilst writers and readers were interested in both the former and the latter, the party used the bureaucrat vs. engineer formula to try to concentrate public discussion on economic matters, and thereby to distract the public from political debate. In this chapter it will be argued that the ‘Secret Speech’ constituted a unique experiment in information policy, carried out by the Party. The party chose the partial public sphere of local party meetings in factories and institutes to test out people’s reactions to Khrushchev’s speech. But when this experiment failed, and threatened to run out of control, the party restricted the discussion of the ‘personality cult’ and ‘democracy’ to the traditional Soviet setting: the factory. The new slogans proclaiming ‘initiative of the masses’ and ‘collective leadership’ were used in a campaign to promote mass inventorship that addressed the rediscovered protagonists, engineers and inventors. Its sole aim was to increase productivity.

‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 65

Disseminating the ‘Secret Speech’ The Secret Speech ‘About the personality cult and its consequences’ read by Khrushchev to a closed meeting in the early hours of 25 February 1956, the last night of the 20th Party Congress, was not secret at all.4 It was not only the nearly 1,400 delegates who spread what they had heard throughout the country.5 It was the Central Committee itself which organized the circulation of the Speech. Its decree of 5 March 1956, the third anniversary of Stalin’s death, ‘About the announcement of comrade Khrushchev’s Speech “About the personality cult and its consequences” to the 20th Party Congress’ stated that all party committees of all republics and districts were to be provided with a brochure containing Khrushchev’s speech, and that this was to be read to factory or institute collectives, including non-party members.6 Evidently, the party leaders around Khrushchev wanted the people to know about the condemnation of Stalin, and they considered the closed space of a party members’ meeting in a factory or institute to be the right place to start this experiment.7 From 20 March to 23 March, the 20th Party Congress delegate, Central Committee member and historian Anna Pankratova went on a reading tour to Leningrad, where she talked nine times in only three days about the personality cult to nearly 6,000 workers, engineers, scholars and students.8 Raisa Orlova recounted that the party secretary took a red brochure out of his portfolio and announced that the audience was going to hear Khrushchev’s Speech. After his reading, he left before anybody could ask questions.9 By 11 April, 35,000 communists in Leningrad had been informed about the speech, whilst in Rostov and Stalingrad, respectively, some 17,000 and 20,000 had been informed.10 The demand for the speech was so great that the Kalinin city authorities asked for more than 100,000 copies of the Secret Speech, instead of the 30,000 brochures with which they had been provided.11 The response to these readings was overwhelming. Although local secretaries tried to convince the party leadership that most communists understood the speech ‘the right way’, they had to admit that ‘demagogic anti-party attacks’ were occurring.12 Where discussion was not allowed, the audience wrote down comments and questions.13 Pankratova returned to Moscow with 825 notes, which alarmed the Central Committee. People wondered why the members of the CC pretended not to be involved in the Stalinist atrocities and why nobody had stopped Stalin.14 Wherever the Speech was read to party or Komsomol organizations, people claimed Khrushchev was a coward for not accepting responsibility for the victims of the terror, or asserted that Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev were not enemies of the people, but only of Stalin.15 After such party meetings people spontaneously took down Stalin portraits, whilst in Stalingrad two drunken tractor drivers drove into a Stalin monument.16 The Central

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Committee was shocked and decided to publish articles as a guide for the ‘right’ interpretation of the Secret Speech. It invoked the idea of criticism and self-criticism (samokritika) to claim this extraordinary step was an ordinary procedure, which the party was ‘courageously’ going through.17 The first Pravda article, revealing and paraphrasing parts of the Secret Speech, appeared on 28 March. It delivered not only a general attack against Stalin and Stalinism but also indicated the importance of principles such as ‘socialist rule of law’, ‘collective leadership’ and ‘inner party democracy’.18 It was followed by a second contribution on 5 April claiming imploringly: ‘The Communist Party was victorious and is victorious because of its devotion to Leninism’.19 When this attempt to guide the ‘correct interpretation’ of the Secret Speech failed, the party started to threaten those who diverged from it. The publication of the decree on 30 June ‘About the overcoming of the personality cult’ was not so much a revelation of further past failures as a clear warning not to abuse the party’s ‘courageous self-criticism’.20 Those who ‘exaggerated’ criticism after the reading of the Secret Speech on party meetings were severely purged, dismissed from their institutes or factories, expelled from the party and even sentenced to several years of imprisonment.21

Shifting the fight against the personality cult to the factories But why did the Central Committee carry out this experiment, reading the Secret Speech to a restricted public and offering a digest in Pravda? Scholars have pointed to the hunger for improved material standards, and have claimed that disillusionment with the Party grew after the war.22 But in addition to satisfying material needs, the party had to address another issue that challenged its power. As long as Stalin lived, the myth of a better life in a communist future could endure, because he was the incarnation of this promise. So when he died, the party leadership had to find a new foundation for the legitimization of its power.23 Khrushchev and the inner circle tried to fill the void which originated in the loss of the almighty vozhd’ (leader) with concepts like the ‘rule of law’, ‘party democratization’ and ‘collective leadership’.24 The new information policy was not only a defensive strategy of publicizing issues which would have come to light regardless. It was an offensive step, propagating an allegedly new political style to the people.25 However, the party leadership came to recognize that criticism could not be limited to Stalin’s person, nor to the new dogma of ‘rule of law’, ‘collective leadership’ and ‘democracy’. To prevent people from continuing to talk about politics, the party undertook an attempt to restrict the public and to divert this emerging demand into more profitable, less dangerous channels: criticism should now focus on the economy, which was promoted by the party as a field where everybody’s participation was urgently needed.

‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 67 The 20th Party Congress was supposed to be identified with the decision to accelerate economic growth.26 Although we are used to associating the congress with the Secret Speech, the main subject of the open meetings was the beginning of the 6th Five Year Plan and the need for continuous technical progress.27 It was in order to reach these goals that the party called for ‘much broader participation by the people in the administration of the state’.28 Thus the promised ‘democratization’ was primarily to be understood to mean a new style of factory leadership and new rights for employees to speak out about matters at work.29 Economic issues served as a substitute to try to distract the people from calling for a discussion of the whole system. Thus on 25 May, Pravda published an article entitled ‘Collectivism is the highest principle of party leadership’, which did not touch on political matters but instead discussed the new decision-making process in the economy based on the new decisions of the 20th Party Congress.30 The author of the article, secretary of the Bashkiriian district party committee, praised a recently established procedure: before passing a resolution, the Party would now go to the towns and villages to consult with the people. Everybody, he claimed, should learn to listen to the voice of the masses. The result of this new approach was, he said, that more people than ever had joined the party meetings, wishing to take part in the discussion.31 On 7 August, the secretary of the party bureau in the Kirov Engineering works in Minsk wrote to Pravda that since the 20th Party Congress a lot had changed in their daily factory life:32 people, even non-party members, now came voluntarily to party meetings knowing that it is possible to discuss production problems openly, whereas formerly they had to endure endless general speeches and declarations. Even the engineers now actively participated and stated their opinion. Whilst lower ranking workers were previously blamed for failures, now even the management and the deputies of the district party committee were subjected to harsh criticism for their bureaucratic methods in running the factory. To show that times were changing, Pravda published a number of cases like that of Ehrenburg’s novel, telling the stories of engineers and inventors who had suffered under their bureaucratic bosses or apathetic administrators. For example, engineer Mitichev had suffered after inventing a new style of cooling metal in the foundry, because his director Iakimchik was not interested in modernizing technology.33 Instead of changing the production process to get better results with the consent of the chief of the Central Committee of the Belorussian party, he forced Mitichev to gloss over the statistics. When Mitichev nevertheless finally succeeded in implementing his invention, thereby nearly doubling the daily output of the foundry, the director began boasting about having defended his engineer against all nay-sayers. He continued praising himself until employees started writing complaints about him to the administration. After a factory meeting dedicated to the 20th Party Congress the director was dismissed,

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just like Ehrenburg’s Zhuravlev, for ‘passivity’, ‘conservatism’ and ‘indifference towards factory matters and his employees’. Pravda now claimed that no one had to fear signing his complaint and published a letter from four engineers from the Moscow automobile works recounting their suffering under the factory administration.34 They recounted that in the traditional Soviet manner directors and department heads considered inventors to be ‘restless people’ causing only trouble, disturbing regular production. Some of these engineers had invented a new method of vacuum founding showing very promising results. But because of the chief engineer’s and the chief metallurgist’s lack of interest, its further development was cancelled before it had even passed the first stages of testing. Another engineer, Iurii Nemtsov, had constructed a new steering wheel, but had to fight for seven years against several institutions, the ministry, the trade union’s central committee and the Moscow party committee to have his invention implemented, saving 4.3 million roubles a year. But even then his suffering did not come to an end. The head of the factory’s ‘Bureau for support of rationalizations and inventions’ (BRIZ) and the head of the Department for inventions of the ministry requested that Nemtsov consent to having co-authors for his invention. When he refused, they put him on trial. The case was dismissed, but Nemtsov’s martyrdom continued when his opponents began to spread rumours denying Nemtsov’s patent. This letter was followed by several articles about inventors and their hopeless fight against directors, administrations and ministry departments in the Soviet Union, describing a time of injustice in factories, now coming to an end.35 ‘Make way for the inventors’ and rationalizers’ creative powers’ was one new slogan used against directors, who ‘disguised shortcomings’, ‘glossed over reality’, who were practised in ‘eyewash’, ‘declarationism’ and ‘paper skills’.36 Using a caricature of ‘The machinery of delays – the bureaucratic conveyer for ‘treating’ rationalizing proposals’, Pravda attacked the irresponsible way in which factories, ministries and authorities dealt with inventions, mangling, stamping, freezing, cooking and pressing them, only, finally, to throw them on the rubbish heap.37 Pravda suggested that a new era had begun, in which employees were invited to participate actively in the decision-making process and engineers were finally able to implement their inventions without any obstacles and without having to pass through endless institutions, committees and commissions.38 It is worth noting that the old directors and administrators, those ‘flatterers’ and ‘obsequious hallelujah-singers’, were characterized as remnants of the personality cult. Claims that ‘liquidating and getting rid of these most harmful remains of the personality cult is our urgent task’ diverted attention away from guilty party members and called on readers to concentrate on bureaucrats in the administrative apparatus.39 Thus the overcoming of the personality cult was diverted from the level of the party

‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 69 to a secondary level, the workplace, where new support for economic growth was being sought.40 ‘Democratization’ came to mean open discussions in factory party meetings; ‘collective leadership’ now meant that factory directors would listen to their engineers before passing resolutions.

The inventor as hero for a new Soviet life The party made the inventor the centre of its new campaign. The engineer was therefore rediscovered as a protagonist. Since the revolution, the factory had been the favoured Soviet setting and the traditional centre of social and political life, where the New Man was born, educated and formed.41 In the 1930s the worker became the engineer, and the engineer in turn became the hero and ideal of the Stalin period, and this was now reintroduced.42 As Petr Vail’ and Aleksandr Genis argue, when it became evident that even the party was not infallible, society longed for a new cult, and the subject of this cult became the physician or inventor.43 After it had turned out that words could deceive, it was easier to believe in scientific formulas. The new ideals of honesty, sincerity, decency and love of truth were embodied in the scientific researcher.44 Like the 35-year-old engineer Koroteev in The Thaw, it was the second generation of technicians, raised in the 1930s, mostly too young to be involved in the Great Terror, who became the incarnation of honesty and integrity. Having participated in the ‘Great Patriotic War’, and made their careers in the paralysed and frozen society of the late Stalin period, they now had the opportunity to free themselves from despotic oppression and regain the old way of revolutionary work and life – such, at least, was the message of The Thaw. It is crucial to note that both the party and the intelligentsia chose the inventor to be the right person for a new beginning. But whilst the intelligentsia was drawn to the inventor because he was free from the burden of history and sought the truth, the party made him the centre of its economic politics solely in order to increase production. To provide industry with a better supply of new technology and to ensure the implementation of new inventions, the Council of Ministers founded a ‘Committee of matters of inventions and discoveries’ (Gosudarstvennyi komitet po delam izobretenii i otkrytii, GKIO) on 23 February 1956.45 This committee had the task of centralizing the reception of invention proposals, accelerating testing and guaranteeing an application’s success.46 Another way of broadening participation in the production process was intensifying and expanding the work of the scientific-technical committees (NTK), which were reformed by the Central Committee plenum in July 1955.47 NTKs were supposed to be founded in all regions to base industrial development on the ‘knowledge and experience of a majority of the country’s leading scientists and engineers’, instead of relying on only ‘a few cadres’, as had been the case before.48 A total of 76 commissions with 1,608 specialists were established on the level of the Union and

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another 213 commissions with over 2,500 specialists in the Soviet republics.49 A new law protecting inventors and encouraging inventions was also enacted in 1956.50 On 1 April, the GKIO opened its doors for letters and proposals. Starting in July, the new journal Invention in the USSR was published, and in several towns inventors’ meetings took place.51 The head of the GKIO A.F. Garmashev aimed to activate the Komsomol, and he called for the press to become patron of the campaign and for more novels and feature films supporting inventors.52 The culminating point of this campaign was the All-union meeting of inventors and rationalizers in Moscow on 17 October 1956. A total of 1,964 people gathered in the Kremlin Palace to discuss new achievements and to report their experience.53 In this situation in autumn 1956 the journal Novyi mir published Vladimir Dudintsev’s novel Not by Bread Alone (Ne khlebom edinym).54 The novel epitomized the problems which were discussed in Pravda, at factory party meetings or at the inventors’ assemblies. Dudintsev chose the figure of the inventor Lopatkin to tell the story of the morally superior Soviet Man being humiliated by his superiors, mocked, exploited and destroyed by the gang of bureaucrats which had grown above him. The novel matched the mood of the year 1956.55 People would talk about how ‘In our factory we had a similar case . . . In our ministry I know several of those bureaucrats . . .’.56 It is worth noting that the readers’ discussion took place at the same time that Pravda printed its campaign against those bureaucrats ‘cooking’ and ‘freezing’ technical proposals. The official public of Pravda and the semi-official public of the readers’ discussion unified, giving the impression that Dudintsev and the party were fighting for the same lost ideal of the good Soviet Man. But how did engineers and inventors react to this development?

Fighting against the ‘little Stalins’ It would appear that the campaign for mass inventorship and Dudintsev’s novel responded to engineers’ needs. The NTKs reported ‘that scientists and engineers were taking part in these commissions with great élan, explaining that for many years nobody had called them in for active participation in deciding important questions about the development and implementation of new technologies’.57 These engineers were less interested in high politics than in solving production problems and getting rid of the ‘little Stalins’ who hindered them from doing their jobs like the Zhuravlevs in The Thaw or the Drozdovs in Not by Bread Alone. Whilst some readers considered one of Dudintsev’s characters, Professor Bus’ko, an inventor who dies alone and in poverty, an exaggeration, engineers stated that there were dozens of technicians who died alone having never been acknowledged as inventors.58 Not by Bread Alone seemed to be telling their own story. But whilst the Central Committee campaign and Garmashev, head of the GKIO, mentioned the shortcomings of the min-

‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 71 istries and administrations in very general terms, focusing more on the losses to the national economy than on blaming the injustice done to the inventors,59 the latter felt encouraged to blame specific individuals and call for their dismissal. This constituted a fundamental misunderstanding between inventors and the party. Engineers not only began recounting their suffering, but also started to demand the dismissal of their superiors. One of the notes to Anna Pankratova after her introduction of the Secret Speech even read: At the 20th Party Congress a lot has been said about reforming the production process, which, it seems, is not taking place in Leningrad. Is it possible to speak about this process, if the majority of our leading employees, who have worked for many years for their own interest instead of for the people’s, remain in their posts as ‘experienced leaders’.60 Others referred to a thick layer of bureaucrats existing in the Soviet Union who had usurped all power.61 In Kalinin, workers and engineers used the slogan of the personality cult to oppose the principle of single leadership (edinonachalie).62 They began calling for the right to elect and dismiss their directors.63 Finally the establishment of the GKIO on 1 April 1956 caused an overwhelming reaction. Although the committee had as yet no permanent address,64 in just the first year it received 25,000 petitions and letters from inventors, some reporting cases that had lasted ten to twenty years.65 Among these letters were 9,165 complaints ‘about incorrect calculations of the savings made [by their inventions] and non-payment of rewards, about [the authorities] losing or stealing proposals, about indifference and being forced to go through a lot of red tape during the testing and implementing of their proposals’.66 Most of the complainants called for an extensive investigation of the ministries and enterprises.67 For them, the enemy was now the despotic and ignorant apparatchik. It was usual for inventors’ proposals to disappear into an impenetrable jungle for three or more years. After this period the invention would be rejected as impractical or it would be claimed that such a machine already existed. The apparatchiks’ co-conspirators were the scientific authorities from the Institutes of Scientific Research (NII), who appropriated the engineers’ inventions and passed them off as their own or who demanded co-authorship. ‘(. . .) the NII presented the opportunity to individual researchers, who themselves were not capable of scientific work, to steal the invention from the inventor under the banner of the NII’.68 The institutes not only refused to support the inventors’ initiative, but suppressed them using the authority of their scientific institution. Two inventors complained to Bulganin, head of the Council of Ministers, about these ‘experts’:

72

Susanne Schattenberg You have to understand that blockheads and impotents exist not only in biology, but also in the scientific-technological field. The Institutes of Scientific Research must get rid of unskilled people regardless of how many diplomas they have. Diplomas and a great length of service without any results have to be seen as indisputable proof of nonsuitability for the job.69

The fact that members of the Academy of Sciences owed their posts to patronage and not to expert knowledge even became the subject of anecdotes, such as the following: The director of an academic institute is called by the porter and told that somebody without documents, calling himself academician Ovcharenko, demands admission. The director says: ‘Ask him the formula for water!’ – ‘He doesn’t know’, reports the frightened porter. ‘That’s him, academician Ovcharenko! Let him in’, answers the director.70 What sounded funny in anecdotes was the bitter reality for many inventors, who complained about the incompetence of those institutions on which they were dependent. The engineer Iakov Nikolaevich Klepnikov had fought for several years for his machine, eventually going bankrupt. His story reads like Dudintsev’s novel. Klepnikov had passed through all institutions, and had even been to the ministry in Moscow, only to be received with indifference, lies and mockery.71 His idea of using the heat of waste gas for the production of steam failed because the chief engineer Shevchenko, though agreeing that this was a useful invention, denied that it was applicable to their factory. Klepnikov then turned to the chief engineer of the Main Administration of Industrial Glass (GlavTekhSteklo), who did not answer for several months. Finally he decided to speed up matters, took all his savings and travelled to Moscow to GlavTekhSteklo, where the administration head Germanov told him that there was nothing new in his invention. Nevertheless Klepnikov did not give up. He wrote to the Ministry for Building Materials, talked to the deputy minister, to the deputy head of the technical administration, to the trust head and others, and finally found out that nobody had ever tested his invention. He spent two weeks in Moscow squandering all of his money and had to leave with just a promise from the main administration council that they would finally test the machine. This was not an isolated case: at trade union meetings engineers and workers accused the chief engineers of not being interested in technical innovations or production rationalization.72 Others complained about directors who took premiums for production methods invented by their staff or about ministries which refused to acknowledge inventions, pretending they had already been published.73 The ‘fight against the administrative and office-bureaucratic method of leadership’74 had flared up and was fought by engineers as their own battle

‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 73 and with their own means. Although Pravda announced that people had started to sign their letters, not all put their name to their accusations against the ‘little Stalins’. A ‘group of party members’ from the factory no. 648 in Krasnoarmeisk complained to Khrushchev about their director Viktorov, who had surrounded himself with Alcoholics, rogues and the like: his assistant Iodarnskii is a drinker and bribe-taker, the head of the supply department is a notorious rogue, fired from the former Ministry of Agricultural Mechanical Engineering for embezzlement, while working in enterprises he embezzled enough to build himself a cottage near Pushkin. The deputy head Konovalov actively participated in all kinds of wheeling and dealing with the former heads Vershinin and Khokhlov, and he is a well-known producer of rejects. The production head is an uncontrolled drinker and layabout, who was expelled from the Ural factories as an incurable drinker.75 Because of the director’s indifference, a dam wall had broken and caused 3.5 million roubles in damage. The complainants suggested that Viktorov had never studied at a university. Although the dam accident had been investigated by three commissions, nobody held Viktorov accountable. The ‘group’ reported: ‘People keep saying there is no truth anymore. It was hidden by rogues, greedy persons, scoundrels and those who gloss things over like Viktorov. The people are outraged, because nobody fights against these rogues and no measures are taken against them’.76 Statements like this expressed very clearly that engineers considered bureaucrats their worst enemies. They saw society as divided into the masses on the one side and a small but mighty clique of administrators on the other. A group of employees from the Ministry of the Armaments Industry, who were also ‘afraid to give their signature’, were equally clear in expressing their discontent with their despotic bosses.77 They reminded Malenkov of the new policies which were supposed to support people in taking initiative and showing their talents. That made them wonder why in the Ministry of the Armaments Industry only second level officials had been expelled while the management continued to rule the old way: The Minister comrade D.F. Ustinov obviously considers despotism to be the best method of leadership. In that he is unquestionably a successor to Arakcheev.78 [. . .] The collective meeting room functions as a place of execution as under Ivan the Terrible. Cooperation is out of the question, because all members of the staff are frightened and used to voting for decisions made by ‘HIMSELF’. Everybody who falls out of Ustinov’s favour, even the most talented employee, will be destroyed by him.

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This atmosphere of fear resulted in the fact that decisions which would have been in the interests of the factory were not made, and a ‘group of sycophants, slanderers and scandalmongers’ formed around Ustinov. The ministry did not resemble a rational administration, but a despot’s court: instead of working on fulfilling the plan, people were ‘taken to the gallows’.79 Inventors used the vocabulary given to them by the party and the writers to blame their directors, as they had blamed their colleagues in the 1930s as ‘Trotskyites’ or ‘enemies of the people’. Nevertheless statements accusing somebody of being a successor to Arakcheev show that these were not just formulas, but were also drawn directly from the engineers’ own painful experience. The picture created by inventors to describe their everyday life went beyond the party’s slogans about technical progress, democratic decisions and the people’s welfare. What was reported was not the failure of a few individuals, but of a whole system functioning on the basis of patronage, clientelism and networks of officials protecting one another. These were two parallel worlds: engineers who saw the urgent need for their inventions on the shop floor, and officials who thought in administrative terms of plan fulfilment and ministry requirements. Obviously they belonged to two different systems functioning on contrasting rules. There was a dividing line between the nomenklatura and ordinary employees which ran through the factories, dividing them into two cultures. On one side were those who owed their posts to higher officials, forming a community of mutual loyalty. On the other were those who had to cope with the adverse production conditions on the shop floor every day, fighting not with the help, but rather against the resistance of their directors for technical improvement. The results of the party’s experiment in ‘factory democracy’ were disastrous. The engineers demanded a change of management for which the party was not prepared.

Conclusion In disseminating the Secret Speech and calling for collective leadership and the people’s initiative the party tried to kill two birds with one stone. ‘Democratization’ and the alleged fight against bureaucratism were intended to ensure a new legitimate foundation for the state on the one hand, and economic growth and technological development on the other hand. But as the consequences of publishing the speech and its general discussion seemed too dangerous and unpredictable, the Central Committee chose party meetings in the factories and institutes as a test ground for this kind of partial public. When even this restricted space threatened to run out of control, the subject under discussion, under the heading of ‘democratization’, was further narrowed to matters of productivity and plan fulfilment. The party leaders could not foresee that their campaign would be reinforced by Dudintsev’s novel.

‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 75 Albeit for different reasons, both the party and the intelligentsia decided that the inventor should be the new hero of the period. This double shift, from an entire to a partial public, and from politics to the economy, was accepted by people who interpreted the Secret Speech as indicating that the ‘little Stalins’ were their despotic directors, and that inventors were in need of liberation. This form of translating the Secret Speech into everyday life constituted a fundamental misunderstanding between the party, which wanted people to focus on economic matters, and those who saw the problems of the factory as a parable for the entire Soviet system. When people focused not on productivity increases, but rather on appeals for bureaucrats to be sacked, it became clear that even this experiment in ‘democratization’ had failed. That is the reason why, on 2 December 1956, Dudintsev’s novel was harshly criticized as ‘harmful’ and ‘libellous’ by the party, still reeling from events in Poland and Hungary.80 Although Khrushchev idealized the masses’ participation in the construction process, the party was not willing to replace large number of directors.81 ‘In fighting against the personality cult, we are not denying authorities and their great significance’, wrote Pravda.82 ‘Collective leadership’ meant exploiting the full potential of all engineers, but not any fundamental revision of the form and structure of leadership. One year after the GKIO’s foundation, it was characterized as a ‘bureaucratic and helpless registration office’, whose staff was dominated by ‘bureaucratic elements’, with not a single inventor.83 Although these measures to increase participation were failing, in 1957 Khrushchev founded local economic councils (sovnarkhozy), which were supposed to shift powers from the ministries to the regions,84 the NTK movement, seeking to include the engineers from the shop floors into planning persisted,85 and in 1958 ‘Permanent production conferences’ were introduced to ensure the workers’ and engineers’ initiative in the decision-making process.86 All these measures could not change two fundamental problems. The first consisted in the structure of economic planning which opposed any invention. The introduction of any new product or production method meant risk, rejections, and plan backlog.87 So it is no wonder that the administration avoided inventions like the plague.88 The second problem was connected with the first. Instead of technological experts, what was needed were people who could guarantee the status quo. That is what the cases of engineer Klepnikov, the ‘group of party members’ and the employees of the Ministry of the Armament Industry demonstrate, and this is what incensed people. The higher authorities and ministries seemed to form a community of interests against which they were powerless. The journalist and party theoretician Arbatov called this the ‘reinforced concrete of the administrative-command style’.89 The bureaucracy formed a closed system of members who protected each other from attacks from outside.

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So in the end the Secret Speech caused only new frustrations, because even on the non-political level of everyday work it could not provide the new revolutionary beginning that it had claimed to bring. Engineers had felt encouraged to press for changes, only to recognize that they were powerless against the administration. Although few engineers indicate that they experienced the Khrushchev period as a romantic-revolutionary time,91 sooner or later even they came to realize that in the Soviet Union there existed two groups, whose worlds and interests intersected only at a few minor points: the nomenklatura on the one hand and the ordinary people on the other. So the Secret Speech merely proved that communication between functionaries and working men was not functioning any more, because both spoke different languages, leading to misunderstanding or indeed a total lack of mutual understanding.

Notes 1 This article is in part the result of my work at the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam in 2001/2002 – many thanks to those who supported me there. Many thanks to Rachel Lindsay, who corrected my English. 2 I. Ehrenburg, Tauwetter, Berlin, 1957, p. 151. 3 Ibid., pp. 184, 191. 4 About the history of the Secret Speech see R. Pikhoia, Sovetskii soiuz, Istoriia vlasti 1945–1991, Moscow: RAGS, 1998; R. Medvedev, ‘Vom 20. zum 22. Parteitag der KPdSU: Ein kurzer historischer Überblick’, in R Medwedew, R. Havemann (eds), Entstalinisierung. Der 20. Parteitag der KPdSU und seine Folgen, Frankfurt am Main, 1977, pp. 23–49; S. Merl, ‘Berija und Chrushchev: Entstalinisierung oder Systemerhalt? Zum Grunddilemma sowjetischer Politik nach Stalins Tod’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, vol. 52, no. 9, 2001, 484–506; V. Naumov, ‘Zur Geschichte der Geheimrede N.S. Chrushchevs auf dem 20. Parteitag der KPdSU’, Forum für Osteuropäischen Ideen- und Zeitgeschichte, vol. 1, no. 1, 1997, 137–77. 5 B. Weil, ‘Legalität und Untergrund zur Zeit des Tauwetters’, in D. Beyrau (ed.), Das Tauwetter und die Folgen: Kultur und Politik in Osteuropa nach 1956, Bremen, 1988, pp. 23–41, here p. 26. 6 M. Zezina, ‘Shokovaia terapiia: Ot 1953 ogo k 1956-omu godu’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1995, vol. 2, 125; Pikhoia, Sovetskii soiuz, p. 146. 7 About the concept of different partial publics in totalitarian states see A. von Saldern, ‘Öffentlichkeiten in Diktaturen. Zu den Herrschaftspraktiken im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts’, in G. Heydemann and H. Oberreuter (eds), Diktaturen in Deutschland – Vergleichsaspekte, Bonn, 2003, pp. 442–75. 8 RGANI, 1/5/747/75; c.f. L. Sidorova, Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke. Sovetskaia istoriografiia pervogo poslestalinskogo desiatiletiia, Moscow: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi nauki, 1997, p. 80. 9 R. Orlova, L. Kopelev, My zhili v Moskve, 1956–1980, Moscow, 1990, p. 23. 10 RGANI, 5/34/2/10, 13, 14. 11 RGANI, 5/34/2/21. 12 RGANI, 5/34/2/11. 13 See Naumov, ‘Zur Geschichte der Geheimrede’, p. 173. 14 RGANI, 1/5/747/76-82.

‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 77 15 N. Barsukov, ‘Oborotnaia storona ottepeli (istoriko-dokumental’nyi ocherk)’, Kentavr, vol. 4, 1993, 129–43, here, 136–7. 16 RGANI, 5/34/2/22. 17 About criticism and self-criticism see L. Erren, ‘Kritik und Selbstkritik’ in der sowjetischen Parteiöffentlichkeit der dreißiger Jahre. Ein mißverstandenes Schlagwort und seine Wirkung’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 50, no. 2, 2002, 186–94. 18 ‘Pochemu kul’t lichnosti chuzhd dukhu marksizma-leninizma?’, Pravda, 28 March 1956. 19 ‘Kommunisticheskaia partiia pobezhdala i pobezhdaet vernostiu Leninizmu’, Pravda, 5 April 1956. 20 ‘Postanovlenie CK KPSS: O preodolenii kul’ta lichnosti i ego posledstvii’, Pravda, 2 July 1956. 21 Naumov, ‘Zur Geschichte der Geheimrede’, p. 175; Pikhoia, Sovetskii soiuz, p. 149; A. Pyzhikov, ‘20 s’’ezd i obshchestvennoe mnenie’, Svobodnaia mysl’, vol. 21, no. 8, 2000, 76–85, here 82. 22 See E. Zubkova, Russia after the War. Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1998; S. Reid, D. Crowley (eds), Style and Socialism. Modernity and Material Culture in Post War Eastern Europe, Oxford: Berg, 2000; A. Pyzhikov, ‘Sovetskoe poslevoennoe obshchestvo i predposylki khrushchevskikh reform’ Voprosy istorii, no. 2, 2002, 33–43. 23 H. Altrichter, Kleine Geschichte der Sowjetunion, 1917–1991, München, 2001, p. 141; Merl, Berija und Chrushchev, p. 491. 24 See for example, ‘Sovetskaia sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ neprikosnovenna’, Pravda, 6 April 1953; ‘Sotsialisticheskaia zakonnost’ na strazhe naroda’, Pravda, 17 April 1953. 25 About the new features of criticism, see G. Breslauer, ‘On criticism: The significance of the 20th Party Congress’, in F. Gori (ed.), Il 20 congresso del Pcus, Milan, 1988, pp. 115–30. 26 See KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s’’ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK, 1956–1960, vol. 9, Moscow, 1986, pp. 17, 29. 27 See also M. Berry, ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’, M. McCauley (ed.), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987, pp. 71–94, here p. 72. 28 Ibid., pp. 22–3. 29 C.f. D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization. The consolidation of the modern system of Soviet production relations, 1953–1964, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 42. 30 ‘Kollektivnost’ – vysshii printsip partiinogo rukovodstva’, Pravda, 25 May 1956. 31 Ibid. 32 ‘Rastet aktivnost’ kommunistov’, Pravda, 7 August 1956. 33 ‘Delo inzhenera Miticheva’, Pravda, 11 June 1956. 34 ‘Chto prepiatstvuet tvorchestvu izobretatelei? Pis’mo v redaktsiiu’, Pravda, 2 September 1956. 35 See Pravda, 28 March 1956 and Ibid., 4 August 1956. 36 ‘Tvorchestvu izobretatelei i ratsionalizatorov – shirokuiu dorogu!’, Pravda, 6 October 1956. 37 ‘Volokitnyi stan’’, Pravda, 17 October 1956. 38 ‘Neustannoi rabotoi’ sovershenstvovat’ metody partiinoi raboty’, Pravda, 4 August 1956; ‘Bol’she vnimaniia rabochemu izobretatel’stvu’, Ibid., 4 October 1956; ‘Nel’zia teriat’ tsennye mysli’, Ibid., 17 October 1956. 39 ‘Pochemu kul’t lichnosti chuzhd dukhu marksizma-leninizma?’. 40 C.f. Berry, ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’, p. 73.

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41 S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; A. Rassweiler, The Generation of Power. The History of Dneprostroi, New York, Oxford, 1988. 42 See S. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979; idem, ‘Stalin and the Making of a New Elite, 1928–1939’, Slavic Review, vol. 38, 1979, 377–402; D. Beyrau, Intelligenz und Dissenz. Die russischen Bildungsschichten in der Sowjetunion 1917–1985, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993; S. Schattenberg, Stalins Ingenieure. Lebenswelten zwischen Technik und Terror in den 1930er Jahren, Munich: L. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2002. 43 P. Vail’ and A. Genis, 60e. Mir sovetskogo cheloveka, Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1996, p. 100. 44 Ibid. 45 RGAE, 373/1/6/8. 46 Ibid., l.21. 47 See also Berry, ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’, p. 80. 48 GARF, R-5446/124/1/42. 49 Ibid., ll.35–6. 50 RGAE, 373/1/11-13. 51 RGAE, 373/1/6/4, 6. 52 RGANI, 5/40/35/46, 48. 53 RGAE, 373/1/6/2; RGANI, 5/40/31/14-15. 54 V. Dudintsev, ‘Ne khlebom edinym’, Novyi mir, nos. 8–10, 1956. 55 See Orlova, Kopelev, My zhili v Moskve, p. 37; D. Rachkov, Minuet pechal’nogo vremeni. Zapiski shestidesiatnika, Moscow: knizhnaia palata (izd. na sredstvo avtora), 1991, p. 6. 56 Orlova, Kopelev, My zhili v Moskve, p. 37. 57 GARF, R-5446/124/1/34. 58 Rachkov, Minuet pechal’nogo vremeni, p. 13. 59 RGANI, 5/40/31/14, 35, 41; RGAE, 373/1/6/7. 60 RGANI, 5/16/747/82. 61 Barsukov, ‘Oborotnaia storona ottepeli’, 136–7. 62 RGANI, 5/34/2/21. 63 Pyzhikov, ‘20 s’’ezd i obshchestvennoe mnenie’, p. 84. 64 RGAE, 373/1/6/30, 39. 65 RGANI, 5/40/35/5. Unfortunately, it seems that these petitions and letters were not saved in the archives. They are not in collection no. 373 with the files of the committee in the RGAE. According to the employees of the archive either these ‘unofficial documents’ were never archived or they were destroyed after a storage period of 25 years. 66 RGANI, 5/40/35/32. 67 Ibid., l.33. 68 RGAE, 373/1/11/16. 69 RGAE, 373/1/6/63-64. 70 V. Korotich, Ot pervogo litsa. Vospominaniia, Moscow: Folio, 2000, p. 92. 71 GARF, R-5446/124/1/294-296. 72 See for example GARF, R-5451/25/5474/13. 73 GARF, R-5451/24/1542/127, 290. 74 KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh, p. 23. 75 GARF, R-5446/123/2/113-116. 76 Ibid., l.115. 77 GARF, R-5446/123/1/18 78 Aleksei Andreevich Arakcheev (1769–1834), minister of war under Aleksandr

‘Democracy’ or ‘despotism’? 79

79 80 81

82 83 84

85 86 87 88 89 90

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I. (1808–10), since 1817 head of the military settlements, known for his cruelty and violence. Ibid. Pravda, 2 December 1956; Novyi mir, 1957, no. 10, p. 7; RGANI, 5/40/35/9, 49. See H. Schröder, ‘“Lebendige Verbindungen mit den Massen”. Sowjetische Gesellschaftspolitik in der Ära Chrushchev’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, vol. 34, no. 4, 1986, pp. 523–60; O. Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia. A Study of Practices, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. ‘Leninizm – pobedonosnoe znamia sovremennoi epokhi. Doklad tov. D.T. Shepilova’, Pravda, 23 April 1956. RGAE, 373/1/6/60. See D. Filtzer, Die Chruschtschow-Ära. Entstalinisierung und die Grenzen der Reform in der USSR, 1954–1964, Mainz: Decaton Verlag, 1995, p. 79; Berry, ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’, p. 78; ‘N. Khrushchev: Za tesnuiu sviaz’ literatury i iskusstva s zhizn’iu naroda’, Novyi mir, 1957, no. 7, 4. GARF, R-5446/124/1/35, 32. See Altrichter, Kleine Geschichte der Sowjetunion, p. 140. C.f. Berry, ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’, p. 76. A. Fedoseev, Zapadnia. Chelovek i socializm, Frankfurt on Main: Possev Verlag, 1979; Id., Sbornik statei. Iz serii: ‘Socializm i diktatura. Prichina i sledstvie’, Frankfurt on Main: Posev, 1971. G.A. Arbatov, Zatianuvsheesia vyzdorovlenie (1953–1985). Svidetel’stvo sovremenniks, Moscow: mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1991, p. 70. For example, in the RGAE among the great quantity of personal collections of engineers and managers there is no personal document telling about the period after Stalin’s death. See RGAE. Putevoditel, vol. 3: Fondy lichnogo proiskhozhdeniia, Moscow 2001. The well-known engineer Andrej Botchkin gives a report about his work in the 1950s, but says nothing about political changes. A. Botchkin, Mein ganzes Leben, Moscow: APN-Verlag Novosti, 1976; RGAE, 475/1/14. L. Polezhaev, Put’ k sebe. Vospominaniia, Alma-Ata: Vagrius, 1993, pp. 56–7.

4

Naming the social evil The readers of Novyi mir and Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone, 1956–59 and beyond Denis Kozlov

In 1956 Novyi mir, under the editorship of Konstantin Simonov, published the novel Not by Bread Alone by Vladimir Dmitrievich Dudintsev (1918–98).1 Except for historians and literary scholars, most young Russians would probably shrug their shoulders today when asked about this novel. Yet those who remember the years 1956–57 are likely to respond to your mention of the book with appreciation, and for good reason. When, in September 1956, L.G. Usychenko came back to Moscow from Germany where he had worked for five years, he noticed something new going on in the city. ‘Everywhere – in the subway, in the streetcars, in the trolley-buses, – young people, adults, and seniors’ were reading light-bluecovered issues of Novyi mir containing Dudintsev’s novel.2 The same happened in Gomel’, Kishinev, Leningrad, Krasnoiarsk, Tashkent, Odessa, Riga and many other places. Retail kiosks selling the journal sold out within a few hours. Readers lined up in libraries for months waiting to get the novel,3 and it was not uncommon for checked-out issues of Novyi mir, tattered and full of marginalia, to go missing.4 The lucky subscribers were besieged by scores of friends, relatives, colleagues and acquaintances who borrowed the journal for a day and sometimes only for one sleepless night.5 Readers without such personal ties would turn to the market, buying Novyi mir at three times the state price.6 People read the novel silently and aloud, on their own and in groups. Heated discussions of Not by Bread Alone broke out at homes, workplaces and at numerous readers’ and writers’ conferences.7 Gatherings of readers were sometimes patrolled by mounted police, as was the case at the Moscow Central House of Writers on 22 October 1956, where Dudintsev himself was present, together with many other writers and literary critics. It was there, in the second-floor Oak Hall, jam-packed with hundreds of people, some of them apparently hanging outside the building on step-ladders and drain-pipes, that Konstantin Paustovskii delivered his famous diatribe against the corrupt, ignorant and parasitic state bureaucrats – the main target of Not by Bread Alone.8 Like most late Soviet literary discussions, Paustovskii’s speech went far beyond literature, sending out an indisputably political message. The

Naming the social evil 81 massive debate around Dudintsev’s novel quickly developed into a collective examination of the economic problems, political changes, administrative defects, legacies of the past, cultural shifts and ethical dilemmas that the country and its people confronted at the time. Not by Bread Alone became a banner of the Thaw. This essay focuses on readers’ reactions to Dudintsev’s novel, particularly on how the readers explained and sought to resolve the major issues raised in the book – technological stagnation, bureaucratic sluggishness, corruption and inefficiency. The chapter contends that the debate surrounding Not by Bread Alone gave readers an opportunity to complain about a range of social injustices far beyond the themes of Dudintsev’s book and manifested new opportunities and enthusiasm for political selfexpression and the exchange of ideas inspired by the 20th Party Congress. At the same time, the audience’s reasoning of the mid to late 1950s was heavily influenced by the political culture that had taken shape during the previous decades, particularly under Stalin. Many remained willing to lay blame for their own and the country’s troubles on scapegoats, proposing mechanistic and exclusionary recipes for social improvement. The readers’ attack against the so-called bureaucrats was often phrased in familiar witch-hunting terms, where ‘bureaucrats’ were reminiscent of erstwhile wreckers. As equivalents of fictional enemies were not easily identifiable in reality, the readers frequently named them after Dudintsev’s characters, which became common nouns in the Soviet language of the early Thaw. During the 1960s, however, the logic of scapegoating increasingly lost currency with many readers, as the debate about the Terror compromised the rhetorical, let alone physical, search for internal ‘enemies’, and a broad range of other socio-political discussions revealed the depth of the country’s problems, demanding more sophisticated explanations and solutions.9 Written (according to Dudintsev) in the late 1940s to early 1950s and finished in 1956, Not by Bread Alone tells the story of a 30-year-old schoolteacher of physics, Dmitrii Lopatkin, who invents a machine for the centrifugal casting of pipes, thus rationalizing and streamlining this costly and labour-consuming industrial operation. The novel, whose action takes place in the late Stalin years, is the saga of Lopatkin’s attempts to put his invention into practice. Several years of persistent labour, punctuated by numerous rejections of the machine by corrupt and self-seeking bureaucrats at research institutes, design bureaus and the ministry in Moscow, lead Lopatkin into poverty and starvation. Nonetheless, he doggedly persists in his battle against the system, aided by the selfless help of a few close friends and a loving woman, Nadia, who ultimately leaves her husband and Lopatkin’s main antagonist, the top industrial administrator Drozdov. The adamant inventor even goes to prison after his rivals’ intrigues curtail his intermediary success in developing the machine. Eventually, justice triumphs. After helpful interventions by friends, the court

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reviews Lopatkin’s case, and he is released from imprisonment. His longtime sympathizer, the thoughtful and influential Doctor Galitskii, steps in for him and assembles his machine at a Urals metallurgical plant, proving its efficiency to the authorities. The perpetrators of evil, however, escape largely unhurt and remain cynical about their defeat. The novel ends with Lopatkin facing his rival bureaucrats at a reception, where he, now empowered, flings a merciless declaration of war in their faces.10 Contemporary observers and subsequent scholars noted that Not by Bread Alone retained many features of a Socialist Realist production novel, and Lopatkin much resembled a traditional positive hero.11 Yet critics also pointed out that the book was unusual in Soviet literature. The party was barely mentioned. Lopatkin’s victory was almost accidental, and his rivals got away unharmed. Unprecedentedly, Dudintsev created a powerful image of the Soviet industrial management as a corrupt yet omnipotent bureaucratic machine resisting improvement and innovation, in which ‘positive’ administrators were exceptional, and against which the chances of a lonely inventor were practically nil.13 Novyi mir published Dudintsev’s novel at the peak of a massive press campaign for ‘technical creative work of the masses’, which encouraged a grass-roots movement of inventors, innovators and ‘rationalizers’ preceding a reduction of the ministries’ power and a shift from the branch to the territorial principle of economic administration (sovnarkhozy).13 Thus, at least two main themes of Not by Bread Alone – the promotion of inventors and the attack on ministerial bureaucracy – sounded very contemporary in 1956, perhaps explaining why the novel saw light. With the nearly simultaneous publication of Dudintsev’s work and several other pieces on technical innovators, Simonov’s Novyi mir became a major centre of discussion about the country’s economic stagnation.14 Not surprisingly, when the All-Union conference of rationalizers, inventors and innovators of production was convened in Moscow on 17–19 October 1956, it was at Novyi mir’s editorial office that inventors met with writers, Dudintsev among them.15 A lawyer by training and a professional journalist who claimed to have spoken to 600 people about problems of technological innovation, Dudintsev was the right man to stand at the centre of this campaign.16 Readers’ responses to the book reached phenomenal proportions. At a time when the audience’s intense reaction to a literary work rarely lasted longer than two or three months, Novyi mir received hundreds of letters about Not by Bread Alone for over a year, in late 1956 and throughout 1957. In diminishing numbers, letters kept coming as late as 1958, 1959 and the early to mid 1960s.17 Even for the literature-centric Soviet civilization and for a journal as important as Novyi mir, this was an outstanding resonance, and few contemporary writings could boast anything comparable. To date I have located 720 letters from over 820 readers about Not by Bread Alone; of these, 698 letters from over 795 people responded specifically to

Naming the social evil 83 the novel, whilst the rest mentioned it in other contexts.18 In Novyi mir’s archive, this is the single largest evidence of readers’ response to anything that the journal published during the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. In numbers, if not in significance of readers’ responses, Not by Bread Alone may even have surpassed Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, for which the journal’s archive thus far reveals 532 letters from over 579 readers dated 1962–69.19 Most letter writers ecstatically welcomed Not by Bread Alone. Only 27 responses were unmistakably negative, whilst 51 more were unspecific or neutral, either asking questions or requesting Dudintsev’s address; 17 others were mixed, four of them more or less rejecting, and 13 accepting the book. The remaining 625 letters praised the novel, unconditionally or sometimes with reservations. Massive support came from the military, from engineers, teachers, college students, professors and researchers, as well as workers.20 Enthusiastic responses came even from such unexpected places as a local KGB branch in Latvia.21 Pitched rhetorical battles broke out at the editorial board meetings of Literaturnaia gazeta and Izvestiia that discussed articles condemning Dudintsev, and many journalists stood up for the book.22 Describing readers’ responses as ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ might seem a crude replication of the world of Socialist Realist literary characters.23 Yet these categories may be useful in discussing readers’ reaction to Dudintsev. Just as the novel itself pitted upright champions of social benefit against corrupt self-seeking bureaucrats, so was much of the audience’s response to Not by Bread Alone formulated as either acceptance or rejection of Dudintsev’s socio-ethical blueprint. Even though some readers observed that his characters transcended the divide between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’, many more understood the central tension in the novel as a battle between the forces of social good and social evil. On 13 September 1956, the 45-year-old teacher B. Zherdina from Gomel’, Belorussia, wrote to Dudintsev, after reading only the first part of his novel: For the first time in the forty-five years of my life I am writing a letter to an author [. . .]. At last, literature has begun talking about our painful problems, about something that hurts and has become, unfortunately, a typical phenomenon of our life! At last, a writer has appeared who saw predatory beasts enter our life, rally together, and stand like a wall in the way of everything honest, advanced, and beautiful! How numerously they have multiplied lately, these base people with capitalist mentality, for whom the highest value in the world is their own status, their carpets, and their peace of mind, and it is for the sake of the stability of their ideals that they suffocate everything that might unmask them, anything honest, noble, and advanced.24

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Zherdina was only afraid that Dudintsev’s powerful opponents would release ‘the tigers’ upon him. ‘In your literary world, you know, there are no fewer [. . .] tigers, jackals, and chameleons than in any other one’, she concluded.25 The night before she wanted to mail her letter, someone brought her the second part of Not by Bread Alone. Zherdina immediately ‘gnawed into the novel avidly and fearfully’. When going through such politically daring episodes as Lopatkin’s conversation with the prosecutor, she had to stop reading because of her excitement. She spent the night reading and came back to her letter at dawn, writing in haste and apologizing for the many blots: I had never thought that it would be so joyful, enough to make me tremble with excitement, to read in the book those same ideas that had besieged me so painfully. ‘Their goal is to hold their offices and to keep enriching themselves!’ How glad I am that Lopatkin’s thoughts match mine! I think Radishchev’s contemporaries had a similar feeling when they read his Journey. I could not fall asleep, so excited I was. With your novel, you have simply made me (and thousands of others) happy. The horizon becomes clearer, and the fresh breeze of a nascent morning blows when one reads your novel.26 Morning came, but the nightmares of darkness had not yet released their grip on Zherdina. The world around her swarmed with predatory beasts – tigers, jackals and chameleons – the malevolent bureaucrats who, just as in Dudintsev’s novel, blocked her and others’ path to happiness. ‘Bureaucrats’ had long been traditional targets of Soviet literature and the press.27 Yet perhaps never before Not by Bread Alone had they been represented not as individual exceptions to the rule, but as a vast and internally coherent subversive class. Whether or not Dudintsev intended to send that message, many readers perceived his book as a battle cry against a large caste of hidden enemies. Lopatkin’s declaration of war on bureaucrats reached a sympathetic audience. The problem was that before combating villains in actual life one had to identify them. To equate the ‘bad’ bureaucrats with the whole Soviet administrative cadre clearly went too far, challenging the entire system’s legitimacy, which most readers hardly desired. Besides, Not by Bread Alone showed some ‘good’ administrators, notably Lopatkin’s patron and benefactor, the intelligent Galitskii who saved the dream machine from destruction. And so, the nagging question for many enthusiasts of the book became how to define the forces of social evil, so vividly portrayed in Dudintsev’s novel but so elusive when it came to finding their real-life equivalents. The names came in handy. In letter after letter, readers identified the bearers of evil in contemporary society by the last names of Dudintsev’s

Naming the social evil 85 characters. These were Drozdov and his companions – the retrograde professor Avdiev, the corrupt deputy minister Shutikov, the self-seeking experts Fundator and Tepikin, the cynical ministry gofer Nevraev, and the plagiarizing designers Uriupin and Maksiutenko. These names would surface in readers’ letters again and again, describing real-life targets of the book as well as labelling the critics who attacked the novel. A doctor from Leningrad, L. Grineva, wrote: Your book does not assault our state system, as your critics try to argue. On the contrary, your book calls for a defence of our system, our laws, and our way of life, from the bark beetles that gnaw away at the main foundations of our life [. . .]. The Drozdovs and Shutikovs, Avdievs and Fundators, Uriupins and Maksiutenkos play this system at will, to profit them at a given moment. [. . .] Your book has done its job: it has awakened, with renewed vigour, burning hatred against the Drozdovs, the Shutikovs, and other scum of all breeds and ranks; and as we know, anger helps to gain victory.28 Anger and hatred were common feelings amongst Dudintsev’s readers. The disastrously malfunctioning economy managed by relatively wellpositioned but often inefficient administrators who, to make things worse, often displayed haughtiness and disregard toward the rank-and-file, produced understandable exasperation. In a gesture reminiscent of responses to the terror of 1937, many readers of the mid to late 1950s readily exploited the press campaign against the bureaucracy as an opportunity to pour out their numerous grievances, blaming the bureaucrats for a wide range of society’s misfortunes far beyond the themes of Not by Bread Alone.29 The readers watched the press, but its language did not necessarily dictate the language of readers’ responses. The relationship between the two was also based on experience and memory. Like newspaper reporters, most readers declared basic acceptance of the existing order, seeking to present social problems as technical rather than systemic, and personifying responsibility for tensions and economic failures. Yet the language of terror was no longer widespread or pronounced in the press of 1956: newspapers and journals rarely called for criminal prosecution of faulty administrators, as a rule reproaching them or at worst suggesting removal from office. The press could also send contradictory signals to the readers, within the space of a few months attacking a minister and then reporting that he had been awarded an Order of Lenin.30 And obviously, the country’s leadership had no plans for a terror campaign against economic administrators. But what is obvious today was less than obvious to the readers of 1956. Given that, in the recent past, criticism in the press had often portended physical repression, few could confidently predict that the crusade against bureaucrats would not result in another purge. It was

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natural for the letter writers to keep reasoning in the same exclusionary terms to which they had been accustomed. In the mid to late 1950s, the language and logic of terror came not so much from the press as from the readers themselves. When labelling social evils by the names of Dudintsev’s characters, readers of the early Thaw not only followed a Russian socio-literary tradition that had produced such common nouns as Mitrofan from Fonvizin’s The Minor, Khlestakov from Gogol’s The Inspector General, Oblomov from Goncharov’s novel, and so on, but also trod a familiar path of witchhunting and scapegoating, dating back to the Civil War and endorsed by the regime’s founding ideologues. S.S. Kovalev, a senior engineer-designer at the Glukhovo cotton factory near Noginsk, Moscow region, justified the struggle against bureaucrats in the following terms: [R]emember Gorkii’s [. . .] hatred of petty bourgeoisie – and he knew well whom to hate. Then remember Lenin’s thesis that we will defeat capitalism only because we can – and we will! – create a higher productivity of labour. And high productivity of labour means, first of all, the creative work of inventors and innovators freed from rascals and bureaucrats; it means science over which no rotten or cunning authorities preside. Consequently, anyone who, willingly or not, impedes technical progress, helps our enemies! This is the logic.31 Kovalev’s hatred of the bureaucracy was understandable: he was an inventor, one of many Lopatkin-type innovators who praised the book, having had their share of trouble with inefficient, corrupt and haughty administrators.32 Yet such reasoning was not limited to exasperated engineers and inventors. Viktor Matveev read the novel and attended three readers’ conferences – at a district library in Moscow, among inventors, and at the Moscow State University. Excited by Dudintsev’s triumph at the conferences, Matveev produced a long eulogy of the book combined with a furious tirade against ‘the Drozdovs’: It is true that, even before this book came into being, we knew the words ‘bureaucrat’, ‘careerist’, and ‘self-seeker’. But V. Dudintsev [. . .] stopped the inter-mixing of pure and impure that was so profitable for the Drozdovs. [. . .] In other words, he pulled out and showed everyone the slime that had for decades hidden behind the broad backs of honest Soviet people. And it is well known that a discovered enemy is another step toward victory (otkrytyi vrag – k pobede shag)! [. . .] Like worms gnawing away at a tree, they do not think about the tree at all. [. . .] Our tragedy, and their strength, is that they are dispersed everywhere but at the same time coherent, bound together by mutual obligations and criminal patronage. They are

Naming the social evil 87 omnipresent. They are few in numbers – but they are everywhere; they are in the pores of our life; and this is why they are exceptionally dangerous. The Drozdovs are double-faced people. Their legal activities are but a mask. Their illegal, criminal activities are their essence. [. . .] People, be vigilant!33 It was as though Matveev had co-authored his letter with the teacher Zherdina, the doctor Grineva and the engineer Kovalev. The metaphors that they used to describe the vicious Drozdovs were very similar – only, Grineva’s ‘bark beetles’ were replaced with Matveev’s ‘worms gnawing away at a tree’. Not only was the language identical, but it was also disturbingly redolent of the newspaper campaigns against ‘enemies of the people’ in the 1920s and especially 1930s. Metaphors of social hygiene likened the hidden adversaries to insects, rodents, reptiles and beasts of prey,34 charging them with greed for self-enrichment – an ‘animal’ trait that many Russians believed, at least as far back as the turn of the 20th century, befitted the petty bourgeois but not a human being in a model (socialist) society.35 And as vigorously as before, many letter writers insisted on demarcating the lines between Good and Evil – a problem that had long been pronounced in Russian culture, but assumed rationalistic overtones in the twentieth century, as a practical attempt at separating good from evil was undertaken during the Great Terror.36 The images of clandestine internal foes masked as friends,37 the likening of imaginary enemies to predators and vermin, the calls for vigilance, and the socioethical stratagems that many of Dudintsev’s admirers reproduced in the mid-to-late 1950s, were identical to the formulas that had once heralded the terror. The rhetoric of social conflict explicitly turned against the entire class of state administrators sent an alarming message to the authorities. Soviet leaders feared a repetition of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution where, they argued, intellectual turbulence was a crucial factor in the armed uprising against Soviet power.38 Even before Hungary, the Central Committee harboured no warmth towards Dudintsev’s inflammatory book.39 After Hungary, the 19 December 1956 Central Committee letter on ‘The Intensification of the Political Work of Party Organizations among the Masses’ drew unambiguous parallels between the Hungarian events and the activities of ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in Soviet literature, arts, humanities and the media, citing as an example Paustovskii’s 22 October speech at the discussion of Dudintsev’s book.40 After late November, the tone of press coverage of the novel changed from qualified praise to reserved censure and even outright rejection.42 However, readers rallied around Not by Bread Alone. Throughout 1957, when the official castigation of the novel was in full swing, Novyi mir received hundreds of letters vigorously supporting Dudintsev and his

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book. The tone of letters remained the same, and the motif of combating bureaucrats even intensified. The exasperated readers perceived the official criticism of their favourite novel as a counter-attack by those very bureaucrats whom Dudintsev targeted. ‘Those who speak against you are the characters of your novel that keep living and working at their old places. They are afraid to lose those comfortable positions’, – wrote a group of seven engineering students.42 Even in the army, admiration for Dudintsev’s novel did not cease in the wake of the administrative interference. Five young soldiers wrote to him: You are a great guy, thank you! [. . .] We were tired, our brains were depleted; we were entangled in terrible contradictions and only waited for something extraordinary, fresh, truly radiant and young, while knocking, like puppies, into the dark, mildewed ‘corners’ of dogmas, regulations, and other rubbish. But time began lifting the veil before our eyes, and your book, like a powerful fist, broke through that veil [. . .]. Shutikovs – go to hell! Avdievs – go to hell! Drozdovs – get out of our way!43 The language and self-perceptions of these and many other readers were rooted in a belief in human progress, a fundamental value of Soviet civilization. Enhanced by Socialist Realism, Russian cultural tradition reserved a crucial place in that progress for creative literature, and as late as 1957 many people chose to be guided by the writer as a standard-bearer of social and ethical ideals. Readers made literary characters into human beings and merged literary plots with reality.44 As a result of the audience’s hunger for the writer’s word and willingness to read literary texts as political manifestos, the early Thaw, together with the late Stalin years, became a culmination of literature-centrism and a new peak of realism.45 Yet, besides these traditional features, the audiences of 1957 also displayed a new quality – an eagerness to challenge the press when it launched political attacks against their favourite authors. This widespread and relatively open defiance of official newspaper propaganda was an important characteristic of the Thaw that persisted, despite the tightening of controls over intellectual life, in 1957 and beyond. So did, for now, the images of enemies. As late as 1958, some readers continued to rage against the wrecking bureaucrats and their presumed talking heads in the press. Nikolai Agridkov, an editorial employee at the district newspaper Radian’ska Pravda in Teplik, Vinnitsa region, did not like the ‘weak’ end of the novel. ‘The Avdievs’ gang should have been completely defeated and sent to the Urals or Siberia to build bridges and mines – to those places where Lopatkin had been’. Agridkov proposed a sequel to the book: since ‘truth had not yet been completely resurrected,

Naming the social evil 89 and the infiltrators (lazutchiki) were still around’, the next volume of Not by Bread Alone could ‘show the neat life of people building communist society’.46 The bricklayer Iurii Babikov from Tashkent identified the struggle against ‘clear enemies yearning to slow down progress’ and against ‘hidden enemies, the survivals of capitalism in the people’s and our own mind’, as a major part of his worldview.47 ‘Aleksei Sapozhnikov’ – a pseudonym that the letter writer defiantly acknowledged as a precaution (‘otherwise you will beat me up’) – compared bureaucrats to ‘swarms of cockroaches’ plaguing all institutions, from ministries to collective farms, and ‘biting and eating, eating, eating everywhere . . .’.48 The persistence and perhaps even centrality of the enemy imagery in reactions to Not by Bread Alone during the mid to late 1950s raises the question of how the letter writers viewed the Stalin terror. Could it be that those who produced the abundant diatribes against the wrecking bureaucrats belonged to the part of society that did not accept Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin half a year before the publication and discussion of Dudintsev’s novel? The answer is apparently no. Only in a couple of radical cases did the supporters of Dudintsev’s book explicitly refer to the Stalin-era reprisals as a model and usable social instrument. B.N. Analov from Leningrad suggested, in November 1956, a purge like the one in 1933 in order to rid the party of the wretched bureaucrats.49 E.I. Bespomoshchnov from Voronezh wanted to ‘apply the Stalin line’ to the Avdievs and Shutikovs.50 Neither Analov nor Bespomoshchnov mentioned the 20th Party Congress, however. But in many more cases, the admirers of Not by Bread Alone did refer to the 20th Congress. Invariably they supported its decisions, passionately condemning ‘the cult of personality’ and the terror, sometimes even accusing the authorities of an attempt to bring the terror back.51 Yet the logic of scapegoating remained valid for many of these readers. The combination of explicit rejection of terror and implicit reproduction of the terror phraseology made some letters look grotesquely selfcontradictory. Viktor Matveev cited above developed his philippic against the bureaucrats as follows: But it is not the year 1937 today! The 20th congress has particularly emphasized that the times are different now. The days of the Drozdovs’ caste are numbered – but that is why they will, now as never before, dodge, slander, falsely philosophize, and invent more and more new theories of self-defence and attack based on Tartuffe-like hypocrisy. With the help of these pharisaical theories of ‘defending’ socialism, they have long and successfully been defending themselves and attacking the interests of the people, like the sands of the desert slide down upon cities. Wherever they are, life dies out. These Jesuits are the main enemies of socialism, the main enemies of the Communist party. They are the fifth column.52

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Matveev’s passionate rejection of the Stalin terror was caught up in his replication of Stalin’s thesis about the enhancement of social strife along with the development of socialism. Having started with a renunciation of the terror, which he designated by the self-explanatory date ‘1937’, Matveev ended up, in the same paragraph, reinforcing one of the very central arguments of the terror – the presumption of a fifth column, a hidden conspiracy of subversives allegedly operating within society. In a phantasmagoric mixture that characterized the early Thaw, the readers’ condemnation of the terror and their earnest desire for change coexisted with the perseverance of the language and logic of social cleansing. Rejection of 1937 intertwined with those roots from which 1937 had grown.53 Responses to Not by Bread Alone suggest that those who welcomed the Thaw in the mid to late 1950s did not possess a consistent and wellordered worldview diametrically opposite to a certain ‘Stalinist mentality’ (itself a very problematic term). Rather, the mindset of the early Thaw represented a mixture of contradictory values and recipes, in which the new and the old stood in close proximity, heavily borrowing from the political culture formed in Soviet society during the earlier decades. The logical question, then, is whether we can draw clear frontlines between the ‘supporters’ and ‘opponents’ of the Thaw, in the way that some readers desired. The probable answer is that, just as with the ‘friends’ of the Thaw, its ‘enemies’ would turn out to be an elusive group. Identifying them socially and physically would be a futile and misleading exercise akin to searching for the Drozdovs, Avdievs and Shutikovs in reality. Readers’ letters suggest that the proponents and adversaries of social change overlapped and could turn into one another, depending on the issue at stake, political circumstances, experiences, and perhaps even momentary disposition. The frontlines of the Thaw lay not so much between, as within, human beings – within the mind of everyone who lived at the time and contemplated the country’s historical past, current situation and the immense socio-cultural transformation that was gradually taking place. That said, stating the complexity of a phenomenon only partially explains it. The question remains: what made it possible for so many readers of the early Thaw to abhor the terror and yet identify with it so uncritically in their social strategies? Neither the peripheral relevance of the book’s plot to the theme of terror (Lopatkin’s unjust imprisonment), nor the fear of touching on the unsafe issue of reprisals could sufficiently clarify why numerous readers excitedly championed Dudintsev’s critical message, opted for reforms, upheld the line of the 20th Party Congress and condemned the purges, but for all that kept reproducing, consciously or not, terror as a viable social instrument. An explanation could be that, in order for the letter writers to arrive at a systematic and introspective rejection of terror, a debate about the terror had to unfold in contemporary literature, media and the arts. During the

Naming the social evil 91 mid to late 1950s, creative literature and the press lagged far behind the numerous kitchen-table discussions of the experiences of recent purges.54 It was the gap between the smouldering polemic and its inadequate recognition in the media that perhaps explained why, in the letters of 1956–59, so few readers of Novyi mir openly raised questions about their own part in the terror – either as victims or perpetrators, or through compliance, let alone language and mentality. Whether or not the readers posed those questions to themselves, in letters they routinely distanced themselves from the terror, presenting it, usually in very restrained language, as an alien evil superimposed from above. Those who mentioned any abuses of Stalin’s time as a rule did so vaguely and euphemistically. The elusive ‘cult of personality’ was the most common description, probably because it became unmistakably legitimate after the 30 June 1956 Central Committee decree, ‘On the Overcoming of the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences’.55 The letter writers much more rarely ascribed the terror to Beria56 or used the self-explanatory ‘1937’.57 Amongst Dudintsev’s correspondents of 1956–59, those who admitted having been imprisoned were few and far between – five, on the last count.58 Even those usually wrote about the camps in reserved, reticent language. Former engineer Genrietta Rubinshtein living in Iagodnyi, Magadan region, who had been repressed for almost 20 years, wrote a detailed letter about her Far Eastern experiences but (responding to Dudintsev’s agenda?) focused on administrative abuses outside the camps rather than in the camps proper.59 Some victims of terror also used images of subversion from within and even explained the terror by the wrecking activities of the same Drozdovs and Shutikovs. ‘The Drozdovs, Shutikovs, and the like were able to establish themselves precisely because there was [sic] 1936–38; and on the other hand, so many people perished precisely because there were so many of those Drozdovs, Shutikovs, Nevraevs, and Abrosimovs’, wrote Rita Bek, a Moscow librarian whose mother and father had been killed in the 1930s.60 In order for readers to recognize the connection between the precariously condemned terror and the witch-hunting impulses that Dudintsev’s novel provoked in their minds, the discussion of the Terror had to become detailed and nuanced, urging numerous people to contemplate their own implicit participation in the purges through deeds, words and beliefs. To reach that stage, the debate about camps, deportations and executions had to become not only broad but also open and legitimate. And besides the legitimacy of discussion, many readers were to realize, with the help of literature and the press, the enormity and pervasiveness of the terror experience. Exceptions aside, and despite the revelations of the 20th Party Congress, by the late 1950s that realization was only dawning. Not all readers of Not by Bread Alone looked for scapegoats. The novel did lead several letter writers to search for deeper origins of society’s problems and reject the ‘bureaucratic’ explanation as reductionist and

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simplistic. I.M. Smirnov from the Crimea wrote that it was ‘only in a society suffering from grave defects’ that the bureaucrats portrayed in the novel could function.61 N.I. Gerasimov, an engineer from Moscow, produced a 40-page-long typed critique of Dudintsev’s book, praising it but arguing that it did not analyse the nature of socio-economic crisis deeply enough. Gerasimov questioned the book’s principal tension, the conflict between a progressive inventor and malicious bureaucrats. In his opinion, Dudintsev exaggerated ‘the role and significance of a single individual doing good or evil’ by presenting social development as the work of a few discoverers hovering high above the rest of the humanity. The other side of the coin, he wrote, was Dudintsev’s exaggeration of the power of a few corrupt bureaucrats single-handedly to block the advancement of the entire society. As Gerasimov knew well, industrial reality was far more complex than a struggle between heroes and villains.62 Ivan Konstantinovich Rogoshchenkov, a military serviceman, went even further. Defending the novel in his 50-page-long handwritten letter/article, he analysed the conditions that might have created the Drozdovs.63 Targeting and blaming scapegoats was not a sufficient explanation for society’s misfortunes, he argued. The country had historical traditions that encouraged administrative abuse, unrestrained bureaucratic blundering, and inertia. Back in the early 1930s, the breathtaking tempo of industrialization from above had produced a special type of ruthless economic managers who cared only about production and disregarded the basic needs of the people. This type of administrator had survived into the present, and it was they whom Dudintsev embodied in his image of Drozdov. Rogoshchenkov did not question the need for industrialization or the existence of enemies (‘wreckers’ and ‘kulaks’) in the past. However, today, he argued, enemies were no longer around. The struggle for socialism had been won, and administrative practices therefore needed to change toward a greater appreciation of the people’s needs.64 Given his attention to the past, one may only guess how Rogoshchenkov read Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich a few years later. Already in 1956–57 he did not look for shortcuts and scapegoats but sought more analytical explanations. For some letter writers, the literary divide between social good and social evil embodied in the struggle of positive heroes against a variety of villains was becoming an increasingly unsatisfactory rationale for society’s omnipresent flaws. As of the late 1950s, such letter writers were still few compared with the many more who kept reproducing the old and familiar witch-hunting clichés. Yet the book inspired a discussion, a search for explanations. The answers were not there, but the questions remained and they mounted over time. Responses to Not by Bread Alone arrived throughout 1958, but their numbers gradually diminished to a handful. Only seven came in 1959,65 and 25, by my last count, mentioned the book over the next six years.66 Practic-

Naming the social evil 93 ally all of them supported the book, but the broad and heated discussion had clearly subsided. In January 1965, a Moscow stenographer A. Vasil’eva remembered how enthusiastically readers had greeted the novel eight years before. She complained: ‘Not by Bread Alone is now completely forgotten by many, and young people do not know it at all’. It was clear to her that ‘the Drozdovs and Agievs [sic] had gained the upper hand and did their best to finish off the novel’.67 Professor S.P. Khromov from the Moscow University still admired the book eight years after its publication, not only because of its social charge but also because of Dudintsev’s ‘tense mastery and art of precise and fine exterior portrait combined with psychological analysis’.68 Both Vasil’eva and Khromov suggested that the novel be republished, and Khromov even used the word ‘rehabilitate’, arguing that Dudintsev was ‘one of the last victims of the cult of personality’.69 Contrary to their expectations, Novyi mir reacted coldly. Professor Khromov received a note from Aleksandr Tvardovskii himself stating: ‘I do not share your apologetic evaluation of Dudintsev’ novel Not by Bread Alone. Despite its many strong aspects, it strikes me as largely false and tendentious’.70 Tvardovskii’s deputy Aleksei Kondratovich (1920–84) replied to Vasil’eva that the book ‘had done its job’ and hardly needed republication, – which exasperated her so much that she wrote back asking whether ‘doing its job’ was the sole purpose of a work of literature.71 A similar response from Kondratovich urged Konstantin Evseevich Gorpinich, a physics teacher in the town of Kriukov-on-the-Dnieper, to write to Novyi mir that the intellectual process begun by Dudintsev’s novel was ongoing, and regardless of official evaluations no one could stop that process.72 It could be this very process that undermined the readers’ admiration for Not by Bread Alone. Some indeed kept praising the novel as late as the mid-1960s. The difference, besides diminishing numbers, was that back in 1956–59 many favourable responses came from young people, mostly college students and soldiers. In the 1960s, every admirer of Dudintsev who identified his/her age was 50 and older, perhaps confirming the stenographer Vasil’eva’s comment that youth no longer knew Dudintsev’s book.73 To some extent, the maturity of the letter writers in the 1960s reflected the overall ageing of Novyi mir’s active reading audience during Tvardovskii’s second editorship (1958–70) and the nature of Tvardovskii’s literary project that emphasized remembrance and historical consciousness – themes to which experienced audiences were possibly more receptive than youth.74 Yet the probability that Dudintsev’s younger readers of 1956–57 did not return to his book a few years later suggests that, in their eyes, the book had become obsolete. Characteristically, the novel was republished in 1968, 1979 and during perestroika, but never again evoked a resonance comparable with that of the 1950s.75 It was for good reason that Not by Bread Alone lost its readers. From the early 1960s onwards, largely due to such publications as Solzhenitsyn’s

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One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Il’ia Ehrenburg’s memoir People, Years, Life, the audiences engaged in a widespread and fairly open discussion of the terror.76 Now, perhaps as never before, readers recognized the country’s troubles as structural and deep-seated, and their examination became increasingly retrospective and introspective. The mirage of noble innovators and callous bureaucrats began evaporating into thin air as people began questioning the mechanistic and exclusionary social recipes that had once been so popular. Engineer G. Levin, 52, from Karaganda, who had spent ten years in the prison camps, remembered Dudintsev’s book in his letter to Solzhenitsyn: ‘We still have fresh memories of the attacks on V. Dudintsev for his Not by Bread Alone, – which, compared to your story [One Day], is merely a children’s fairy tale’.77 In the 1960s, enemy images did not entirely disappear. Yet naming scapegoats became increasingly unacceptable even as a rhetorical solution for society’s problems. The intense discussions of the terror and the country’s overall historical experience compromised the very idea and language of scapegoating. The debates of the Thaw, to which Dudintsev so powerfully contributed, outgrew the agenda of his novel. The readers’ polemic about Not by Bread Alone, the book that became a symbol of its time, owed much of its language and imagery to the culture of political violence that had taken shape in the Russian and Soviet civilization at least since the turn of the 20th century and matured under Stalin. The dismantling of that culture, the erosion of the terror mentality, was a lengthy process that only slowly, gradually – yet steadily – developed during the Thaw. In the mid to late 1950s, most admirers of Dudintsev’s novel still followed the old social recipes and paradigms. At the same time, Not by Bread Alone intensified a massive socio-intellectual fermentation, a range of discussions and thoughts that eventually transcended the book’s conceptual framework. The debate that the novel provoked was, in scale and intensity, perhaps unprecedented in Soviet culture. It was this debate that carried the potential for transforming the minds of many readers and urging them to part with old stereotypes.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Eleonor Gilburd, Lynne Viola, the participants of the University of Toronto Russian Studies Workshop, and the editor for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

Notes 1 V. Dudintsev, ‘Ne khlebom edinym’, Novyi mir, 1956, no. 8, 31–118; Ibid., no. 9, 37–118; Ibid., no. 10, 21–98. Novyi mir’s print run was 140,000. The novel was also published as a book by Sovetskii pisatel’ in 1957 (print run, 30,000). 2 RGALI, 1702/6/242/111.

Naming the social evil 95 3 RGALI, 1702/6/240/37 (Novosibirsk), l. 85 (Tashkent); d. 241, l. 67 (L’vov region), l. 117 (Kostroma); d. 243, l. 25 (Yalta); d. 245, l. 57 (Leningrad); op. 8, d. 127, l. 222 (Velikie Luki); d. 134, l. 14 (Minsk); d. 136, l. 18 (Kazan’); d. 268, l. 15 (Odessa). 4 RGALI, 1702/8/133/132 (Baku). 5 RGALI, 1702/6/240/15; d. 241, l. 16. 6 RGALI, 1702/6/242/22-23; d. 243, l. 121 (Magnitogorsk). 7 RGALI, 1702/6/241/16 (Gomel’), l. 76 (Molotov region); d. 242, l. 128 (Kiev); op. 8, d. 131, l. 4 (Leningrad). 8 For a translation of most of Paustovskii’s speech, see H. McLean, W. Vickery (eds), The Year of Protest, 1956: An Anthology of Soviet Literary Materials, New York: Vintage Books, 1961, pp. 155–9. For eyewitnesses’ memoirs, see V. Dudintsev, Mezhdu dvumia romanami, Saint Petersburg: Zhurnal ‘Neva’, 2000, pp. 9–14; N. Bianki, K. Simonov, A. Tvardovskii v ‘Novom mire’: Vospominaniia, Moscow: Violanta, 1999, p. 186; E. Dolmatovskii, ‘I Didn’t Sleep All Night Because of You’, Russian Studies in History, vol. 38, no. 4, 2000, 7–20. For an archivally based discussion, see K. Loewenstein, ‘The Thaw: Writers and the Public Sphere in the Soviet Union 1951–57’, PhD Diss., Duke University, 1999, pp. 299–311. 9 For a persuasive discussion of continuity between Stalin-era and early postStalin (1950s) fiction, see K. Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 216–20; idem, ‘The Changing Image of Science and Technology in Soviet Literature’, in L. Graham (ed.), Science and Soviet Social Order, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990, pp. 259–98, esp. pp. 280–4. Compared with the 1950s, Clark observes much more significant departures from Socialist Realist clichés in Soviet fiction during the 1960s. 10 Dudintsev, ‘Ne khlebom edinym’, Novyi mir, no. 10, October 1956, p. 97. 11 B. Platonov, ‘Real’nye geroi i literaturnye skhemy’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 24 November 1956; Clark, Soviet Novel, 218–20; idem, ‘The Changing Image of Science’, 282. 12 Clark, Soviet Novel, p. 217; R. Chapple, ‘Vladimir Dudintsev as Innovator and Barometer of His Time’, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, 1992, pp. 1–19, esp. pp. 1–8. 13 See Susanne Schattenberg’s article in this collection. 14 A. Bek, ‘Zhizn’ Berezhkova’, Novyi mir, 1956, nos. 1–5; D. Granin, ‘Sobstvennoe mnenie’, Novyi mir, 1956, no. 8, pp. 129–36. 15 TsGALI SPb, 107/3/41/1-64. 16 TsGALI SPb, 107/3/41/45. 17 Two last responses were dated May 1965: RGALI, 1702/9/178/52 (Moscow, 13 May 1965); RGALI, 1702/10/250/64-67 (Zaporozh’e, registered 14 May 1965). 18 RGALI, 1702/6/240, 241, 242, 243, 244, 245 (entire); 1702/8/10, 11, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 267, 268, 279, 404, 405 (entire); d. 735, ll. 63–4; 1702/9/82/32-33ob, 144–5; d. 167, ll. 13-18ob, 27–30; d. 176, ll. 19–20; d. 178, ll. 7-16ob, 52, 79-79ob; RGALI, 1702/10/1/170; d. 2, ll. 49–50; d. 3, ll. 4–7, 18; d. 74, ll. 14-14ob, 44–53; d. 75, ll. 7-14ob, 69-70ob; d. 76, ll. 43-43ob, 67-67ob; d. 78, ll. 94-113ob; d. 79, ll. 76–77, 85-86ob; d. 83, l. 55, 191–2; d. 173, ll. 136136ob; d. 250, ll. 64–7. The numbers of letters and letter writers do not match because one letter sometimes had several authors; conversely, one reader sometimes wrote several letters. 19 The count on both Solzhenitsyn and Dudintsev is not definitive, as recordkeeping practices may have differed under Simonov and Tvardovskii and between publications. And, of course, my database may be incomplete. 20 For Novyi mir readers’ social portrait, see my dissertation, ‘The Readers of

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23

24 25 26 27

28 29 30

31 32

33 34

35 36

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38

Denis Kozlov Novyi mir, 1945–1970: Twentieth-Century Experience and Soviet Historical Consciousness’, PhD Diss., University of Toronto, 2005. RGALI, 1702/6/243/27. RGALI, 634/4/1271/1-53, esp. 14a–17, 42–7; GARF, 1244/1/178/7-33, 132–40. On 13 and 27–28 December, 1956, Izvestiia’s party organization reprimanded those journalists who praised Dudintsev’s novel. TsAODM, 453/2/27/87-88, 104–6, 133, 159, 220–31, 233, 235. On positive heroes in Socialist Realist literature, see K. Clark, ‘Socialist Realism with Shores: The Conventions for the Positive Hero’, in T. Lahusen, E. Dobrenko (eds), Socialist Realism without Shores, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 27–50. RGALI, 1702/6/241/15. RGALI, 1702/6/241/15. RGALI, 1702/6/241/16. For the traditional targeting of bureaucrats in Soviet literature and press, see Clark, Soviet Novel, pp. 75–9, 203; S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Cultural Revolution as Class War’, in idem, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992, pp. 115–48. RGALI, 1702/6/245/91-92 (original emphasis). For reactions to the terror, see S. Fitzpatrick, ‘How the Mice Buried the Cat: Scenes from the Great Purges of 1937 in the Russian Provinces’, Russian Review, 1993, vol. 52, 299–320. See, e.g., ‘Dozhdetsia li tokar’ N. Smirnov otveta ot ministra A. Kostousova?’ Promyshlenno-ekonomicheskaia gazeta, 13 May 1956; ‘Ukaz Prezidiuma Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR O nagrazhdenii tov. Kostousova A.I. ordenom Lenina’, Pravda, 6 October 1956. RGALI, 1702/6/241/53. Engineers and technical specialists were one of Dudintsev’s largest constituencies – over 110 letter writers (13.6 per cent of total and 21.7 per cent of letter writers with identified occupations). In addition, at least 22 inventors (mostly unaffiliated) and 30 workers wrote. RGALI, 1702/6/244/63, 67–8. On the rhetoric of social hygiene and cleansing, see A. Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 34–7; J. Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin. Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, pp. 51, 128–46. On ‘romantic anti-capitalism’ as fundamental to Russian revolutionary culture, see K. Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 16–23, 66. On the ethical and in Igal Halfin’s argument, eschatological dimension of the terror of 1934–38, see Brooks, Thank You Comrade Stalin!, pp. 139–48; I. Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003, esp. pp. 7–42. On ‘unmasking’, see S. Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 239; idem, ‘Making a Self for the Times: Impersonation and Imposture in 20th-Century Russia’, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, vol. 2, no. 3, 2001, 469–87, esp. 477–80; on the rhetoric of enemy elusiveness developed around 1937, see Weiner, Making Sense of War, p. 35. On the Soviet overestimation of the role of intellectuals in the Hungarian Revolution, see J. Granville, The First Domino: International Decision-Making during the Hungarian Crisis of 1956, College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004, pp. 19, 42–3.

Naming the social evil 97 39 ‘Zapiska otdela nauki, shkol i kul’tury TsK KPSS po RSFSR ‘O ser’eznykh ideologicheskikh nedostatkakh v sovremennoi sovetskoi literature’, 26 September 1956, in Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura. 1953–1957: Dokumenty, Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2001, p. 537. 40 ‘Pis’mo TsK KPSS “Ob usilenii politicheskoi raboty partiinykh organizatsii v massakh i presechenii vylazok antisovetskikh vrazhdebnykh elementov” ’, 19 December 1956, in Reabilitatsiia: kak eto bylo. Dokumenty Prezidiuma TsK KPSS i drugie materialy, vol. 2, Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond ‘Demokratiia’, 2003, p. 210. 41 Analysing the press reactions to Not by Bread Alone is beyond the scope of this work. See, e.g., ‘Obsuzhdaem novye knigi’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 27 October 1956; Platonov, ‘Real’nye geroi i literaturnye skhemy’; N. Kriuchkova, ‘O romane ‘Ne khlebom edinym’, Izvestiia, 2 December 1956; ‘Literatura sluzhit narodu’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 15 December 1956; D. Eremin, ‘Chem zhiv chelovek?’, Oktiabr’, no. 12, December 1956, 166–73; ‘Pod znamenem kommunisticheskoi ideinosti i sotsialisticheskogo realizma’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 15 January 1957; ‘Sozdavat’ proizvedeniia, dostoinye nashego naroda’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 26 January 1957; T. Trifonova, ‘Ne khlebom edinym’, Kul’tura i zhizn’, no. 1, 1957, 18–19 (a milder reaction, perhaps due to the fact that the journal targeted foreign audiences); V. Nazarenko, ‘Kryl’ia literatury’, Zvezda, no. 3, 1957, 192–204, esp. 193–200; Nikolai Shamota, ‘Chelovek v kollektive’, Kommunist, no. 5, 1957, 75–87, esp. 80–7; I. El’sberg, ‘Neopravdannoe vysokomerie’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 13 June 1957. 42 RGALI, 1702/6/240/41 (students). 43 RGALI, 1702/8/134/81 (soldiers). 44 T. Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997; E. Dobrenko, ‘The Disaster of Middlebrow Taste, Or, Who Invented Socialist Realism?’ in Dobrenko, Lahusen (eds), Socialist Realism Without Shores, pp. 135–64; idem, Formovka sovetskogo chitatelia: Sotsial’nye i esteticheskie predposylki retseptsii sovetskoi literatury, Saint Petersburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1997, pp. 263–4. 45 On readers’ avidity for literature after World War II, see Iu. Trifonov, ‘Zapiski soseda’, in his Rasskazy. Povesti. Roman. Vospominaniia. Esse, Ekaterinburg: U-Faktoriia, 1999, p. 672. 46 RGALI, 1702/8/267/8. 47 RGALI, 1702/8/279/25. See also RGALI, 1702/8/268/78, 75ob-76 (Crimea). 48 RGALI, 1702/8/268/60. 49 RGALI, 1702/6/242/79-80. 50 RGALI, 1702/6/240/43. 51 RGANI, 5/30/236/5-6 (anonymous, mid to late December 1956). 52 RGALI, 1702/6/244/68. 53 For the ‘fifth column’ argument as central to the terror of 1937, see O. Khlevniuk, 1937-i: Stalin, NKVD i sovetskoe obshchestvo, Moscow: Respublika, 1992, pp. 82–5. C.f. RGALI, 1702/8/133/103, 106, 107 (Chirchik, Uzbekistan); d. 130, l. 111 (Sokol, Vologda region). 54 On these private discussions, see, e.g., R. Orlova and L. Kopelev, My zhili v Moskve: 1956–1980 gg., Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988, pp. 27–9, 43, 46, 56–60; L. Alexeyeva and P. Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990, pp. 68–71, 76–7, 83–4. 55 RGALI, 1702/6/240/16, 18, 38, 98; d. 241, ll. 5, 7, 30, 130; d. 243, l. 2; d. 244, ll. 59, 108, 117; d. 245, ll. 24, 33, 43–4, 68, 132–4; op. 8, d. 127, ll. 32, 42–5, 195–203, 225–8; d. 128, l. 21ob; d. 129, ll. 19–21; d. 132, ll. 124-124ob; d. 133, ll. 19–20; d. 136, ll. 70–92; d. 145, ll. 8–12; d. 268, ll. 1-1ob, 75–9. For the decree, see Pravda, 2 July 1956.

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56 RGALI, 1702/8/130/118; d. 268, ll. 1-1ob. 57 RGALI, 1702/8/127/37; d. 244, l. 136. 58 RGALI, 1702/6/242/22-23 (Novocherkassk); d. 245, l. 81 (Krasnodar); op. 8, d. 127, ll. 148–9 (Iagodnyi, Magadan region), 216–17 (former senior employee at the Ministry of Transportation, rehabilitated but still living in Magadan); d. 134, ll. 23–4 (Kiev). 59 RGALI, 1702/8/127/148-149. 60 RGALI, 1702/6/242/120. 61 RGALI, 1702/8/127/160-161. 62 RGALI, 1702/8/132/62-102, esp. 95, 99–101. 63 RGALI, 1702/8/127/61-73, 74–124 (typed copy and handwritten original, no date). 64 RGALI, 1702/8/127/65-66. 65 RGALI, 1702/8/404/3-7, 9, 11, 13-16ob; d. 405, ll. 1, 2, 6. 66 RGALI, 1702/8/735/63-64; 1702/9/82/32-33ob, 144–5; d. 167, ll. 13-18ob, 27–30; d. 176, ll. 19–20; d. 178, ll. 7–16, 52, 79-79ob; 1702/10/1/70; d. 2, ll. 49–50; d. 3, ll. 4–7, 18; d. 74, ll. 14-14ob; d. 75, ll. 7-14ob, 69-70ob; d. 76, ll. 43-43ob, 67-67ob; d. 78, ll. 94-113ob; d. 79, ll. 76–7, 85-86ob; d. 83, ll. 55, 191–2; d. 173, ll. 136-136ob; d. 250, ll. 64–7. 67 RGALI, 1702/9/176/19-20. 68 RGALI, 1702/9/178/79 (1 April 1965). 69 RGALI, 1702/9/178/79ob. 70 RGALI, 1702/9/178/77. 71 RGALI, 1702/9/176/18; d. 178, l. 52. 72 RGALI, 1702/9/82/32-33ob (4 January 1962). 73 RGALI, 1702/9/167/13-18ob (Borisov, 59); d. 178, ll. 7-16ob (Pantiukhin, 52), 79-79ob (Khromov, 60); RGALI, 1702/10/75/69-70ob (Gorshunov, 66); d. 78, ll. 94–113 (Meerson, 70). 74 For evidence of the ageing of Novyi mir’s active audience in the 1960s, see Kozlov, ‘The Readers of Novyi mir’. 75 V. Dudintsev, Ne khlebom edinym, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1968; idem, Moscow: Sovremennik 1979; idem, Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990. 76 A. Solzhenitsyn, ‘Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha’, Novyi mir, 1962, no. 11, 8–74; I. Ehrenburg, ‘Liudi, gody, zhizn’, Novyi mir, 1960, nos. 8–10; 1961, nos. 1–2; 1961, nos. 9–11; 1962, nos. 4–6; 1963, nos. 1–3; 1965, nos. 1–4. 77 RGALI, 1702/10/2/49-50 (14 December 1962).

Part II

Forging old/new identities De-Stalinizing the Stalinist self

5

Forging citizenship on the home front Reviving the socialist contract and constructing Soviet identity during the Thaw Christine Varga-Harris

In October 1957, E.G. Khilimok moved into a new apartment at the 122nd block (kvartal) of Shchemilovka Street, the foremost experimental housing construction site in Leningrad at the time. As one of the more than two hundred families receiving housing there, she was among those featured in a human-interest story published in the local newspaper Vechernii Leningrad. The two buildings on Shchemilovka being settled had reportedly only recently been covered in scaffolding; now they were complete and contained all sorts of amenities. As the stream of vehicles laden with household items advanced toward the new apartment block, the ‘cordial host’ – housing office manager G.A. Savitskii – greeted new residents.1 The joyous housewarming was a common theme in the local press during the Khrushchev period, and the article on Khilimok and her fellow tenants was typical. Such human interest stories conveyed the beauty of new or refurbished city districts. Smiling families, first carrying their belongings into their new apartments, then hanging curtains and pictures while admiring the workmanship in their building, completed the scene. Articles on housewarmings also presented new housing as a gift or reward to workers (Khilimok herself had ‘worked almost all her life’), provided facts and figures on progress in housing construction, and asserted that such sights were testimony to the concern of the Soviet state and Communist Party for the well-being of the people (blago naroda). In a characteristic episode of the housewarming narrative, after scrutinizing the kitchen, bathroom, shelving and pantry, and discerning the ‘good quality’ of the finishing, Khilimok exclaimed, ‘Thanks go to our native party and government for their concern [zabota] for us, simple working-people’.2 The buildings on Shchemilovka were put into operation in honour of the fortieth jubilee of the October Revolution. On this same occasion, Khrushchev elaborated his goals in a speech to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR: ‘The housing programme, drawn up by the Party and the Government and warmly approved by the entire people, sets the task of securing a considerable increase in accommodation so as to put an end to the housing

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shortage in the next ten to twelve years’.3 The mandate to resolve this crisis was a key element of domestic reform under Khrushchev, who sought at last to fulfil the revolutionary promise to provide for the proletariat all fundamental human necessities, including shelter and consumer wares.4 Housing construction and consumer goods production during the Thaw thus diverged from the post-war Stalin-era concordat that had provided official sanction for comfort and domesticity to the professional segment of the population, in exchange for its participation in the reconstruction goals of the state.5 At the same time, the massive housing construction campaign initiated by Khrushchev did not signify an unambiguous turn toward private life: presented as a continuation of the revolution, the housewarming denoted movement rather than ‘settling down’, and although the separate family apartment connoted privacy, the home was intended to be a site for the rejuvenation of the collectivist spirit and the revival of socialist activism.6 Beyond restructuring living space, then, housing policy during the 1950s and 1960s was conflated with a return to the ‘normal’ development of socialism, of which material progress and concern for the populace were but two of several crucial components.7 The repartition of the living space of the ‘bourgeoisie’, and its nationalization immediately following the October Revolution, constituted the first endeavour to realize the goal of housing for the people.8 The commitment to provide housing waned, however, during the 1930s and 1940s, as capital and resources were diverted from consumer goods production to intense industrialization and the collectivization of land, and then the war effort. The inadequate supply of housing inherited from the tsarist regime, the rapid influx of rural residents to urban centres during the Soviet era, which overwhelmed existing urban infrastructures, and wartime destruction of the housing stock also contributed to the housing shortage.9 Extensive construction of residential buildings in the Soviet Union finally received priority following the Second World War, and soared after Khrushchev assumed leadership of the state and Party: during the FiveYear Plan of 1956–60, more housing was built than in the entire period from 1918 to 1946, with a total of 474.1 million square metres of aggregate floor space.10 By 1964, the press was boasting that every fourth resident of the country was a new settler and that in Leningrad alone, more than one hundred families were celebrating a housewarming each day.11 Letters from ordinary citizens to local housing, factory, military and municipal government and Party authorities, national figures, and newspaper and magazine editors – correspondence that was never published – belied such proclamations about the achievements of housing construction. This chapter is based on these letters, namely complaints (zhaloby) and written requests (pis’ma zaiavleniia) submitted by Leningraders intent on improving their living conditions. This correspondence is contained in the archives of the executive committee (ispolkom) of the Leningrad city

Forging citizenship on the home front 103 soviet and stored in the Central State Archive of St. Petersburg. Although housing was distributed by places of employment and the district soviets, the city soviet was ultimately responsible for housing allocation. Petitioners therefore turned to the Leningrad city soviet to make appeals, while their letters to other authorities (from housing administrators to newspaper editors) were invariably forwarded to its executive committee for examination.12 The same promises celebrated in official discourse were presented in letters written by ordinary people, but with a divergent portrayal of daily life. Rife with frustration, the discourses that emerged conjure up themes of wartime propaganda and bemoan a delayed homecoming or return to normalcy on the domestic front after Stalinist repression and war. In evoking persistent hardship and official rhetoric of the past, they offer a counter-narrative to that of the radiant socialist future depicted in the typical housewarming feature of the Khrushchev period. They demonstrate that, despite grandiose efforts, housing continued to be characterized by overcrowding, disrepair and extreme inconvenience.13 Housing petitions also present an important mode of interaction between state and society. Although petitioning was not a novel practice under Khrushchev – the tradition of writing letters to figures of authority was embedded in Russian and Soviet culture – the premises upon which individuals based their demands serve as a reflection of reform.14 In the more than one hundred cases scrutinized, Leningraders asserted the right to humane living conditions based on state discourse about revolutionary promises and official concern for the person, policy tracts related to daily life (byt), perceived legal rights, and universal conceptions of justice (pravda) and human dignity.15 The correspondence that was generated thus indicates a populace actively engaged in reviving the social(ist) contract, an implicit accord that had been severely undermined during the Stalin period. Relatedly, petitions for improved housing offer a valuable site for observing the ways in which individuals defined themselves within the post-war, post-Stalin context, and identified themselves as ‘Soviet’ citizens. In the process of narration, petitioners not only delineated the minutiae of their material circumstances, but also provided autobiographical details verifying their personal value to the regime, which they conflated with their identity. The latter served as a means of asserting entitlement to reward, restitution and repatriation. Indeed, individuals made their demands by drawing upon a broad cache of public identities – soldier, worker, orphan, ‘disabled’ (invalid), war widow, mother, Party member and ‘rehabilitated’. The focus here will be on three key modes of identification: ‘soldier’, ‘worker’ and ‘rehabilitated’. Although petitioners rarely applied the literal Russian-language equivalent grazhdanstvo, they did employ the rhetoric of citizenship. In particular, they mobilized the social aspect of citizenship, the right to

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welfare.16 At the same time, pride of purpose bred during the war, or the feeling of being part of a victor nation, as Elena Zubkova indicates, cultivated a particular sense of Soviet citizenship.17 Also, the perceived right to decent housing had been advanced by wartime propaganda on hearth and home.18 Indeed, the discourses generated in housing petitions demonstrate a popular preoccupation with private life and suggest that addressing wartime and immediate post-war expectations in this sphere, years after the war had ended, constituted as significant a dimension of the reform process during the Thaw as elements of de-Stalinization such as the denunciation of the cult of personality and of the excesses of Stalinist terror.19

Reviving the socialist contract and constructing post-war normalcy during the Thaw Features on happy housewarmings published in the press under Khrushchev increased hopes and shaped requests for better housing. Many petitioners cited familiarity with construction policy in their letters, highlighting the role of the media in making them aware of official objectives and progress in the sphere of daily life. They also juxtaposed wartime material privation with continuing hardship to assert the need for long overdue ‘normal’ living. Petitioners thus presented housing conditions as a measure of the performance of the Soviet system, and in their current state, as a mockery of socialism and an affront to humanity tolerated by the supposedly ‘caring’ regime. Some individuals asserted a right to decent housing simply by reason of having been born ‘Soviet’. These petitioners demanded that the regime at last honour the socialist contract forged by revolution, through the provision of reasonable living space. The powerful sense of entitlement to housing that Russians came to feel already by the conclusion of the Civil War is aptly captured by John Hazard in his 1939 study of Soviet housing law: The population had grown to expect that their government would supply them with rooms, and this expectation had come to be considered during the first years of the Revolution what might be termed a ‘right to space’. No laws had ever declared that such a right to space existed, but in the psychology of the people its realization became one of the criteria by which the government was to be judged.20 This expectation continued to be articulated throughout the 1950s and 1960s. For instance, N.I. Perevezentseva clearly perceived her right to housing as a promise to all Soviet citizens. Deprived of adequate living space, she thus felt compelled to proclaim, ‘Can it really be that I am not such a Soviet person as are all. . . . If this is not so, then why ever do they

Forging citizenship on the home front 105 not care about those such as I, who have no living space, I am not asking for more . . . only the slight possibility to live, eight to nine metres’.21 Indicative of the impact of extensive publicity on the feats of construction, T.F. Fainberg argued that if it had been impossible to fulfil her request before, it was possible now: she cited an article from Sovetskaia Rossiia, which she quoted as stating that due to the ‘fantastic tempo’ of housing construction, ‘fifty million people celebrated housewarmings during the last five years’.22 Given their familiarity with official policy, many petitioners proceeded to ask why they were not benefiting from the massive housing campaign. For example, A.T. Solov’eva wondered, ‘is it really possible in our time and in our so excellent [prekrasnaia] country, when we are doing all so that our people should live well and not be in need of anything . . .’, that she should be denied living space.23 Some petitioners delineated similarities between the hardships of war and their current circumstances. Residents at 11 Il’ich Lane, for instance, cited abnormal living conditions long after the war had ended: some had lived in their building for 30–35 years and throughout the blockade, and their plumbing had not been working for years, their roof leaked, and sometimes the gas did not function.24 In a letter to the public prosecutor of Leningrad, they exclaimed, ‘we are living through a second blockade’ and asserted, ‘as citizens of the Soviet Union – we should not be deprived of humane conditions’.25 Clearly, those petitioning for better housing believed that ‘post-war’ narratives – invoking the war and blockade – still resonated with officials and would appeal to their sympathies.26 Indeed, the press sometimes portrayed new housing as a reward for having struggled through the war. For example, one housewarming article featured a pensioner who had worked for thirty years as a doctor and had chosen to remain in Leningrad to serve her fellow Leningraders rather than accept the offer of evacuation during the war. She and her four children subsequently endured blockade life, while her husband died at the front. Her new apartment on Nalichnyi Lane was apparently erected on the very site where her previous home had been destroyed.27 Vis-à-vis such published features on housewarmings, unpublished letters demonstrate that petitioners cleverly manipulated official rhetoric. Alexei Yurchak’s concept of ‘hegemony of representation’ provides a useful framework for considering the way in which individuals incorporated into their correspondence the catch phrases of the regime. Like the popular discourses that Yurchak examines for the period of late socialism (spanning the late 1960s through 1980s), housing petitions during the Thaw constituted a ‘communicative space’ – neither entirely public nor private – in which individuals collectively exposed to the same rhetoric in turn created a sense of shared experience, one that in the present analysis is characterized as ‘Soviet’. However, while ordinary Leningraders submitting requests for better living space demonstrated ‘simulated support’ for

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state initiatives (namely, housing policy), they did not merely re-present the official version of reality: they concurrently expressed personal concerns, revealed genuine hardships, and indicted the state and Party for their failure to fulfil their promises.28 Essentially, the securing of living space was central to individual aspirations to enter back into normal (civilian) society after military service, retirement from a lifetime of employment, or internal exile.

Forging Soviet citizenship on the home front One of the most common bases of appeal for housing under Khrushchev was military service, whether in the form of sacrifices on the front during the Second World War (the ‘Patriotic War’) or of careers that spanned war and peace.29 Soldiers attempted to invoke both pity and praise, citing their losses (of physical health, loved ones and home) and accomplishments (awards and decorations). While declaring that they deserved better living conditions, they also demonstrated urgent material need. V.S. Svetukhin employed this strategy in his request for better housing for his family. Over the course of his petition, he repeatedly introduced himself as a ‘A Disabled [Invalid] of the Patriotic War’ and revealed that from the age of 18 he had sacrificed his health for the defence of his native land (Rodina), and was seriously wounded in battle. Also, he had been awarded the ‘Order of Bravery’.30 He thus proclaimed that he ‘deserved’ (zasluzhil) to be provided with housing, and could not ‘live and wander without attention in the Soviet Union’.31 In this way, having served his duty, he asserted his right to be reincorporated into civilian society. Svetukhin also highlighted wartime loss and the unfavourable conditions in which his family was living to convey his sense of rootlessness following military service. Having spent the entire blockade on the Leningrad front, he had nowhere to return to in his native (rodnoi) city of Kalinin – his parents had died during the war and his living space was destroyed by bombing. He therefore went to Leningrad to live with his sister and her family, and after marrying, moved into a private apartment where he was paying more than his pension afforded him.32 Some soldiers invoked their perceived moral rights as former military personnel to strengthen requests for better housing that were predicated on legal foundations. This was evident, for example, in the case of I.G. Petrov, who declared, ‘with faith and truth I served my native land and by law must be provided living space’.33 He was alluding to a government decree granting housing privileges to officers of the reserve who had served in the Soviet Army for more than 25 years.34 The homecoming he imagined had clearly been thwarted – following his discharge in 1956 after 26 years of service, and lacking any provision of living space in Leningrad, Petrov had no choice but to live with his mother. However, because their room was ‘not fit for permanent habitation’, he had to live apart from his

Forging citizenship on the home front 107 wife and son, who were residing with relatives in another city.35 In one letter, he argued that if there genuinely existed ‘concern for former servicemen, not in words but rather in actions would they promulgate laws for their fulfilment . . .’. Instead, he despaired, ‘now I am not needed by anyone’, demonstrating the failure of the regime to repatriate the very individuals who had defended it, more than a decade after the war had ended.36 In addition to military service, many petitioners outlined a lengthy employment record, in some cases embellished by wartime experience, thus evoking the conventional Soviet identity of ‘worker’.37 That so identifying oneself might prove expedient was suggested by the press: human interest stories on housewarmings consistently provided the name and occupation of the (often exemplary) new tenants featured, the duration of their employment, and select personal details. For example, P.A. Batova, moving into a new flat with her son, was distinguished as a senior worker who had devoted 26 years of her life to her factory and had defended it during the blockade.38 In petitions for improved housing, some workers demanded what they deemed to be deserved respite in retirement, while others pleaded for protection of their health, in some cases as a means of ensuring their further utility to the regime. F.Ia. Struchkov had laboured as a construction worker in Leningrad for over 30 years, and was living in an extended family arrangement of seven persons in a dwelling measuring 20.15 square metres. Basing his request for additional living space on labour service, he declared, ‘I gave nearly all my life for the state and ask the state to help me in old age to rest . . .’. He added that five of his family members were working for the ‘welfare of the native land’ but had nowhere to live in peace.39 A.A. Chunaev invoked the social contract with the state and Party, implying that preserving his health, that of a worker, would contribute to the development of the regime. Living in a family of four in a room measuring only 11.8 square metres, he asserted, ‘This shortcoming of the sanitary norm in space has a strong influence on our work capacity, such that having returned from work, we do not have the possibility, as owed, to rest’. Not only had he and his wife sacrificed more than half of their lives working in dangerous (vrednoe) production, but Chuanev had also participated in the Finnish and Patriotic wars.40

A ‘de-Stalinizing’ citizenry On 8 September 1955, the Council of Ministers issued a decree to privilege with a special housing queue individuals who had been denounced as ‘enemies of the people’ or persecuted by association with those who had been so designated.41 Since housing was a promise made by the regime to all Soviet citizens, petitioners who invoked their official rehabilitation

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apparently equated the securing of living space with ‘re-acquiring’ citizenship. Such persons had been excluded from the participatory or associative roles of citizenship that others – like soldiers and workers – emphasized, and therefore sought through housing reintegration into the body of Soviet citizenry, the reinstatement of their living space, and fundamental justice. As with soldiers returning home, a dwelling could provide structure and a sense of normalcy, in this case after exile and imprisonment. T.F. Fainberg emphasized the moral justness of her being placed on the housing registry for the rehabilitated. In 1937, her family underwent repression and her husband died ‘tragically’. In turn, her apartment was confiscated and she was placed in prison and then exile, where she raised her son. In 1957, her husband was posthumously rehabilitated. At the time, she herself was living with her adult son in a room of 14 square metres in a noisy communal apartment; she wanted to exchange this space for a separate apartment in order to preserve her fragile health. In one letter, Fainberg stated, ‘Is it possible that all undeservedly lived through and lost by me does not give [me] the right to an improvement of housing conditions?’.42 On another occasion, she more emphatically employed the tactic of justice seeker, stating, ‘I am awaiting salvation [spaseniia]!’ – which would be more than the 30 square metres she had received in exchange for 56 square metres and 15 years of her life. This, she asserted, would enable her to live out her old age in ‘normal housing conditions’ as would be ‘natural, lawful and just [estestvenno, zakonno, spravedlivo]’.43 For some, housing literally was a means to have a ‘place’ in the Soviet Union. This is vividly apparent in the case of A.I. Komarova, whose preoccupation with living ‘legally’ was prominent in all of her letters of request. Komarova had lived in Leningrad from her birth in 1901 up to July 1937, the moment of her administrative exile (vysylka) to Central Asia. Having lost her living space upon her return to Leningrad in 1947, Komarova had no option but to move in with her brother; when he exchanged his room for another one, she relocated with him.44 Komarova insisted on being included in his writ (order) with a right to living space, and ‘legalized’ (zakonit’) as an inhabitant of Leningrad in the registration (oformlenie), explaining, ‘. . . everyone seemed to look at me with distrust, as though at an enemy of the people. Such a state continued for me from 1937 to 1957 until I received the documents about my innocence’. Demonstrating that her ‘enfranchisement’ was contingent upon securing living space, when Komarova received the document declaring her expulsion to be unfounded, she immediately acted to exercise her right to register for housing in the queue for the rehabilitated.45 In general, living space may have served as a tangible medium through which individuals felt comfortable about raising the issue of rehabilitation. Nevertheless, among the cases explored for the 1950s through 1960s, the quantity of housing petitions related to this aspect of de-Stalinization is

Forging citizenship on the home front 109 negligible in comparison with correspondence in which petitioners invoked entitlement in association with military or labour service. At the same time, because rehabilitation was a sensitive matter, petitions predicated upon it perhaps ended up in files other than those of the Leningrad city soviet. Clearly, however, individuals were reluctant to raise or forefront their rehabilitation when requesting better housing. In fact, minutiae about the spaces petitioners inhabited prior to and following repression conveyed the tragedies of their personal lives often more vividly than the autobiographical details provided, while pressing personal and material concerns predominated over the fundamental assertion of entitlement based on rehabilitation. The case of M.A. Zhilinskaia is illustrative. She placed concern for her personal development and future at the forefront of her petition for improved housing, which was ultimately predicated upon the decree on housing for the rehabilitated. Although she possessed two rooms in an apartment ‘with all the conveniences’, her living space was situated in a communal apartment, circumstances, she claimed, that hindered both her scientific work and peaceful living. As a 62-year-old doctor of medicine, working as a senior scientific employee, she asserted, ‘I gave all my strengths to the development of our Soviet Science and in old age would like to live in a tranquil arrangement [obstanovka] in a separate apartment . . .’. Almost as an afterthought, maybe anxious about the associations of her past, she added that officials should also take into consideration the fact that in 1937 her husband, an important war employee, was ‘without guilt’ (nevinno) arrested and executed, and during this time she herself endured much ‘torment’ (muchenie). Her husband had now been posthumously rehabilitated.46

Identifying a scapegoat The correspondence pertaining to the housing petitions examined typically extended over several years. In general, the numerous letters written by a petitioner were often consistent over time in terms of content and language, regardless of the type or level of official being addressed. There was, however, a broad tendency to criticize local bureaucrats in letters to senior officials, and the tone sometimes became more desperate over time. Indeed, while requests invoked a socialist contract with the proletarian regime or proclaimed rights of citizenship based on different ‘Soviet’ identities, blame for the failure to obtain better housing was frequently placed on one single antagonist, the local bureaucrat, whether affiliated with housing, state or Party organizations. The stereotypical bungling bureaucrat was incompetent, indifferent and insensitive to the needs of the people.47 As M.M. Tveritinova complained in a letter to K.E. Voroshilov, the local organs to which she had repeatedly turned would not help her, ‘rather they occupy themselves only with

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formal standardized responses [otpiski], they do not interest themselves in where a person lives and how, in what conditions’.48 I.G. Petrov claimed that the way in which local power was operating demonstrated not ‘concern for the person, but rather mockery’.49 While many petitioners indicted local bureaucrats for disregarding their right to decent housing, a few denounced them as a danger to the state and Party. For example, M.P. Smirnova suggested that the officials she had encountered were akin to those of Tsarist times, referring to them as ‘callous Gogolesque functionaries but not Soviet people’.50 After turning to the soviet, Party committee, and housing department of her district – all of whom failed to satisfy her request for improved living space – A.I. Shvedova proclaimed the following: ‘A DANGEROUS SICKNESS, THE NAME OF WHICH IS BUREAUCRATISM, HAS PENETRATED INTO THE PORES NOT ONLY OF THE STATE, BUT ALSO OF THE PARTY APPARATUS’.51 The tendency of citizens to blame inadequacies in housing on proximate powers rather than officials in the national branches of the state and Party, can be attributed to the fact that living space was distributed at the local level.52 At the same time, however, directing criticism at local administrators was a course followed also by the central authorities. Some scholars have interpreted this practice as a deliberate strategy of the regime for containing discontent, and for ensuring loyalty toward the leadership at the national level and discouraging local group allegiances.53 The allegation made by Shvedova that the Party had been compromised lies on the border between condoned critique of individual local bureaucrats and condemnation of the entire regime. In a number of cases, petitioners explicitly crossed this boundary. Some overtly expressed their lack of faith in the system. This is evident in the case of U.A. Denisov, who lived in a damp, narrow room of 14 square metres with his family of three. After his petition for better housing was ignored by the executive committee of the Leningrad city soviet, he proclaimed to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, ‘I have already ceased to believe in that which is written in the programme of the Communist Party, that there will be a separate apartment for each family . . .’.54 In more extreme cases, petitioners starkly illustrated how their lives were being destroyed by conditions contrary to socialism. I.S. Semenova cited suicide, emigration, or leaders de facto honouring the laws of the state as potential solutions to her desperate living conditions, given the indifference of local officials to her request for better housing. In a letter to Izvestiia, she lamented ‘they do not help as . . . we are not living, but rather we are dragging out a miserable existence and it is better to die immediately than lead it slowly. Such is our life, like death’.55

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Conclusion In employing rhetoric manufactured by the regime – that associated with the building of socialism or ‘concern for the person’ – the discourses that surfaced in housing petitions during the Thaw are to some extent analogous to the phenomenon of ‘speaking Bolshevik’ formulated by Stephen Kotkin in his research on the 1930s: petitioners deliberately employed official catch phrases and represented themselves in ways they deemed most effective to furthering their cause.56 In addition, most correspondents were clearly aware of and invoked, even if only implicitly, the elaborate system of housing privileges that had developed over the course of Soviet rule. The broad range of individuals eligible for special consideration on the housing registry or for additional living space included leading workers of state, Party, economic enterprises and social institutions; scientific employees; artists, writers, composers and architects; physicians practising in residential buildings; individuals with honorary titles like ‘Hero of Socialist Labour’; persons suffering from certain diseases; individuals enlisted in the armed forces and high ranking military personnel; and disabled veterans of the Second World War and the families of those who died in that war.57 It is nevertheless insufficient to conclude that the vocabulary of the state and Party was simply regurgitated by ordinary citizens in a quest to exercise a modicum of power. Rather, the discourses explored depict persons pursuing individualistic aims and demanding that officials enter into dialogue with them and assist them; some even vividly illuminated the failings of the Soviet system. In requesting improved living conditions, petitioners insisted that the state and Party honour their part of the socialist contract – in accordance with policy tracts on housing and proclamations about happy housewarmings published in the press – as they themselves had done, in their estimation. This suggests a new mode of negotiation during the Thaw: housing petitions of the 1950s and 1960s, in which both privilege and duty were emphasized, complicate the line demarcating supplicants (seeking justice) from citizens (invoking the rights of public interest) evident in correspondence of the 1930s, as delineated by Sheila Fitzpatrick.58 In complaints and requests for better housing under Khrushchev, Leningraders sought justice and invoked rights. These petitioners presented themselves as subjects of the Soviet Union (under the governing power of the state) who had fulfilled various requisites of citizenship (sacrifice, labour, loyalty), and in their requests highlighted material conditions, aware that housing was an ‘objective’ commodity due to collective or state ownership. At the same time, they interspersed (sometimes exhaustive) autobiographical details and ‘subjectified’ their living space through personal histories of habitation. The failure of housing construction to keep pace with demand effectively rendered moot the rights and privileges of the ordinary person, as

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local officials simply were not able to satisfy the endless requests for better housing that they received.59 Nevertheless, through their petitions, individuals were able to elicit official validation for both their living circumstances and identity. Indeed, administrators and commissions assigned to investigate housing cases verified the appalling conditions and services dutifully rendered to the state detailed by petitioners – even if alleviating the burdens of poor housing (i.e. a tangible ‘reward’) was not immediately possible. Finally, it is curious to note the continuity that emerged in the discourses employed by individuals petitioning for better living space over the immediate post-war Stalin period and throughout the Khrushchev era.60 Whether drawing upon stock images of homes destroyed during the war or confiscated in conjunction with repression, or of dwellings overcrowded or in extreme disrepair, petitions submitted during the Thaw thus temporally propel forward both the ‘return to normalcy’ that some scholars conflate with the death of Stalin, and ‘the psychological frontier of the end of the war’.61 In continuing into the 1960s to invoke themes of wartime propaganda like sacrifice for the native land (Rodina), and in combining an aspiration for overdue normalcy on the home front with the simple wish for a place to come home to, Leningraders did not merely appropriate official rhetoric about housing reform; they participated in shaping the general field of discourse about private life and its significance to their daily lives and their civic identities. Essentially, they placed on the agenda of de-Stalinization not only material restitution for rehabilitated persons, but also demands for post-war normalcy and the revival of the socialist contract. Furthermore, individuals proclaimed a right to housing based both on the promises of the Soviet regime with its revolutionary agenda (thereby reasserting official rhetoric), and on a personal sense of entitlement to decent living space, as members of a public intensely aware of its human rights.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank Diane P. Koenker, Mark D. Steinberg and Polly Jones for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this chapter.

Notes 1 D. Sokolov, ‘V chest’ 40-let. Velikogo Oktiabria. Bol’shoe novosel’e’, Vechernii Leningrad, 25 October 1957, 1. 2 Sokolov, ‘Bol’shoe novosel’e’, 1. 3 N.S. Khrushchov [sic], Forty Years of the Great October Socialist Revolution. Report of the Jubilee Session of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. on November 6, 1957, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1957, pp. 49–50. 4 The obligation of a socialist system to provide housing for the people was expressed in dozens of propaganda brochures published under Khrushchev.

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5 6

7

8

9

10 11 12

13

See for example, A.I. Shneerson, Chto takoe zhilishchnyi vopros, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo VPSh i AON pri Tsk KPSS, 1959 and N. Grigor’ev, Zhilishchnaia problema budet reshena, Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1963. On consumer goods during the Thaw, see S. Reid, ‘Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev’, Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 2, 2002, 211–52. Here I am referring to the ‘Big Deal’ conceptualized by Vera S. Dunham in In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction, Durham: Duke University Press, 1990, esp. pp. 3–23. These aspects of the Khrushchev-era housewarming and ‘domesticity’ during the Thaw are elaborated, respectively, in chapters one and three of C. VargaHarris, ‘Constructing the Soviet Hearth: Home, Citizenship and Socialism in Russia, 1956–64’, PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005. Natal’ia Lebina, in her exploration of the 1920s and 1930s argues that the negative realities of Soviet daily life – from alcoholism to the housing shortage – were anomalous to socialism (N. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ Sovetskogo goroda: normy i anomalii. 1920/1930 gody, St. Petersburg: Zhurnal ‘Neva’; ITD ‘Letnyi sad’, 1999.) For overviews of the revolutionary repartition of housing, see, for example, the following: A. Fedulin, ‘Revoliutsionnyi “zhilishchnyi peredel” v Moskve (1918–1921 gg.)’, Voprosy istorii, No. 5, 1987, 180–3; M. Potekhin, ‘Pereselenie petrogradskikh rabochikh v kvartiry burzhuazii (oktiabr’ 1917–1919 gg.)’, Istoriia SSSR, No. 5, 1977, 140–4; and T. Kuznetsova, ‘K voprosu o putiakh resheniia zhilishchnoi problemy v SSSR’, Istoriia SSSR, No. 5, 1963, 140–7. Khrushchev himself recognized these reasons for the ‘acute housing shortage’ he had inherited. See Khrushchov, Forty Years of the Great October Socialist Revolution, p. 49. With regard to rapid urbanization, the urban population of the Soviet Union increased from 26.3 million in 1926 to 111.8 million at the beginning of 1962. See T. Sosnovy, ‘The Soviet City (Planning, Housing, Public Utilities)’, Dimensions of Soviet Economic Power. Studies Prepared for the Joint Economic Committee Congress of the United States, 87th Congress, 2nd Session. Part V. The Share of the Citizen, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1962, p. 325. Concerning wartime damage, according to official Soviet data, nearly one half of the buildings in cities occupied during the war were destroyed. See T. Sosnovy, ‘The Soviet Housing Situation Today’, Soviet Studies, vol. XI, no. 1, 1959, 2–3. See for example, J. DiMaio, Jr., Soviet Urban Housing: Problems and Policies, New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1974, pp. 20–1. See for example, M. Sapronov et al., ‘K novym stroitel’nym rubezham. Sdacha kazhdogo doma dolzhna stat’ prazdnikom. Otkrytoe pis’mo stroitelei – udarnikov kommunisticheskogo truda’, Vechernii Leningrad, 23 December 1964, 4. In 1956, 73.3 per cent of housing was operated by the Leningrad city soviet. See D. Cattell, Leningrad: A Case Study of Soviet Urban Government, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers, 1968, pp. 144–5. Although files for only a few hundred cases pertaining to housing were found in the Central State Archive of St. Petersburg, the quantitative extent of such correspondence is larger. To illustrate, one report of the executive committee of the Leningrad city soviet revealed that in 1959, 53,007 complaints or written petitions were addressed to this body, of which 65 per cent concerned the housing question. See TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/8/1, 8. As one quantitative illustration, in Leningrad per capita living space (zhilaia ploshchad’) declined from 8.73 square metres in 1926 to 5.18 in 1956; by 1961, this figure had risen only to 5.89, while the official health norm remained 9 square metres. Sosnovy, ‘The Soviet Housing Situation Today’, 4–6.

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14 For an overview of letter writing throughout Russian history, see the special issue of Russian History/Histoire Russe, 1997, vol. 24, nos. 1–2, edited by Sheila Fitzpatrick. C.f. S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s’, Slavic Review, vol. 55, no. 1, 1996, 78–105; idem, ‘Signals from Below: Soviet Letters of Denunciation from the 1930s’, Journal of Modern History, no. 68, 1996, 831–66; and L. Siegelbaum, ‘ “Dear Comrade, You Ask What We Need”: Socialist Paternalism and Soviet Rural “Notables” in the Mid-1930s’, Slavic Review, vol. 57, no. 1, 1998, 107–32. 15 These were selected on the basis of their representativeness within each file (delo) examined. 16 My conception of citizenship is in part informed by the sociologist T.H. Marshall, who delineated the development of three different aspects of citizenship over the course of the eighteenth through twentieth centuries: civil (entailing the rights to liberty, free speech and due process of the law), political (involving the right to participate in the exercise of political power and elections) and social (the right to welfare). The focus here will be on the last of these, but in contrast to Marshall, who chronicles a shift from duties to rights, I demonstrate that the two were intricately intertwined in the Soviet case. See ‘Citizenship and Social Class’, Class, Citizenship, and Social Development. Essays by T.H. Marshall, with an introduction by Seymour Martin Lipset, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1965, pp. 71–134. 17 E. Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans., ed. Hugh Ragsdale, Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1998, pp. 15, 18. 18 On wartime propaganda, see Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, ‘ “Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families”: Local Loyalties and Private Life in the Soviet World War II Propaganda’, Slavic Review, vol. 59, no. 4, 2000, 825–47. 19 Deborah Ann Field is among the first historians to address the question of private life in the Khrushchev period. (D. Field, ‘Communist Morality and Meanings of Private Life in Post-Stalinist Russia, 1953–1965’, PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1996). 20 J. Hazard, Soviet Housing Law, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939, p. 8. 21 TsGA SPb, 7384/41/759/341. 22 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/633/68. 23 TsGA SPb, 7384/41/766/69-70. 24 TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2065/382, 391, 395, 401. 25 TsGA SPb, f. 7384, op. 37, d. 2065, l. 391. 26 Given that their native city had endured the German blockade in addition to the traumas of war experienced elsewhere, the housing petitions of Leningraders provide a sense of the persistent psychological impact of the Second World War in perhaps amplified form. After all, the blockade lasted for nearly three years during which time the city lost about two-thirds of its prewar population of about 3.2 million, and approximately 16 per cent of the already insufficient housing stock was destroyed. The tendency to draw upon claims of Leningrad ‘heritage’ is certainly unique to these letters. At the same time, however, Leningrad was rebuilt within a few years and the post-war housing conditions that motivated petitioners in this city were ubiquitous in urban Russia. It is possible, therefore, that the strategies, hopes and frustrations, and senses of Soviet identity evident in letters submitted by Leningraders, bear similarities to popular discourses that emerged in other parts of the country. On wartime deaths in Leningrad, see B. Ruble, Leningrad. Shaping a Soviet City, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990, p. 49 and J. Barber and M. Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II, London: Longman, 1991, p. 42. On the destruction of residential buildings in Leningrad during the blockade,

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27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

49 50 51

see E. Bibis and B. Ruble, ‘The Impact of World War II on Leningrad’, in S. Linz (ed.), The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union, Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985, p. 189. The following overview of housing petitions submitted by Muscovites during the Thaw suggests that the discourses employed by Leningraders do in fact have parallels in the rhetoric used by citizens in other parts of Russia: E. Kulavig, ‘ “Give Us Decent Homes!” ’, in Id., Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev: Nine Stories About Disobedient Russians, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, pp. 41–51. E. Perovskii, ‘Novosel’e’, Stroitel’, 11 August 1962, 2. See A. Yurchak, ‘The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism: Power, Pretense, and the Anekdot’, Public Culture, vol. 9, 1997, 161–88. For a broad overview of the position of veterans in Soviet society, see M. Edele, ‘A “Generation of Victors”? War Experience, Victory, and the Culture of Veterans in the Soviet Union, 1941–1956’, PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2004. TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2083/113, 116, 120. TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2083/113. TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2083/120. TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/103. TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/103. Petrov cited the Decree of the Soviet of Ministers of the USSR of 24 September 1953 (No. 2508). TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/108. TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/99. ‘Party member’ was another standard ‘Soviet’ identity. However, while many petitioners did cite Party membership, in only a few cases was Party activism at the forefront of letters of request for housing. See for example the correspondence pertaining to the cases of N.M. Berezkina (TsGA SPb, 9626/1/291/10307) and A.Ia. Shvedova (TsGA SPb, 7384/42/343/360-78, except ll. 362–3). S. Zhitelev, ‘Khronika iubileinykh dnei’, Vechernii Leningrad, 19 June 1957, 1. TsGA SPb, 7384/42/633/44-45, 47–8. TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2083/89. Namely, the Decree of the Soviet of Ministers of 8 September 1955, No. 1655. TsGA SPb, 7384/42/633/79. TsGA SPb, 7384/42/633/68. TsGA SPb, 7384/42/341/503-04, 512. TsGA SPb, 7384/42/341/503-04. TsGA SPb, 7384/42/343/151. The ineffective and callous local bureaucrat was a stock image of the national satirical magazine Krokodil. See for example, C. Varga-Harris, ‘An Unimaginable Community? Satirists, Citizens and Bungling Bureaucrats Tackle the Soviet Housing Question, 1956–64’ (conference paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association of Slavists, Quebec City, PQ, Canada, 25–27 May 2001). TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2083/187. Nicholas Lampert defines ‘otpiska’ as ‘a reply for form alone, which meets the requirement that a submission or complaint should receive a response, but gives no indication of what if anything has been done, and no indication of the reasons why a complaint is rejected as groundless’. The majority of responses to the housing petitions contained in the files of the executive committee of the Leningrad city soviet were of this kind. See N. Lampert, Whistleblowing in the Soviet Union: Complaints and Abuses under State Socialism, London, The Macmillan Press, 1985, p. 125. TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/85. TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2070/100. TsGA SPb, 7384/42/343/375-376. Capitals appear in the original.

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52 When émigrés who had left the Soviet Union between 1977 and 1980 were interviewed about their experiences with certain bureaucracies, they most negatively evaluated official bodies providing housing, particularly the housing department of the local soviet. Negative assessments of treatment, efficiency and fairness might, however, simply be attributable to sheer material dissatisfaction. See Z. Gitelman, ‘Working the Soviet System: Citizens and Urban Bureaucracies’, in H. Morton and R. Stuart (eds), The Contemporary Soviet City, Armonk, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 1984, pp. 226–32. 53 See for example, R. Bauer, A. Inkeles and C. Kluckhohn, ‘Informal Adjustive Mechanisms’, in Ids, How the Soviet System Works. Cultural, Psychological and Social Themes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956, p. 81, and Zubkova, Russia after the War, pp. 74–87. 54 TsGA SPb, 7384/41/765/291. 55 TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/64. For a discussion of the use of lament in Soviet letter writing, see G. Alexopoulos, Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003, pp. 115–22. 56 S. Kotkin, ‘Speaking Bolshevik’, in Id., Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as Civilization, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, pp. 198–237. According to Kotkin, ‘speaking Bolshevik’ entailed a process of social identification, drawing from the vocabulary of official discourse and creating a ‘field of play’ through which individuals could become members of ‘official society’ (see Ibid., esp. pp. 224–5). 57 See for example, DiMaio, Jr., Soviet Urban Housing, pp. 122–3, and H. Morton, ‘Who Gets What, When and How? Housing in the Soviet Union’, Soviet Studies, vol. XXXII, no. 2, 1980, 240. 58 Fitzpatrick, ‘Supplicants and Citizens’, pp. 103–4. Zvi Gitelman defines ‘supplicants’ in the same way. See Gitelman, ‘Working the Soviet System’, p. 222. 59 Most of the housing petitions examined remained unresolved or unsatisfactorily resolved. Some notifications provided no explanation as to why the request to exchange living space had been denied. In other cases, officials cited the following reasons: an absence of available housing; ineligibility in accordance with the claims of entitlement being made; possession of housing deemed ‘fit’ and sufficient in size; and the absence of documents required to verify former space inhabited. 60 See for example the correspondence pertaining to the case of N.E. Posnova – whose home had been destroyed during the war – which spanned from September 1953 to March 1958. TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2070/4-35. 61 See, respectively, S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Postwar Soviet Society: The “Return to Normalcy”, 1945–1953’, in Linz, The Impact of World War II, pp. 150–2, and Zubkova, Russia After the War, p. 102. Zubkova envisions this ‘frontier’ as the year 1948; by then, rationing had ended, pre-war industrial production had been restored, and the demobilization of the army had been completed.

6

De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood The quest for moral rebirth, 1953–58 Ann Livschiz

Anxiety over the state of the minds, hearts and souls of the youngest Soviet citizens was a fairly consistent feature of both public and behindthe-scenes discussions over childhood matters throughout the Soviet era. After all, the future of the Soviet project hinged on the moral purity of the youngest generation. Certainly, concerns about children were voiced even in the ‘lacquered’ world of post-war Stalinism. Most of the issues associated with the Khrushchev period – concerns about the quality of literature, juvenile delinquency, educational reforms and labour education – had already been noticed and acknowledged in previous years. But because most of the problems were direct consequences of Stalinist legislation or spending priorities, there was little possibility that any reversal could take place as long as Stalin was alive. Stalin’s death made it possible to address the problems already under consideration with renewed vigour and openness, and with the real potential for change. Khrushchev-era officials and bureaucrats saw an opportunity to tackle long-standing problems by instituting reforms which some of them had long nurtured.1 Most officials were neither revolutionaries, nor anti-Stalinists, but rather professionals vested in improving the workings of the specific institutions under their jurisdiction or tutelage, namely children’s education and upbringing (vospitanie). Driven by a blend of professional pride and ideological belief in the importance of their work as guardians of the souls of the future Soviet citizens, some of them were eager to launch targeted structural changes and reforms.

Crime and punishment An increase in crime, juvenile delinquency and various forms of disorderly public behaviour (hooliganism) – a manifestation of a serious problem with the quality of upbringing – troubled parents, teachers and party officials. Juvenile delinquency plagued the Soviet system from its very inception; real or imagined spikes in crime committed by minors evoked panic from officials and citizens alike. Harsher punitive measures in place since

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the 1930s could not eliminate crime, nor prevent an increase during the war and post-war years. In fact, however, although a number of scandalous cases drew attention to robberies or murders, the vast majority of incarcerated juveniles were there because of the 1947 theft laws. Whilst recent studies of crime in the Soviet Union point to 1953, or more precisely to the Spring 1953 amnesties, as the period in which crime increased, along with public and official awareness of this problem, archival evidence suggests that the problem, at least as far as juvenile delinquency was concerned, was already conspicuous as early as 1952. Evidence from a wide range of sources indicates that 1952 was a particularly problematic year. In Odessa, for example, it was in 1952 that ‘the civic-minded parents of the building, seeing a great deal of disgraceful things, hooliganism and negative occurrences among children, decided to organize a summer camp in the courtyard for them’.2 Even before the 1952 Council of Ministers’ decree on liquidation of the problem of homeless and unsupervised children, as well as juvenile delinquency, local authorities in Leningrad were gearing up for ‘increasing the struggle against unsupervised children’, which included both punitive and preventive measures.3 The post-Stalin amnesties and their real or perceived impact superseded all previous efforts in the area of juvenile delinquency prevention. In addition to adult criminals, young offenders were released in a series of amnesties in the period 1953–57. In 1958, the prosecutable age was raised from 14 to 16.4 The successive releases point both to an increased leniency but also to a constant stream of young offenders continuing to enter the camps and colonies during this period.5 It is important to note that while public panic and the state’s criminalization of activities such as streettrading or begging contributed to juvenile delinquency, not all arrests were mere victims or rebels against the system; it was categories like murder, banditism, robbery, sex crimes as well as group crimes that saw significant increases in this period.6 Regardless of when the ‘crime wave’ by minors began, it became one of the focal points in public discussions about children, youth and the state of their upbringing in the years after Stalin’s death. Although self-criticism was an important component of any official discussion, the frankness with which problems were discussed did increase after Stalin’s death. At a December 1953 conference, A. Shelepin, a komsomol secretary, declared that discipline in schools was quite poor, and ‘many boys end up in prison. . . . We are responsible for this, but no one is talking about the measures we need to be taking’.7 Newspapers were avoiding the terms ‘street boys’, using the misleading euphemism ‘pigeon-fanciers’ (golubiatniki) instead. Another important and new component of delinquency discussions, at least behind the scenes, was an admission that young criminals and criminal activity held a certain amount of appeal for some children. In a 1954 report ‘On the goals of Pioneer newspapers’ Tumanova, a CC komsomol secretary announced that:

De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 119 We have a lot of hooliganism on the streets and in school and for some kids, [criminals] look like heroes, which is one of the main difficulties. [Pioneer newspapers] need to use humour and satire to dethrone them, to show that . . . they are not worthy of admiration, but of contempt.8 A similar sentiment was expressed in 1955 by the young poet Anatolii Aleksin: [Newspapers] don’t discuss hooliganism and it is a big problem. [They] should write stories about it. Sometimes a hooligan has authority in school, such a nice guy, even though he does harm. We need to show that he is a nonentity, that he is trash.9 A franker discussion of the depth of the problems, in particular the appeal of delinquency, did not translate into greater tolerance or compassion towards transgressors and disturbers of public order. At another 1955 conference on improving pioneer newspapers, the venerable poet Sergei Mikhalkov criticized the patently false way that hooligans and their reform were depicted in Pionerskaia pravda: An article described a boy who stabbed someone with a knife on the street, got expelled from school and now he misses school. Like hell, he misses school (Voices from the audience: Right, right). No, he does not miss school one bit. That is where the main lie is. (Right!) This is what’s happening. The editors have not found a new form [to deal with this problem]. So they wrote that he wanders around and suffers. He is not suffering at all. And it is necessary, like the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet when it repealed the ban on abortions boldly, and equally as bravely, to work on these questions. (Laughter in the audience).10 Although Mikhalkov did not elaborate on what this new method would be, he did hit upon the fundamental question of the time – how to deal with incorrigible wrongdoers, once their existence had been admitted, but the main repressive strategies had been rejected. In July 1954, Minister of Education I.A. Kairov touched on the issue of hooliganism at a conference on preparing for the upcoming school year: Strengthening discipline is an important goal, but we seem to go to two extremes – either a liberal attitude, coddling, fear of hooligans and trouble-makers, or to see in every prank a crime. Kairov pointed to the influence of adults and the street that needed to be overcome and punctuated his speech with examples of suicides, knifings

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and a murder of a seventh year girl by her ex-boyfriend, which happened while her classmates watched.11 Not everyone agreed with Kairov’s formulation of the problem. Most notably, deputy Minister of Education L. Dubrovina expressed her dissatisfaction – ‘all the attention drawn to it at this time makes it seem like there is a crisis, but it is not really a discipline crisis, though of course things can be improved’. Dubrovina did not seem to be enamoured of the openness with which problems were discussed: If we are going to talk about major questions of upbringing, then we must say that even though we do not have a crisis in upbringing, of course we also do not have great discipline either, and that is not a normal state of affairs.12 It was not just officials who noticed the problem – ordinary citizens felt quite eager to express their concern and to offer suggestions for improving the situation. Letters from angry citizens advocated a range of approaches.13 A particularly long letter on the subject was sent by a group of citizens to Bulganin in May 1954, offering a detailed plan for battling juvenile delinquency. The letter suggested an increase in parental responsibility and social pressure on offenders: We must immediately bring some order to the schools. If necessary, open schools with [stricter rules]. . . . In the children’s sphere, we need to destroy the ‘theory of impunity’. A decisive battle against hooliganism in public places is necessary. . . . People are afraid of hooliganism. Hooliganism is a form of fascism. Measures for battling hooliganism included ‘simultaneous efforts through the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the procuracy, and the press and public opinion’. The letter also suggested some changes to the existing system of punishment. Rather than giving a prison sentence for the first offence, they recommended introducing hard labour.14 Tolerance and compassion were rare in letters from angry citizens. In meetings with ‘workers’ about school improvement in 1956, citizens called for stricter measures against discipline offenders. They suggested a broadening of the rights of militia to preserve public order, shipping off juvenile delinquents to labour colonies, stricter disciplinary measures in schools and more powers of enforcement for teachers.15 Lack of compassion on the part of the public towards criminals was an important feature of this period.16 This makes the attitude of ‘professionals’ on this matter so striking. Judging from reports, letters and suggestions, those entrusted with the supervision of the re-forging process of young delinquents continued to believe in the ability of cultural (and physical) work to reform temporarily fallen children and youth.

De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 121 Education officials did not seem particularly tolerant either. If the procuracy and militia officials had crime as their sole purview, school officials had to deal with both delinquents and other children as well. Some teachers felt insecure and unable to compete against the appeal of the popular juvenile delinquents. In September 1955, Kairov petitioned the CC for permission to allow school directors to expel students: Local departments of education are preventing schools from achieving great improvements in discipline because they are vetoing expulsions from schools – this undermines school discipline and creates an atmosphere of impunity.17 Teachers felt frustrated by their inability to control the children or to offer a viable system of punishments and rewards. They also felt victimized by their particularly disobedient students, who were able to act with impunity, knowing that they could not be punished.18 Teachers encountered decidedly un-Soviet behaviour, which they felt powerless to combat: Children who are not disciplined and are transferred from school to school – things are reaching the point where hooligan elements insult the school. . . . Some [of the children] are in school only because of pensions. A mother receives a pension for her son as long as he is registered in school, so he is registered. Such [young people] should have been working long ago.19 Teachers and education officials repeatedly demanded the right to expel students, raising questions about the possibility of correction and redemption for all.20 Law enforcement officials perceived this as education officials’ using such rhetoric ‘as an excuse to get rid of troublemakers, basically forcing them on to the street’.21 Opinions varied on who was to blame for the unfortunate state of affairs. Some did place the blame on the ‘adult criminals’, implicitly blaming the amnesties.22 However, according to most reports and observers, the brunt of the blame lay with parents, schools and insufficient party guidance. Since many juvenile delinquents turned out to be schoolchildren, departments of education were under constant attack.23 Schools, in turn, pushed the responsibility onto parents, readily providing countless examples of parental neglect and corruption through drinking, sex and prostitution.24 Party and law enforcement officials were willing to place the blame on both: Most of the problems are due to the unsatisfactory supervision from the parents (most juvenile delinquents do not have fathers, and mothers work in factories). There are also cases of morally unstable parents who influence their children negatively. Of course [such

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When it came to practical measures to deal with juvenile delinquents, two contradictory tendencies appeared to be at work – a desire to help and a desire to isolate them from the rest of the children and make them someone else’s problem. But as the state continued to wage battle against ‘the street’, which lured children away from their duties and responsibilities and corrupted them, there emerged a gradual shift from a desire to transform to trying simply to maintain order.

Unthawing hearts In addition to the more concrete disturbances of public order, there was also a more ephemeral, yet no less troubling concern, involving the moral inner world of Soviet children. In the years following Stalin’s death, it seemed as though everyone was preoccupied with the state of morals of the youngest generation and the bad quality of their upbringing – from teachers, komsomol and party officials, to writers and ordinary citizens.26 The Stalin cult was seen as particularly damaging to children. The problems in Soviet society and the falseness with which they had been depicted in literature had corrupted children: ‘the cult of personality promoted the development in schoolchildren of a soulless dogmatic attitude towards questions of worldview and morality’.27 Children spoke perfect ‘Bolshevik’, but to the dismay of officials this did not translate into proper behaviour in real life, as was captured in one library worker’s lament – ‘they write the most beautiful [essays] about the actions of young heroes, but they do not imitate those heroes themselves’.28 This led not only to an increase in manifestations of improper public behaviour, but also to two-facedness and careerist aspirations, negative attitudes towards physical labour and a disinterest in the pioneer organization and socially useful work. In April 1953, a party member wrote to Pravda, concerned that the paper ‘does not notice serious shortcomings in the way children are being brought up in the school and in the family’: Is the coarseness of children and young people, their lack of discipline, disgraceful attitude to socialist property, not to mention mass hooliganism, befitting a country marching towards communism?29 In May 1953 another party member wrote directly to Khrushchev: Children are our future, but for reasons entirely unclear to me, the CC in the last few years clearly weakened its attention to questions of schools and the improvement of children’s upbringing.30

De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 123 Implicit in the letter is the notion that moral questions fell under the Central Committee’s jurisdiction. In 1956, another citizen complained to Khrushchev that: The overwhelming majority of young people are amoral, uncultured; foul language has entered the conversational lexicon; feelings have coarsened; girls give birth without shame and, most importantly calmly respond – I am a single mother. But all the population younger than 47 years old graduated from our Soviet schools, and what is the result? . . . When are we going to create a new cult of morality?31 What should be made of these wholesale accusations? Was this generation of children so much worse than the preceding ones? While the laments about the moral state of children were nothing new, it does appear that there were some differences in how the question was approached this time around. ‘No one’ took part in a discussion of ‘moral upbringing’ organized by Sovetskaia pedagogika in 1947, because ‘people saw it as an inter-departmental argument among employees of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences’.32 Perhaps the political and cultural climate of the time did not lend itself to a discussion about morality, or perhaps the readership of Sovetskaia pedagogika was too narrow. In 1952, newspapers were called upon to ‘be more courageous about publishing critical materials about shortcomings of pioneers’.33 Morality and public behaviour were annual subjects of concern in reports on schools.34 But it does seem that in the post-1953 period everyone wanted to express their opinion about the morals of the youngest generation in public and semipublic forums, and also saw the era as more conducive to accomplishing the long discussed and long overdue changes. This was more than just a feeling. Signals were apparently transmitted through official channels as well. In August 1953, Leningrad education officials talked about the need for improvements in order to be able to talk about the ‘true alteration of consciousness of young people, about bringing them up on the level of demands, presented to us right now by our party’s Central Committee’.35 By August 1954, the appearance lately of articles, feuilletons, letters about amoral behaviour of young men and women, which disturbed and attracted everyone’s attention, in particular, put us, teachers, on guard, forcing us to re-evaluate our work with young people; perhaps [we have been paying] too much attention to grades and not enough to their upbringing.36 The Minister of Education reported to the CC in July 1955 that ‘lately there have been a lot of reports about problems’ with the schools and children’s upbringing.37

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But public discussions paled in comparison to what was going on behind closed doors. Meetings of writers with or without party officials should be singled out as forums where particularly frank statements were made about the extent of problems. Children’s writers took their title of ‘engineers of souls’ quite seriously. In particular, those sympathetic to the issues raised by the Thaw took advantage of these meetings to raise a number of important questions. Such meetings had happened before, and complaints about children had been voiced. Yet it was here more than anywhere else that the language and nature of the problems admitted diverged from the pre-1953 period. In particular, they focused on the inner world of children not just in the ideological, but in the more ordinary human sense as well. In April 1954, a conference about children’s literature, entitled ‘Life’s truth and literary lies in books for children’ was held. According to the komsomol Central Committee’s report-denunciation to Khrushchev, in Lev Kassil’’s opening speech at the conference, when talking about reasons for bad children’s books, ‘instead of talking about insufficient mastery of writers, their poor knowledge of children’s psychology and interests, Kassil’ accused teachers, education and komsomol officials of alleged incorrect demands’. The report also contained a list of ‘incorrect and tendentious’ statements by other writers in attendance. When the discussion came to ‘unhealthy tendencies’ among youth, Iosif Dik, a young writer and a war veteran, pronounced them to be a product of contemporary life (ikh rodila segodniashniaia zhizn’). Certainly just a few years ago no one would have dared to make such public statements. But perhaps the most offensive comment came from a young poet Iakov Akim, who ‘accused the pioneer organization of training children to grow up into demagogues. Children all over grow up to become open adult demagogues, open careerists’.38 If in the past, critics of the pioneer organization focused on its shortcomings, this was an open indictment of the primary tool of political socialization of children. Similarly, Dik’s comment went beyond the customary evocations of ‘survivals of the past’ to condemning Soviet society as a whole. At a poetry conference in May 1956, the following statement by one of the participants evoked thunderous applause from the audience: We must enrich the personality [lichnost’] of [each] child . . . Forget the word sentimentality, at which everyone laughs, because we are not talking about sentimentality, but about real feelings. We are raising children now who are callous [cherstvye]. These children walk by a fallen person and don’t ask if there is something wrong. They don’t give up their seats for the elderly, and it is not because they don’t respect these people, but because they are callous. Our poetry must fight against this callousness.39 This was far from an isolated statement – at another conference, someone expressed a wish that ‘children needed to be more sincere

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(dushevnye)’. Parents asked for more books like Valentina Oseeva’s Magic Word – a collection of short morality stories about politeness, kindness to young and old, taught through examples devoid of politics.41 After years of talking about abstract moral, uniquely Soviet concepts, it was becoming clear to some that all the ideological soundness and patriotic fervour in the world would be insufficient, if the person in question was heartless. Perhaps Soviet morality was not meant to supplant basic human decency.

Literature to the rescue? One of the most striking examples of the new literature about feelings and cultivation of a greater sense of humanity was Olenka by Mikhail Zhestev, a writer specializing in books on collective farms and agriculture. The Olenka of the title is a Young Pioneer, an excellent student and an active worker in the collective farm. Orphaned by the war, she lives with her beloved adopted grandmother, until a woman named Anisia shows up on their doorstep announcing that she is Olenka’s long-lost mother, who spent the last ten years looking for her after they were separated during a bombing raid. Though heartbroken, the grandmother decides that Olenka should be reunited with her mother. Anisia and Olenka grow closer, but soon trouble strikes. Anisia went into debt to finance her trip to find Olenka. The sudden acquisition of a new and beloved dependent makes Anisia keen on increasing her material possessions in order to make a better life for her daughter. But rather than turning towards the collective farm, she hopes to earn money more quickly by selling her homegrown vegetables at the farmers’ market. She then falls in with a truck driver, who begins to procure produce for Anisia to sell, first from other collective farmers and eventually produce destined for state stores from other corrupt truckers. But according to Soviet law, reselling other people’s produce was considered ‘speculation’ and illegal. Olenka’s discovery that her mother has become a speculator sends the girl into a deep depression. Their budding relationship sours. Olenka’s grades slip and her teachers and classmates are puzzled. Olenka, a good pioneer, keeps the information to herself as long as she can, seeing it as too shameful to share. She ‘hated herself for weakness, indecisiveness, cowardice. She, a pioneer, was living on dishonest money. . . . And she did not know what to do’.42 Given that the most prominent child hero, Pavlik Morozov, gained his fame precisely for demonstrating what needed to be done in a situation when a parent does something illegal, the fact that his name is not invoked here marks a dramatic departure from children’s books from the previous years.43 Eventually, Olenka breaks down and tells a trusted teacher about her mother’s descent into speculation as well as her plans to marry the thieving and speculating truck driver. The teacher’s reaction is remarkably muted. He listens attentively to Olenka’s story all

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the while thinking, ‘Does the girl exaggerate the situation? Maybe there is no speculation taking place? She just does not like [the truck driver] and is attributing all sorts of sins to him?’.44 Olenka’s attempt to run away is foiled. Anisia is arrested for theft and speculation. Rather than experiencing joy and liberation at the news of her mother’s arrest, Olenka is crushed. She is adamant about visiting her mother in detention, explaining that – ‘She is alone, all alone . . . She thinks that I don’t love her . . .’.45 She refuses to run away, bound by filial duty: Nothing was holding her [in the village], yet she could not leave everything either. What if her mum needs her? Who knows what could happen. What if she gets sick, and someone needs to take care of her. To go back . . . means leaving mom in a difficult situation. No, she cannot do that. Whatever happened between her and her mother, running away would be pusillanimity. Yes, pusillanimity!46 Olenka decides to stay and take care of the house. Fortunately for Anisia, the local teacher (and party member) decides to act as a character witness for her in court, explaining to the district party secretary that Anisia is a victim both of the real speculator – the truck driver, but also of the collective farm leadership, that ‘pushed [her] into the [speculator’s] grasp’ by the new ambiguous legislation about private plots.47 The teacher serves as a mouthpiece for Khrushchev-era paternalism and (renewed) emphasis on the importance of community guidance and pressure to maintain individuals in check.48 Anisia and Olenka reconcile in the courtroom in a wordless embrace after Anisia receives a suspended sentence. Zhestev justifies Anisia’s brush with the law by referring to her confusion and difficult financial circumstances. She descends into a life of crime not out of an intrinsic desire for wealth, but rather in a misguided attempt to create a better life for her daughter. Olenka is not admonished for failing to come forward about her mother’s criminal behaviour, but is praised for standing by her mother, despite her illegal activity, in the hope of Anisia’s redemption and their eventual reconciliation. The book preaches tolerance and compassion. At the same time, Zhestev does not suggest that domestic problems and disagreements are private. In fact, it is the collective that helps Olenka and Anisia respectively to understand and overcome their problems. Olenka was published in a modest circulation by the Leningrad branch of the Children’s Publishing House in 1955, yet it evoked a stream of readers’ letters in the years 1955–56. Certainly, letters from readers were a widespread phenomenon throughout the Soviet period. Yet, there was something different about the letters written in response to Olenka, particularly if compared with reader-response letters from previous years.49

De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 127 In the period 1950–53, the dominant book was Pavel Zhurba’s Aleksandr Matrosov, commemorating a young man who covered a German machine gun with his body so that his unit could advance during the Great Patriotic War. But in this case, quantity did not translate into variety. The vast majority of the letters were fairly uniform, filled with standard expressions of admiration for the hero and ending with the even more standard invitation ‘for all other Soviet children’ to read the book as well. Although it is impossible to know for sure, it is highly likely that many of these letters were written as school assignments. The flood of letters about Zhurba’s Aleksandr Matrosov appears to have subsided by 1955–56, if not sooner.50 But now it was not only the object of the letters that changed – the content changed as well. The letters in response to Olenka contained a wide range of feelings and opinions. The book, especially the mother–daughter relationship, appeared to have touched a nerve in people and the letters were both highly personal and much more heartfelt than anything in the previous years. That is not to say that these letters were not using some of the stylistic conventions of reader-response letters. A teenage girl from Moscow wrote that: In this book, problems that have always interested me are resolved. All conflicts arising between people are resolved by the author very correctly, as it should be in our country.51 But alongside such generic statements were quite personal letters as well. One letter writer saw her life reflected on the pages of the book, recounting her own experiences with an unfeeling school director who did not care about her and had wanted to turn her over to her criminal mother. Some personal reflections went even further: When I read this book, I thought – many students don’t respect their mothers. What I really liked in Olenka was that she loved her mother and even when she knew she was in prison, she did not abandon her.52 But the book’s reception was far from unanimous. A group of students from the Leningrad region wrote a potentially sincere message – ‘We never lost the sense of pride for Olenka, who left her mother, the speculator, but then returned to [her] during a difficult time’ – which was virtually negated by that traditional Soviet letter-writing formula: ‘In Olenka’s place, every one of us would have done the same’. They also took issue with Zhestev’s choice of topic, pointing out to him that ‘the topic you selected does not fit our time. In Soviet families such things do not happen’. However, they did grant that the author wrote the book well.53 While for some readers, the book resonated in an almost unprecedented way, others responded to it in the same traditional standardized manner.

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That is not to say that reader letters on books about heroes from the Great Patriotic War could not be highly personal. There is a difference, however, between identifying with a heroic figure and identifying with protagonists in a domestic tragedy. Zhestev’s Olenka offered a model of family dynamic based on almost unconditional filial love, loyalty and compassion – an obvious and dramatic contrast to the Pavlik Morozov-based model of behaviour that lauded denunciatory practices by the young against family members. Zhestev brought up questions rarely raised on the pages of children’s books. It would be premature to argue that Pavlik was supplanted with a new model – a daughter who instead of denouncing, felt love and compassion for her temporarily fallen mother, and refused to abandon her even after her arrest. In fact, Pavlik continued to be fairly actively promoted as a model for children during this time.54 However, Zhestev attempted to inject the note of humanity and present an alternative way of dealing with people who make mistakes. This view of family dynamics resonated with some segments of the reading public. After years of preaching hatred for enemies, the Thaw created a relatively safe space for alternative ideas to be articulated and this was met with mixed response from the readers. Some welcomed the change, appreciating the new literature that reflected their problems and experiences. Others either refused to believe such scenarios ‘in our time’ or continued to believe that such scenarios were unacceptable for works of literature and should not be condoned, even if they were well written. It serves as a useful reminder that the ideas and trends unleashed by the Thaw were not uniformly accepted by the population. This attempt to offer models of humane behaviour was an important component of the Thaw as expressed in children’s literature. Zhestev’s Olenka is just one example of this literary current, chosen because of the availability of a large sample of reader responses. In writing Olenka, Zhestev did not abandon the fundamental assumption about the leadership role of writers and literature. He continued to believe in the importance of his writings and the necessity of didacticism as the key component of Soviet children’s literature, just like the overwhelming majority (if not all) of children’s writers. Judging from many of the letters that continued to be written to writers, some proportion of the reading public continued to believe in this as well. But what the ‘engineers of souls’ and arbiters of culture and morality did not count on was that the younger generation was becoming less interested in literary models and writers’ opinions when it came to how they lived their lives, a phenomenon that may have started much earlier, but was only now tentatively acknowledged. This discovery is captured perfectly in the experience of a Leningrad librarian discussing a book TVT with a seventh year boy in 1957. TVT describes a game invented by schoolchildren – a competition for points

De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 129 earned for performing good and useful deeds. Doing good deeds becomes ingrained in children’s daily patterns, making them better citizens. The boy admitted that he enjoyed the book, and that the game was fun, but when prodded, he responded that he would not want to take part in such a game himself.55 Teachers noticed children’s emotional detachment when it came to works of literature as well, worrying that students were reluctant to pick topics that deal with ‘thoughts and feelings evoked by the works of literature’. Rather than writing passionate essays about literary characters, they brought nothing personal to their writing, hiding behind citations from critics instead.56 Thus, even when children were reading the appropriate books, which in and of itself could no longer be taken for granted, there was no guarantee that they would draw the correct conclusions from the books’ didacticism.57 Writers continued to posit themselves as moral authorities. But children in the post-Stalin years were not the same as they had been in the 1920s and 1930s. They did not crave approval and guidance quite as much as their parents and grandparents had. Some continued to write letters, particularly to their favourite authors. However, it is perhaps more telling of the change that those children who were sceptical towards both the advice and the advice-givers, who in the past would have remained quiet, now felt compelled to write in and question the authority of the cultural figures to act as arbiters of morality and good taste.58 A number of children’s writers wrote moralizing articles or scathing feuilletons for newspapers and journals, considering such work as part of their mission. Lev Kassil’ was both a popular children’s writer and one such self-proclaimed cultural and moral authority.59 His opinions definitely resonated with segments of the adult audience, who saw him as a kindred spirit and a sympathetic ear for complaints about the depravity of today’s children and youth. But what about children and young people, his intended audience? The following letter throws an interesting light on how such moralizing may have been received. In early March 1958, Kassil’ received a letter from two boys, probably teenagers. It opened on a note of familiarity with a touch of sarcasm: Dear Lev Kassil’! We just finished listening in a state of bewilderment to your bombastic outpouring of your soul [pateticheskoe dusheizleianie]. Bravo! You forced us to think for a bit [na chutok prizadumatsia]. But our thoughts were not of a cognitive but rather of a conjective nature. [Razdumia otniud’ ne poznavatel’nogo poshiba, a dogadyvatel’nogo.] Judging from the references in the letters, the boys were well read, or to use a Soviet phrase, ‘cultured’. Yet their knowledge of literature did not make them respectful of authority or literary figures. Some of the expressions in the original Russian convey the sacrilegious tone of the letter.

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Ann Livschiz Listening to your Tolstoyan phrases in combinations marvellously resembling a literary dictionary, we felt ourselves to be wanderers in the Paraguay wilderness. Yes, yes. Though catching the meaning of the beginning, by the end we in some ways resembled newborn kittens. But that was at first; then things got easier. Evidently, the grandeur of what was being created knocked this purely literary spirit of phrase-mongering out of you. [Vidimo grandioznost’ sozidaemogo vykolotila iz Vas sei chisto pisatel’skii dukh frazerstva.] It seems you were talking about styles, epochs and beauty. Of course, it’s great that you are familiar with Sophocles and Hegel, but in the show ‘Let’s talk about taste’, [we] think that there is no reason to parade these ancient names to the detriment of our rich vocabulary.

Judging from subsequent comments, the topic of Kassil’’s radio show that provoked the two smart-alecky boys to write in had been clothing and current fashion. Exhibiting knowledge of one the classics of Soviet satire – Il’f and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs – as well as movies and other Soviet and pre-revolutionary works of literature, the boys proceed to attack what they perceived as Kassil’’s zealous defence of Russianness. It is possible that in this case, they were also channelling their frustration with the fanatical, even ridiculous, promotion of all things Russian in Soviet schools. The boys suggested that listening to Kassil’’s opinions on taste and culture was roughly equivalent (and just as ridiculous) to a situation where a war hero would defer to his wife when faced with an order from a commanding officer. The boys alluded to the generation gap, which, in their eyes, also made Kassil’ (then 52 years old, or as the boys put it ‘getting on in years’) unsuited for the position of arbiter of taste – ‘It is all a matter of age. And some day . . . we will stand behind a rostrum and sway an audience of a million by repeating the morals told by you today’. Generational unity – one of the tenets of Soviet social ideology – was perhaps a stronger belief amongst the older members of Soviet society than amongst younger members. They concluded the letter with a conventional Soviet advice-letter phrase, here clearly infused with sarcasm – ‘Explain to us if our tastes are on the right path’. (Raz’’iasnite na pravil’nom li puti stoiat nashi vkusy). To underscore their worldliness, or perhaps an affinity for the West, particularly America, one of the boys could not resist showing off his knowledge of English, by signing the letter ‘Good bay. Good bay [sic]’.60

Conclusion Whilst the standard set of problems with children and youth carried into the Khrushchev era, it was the children’s seeming lack not just of civic feelings, but of the most ordinary feelings – love, tenderness, compassion

De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 131 that troubled many cultural figures. Although the Thaw appeared to have made possible a frank discussion of all problems with the Soviet system of upbringing, a number of writers seized the opportunity to tackle the problem of cultivating these ‘most ordinary feelings’, something they have been long interested in, but not permitted to do. These children’s writers saw themselves as fulfilling their artistic, civic and, in some cases, party duty by creating works of literature that would provide models for children, whom they viewed as being in severe need of such guidance. The children’s writers firmly believed in their own importance, as well as the importance of their writing, not wavering from the fundamental assumption about didacticism in children’s literature. They were quite eager to take advantage of the relative freedom of the Thaw to achieve their longnurtured dreams of moral reform of the younger generation. The letter to Kassil’ was certainly not a typical or representative Soviet reader-response letter. But behind the clever wordplay of two smartalecky boys lay a fairly simple sentiment that was perhaps far more representative, questioning the right of cultural figures to act as arbiters of morals and taste. Such an attitude points to a growing gap between the creators of culture and its intended recipients. Whilst writers continued to believe that the requisite transformations and positive change could be promoted by creating honest literature, indications of the mindsets of some members of their audience pointed to the fact that the view of cultural figures as arbiters of morality no longer applied. Zhestev seemed to pour his heart and soul into Olenka, yet some readers seemed to treat the work as they would any other less emotionally charged book. Lev Kassil’’s moralizing provoked a scathing and clever critique. While children’s writers remained locked in the established Soviet framework during the Thaw, children and young people’s experience was taking them in a different direction. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Thaw was the opportunity to discuss and debate important social issues, with the morality and behavioural problems of the youngest generation of Soviet citizens often at the forefront. Since many of these problems were attributed to the ill effects of the Stalin cult, de-Stalinization carried with it great hope for a moral renewal and rebirth of Soviet society in general, and the younger generations in particular. Yet, not all hopes for reform and change could be realized. The lowly position of children’s institutions in the spending hierarchy changed very little. The approach to problem-solving remained largely unaltered – numerous and at times contradictory policies continued to compete for scarce resources on the local level. When it came to enacting change, almost all the Stalinist constraints applied – shortages of funding and supplies, overworked and underpaid teachers and pioneer leaders, institutional inertia and fear of consequences for unsanctioned initiative. Only when it came to discussing problems did it appear as if the old constraints had fallen away. Thus, the most dramatic changes occurred not in

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the realm of the practical, but in the discursive practices and rhetoric used to discuss problems in children’s upbringing – from juvenile delinquency to the more abstract notions of morality. When it came to juvenile delinquency, greater openness in discussion revealed not only a lack of consensus, both among professionals and the general public. The continued presence of quite unreconstructed views on these questions also pointed to the diversity in popular ideas of the direction that the reforms should take and the approaches that could be used to deal with problems facing the youngest generation. To achieve new goals in moral education – the attempts to reach and soften children’s inner worlds – old methods, namely didactic literature, continued to be used by writers seeking to remain moral authorities. In the process, an important socio-cultural contract was broken – not only were some young people no longer interested in cultural figures’ morality tales, they refused to play their part as grateful recipients of such advice. If for writers, the Thaw meant expressing their desire to tell young people how to live, for young people, the Thaw meant expressing their desire not to have to listen.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Eleonor Gilburd, Steven Harris and Polly Jones for very helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes 1 The speed with which proposals were drafted and presented suggests that the officials had the material ready, waiting for an opportune time. In other cases, it was a matter of resubmitting previously rejected proposals. 2 RGASPI, M-1/5/614/103. 3 TsGA SPb, 7384/25/1924. 4 Iu. Aksiutin, A. Pyzhikov, Poststalinskoe obshchestvo, problema liderstva i transformatsiia vlasti, Moscow: Nauchnaia kniga, 1999, p. 179. 5 Statistics on juvenile crime during this period point to a steady increase. Deti GULAGa: 1918–1956, Moscow, 2002, p. 554. 6 RGASPI, M-1/32/803. For example, in 1955 in Leningrad region, a group of four 14–15 year olds killed a classmate who ‘treated them haughtily’ (RGANI, 5/18/70). 7 RGASPI, M-1/5/546/147. 8 RGASPI, M-1/5/556/27. 9 RGASPI, M-1/32/794/6. 10 RGASPI, M-1/5/599/10. 11 RGASPI, M-1/5/559/192-4. 12 RGASPI, M-1/5/559/229-30. 13 Of course, letters offering suggestions on how to solve the problem of juvenile delinquency were written even before 1953. Some were quite creative, such as one from an army captain in 1947, suggesting that the worst juvenile offenders be isolated on an island off the coast of Estonia (RGASPI, 17/125/559/140). Yet Stalin’s death unleashed a veritable flood of letters.

De-Stalinizing Soviet childhood 133 14 RGANI, 5/18/55/164-169. One of the signatories appeared to have been a ‘professional’ letter writer, penning multiple letters over a period of (at least) several years to various high-ranking officials. 15 RGANI, 5/18/76/1-3; RGANI, 5/37/45/58. 16 M. Dobson, ‘Re-fashioning the Enemy: Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of Destalinisation, 1953–1964’, PhD Diss., University College London, 2003. 17 RGANI, 5/18/68/121-2. C.f. similar sentiment expressed by local officials in August 1955, TsGA SPb, 5039/3/2109/43. 18 It should be noted that the student body contained children with psychological and developmental problems, some as a result of wartime trauma, and increasingly as a result of parental alcoholism. Mainstream schools with their overcrowded classrooms and overworked teachers were not equipped to deal with their needs. 19 TsGA SPb, 5039/3/2109/27. For other expressions of the disdain for ‘welfare mothers’ milking the system, see TsGA IPD SPb, K-598/11/301/106; see n. 3 above. 20 RGASPI, M-1/5/512/11; TsGA IPD SPb, K-598/11/301/106; RGANI, 5/18/74/164. 21 RGASPI, M-1/5/670/40, 43. 22 RGANI, 5/18/70/86 (1955). 23 RGANI, 5/18/70; TsGA IPD SPb, K-598/16/36/15, 16ob. 24 RGANI, 5/18/70/84. 25 TsGA IPD SPb, K-598/16/36/16ob. 26 Though similar letters were written during Stalin’s lifetime as well, there does seem to be a veritable explosion of them. 27 GARF, A-2306/72/5268/3. 28 TsGALI SPb, 64/5/107/39. The term ‘speaking Bolshevik’ is taken from S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 29 RGANI, 5/30/5/108. 30 RGANI, 5/18/42/31. 31 RGANI, 5/30/141/148. 32 RGASPI, M-1/7/156. 33 RGASPI, M-1/32/704/58. 34 GARF, A-2306/72/1623/18; d. 1869, l. 342. 35 TsGA SPb, 5039/3/1830/104-5. 36 TsGA SPb, 5039/3/1973. 37 RGANI, 5/18/74154. 38 RGASPI, M-1/32/762/47-48. See another version of this denunciation in RGANI, 5/18/54/55-58. 39 RGASPI, M-1/32/819. Emphasis mine. 40 RGASPI, M-1/5/585/151. 41 TsGALI SPb, 64/5/65. The ‘magic word’ of the title is ‘please’. 42 M. Zhestev, Olenka, Leningrad: Detgiz, 1955, p. 122. 43 On the establishment of the cult of Pavlik Morozov, see Iu. Druzhnikov, Donoshchik 001, ili Voznesenie Pavlika Morozova, Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1995. 44 Zhestev, Olenka, p. 128. 45 Ibid., p. 183. 46 Ibid., p. 185. 47 This offers a fascinating glimpse of the justification of the paternal state and the confusion that may befall ordinary people (especially women) when guidance is withdrawn. 48 This emphasis on community care for fallen members of society is reflected in the campaigns to deal with the newly released Gulag inmates during this

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period, which, as Miriam Dobson has shown, were not met with enthusiasm by the public. It was one of the two most letter-provoking books in 1955–56 for the Leningrad branch. The other book was G. Matveev’s Semnadtsatiletnie (tenth years in an all-girl school and their journey of self-improvement). Files of letters are not available for all years. For comparison, the book received 85 letters in 1953 and only three letters in 1956. TsGALI SPb, 64/5/87/80. TsGALI SPb, 64/5/87/80. TsGALI SPb, 64/5/87/241. At almost the same time as Olenka came out, the central pioneer organization officials began to formulate plans to create a Pioneer Honour Book with Pavlik Morozov as the first entry. For more examples, see also RGASPI, M1/5/648/145-146 (1957); A. Gusev, God za godom, Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1964. TsGALI SPb, 64/5/110/28. TsGA SPb, 5039/6/67/53, 71. It was also during this period that officials discovered that boys were overwhelmingly reading adventure stories, which lacked the necessary didacticism and in fact distracted boys from reality. Children did not seem to write such critical letters in the earlier periods, though some adults did. In his own words, someone ‘for many decades intently following everything that takes place in the souls of our youth’: L. Kassil’, ‘Po suti dela’, Iunost’, no. 12, 1956, 98. RGALI, 2190/2/439/77-9. Both boys signed their name. Judging from the handwriting, the letter was written by one of them, and the other one wrote the English phrase.

7

The arrival of spring? Changes and continuities in Soviet youth culture and policy between Stalin and Khrushchev Juliane Fürst

The terms ‘Thaw’, ‘youth’ and ‘spring’ have always enjoyed a strong correlation in the minds of political observers and historians of Khrushchev’s Soviet Union. Just as the thawing of ice and snow reveals the buds of spring flowers, which, against all odds, force their way through the frosted soil, the political Thaw after Stalin’s death was seen as an awakening of the powers of youth after the long hibernation of the Stalinist winter. Like flowers, young people were ascribed natural powers that made them persistent opponents of everything that was old, encrusted and frozen in Soviet society and politics. After 1956, youth once more became the centre of attention for Sovietologists, who now saw in the young generation less the spark of Revolution than a glimmer of hope for victory in the Cold War.1 The enormity of the expectation placed on this new and rebellious generation of Soviet youth was best represented by Klaus Mehnert, who compared youth’s mood after Stalin’s death with the atmosphere prevailing among young Russians after the death of Nicholas I. Then, too, initial reforms had been followed by partial retreat, which ultimately led ‘to a life-and-death struggle between the regime and the people, particularly the young generation’.2 There is ample evidence to indicate that the young generation that came of age in the twilight years between Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s Secret Speech fell short of Soviet expectations for the New Man and Woman. Youth hooliganism, fuelled by high consumption of alcohol, was a problem both in town and countryside. The modesty of dress and behaviour propagated by Party and Komsomol was challenged on every street corner by fashion-conscious and jazz-hungry young urbanites. Student reaction to Khrushchev’s Secret Speech was far more pronounced than the Party wished and political non-conformism was springing up in dormitories and lecture halls. Yet was this really the arrival of spring? Was this the result of a liberalization of youth policy? Can we apply the term ‘Thaw’ to post-Stalin youth culture or do we have to develop a new vocabulary to do justice to the phenomenon of generational non-conformism? This chapter aims to dispel some of the popular myths concerning the transition between Stalin-era and Khrushchev-era youth and in the

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process challenges the common assumption that de-Stalinization was synonymous with liberalization. In the first part of the essay I will look at the various ‘youth problems’ Khrushchev faced in the early years of his rule and will demonstrate that, while they represented a change in quantitative terms compared with the late Stalinist years, qualitatively they were hardly new phenomena. I will then examine Khrushchev’s response to the challenges of youth hooliganism, worship of Western life-styles and political non-conformism and disobedience. His policies, many of which were resurrected from the 1920s and 1930s, aimed to solve problems by addressing them head on. The politics of ‘lifting the veil’, however, had their own pitfalls. Ultimately, they resulted in the same rift between official and unofficial youth cultures, which Khrushchev had identified and deplored as a consequence of Stalinism. Finally, I will interpret my findings with a view to developing a new paradigm to describe youth politics between Stalin and Khrushchev. Whilst Khrushchev unquestionably attempted to deStalinize Party and state attitudes towards youth, his uncompromising drive for re-ideologization meant that officialdom started to impact in a far more intense and intrusive manner on the lives of Soviet young people. Consequently, our acceptance of the Stalinist/Khrushchevist paradigm as essentially a dichotomy between repression and reformism has to be revised.

Khrushchev and the youth problem Youth was a favourite topic of Soviet discourse. Young people were supposed to embody the spirit of the Revolution, grow into a new generation of Soviet citizens and devote their energies to the construction of socialism. Their youthfulness symbolized the promise of a communist future as well as a sentimental homage to the young and wild days of the Revolution. Yet young people continued to misbehave in very visible ways. Traditional non-Soviet behaviour showed remarkable resilience in the face of Soviet educational campaigns, whilst old vices that had been eradicated were quickly replaced with new problems. Overt resistance was very rare among young people under Stalin, yet youth continuously, and in many instances unconsciously, pushed the boundaries of the acceptable. Their behaviour, style and political beliefs challenged the image of the perfect young Soviet man and woman that was so crucial to the Soviet Union’s self-perception. The ‘youth problem’ Khrushchev faced in his early years of rule resists easy interpretation, since it was not entirely caused, as is often suggested, by political defiance of youth to the existing regime.3 Rather, Khrushchev faced a multitude of problems, which were interlinked, but never formed a coherent phenomenon. In the post-war years, youth came to the attention of the authorities in three different ways: as hooligans, as stiliagi and as ideological critics and non-conformists.4 Looking at each of these three groups it will become apparent that the

The arrival of spring? 137 various youth problems were intrinsically rooted in the realities of Soviet life and thus a consequence, not a contradiction, of a young person’s socialization in the Soviet Union. A constant feature of both Soviet life and rhetoric, hooliganism was a slippery concept variously employed to mean the ‘primitive other’, the unmannered or the petty criminal. The habit of both Soviet officialdom and citizenry of using pejorative terms randomly and interchangeably meant that the description ‘hooligan’ could be attributed to, at one end of the spectrum, harmless young men dressed in a non-conformist manner to, at the other, brutal robbers and bandits. Youth hooliganism, although fuzzy around the edges, was nonetheless an undeniable reality of post-war Soviet life, and an affront to Soviet morals and manners. After 1948 hooliganism was the only crime category that showed a continuous rise in under-age offenders, while the overall crime rate was dropping dramatically.5 By 1952, in some industrial regions, almost 40 per cent of all youth offenders brought to court were facing charges of hooliganism.6 More than 70 per cent of all acts of hooliganism were committed by men under the age of 25.7 Acts of hooliganism could range from drunken brawls to destruction of public property to swearing in public. The disturbances usually happened in public or semi-public places.8 As the files of the Soviet procuracy demonstrate, parks, youth clubs and cinemas were favourite hooligan hangouts, where there were almost daily clashes between individuals or rival peer groups.9 Alongside the inevitable involvement of alcohol, it is noteworthy that the larger and more spectacular offences took place against a background of communal living in factory or university dormitories. Several days of organized fighting between the inhabitants of the dormitories of ‘Tulashakhstroi’ and ‘Shakhtostroimontazh’ involving up to 70 youngsters in October 1953 were typical of life on industrial or construction sites.10 This was no one-off event. To name just a few other incidents: in January 1952 over 50 pupils from different factory schools in Dnepopetrovsk attacked each other in brawls lasting over several days. Police who intervened were subjected to savage beatings.11 In February 1953 about 100 young students of the Factory School no. 9 in Kherson beat up other young workers of the Factory School no. 6. Only two months later roughly 200 pupils from the Craft School no. 9 engaged in a mass brawl with the town’s local youths.12 In November 1955 a group of 60 teenagers organized a large-scale brawl in Poltava – ostensibly because of rivalries over girls.13 Fights would routinely flare up between several dozens of young men representing their particular home turf. Drinking and brawling were turned into rituals marking the differentiation between free time and work hours. It was here that young people, away from their families and (often rural) homes, were trained in survival tactics required for living the harsh reality of Soviet post-war life. Hooliganism in these instances transcended deviance and crime, becoming a life-style, a virtual counter-culture to the ordered and

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essentially bourgeois world of Komsomol morals and behaviour. As such, hooliganism was hardly a Khrushchev-era problem. The historian Joan Neuberger identified hooliganism in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg as politically subversive. Yet modern Soviet hooliganism was largely due to the massive population shifts between countryside and town, the deracination and social loneliness that resulted from industrial dormitory living and the increasingly conservative living code propagated by the Komsomol.14 Late Stalinism with its major reconstruction sites and mobilization of vast amounts of young people into ill-equipped industries was a particularly good breeding ground for violence. The Komsomol, whose percentage of worker-members fell dramatically in the post-war years, struggled to regain (or gain control) of lost spaces: streets, dance squares and dormitories, which were dominated by a value system that tolerated, rather than condemned, the hooligans.15 Khrushchev inherited this problem, but his large-scale ad hoc campaigns to rally youth into the Virgin Lands or into the Donbass did little to diminish it.16 A more subtle, yet equally subversive, challenge to the ideal of a pure Soviet youth was the growing number of fashion-conscious young people, who often overtly aped Western style, or at the very least disdained the modest uniformity of Soviet dress. Their most famous and most visible exponents were the so-called stiliagi. It has become a common assumption that stiliagi were members of the so-called ‘golden youth’, products of increased contact with the West in the years after Stalin’s death.17 Yet examining the scant evidence available, it is apparent that stiliagi as a social phenomenon were neither distinguished by wealthy parents, nor did they owe their existence to the Khrushchev-era Thaw. Rather, they represented the tip of an iceberg of fashion-conscious and entertainmenthungry youth, who had been developing a culture parallel to the official world of the Komsomol ever since the end of the Second World War.18 The testimony of a young stiliaga arrested in 1954 after a dance evening in Moscow supports such an assumption. Aleksandr Bairon, a Komsomol member who was 19 years old at the time of his arrest and working as a mechanic at a factory in Tushino, lived with his parents, worked to support his family, over-fulfilled the norm of his production unit and was active in his Komsomol cell. However, since 1950, he had spent most of his free time studying and copying the latest fashion: I know that now a coat with sleeves ‘Reglan’ is in fashion, at the front there is a double coquette, on which buttons are sewn. I saw this kind of coat when some foreign delegation was visiting the centre of Moscow . . . To wear broad ties is not in fashion now, therefore I ask my mother to re-tailor each tie I buy in a shop. . . . In order to have boots with thick soles, I sometimes buy Czech or Romanian boots and then give them to a shoemaker to make the soles thick, for example with rubber. For some reason people think that fashionable hairstyles

The arrival of spring? 139 – long and straight hair combed back – came into existence with the release of the film ‘Tarzan’. This is not so – these hairstyles appeared here much earlier, around 1946. In our time these hairstyles are already out of date, now we do not do straight styles, but with a parting on either the right or the left side, with a curl hanging onto the forehead. This is the so-called Italian hairstyle. They were copied by some young people from the latest Italian films. . . . My acquaintance Nikolai, working at factory no. 4005, wears a net over his hair at night in order to achieve such a hairstyle . . . I dance with so-called ‘style’ and like faster dances. . . . We used to dance ‘atomic’ style, the ‘Hamburg’ style and now it is fashionable to dance ‘Canadian’. I saw that style for the first time at the dance square at Krasnaia Presnia.19 Aleksandr’s statement draws attention to several factors, which are important in understanding the stiliaga phenomenon of the Khrushchev era. First of all, he does not present himself as anti-Soviet or even anticollective. His actions run in parallel to his life as a mechanic, Komsomol member and activist. Nonetheless, his priority in life is his appearance and thus his individual self. Second, he can hardly be called privileged nor does he indicate that his acquaintances are wealthy. His solidly working class background is a reminder that it was not only the purchasing power of the golden youth that fuelled the phenomenon; factory floors, too, were breeding grounds for a culture of fashion and display.20 Finally, he consciously avoids using the term stiliaga or otherwise identifying himself with a set group. Rather, he considers himself a follower of fashion, who hangs out with other fashion-conscious youth, but frequents public places of entertainment. The reason for his arrest is a dance organized privately by a few young people under the cover of a reunion of young tourists – according to the report, not the first such occurrence. The stiliaga culture, while extreme in its care to distinguish itself, thus floated on top of a general culture of pleasure-seeking. Finally, Bairon testifies that Stalin’s death or Khrushchev-era liberalization had little influence on the existence of the phenomenon. While very much on the pulse of the moment in terms of content (e.g. the adoption of Italian chic), the essence of stiliachestvo was set in place shortly after the war, when a new young post-war generation was searching for alternative forms of self-identification. Khrushchev’s most intricate and complicated troubles with youth came with a section of society that had traditionally worried Soviet leaders and been the object of recurrent ideological criticism over the years: Soviet students (studenchestvo). Nonetheless, in 1956, when students heatedly debated the implications of the cult of personality and critically discussed daring new literary works such as Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone, the Soviet leadership and Khrushchev himself were unpleasantly surprised. The difficulty with this particular display of youth disobedience was that the border between the officially accepted and encouraged and the

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provocative and forbidden was ill-defined. After all, spontaneity, rejuvenation and grass-root activity was what Party and Komsomol wanted. The idea of renewal and criticism of old structures had figured prominently in Khrushchevite rhetoric before and after the 20th Party Congress.21 Yet iconoclasm, generational conflict and criticism of fundamentals were only a stone’s throw away. Both Party and Komsomol therefore spent most of 1956 redefining their position, drawing borders and limiting overzealous enthusiasm. Their task was not helped by the developments in Poland and Hungary which gave embodiment to many demands made by critical youth. Yet looking at the rhetoric and actions employed by young people in the wake of the Secret Speech, should the leadership really have been so surprised? How new were the voices coming from the young critical intelligentsia? The most immediate concern of students in 1956 was often what was closest to their lives: the Komsomol. Criticism of the current condition of the Komsomol was hardly new or indeed particularly radical. The Komsomol had been singled out for sharp criticism in the main address of the 20th Party Congress, which in essence repeated criticisms levelled at the Komsomol on previous occasions.22 Thus, although certainly encouraged by the excitement of the new revelations of the Secret Speech, the young critics of the Komsomol hardly opened up a new debate. It was alleged that the Komsomol was boring and had lost its drive to rally politically interested youth. Komsomol members accused their organization of being a marionette of the Party, inflexible in its procedures and out of touch with the true interests of young people. In a typical incident, students of the Moscow Energy Institute wrote an open letter to the Komsomol Central Committee, in which they asked for a reduction of membership numbers, bemoaned the loss of avant-garde status and spoke disdainfully of the ‘grey Komsomol mass’.23 Yet while often mentioning the cult of personality as a starting point, such demands echoed those of previous student generations. As early as 1946, a Moscow Party official reported ‘difficulties’ from the history faculty of Moscow State University (MGU): ‘The most widespread form of (students’) “pains”and “doubts”concerns the necessity of the Komsomol. It is believed that the Komsomol has exhausted itself, is over-blown and cannot play a leading role. The only salvation is a radical purge – as long as this does not happen there is nothing to do in the Komsomol’.24 At the root of youth’s disenchantment with the Komsomol was thus its mass character, which had come into existence in earnest in the war and post-war years.25 It was then that increasing formality, bureaucracy and rigidity sapped much of the organization’s credibility. A widening age gap between base and nomenklatura and a generational fault-line between participants and non-participants of the war introduced an ‘us vs. them’ paradigm into youth’s views in the immediate post-war years, which was to feature heavily in the debates of 1956.

The arrival of spring? 141 The more ambitious students in 1956 raised their aim higher and felt compelled to extend their ideas of social and moral justice to the whole Soviet system – often mistakenly assuming that they were answering a call for help from their country and leader. The following programme, put together by students from the Journalism Faculty at Kiev State University was typical of the demands made by various student groups after the 20th Party Congress. Labelled ‘Programme-Minimum’ it contained various neo-Leninist points together with calls for greater artistic freedom and general human values. The students demanded equal salaries for all professions, fewer taxes, expansion of consumer industries, greater sovereignty of the republics, free press, abolition of privileges for the elites, glasnost’ of political procedures, free travel, sale of foreign newspapers, no censorship and the introduction of workers’ committees as heads of major factories.26 Such voices could be heard and read in rooms and wallnewspapers all over the Soviet Union, varying only insignificantly in their content and form of expression.27 Yet while shockingly provocative by late Stalinist standards, all these views and demands remained, in essence, respectfully within the socialist boundaries and propagated what, at different times in different places, has been called ‘neo-Leninism’, ‘Socialism with a human face’ or ‘Perestroika’.28 Indeed, critically minded youth wrote up very similar demands and programmes in the Stalinist post-war years – albeit observing more secrecy. Essentially they drew from the same socialist texts and observation of Soviet reality as their post-Stalin counterparts.29 At the extreme end of the spectrum of political non-conformism in 1956 lay young people who were not content just to voice their demands, but also formed independent groups to bring about a better order. The most famous, yet by no means the only examples, are the groups of Pimenov and Trofimov at Leningrad State University and Krasnopevets at MGU. Both organizations rooted their ideas in classical Marxism tinged with a romantic longing for revolutionary activity and an idealistic sense of social and moral justice.30 While refusing to stray from the dogma of socialism, these illegal groups expressed horror at the past, but also implicated the current leadership in crimes committed against the Soviet people.31 Yet again, however, youth underground activity was not a Khrushchev-era phenomenon. A few oppositional youth organizations seem to have already existed in the 1930s; we have evidence of around two dozen operating in late Stalinism.32 Undeniably, however, the events of 1956 encouraged students to ask questions and debate issues, which had hitherto been unmentionable. This in turn had a snowball effect on the amount of students who dared to go public with a critical platform. Yet the extent to which such actions fell short of active protest is demonstrated by the fact that many of the discussions were framed in questions rather than in statements. ‘Why did Khrushchev not criticize himself, but only Stalin? Why are our electoral

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candidates imposed from above? What are the reasons for the distrust of the People’s Democracies toward the USSR?’, were only a few of the probing questions hurled at officials in those days.33 Agitators and professors were often at a loss as to how to answer and reacted with defensive replies or silence. A teacher at MGU denied that the 1936 Constitution was ever called Stalinist, while another bluntly stated that ‘he knew as much as they did’.34 The confusion and uncertainty of functionaries and students alike encouraged youth to raise questions in more public domains. Questionnaires, intended to be distributed by and among students at Kiev State University, demonstrate the intense search for a new definition of what socialism in the new post-war world meant: ‘Your opinion on the workers’ councils in Yugoslavia? Your opinion about the events in Poland? Your opinion on trade unions in the USSR? Your opinion on communism in China? What is required to develop democracy in the framework of the dictatorship of the proletariat?’, were some of the items on the list, culminating in the daring question, ‘Is the peaceful introduction of capitalism possible in a socialist framework?’.35

Lifting the veil of silence While the youth problems of the Khrushchev era seem very diverse to Western eyes, they were inextricably linked in the minds of youth leaders and policy-makers of the time. For Khrushchev and the youth officials of the time, they all represented the same malaise: lack of revolutionary commitment and disengagement from the official collective. The problem might have many faces, and might indeed be attributed to the diametrically opposed causes of capitalist residues and third-generation inertia, but the cure was to be the same. Re-ideologization, re-engagement and recreation of a revolutionary fighting-spirit (boevyi dukh) were the keywords in the struggle to recapture the hearts and minds of the young.36 ‘Everything in a person has to be beautiful’ was the slogan that summed up the Khrushchevite vision, which renewed the old Soviet pledge to create a new and better person.37 Yet Khrushchev went at it with a new vigour and determination that in many ways put his predecessor in the shade, whilst at the same time attempting to find new methods and approaches to the problem. It was characteristic of Khrushchev that the various campaigns and drives to improve the ideological standing of youth merged together, and combined the ideological with the practical. Superficially, it seemed that hooliganism and its related evil, drunkenness, were the first problems to be addressed by Party and Komsomol officials. In March 1954, the Komsomol biuro issued its first instructions about a campaign for healthier living that focused in particular on alcohol consumption.38 In 1955, the Komsomol circulated a closed letter to all Komsomol organizations about the problem of hooliganism – an action that was common practice in the

The arrival of spring? 143 Party, but represented a first in Komsomol work.39 Yet these early drives already contained much that was to be characteristic for youth policy in the ‘Thaw’ years. It named negative phenomena and put the relevant information and vocabulary in the public domain through extensive press coverage. The drive against hooliganism included the active participation of ‘good’ Komsomol members, who started to patrol the streets under the names ‘brigade of co-operation with the police’ (brigada sodeistviia militsii) or ‘Komsomol patrol’ (komsomol’skii patrul’). The positive effect of keeping an eye on hooligan activity was enhanced by the fact that participation in the patrols furthered their members’ physical and ideological involvement in official collectives. Finally, the naming and shaming of hooligans, and their subsequent reform into useful citizens, indicates the new emphasis on persuasion and re-education that was to replace the excising and purging of the previous years. Whilst the extent to which the new youth policy was initiated by Khrushchev himself cannot be exactly established, the new direction certainly reflected his attitudes and character traits. He was known to be a straight talker, who liked to shock his fellow comrades by naming unpleasant facts and figures. Many of his personal campaigns, such as the Virgin Lands, focused on the mobilization of society and the subsuming of individual freedom under the greater collective good. Finally, the de-Stalinization pursued by him involved a change of rhetoric and practice away from excision and purging and towards reintegration and re-education.40 Late Stalinism, by contrast, met most problems with a stony silence. Whilst not shy of putting a wide vocabulary of negative images into circulation, no word was uttered about problems that were not conducive to furthering a political goal. Crime, drunkenness, hooliganism, stiliachestvo and political non-conformism remained, with a few exceptions, firmly behind the locked doors of Party, Komsomol and procuracy meeting rooms. Yet the seals began to crack even before Stalin’s death – and, interestingly, in the periphery, rather than in the centre. The Ukrainian Central Committee Komsomol had always been more eager to discuss cases of hooliganism and youth crime than its Moscow counterpart.41 In 1952–53 the official Ukrainian Komsomol Russianlanguage newspaper, Stalinskoe plemia, began publishing surprisingly frank accounts of youth deviance, which, unlike Stalinist articles, indicated that the problems mentioned were general, rather than limited to a certain locality. In May 1952, it braved the subject of privileged children gaining access to universities by avoiding the usual entrance procedures and behaving badly without impunity. The publication caused a storm of reaction among the readers of the paper.42 In February 1953, there appeared a letter about severe dormitory hooliganism from a construction site in Kiev.43 In November, a long article about teenage speculation, thievery and moral corruption was published under the heading ‘When a family loses a child . . .’, which included the sub-headline ‘We are not allowed to

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be silent about this’. In the following paragraph, statistics were provided to illustrate the extent of teenage and youth loiterers – unimaginable for a Stalinist paper.44 In December 1953, an even longer piece entitled ‘In the clutches of romanticism’ made it into the paper; it addressed the problem of teenage gangs, who committed crimes for the sake of adventurism.45 Since this amounted to an admission of failure of the official collectives to fulfil youth’s needs, the article unquestionably broke the period’s journalistic taboos. It was to take a few years before similar articles appeared in the central press. Then, however, they came thick and fast, introducing a whole range of new vocabulary to describe the youth problem: bezdelniki (loiterers), tuneiadtsi (no-gooders), plesen’ (fungus), parazit (parasite), lezhevok (lazybones) and of course, the ubiquitous stiliaga (fashion worshipper).46 This last term was coined by a Krokodil’ correspondent in 1948, never to appear again in the Stalinist press.47 ‘Hooligan’ had made the occasional appearance under Stalin, yet rarely to designate group activity (its most common form), but to describe the case as an extreme exception.48 While the Stalinist terms, such as cosmopolitan, bandit or spy merely joined an increasingly abstract collection of hostile titles, Khrushchev’s terminology was descriptive, clear and simple, finding resonance among youth and adults alike. However, as was soon discovered, speaking so clearly and loudly also had its pitfalls. While the very existence of non-conformist youth cultures under Stalin demonstrates that the Soviet educational effort was never successful in creating real socialist men or women to match their ideals, lack of information on how to be different kept non-conformist phenomena in check. The Khrushchev-era policy of tackling problems head on changed all this. Propaganda intended to show the evils of non-conformist youth could easily achieve the opposite. Fascination for forbidden fruits compelled many young people to seek out phenomena promising to distinguish them from the grey masses. Nowhere did one learn better how to dress as a stiliaga than in the post-Stalinist press. This immediately meant that, on the one hand, the stiliagi movement gained a coherence and breadth it had never enjoyed before, whilst, on the other, the term stiliagi – and indeed other negative names for ‘bad kids’ – were applied inexpertly and randomly, rendering them almost meaningless. As early as 1955, all Komsomol letters on hooliganism included immorality, cursing, refusal to work and excessive pleasure-seeking in their definition.49 The terms stiliaga, plesen’, parasite and hooligan quickly became interchangeable. Yet whilst initially it seemed to make sense to tackle all negative youth images at once, it soon became apparent that, with a dilution of terms, the propagandistic value of campaigns was waning. In 1956, Komsomol’skaia pravda felt compelled to publish an article titled ‘Who is the stiliaga?’, in which it condemned the equation of all types of ‘un-Soviet’ behaviour.50 The Ukrainian Stalinskoe plemia went one step further and published a

The arrival of spring? 145 piece condemning an overzealous Komsomol patrol member for ‘arresting’ a harmless stiliaga.51 In 1957 an assembly of journalists in the Ukraine heatedly debated whether it really was useful to paint style-seeking with the same brush as hooliganism or anti-Soviet activity.52 Soon youth officials also came to realize that frankness was a very potent and addictive drug for its audience, who soon started attacking myths that were central to Soviet self-understanding. The confluence in 1956 of Khrushchev’s not-so-secret speech about Stalinist crimes, Dudintsev’s novel on bureaucratization and the information war concerning events in Poland and Hungary highlighted the problems of partial openness. In the end, the regime was forced to backtrack severely on its calls to discuss and name problems for the sake of ideological stability. The introduction of straightforward terms, which described wrongs without permitting further thoughts, was not going to solve Soviet officialdom’s credibility problem. At the same time, though, half-hearted as the policy was, it created a new problem. Revelations about the imperfections of Soviet youth increasingly undermined the Stalinist self-perception of Soviet youngsters as the ‘chosen ones’ – the constructors of socialism and the beneficiaries of life in the Soviet Union. The admission of faults in the Soviet system in general did not always lead to a desire to fight evil; often it resulted in a feeling of confusion and despair among young people and a withdrawal into a more private world.53 Even more significant than the policy of lifting the veil was another campaign intended to solve the ‘youth problem’, also pioneered by the Ukraine. In February 1952, Stalinskoe plemia published a positive report about the wall-newspaper of the Kharkov Medical Institute, which called itself Nash krokodil’ in reference to the all-Union satirical journal Krokodil’. Its naming-and-shaming campaigns, directed both against lazy students and the inefficient Komsomol committee, were presented as exemplary.54 Satirical journalism was the first step in the new policy of getting young people involved in chastening others, thus creating community and order at the same time. For this purpose, the old 1930s institution of the light cavalry (legkaia kavaleriia) was revived. Instead of the earnest raids against wasteful practices in industries and collective farms, the new light cavalry were roving squads, who roamed the streets armed with camera and pencil, producing poster-newspapers, which ridiculed transgressors of societal norms by publishing their name, picture or caricature. A Komsomol pamphlet from 1958 recounted the supposed origins of the revival: the legkaia kavaleriia was re-founded after the 12th Congress of the Ukrainian Komsomol (January 1956) when in the small but cosy rooms of the Odessa obkom there was a debate about which types of Komsomol work were most exciting and effective. Minds were cast back to a time some two or three decades earlier, and the light cavalry was mentioned. It was decided to invite old members of the movement. They came for a visit and displayed such an astonishing degree of

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enthusiasm and camaraderie that the creation of a new version of the movement was agreed. The Khrushchev-era light cavalry was born.55 While some emphasis was laid upon the existence of a problem that had to be eradicated – hooliganism, stiliachestvo, moral corruption – it is clear from the text that the legkaia kavaleriia existed mainly for its members. It was intended to take young people away from spaces uncontrolled by official control and give them an adventurous alternative. In the process it was to return that mysterious lost revolutionary spirit. While not quite Leninist, the movement had its heyday in the early 1930s, and was thus untarnished by the corruption of the Purges and the stagnation of the late Stalin years. Yet the importance of the experience of old comrades sent out strong signals that this movement was not iconoclastic or breaking with the past. It was firmly rooted in an idealized Soviet past. The founding myth of the light cavalry was pure propaganda. In fact satire and raids had never ceased to exist even in the Stalinist post-war years, albeit muted by restrictions and more cautious in their approach. Shortly after Stalin’s death, the existing structures devoted to issues of control and report56 were reformed into the komsomol’skii shtab (literally: Komsomol military headquarters). Later the terms druzhiny (friendship units), komsomol’skii patrul (Komsomol patrol), sinubluzniki (blueshirts), forposty (advanced posts) were added to the repertoire. From 1954, these shtaby – consciously borrowing military vocabulary and indeed established in the fashion of front headquarters – took Khrushchev’s call for self-initiative57 seriously and established neighbourhood watches fighting hooligans, photographing stiliagi, reprimanding ‘loose’ girls and reporting their deeds to the wider community via posters, photographs and caricatures. The movement mushroomed. In 1954, a middle-sized town such as Stalino in the Donbass had 55 patrols, in 1955, it had 78, and in 1956 as many as 97.58 In towns all over the Union announcements went up displaying the pictures of local deviants of the public order under the title ‘Is this maybe one of your acquaintances?’, thus shaming not only the offender, but his social environment and family. In Leningrad, a komsomol’skii shtab patrolling Nevskii Prospekt went even further, engaging physically with the hooligans they encountered, for which they were awarded with a positive article in the journal Sovetskaia militsia.59 Unlike the brigady sodeistvii militsii,60 the komsomol’skii shtab was not under the line management of the police, but responsible only to the Komsomol. This gave its members both a greater loyalty to the youth organization and a greater range of action, since they were not bound by Soviet laws governing the actions of the militia. Belying Khrushchev’s mighty rhetoric on the return of Soviet legality (zakonnost’) these youth patrols acted without any sanction of the law. Herein lay its strength; but it was also here that Khrushchev intensified old problems and created new ones. At first glance, the mobilization of youth to ensure collective order was very successful. The public naming-and-shaming campaign provoked mass

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discussions. Both community spirit and public order improved. The additional success of the campaign in improving the attractiveness of the Komsomol is demonstrated by the memoirs of Valerii Ronkin, later a member of the dissident underground organization ‘The bell’ (Kolokol) in Leningrad. Highly ideologically literate and already in trouble for some over-frank remarks in Komsomol assemblies, Ronkin found a valve for his desire ‘to return to the Komsomol its true face’62 in the reidbrigady at his university. Directing their main efforts towards combating drunkenness and lewd behaviour, they also enthusiastically tackled morals, stiliagi and bureaucratization.63 Yet Ronkin’s memoirs also indicate the difficulties that were embedded in the patrols’ success. He describes the escalating violence that ensued between the brigades and so-called hooligans. A Moscow student-brigadier was killed by a hooligan – only to become an instantaneous icon to the movement. Ronkin himself had his nose broken during a raid and, with a mixture of horror and fascination, he recounted the first time he hit somebody directly in the face.64 Indeed, the situation on the street degenerated so quickly that already in 1956 doubts were voiced at an all-Ukrainian meeting of patrol members as to whether the example of Leningrad was worthy of copying in the future; one speaker complained that, ‘instead of a twin-pronged method of convincing and forcing, only one method is employed: a blow to the head’.65 From another university it was reported that ‘wild instincts had appeared among the student-brigades leading to a purely sportive understanding of brawls and fights’.66 Complaints started to come in from citizens about the brigades, rather than the hooligans, and in some instances police arrested the ‘activists’ rather than their ‘victims’.67 Rough methods were employed not only against hooligans, but, also against other non-conformist elements, namely drunks, loiterers and stiliagi, who, as the raiders proudly declared, were outside the jurisdiction of the police, but within the educative and punitive reach of the patrols.68 In addition to the usual naming-and-shaming-campaign, measures such as dunking drunks into water, cutting stiliaga-ties and shaving off unsuitable hair from both boys and girls were common.69 Female patrol members often taunted girls – often the consorts of stiliagi – who, in their opinion, were dressed too loosely or behaved in a sexually provocative way.70 Ronkin explains in his memoirs why it was the stiliagi in particular that became such a target for the raiders: ‘Against our high ideals they placed tight trousers and shrill ties. Their derogative term for us was kolhoznik (collective farmer) . . . in our view, exaggerated care of one’s exterior did not correspond to intellect’.71 Rather than integrating the fashionconscious youth of those years back into the Komsomol fold, the patrols widened the gap between official and unofficial youth cultures, setting up and deepening existing divisions. Yet at the same time, members of the patrols were usually not content with official Soviet life either. The brigades’ strong sense of community

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could easily be turned against non-sanctioned targets such as the Komsomol leadership, the university or other official institution – after all, the patrols understood themselves to be charged with fighting non-socialist elements wherever they found them. Ronkin’s brigade revolted against their obsequious leader, favoured abstract art despite contrary guidelines from the Komsomol and finally tried to bring the institute’s organization into their hands.72 To all intents and purposes, the brigade had thus become what Party and Komsomol had tried to avoid: an alternative organization with its own culture and ideological outlook. Ultimately, it was participation in the brigade which allowed both critical thought and oppositional activity to flourish. Khrushchev’s most extensive solution to the ‘youth problem’ was an attempt to channel young peoples’ energies into production. Alongside the major recruitment programmes for the Virgin Lands and the Donbass, young people were called upon to help at large construction sites, gather in the harvest and build their own dormitories and clubs. While undoubtedly eliciting an enormous response initially, the problems prevailing at the work-front soon undermined youth’s belief that they were repeating the successes of the First Five-Year-Plan. Moreover, the emphasis the regime put on work-campaigns after 1956 in order to counter demands for democratization left many who had hoped in 1956 for radical change rather cynical about their purpose.73 Telling is the experience of a young, enthusiastic librarian in Leningrad, who had observed several readers’ conferences on Dudintsev’s novel Not by Bread Alone in Leningrad. Impressed by the quality and radicalism of debate and dismayed by the authorities’ attempts to stifle it, she complained to the Central Committee. She was promptly cited to Moscow where an official explained her errors to her, saying, ‘We cannot permit certain elements to spoil our youth’. Upon hearing her reply, ‘But this is important for the development of democracy’, the official countered, ‘What is important now is the question of housing, the development of industry and a good harvest’.74 For young idealists, committed to building socialism, it was difficult to argue with the necessity of economic need. Yet in the end, the renewed concentration on useful practicalities, which is evident in several resolutions and circulations by the Komsomol in late 1956 and early 1957, left their questions unanswered.75

Conclusion: the arrival of spring? Ultimately Khrushchev was left with the same problems which he had set out to eradicate – if anything, on a much larger scale. Youth policy was caught between the contradictory demands of generating enthusiasm and spontaneity and maintaining control and ideological purity. Unable either to fulfil the demands of radical youth calling for a return to revolutionary times or to incorporate fashionable non-conformists into the official youth

The arrival of spring? 149 culture, youth functionaries resorted once again to empty rhetoric and bland solutions. Komsomol secretary Mesiatsev – responsible for propaganda – recalls the challenges the organization faced in 1956 and how he, in his capacity as head of a commission charged with improving the work of the Komsomol, drew up a list of proposals. However, the list was a rather sorry compilation of vague and inconsequential measures (most of which were not implemented): establishment of subsidiaries such as a youth group for tourism, lovers of photography etc; foundation of new youth publications; strengthening of primary organizations and – a favourite of Stalinist times – exchange of Komsomol tickets.76 Serious revisions of policy were not proposed, much less implemented. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the youth problem was not solved. Youth continued to find alternative platforms of collective experience, pursue interests different to those receiving ideological sanction, and to deplore the bureaucratic, out-of-touch Komsomol. If anything, the policies introduced hardened the fronts between official and unofficial youth cultures. The persecution of stiliagi and other non-conformist youth by young people themselves – in the form of the different brigades – pushed youngsters into choosing sides, whereas, hitherto, benevolent ambiguity had prevented polarization. The partial surrender to certain non-ideological pleasure-seeking pursuits disappointed the more radical youth constituent. The introduction of large-scale eye-catching campaigns only provided micro-worlds in which these identity conflicts were enacted. Looking at Khrushchev-era campaigns to solve the ‘youth problem’ it would be hard to speak of liberalization. Young individuals of Khrushchev’s early years were not only subjected to the traditional pressure of applying for Komsomol membership and keeping their behaviour within the socialist framework, they were scrutinized for ideological faults even in their most intimate spheres of life and expected to eradicate them actively in themselves and others. In essence, these expectations did not differ from the demands made of young people in Stalinist times. Then too, the aim had been to build a new society by raising a new man or woman. Then too, young people were called upon not only to behave in a socialist way, but also to think, feel and dress in ways considered appropriate for a youngster raised in the Soviet Union. What was different about Khrushchev’s approach was that he actually took steps to implement these demands in a very hands-on fashion. Khrushchev-era youth policy sanctioned quasi-illegal measures aimed at imposing a socialist conformism that went far beyond anything attempted in the area of youth policy under Stalin. It combined propaganda with physical force, not refraining from sponsoring state-imposed violence against youngsters who dared to defy these norms. It claimed control over every area of life and put a network of agents in place charged with reporting and dealing with everyday deviations. While thus distancing itself from the Manichean worldview of the Stalinist purges, Khrushchev’s youth

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politics carried the socialist struggle into a more ordinary and personal setting. Not the Gulag and social exclusion, but public humiliation and forceful re-education were the preferred punishments. Khrushchev’s youth policy was highly visible – as Komsomol patrols, as satirical newspapers and as trainloads of youngsters shipped off to work in God-forsaken places. It intruded into ordinary youngsters’ daily lives on a recurrent basis by influencing youth’s decision in its choice of dress, style of dancing, displays of love and affection and leisure pursuits. How, therefore, can one adequately describe the transition between Stalinist and Khrushchev-era youth culture and policy? The traditional terms of ‘Thaw’, reform and liberalization have proven inadequate. Even the simple term ‘change’ panders more to Khrushchev’s self-representation than it does justice to actual events. Neither the problems encountered nor the essence of youth policies employed demonstrate qualitative change. Rather, Khrushchev revived many Stalinist ideas on youth policy (rather than returning to the progressive educational ideas of the early 1920s) and relaunched them in campaigns that combined the practical with the ideological. It was thus the degree of intensity that distinguished Khrushchevera policies from those of the Stalin years. However, as has become apparent, it was precisely Khrushchev’s intensification of Stalinist ideas and campaigns that augmented the actual problems prevailing among Soviet youth or turned them into such. To apply Zygmunt Bauman’s gardening state analogy to the Soviet Union77 – Khrushchev was in many ways a much more enthusiastic ideological gardener than his predecessor had been after the war. Nonetheless, he also created much more mud and dirt.

Notes 1 See A. Kassof ‘Youth organizations and the Adjustment of Soviet Adolescents’, in Cyrill Black (ed.), The Transformation of Russian Society: Aspects of Social Change since 1861, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960; M. Fainsod, ‘What Russian Students Think’, Atlantic Monthly, Sept. 1957, 31–6; D. Burg, ‘Oppositionelle Stimmungen in der Akademischen Jugend der Sowejetunion’, Osteuropa, vol. 7, 1957, 623–9; R. Delaney, ‘Youth versus the Kremlin’, Sign, 1958, 40. This view was also prevalent among the Russian m é igrécommunity: see V. Zavalishin, ‘Osvobozhdenie ot strakha’, in Sud’bi Rossii: Sbornik Statei, New York, 1957, pp. 148–56; The Revolt of Communist Youth, Munich, 1957. 2 K. Mehnert, ‘Changing Attitudes of Russian Youth’, in Black (ed.), The Transformation of Russian Society, 1960, p. 515. 3 I borrow the term ‘youth problem’ from K. Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media and the Remaking of Soviet Culture 1950s–1960s’, PhD diss., Princeton University, 2003, pp. 46–98. This view was particularly prevalent among contemporary Western observers and Russian m é igré s (see n. 1), but continues to be a favourite model of interpretation today, e.g. E. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, Moscow: Rossiia Molodaia, 1993. 4 This list omits youth engaged in religious practices, which was not considered a

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5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

‘youth problem’ as such, even though youth’s participation in religious practices worried officials. GARF, R-8131/29/506/135. TsDAHOU, 7/13/110/21. Ibid. In 1952, 98.4 per cent of all hooligan acts in Moscow were committed in public. GARF, R-8131/32/453/87. E.g. GARF, R-8131/32/453/32, 34, 44, 57. RGANI, 5/15/432/174-176. TsDAHOU, 7/13/109/30. TsDAHOU, 7/13/495/71. TsDAHOU, 1/24/4089/79. J. Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. The fact that even Komsomol members protected hooligans was much decried. See TsDAHOU, 1/24/4054/238. Theft, rape and hooliganism were the crimes on the rise from 1954 onwards. While the amnesty was blamed by many officials, the list of hotspots of hooliganism reveals a strong correlation between concentration of industrial centres and high incident rates. GARF, R-8131/32/4035/1-7. M. Edele, ‘Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945–53’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 50, 2002, 41. E. Zubkova, Poslevoennoe obschetsvo: Politika i povsednevnost’, Moscow: Rosspen, 1999, p. 153. See J. Fü rst, ‘Stalin’s last Generation: Youth, State and Komsomol 1945–53’, PhD Diss., University of London, 2003, pp. 223–58. RGASPI, M-1/46/175/91-92. M. Menshikov, ‘Zolotaia koronkoa’, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 18 May 1946, 3. S. Gorbusov, ‘Vecher v Gigante’, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 16 April 1946, 2. See for example Otchetnyi doklad at the 11th Congress VLKSM 1954, published in Tovarishch Komsomol, Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1969, pp. 130–1; RGASPI M-1/2/348/65-70; RGASPI, M-1/32/816 (entire). N. Mesiatsev, ‘Probuzhdenie (Komsomol vtoroi poloviny 50-kh godov)’, in Pozyvnye Istorii vyp. 9, Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1990, p. 274. RGASPI, M-1/46/192/146. TsAODM, 3/63/56/366-388. Membership remained stable during the war years, but rocketed afterwards, thanks largely to school recruitment drives in the years 1948–54. TsDAHOU, 1/24/492/6-7. See for example RGASPI, M-1/46/192/145, 153, 185, RGASPI, M-1/32/821/79. V. Ioffe, Etiudy ob optimizme, St. Petersburg: Memorial, 1998, pp. 45–52. See J. Fü rst, ‘Prisoners of the Soviet Self? Political Youth Opposition in Late Stalinism’, Europe-Asia-Studies, vol. 54, no. 3, 2002, 353–75. Archive Memorial Moscow, Files Krasnopevets, Cheshkovyi, Kosovyi. See also Ioffe, Etiudy ob optimizme, p. 100. L. Silina, Nastroenie sovetskogo studenchestva 1945–64gg, Moscow: Russkii Mir, 2004, pp. 145–58. Fü rst, ‘Prisoners’, p. 355; Ioffe, Etiudy ob optimizme, pp. 45–7. TsDAHOU, 1/24/4274/39-43, RGASPI, M-1/46/192/185, 236. RGASPI, M-1/46/192/85. TsDAHOU, 1/24/4492/9. See A. Shelepin, Ob uluchshenii ideino-vospitatel’noi raboty komsomol’skikh

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41

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49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

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organizatsii sredi molodezhi, Doklad na 7-plenume TsK VLKSM, 26.2.1957, Moscow, 1957. While this slogan rose to prominence after Stalin’s death, it was coined by the writer Anton Chekhov and made famous among Soviet youth by the Stalinist heroine Zoia Kosmodemianskaia, who copied these words into her diary. RGASPI, M-1/3/840/11. TsDAHOU, 1/24/4054/236-239. On straight talking and Virgin Lands see W. Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and his Era, London: Simon and Schuster, 2003, pp. 261, 263. C.f. M. Dobson, ‘Re-fashioning the Enemy: Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of Destalinisation 1953–1964’, PhD Diss., University of London, 2003. The biuro and secretariat in Kiev discussed 14 such items in 1951, while in the same period the word hooliganism appears only once in the topics discussed at the biuro and secretariat in Moscow. TsDAHOU, 7/13/109/1-3, RGASPI, M1/3, perechen’ for 1951. ‘Po povodu bezdel’nikov i vechnykh studentov, Stalinskoe plemia, 8 May 1952, 3; TsDAHOU,7/13/106/63-68. ‘V cheloveke vse dolzhno byt’ prekrasnym’, Stalinskoe plemia, 14 February 1953, 2. ‘Kogda sem’ia teriaet rebenka . . .’, Stalinskoe plemia, 29 November 1953, 3. ‘V poiskakh romantiki’, Stalinskoe plemia, 30 December 1953, 3. ‘Eshche raz o pleseni’, Komsomol’skaia Pravda, 15 August 1956, 2; ‘Stiliagi’, Sovetskaia kul’tura, 18 January 1955. See also Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media’, p. 47. D. Beliaev, ‘Stiliaga’, Krokodil’, no. 7, 10 March 1949, 10. Typical of a Stalinist treatment of hooliganism is the Komsomol’skaia pravda article ‘Khuligan nakazan po zaslugam’, KP, 21 September 1952, 3. The hooligan in question was a wayward, violent husband; the hooligan got his deserved punishment: 18 months imprisonment. TsDAHOU, 1/24/4054/236-239. ‘Kto iz nikh stiliaga?’, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 11 August 1965, 3. V. Beskaravainyi, ‘Oshibka’, Stalinskoe plemia, 17 October 1956, 3. TsDAHOU, 7/13/1660/54-55. For a similar argument see Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media’, pp. 96–9. ‘Ostrym perom satiry’, Stalinskoe plemia, 7 February 1953, 3. V. Nikolaev, Legkaia kavaleriia, Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1958, pp. 3–6. Late Stalinism had the institutions of komsomol’skii kontrol’ (Komsomol control posts to check production processes) and Ionkery (young newspaper correspondents writing in with reports on mismanagement or corruption). Khrushchev had vented his views on how to treat hooligans at a joint Party/Komsomol meeting in Leningrad, where he deplored the shyness with which the Komsomol tackled hooligan behaviour and alleged that hooligans were often braver than those designed to fight them. His speech initiated the first raid on Nevskii prospekt. RGASPI, M-1/5/596/86-87. TsDAHOU, 7/13/1429/13. TsDAHOU, 7/13/1429/70. This was a formation that had existed already under Stalin. Its original purpose was to help the police in the collection and processing of homeless and vagabond children. TsDAHOU, 7/13/1537/13. Valerii Ronkin, Na smenu dekabriam prikhodit ianvari . . ., Moscow: Memorial, 2003, 121. Ibid., pp. 69–74. Ibid., pp. 78–9. TsDAHOU, 7/13/1429/70.

The arrival of spring? 153 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75

76 77

RGASPI, M-1/46/198/182. TsDAHOU, 7/13/1537/22-24. RGASPI, M-1/5/596/89. TsDAHOU, 7/13/1537/8, 23; Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media’, pp. 73–4. TsDAHOU, 7/13/1537/61. Ronkin, Na smenu, p. 73. Ronkin, Na smenu, pp. 81, 117, 120. Shelepin strongly implied in his speech at the 7th Plenum VLKSM in 1957 that ‘work’ represented the right form of ‘fighting for communism’, mentioning construction of housing, harvesting and general agricultural work: Shelepin, Ob uluchshenii ideino-vospitatel’noi raboty, pp. 13–15. RGALI, 1702/6/243/38-39. RGASPI, M-1/46/192/90; ‘O rabote komsomol’skikh organizatsii v sviazi s obrashcheniem tsentral’nogo komiteta KPSS i soveta ministrov SSSR ko vsem komsomol’skim organisatsiiam’, Postanovlenie TsK VLKSM: ‘Ob uluchshenii ideino-vospitatel’noi raboty komsomol’skikh organizatsii sredi komsomol’tsev i molodezhi’, Postanovlenie plenuma TsK VLKSM, February 1957 (published in Tovarishch Komsomol, Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1969). N. Mesiatsev, ‘Probuzhdenie (Komsomol vtoroi poloviny 50-kh godov)’, Pozyvnye Istorii vyp. 9, Moscow, Molodaia Gvardiia, 1990, pp. 274–86. For an application of Bauman to the Soviet Union see A. Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, pp. 21–39.

8

From mobilized to free labour De-Stalinization and the changing legal status of workers Donald Filtzer

Introduction: the dilemma of workplace reform The question of how Soviet workers perceived, and responded to, Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization, has yet to be adequately researched. We know that the dictator’s death lowered the threshold at which popular anger could erupt into violence against local officials and police, or against perceived outsiders. In Novocherkassk, in 1962, discontent with food price rises led to a full-fledged workers’ revolt which the Khrushchev leadership brutally suppressed.1 Yet such events, though revealing and dramatic, never involved more than a small proportion of workers, and then only at climactic moments. How de-Stalinization affected the vast majority of workers and their families at a more quiet, day-to-day level, is another matter. Historiography still awaits a thorough study of how workers understood and articulated their own position within society at large and within the workplace, as subjects of the production process. The present article does not pretend to fill this gap. It deals instead with another, equally vital aspect of the history of this period, namely how the legal status of workers changed after Stalin’s death and how this impacted upon what we can loosely term the class relations of the Soviet system, in particular the process of surplus extraction. By this I mean the system of social, political and economic relations through which the Soviet elite appropriated, and then attempted to dispose over, the surplus product which its workers and peasants created. For in the last analysis it was this process of surplus extraction which created the basis of the elite’s privileges and, more deeply, determined its ability, however attenuated or imperfect, to exercise its dominance over society. As historians have long noted, insofar as Khrushchev wished genuinely to reform the Soviet system, such reforms were constrained by a need to preserve the system’s basic structures and foundations. There was a permanent tension between the perception that change was desperately needed, and a fear that reforms could bring the entire system crashing down, together with Khrushchev and the rest of the elite. This same principle applies to labour policy. Stalin had bequeathed to his successors an

From mobilized to free labour 155 economy that was largely dysfunctional, and one of the prime causes of this dysfunction was the way in which society’s toilers – its workers and peasants – related to their work. Motivation was low and the quality of the work they performed was retarding economic growth. Khrushchev understood this, but the problem was how to improve motivation and productivity without threatening the class relations of the system. Key to this dilemma was the labour process which had emerged out of Stalinist industrialization. Stalinist industrialization was not an economic process, but a process through which a uniquely Soviet system of production relations, and indeed class relations, took shape. The regime and its working class confronted each other in an antagonistic, conflict-ridden relationship, a conflict which the regime resolved by destroying the working class as a class, breaking down its social and class cohesion, atomizing it politically, and individualizing workers’ relationship to the process of production. This had a contradictory effect. Politically it was essential to the elite’s attempt to consolidate its power over society, because it closed off to workers avenues of collective political action. In doing this, however, it left individual action within the workplace as virtually the only sphere within which workers could attempt to defend themselves from the intense pressures of accumulation and loss of political freedom. The external manifestations of this during the 1930s were poor labour discipline, high levels of labour turnover, truly massive losses of work time, and large amounts of low-quality output and outright waste. Attempts to suppress these essentially individualized forms of non-cooperation were undermined by an intricate system of informal bargaining between workers and line managers, as the latter found themselves compelled by acute labour shortages to reach accommodation with workers over issues of discipline and pay. In the context of the 1930s such concessions were primarily negative, that is, managers colluded to lessen the potentially calamitous impact on workers of punitive sanctions against violations of discipline and job-changing, and of a wages policy that was little more than naked speedup. Line managers had little choice but to enter into such tacit arrangements. Had they not done so they would have had little chance of meeting the regime’s demands for plan over-fulfilment and rapid increases in output. This was not a political or economic environment conducive to stable economic growth. On the contrary, the highly authoritarian and bureaucratic ‘planning’ through which the elite attempted to administer industrialization generated almost endless chaos and disruptions to production. Workers directly contributed to these dislocations by quitting their jobs and by adopting a negligent approach to their work. The result was that a large amount of the inputs and labour power expended on production yielded no useful economic result or benefit. There was a very real expansion of the industrial base and an equally real growth of gross output, but much of this production was either literally wasted or could not be used

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for the purposes for which it was intended. What Stalinism had created was a specifically Soviet labour process which partially negated the elite’s attempts to maximize surplus production and to dispose of the surplus in the ways it would have wished. During the 1930s the full impact of this process was partially muted by the growing use of coercion and the regime’s heavy reliance on the slave labour sector. During the war and early post-war years these tendencies were even more strongly suppressed, if not masked altogether. Wartime legislation effectively ended workers’ freedom to change jobs, and this, combined with the intense material hardships of the war period and the eruption of a second, though less serious food crisis from late 1946 through to the end of 1948, caused a fundamental shift in the balance of power on the shop floor. Workers had fewer – in most cases, almost no – weapons with which to extract concessions from line managers; line managers had less need to grant such concessions and far fewer concessions to grant even if they had been willing. This is not to say that informal bargaining completely disappeared, because management’s reliance on cooperation from its workers stemmed only partly from the need to deter quitting. They also required workers’ cooperation to iron out, rectify and otherwise cope with the myriad delays, disruptions and dislocations to production, all of which threatened plan fulfilment and with it managers’ careers and well-being. Yet even here managers seem to have been less dependent on workers, whose bargaining power during the war and early post-war years was probably weaker than at any time since the First Five-Year Plan or in all the years following Stalin’s death.2 Khrushchev’s labour policies altered this situation in quite fundamental ways. First, he removed the legal restrictions on workers’ freedom of movement. In this sense he returned the Soviet factory to the situation of the 1930s. However, he went much further than this, because he also removed most of the coercive levers through which the Stalinist regime had attempted to curb slack discipline and enforce higher productivity and tried to replace them with more informal mechanisms. To this extent even the more general political reforms of de-Stalinization had an economic motivation, insofar as they sought to give the regime renewed legitimacy in the eyes of its workforce. There were also campaigns designed specifically to mobilize workers’ enthusiasm. Insofar as coercion was used, it was primarily economic, namely an attempt to exercise tighter control over the wages system. Yet even here there was a fundamental difference with the Stalin period. Under Stalin wages policy had always tried to present workers with a stark choice: either boost productivity or face poverty or even starvation. Under Khrushchev the aim was different: to remove the disincentives to exerting greater effort, but within the context of a larger endeavour to raise the standard of living. De-Stalinization, by substantially removing direct coercion within the factory and more or less liquidating the slave labour sector, also did away

From mobilized to free labour 157 with the constraints which, under Stalin, had kept the inherent centrifugal tendencies within the Soviet labour process from developing unfettered and unchecked. Khrushchev had hoped that the combination of political and social reform and a shift from political-legal to economic coercion would keep these tendencies under control, if not eliminate them. The reality turned out to be the reverse: the elite found itself deprived of any effective means of influencing worker behaviour within production or the associated patterns of informal bargaining between workers and line managers. At the same time, by continuing to close off avenues of collective action and the right to form free working class organizations, Khrushchev made informal bargaining the only arena within which workers could exercise control over this vital part of their lives. Rather than providing reform of the labour process and a stimulus to accumulation and economic growth, de-Stalinization gave free play to a system of work relations within the enterprise which tended to negate the accumulation process, culminating eventually in stagnation and collapse.

The liberalization of labour law and its consequences During the period of the first three five-year plans, from 1928 to 1940, the economy was characterized by two separate sources of labour power: a growing slave labour sector, mobilized via the network of labour camps and special settlements (the Gulag), and a free labour force. This notion of ‘free’ labour has to be qualified, because, as already indicated, the period after 1928 saw workers subjected to ever-tighter political restrictions on their freedom to organize, protest and collectively defend their position within the workplace, not to mention within society at large. However, workers remained ‘free’ in one fundamental respect: they could move from one enterprise to another, and could use their relative scarcity to lever various concessions regarding pay and discipline from local managements. It was this fact which shaped the specifically Soviet patterns of shop-floor informal bargaining described above. It is true that the regime tried to counter this process by imposing potentially serious economic sanctions against absenteeism, but it is noteworthy that it made no similar interventions to curb labour turnover.3 This came only in June 1940, when the regime made both absenteeism and unauthorized quitting criminal offences.4 With the Nazi invasion of the USSR in June 1941, the legal and de facto status of Soviet workers changed dramatically. All workers were subjected to compulsory mobilization. Workers in defence-related industries and in transport were placed under military discipline, so that quitting one’s job without permission now incurred not a relatively mild stint of two to four months in a local jail, but from five to eight years in a labour camp for those in industry and construction, and from three to ten years if they worked in transport. Workers’ freedom of manoeuvre within the factories

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equally deteriorated. Working hours were lengthened, and internal discipline was enforced more tightly than at any time since the Civil War. The war ended, of course, in 1945, but most of these controls remained in place until the spring of 1948, when all cases of illegal job-changing once again came under the June 1940 Edict.5 The ban on job-changing and harsh punishments for absenteeism were just one means of controlling the mobility of labour power. From 1940 until Stalin’s death, the economy relied heavily on compulsory and semicompulsory labour mobilization. The ‘bifurcated’ labour force of the prewar period – ‘free’ and slave (or prison) labour – was now augmented by various categories of semi-free workers, the status of most of whom was for all intents and purposes that of indentured labourers. Some, such as repatriated former prisoners of war, certain categories of internal exile, or camp prisoners given conditional early release, were under the administrative control of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) and were an adjunct of the Gulag. Others were workers mobilized or conscripted through the Ministry of Labour Reserves. Most of these latter came from two sources. The first was teenagers recruited, but in most cases involuntarily conscripted, to the Ministry’s network of vocational training schools, from which, after various periods of instruction, they were despatched to enterprises in industry, coal mining or construction to serve a four-year period of indenture. The other was workers recruited via so-called organized recruitment, or orgnabor, to sign fixed-term contracts to work in industry or construction, often in seasonal industries such as peat-digging or building materials. Although the orgnabor recruits notionally enlisted of their own free will, the anti-quitting laws effectively bound them to their contracts for their full duration, irrespective of the conditions they encountered or the deceptions committed by recruiting agents. Taking the Labour Reserve schools and orgnabor together, I have estimated that they provided the economy with between 8 and 9 million new workers between 1946 and 1952 – more than the entire net increase in the manual workforce in industry and construction over the same period.6 If we add to this number the roughly three million Gulag prisoners in industry and transport – nearly a quarter the size of the ‘free’ labour force in these two sectors in 1947 – and the nearly 1 million former soldiers and civilians repatriated from the Third Reich and working in MVD-controlled ‘special contingents’ and labour battalions, we can appreciate just how dependent the post-war reconstruction was upon a workforce labouring under greater or lesser degrees of coercion.7 The problems caused by such heavy reliance on conscript labour were obvious even during Stalin’s lifetime. A surprisingly large proportion of indentured workers were willing to risk defying the law – and the threat of the Gulag – by running away from their training schools and jobs, and illegal turnover among young workers stayed high even when, after 1948, it declined to very low levels for the workforce as a whole. Moreover, the

From mobilized to free labour 159 quality of the training offered at the Labour Reserve schools was unreliable, and enterprises frequently had to retrain the graduates from scratch.8 The economy had already begun to reduce its reliance on indentured – but significantly not prison – labour even before Stalin died, and Khrushchev effectively put an end to both institutions. There were three aspects to this policy: the mass release of camp prisoners, begun under Beria but completed by Khrushchev; the end of labour conscription and compulsory labour mobilization; the decriminalization of job-changing in April 1956.9 Taken together these moves had a radical effect on the economy. For the first time since forced dekulakization, Soviet industry and construction had to rely solely on free labour power; and for the first time since June 1940, they could not rely on the courts to deter workers from quitting. How enterprises coped with the loss of prison labour and special contingents leased to them by the MVD (a totally separate category from prisoners working in the camps themselves) is a question which awaits further archival study. I do not know how many such workers there were in 1953, although as late as 1949 industries such as coal mining and oil drilling and refining were still heavily dependent on them.10 We should not forget that the coal mining region of Vorkuta had been exclusively run by the MVD, and many of the ex-prisoners remained there after 1953 to join the free labour force. The fate of labour conscription and the Labour Reserve system is something we know rather more about. The system had been introduced in October 1940, and had called for an annual draft from the collective farms of two teenage males for every 100 working-age kolkhoz members of both genders.11 Once war broke out, the system was expanded to include both boys and girls. The schools were of two types: short training courses in Factory Training Schools (shkoly fabrichno-zavodskogo obucheniya, or FZO) for so-called ‘mass trades’ in coal mining, construction and heavy industry; and more prestigious trade or craft schools, which offered twoyear training in skilled manual trades for heavy industry (remeslennye uchilishcha, or RU) and the railways (zheleznodorozhnye uchilishcha, or ZhU). As indicated, this system not only stayed in place after the war, but was a major source of replenishing the labour force. The FZO relied largely on conscription; the RU, which offered far better conditions, had greater success attracting volunteers. The economy’s reliance on the Labour Reserve schools and labour conscription had been steadily declining even before Khrushchev. The largest intake was in 1947, when the FZO took in over 830,000 students (73 per cent of them conscripts), and the RU/ZhU another 250,000 (of whom 80 per cent were volunteers). By 1952 the system had shrunk to barely a third this size, and the FZO to less than a quarter: the FZO enrolled 184,700 students (56 per cent of whom were still conscripts), and the RU/ZhU 145,500 (98 per cent of them volunteers).12 The reasons for this are not

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complicated. The main function of the FZO had been to direct young workers into those sectors – primarily coal mining, metallurgy and construction – where conditions were so harsh that they could not hope to attract workers voluntarily. By 1948 these three branches alone were absorbing over three-quarters of all FZO students.13 Yet by 1952 even these sectors had seen a relative stabilization of their labour supplies: although they still could not recruit without conscription, their demand for new labour power was decreasing. At the same time the skills requirements of industry were changing, a fact already reflected in the increasing proportion of Labour Reserve students going into the RU and ZhU. The system was fundamentally reorganized soon after Stalin’s death. In 1954 the regime introduced a new tier of training, technical colleges (tekhnicheskie uchilishcha), to provide skilled vocational training to teenagers who had already completed a general secondary school. Graduates were still obliged to work for three years at the enterprises – now including agricultural Machine Tractor Stations and state farms – to which the Labour Reserves (now demoted from a ministry to a mere Chief Administration) might assign them.14 In 1955 the RU and ZhU were officially made voluntary – a somewhat hollow gesture in view of the fact that this was already de facto the case before Stalin died.15 In 1959 the FZO were formally replaced by a new network of Professional-Technical schools (professional’no-tekhnicheskoe obrazovanie, PTO).16 The changes here were not just institutional. From 1954 roughly half of all labour reserve graduates now went into agriculture as so-called ‘mechanizers’. The numbers going into industry continued to fall.17 The decline of the Labour Reserve system was not, however, simply a reflection of structural changes in the economy. At its heart lay much deeper problems which had stronger continuity with the Stalin years. The schools had never been overly effective from an educational point of view. In the early post-war years the schools suffered from being housed in inappropriate, often dilapidated premises and from a dearth of machinery on which to teach trainees. The curricula were badly designed and often out of date. Many of the teachers were unqualified, of questionable competence, and abusive to the children. It is therefore not surprising that factories routinely complained that the graduates of the schools, even those from the RU, were generally ill-prepared for the jobs for which they had been taken on, and that enterprises had to retrain them more or less from scratch.18 Perhaps surprisingly, these problems did not lessen as the postwar economic recovery progressed. On the contrary, the disparity between what the schools provided and the skills industry needed simply widened. This was even true in coal mining, which as I have noted, was one of the system’s primary raisons d’être. By 1956 pit managers were shutting down their Labour Reserve schools because of the limited employability of the graduates. The litany of shortcomings could have been written ten years earlier: the schools trained students in trades the mines did not need; the

From mobilized to free labour 161 curriculum showed little familiarity with the machinery and organization of labour the mines were then applying; the teachers were ‘poorly chosen’. Mine managers estimated that they had completely to retrain about half the Labour Reserve graduates they took on. In any event, they were already training on-the-job five times as many workers as they were receiving from the Labour Reserve schools, at about one-tenth the cost per student.19 Yet the rundown of the Labour Reserve schools and the shift to the PTO did not solve this problem. The new schools – now controlled by regional sovnarkhozy – still failed to coordinate the number of trainees with the needs of enterprises, and enterprises were still refusing to accept workers whom they could not employ.20 The fate of orgnabor was somewhat different. From 1947 through 1952, orgnabor recruited approximately 600,000 to 650,000 workers a year. Of these, roughly a quarter went into industrial and military construction; 15 to 20 per cent into the timber industry; between 12 and 16 per cent into coal mining, and another 20 per cent into metallurgy, the oil industry and electric power stations.21 In 1958 orgnabor still provided some 500,000 workers for these same industries, but by 1962 this had fallen to just 249,000.22 This apparent continuity with the late Stalin years concealed a significant shift in its role. Under Khrushchev, orgnabor was used less and less to recruit workers to existing enterprises, and more as a vehicle to recruit workers to construction in newly developing regions.23 Like the Labour Reserve system, orgnabor was better at providing in quantity than it was in quality. Prior to the sovnarkhoz reform of 1957, plans for numbers recruited for each region and industry had been drawn up by the industrial Ministries, and coordination between the needs of enterprises or construction sites and the number and skills of the workers they received was haphazard at best. The sovnarkhoz reform should have corrected this, since, at least in theory, the sovnarhkozy had proper knowledge of local labour requirements and local labour resources – a fact which allegedly helps explain the fall in numbers recruited. Yet problems persisted. The system continued to despatch workers with the wrong skills – in the main, sending skilled building workers to sites which could only employ them at unskilled labouring jobs. Given the more liberal legal climate the response was predictable. Some workers quit; others became embroiled in labour disputes with management.24 In coal mining the problems were somewhat different: recruiters made up their quotas by hiring miners who had been fired from one mine for discipline violations and dispatching them to another. To this extent allegedly unreliable workers were being recycled back through the system.25 The essential point here is that structural changes to the economy, the already receding utility of overt coercion in the mobilization and direction of labour power, and the new political rules that came with de-Stalinization all meant that industry and construction had to rely on other methods to meet their demands for labour power. Here we should differentiate

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between labour recruitment and retention in the USSR’s older industrial centres, and Khrushchev’s grand plan for the industrialization of Siberia and the Far East. The latter was an industrial equivalent to his Virgin Lands campaign in agriculture, and relied heavily on the recruitment and mobilization of new workers, primarily young people. In addition to orgnabor, the core of this campaign was the Social Call-Up (obshchestvennyi prizyv), organized by the Komsomol in 1954, initially to help recruit for the Virgin Lands, and then extended in 1956 to industry and construction.26 Its results were not insignificant: annual intake rose from 200,000 in 1956 to 590,000 in 1958, and a further 800,000 over the period April 1958 to April 1962. Thus in numerical terms it was no less important than orgnabor, and was instrumental in providing workers for certain key industries: in 1956 it provided 40 per cent of all new workers going into non-ferrous metallurgy and some two-thirds of new recruits for highpriority construction projects (so-called ‘Shock Construction’).27 Like orgnabor and the Virgin Lands campaigns, these results were partially nullified by high rates of labour turnover – a response to the harsh, often primitive housing and living conditions these young workers encountered.28 The difficulties encountered by the Social Call-Up were indicative of a much larger phenomenon. The regime found it almost impossible to create a permanent industrial workforce in Siberia and the Far East. Between 1956 and 1960 some 1.5 million people migrated into Siberia under one or another recruitment campaign, yet the region suffered a net population loss: between 1959 and 1965, 360,000 more people left the region than came in.29 Under Stalin such problems had been solved through the Gulag and labour conscription. When these were removed the regime found that it could attract people to the region, but could not force them to stay. Only the creation of a viable infrastructure could have done that, and this is precisely what it could not provide. The repeal of the Stalinist labour laws also had a profound impact in the industrial centres of the European USSR. In some ways workers’ reaction to decriminalization was surprisingly muted. When Stalin removed criminal penalties for absenteeism in July 1951, its incidence skyrocketed. In industries such as coal mining, chemicals, non-ferrous metallurgy and industrial construction it literally doubled or tripled.30 We might therefore have expected a similar surge in labour turnover after April 1956, on the theory that workers who had been tied to jobs they had wanted to leave would now suddenly exercise the legal right to do so. The real level of increases turned out to be more modest: from a national average of around 12 per cent in 1954, turnover rose to just over 33 per cent in 1956, then fell back to around 17 per cent in 1960, before rising back to its 1956 level during 1963 and 1965. Put another way, this means that the average worker changed jobs but once in eight years in 1954, and once every three years in 1956, 1963 and 1965. Such figures are hardly exceptional if compared with the rate at which workers had been changing jobs just before

From mobilized to free labour 163 the 1940 criminalization – roughly once every 12 to 15 months.31 Yet these were national averages across all of industry and construction, and concealed a genuine crisis situation which arose in specific sectors and localities, most notably in the engineering industry. The story of labour turnover in engineering is of some significance, because it shows just how far the relationship between workers and managers in Soviet factories had become ‘normalized’. What prompted it was a reform of the wages system which Khrushchev introduced between 1956 and 1962. The purpose of the reform had been to undermine an important aspect of shop-floor informal bargaining, namely the propensity for line managers to collude in various subterfuges of wage- and rate-setting regulations in order to protect workers’ customary earnings. Under Stalin such subterfuges had been a necessity, because the essence of Stalinist wages policy had been regularly (usually annually) to push up individual piecework targets (known as ‘norms’) and to cut piece rates, so that workers would need substantially to raise output merely to retain their previous earnings. One of the more widely used methods of doing this was for managers simply to retard the annual norm rises, so that the increases actually implemented in a given shop or factory were well below those decreed by the centre. Norms were deliberately kept at manageable levels, so that workers could substantially over-fulfil them, earn large bonuses, and in this way make up for the cuts in piece rates. The problem for the authorities was twofold. First, it led to overspending of the wages fund. More importantly, however, it blunted the coercive impact of the annual norm rises, because workers could defend earnings without necessarily achieving large increases in output and even without over-fulfilling the shop or factory plan. In the mid-1950s, just before the reform was introduced, the average pieceworker in Soviet industry fulfilled his or her norms by 170 per cent – that is, by 70 per cent more than the official target. The average piece worker in engineering fulfilled his or her norms by 209 per cent – more than double the target. If managers had not made this possible, workers simply would not have earned enough money to survive.32 Just as under Stalin, the economic authorities under Khrushchev saw such behaviour as a brake on productivity and economic growth. The wage reform attempted to discourage it through a combination of incentives and pressure. The incentive was to raise the share of the basic wage in total earnings, so that workers would be less desperate to keep norms low. The reform also sought to detach earnings from norm fulfilment per se and make them dependent on more qualitative indicators, such as overall enterprise plan fulfilment or the quality of output. Pressure, however, played the dominant role. The reform attempted to regrade most piece workers downwards into lower skill and wage grades, while at the same time exerting tighter control on norm- and rate-setting, so that they would more accurately reflect alleged improvements in technology and work organization. There were many reasons why this strategy proved

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effectively unworkable, but significantly it did achieve some success in engineering, where the nature of the production process made it possible more tightly to control norms and earnings.33 But the ‘victory’ here was pyrrhic. Machine-tool operators throughout the engineering industry responded with their feet and left their jobs en masse. The result was a massive shortage of machine-tool operators throughout engineering. We can gauge the scale of the disruption from the fact that in 1964, engineering plants in the 15 largest oblasti and territories of the RSFSR alone reported a shortage of 600,000 workers. This was over ten per cent of all workers in engineering factories outside of Ukraine, and a much larger proportion of machine-tool operators. Thus the shortage of workers in this key trade was substantial.34 Factories were losing up to a third of their machine-tool operators, many of whom opted to take lowerpaying jobs in the same industry if these gave the workers greater control over the speed of work or how they organized their job. Given the central role of machinists within the production process of machine-building, and the equally central role of machine-building within Soviet heavy industry as a whole, the knock-on effects of their high turnover were considerable. Most engineering factories did not have enough machinists to run two full shifts; some could barely manage one. Bottlenecks, a constant problem in Soviet factories anyway, grew worse, as assembly workers and fitters could not obtain enough parts to maintain a steady flow of output. Moreover, the crisis developed a self-perpetuating dynamic. As experienced machinetool operators quit their jobs, factories tried to plug the gap by taking on inexperienced younger workers or ex-servicemen, or by shifting auxiliary workers into production. Yet even where such efforts bore some fruit – which was not very often – skilled machinists were quitting faster than the new, less efficient recruits could replace them.35 In some cases it is clear that quitting was even a de facto substitute for going on strike: workers, aggrieved over what they perceived as inequities in the local wages system, withdrew their labour by giving notice. More and more of their colleagues followed suit until management perceived the danger and intervened to meet their demands.36 A labour crisis of this magnitude would have been unthinkable prior to 1953, or even prior to 1956. Labour turnover re-emerged as a ‘weapon of the weak’, a rational response by workers to unsatisfactory, if not intolerable conditions and pay, and at the same time one of the few bargaining chips they had in dealings with enterprise managers. The crisis was resolved only under Brezhnev and Kosygin, who rescinded the Khrushchev wage reform and removed controls on the upward drift of money wages.

Epilogue: the long-term problem of surplus extraction The above discussion has focused on how the re-establishment of free mobility of labour power undermined certain key objectives of economic

From mobilized to free labour 165 policy under Khrushchev. Its ramifications, however, ranged far beyond whether or not Siberia would be industrialized or whether the regime would succeed in finding more effective incentive systems. They touched the very condition of the Soviet elite’s continued existence, namely its ability to regulate the process of surplus extraction. The industrialization of Siberia was deemed crucial to the larger process of accumulation, and to the extent that high labour turnover retarded or jeopardized this policy, it threatened accumulation itself. The failure of Khrushchev’s wage reform and the crisis in the engineering industry were perhaps even more damaging from this point of view, because they signalled the resurrection of informal shop-floor bargaining at the very core of Soviet industry. Because of the nature of the Soviet political system, the reassertion of workers’ ability to exploit their relative scarcity did not lead to large-scale strikes or other forms of mass action. It eroded the Soviet system’s viability in less obvious but no less important ways, already described in the introduction: substantial losses of work time; resistance to technological innovation; low-grade quality of finished output; and general problems of labour discipline, including alcoholism. Not all of these problems stemmed directly from workers’ own actions; rather they were part of a distinct cycle of reproduction of shop-floor relations. The actions of workers in one stage of the production and distribution process created ‘objective’ difficulties for workers further down the line: shortages of raw materials or components, shoddy or unusable machine parts which had to be remade or adapted, or faulty equipment which had to be constantly repaired, all helped to create a work environment which workers found intensely frustrating, but which also gave them additional bargaining power with line managers, who did not just worry that their workers would quit and move to a new job, but relied on their cooperation to help circumnavigate or rectify the endless stream of problems that were the daily reality of the Soviet factory. Not all workers had this kind of leverage in equal measure. Skilled workers were in a more powerful position than the unskilled; workers in large enterprises in priority sectors were better placed than those in small or peripheral factories or in light industry; and perhaps most fundamental of all, men were much stronger than women. To a large extent it was the special position of women workers within Soviet industry which helped the elite recoup some of its control over surplus extraction. Light industry, which was overwhelmingly female, had a much higher intensity of labour, better discipline and far less lost work time than heavy industry. Within heavy industry itself women formed a reserve army of low-paid semiskilled workers, and were the bulk of those doing heavy, semi-skilled manual work in foundries, warehousing and internal factory transport. Even where they were in the same trades as men and worked on identical jobs, they still earned significantly less. To the extent that this greater exploitation of female labour power increased the amount of the surplus

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product and improved the elite’s ability to dispose of it as it wished, it partially compensated for the elite’s inability to exercise similar control over large sections of the male workforce. In this sense, male Soviet workers derived quite palpable privileges from this ‘super-exploitation’ of their wives, sisters and mothers – not to mention the privileges they enjoyed within the home.37 After Khrushchev fell from power this reserve army of labour came to include not just women, but also migrant workers of both sexes who moved to the large industrial centres, such as Moscow and Leningrad, from outlying regions on special work permits. These were the so-called limitchiki, and their importance to the regulation of the Soviet economy was critical, for, like migrant labour everywhere, they carried out jobs that were economically indispensable but which the local population, especially the local male population, refused to do. This, however, is another story.38 What is relevant here is that with de-Stalinization the Soviet system needed to find, and to rely on, more indirect methods of exploiting labour power. If the methods of the Stalin years had exhausted their political and economic possibilities, those that replaced them brought with them new contradictions. Although they allowed the system to expand and to survive for several decades more, they eventually sapped it of any remaining dynamic. In this sense, at least, the political economy of the Soviet labour process proved to be the ultimate dilemma of de-Stalinization.

Notes 1 V. Kozlov, Mass Uprisings in the USSR: Protest and Rebellion in the Post-Stalin Years, London & Armonk, New York, 2002. This is a slightly abridged version of his Massovye besporiadki v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve (1953nachalo 1980-kh gg.), Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 1999. 2 For a fuller argument of this point see J.E. Duskin, Stalinist Reconstruction and the Confirmation of a New Elite, 1945–1953, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001, and D. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System After World War II, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, ch. 6. 3 Prior to June 1940, the emphasis had been on punishing absenteeism. From November 1932 absenteeism for a single day required automatic dismissal from the enterprise, loss of ration entitlements, and eviction from enterprise-owned housing. When rationing ended in 1935 part of the law lost its force. Nevertheless, it continued to form the basis of regime policy in December 1938, when absenteeism was redefined to include lateness of more than 20 minutes. ‘Decree of the Central Executive Committee and Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, 15 November 1932, Ob uvol’nenii za progul bez uvazhitel’nykh prichin’, Trud, 16 November 1932; ‘Decree of Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR, Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), and the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, 28 December 1938, O meropriiatiiakh po uporiadocheniiu trudovoi distsipliny, uluchsheniiu praktiki gosudarstvennogo sotsial’nogo strakhovaniia i bor’be s zlouportrebleniiami v etom dele’, Pravda, 29 December 1938. 4 ‘Edict of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 26 June 1940, O

From mobilized to free labour 167

5

6 7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15

16

perekhode na vos’michasovoi rabochii den’, na semidnevnuiu rabochuiu nedeliu i o zapreshchenii samovol’nogo ukhoda rabochikh i sluzhashchikh s predpriiatii i uchrezhdenii’, Izvestiia, 27 June 1940. Truants were sentenced to up to six months’ corrective labour at their enterprise with a loss of pay of up to 25 per cent. People quitting their jobs without permission served a prison sentence of two to four months. ‘Edicts of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 26 December 1941, Ob otvetstvennosti rabochikh i sluzhashchikh predpriiatii voennoi promyshlennosti za samovol’nyi ukhod s predpriiatii’; 15 April 1943, O vvedenii voennogo polozheniia na vsekh zheleznykh dorogakh; and 9 May 1943, O vvedenii voennogo polozheniya na morskom i rechnom transporte’. The Edicts were unpublished but are cited in a number of documents. The most accessible public source is V.N. Zemskov, ‘Ukaz ot 26 iiuniia 1940 goda . . . (eshche odna kruglaia data)’, Raduga, no. 6, 1990, 45–6. The penalties against absenteeism did not change during the war, with the exception that truants had their bread rations cut by between 100 and 200 grams a day – a potentially draconian stricture at a time when rations were already below subsistence level. J. Barber and M. Harrison, The Soviet Home Front, 1941–1945: A Social and Economic History of the USSR in World War II, London: Longman, 1991, p. 173. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism, pp. 22–40. The number of prison labourers is for 1947, and includes roughly one million German and Japanese prisoners of war. It is calculated from GARF, 9401/2/199/73-4, 396, and d. 234, l. 8. The number of repatriates in special contingents and labour battalions is calculated from R.W. Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997, pp. 167–8, and RGASPI, 17/121/545/14. Of these figures, at the end of 1947 the MVD was renting out roughly 500,000 camp prisoners and 900,000 workers from special contingents and labour battalions to enterprises and construction firms; several hundred thousand more exiles were working outside of agriculture in local enterprises. Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism, pp. 120–32, 167–76. Criminal prosecutions for illegal job-changing were already declining before 1953, but legal recognition of this fact came only after the Secret Speech. ‘Edict of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 25 April 1956, Ob otmene sudebnoi otvetstvennosti rabochikh i sluzhashchikh za samovol’nyi ukhod s predpriiatii i iz uchrezhdenii i za progul bez uvazhitel’noi prichiny’, Vedemosti Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR, no. 10, 1956, art. 203. In 1949 workers leased from the MVD accounted for 10 per cent of coal miners and over 30 per cent of workers in the oil industry. GARF, 9401/2/269, tom 1, l. 63, and RGAE, 1562/321/416/40. ‘Edict of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 2 October 1940, O gosudarstvennykh trudovykh rezervakh SSSR’, Pravda, 3 October 1940. GARF, 9507/2/418/1,3; d. 425, l. 8. See also, Filtzer, Soviet Labour and Late Stalinism, pp. 36–9. GARF, 9507/2/420/9. ‘Decree of the USSR Council of Ministers, 2 August 1954, Ob organizatsii proizvodstvenno-tekhnicheskoi podgotovki molodezhi, okonchivshei srednie shkoly, dlia raboty na proizvodstve’, Direktivy KPSS i sovetskogo pravitel’stva po khozyaistvennym voprosam, vol. iv, Moscow, 1958, pp. 247–50. ‘Edict of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 18 March 1955, Ob otmene prizyva (mobilizatsii) molodezhi v remeslennye i zheleznodorozhnye uchilishcha’, Direktivy KPSS i sovetskogo pravitel’stva po khoziaistvennym voprosam, vol. iv, Moscow, 1958, p. 371. Rabochii klass SSSR (1951–1965 g.g.), Moscow, 1969, pp. 112–14.

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17 S.L. Seniavskii, Rost rabochego klassa SSSR (1951–1965 g.g.), Moscow, 1966, pp. 105–6. 18 Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism, pp. 131–2. 19 Promyshlenno-ekonomicheskaia gazeta, 7 April 1957. 20 Seniavskii, Rost rabochego klassa, pp. 107–8. 21 GARF, 9507/2/835/4; d. 842, l. 3, 25, 195; d. 855, l. 2–3; d. 863, l. 1–2. 22 Rabochii klass SSSR, pp. 104–5. 23 Sotsialisticheskii trud, 1960, no. 4, 75–6. In 1959–60, some 57 per cent of all workers resettling from the RSFSR into Siberia and the Far East – regions targeted for new industrial development – went there via orgnabor. Sotsialisticheskii trud, no. 6, 1961, 22. 24 Sotsialisticheskii trud, no. 4, 1960, 74–8. The rise in disputes was partly caused by inconsistencies in the labour law. The post-Stalin labour code stipulated that workers had a right to be employed on jobs commensurate with their trade and skill grade. The basic orgnabor contract, however, obliged the worker to carry out whatever job management gave them, whether or not it matched their training and skill levels. Ibid., p. 75. 25 Trud i zarabotnaia plata, no. 6, 1959, p. 30. 26 Izvestiia, 19 May 1956. 27 Rabochii klass SSSR, pp. 108–9, 112. By 1958 almost all of these recruits went to construction. Of the 590,000 mobilized in 1958, 300,000 went to building sites in Siberia, and another 250,000 to projects in their own oblast’. The bulk of the remainder – 40,000 – became underground workers in coal mining. 28 Stroitel’naia gazeta, 17 March 1957; Rabochii klass SSSR, pp. 111–12. 29 Rabochii klass Sibiri, 1961–1980 g.g., Novosibirsk, 1986, pp. 90, 99. Voprosy ekonomiki, no. 5, 1962, p. 50. 30 RGASPI,17/131/279/24; GARF, 8131/28/1152/11; RGAE, 8592/2/899/84-7, and d. 915, l. 74. 31 The figures for 1939 are from Problemy ekonomiki, no. 6, 1939, p. 158, and A.V. Mitrofanova, ‘Istochniki popolneniia i sostav rabochego klassa SSSR v gody tretei piatiletki’, in Izmeneniia v chislennosti i sostave sovetskogo rabochego klassa, Moscow, 1961, p. 216. Figures for the 1950s and 1960s are from Voprosy ekonomiki, no. 10, 1963, 47–8, and Trud v SSSR, Moscow, 1988, p. 258. 32 R.A. Batkaev and V.I. Markov, Differentsiatsiia zarabotnoi platy v promyshlennosti v SSSR, Moscow, 1964, p. 198. For a more detailed account of the wages system prior to Khrushchev see Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization, ch. 8. 33 The reform ran into two main difficulties. Emphasis on plan fulfilment and quality indicators still left workers’ earnings vulnerable to a plethora of disruptions to production which were outside of workers’ direct control. For those still on piece rates, there was considerable resistance to regrading. In both cases managers still found themselves under pressure to intervene and prevent earnings from dropping, and so manipulated the new criteria just as they had manipulated the old norm-setting and bonus systems. See Filtzer, Soviet Workers and de-Stalinization, ch. 4. 34 In 1965 Soviet engineering employed 7.5 million manual workers, 1.5 million of whom were in Ukraine. Of this total there were 1.25 million machine-tool operators. Trud v SSSR. Statisticheskii sbornik, Moscow, 1968, pp. 84–5, 121, 206–7. We do not know how many of the reported 600,000 vacancies were for machinists, but we do know they made up a disproportionate share. E.A. Utkin, Rabotu mashin – na polnuiu moshchnost’, Moscow, 1964, pp. 29–30. 35 See, for example, Leningradskaia pravda, 21 April, 14 May and 20 May 1961; Ibid., 17 May, 3 July and 31 July 1962; 27 July, 24 August and 13 November

From mobilized to free labour 169 1963. L.S. Bliakhman, A.G. Zdravomyslov, O.I. Shkaratan, Dvizhenie rabochei sily na promyshlennykh predpriiatiiakh, Moscow, 1965, pp. 71–4. Moskovskaia pravda, 29 January 1963; Ural’skii rabochii (Sverdlovsk), 16 November 1962; Rabochii krai (Ivanovo), 19 September 1964. 36 For a particularly graphic example of this see the case of the Kotliakov factory in Leningradskaia pravda, 11 October 1962. 37 I have developed this argument in some detail in Filtzer, Soviet Workers and de-Stalinization, ch. 7. 38 For an analysis of the role of limitchiki in the motor vehicle industry see Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, no. 3, 1987, p. 80. For an especially heart-rending account of migrant workers in textiles see Komsomol’skaia pravda, 1 May 1991.

Part III

Rewriting Stalinism In search of a new style

9

Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography, 1953–64 Roger D. Markwick

We placed our hopes on Khrushchev, although we saw that he by no means had a consistent outlook. On the one hand he tried to overcome some things from the past; on the other, we saw that he was shaped by that very same past. On the one hand, he said that Stalin was a ‘criminal’, on the other, usually more vociferously, that he was a ‘great Marxist’. Khrushchev, however, had no idea how to reconcile ‘Stalin the criminal’ with ‘Stalin the great Marxist’.1

Nothing illustrates more vividly the ambivalent nature of Nikita Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization than the fate of Soviet historiography in his time. Stalin’s death, and especially Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in his Secret Speech at the 20th Party Congress (1956), had emboldened professional historians to critique historical writing. They did so within the bounds of official Marxism–Leninism, but even this was too threatening for Khrushchev and his circle. Fearful of unleashing the floodgates of historical revisionism, initial attempts to revisit and reinvigorate Soviet history were soon quashed by the party leadership. But the 20th Party Congress had spurred a rethinking of historiography that had a momentum of its own, which was to be given renewed, if short-lived, impetus by the 22nd Party Congress. It would take the removal of Khrushchev himself in October 1964 by the neo-Stalinists around Leonid Brezhnev to deliver a decisive blow to historical revisionism. This chapter will examine historiographical developments, chiefly among professional historians, and their interaction with the political processes of the Khrushchev period.

The Thaw Ever since Stalin’s menacing admonition in 1931 to the editorial board of Proletarskaia revoliutsiia that historical scholarship should be nothing less than ‘party scholarship’,2 party control over historiography, especially the history of the party itself, had been at the core of Stalin’s ideological system and the ‘cult of personality’ that surrounded him. Partiinost’ (party spirit) meant that the leadership of the communist party should be the sole

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arbiter of historical truth. Stalin’s subsequent ruthless imposition in 1938 of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course,3 established the paradigm for Soviet historical writing. Accordingly, Soviet ‘historical science’ had been reduced to little more than a ‘handmaiden’ to party policy.4 For historians schooled in the draconian Soviet academic system, casting off the fetters of the Short Course paradigm was not simply a matter of substituting historical truth for Stalinist falsehoods. According to the revisionist historian Mikhail Gefter, it entailed a shift in ‘social consciousness’, in the first place on the part of the intelligentsia, a ‘powerful imperative’ for which was the ‘victory of the Soviet people in the Great Patriotic War’, further fuelled by Stalin’s death, the execution of Beria, the cessation of mass repression and a certain liberalization, which nourished the first ‘shoots of de-politicization and de-ideologization’ of thought.5 But the Thaw in historical thinking was not initiated by the professional historians, among the most cowed of the Soviet intelligentsia. Rather, in the Russian tradition, writers and publicists registered the first shifts in social consciousness, facilitated by Aleksandr Tvardovskii’s ‘thick journal’ Novyi mir, which in December 1953 boldly called for ‘Sincerity in Literature’.6 Literature became the vehicle for the appearance of a genuine ‘public opinion’ in Soviet life7 and the catalyst for the creative and scientific intelligentsia as a whole, including historians, to confront the issue of ‘reflecting reality’ through ‘creative freedom’.8 Not for the last time under Khrushchev, writers took the lead in addressing issues that professional historians were loath to tackle.

Sanctioned freedom The historians moved cautiously, awaiting their cue from party resolutions and editorials in the Soviet Union’s leading historical journal, Voprosy istorii [Problems of History]. Ironically the seeds for the de-Stalinization of history had already been sown by the party leadership itself immediately after Stalin’s death. On the 50th anniversary of the communist party’s founding (1903–53), the need to rectify the ‘cult of personality’ and to institute collective leadership were at the top of the party’s agenda. They remained so right up until the 20th Party Congress, although as yet no connection had been made between the ‘cult’ and Stalin. One of the first steps taken by the party to reinvigorate historiography was the appointment in May 1953, on the recommendation of the director of the Institute of History, Arkady Sidorov, of a new editor-in-chief and deputy editor to Voprosy istorii: Anna Pankratova and Eduard Burdzhalov. All three had hitherto been in the main loyal to the Stalin regime, especially Sidorov, who had played a leading role in the viciously antiSemitic ‘anti-cosmopolitan’ campaign (1948–52). Here we encounter a paradox about the initial moving forces for the rejuvenation of historical

Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 175 writing: just as the vanguard of de-Stalinization was made up of politicians who had been close allies of Stalin himself, so too some historians who had played an orthodox and even extremely reactionary role under Stalin laid the ground work for the reinvigoration of historiography in the post-Stalin era. It was a measure of the importance that the new Soviet leadership attached to historical science that they appointed Central Committee member and soon to be academician, Pankratova, to head up this process.9 The benefits for historiography were quickly forthcoming. In the new editors’ first editorial, published in issue No. 6 of the journal in 1953, they declared their primary task to be struggling against the ‘cult of the personality’ and demonstrating that the ‘masses [were] the driving force of historical development’.10 In the three years before the 20th Congress many indicators of the gathering storm in historical science were reflected on the pages of Voprosy istorii, as historians struggled to throw off Stalin’s malevolent legacy and establish history as a discipline rather than as a mere agency for agitation and propaganda. Vigorous discussions were initiated, for instance, on the basic economic laws of feudalism, on the colonial policies of the Tsarist empire and on the periodization of the history of Soviet society, which some historians argued did not need to conform to that advanced in the Short Course. Of course, such discussions were strictly confined within doctrinal orthodoxy: ‘Everything in contradiction with Marxism needs to be stigmatized and thrown out’, declared one contributor in May 1955.11 And historians were still subservient to their political overlords. It is a telling statement of the degree of political and organizational subordination of Soviet historiography that in 1954 even the leading historian Militsa Nechkina could beseech the Academic Secretary to the Division of History within the Soviet Academy of Sciences as to whether there was any possibility of ‘the development on the common basis of Marxism of varied schools and directions within science’.12 Clearly, the discussions initiated by Voprosy istorii were still subject to ‘sanctioned freedom’.13 The party leadership retained the final word on what constituted historical truth, the arbitrariness of which was extremely intimidating for any historian. The party also retained the instruments to enforce it, particularly the Argus-eyed Department of Science and Culture of the Central Committee, which kept the social sciences under surveillance. While in 1954 the Department of Science and Culture showed no concern about the direction in which Pankratova and Burdzhalov were taking their journal,14 in spring-summer 1955 it condemned Voprosy istorii for lacking ‘ideological-political consistency’ and ‘serious methodological mistakes’.15 Yet, thanks to the adroit manoeuvring of Pankratova, including appeals to the party leadership, the editors were able to keep the Department of Science and Culture at bay.16 The advent of the 20th Party Congress provided an unprecedented opportunity for Voprosy istorii to become a tribune of anti-Stalinist historical revisionism.

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The 20th Party Congress Khrushchev’s ringing denunciation of Stalin in his Secret Speech sent shock waves through Soviet society and the international communist movement. The dethronement of Stalin could hardly leave Soviet historiography untouched. Even before the main shock there were several tremors among politicians and historians alike. At the congress itself Anastas Mikoian bemoaned the theoretical poverty of Soviet social science as a whole, singling out party and Soviet history as its ‘most backward’ branch.17 Likewise, Academician Pankratova attributed the oversimplification, embellishment and modernization of the past by historians to the ‘cult of the personality’, without mentioning Stalin by name. Rejecting the view that scholarship developed by ‘edicts and votes’, she extolled the virtues of unfettered discussion for the development of historical writing,18 a stance that would soon be her undoing. Whereas nobody dared link Stalin to the ‘cult of the personality’ at the congress itself, Khrushchev’s Secret Speech put Stalin firmly at its centre. But Khrushchev deliberately divorced the personality cult from the role of the party, its leadership, or any broader social forces. His analysis was tantamount to a ‘Great Man’ theory of history, couched of course in Marxist–Leninist verbiage.19 Almost immediately, however, the party leadership sought to put a cap on the de-Stalinization process, reflecting the resilience of Stalinism, personified by Viacheslav Molotov, Lazar’ Kaganovich and Georgii Malenkov, behind the facade of ‘collective leadership’. The 5 March 1956 resolution endorsing Khrushchev’s report did not mention Stalin by name.20 The ‘heated discussions’ about the Stalin period which subsequently took place both publicly and privately, nurtured by the millions who had returned from the camps and the posthumous rehabilitation of thousands of victims of the terror,21 were denounced in the party press as pretexts for ‘scandalous calumnies’ against the overall course pursued by the party.22 Particularly unnerved by disturbances in Poland, the leadership’s retreat from the agenda of the 20th Party Congress was codified in the June 1956 Central Committee resolution ‘On Overcoming the Cult of the Personality and its Consequences’. The resolution baulked at outright condemnation of Stalin and acknowledged his contribution to the party, the nation and the international revolutionary movement. Straddling determinism and contingency, the resolution pointed to both ‘objective, specific historical conditions’ and ‘certain subjective factors, connected with Stalin’s personal qualities’ to explain the Stalin phenomenon. The stress, however, was on Stalin’s ‘mistakes’, and the resolution pointedly repudiated any systemic explanation for Stalinism.23 This ambivalent attitude of the CPSU leadership toward the Stalin phenomenon, fuelled by the Polish and Hungarian upheavals of 1956, which particularly alarmed Khrushchev, was a crucial element in the political

Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 177 environment of the revisionist historians from the mid-1950s to the mid1960s. Such was the centrality of the Stalin myth to the legitimacy of the Soviet system. Soviet historical revisionism expressed this constant tension between what was historiographically possible and what was politically permissible in the Khrushchev decade. This was evident from the fate of Voprosy istorii.

The Burdzhalov affair Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ condemnation of Stalin was subsequently circulated and discussed at thousands of party meetings across the country. But such ‘public’ discussion was anticipated by Voprosy istorii a month before the 20th Congress when it convened in Moscow the first of several ‘readers’ conferences’. Voprosy istorii thereby became the vehicle for re-establishing the historical community by organizing large-scale discussions of historians. It was these ‘readers’ conferences’, coupled with the publication in the journal of some impermissible ‘Trotskyite’ views, that triggered the notorious ‘Burdzhalov affair’ of 1956–57. At the January 1956 conference, 600 historians participated in three days of intense discussion. Pankratova expressed the hope that Voprosy istorii would become an ‘international tribune of Marxist history’. She lamented, however, the shortcomings of many of the articles it published for their ‘dogmatism, rote-learning, vulgarization, political fashionableness and black-and-white representation of the past’.24 Burdzhalov was even more forthright in his criticisms. Among other things, he called for the reevaluation of feudalism in Eastern Europe and Russia, of the nature of Russian imperialism, of both Plekhanov and Lenin as historians, of Soviet industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture and the early years of the Great Patriotic War. He also condemned party historians, many of whom had yet to go beyond the pronouncements of the Short Course. Burdzhalov thus put on the agenda many of the issues that were to rack historical science over the next decade. Once again, the Central Committee’s (renamed) Department of Science and Higher Educational Establishments took a hostile view of Burdzhalov’s presentation and of the conference as a whole. In a confidential report, Burdzhalov was taken to task for encroaching in a ‘free and easy’ manner on a number of ‘established views’ concerning Soviet and party history, for example, the Mensheviks in 1905 and anti-tsarist national movements. At times, the report alleged, Burdzhalov’s interpretations amounted to falsehood.25 What really aroused the ire of the Department of Science was that Voprosy istorii had taken upon itself the task of organizing discussions that went beyond the bounds of the role of the journal as the department saw it. The editors allegedly had arrogated the right to interpret the party’s wishes in regard to historical writing and even presented the journal as if it, rather than the party, had resurrected Lenin’s

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role in Soviet history.26 In short, Burdzhalov and Pankratova had transgressed the doctrinal and organizational boundaries of historical science. Further, almost immediately after the 20th Congress a Voprosy istorii editorial,27 personally written by Burdzhalov, confronted the causes of the degradation of party history and proclaimed the journal’s determination to revitalize historical science as a whole. The ensuing ‘cult of the personality of I.V. Stalin led to the immediate distortion of historical truth’; but it was the ‘task of historians’, Voprosy istorii editorialized, ‘to explain historical facts, not to hush them up’.28 Hard on the heels of his audacious editorial came Burdzhalov’s provocative article on the tactics of the Bolsheviks in March–April 1917.29 Burdzhalov took issue with the misrepresentation in party historiography of Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev as treacherous opportunists in relation to the provisional government while falsely extolling Stalin as the consistent advocate of Lenin’s approach.30 Such criticism of Stalin went far beyond the ‘Secret Speech’. Above all, Burdzhalov’s exposure of Stalin’s role in March–April 1917 was perilously close to Trotskyism. It was precisely Stalin’s cover-up of his conciliatory approach to the provisional government that lay at the heart of Trotsky’s denunciation of the ‘Stalin school of falsification’.31 At two further readers’ conferences in June 1956 in Leningrad and Kiev, Burdzhalov repudiated the Short Course as a ‘handbook’ for historians. The work as a whole, he declared, was effectively a denial of Marxism and discredited as a basis for scholarship.32 In the year following the 20th Party Congress, Voprosy istorii was engaged in a constant ‘dialogue’ with its readership that fostered the reemergence of a community of historians.33 In these discussions, in their editorials and in the correspondence with the party leadership, Burdzhalov and Pankratova emphasized that they were acting on the spirit of the 20th Party Congress, the ‘decisive turning point in every facet of our life – political, economic, international and scientific-ideological’.34 Unfortunately, the fact that Burdzhalov and Pankratova sincerely believed that their campaign to regenerate historical science was fully in accord with the spirit of the congress ultimately was no defence against Stalin’s still well entrenched protégés. The middle level apparatchiks of the Department of Science and the newly established Department of Culture were intent on bringing the editors to heel. However, in the first months after the 20th Party Congress, Pankratova was able to ward them off with the support of Central Committee Secretary Dmitrii Shepilov and of Khrushchev himself, who emerged as a crucial ‘arbiter’ in the dispute.35 Nevertheless the apparatchiks conspired against the journal. Following the adoption in June 1956 of the Central Committee resolution ‘On overcoming the cult of the personality’ they unleashed a vitriolic campaign in the party press, which grew especially shrill in the wake of the Hungarian and Polish events of October 1956.36 Driven by the vindictiveness of a party apparatus that would not brook any challenge to its authority, on the floor of the readers’

Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 179 conferences and within academic and party institutions, the campaign against Voprosy istorii and its revisionist editors gathered pace, culminating in Burdzhalov’s dismissal from the editorial board in March 1957 and Pankratova’s premature death two months later, 25 May 1957.37 Burdzhalov and Pankratova, it seems, were casualties of the so-called ‘anti-party’ group’s counter-offensive against the de-Stalinization campaign unleashed by the 20th Party Congress. They lost not only the crucial support of Shepilov, who supported the ‘anti-party’ group, but also of Khrushchev.38 All their appeals to the highest echelons of the party, including Khrushchev himself, to defend Voprosy istorii and to repudiate the calumniations against them fell on deaf ears.39 In the 9 March 1957 Central Committee resolution, ‘Concerning the Journal Voprosy istorii’, Burdzhalov was singled out for his alleged departures from ‘Leninist principles of partiinost’ in history’.40 Their defeat was decisive. By 1958, Voprosy istorii had fallen completely under the tutelage of the Department of Science, although a campaign to root out ‘Burdzhalovism’ continued right until the end of the 1960s.41 It was not just Voprosy istorii that was brought into line by the March 1957 resolution. It was used to snuff out any ‘spark of dissent’.42 Partiinost’ was re-emphasized, reinforced by a strident ‘struggle against bourgeois ideology’.43 In this environment the majority of historians once again cleaved to Soviet historiographical orthodoxies. Marxism–Leninism was affirmed as the acme of social sciences, the laws of which provided the exclusive key to understanding past and present, while bankrupt ‘bourgeois’ historiography could offer nothing. In this scenario, ‘conjuncturalism’ reigned: once again historians were reduced to ‘illustrating’ the latest twist and turn of party policy.

Seeding revisionism Nevertheless, even these measures were insufficient to halt the advance of historical thought. The 20th Party Congress had been a watershed in Soviet political life, shaking the political convictions of many historians who hitherto had been resolute Stalinists. Some of the most illustrious revisionists of the 1960s, such as Gefter and Pavel Volobuev, both of whom were hostile towards Burdzhalov, were evidently profoundly shaken by the denunciation of Stalin and the anti-Stalinist shift in social consciousness amongst the intellectual ‘children of the 20th Congress’. Volobuev, who as a bureaucratic overseer within the Department of Science until October 1955 had relentlessly pursued Pankratova and Burdzhalov for their alleged ‘Trotskyism’,44 by 1957 was well on the way to abandoning what he later described as his ‘dogmatic pro-Stalinist views’.45 Volobuev’s experiences exemplify the sharp rupture in the political outlook of the shestidesiatniki (‘people of the sixties’) which subsequently drove historical revisionism, despite party attempts to contain it.

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Ironically, despite the setback that historiography suffered in the wake of the ‘Burdzhalov affair’, the party’s own initiatives – notably the postStalin Thaw in intellectual life under Khrushchev, coupled with increased investment in historical research and writing – wittingly or unwittingly, fostered historical revisionism. Liberalization at home was reinforced by contact with the international community of historians. Already, in September 1955 Pankratova, due to the support of Khrushchev, led a delegation of Soviet historians to Rome to participate in the International Congress of Historians, the first delegation since 1933.46 Exposure to the West was undoubtedly a leavening experience for Soviet historians,47 but the most important influences and initiatives were domestic, especially after the 20th Party Congress: an expansion in the number of historical journals, the growth of research themes, vastly increased publication of documents and access to archives, the establishment of new research institutes and of specialist historical subdivisions within the Academy of Sciences. In addition, a proliferation of All-Union interdisciplinary Scientific Councils and conferences encouraged scholarly collaboration. These initiatives enabled revisionism quietly to survive and even develop, despite the renewed ideological pressures. The editor of the newly established (1957) historical journal Istoriia SSSR (History of the USSR), Maksim Kim, masking his revisionist sympathies with official nomenclature but without once mentioning partiinost’, promoted ‘specifichistorical’ research as the antidote to ‘dogmatism’.48 Likewise, Academician Nechkina’s ambitious initiatives for the systematic study of historiography, particularly the Scientific Council on ‘The history of historical science’, which she established in 1958 and led from 1961, promoted the study of historical methodology and theory in Russian historiography and the Marxist classics.49 In this regard, a crucial intellectual spur to historical revisionism was the publication of the complete, fifth edition of the Collected Works of Lenin between 1958 and 1965 (purged of some of his more violent utterances).50 Leninism was a two-edged sword within post-Stalin historical discourse. Citing from Lenin, where once one cited from Stalin, could be used to stifle discussion or merely to demonstrate orthodoxy. For other historians, however, Lenin’s thinking provided the cutting-edge of revisionism. However, deference to Lenin’s thought as inviolable axioms demonstrated both the limits of Soviet revisionism and its subversive potential within the rigid intellectual environment of official Marxism–Leninism.

The Great Patriotic War The limits and ambiguities of historical revisionism in the wake of the 20th Party Congress are well illustrated by the historiography of the Second World War. Under Stalin, the Soviet victory over Nazism became synony-

Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 181 mous with Stalin’s ‘genius’ and a crucial component of the Stalin cult during post-war reconstruction. In the decade following the war, Soviet historians retailed the triumphant version of events sanctioned by Stalin. Official clichés about the Soviet Union’s ‘peace-loving’ foreign policy, especially Stalin’s August 1939 non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, and his allegedly ‘wise’ pursuit of ‘active defence’ in 1941–42, were uncritically recapitulated by Soviet historians. Dependent as they were on published sources and denied access to archives or diplomatic documents, historians were ignorant about the pact’s secret protocols, inter alia, incorporating the Baltics into the Soviet Union, and they were necessarily silent about Stalin’s responsibility for the catastrophic defeats of 1941–42.51 Khrushchev’s Secret Speech changed much of this. He audaciously blamed Stalin’s ‘incompetent’ leadership for the initial defeats, in particular his failure to heed dire warnings of the impending attack, and his ‘nervousness and hysteria’ for subsequent disasters. He mocked Stalin’s so-called ‘active defence’ and blamed his paranoia for the ‘mass repression’ which decapitated the military in 1937–41. Khrushchev opened the door for revisionism by calling on historians to research the war, as much for its ‘political, educative and practical significance’ as its ‘historical significance’.52 Over the next decade historians took up Khrushchev’s call. In addition to the new Military-Historical Journal, several major centres dedicated to military history were established under a variety of authorities, including the Institute of Marxism–Leninism, the General Staff and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The result was the publication of a vast amount of material about the war, including a six-volume history and new documentary sources. Under the imprint of the Academy Sciences’ press ‘Nauka’, headed by the liberal academician Aleksandr Samsonov, a stream of books and military memoirs was published.53 Despite this plethora of publications, its overall impact on the historiography of the war was limited. The historiography of the war remained constrained not only by a dearth of serious research but even more so by the shallow ‘cult of the personality’ analytical framework expounded in party resolutions. Whereas prior to the 20th Party Congress historians attributed Soviet military successes to Stalin’s ‘genius’, afterwards he was blamed for all the defeats and the communist party was proclaimed the true architect of victory. A partial exception to such simplistic analyses was Aleksandr Nekrich’s monograph June 22, 1941. Written in the Khrushchev period but not published until September 1965, it not only held Stalin directly responsible for the initial Soviet defeats but also ‘for the first time in Soviet literature’ argued that the non-aggression pact had advantaged Nazi Germany rather than the Soviet Union.54 But even his book, while it questioned fundamental aspects of party history, did not present a fundamental challenge to Soviet historical theory or methodology. Those challenges came in other fields.

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The New Direction The principal example of the contradictions of Soviet revisionism in the Khrushchev period is the emergence of the so-called ‘New Direction’ (novoe napravlenie) historians under the patronage of Arkady Sidorov, director of the Institute of History. Sidorov had vehemently opposed Burdzhalov and Pankratova, and supported researchers like Gefter and Volobuev, who likewise had pitted themselves against Voprosy istorii. Yet, ironically, Gefter and Volobuev would emerge as the leading lights of the New Direction revisionists. In 1954–57, the very years in which Pankratova and Burdzhalov were leading the charge for revisionism, from the ranks of their principal adversaries emerged the ‘school of Professor A.L. Sidorov’,55 which formed the ‘kernel of a new scientific direction’ that ultimately became the New Direction in 1965.56 The challenge to the prevailing Short Course paradigm that these scholars presented came not from rewriting party history, as it had with Burdzhalov, but more indirectly. Initially, it was through their reconsideration of the history of Russian imperialism. Subsequently, it was through their application of the concept of ‘multistructuredness’ (mnogoukladnost’) to pre-revolutionary Russian society, from what started out as an empirical inquiry into the economic preconditions of the October Revolution. For this undertaking, the crude deterministic conceptions of the Short Course were inadequate. These historians had to work their way through this question. The 20th Party Congress provided the space and stimulus to pursue this. It was an intense re-reading of Lenin that provided the way forward. But even then the path was far from straight. Up until Stalin’s death in 1953 it was an unassailable orthodoxy, formally incorporated into the Short Course, that Tsarist Russia was a semicolony of the Western imperialist powers. Though gradually challenged by researchers, it was not until after the 20th Party Congress that a frontal assault was made on the concept by Sidorov’s students who were intent on demonstrating, on the basis of Lenin’s theory of imperialism and detailed research, that Tsarist Russia, despite its backwardness, possessed the necessary development of monopoly capital for the victory of the October Revolution. But at this stage there was a contradiction; in repudiating Stalin’s ‘semi-colony’ thesis, these historians embraced the anti-Trotskyist position that Russia was a full-fledged imperialist state, ripe for the construction of ‘socialism in one country’.57 But as their research into the development of capitalism in the cities and the countryside developed through the 1950s, it became increasingly apparent that Tsarist Russia was not a full-fledged capitalist state. On the contrary, it was characterized by a complex combination of islands of advanced financial-industrial capital in the cities swamped by a sea of semi-feudal relations in a backward countryside. In short, Russia was a ‘multistructured’ society, as it came to be formulated by the mid-1960s, towards the end of the Khrushchev period.

Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 183 However, it was not until the Brezhnev period that the New Direction’s advocacy of ‘multistructuralism’ became politically contentious. ‘Multistructuralism’ was a concept that called in question whether the October 1917 Revolution was the inexorable product of law-driven economic development, as Short Course conceptions would have it. ‘Multistructuralism’ therefore struck at the heart of the historical legitimacy of the socialist origins and nature of the Soviet state and all that flowed from it, including the forced collectivization of agriculture. It was also open to the subversive charge of Trotskyism, echoing as it did (though purely coincidentally) Trotsky’s notion of ‘combined and uneven development’.58 With the ousting of Khrushchev and the ensuing neo-Stalinist counter-offensive, such notions would sound the death knell of the New Direction. The intellectual evolution of the New Direction revisionists illustrates the struggle for Soviet historians in sloughing off the dogmatic historical conceptions instilled by Stalin, and only partially challenged in the wake of the 20th Party Congress. The neo-Stalinist editorial board of Voprosy istorii ensconced after Burdzhalov and Pankratova had terminated debate around the dependent status of Tsarist Russia.59 But the emergence of the New Direction also indicates the shift in historical thinking engendered by Khrushchev’s Stalin revelations and the tenacity of certain attributes of Russian historiography that had survived the Stalin era, in this case through Sidorov who instilled in his students the necessity for archival research and a ‘love of methodological questions’.60

Collectivization Despite Sidorov’s Stalinist credentials, as director of the Institute of History he was also father to another revisionist trend, even more politically fraught than ‘multistructuralism’: the historiography of the collectivization of agriculture, which was pivotal to the Stalin myth. Stalin’s triumphalist Short Course history asserted that with ‘full-scale collectivization’ and the ‘elimination of the kulaks as a class’ in 1929–34, the basic problems of Soviet agriculture had been solved and the basis laid for socialist relations in the countryside and the Soviet Union as a whole.61 The seeds for a radical rewriting of the history of collectivization were sown soon after Stalin’s death by a protégé of Sidorov, Viktor Danilov, who was to emerge as a leader of historical revisionism. Taking advantage of the post-Stalin Thaw, Danilov’s research repudiated Stalinist wisdom that in 1929 the Soviet Union possessed the necessary material and technical prerequisites for the complete collectivization of agriculture.62 With the encouragement of Sidorov, Danilov published his research in 1956–57. It provoked a stream of protests to the Central Committee, forcing Danilov to rebut charges that his work was ‘anti-party’. Nevertheless, in 1958 Danilov provided further ammunition against premature, forced, collectivization by resurrecting the significance of the village commune

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(obshchina) in the late 1920s, which had disappeared from the lexicon of Soviet historiography.63 In 1958 Sidorov appointed Danilov head of a research Group on the History of the Soviet Peasantry. The establishment of the research group was part of Sidorov’s personal campaign against the Stalinist generation of historians and against the influx of Stalinist bureaucrats then being purged from the Central Committee apparatus who were being appointed researchers in the Institute.64 But there was also a larger political imperative, in keeping with the requirement in Soviet political culture that historical science dovetail with contemporary political needs. Addressing the parlous state of Soviet agriculture bequeathed by Stalin was one of Khrushchev’s major priorities. The history of Soviet agriculture was therefore a research priority. The first fruits of the collective researches of Danilov’s group were evident at a major conference which it helped organize on the Soviet peasantry and collectivization held in Moscow in April 1961. Already, he was repudiating clichéd Stalinist conceptions about capitalism prevailing in the countryside, which had justified full-scale forced collectivization. Instead, he argued for a ‘complex combination’ of social relations, a notion akin to the New Direction’s ‘multistructuralism’,65 which implied there should have been incremental collectivization through agricultural cooperatives. At the same conference other members of Danilov’s group boldly criticized the orthodox history of Sergei Trapeznikov, Brezhnev’s future head of the Department of Science and scourge of historical revisionism. Apart from their distinctive analysis, what distinguished Danilov’s revisionists from Stalinist antagonists such as Trapeznikov was that they actually undertook research, including in archives, rather than simply elaborating party resolutions. This was most evident in the massive 798-page manuscript they produced for publication in 1964: The Collectivization of Agriculture in the USSR 1927–1932.66 Overall, Danilov’s unpublished monograph condemned Stalin’s forced collectivization, based on Danilov’s view that the poor and middle peasantry, among whom traditional family ownership prevailed, were not ready for full-scale collectivization. In blaming Stalin and his circle for the excesses and failings of collectivization, the revisionists’ critique was in the true spirit of Khrushchev reformism and consistent with Khrushchev’s condemnation of the ‘cult of the personality’. However, with the dismissal of Khrushchev as CPSU First Secretary on 14 October 1964, the way was open for the neoStalinists to turn back the tide of historical revisionism. The very first to feel the chill of the Brezhnevite reaction against Khrushchev’s erratic reformism was Viktor Danilov. Accused of ‘grieving’ for Khrushchev, within 24 hours of Khrushchev’s dismissal, Danilov was ordered to withdraw the proofs of his history of collectivization. The manuscript was never to see the light of day.

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Professionalism and methodology Ironically, the professionalism that attended the work of revisionists such as the New Direction and Danilov’s group was facilitated by the communist party’s renewed commitment to historical science in the wake of the Burdzhalov affair. From 1960 onwards the party gave top priority to professionalizing history, if only to perfect it as an instrument of party policy, and this course was embraced even by conservative historians who had been dismayed by the Burdzhalov affair. Over the next decade the resultant quantitative expansion of research and the encouragement of new fields, such as historiography, stimulated the simultaneous ‘co-existence of regressive and progressive tendencies’ in history. At the same time it fostered an unprecedented ‘dialogue’ between the historical guild and the party,67 which was rudely interrupted after the fall of Khrushchev. The 22nd Party Congress (1961), which renewed Khrushchev’s assault on Stalin, further spurred historical revisionism. Late 1961 saw the posthumous, partial rehabilitation of M.N. Pokrovsky. He was re-instated as a Bolshevik and accorded guarded recognition of his achievements as a historian.68 Further, the programmatic conviction that communism was on the horizon impelled the party to convene the 2,000-strong all-Union conference of historians in December 1962. Whilst the formal agenda of the conference was the training of historians, the real agenda was to ensure that historians served the immediate needs of the party.69 Official calls to bury the ‘cult of the personality’ in historical writing once and for all were coupled with cautions against those who would use this interment as a ‘pretext’ to undermine Marxism–Leninism.70 Nevertheless this did not prevent many of the historians present, including senior academicians, from publicly voicing their concerns in a way not seen since the Voprosy istorii readers’ conferences six years earlier. Unfortunately, the furious struggle then being waged within the party leadership around de-Stalinization prevented much of the potential of the all-Union conference from being realized, particularly in the field of party history.71 The need for Soviet historians to attend to methodological questions had also been a concern at the all-Union conference, a concern shared by the party Central Committee which in June 1963 called for greater emphasis on ideology to facilitate the alleged transition to communism and combat the pernicious influence of ‘bourgeois ideology’.72 As a result, a general meeting of the Academy of Sciences held that year emphasized the ‘importance and immediacy of methodological questions’ and its Presidium authorized discussions on methodology in all research institutions.73 These party and academic initiatives in the mid-1960s in relation to historical theory and methodology evidently answered the needs of a growing number of revisionist scholars, for whom they derived from the ‘logic of research’ itself. Herein lay the germs of conflict between the growing community of revisionist scholars and their academic and political

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overlords: the one anxious to shed the doctrinal baggage of Stalinism, the other increasingly intent on re-appropriating it. Conservative containment of historical revisionism did not depend entirely on the vigilance of the Central Committee’s Department of Science. The Central Committee had its allies among those historians who made their careers by defending every shift of the party line on a given historical issue. Trapeznikov, Brezhnev’s future scholar-vigilante, made his reputation as an orthodox chronicler of Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture. Isaac Mints, the consummate adherent to partiinost’, survived and prospered by choosing a field that would demonstrate his loyalty – ‘unmasking’ imperialist instigation of the civil war (1918–20) – and actively contributing to Stalin’s Short Course history and its post-1956 congress successor, the History of the CPSU, seven editions of which were edited by the arch-Stalinist Boris Ponomarev.74 Within the Institute of History intellectual compliance was policed by concentrating power in the hands of its director, nominated by the Central Committee. The bureaucrat-scholar Vladimir Khvostov, director of the institute from 1959 to 1967, was the ‘most influential and powerful individual in the field of history’ in these years. Khvostov reinforced his tutelage not only by his control over the institute party committee but also by resorting to divide and rule, playing off party hacks and informers within the institute against dissenting scholars.75

History and sociology The year 1964 was crucial for historical revisionism. Historiographically, it opened propitiously with the beginnings of an intense engagement with methodological questions. Politically, it ended ominously with the dismissal of Khrushchev as CPSU First Secretary. A major initiative for systematic consideration of methodological questions was the conference of historians, philosophers and other scholars on ‘History and Sociology’ convened in January 1964.76 The conference discussed a myriad of unresolved methodological and philosophical problems in historical science, reflecting the broad range of institutional input.77 The conference was viewed by the revisionist Gefter as a ‘vital step towards overcoming serious inadequacies in the methodology of history’.78 The position paper for the conference was presented not by historians but by two conservative philosopher-academicians who attributed the poverty of Soviet historiography to the divorce between history and sociology. The key to the renovation of historical writing, they argued, was its methodological renewal, which would better equip historians to tackle the ‘problems of the present’. And the best guarantee of history’s methodological renewal was to forge an alliance between philosophers and historians,79 an injunction that once again reduced historians to merely illustrating the general sociological laws of historical materialism. Further, in the guise of the struggle to overcome the negative consequences of the

Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 187 ‘cult of the personality’, these philosopher-academicians enjoined historians to engage not so much with the past as with the contemporary struggle against ‘bourgeois ideology’. In the absence of a Soviet political science or sociology, the priority for historical science was to address current international developments, thereby impoverishing historical research and reinforcing the political subordination of historical science.80 Despite the constraints imposed by the report, the ensuing discussion revealed that the historians, while paying lip service to its injunctions, generally had much more to contribute than the philosophers. For Gefter, charting the future direction of historical science required ‘elaborating both the theory of the historical process and also its method of study’.81 But any attempt to divorce the methodology and/or philosophy of history from historical materialism was anathema to the guardians of orthodoxy such as Mints,82 who had deep reservations about the precipitous establishment of seminars and sectors dedicated exclusively to methodology. But it was a little too late. Gefter’s Sector of Methodology in the Institute of History was already up and running.

The Sector of Methodology The Sector of Methodology was, in every sense, the realization of the injunctions of the convenors of the History and Sociology conference that high priority be given to organizing seminars within and between institutes of the Academy of Sciences that would directly address questions of methodology in history.83 Thus from the outset the sector was not an ‘alternative’ formation of dissident historians but an officially endorsed subdivision within the Institute of History. However, the aims and methods of work of the sector were largely decided by the collective of researchers that organized and participated in it and they often went far beyond the bounds intended by their academic overseers. The sector did not limit itself to the elimination of the ‘negative consequences of the cult of the personality’ in historical science. Rather, it sought ways to throw off the dogmatism and scholasticism which had encrusted Soviet historiography and to overcome the divorce between the theoretical disciplines, especially that of social philosophy, and actual historical research. Surviving some four years after Khrushchev’s ousting (it was finally closed in 1969), the sector proved to be a particularly crucial site of contestation between the academic apparatchiks and the revisionist intelligentsia. During its brief, four-year existence was concentrated a clash of unequal forces over the future direction of social science and ideology in the USSR. At the first session of the sector, which convened in February 1964, its director and moving spirit Gefter outlined the basic objectives of its work. The axis of Gefter’s thesis was that ‘entire epochs must be reread anew’ since the ‘contemporary world needs to be explained historically’. Moreover, the very ‘meaning of the categories and concepts must change

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from the point of view of the progress of humanity as a whole’.84 In this respect Gefter noted the importance of the international context, particularly of the anti-colonial revolutions of the 1950s and 1960s, which gave additional impetus to historical thinking. Accordingly, the fundamental objective of the sector was deemed to be the overcoming of the gulf between specific historical research and the theoretical disciplines, in which prevailed an abstract method divorced from historical reality.85 These objectives were reflected in the proposed organization of the sector’s work. In particular, there was to be a conscious attempt to overcome the limits of ‘petty specialities’ which fragmented theory and specific research. Within the Institute of History the sector should not be, in Gefter’s words, ‘an isolated unit’ but ‘the active kernel of collaborative work for the entire institute’.86 In this regard the sector exceeded its own expectations. It became a pole of attraction not only for theoretically inclined, anti-Stalinist researchers from the Institute of History itself but also for scholars from other research institutions: historians with a variety of specialities, philosophers, economists, ethnographers, orientalists, Slavists and linguists. Scholars from a broad range of institutes participated in the work of the sector. The sector also acted as a conduit for some major discussions among neo-Marxists in Western and East Central Europe.87 The fact that the discussions of the sector spilled over into other disciplines, such as theoretical ethnography, is a measure of the degree to which the quest of the shestidesiatniki to reinvigorate historical science was the catalyst for revisionism in a range of allied disciplines.88 However, in all these labyrinthine discussions by the professional historians about the pernicious consequences of Stalin’s rule for historiography there was a glaring omission. In the 1960s no professional historian addressed the actual experience of the Stalin dictatorship or the nature of Stalinism (a term that did not enter the Soviet lexicon until perestroika). While there were numerous references to the ‘cult of the personality’ and Stalin’s ‘crimes’, no Soviet historian directly engaged with the nature of the Stalin phenomenon and its implications for Soviet socialism. Many of the horrendous facts and figures relating to ‘mass repression’, ‘terror’ and ‘violations of Soviet legality’ under Stalin had become public knowledge courtesy of the party since its 20th and particularly its 22nd congresses. But it fell to writers, nurtured by Tvardovskii’s Novyi mir, rather than historians to reflect openly on the Stalin experience, as both the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the poet Evgenii Evtushenko did respectively in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and ‘The Heirs of Stalin’, both published in 1962.89 Only one non-professional historian, the educationist and future dissident Roy Medvedev, dared to depict and interrogate the nightmare under Stalin in his Let History Judge, drafted in 1962–64, the last years under Khrushchev, which perforce had to be published abroad.90 Medvedev’s tome reflected and drew considerably on the work of revisionist historians, including participants in the Sector of Methodology.91 But it

Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 189 is indicative of the internalized and coercive constraints on the professional historians even in the Khrushchev era that they chose to focus on the pernicious ‘consequences of the cult of the personality’ for historical scholarship, as Ponomarev once again urged them to do at the 1962 AllUnion Conference of Historians,92 rather than the history of Stalinism itself.

Conclusion The ousting of Khrushchev was the beginning of the end for Soviet historical revisionism. Despite rear-guard resistance, including an attempt by the revisionists to democratize the Institute of History through its party committee (1965–66), they were defeated and dispersed. After a prolonged, vituperative assault on his book, Nekrich was expelled from the party in 1967. In 1968 the Institute of History itself was divided into two, breaking it up as a collective. A year later Danilov was removed as head of historical research on the Soviet peasantry and Gefter’s Sector of Methodology was closed. March 1973, after prolonged persecution by Trapeznikov’s Department of Science, saw the dispersal of the last concerted attempt at revisionism spawned in the Khrushchev period: the New Direction. Khrushchev’s political reformism and Soviet historical revisionism had gone hand in hand. In a political system in which history was central to its legitimation, it could not be otherwise. In the words of one of the few women revisionist historians, Liudmila Danilova, Khrushchev’s attempted de-Stalinization was a ‘Second October Revolution’.93 Unfortunately, this was not quite the case. Khrushchev had looked to the Soviet intelligentsia for support for his reforms. But Khrushchev’s ‘awkward and erratic’ deStalinization and his carrot and stick approach to the intelligentsia had eroded much of their good will.94 Few were prepared to stand in his defence when he was ousted in October 1964. Soviet historical science had the most to lose from the demise of Khrushchev, for the logic of historical revisionism went far beyond Khrushchev’s inconsistent de-Stalinization. It would not be realized until the advent of perestroika.

Notes 1 Ia.S. Drabkin cited in R. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia. The Politics of Revisionist Historiography 1956–1974, Houndmills: Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001, p. 48. 2 J. Barber, ‘Stalin’s Letter to the Editors of Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya’, Soviet Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 1976, 21–41. 3 N. Maslov, ‘ “Kratkii kurs istorii VKP (b)” – entsiklopediia i ideologiia stalininizma i poststalinizma: 1838–1988 gg.’ in Iu. Afanas’ev (ed.), Sovetskaia istoriografi ia , Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1996, pp. 240–73. 4 ‘Perestroika i istoricheskoe znanie’, in Iu. Afanas’ev (ed.), Inogo ne dano – perestroika: glasnost’, demokratiia, sotsializm, Moscow: Progress, 1988, p. 498.

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5 L. Sidorova, Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke: Sovetskaia istoriografi ia pervogo poslestalinskogo desiatiletiia, Moscow: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli, 1997, pp. 13–14. 6 Sidorova, Ottepel’, p. 31; L.A. Sidorova, ‘Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke seredina 50-x – seredina 60-x gg.’, in G.D. Alekseeva (ed.), Istoricheskaia nauka Rossii v XX veke, Moscow: Skriptorii, 1997, pp. 245–6. 7 E. Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945–1957, trans. and ed. by Hugh Ragsdale, Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998, p. 193. 8 Sidorova, Ottepel’, p. 32. 9 Joachim Hösler, Die sowjetische Geschichtswissenschaft 1953 bis 1991 Studien zur Methodologie- und Organizationsgeschichte, Munchen: Otto Sagner, 1995, pp. 18–20 and n. 10. 10 E. Gorodetskii, ‘Zhurnal “Voprosy istorii” v seredine 50-x godov’, Voprosy istorii [VI], 9, 1989, 69–70. 11 Sidorova, ‘Ottepel’’, p. 248. 12 Ibid., p. 249. 13 Ibid., p. 251. 14 A. Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba vokrug zhurnala “Voprosy istorii” v 1954–1957 godakh’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, vol. 5, 2003, 149. 15 Sidorova, ‘Ottepel’’, p. 250. 16 Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, p. 151; c.f. Sidorova, ‘Ottepel’’, p. 251. 17 XX S’’ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza 14–25 fevralia 1956 goda. Stenografi cheskii otchet , Vol. 1, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1956, p. 325. 18 Ibid., pp. 621–2. 19 N.S. Khrushchev, The S ‘ ecret’ Speech delivered to the closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, introduction by Zh. Medvedev and R. Medvedev, Nottingham: Spokesman Books 1976. 20 V. Zhuravlev (ed.). XX s’’ezd KPSS i ego istoricheskie real’nosti, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, pp. 42, 46. 21 R. Medvedev, ‘The Stalin Question’, in S. Cohen, A. Rabinowitch and R. Sharlet (eds), The Soviet Union Since Stalin, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980, p. 39. 22 Zhuravlev (ed.), XX s’’ezd KPSS, p. 44. 23 ‘Postanovlenie Ts KPSS o preodelenii kul’ta lichnosti i ego posledstvii’, 30 iuniia 1956 g.’, in Khrestomatiia po istorii KPSS, vol. 2, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1989, pp. 413–30. 24 ‘Konferentsiia chitatelei zhurnala “Voprosy istorii” ’, VI, 1956, vol. 2, 200. 25 RGANI, 5/35/39/20-25. 26 Ibid., l.22. 27 ‘XX s’’ezd KPSS i zadachi issledovaniia istorii partii’, VI, 1956, vol. 3, 3–12. 28 Ibid., 4, 7. 29 E. Burdzhalov, ‘O taktike bol’shevikov v marte-aprele 1917 goda’, VI, 1956, vol. 4, 38–56; Burdzhalov replied to his critics in ‘Eshche o taktike bol’shevikov v marte-aprele 1917 goda’, VI, 1956, vol. 8, 109–14. 30 Burdzhalov, ‘O taktike’, pp. 38–9. 31 L. Trotsky, The Stalin School of Falsifi cation , London: New Park Publications, 1974, pp. 146–50. 32 ‘Doklad E.N. Burdzhalova o sostoianiii sovetskoi istoricheskoi naukii i rabote zhurnala “Voprosy istorii” (na vstreche c chitateliami 19–20 iuniia 1956 g. v Leningradskom otedelenii instituta istorii AN SSSR)’, VI, 1989, vol. 9, 85–6; 11, 116. 33 Gorodetskii, ‘Zhurnal’, p. 73.

Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 191 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

‘Doklad E.N. Burdzhalova’, pp. 82–4. Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, pp. 154–5; Sidorova, ‘Ottepel’’, p. 256. Gorodetskii, ‘Zhurnal’, p. 76. C.f. Zubkova, Russia After the War, pp. 195–6. Gorodetskii, ‘Zhurnal’, p. 80. Ibid., p. 73; Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, p. 156. RGANI, 5/35/39/161; Gorodetsky, ‘Zhurnal’, pp. 78–9. ‘Za leninskuiu partiinost’ v istoricheskoi nauke!’, VI, 1957, vol. 3, pp. 4–5, 8. Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, pp. 152, 157, suggests Pankratova was just as responsible, if not more so, than her deputy but ‘sacrificed’ him in a vain attempt to ward off defeat. Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, p. 158. Zhuravlev (ed.). XX s’’ezd KPSS, p. 252. Hösler, Die sowjetische Geschichtswissenschaft, pp. 54–5. Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, pp. 150, 153. ‘Interviu s akademikom P.V. Volobuevym’, in G.N. Sevost’ianov (ed.), Akademik P.V. Volobuev. Neopublikovanye raboty. Vospominania. Stat’i, Moscow: Nauka, 2000, p. 26. Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, p. 154. See R. English, Russia and the Idea of the West. Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, esp. Chs. 2–3. Hösler, Die sowjetische Geschichtswissenschaft, pp. 58–9. M. Vandalkovskaia, ‘Militsa Vasili’evna Nechkina’ in G.D. Alekseeva (ed.), Istoricheskaia nauka Rossii v XX veke, Moscow: Skriptorii, 1997, p. 411. Zhuravlev (ed.). XX s’’ezd KPSS, 242. C.f. Richard Pipes (ed.), The Unknown Lenin: from the secret archive, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. V. Kulish, ‘Sovietskaia istoriografiia velikoi otechestvennoi voiny’, in Afanas’ev (ed.), Sovetskaia istoriografi ia , pp. 274–81. Ibid., p. 284. Ibid., pp. 284–5. A. Nekrich, Forsake Fear: Memoirs of an Historian, trans. D. Lineburgh, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991, pp. 107, 111, 169, 172. K. Tarnovskii, ‘Put’ uchenogo’, Istoricheskie zapiski, vol. 80, 1967, 233–5. Alexander Gerschenkron, ‘Soviet Marxism and Absolutism’, Slavic Review, vol. 30, no. 4, 1971, 859. V. Polikarpov, ‘ “Novoe napravlenie” 50–70x-gg.: posledniaia diskussiia sovetskikh istorikov’, in Afanas’ev (ed.), Sovetskaia istoriografi ia , pp. 349–51. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia, p. 103. K. Tarnovsky, Sovetskaia istoriografi ia rossiiskogo imperializma , Moscow: Nauka, 1964, pp. 195–6. A. Sidorov, ‘Nekotorye razmyshleniia o trude i opyte istorika’, Istoriia SSSR, 1964, vol. 3, 124. Istoriia vsesoyuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (bol’shevikov): kratkii kurs, Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1952, 1st edn 1938, pp. 290–8. Danilov, ‘Material’no-tekhnicheskaia baza sel’skogo khoziaistva SSSR nakanune sploshnoi kollektivizatsii’, VI, 1956, vol. 3, 3–17. Danilov, ‘Zemel’nye otnosheniia v sovetskoi dokolkhoznoi derevne’, Istoriia SSSR, vol. 3, 1958, 90–128. V.P. Danilov, interview with the author, 7 April 1992. As he later made clear: Danilov, ‘Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskie uklady v sovetskoi dokolkhoznoi derevne: ikh sootnoshenie i vzaimodeistvie’, in Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika: Voprosy teorii i istorii, Moscow: Nauka, 1974, p. 62.

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66 V.P. Danilov (ed.), ‘Kollektivizatsiia i kolkhoznoe stroitel’stvo v SSSR: Kollektivizatsiia sel’skogo khoziaistva v SSSR 1927–32’, Moscow: Mysl’, 1964. Unpublished proofs. 67 Hösler, Die sowjetische Geschichtswissenschaft, pp. 296–7. 68 H. Asher, ‘The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of M.N. Pokrovsky’, The Russian Review, vol. 31, no. 1, 1972, 49–63. 69 H. Rogger, ‘Politics, Ideology and History in the USSR: The Search for Coexistence’, Soviet Studies, vol. 16, 1965, 259–62. 70 P. Pospelov, Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie o merakh podgotovki nauchnopedagogicheskih kadrov po istorichekskim naukam 18–21 dekabriia 1962 g., Moscow: Nauka, 1964, 200–1. 71 Nekrich, Forsake Fear, p. 112. 72 Zhuravlev (ed.). XX s’’ezd KPSS, pp. 285–7. 73 Istoria i sotsiologiia, Moscow: Nauka, 1964, p. 8. 74 Iu. Afanas’ev, ‘Fenomenon sovetskoi istorigrafii’, in Id. (ed.), Sovetskaia istoriografi ia , p. 26. 75 Nekrich, Forsake Fear, pp. 107, 111, 169, 172. 76 Istoriia i sotsiologiia, p. 3. 77 Ibid., 326–7. 78 ‘Sostoianie i perspektivy razrabotki metodologii istoricheskoi nauki’ (unsigned, undated manuscript, probably written by Gefter in 1969/70), p. 2. 79 Istoriia i sotsiologiia, pp. 9–11, 16, 23, 25–6, 28, 37. 80 Alekseeva, ‘Nekotorye voprosy’, pp. 288–90. 81 Ibid., 293–4; Istoriia i sotsiologiia, p. 144. 82 Ibid., pp. 73, 80–1, 144. 83 Ibid., pp. 336–9. 84 Arkhiv Instituta Rossiiskoi Istorii, 1/2188/267. 85 Gefter, ‘Plan’, ll. 267–8. 86 Ibid., l.268. 87 M. Sawer, Marxism and the Question of the Asiatic Mode of Production, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977, pp. 80, 191. 88 V. Kabo, The Road to Australia. Memoirs, trans. R. Ireland, K. Windle, Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press, 1998, p. 225. 89 W. Taubman, Khrushchev. The Man and His Era, New York: W.W. Norton, 2003, pp. 525–8. 90 R. Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, 2nd rev. edn, edited and trans. by George Shriver, New York: Columbia University Press, 1989, xiii. 91 Markwick, Rewriting History, pp. 242–3. 92 Nekrich, Forsake Fear, pp. 112–15. 93 Danilova, interview, 26 May 1992. 94 Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 381–3, 649.

10 The need for new voices Writers’ Union policy towards young writers 1953–64 Emily Lygo

In the 1940s, lyric poetry practically disappeared from print in the USSR, and was produced only for the author’s desk drawer or the readership of close and trusted associates. Zhdanov’s attack on Akhmatova in Leningrad in 1946 confirmed the intelligentsia’s concern that lyric poetry under Stalin had become a dirty word, and thus it remained until there was a change at the highest level of power in 1953. Very soon after Stalin’s death, Ol’ga Berggol’ts and other poets began to publish articles promoting lyric poetry, and lyric poems returned to the pages of the thick journals and newspapers, and to the stages of literary evenings.1 There followed an upsurge in lyric poetry in the USSR: the public began to show more interest in reading and listening to poetry, and a fashion developed, particularly among young people, for writing poetry.2 Both at that time and in hindsight, commentators have attempted to explain this ‘poetry phenomenon’ in terms which serve their own interpretations of Soviet literary culture and history: unsurprisingly, these interpretations can offer radically different explanations. At a meeting of the Leningrad Branch of the Writers’ Union in 1963, the poet Nikolai Braun attributed lyric poetry’s recent change in fortune to the atmosphere created by the 20th and 22nd Party congresses: How can we explain such an unprecedented interest among readers in poetry? I think that it is the result of the atmosphere of attention to and regard for literature and art which developed here after the XX and XXII Party Congresses.3 Whilst there is some truth in this, Braun does not explain why it was poetry, and not other creative pursuits, that revived at this point. Others have suggested that as soon as Stalinism ended and its embargo on lyric poetry was lifted, people in the USSR turned to this poetry for some kind of spiritual nourishment that had been denied them by the politicized, militarized, ideologically rigid and atheist culture of Stalinism. As Deming Brown has said of the young poets who appeared during the Thaw:

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He unquestioningly accepts the poetry ‘boom’ of the Thaw as a spontaneous reaction to the end of Stalinism, leaving it unclear why poetry and not some other genre, or a non-literary activity, fulfilled this requirement among the intelligentsia at this point. The present chapter will address the question of why lyric poetry came into fashion, particularly among young people, after 1953. In doing so, it will examine two key elements of Thaw culture which number among the period’s defining characteristics: youth and poetry.5 Evgenii Evtushenko, and other Moscow poets belonging to the ‘young literature’ (molodaia literatura) of the 1950s most obviously embodied these concepts. As the most famous and influential of all young poets of the Thaw, however, their cases are exceptional rather than typical for the period, and for this reason, this chapter will take as a case study the situation in Leningrad, where the Writers’ Union and literary journals did not experience such extremes of liberalization,6 and poets were not in the limelight of the Thaw poetry ‘boom’, but where, nonetheless, there were a great many young poets writing and engaging in both official and unofficial literary activity.7 Drawing on previously unpublished material from the archive of the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union, I will suggest that this revival of lyric poetry during the Khrushchev Thaw and, in particular, poetry’s attraction for young people, occurred not because people spontaneously began writing poetry after the death of a tyrant – there is every reason to presume that ordinary people in the USSR, as well as published poets, continued to write lyric poetry throughout the Stalinist period, even though it was not published – but because at this point in time, poetry became a concern of high-level party policy. I will show how, in response to a demand for an improvement in Soviet poetry, the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union set about encouraging and supporting young poets. Official policy thus emerges as a decisive factor in bringing about the fashion for poetry in the 1950s and early 1960s. The common representation of Thaw poetry as a ‘vehicle of expression for the oppositional mood in the country’,8 is shown to be too superficial to describe the complexities of the situation. Too often, the upsurge in poetry during the Thaw has been unquestioningly accepted as the result of only the poets’ desire to write with sincerity – the product of young poets’ ‘youthful temperaments’, ‘exuberance’ and their being ‘more assertive, individualistic, and candid than their elders’.9 In fact, as we shall see, enthusiasm for poetry

The need for new voices 195 was purposely propagated by the Writers’ Union to meet party demands for change in the genre. The chapter will go on to show how the policy of encouraging young writers, and especially poets, was put into practice through the development of the system of LITOs, the conferences for young writers, and opportunities to take part in readings and competitions. The origins of this fashion are more complex than a ‘top-down’ model of policy alone might suggest. I will proceed to examine the role of non-party intelligentsia – whose influence in society increased during the Thaw – in the shaping of the poetry phenomenon. The chapter will then trace the demise of the liberal tendencies of the Thaw, and conclude by showing how the leniency towards young writers was retracted in the early 1960s. It will show how this process began as early as 1962, a year often considered to be well within the Thaw period. Case studies of the early careers of two poets, Viktor Sosnora and Iosif Brodskii, will demonstrate the effect that this change in policy had on the careers and fates of aspiring young poets. Archival material from the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union provides a coherent explanation of one crucial factor which initiated the poetry phenomenon of the Thaw: in 1953, lyric poetry was criticized by the powers in Moscow for lagging behind the other literary genres in its Socialist Realist development. In Leningrad, the appropriate response to this criticism was discussed at a specially convened, three-day meeting in November, at which members of the Union were called upon to identify the causes of poetry’s slow development, and to offer strategies to redress the problem.10 One major concern of the meeting, which was voiced by many writers, emerged as the Writers’ Union’s practice in identifying, encouraging and training young writers, and especially young poets. The poet Elena Ryvina (1910–?) spoke at this meeting of her experience of work with young writers in the city, and her understanding of the problems that young poets had in publishing their work.11 She related to the meeting a story about how one of the students at her literary club wrote a beautiful poem about a rural landscape, which she judged to express a profound love for his motherland, and hence to be eminently suitable for publication. When the poet took his work to a newspaper editor he was advised to add to the riverbank he had so picturesquely described the detail of a hydro-electric power station glittering in the sun. Ryvina deplored the malign influence of editors, who forced poets like her student to edit their work before submitting it for publication. Echoing the sentiment of Ryvina’s speech, many delegates at the meeting argued for more frequent and representative publication of young poets’ work, of which, it was claimed, there was deplorably little in print: one writer complained that there were no opportunities for young poets to publish at all. The poet Vadim Shefner (1915–2002) went as far as to suggest that if the standard of Soviet poetry did not soon rise, readers

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would come to assume that it could never be as good as the classics. He urged the Writers’ Union: We must be more bold in introducing young writers into poetry. We must introduce them without a fuss, without talking down to them, and without telling them off for their first failure. To have greater respect for young people means to talk with them as adults.12 This meeting seems to have been the first time that an anxiety over the development of the lyric was announced in Leningrad. The powerful consensus that young poets might provide the accelerated development that Soviet poetry needed in order to catch up with other genres influenced policy in Leningrad over the subsequent decade, and was one major factor which brought about very significant changes to the provision for young poets in the city. This enthusiasm for young writers during the Thaw should also be seen in the broader context of the authorities’ anxiety about Soviet young people’s apathy. During the Thaw the political leadership became aware that there was a problem with disaffection among young people: official support for young writers fitted into this broader concern, as it constituted one way of trying to re-engage young people with society.13 Further evidence that the Union was advocating a liberal and encouraging policy towards young poets is found at a meeting of the Board of the Leningrad Branch of the Writers’ Union in April 1954.14 At a routine discussion of the thick journal Zvezda, the editors were criticized because the poetry section was found to be weak. The cause of this shortcoming was diagnosed as a lack of input from young writers. Sergei Orlov observed that ‘. . . a failing of the poetry section [was] undoubtedly its weak promotion of young poets who [were] at the beginning of their careers, of young blood’. The selections of work by young poets of the post-war generation which we find published fairly regularly in the thick journals in the later 1950s were probably instigated as a response to this and similar criticisms.15 In January 1955, 16 months after attention was initially turned to young writers, Chivilikhin presented a report to the board of the Leningrad Branch of the Writers’ Union entitled ‘The Implementation of Critical Comments’.16 In this report, the Committee for Work with Young Writers came under fire, and far-reaching recommendations for improvement were made: Chivilikhin argued that the Committee should be enlarged, and should cooperate more closely with the Committee for Admissions, probably hoping thereby to increase the rate of admissions of young writers to the Union. He even suggested that the Committee be given the authority to make recommendations for publication, which was a privilege conferred upon only the Sections of the Union for each genre, leaders of conference seminars and editors:

The need for new voices 197 We need to bring this committee into closer cooperation with the Committee for Admissions. Perhaps even give the committee the right to recommend the best works of literature by young authors to journals, almanacs and publishers, so that members of the committee do not have to confine themselves to making general comments about the lack of interest in young writers, but can make real recommendations and suggestions. It is apparent from the tone of this comment that the Committee for Work with Young Writers was hitherto empowered to do little more than comment on the failings of the system it served. Although the power to give recommendations for publication was not conferred on its members, the number of the membership was greatly expanded, and its profile thus raised: at this meeting a total of 19 writers were named as the members of the new committee. As the policy of fostering young poets was taking hold, the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union began to develop the existing institutional structure of work with young writers. As early as 1953, the Writers’ Union branch had agreed with a report that found the work of the Committee for Work with Young Writers to be weak. Criticisms of the existing apparatus which were made at a meeting in September went so far as to assert that work with young writers did not really exist in Leningrad.17 It was explained that a seminar, or LITO (literaturnoe ob’’edinenie, literary group) existed which was nominally for young writers, but that the same ‘young’ writers had been attending it for 15 years. These people, it was agreed, could no longer be classed as young, and should no longer be in receipt of help from the Union. At the end of the meeting, five resolutions were drawn up: 1

2

3

4 5

Abolish the group for young writers at the Writers’ Union branch, and, instead, create groups at ‘Leningradskii almanakh’, and hopefully at the journal Zvezda. Try to attract young writers who have proved themselves to come and work within the creative departments of the Writers’ Union, as this will enable professional writers to exercise individual, creative leadership over their younger counterparts. Recommend that the Committee for Work with Young Writers pay special attention to the work of the literary groups in the city, at factories, in clubs, and at institutes of higher education. Examine the state of the long-running seminars and groups of young writers. Raise the standard of literary consultation for young writers. Give the job of reviewing young writers’ manuscripts to experienced writers.

All these resolutions aimed at bringing young writers into closer contact with the Union, where they could be observed and, if appropriate, given

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special attention from established writers. Although the poet Britanishkii, who belongs to the post-war generation targeted by these policies, has cynically suggested that such measures on the part of the Union were only intended to control young writers, it does seem that the organization was genuinely anxious to discover and recruit new talent, and was not only concerned with the suppression of all literary activities outside its own auspices.18 After the announcement in November that lyric poetry was in need of accelerated development, the recruitment drive of the Union became a pressing concern. At a meeting of the Board of the Leningrad Branch of the Writers’ Union in 1955, Gleb Semenov, the seminar leader of the Committee for Work with Young Writers, gave a report on the developments in the committee’s work.19 Overall, he announced, it had been an excellent year, and he lavished praise on the grass-roots organizations involved in the work with young writers – the LITOs of the city – but criticized the central literary bodies for their lack of enthusiasm and support for those writers. Many members of the Committee for Work with Young Writers had failed to turn up to the meetings and had not taken on any responsibilities. Semenov complained that members of the Union often paid lip-service to the issue of work with young writers, but rarely acted upon the concerns they voiced. At the end of this meeting more resolutions were drawn up which aimed to improve the current situation further: 1 2

3

4

5

6

To consider work with young writers to be a direct obligation of all the creative sections of the Union. To recommend to the editorship of the journal Neva that they normalize the functioning of their LITO by providing it with a permanent and experienced leader. To recommend to the Leningrad Branch of the publishing house Sovetskii pisatel’ that they include young poets in their LITO, and support them by appointing an experienced leader. To hold a general meeting of young writers on 27 November 1955, which will be considered one form of educational work with young writers. To oblige members of the Board to take an active part in the organization and running of the meeting. To admit that the Committee for Work with Young Writers needs to activate its work. To instruct the secretariat to create a new authoritative and hard-working committee. To recognize the positive initiative of the publishing house ‘Sovetskii pisatel’ ’ in its publication of the almanac Molodoi Leningrad, and to consider it desirable that the almanac be produced once a year.

The almanac Molodoi Leningrad (‘Young Leningrad’) was indeed produced once a year, and became an important publication for poets who

The need for new voices 199 were at the beginning of their careers but in a prominent enough position to publish. It should be remembered, however, that the number of such poets whose work appeared in the almanac was small, for most young people did not publish their work officially.20 For the majority of poets, the main forum for poetry in the city became, during the Thaw, the Union’s system of LITOs, which had existed in pre-war Leningrad and in the 1940s, but was expanded during the Thaw. The groups were usually attached to an Institute of Higher Education, House of Culture or a factory and were run by members of the Union who received a monthly payment for this service. During the Thaw, some LITOs became very popular, and the high numbers of aspiring poets allowed these to become selective workshops with high admission standards. The most prestigious LITO in Leningrad in the 1950s was run by Gleb Semenov at the Mining Institute from 1954–58.21 Other groups which poets recall as having been prestigious during the Thaw included the Narvskaia zastava (Narva gate), run by Natalya Grudinina (1918–?); the Tsarskoe Selo LITO run by Tat’iana Gnedich (1907–80) and the Trudovye rezervy (labour reserves) led by David Dar (1910–80). The latter three teachers belonged to the generation of writers born at the turn of the century who, like the more famous figures of Anna Akhmatova and Boris Pasternak, possessed the knowledge and the traditions of the Russian intelligentsia after which the younger generation so hankered. The system of workshops recalled the studios of the Proletkul’t in the 1920s and the atmosphere of creative freedom associated with that period, and the LITOs which these teachers ran became havens of culture and tradition for young people growing up in the aftermath of the Stalinist decimation of pre-revolutionary intellectual culture. Elena Kumpan described the meeting of these two generations thus: They had waited a long time for someone in this world who still had any need for their NON-SOVIET upbringing and world view, had grown tired of waiting and had almost lost hope, and we . . . threw ourselves at them and greedily absorbed, over at least three decades, their experience, their stories, their opinions, their school, their libraries, their SAMIZDAT, and, of course, the incomparable atmosphere of their everyday lives . . . and their company.22 Seminars for translators held by El’ga Linetskaia (1909–97)23 and Efim Etkind (1918–99) held much the same appeal as the LITOs for young people, as did Dmitrii Maksimov’s (1906–87) famous seminars on Aleksandr Blok held at the Philological Faculty of Leningrad University. Many of these teachers who nurtured the younger generation had spent time in the Gulag under Stalin, and for the younger generation this experience further underlined their credentials as independent-minded and un-Soviet, sometimes even anti-Soviet figures. Thus, although the system of LITOs

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was under the aegis of the Writers’ Union, certain groups became strongly associated with and influenced by the non-party literary and cultural intelligentsia in Leningrad. When, in the 1950s and 1960s, an official policy in Leningrad to encourage young people to take up poetry coincided with a popular interest among young people in learning about the literary culture of the early decades of the century – especially the poetry of the Silver Age – from its surviving representatives, poetry achieved unprecedented popularity.24 The enthusiasm for poetry which, in the 1950s at least, had the blessing of both the party and the intelligentsia, was fostered by the authorities not only through their LITOs, but also through officially organized poetry competitions, conferences for young writers, readings and occasional opportunities to publish. In 1956 Den’ poezii (Poetry Day) was added to the calendar of Soviet red-letter days, and the almanacs of the same name established in Leningrad and Moscow, in which famous poets were published alongside their lesser-known counterparts. Together with the almanac Molodoi Leningrad, it improved provision for publishing, although this goal was still not easy to achieve. The biennial conferences of young writers were perhaps the most accessible of these opportunities outside the LITOs available to most young writers. Delegates were divided into seminars devoted to the genres of prose, poetry, drama, science fiction and criticism, and enjoyed the opportunity to work closely with established writers over three days, and, potentially, to make an impression on them. At the conclusion of the three days, the supervisors reported back to the final assembly of participants, and a poetry reading was held in the evening. In the 1950s there was considerable prestige attached to young writers who participated in the conferences, and especially to those who were recommended to editors by these conferences.25 The 1956 conference was held shortly after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, and it is apparent from the stenographs of speeches that the whole event was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of the Thaw: the opening speaker began the conference by attacking Stalinist Socialist Realism, suggesting that Soviet writers turn to foreign literature for inspiration. In the final assembly of the conference, the supervisor of the poetry seminar, Elena Ryvina, spoke at length about a new direction in poetry taken in her seminar by four young poets, aged between 19 and 25: Gleb Gorbovskii (b. 1931), Vladimir Britanishkii (b. 1933), Viktor Berlin, and Vladimir Ufliand (b. 1937): This is, as it were, a reaction against the huge quantity of poems that have appeared in the thick and thin journals this year, the large number of grey poems which often varnish reality, which are outwardly patriotic but in essence are mindless and declamatory, which frequently bear no real weight in their lines; as if in reaction to this, is

The need for new voices 201 the work of these comrades, each one wishing to comprehend everything happening extremely insightfully and extremely individually.26 Ryvina’s commentary on the work of the four poets was not without criticism, but the disproportionate amount of time that she devoted to them – nobody else gave a report of their seminar that was even half as long – indicates that she thought very highly of them. The poets were praised for their individuality, interesting subject matter and the quality of their thought. Ryvina liked poems that addressed contentious issues or problems in Soviet society: she singled out the poem ‘The Other’ by Britanishkii as an example, which criticized materialistic civil servants who believed that their cars shielded them from the common people in the street.27 Of Ryvina’s four poets, Britanishkii and Gorbovskii certainly joined the Writers’ Union, and Viktor Berlin may have done so. Ryvina’s praise of these young poets probably helped them to begin the process of making a career and a name for themselves. Vladimir Ufliand might also have become a professional poet, had he not been involved in a scandalous poetry reading in 1968 characterized in the press as a ‘Zionist sabbath’.28 Ufliand’s fate – to suffer at the whim of a malicious and careerist journalist – was not uncommon. In their time, Aleksandr Kushner (b. 1936), Viktor Sosnora (b. 1936), Vladimir Britanishkii, and Iosif Brodskii (b. 1940) suffered similar attacks. Brodskii’s chances of a career, like Ufliand’s, were destroyed by the reputation that he was given by a defamatory article. The cases of young poets like Kushner, Sosnora and Britanishkii – all of whom were accepted into the Writers’ Union during or just after the Thaw, demonstrate that an attack, or unwanted attention from the authorities did not preclude the possibility of a professional career. As we know, in the 1950s the Writers’ Union was eager to accept young poets, and this aim provided the impetus not only for an intensification of work with young writers, but also for a revaluation of both the criteria for admission to the Union, and of the admissions process. It is apparent from stenographs of meetings of the Board that, during the early 1950s, the Union dispensed with the kandidat stage of the admissions process, whereby a young poet was given junior status in the Union for some years before becoming a fully-fledged member. In 1953, Toropygin and Novoselov were given the status of kandidat when they applied, but by 1956 the last remaining kandidaty were given full membership, and new poets were accepted into the Union proper immediately. This meant not only an increase in membership, but also meant that some poets were becoming members of the Union at a younger age. When V.N. Kuznetsov was accepted into the Union in 1956 at the age of 24, his age was given as a reason in favour of his acceptance: ‘We need to grow younger with the aid of talented young people’.29 There were also many cases in which writers were accepted into the Union on the strength of having published only one book. The criteria for

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admissions to the Union seem to have stipulated that an author should have published two books,30 but in 1958 it was noted at a meeting of the Committee for Admissions of the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union that, ‘we very often accept writers after a first, and often poor quality book’.31 Such a concession made it slightly easier to gain admission, and also meant that writers could apply for admission a little earlier than they might otherwise have done. By the beginning of the 1960s, the results of the Thaw policies towards young writers were discernible for many writers: not only were there hundreds of readings by amateur poets held in the city,32 it was also at this time that poets who had attended the LITOs of the 1950s began to be accepted by the Union. Stenographs of meetings of the Board of the Writers’ Union show that in 1961 Lev Kuklin (b. 1931) became the first member of the Mining Institute LITO to be admitted to the Union; in 1962 he was joined by Lev Gavrilov (b. 1931) and the following year by Gleb Gorbovskii and a member of David Dar’s LITO, Viktor Sosnora. At a Board meeting in 1961 a discussion of the provision for young poets in the city took place.33 The chairman of the Board enumerated and commented upon the various facets of this provision, and announced that save for a few isolated instances where there was still room for improvement, the system of support for young poets in Leningrad was now adequate: Now we can no longer say that young poets receive little attention – their poems are published in journals and in newspapers, we hold creative discussions of their work with them, they perform on the radio, we give them critical assessments of their work. As soon as the provision of work with young poets had been acknowledged to be satisfactory, a backlash against the liberalism of the Thaw materialized in the form of certain writers who spoke out at the meeting to complain that, in their opinion, young poets received too much attention. There existed a school of thought among some writers that young poets had had far too much encouragement and freedom to experiment in their work, and in particular with form. Sergei Orlov criticized what he saw as uncontextualized, misguided appropriation of experimental poets of the 1920s and 1930s: it seems likely that he was hinting at the interest many post-war poets in Leningrad had in the early poems of Mayakovsky and Zabolotskii, and the work of Khlebnikov, and the OBERIU poets. This body of conservative opinion within the Writers’ Union had not had much influence over policies during the Thaw which began in 1953, and especially after 1956, and young writers had consequently benefited from lenient attitudes towards them, and a supportive system of work with them. In 1962 and 1963, however, as the politics of the USSR began to grow conservative again, the Writers’ Union began to retract much of its

The need for new voices 203 provision for young writers. As early as January 1962, the Board of the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union met to discuss the question of the ideological work and tasks of writers, and the father figure of Soviet Leningrad poetry, Aleksandr Prokof’ev, complained about certain young poets who had no social conscience, and desired only scandalous success.34 Sergei Orlov complained at the same meeting that he felt quite alienated by the public’s taste in poetry: at a reading in the city he was surprised by an audience’s enthusiasm for poetry in which he saw no merit. In 1963 it became more difficult to organize readings for young poets, and control over the content of such events was tightened: it was decided that Anatoly Chepurov of the metodsovet (methodological council) should vet the contents of every public reading that the Union organized before it took place and, a few months later, a decision was taken ‘about the increase in control over the programmes of literary evenings in the city’.35 At the same meeting a similar decision was taken to gather the leaders of all literary groups in the city together, in order to give them ‘guidance’ in their work, and to allot to each literary circle and LITO a group of writers selected from the Board who would support the running of the group: ‘to help them and to control them’. At meetings such as these in 1962 and 1963, Orlov, Prokof’ev and other politically orthodox writers of the older generation who occupied the central positions in the Writers’ Union spoke out against what they considered to be the ‘excesses’ of many young, liberal poets. It seems likely that they felt empowered by the evident shift towards conservatism in central politics, and they quickly became a force for reactionary policies. Over the coming years more measures of control would be taken, and opportunities for unknown poets to publish, or to attend conferences would begin to diminish. This tendency was, of course, reflected in the politics of the capital too: after the initial honeymoon period following the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich (Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha) – probably the most important event of the 1962–63 Thaw – criticism of the work began to appear as early as January 1963,36 and even the poet Evgenii Evtushenko, who was often criticized by liberals for his willingness to compromise with the authorities, was banned from travelling abroad in 1963 after the tamizdat publication of A Precocious Autobiography.37 We can see how policies towards young writers were in a state of flux by 1963 if we examine the fates of two young writers who were trying to make careers for themselves at that time: Viktor Sosnora and Iosif Brodskii. From stenographs of meetings of the Writers’ Union it is clear that Brodskii and Sosnora were the two most contentious figures among young writers who emerged during the Thaw – their cases prompted the most fierce and involved discussions, and divided the Union into staunch supporters and opponents, probably in part due to the fact that they were two of the most talented poets to appear in Leningrad in the early 1960s.

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When Sosnora appeared in about 1960, his career was supported in Moscow by Nikolai Aseev and Lili Brik – two very powerful figures in Soviet literary circles. Sosnora’s work was apparently recommended to Aseev by Boris Slutskii, who had seen his poems in manuscript (samizdat) form, after which Aseev took it upon himself to help the young poet.38 Aseev enlisted support in Leningrad for his protégé from D.S. Likhachev, one of the most influential figures in the Leningrad literary intelligentsia at the time, and Likhachev sponsored Sosnora’s application to the Union in 1963.39 When the application was discussed by the Board of the Leningrad Branch of the Writers’ Union, however, it became clear that several members were opposed to Sosnora being accepted. As reason why Sosnora should not be admitted, this opposition argued that some passages in his work were highly inappropriate, and even insulting to Soviet citizens, for example the line in his long poem Horsemen:40 – You, Russians, you – cowards, Sons of dogs! Another problem was a comparison in one poem between workers on their way to factories and black, scuttling crabs. The debate about Sosnora’s application eventually boiled down to a choice between two options: to accept him into the ranks of the Union where he could be helped and guided by older and more experienced poets, or to leave him out in the cold. The liberal pedagogically inclined members of the Union prevailed, and Sosnora was accepted.41 By 1963, Iosif Brodskii was also beginning to make a career for himself: he had a budding reputation as a translator, and possessed a contract to produce a volume of translation for a Moscow publisher.42 The development of his career was interrupted by the now infamous article ‘A Drone on the Literary Periphery’ which appeared in Vechernii Leningrad at the end of 1963.43 The article slandered Brodskii as a parasite on society, and the young poet and translator was put on trial at the beginning of 1964 on this charge.44 In itself, this was not uncommon for unofficial writers at this time – Aronzon and Kuz’minskii are among other writers who also stood trial but were acquitted – in Brodskii’s case, however, the trial received a much higher public profile. The Writers’ Union was split over the attitude that it should adopt towards Brodskii. After the fiasco of the trial and Brodskii’s internal exile, many writers were very angry that the Union had made no attempt to negotiate with Brodskii, or to help him. In a meeting at the end of 1964, David Dar spoke out about this issue.45 Dar claimed that meetings at which the course of action was discussed had been closed, and no writer who supported Brodskii had been given any say in the Union’s policy. He highlighted how members of the translation section and others who spoke

The need for new voices 205 out in defence of Brodskii at his trial were strongly criticized by the Union, which insisted that the writers should have toed the party line over the issue. Dar recalled that he had suggested, even before the article appeared in the press, that the Union invite Brodskii to come and talk to them, so that they might find out more about him and what he was thinking. Nothing was done about his suggestion. Some time later, Dar reiterated his point, but he was ignored again, and so, he said, the Union allowed itself to ‘let this person’s head roll’. After the article appeared, Dar explained, he had still wanted to reconcile the Union and Brodskii, but this was categorically forbidden by the then chairman of the Union Daniil Granin, and the whole affair developed into a catastrophe. In Brodskii’s case, then, the conservatives in the Union and not the liberals prevailed. The case studies of Sosnora and Brodskii demonstrate clearly how crucial the policy of the Writers’ Union was in determining the fates of young writers, for the critical difference between these stories of success and failure is the difference in attitude of the Writers’ Union. While, during the Thaw, the prevailing mood was liberal and encouraging towards young writers, and especially towards young poets, the Union held the view that it was better to bring erring writers into the fold and help them, than alienate them and leave them to the mercy of the political authorities. As official policy grew more conservative, there were more and more instances when the Union declined to intervene in troubled literary careers and, gradually, only the more politically compliant and, often, artistically mediocre, found success in their applications for admission to the Union. The decisions to support Sosnora but not Brodskii also appear to be early indications of a tendency, which would later develop into a policy for the Writers’ Union, to take an interest in only those young poets who had already made some progress in their careers. In the 1950s, the system of LITOs, readings, competitions and conferences had been open to poets with no experience or publications, like Ufliand, Gorbovskii, Britanishkii and Berlin who received special attention at the 1956 conference; by 1964, however, the Union had restructured its work with young writers, so that it ran only the seven largest LITOs in the city which proficient and more experienced poets attended.46 In a few years time, it would express interest almost exclusively in poets who had attended LITOs for several years, and would pay virtually no attention to new and unknown faces on the literary scene.47 The generation of poets who appeared in the 1950s LITOs were assimilated so slowly into the Union – over a period of more than ten years – that even in the first half of the 1970s, most poets admitted to the Union had been born between 1935 and 1940 and had appeared on the literary scene in the 1950s. Poets who were born after 1940 – and Brodskii was born in 1940 – found it much more difficult to gain a foothold in the literary establishment.

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As the Union’s policy towards young writers grew more conservative, once again the intelligentsia became alienated from the official, Soviet culture, as it had been prior to the Thaw. The precarious constellation of power and influence in society under Khrushchev was a short-lived period of reconciliation of the political and cultural authorities in society; while it lasted, it engendered and supported a flourishing of official lyric poetry. The non-party intelligentsia was sidelined, however, by decisions the Union took towards the end of the Thaw to increase political control over literary activities in the city. After Brodskii’s trial, members of the translation department and other supporters of Brodskii were dealt with harshly, in some cases being prohibited from working with young writers.48 As a result of these changes, the atmosphere in the LITOs and at readings in the city was not nearly as free as it had been. The attitudes of young writers changed towards these institutions: many no longer viewed the Union as a career prospect, but, instead, orientated their literary efforts towards an audience they could reach through samizdat and later through tamizdat, and at underground, unofficial readings. Gleb Semenov and others continued to run LITOs and provide young poets with creative forums for work, but the scarce opportunities to read in public or to publish discouraged young people from trying to pursue an official career. Important relationships continued to exist between young poets in the city and the older generations of the intelligentsia, but often these no longer formed part of the Union’s work with young writers. Instead, such relationships between young poets and their older mentors became a private, literary support system which constituted an alternative to the Writers’ Union.

Notes 1 See H. Swayze, Political Control of Literature in the USSR 1946–59, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962, pp. 83–142. 2 M. Slonim, Soviet Russian Literature. Writers and Problems 1917–1967, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967, pp. 315–17; O. Carlisle, Poets on Street Corners, New York: Random House, 1968, pp. 2–6; V. Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power. The Post-Stalin Era, London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 1990, pp. 112–13. 3 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/468. 4 D. Brown, Soviet Russian Literature Since Stalin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 141. 5 A. Genis, P. Vail’, 60-e. Mir sovetskogo cheloveka, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988. 6 The Moscow branch of the Writers’ Union, which had limited self-governance, was established by Khrushchev in 1955 to appease liberals. See: J. Garrard, C. Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union, London: I.B. Tauris & Co., 1990, p. 79. 7 This is evident in an anthology of unpublished poetry: K. Kuz’minskii, G. Koval’ev, The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry, Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1986. 8 Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power, p. 112.

The need for new voices 207 9 Brown, Soviet Russian Literature Since Stalin, p. 106. 10 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/194-95. This discussion is referred to in the chronology of Soviet literature found in Literaturnyi entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1987, p. 399. 11 Ryvina ran the LITO at the Forestry Engineering Institute in Leningrad in the early 1950s. 12 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/194-95. 13 On the apathy of the younger generation, see A. Gaev, ‘The Decade Since Stalin’, in M. Hayward and E. Crowley, Soviet Literature in the Sixties. An International Symposium, London: Methuen, 1965, pp. 18–54, here p. 28; and M. Bryld, E. Kulavig (eds), Soviet Civilisation Between Past and Present, Odense: Odense University Press, 1998, p. 87. c.f. chapter by Juliane Fürst in this volume. 14 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/216. 15 See in particular the sections published regularly in Neva entitled ‘Molodye golosa’. 16 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/244. 17 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/186. 18 V. Britanishkii, ‘Stat’i i materialy’, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 14, 1995, 167–80. Britanishkii is a professional geologist and poet, and member of the Writers’ Union. He was a student in the Mining Institute LITO during the 1950s. 19 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/245. 20 There were fewer opportunities to publish in Leningrad than in Moscow for both young and mature writers: Moscow’s Novyi mir was the flagship of the Thaw for mature writers, and Molodaia gvardiia became the equivalent for young writers. In the late 1950s and 1960s the possibility of establishing a filial of Molodaia gvardiia in Leningrad was raised at many meetings of the Writers’ Union, but the idea did not come to fruition. 21 In the history of Leningrad poetry in this period, it is impossible to ignore the influence of the poet and pedagogue Gleb Semenov. He began teaching poetry to groups of young people before the war, when he was a teacher at the children’s poetry club of the Pioneer Palace. In 1954, he was appointed referent, or seminar leader, of the Writers’ Union Committee for Work with Young Writers in Leningrad, and he used this position to influence the shape of policy towards young writers; his promotion to this position and his resulting influence over Union policy towards young writers is a good example of the increase in power of the non-party intelligentsia during the Thaw. He wanted the LITO system, which existed to provide a career structure leading young writers eventually to admission to the Writers’ Union, to foster a creative atmosphere where young poets could enjoy a considerable degree of artistic freedom, as well as find opportunities to develop their careers. A whole generation of postwar poets in St Petersburg developed under his tutelage: Tat’iana Galushko, Leonid Ageev, Aleksandr Kushner, Vladimir Britanishkii, Nina Koroleva, Oleg Tarutin, Aleksandr Gorodnitskii and Nonna Slepakova, to name but a few. 22 E. Kumpan, ‘Nashi Stariki’ in Istoriia Leningradskoi nepodtsenzurnoi literatury: 1950–1980-e gody, St Petersburg: DEAN, 2000, pp. 29–38, here p. 29. 23 For more information on Linetskaia, see: M. Iasnov (ed.), El’ga L’vovna Linetskaia. Materialy k biografi i. Iz literaturnogo naslediia , St Petersburg: Symposium, 1999. 24 The young writers’ desire to learn more about their grandparents’ generation has been attributed to a need to pick up the threads of literary tradition which

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had been severed by both the censorship and purges of the Stalinist period. See, for example, Kumpan, ‘Nashi stariki’. Such conferences are described in: D. Shraer-Petrov, Druz’ia i teni, New York: Liberty Publishing House, 1989, and information about them is also found in the Writers’ Union archives. TsGALI SPb, 371/1/299. The poem was first published in M. Borisova, ed., To vremia – eti golosa. Leningrad. Poety o ‘ ttepeli , Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990, p. 81. Ufliand asserts that until this disastrous evening he had entertained the idea that he might manage to publish and eventually join the Writers’ Union. After the furore which followed the evening he realized that this was impossible. Vladimir Ufliand, interview by author, tape recording, St Petersburg, 26 May 2003. See also: V. Ufliand, ‘Odin iz vitkov istorii literaturnoi kultury (Nekotorie osobennosti nezavisimoi piterskoi poezii v sootnosenii s sobstvennym opytom)’, Petropol’, no. 3, 1991, 108–15. ‘Protokoly i stenogrammy zasedanii Pravleniya 1956’, TsGALI SPb, 371/1/267. S. Massie (ed.), The Living Mirror. Five Poets from Leningrad, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1972, p. 29. TsGALI SPb, 371/1/374. Aleksandr Kushner remembers that he participated in poetry readings as often as once a week during the height of their popularity during the Thaw. Aleksandr Kushner, interview by author, tape recording, St Petersburg, 7 November 2002. TsGALI SPb, 371/1/418. TsGALI SPb, 371/1/440. TsGALI SPb, 371/1/464. B. Rubin, ‘Highlights of the 1962–1963 Thaw’ in Hayward, Crowley, Soviet Literature in the Sixties, pp. 81–99, here p. 93. E. Evtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography, London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1963. Viktor Sosnora, interview by author, tape recording, St Petersburg, 21 May 2003. TsGALI SPb, 371/1/463. Originally published in 1969, and republished as V. Sosnora, Vsadniki, St Petersburg: Pushkinskii fond, 2003. TsGALI SPb, 371/1/463. Y. Gordin, ‘Delo Brodskogo’, Neva, no. 2, 1989, 134–66, here 146. Lerner, ‘Okolo-literaturnyi truten’’, Vechernyi Leningrad, 29 November 1963. For details of Brodskii’s case see Gordin, ‘Delo Brodskogo’. TsGALI SPb, 371/1/476. TsGALI SPb, 371/1/476. A decision was taken in 1973 to allow ‘only writers who have already written something interesting to take part [in the conference of young writers]’, TsGALI SPb, 371/1/621. These punishments meted out to translators are alluded to in the stenograph of the meeting of the Board of the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union on 19 March 1964: TsGALI SPb, 371/1/476.

11 Modernizing Socialist Realism in the Khrushchev Thaw The struggle for a ‘Contemporary Style’ in Soviet art Susan E. Reid In summer 1958, aesthetician Nina Dmitrieva published an essay ‘On the Question of the Contemporary Style’ in the relatively liberal art journal of the USSR Artists’ Union, Tvorchestvo.1 The Contemporary Style (sovremennyi stil’) as she presented it was a new period style embracing all aspects of Soviet culture and embodying the spirit of the present age. Not only in its iconography but, most significantly, in its formal structures, it would express the vast transformations that had taken place in the Soviet Union since the Revolution and the rapid pace of progress in the present. A contemporary artist must have a heightened awareness of these momentous changes, and this would inevitably find expression precisely in stylistic change. The hallmarks of the Contemporary Style according to Dmitrieva and others were generalization, lapidariness, expression and monumentality. Dmitrieva’s essay was a manifesto of artistic reformism, bringing together some of the key concerns and criteria that had emerged within the official art establishment since Stalin’s death.2 Attempts to define and promote the Contemporary Style were countered by rearguard efforts to discredit it or to contain the revision of Socialist Realism and of the ‘usable past’ it implied within controllable limits.3 For the art world, no less than other ideological and cultural institutions in the Thaw, was split between reformists and conservatives of various stripe and degree. What was at stake in this seemingly arcane and inconsequential discussion of style? Why did it arouse such passions? This chapter will examine the battle lines marked out by the terms sovremennyi (contemporary or modern) and stil’ (style), focusing on reformist painting and criticism in the Moscow art establishment, especially the Moscow Artists’ Union, MOSKh, the hub from which intra-systemic pressures for artistic de-Stalinization emanated. Our discussion will turn, as quarrels between these Soviet Ancients and Moderns did, on a cluster of highly charged terms – modernity, progress, youth, realism, and, of course, style – over whose definition the forces for and against deStalinization, modernization and internationalism were fought out in the official art world of the Khrushchev Thaw.

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Ancients and Moderns To promote the ‘contemporary’ in art and to rehabilitate discussion of artistic form constituted one front in the widespread social and political battle over past, present and future that marked the Thaw, a battle that was coded in the official Soviet press as the struggle between ‘innovation and tradition’.4 For art world reformists it was not simply a choice between tradition or innovation, but a question of which tradition – or rather traditions – should serve as the basis for new developments that would put Stalinism behind them. This constituted a challenge to those artists and critics who, in the course of the Stalin period had accrued the personal and institutional power to define realism in terms of their own practice and of its prototype, the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers) of the nineteenth century. The confrontation between (to use Stephen Cohen’s phrase) the ‘friends and foes of change’ in the art system was fought out over the question of a liberal or dogmatic conception of realism.5 Must realism be based solely on nineteenth-century Russian sources, and founded in cultural autarky? Or might it embrace international, twentieth-century models? Foreshadowing French revisionist Roger Garaudy’s 1963 formulation of a syncretic ‘Realism without Bounds’,6 blacklisted in the Soviet Union, the discussion of the Contemporary Style was fundamentally about the modernization of Soviet art and its opening up to international influence. At issue was the legitimacy of selectively assimilating modernism – Russian, Western and increasingly also post-colonial – which for so long had been anathematized as formalist decadence, into a modern, civic, socialist art; and the question of whether this art could be considered ‘realism’. Even before Stalin’s death in 1953, art critics had begun to express a sense that realism as currently practised was no longer adequate to reality or effective on the public. Exhibitions were dominated by a powerful gerontocracy peddling ‘applause painting’ that promoted the Stalin cult, lakirovka (art that ‘varnished’ or embellished reality), and trivial genre painting lacking dramatic conflict. Clichés and dogma had got in the way of any genuine, sincere artistic response to life. In the struggle against formalism, form itself had been neglected. As a result, some warned, art was losing its audience; it no longer had the power to move, or even to matter.7 Artistic renewal was urgent, and this required attention to the means of art. It was time ‘to introduce concepts of form into the very technology of our business’.8 For reformists the nadir of what they denigrated as ‘naturalism’, as opposed to ‘true’ realism, was marked by the meticulously descriptive illusionism of Aleksandr Laktionov, such as his Moving into the New Apartment, 1952 (Figure 11.1). A broad spectrum of artists and critics was united in hostility towards Laktionov’s ‘striking unartisticness’ and ‘primitive illustrativeness’.9 His work was culpable of lakirovka in two mutually reinforcing senses. This pejorative referred at once to the rose-tinted view

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Figure 11.1 Aleksandr Laktionov, Moving into the New Apartment, 1952.

of reality and to the varnish-smooth, quasi-photographic surface. Effacing the sense of the materiality of paint applied to a flat surface by a human hand, it aspired to give the illusion that this embellished world was an unmediated presence, or ‘reality in the forms of reality itself’, rather than a representation in the forms and conventions of art.10 Two complementary reformist agendas met in the discussion of the contemporary during the Thaw. It was, on one hand, about consigning Stalinism, including its artistic dogmas, hierarchies and practices, to the

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past. It was also about embracing present and future: acknowledging the rapid course of modernization the Soviet Union had undergone in the process of intensive industrialization, urbanization and scientific and technological revolution. As Katerina Clark has argued: [M]uch of the 1956 ‘protest’ was not ultimately about ‘Stalinism’ per se. It was rather the sort of stock-taking that was bound to occur when the Soviet Union came of age as a modern society. The coming-of-age had occurred in the late thirties, but the stock-taking had largely been kept out of print hitherto. Now it could be made public.11 Efforts to define and contest the Contemporary Style were a vital contribution to this overdue stock-taking about the specific nature of Soviet modernity and its appropriate cultural expression. The discussion of style was, furthermore, motivated by a concern for professional status and autonomy: to gain recognition for art and its analysis as a specialist field with its own specific tools and expertise. It was associated with the revival of the discipline of aesthetics that took place in this period. Informed by a cautious and largely unacknowledged re-examination of Russian Formalist as well as Western theories, in addition to rereading of Marx, theorists began tentatively to explore once again such fundamental aesthetic categories as beauty; the aesthetic nature of art and its difference from life; and of course, style.12

Modernism, realism and the Two Camps The discourse of contemporaneity, like other ways of knowing and categorizing the world in the 1950s, was shaped by the binary structures of the Cold War.13 The world was pictured as divided into ‘Two Camps’ permanently pitted against each other in ideological battle. To the antithetical world systems of capitalist imperialism and socialism corresponded two absolutely irreconcilable, aesthetic ideologies: modernism and realism. From the orthodox Soviet perspective, modernism, as the instrument of global capitalism, was decadent, individualistic, anti-rational and antihumanist.14 Although, according to the doctrine of Peaceful Coexistence, the threat of armed conflict had receded, ideological hostility continued. Realism and modernism remained irreconcilable. Indeed, according to orthodoxy, vigilance was all the more necessary. As President of the Moscow Artists’ Union board Dmitrii Shmarinov declared in late 1958, ‘Contemporaneity, now as never before in history, is antagonistic and both sides possess quite different means of expressing their own ideology’.15 To reject realism and espouse modernism was to betray socialism. Even to question the absolute antithesis and propose some syncretic ‘third way’ in art was heretically to will the convergence with capitalism. The spectre of international Marxist revisionism, of the uncoupling of socialism and

Modernizing Socialist Realism 213 realism, and of the unholy reconciliation with modernism had already arisen uncomfortably close to home, in parts of socialist Central and Eastern Europe as well as in the developing countries over which the Soviet Union was anxious to establish cultural and ideological dominion.16 It loomed large over the Soviet domestic discussion of the Contemporary Style. ‘Some jealous guardians of tradition say Western form is incomprehensible to the masses’, art historian German Nedoshivin noted at a debate in the Institute of Art History in April 1960. But, he argued, this was belied by the success that recent exhibitions from the fraternal countries, often presenting unfamiliar, modern forms, had enjoyed with the Soviet public.17 Soviet anathema since the 1930s had firmly identified such departures from naturalism as flattened pictorial space, heightened colour, and expressive deformation with capitalist decadence and anti-realism. But why should the achievements of modern art be relinquished unconditionally to capitalism? Why should not Soviet artists also have access to twentieth-century expressive pictorial means? They could, indeed must, reappropriate them and put them to serve the expression of ‘socialist humanism’.18

The importance of being ‘contemporary’ Why the imperative to be ‘contemporary’? What was invested in this epithet? What meanings and values did it convey in Soviet art discourse of the 1950s? ‘Contemporary’, like ‘socialist’ or ‘realist’, was an honorific; it indexed a valorized quality but its specific content was contested between different forces in the art establishment as part of the wider struggle between reformism and conservatism. Appropriating the label ‘contemporary’ for their agenda, the reformers challenged the status quo of the art system established under Stalin. ‘Contemporary’ is defined in the 1960 edition of S.I. Ozhegov’s Dictionary of the Russian Language as ‘pertaining to the present time, presentday’, and as ‘standing on the level of one’s own age, not backward [otstalyi]’.19 ‘Contemporaneity’ was, in part, about becoming conscious of, and publicly articulating the specificity of present day life; it was about finding a form for the experience of modernity, just as modernism had been. As Ozhegov indicates, ‘contemporary’ is the antonym of passé or outdated. To be contemporary was to be on the side of the future, which meant, from a party-minded perspective, of communism. Conversely, whatever the ‘contemporary’ defines itself against is implicitly delegitimated, deprived of any place either in the present or in the trajectory to the future. In the reformist discourse of the Thaw ‘contemporary’ was code for opposition to dogma, to the atrophied forms and sclerotic cultural institutions that were Stalinism’s legacy. For many of the Moscow intelligentsia, at least, the term had immediate associations with the Sovremennik

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(Contemporary) Theatre of Oleg Efremov. Opened in 1956, this theatre was directly identified with the de-Stalinization launched by the Secret Speech that year. It was set up as a ‘studio of young actors’ nominally affiliated to the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT) but adopting a consciously critical relation to it. It set out to challenge MKhAT’s complacency and entrenched practices and repertoires with new blood and experimentation.20 Representing a commitment to both the ‘truth of life’ (introducing a new critical element into the ‘reflection of reality’) and ‘truth of art’ (a new attention to the specificity of the theatrical medium), the Sovremennik became a flagship of efforts to rejuvenate Soviet culture. The modernizers did not have a monopoly over the ‘contemporary’, however. As their adversaries never stopped reminding them, to ‘be of one’s time’ had been the credo of realism since the nineteenth century.21 The principled stance of the radical intelligentsia since the 1830s, it implied not simply passive verisimilitude but a critical examination of the present, its institutions and norms, and a commitment to reform, justice and modernization.22 According to Soviet orthodoxy, the Russian Realist painters, the Peredvizhniki, shared the radical intelligentsia’s dedication to cognizing the life of its times with its conflicts and contradictions, to creating the ‘type’ of the contemporary person, and to arousing anger against the Tsarist social order.23 Socialist Realism, as established under Stalin, claimed to continue this commitment but with the vital difference that life itself, the ‘contemporaneity’ it reflected, had changed: the contradictions had allegedly disappeared along with the elimination of class oppression. The Peredvizhniki and their self-styled Soviet heirs, the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia, AKhRR (1922–32), had in the course of the Stalin period become the dominant stylistic paradigm of Socialist Realism.24 AKhRR’s credo was to depict revolutionary subject matter in accessible form. This meant, in practice, to equate realism with familiar and hence seemingly transparent styles of the past, effectively with the representational conventions and genre structures of the nineteenth century. Dogmatically enforced in the late Stalin period, this interpretation of realism continued to be upheld by conservatives during the Thaw. From a reformist position, however, it had ossified a style whose referent and motivation – life – had in the meantime undergone radical modernization. Its audience, the Soviet masses, was also transformed: thanks to the Revolution they now had the benefit of forty years of education and access to culture behind them.25

Style Aleksandr Kamenskii, one of the most outspoken reformist art critics, scathingly summarized his conservative opponents’ position on the relationship between realism and contemporaneity: ‘art of our times equals contemporary theme plus the elevation to an unchanging canon of stylistic

Modernizing Socialist Realism 215 traditions of past centuries’. This ahistorical conception of artistic form, as if ‘disembodied like a ghost and able to adapt itself to any image’, must, Kamenskii argued, be replaced by a properly historicized understanding of artistic style.26 ‘Style’ is one of the most fundamental and disputed terms in art history and aesthetics, as well as having broader anthropological uses. A broad working definition that seems to correspond to what Dmitrieva was proposing is ‘the presence of a common formal denominator in the visual production of a period’.27 Style was ‘the mirror of the epoch’, but this was not merely a matter of ‘reflecting’ contemporary subject matter to which conservatives tried to reduce it, but of changing formal devices and conventions. For style was ‘a category of artistic form’.28 Dmitrieva’s intervention ‘On the Question of the Contemporary Style’ was a programmatic attempt to raise the formulation of style to a conscious project. It theorized a new, historically determined stage of painting, with its own identifiably modern, even – though this could not be directly stated – modernist, set of formal characteristics. The momentous transformations in ‘life itself’ must generate a commensurate revolution in the means of representation. ‘Does not the pathos of contemporary reality find corresponding stylistic forms?’ Dmitrieva asked.29 Scientific and technological modernity had rendered the techniques of the past obsolete and brought about a ‘crisis of representation’.30 The advent of new form, Dmitrieva proclaimed, was already to be discerned in contemporary art, in a marked shift towards ‘publicistic pathos’ and monumental, synthetic images. And yet ‘the question of the artistic style born of these tasks, or even of the trends in the development of style, is so rarely posed by criticism’.31 Style, to be recognizable as such, was contingent upon difference. But the Stalinist system had emphasized not difference but unity: first, the homogeneity of all loyal Soviet artists, beginning with the 1932 party decree that disbanded literary and artistic groups and laid the institutional basis for Socialist Realism; and second, the identity of art and life.32 Although the original definition of the sole ‘method’ for all Soviet arts did not determine a single style to embody it, the equation of realism with the apparently unmediated ‘reflection of life in the forms of life itself’ became hegemonic as a result of power structures in the art world.33 A concern with the specifically aesthetic qualities of artistic representation – that which made it different from life – was suppressed under Stalin along with the condemnation of formalism in general and Russian Formalism in particular.34 Thus the style of Socialist Realism (as opposed to its method) had received very little theoretical elaboration, for style implied not only difference between artistic manners or conventions, but also a non-congruity between art and life. This, according to Stalinist prejudice, was style’s original sin: it was marked as ‘a form of deviation of art from reality’.35 However, style began to acquire broad cultural importance in practice, not only in the arts but also in other aspects of material culture in the

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post-war period, growing in the 1950s as the Soviet Union became more permeable to diverse outside influences. Style, in the broad anthropological rather than art–historical sense, began to function as a marker of difference and a means of self-differentiation between generations, social strata, and other divisions within Soviet society. The process was most vividly manifest in the post-war youth subculture of the stiliagi, for whom, as Elena Zubkova notes, ‘style’ became a symbol of self-expression – a concept almost prohibited in those times.36 In ‘high’ culture, too, style, became a mechanism of differentiation, disrupting both the supposedly natural and transparent relationship between art and its object – reality – and also the carefully maintained myth of a unified ‘public’ with a single consensual taste. The context was a dramatic expansion in the range of representational devices available to artists and viewers in the 1950s. Museums opened their storage and selectively put back on display their collections of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury West European art as well as rehabilitating selected aspects of early Russian modernism hitherto buried on grounds of formalism or aestheticism. Exhibitions from abroad began to arrive in the Soviet Union under international cultural exchange agreements. The unprecedented range and diversity of painterly styles with which the Moscow public was suddenly confronted made style visible and rendered it a matter of elective identification: artists, viewers and critics could position themselves as members in particular subcultures of taste and understanding while dissociating themselves from others.37

Artistic rejuvenation Exposure to diverse international artistic currents not only made style relative and visible. It also exacerbated the sense among reformers that artistic renewal was urgent. The Soviet Union’s claim to leadership of the socialist world camp implied artistic leadership too. But when exposed in the international context – as it increasingly was – it was found wanting. The first World Fair of the post-war era, Brussels ’58, with which publication of Dmitrieva’s article on the contemporary style coincided, was a particularly humiliating experience. The exclusion of Soviet art from the narrative of ‘modern art’ which the fair’s international art exhibition constructed was only averted when the USSR Ministry of Culture agreed to loan Russian and Western modernist works still condemned for formalism and buried in museum storage. It was also compelled to accept a highly selective version of Socialist Realism and its subsumption under an international category of ‘Neo-Realism’. The term generally referred to recent engaged Western figurative art, especially by Italian, French and Belgian Marxists, who used expressionist, cubist and other modernist devices to critique capitalism. For Soviet orthodoxy, Neo-Realism remained an unacceptable revision of realism. But at Brussels, realism’s potential for

Modernizing Socialist Realism 217 renewal – the Soviet reformist agenda – seemingly received the ministerial imprimatur, contrary to the official position back home.38 The Festival of Youth and Students held in Moscow in 1957, an event of signal importance for de-Stalinization in artistic and popular culture, also set Soviet art in a less than flattering context – and with greater domestic impact because it was held on Soviet soil. A young leader of artistic reform, Moscow painter Pavel Nikonov, recalled his response to the range of diverse foreign tendencies he encountered for the first time at the festival’s international art exhibition: ‘In the West art was quite different. In our section everything was dead, some kind of tortured academicism. It had to be done differently. But how?’39 How to rejuvenate realist painting, how to inject it with renewed relevance and impact on its contemporary audience? As German Nedoshivin put it, ‘where is the new realistic form?’40 Answers to Nedoshivin’s and Nikonov’s questions had already begun to appear in two contexts, both of which injected new blood into the body of Soviet exhibition fare. The first, of signal importance for the formation of the Contemporary Style but beyond the scope of this chapter, was that of international exhibitions, especially those of ‘progressive’ or socialist artists, including the Festival of Youth and the unprecedented ‘Art of Socialist Countries’ in winter 1958–59.41 The second category, to which we shall now turn, was that of Moscow ‘youth exhibitions’.

Youth exhibitions Separate exhibitions for young artists under 36 years old were a significant new institution of the Thaw, introduced by the Moscow Artists’ Union during the first wave of anti-dogmatism and de-Stalinization in 1954 with the support and involvement of the Moscow Komsomol.42 Like the Sovremennik Theatre, youth exhibitions served as a critique of, and alternative to established, ‘grown-up’ institutions. Pitting their ‘youth’ against the sclerosis of age, they injected a new sense of dynamic change into artistic life. ‘Youth’ was one of the most valorized terms in the symbolic system of the Thaw, cogently embodying the party’s promises of rejuvenation of the socialist project, of social and scientific progress, and of the imminent advent of communism. But even as they guaranteed the radiant future, young people, especially adolescents, also represented a source of anxiety (as Juliane Fürst explores in this volume). It was not only political resistance that concerned the regime; it was also troubled by the spread of ideological apathy and even delinquency among young people.43 The measures the party and Komsomol adopted to tackle the social alienation of the young alternated nurture with mistrust. The integration of the younger generation was essential to ensure the continuity and development of the system. This applied also to young artists, whose

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problems were regularly discussed throughout the Thaw. As a shadow economy of art and underground artistic circles began to emerge, youth exhibitions were introduced partly as a means to keep talented young artists within the fold. Thus they were part of the reformist effort to maintain the viability of the state art system by building into it structures for renewal. These exhibitions provided young artists with rare opportunities to exhibit and sell their work. Moreover, thanks to the sponsorship of the Komsomol, preparations for them were often accompanied by paid assignments. These constituted a source of material support for young artists, who otherwise received little assistance while establishing themselves.44 Youth exhibitions had, by 1958, become a regular event in Moscow’s artistic calendar, and had acquired a reputation for innovation, controversy and even scandal; they represented the avant-garde of the official art system. They took place in spite of unremitting hostility towards them among conservatives in the art world who repeatedly tried to curtail them, finally succeeding (temporarily) in 1963 in the retrenchment that followed the ‘Manège Affair’.45 The separation out of youth as a distinct constituency and interest group split the fictional unity of the artistic body. But for reformist critics the generation gap was to be welcomed rather than feared; it opened up the possibility of diversity and change. ‘Youth’ as a curatorial category allowed some latitude for experiment and even for ‘mistakes’, whose seriousness could be mitigated by reference to youthful inexperience and exuberance. They began to look to the youth exhibitions as benchmarks of innovation, occasions to discern the tender young shoots of ‘contemporaneity’ that must be nurtured, to identify new names and new tendencies in art – and to consign others to the past.

The Fourth Moscow Youth Exhibition, 1958 The hallmarks of the new style began to be articulated with increasing clarity and consistency in discussions of the Fourth Moscow Youth Exhibition, which opened in June 1958 despite a last-minute rearguard attempt to obstruct it.46 As Vladimir Kostin, a leader of MOSKh’s liberal wing, summed up, it demonstrated that ‘[m]any young artists have felt the need to seek, for the expression of contemporary content, a contemporary realist form organically connected with it’.47 Young artists, other reviewers concurred, were united in search of ‘contemporary expressive means, [seeking] to speak with the viewer in clear, lapidary and generalized language’. What they had left behind was ‘dismal, boring descriptiveness, the simple statement of facts (. . .), trivial didacticism and anecdotalism’.48 In this discourse, formerly mandatory practices of Socialist Realism, which had emphasized exhaustive description, psychological portrayal and narrative, were disadvantageously counterpoised to the ‘contemporary’, and relegated as hallmarks of an obsolete, ‘passé’ style. Another antithesis was also in play here: between the verbal and the

Modernizing Socialist Realism 219 visual/spatial arts. The subordination of painting to a verbal narrative or script in the Stalinist art system had delegitimated painterliness – an emphasis on colour and brush mark – and other specifically visual means of communication that could not easily or fully be translated into verbal concepts. Thus it had functioned as a means to corral painting’s capacity for expression, suggestion and multivalence. Reformists identified contemporaneity with the liberation of the visual from the literary, the painterly from the verbal. This insistence on the specificity of the medium, reflecting the revival of Russian Formalist concerns, constituted an important area of rapprochement with modernism.49 Dmitrieva formulated her authoritative definition of the Contemporary Style in the light of the 1958 youth exhibition and, in particular, of one challenging painting presented there: The Construction of the Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Station (Figure 11.2) by Nikolai Andronov (born 1929), who had graduated from the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow in 1954. According to Andronov, a manuscript version of Dmitrieva’s article on the Contemporary Style directly discussed his painting.50 Other reformist art historians such as Aleksei Gastev (son of the purged revolutionary poet) also hailed Andronov’s painting as the advent of a new style.51 In order to put flesh on the bones of the Contemporary Style it will be useful to pause on this painting and its reception. The Construction of the Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Station was a large composition based on material Andronov had gathered on an assignment to the construction site of a major hydroelectric dam on the Volga. Its subject matter, the Promethean transformation of nature to produce electricity, had impeccable ‘contemporary’ credentials in a sense even conservatives could accept. It was a cliché of Khrushchev era public discourse that, ‘before our eyes the grandiose transformation of the world is taking place, ordinary people build, and giants of industry conquer the deserts,

Figure 11.2 Nikolai Andronov, Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Station, 1957.

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raise thousands of kilometres of virgin land, and discover new elements’.52 But for reformists, the intensive processes of transformation also had important implications for artistic style. Artists must produce works commensurate with the vast scale of the construction tasks under way and the stature of the ‘creators of the future, the heroes of our working days’, works that were intense and monumental in their visual impact. Kuibyshev depicts a barren, mountainous, industrial landscape. As the morning mist rises off the strip of pale water in the middle ground, the angular silhouettes of cranes can be seen at work. All the human action of the picture is compressed into a shallow register in the foreground, between the chill, white water and the surface of the canvas. Three figures stride off purposefully to the right, while another, pressed up against the picture plane, is cropped by the frame. The workers are not linked by any narrative motive or exchanges of glances, as was customary in Stalinist painting, but only by the shared direction of their determined march, which is underscored by the conspicuous brushstroke, the diagonal strips of reddish-brown snow and greenish-grey mud underfoot, and by two heavy trucks. The clumsy, decidedly un-picturesque, utilitarian forms of the trucks dominate the composition, along with the graceless human figures. There is no vegetation to soften the severe environment, a cold light deprives it of any charm of colour and atmosphere, and the paint application is equally lacking in refinement. Despite its fundamentally optimistic theme, Andronov’s painting departed so far from established norms that hardliners wanted it removed from the show. It was only after a battle within MOSKh that it remained.53 Even for reformers its technique was controversial. The ambivalence of the reviewer in the newspaper Moskovskaia pravda was typical: ‘For all its purely professional shortcomings and imperfections, and its occasional failure to find correct tonal relations, this painting also attracts [one] by its acute sense of contemporaneity, its pathos of creation’.54 Kostin conceded that, judged by established norms of ‘good painting’, it was ‘not hard to see the shortcomings of this piece – mistakes in the drawing of figures and objects, the rather coarse and heavy form’. However, he went on, ‘at the same time I know of very few works that convey the severe working days of our construction sites so strictly, without any ostentation in the treatment of the motif, and without over-sweetness in the manner of painting’.55 Pavel Sokolov-Skalia, a painter of the older generation, concurred with Kostin: ‘We will curse this painting for its lack of finish and because it is coarsely painted’. Yet, he found, it possessed a rhythm that well expressed the sense of strenuous labour characteristic of the present.56 Critics who welcomed Andronov’s painting consistently invoked ‘life itself’ as the source and determinant of its style. Gastev praised Andronov’s painting for ‘authenticity’ and for conveying the life-affirming rhythm of the contemporary construction site.57 The young critic Liudmila Bubnova found Andronov’s painting exemplary of a tendency among ‘the

Modernizing Socialist Realism 221 best young artists’ to ‘speak truthfully and forcefully about life, revealing it in all its complexity and contradictoriness; the wish to speak not only of victories and achievements, but also of difficulties’.58 ‘Contemporaneity’, as invoked in relation to Andronov’s painting, set two imperatives: the new severe truthfulness or authenticity noted in the passages cited above; and a new monumentality. These requisites identified artistic de-Stalinization with modernization in the sense of a renewed engagement with modernist form. Andronov’s image demonstratively flouted the norms of Stalinist painting as hypertrophied in Laktionov: saccharine colours, meticulous detail, deep space, contrived compositions, fluid transitions and immaculate finish. Instead, its awkwardness and severity, rough facture, abrupt confrontations of tones and hues, and tough, unbeautiful heroes: all this took on critical, contemporary meaning through its distance from the lakirovka and clichés of the past, becoming, by antithesis, the sign of its sincerity, emotional authenticity and observation of ‘life as it is’. Even committed reformers equated ‘authenticity’ and ‘contemporaneity’ with a fundamental optimism, however ‘severely’ it was expressed. This does not necessarily indicate, however, that they were insensitive to the darker complexity present in the work of Andronov and his peers. Being ‘contemporary’ meant, in part, restoring to realism the critical, expository role it had played in the past. Andronov later admitted that his visit to Kuibyshev had aroused in him conflicting emotions concerning the inexorable forward-march of progress and the means by which it was achieved. Tensions between the received triumphalism about socialist industrialization and their own personal encounters with its costs and effects left their trace on the surface of the young artists’ work.59 It was this ambiguous experience of Soviet modernity for which Andronov sought commensurate pictorial form: At the construction site of Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Station, where many prisoners worked, I witnessed the destruction and subsequent submergence of the ancient Russian town of Stavropol’ on the Volga. The drama and conflict sought expression in forms unexpected even for me. I wanted to convey the dramatic character of the whole atmosphere of labour in the means of painterly plasticity.60

Monumentality The ‘monumentality’ that reformers identified as a hallmark of artistic contemporaneity was, they claimed, impelled by the experience of Soviet modernization. Suppressing the ambivalence discussed above, this rhetoric served to legitimate modernist departures from naturalism such as relative flatness, expressive intensification of line and colour, and ‘generalization’ or reduction of detail. The scale and grandeur of the transformations going

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on before the artists’ eyes, the critics argued, combined with the intense rhythms of contemporary labour, rendered older forms of depiction inadequate, including meticulous description, narrative and the exploration of character development. They generated, instead, synthetic, ‘generalized’ or abstracted forms, and simplified, heightened expressive contrasts. A young artist, Irina Vorob’eva, recounted her visit to another of the major hydroelectric construction sites of the era: I was in Bratsk. I saw the elements of nature, against which backdrop man appears at first glance like an ant. What would be the result if one scrupulously depicted the gigantic cliffs, the bottomless pits, the innumerable machines and the small human figures? The artist would accurately convey the external impression, but he would not tell the truth. The rhythm of our life naturally demands such forms of expression in art as can convey the magnificent energy of creative labour, the stormy tempo of this labour, its dynamics.61 Reviewing the 1958 youth exhibition under the indicative headline, ‘In Search of Acute Contemporary Expression’, Bubnova wrote: The impetuous tempo of contemporary life, filled with amazing technical discoveries, demands more dynamic, acute language of art than, say the nineteenth-century tempo of life. The young clearly sense this need for a contemporary language of fine art and strive towards ever more acute, lapidary and monumental treatment.62 According to Bubnova, Andronov had found just ‘that lapidary language, that beaten-out, staccato rhythm, with whose help he has conveyed the severe pathos of the work of the constructors’, and had captured ‘contemporaneity’.63 Monumentality was not only opposed to the naturalistic conception of realism, displacing exhaustive detail or ‘verbosity’ by ‘lapidariness’, pedantic inventories by synthesis. It also rejected another characteristic which Stalinist Socialist Realism had derived from Peredvizhnik painting: the exploration of character development and playing out of emotional responses through dramatic scenarios, depicted gesture and facial expression. This Gastev and other modernizers now disparagingly dubbed ‘psychologism’ and consigned to the past. Thus Andronov’s major achievement, for Gastev, was the formation of a non-psychological, monumental type of painting: he treated his figures on an epic scale as social types rather than individuals, eschewing complex psychological development and the narrative on which this depended. Psychological description and story-telling were no longer the business of art; they had become the specific preserve of literature and cinema, freeing the visual and spatial arts to deal with other tasks specific to them.64

Modernizing Socialist Realism 223 To promote the ‘monumentalization’ of easel painting at the expense of ‘psychologism’ and narrative was not only to reject the nineteenth-century realist paradigm of easel painting that had been held up since the 1930s as the foundation of Socialist Realism. It challenged, more broadly, the authority of the conventions of pictorial representation established in easel painting since the Renaissance. Here, too, it resumed the process begun by early modernism but abandoned in the Soviet Union since the 1920s.65

New paradigms to engage the contemporary viewer The formerly canonized models of realism were designated ‘uncontemporary’ on a number of counts, not least the mode of spectatorship they required of the viewer. Their deep illusionistic space, isolated from the real world by the picture frame, combined with their use of detail and narrative, required a form of engrossed contemplation through time. Far from thrusting the viewer into the momentum of contemporary life and mobilizing her/him into action, they abstracted her/him from life and induced passivity.66 The most significant historical sources for a contemporary artistic language were now located in those currents of Soviet figurative painting of the 1920s that had earlier challenged the nineteenth-century identification of realism with verisimilitude and narrative and had continued to explore the technical and expressive possibilities of pre-war international, figurative modernism. Two artistic tendencies, in particular, were important for Andronov’s experiment in Kuibyshev and were identified by Dmitrieva and others as fruitful stylistic models. These were the Society of Easel Painters, OST, with its post-Cubist, flattened pictorial space, reduction of detail, and expressionist deformation, especially the work of Aleksandr Deineka; and the Soviet continuation of the pre-Revolutionary group Bubnovyi valet (the Knave of Diamonds) who had introduced a Russian interpretation of Paul Cézanne (exemplified by Petr Konchalovskii).67 The Contemporary Style’s champions did not, however, limit its potential sources to earlier Russian and Soviet engagements with international modernism. They also looked directly to foreign models, especially those with socialist, ‘progressive’ credentials. Liberal novelist Iurii Nagibin proposed that the best examples of the ‘extreme laconicism, simplification, and immediate expression of the Contemporary Style’ included Pablo Picasso’s response to the Spanish Civil War, Guernica (1937), and the work of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. Both artists were communists who made wide use of modernist devices to address contemporary issues of power and oppression.68 Such art was represented as a modern, activist form of realism; far from a passive reflection of reality, it was – in true Marxist fashion – an exhortation to go out and change it. Dmitrieva’s conception of the Contemporary Style in terms of ‘generalization, lapidariness and expression’, was also inspired by international,

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leftist art, as well as by the Soviet 1920s. Important models included the radical expressionist painting and graphic art that opposed the rise of fascism in Weimar Germany, and their recent revival in East Germany.69 She specifically cited Bertolt Brecht’s ‘alienation technique’ as a means for goading an audience into critical engagement with the questions raised in the theatre – and ultimately to an active response in actual life – rather than of lulling it into a contemplative, aesthetic trance. To be contemporary meant to be realist but emphatically not naturalistic: to be – like Brecht or Vladimir Maiakovskii – tendentious, militant and capable of rousing the viewer to thought and action through synthetic, generalized, laconic and expressive images.70 The search for new paradigms was justified not only by reference to changes in the reality realism was to ‘reflect’, but also by changes in the viewer it was to address. It was a legitimating premise of the Contemporary Style that ‘the aesthetic demands of the Soviet people’ had matured significantly since Socialist Realism’s inception in the 1930s.71 ‘Now it is not enough to show the viewer something’, Dmitrieva declared. ‘It is necessary to arouse him to think about the great social problems of contemporaneity, but . . . as in any genuine art, the path to thought lies through the emotions’.72 The Contemporary Style’s monumentality, ‘lapidariness, expression and generalization’ were determined by the need emotionally and intellectually to engage the viewer in an immediate and effective way. Andronov, for example, was praised for finding ‘a rhythmic structure for the picture, such that the theme can be read immediately, and what is depicted imprints itself on the memory and takes effect’.73

A unified style of modernity? The Contemporary Style’s rapprochement with modernism could hardly escape the attention of the guardians of orthodoxy. Even to refer to the ‘Cézannist’ tradition was still contentious in 1958, and Andronov’s Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Station and its champions were castigated for uncritically embracing the painterly devices of Bubnovyi valet.74 But the Contemporary Style also embodied an even more fundamental threat to the Soviet view of itself and the world. Invoking the party’s claims that an unprecedented ‘Scientific Technological Revolution’ was under way, some modernizers proposed that jet travel and space flight, atomic research, cybernetics and scientific abstractions had transformed the nature of perception, the way the world was cognized.75 Taken to its logical conclusion the argument could legitimate not only figurative modernism but even abstraction; indeed it recalled the rhetoric that had underpinned the development of non-objective art in the 1910s. Moreover, if the experience of scientific and technological modernity shared by East and West, socialist and capitalist camps alike, was the ultimate determinant on cultural forms

Modernizing Socialist Realism 225 it must surely generate a common ‘contemporary’ or modern style, a unified period style of the twentieth century. Whether out of caution or conviction, the reformists usually stopped short of such radical conclusions. But their conservative opponents made the heretical corollary of their arguments explicit in order to discredit the Contemporary Style as ‘a loophole through which the decadent influences of cosmopolitan modernism can penetrate our art’.76 To prioritize technological determinism over the fundamental differences in ideology and social relations under capitalism and socialism threatened to destabilize the binary structure of the world into two irreconcilable camps.77 But, the party reaffirmed, ‘in the world there exist two cultures, two ideologies, and we must join battle on behalf of our ideology which will be the salvation of all humanity’.78 ‘The Problem of Contemporaneity in Art is a Political Problem’, ominously read a headline in the conservative, Russian chauvinist art journal Khudozhnik.79 Under pressure from China, the CPSU launched an attack on ideological and cultural ‘revisionism’ in which the Contemporary Style was implicated. Debates concerning ‘contemporaneity’, ‘innovation’ and the ‘means of expression’ were denounced in August 1958 as a mask behind which artistic revisionists promoted an anti-realist, bourgeois capitalist notion of art quite irreconcilable with Socialist Realism.80 In December MOSKh’s party section upbraided reformist critics for attempting to reconcile realism and modernism and, by extension, of willing the convergence of socialism and capitalism.81 Conservatives also ‘unmasked’ the Contemporary Style’s affinity with dangerous ‘revisionist’ reinterpretations of Marxist–Leninist aesthetics proposed since the mid-1950s by East European and Western Marxists.82 They conflated Dmitrieva’s demand for a modernized artistic language with the modernist notion of the autonomy of art, currently being proselytized by revisionists in Poland. There, they alleged, the term ‘contemporary’ referred to ‘pure geometric and non-geometric abstraction, non-figurative structures based on the factor of chance (i.e. tachisme), and also figurative art operating with broad, extended artistic metaphor’ – in short, to modernism.83

Conclusion ‘The question of style is now especially urgent’, a conservative intervention proclaimed in 1961. ‘The struggle of styles . . . in contemporary art reflects the struggle of different ideologies.’84 Evidently the reformist aim to raise questions of style to conscious debate had succeeded at very least in forcing the agenda, compelling conservatives to engage with matters they had previously suppressed. The reformist promotion of a Contemporary Style placed the stylistic parameters of realism under review, just as the conception of socialism and the path to it were also subjected to revision in this period. However,

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it was not, on the whole, a rejection of the commitment to either socialism or realism, as conservatives charged. Nor was it about abandoning the civic, mobilizational role and mass address ascribed to art since the Revolution. The Contemporary Style was, rather, a call for a syncretic ‘realism of a new type – one might say, a militant realism that speaks in the name of the people’. In order to exploit the full expressive and persuasive potential of the artistic medium, this new realism was to ‘critically assimilate’ forms hitherto identified with modernism.85 A central platform of artistic de-Stalinization, the discussion of the Contemporary Style reopened debate about the relations between realism and modernism, art and reality, art and its audience, over which reformist and conservative factions would continue to battle through the Brezhnev era until the last days of the Soviet Union.86

Notes 1 N. Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu o sovremennom stile’, Tvorchestvo, 1958, no. 6, 9–12. See also the ensuing debate in Tvorchestvo, 1958, nos. 6–12; and 1959, nos. 5, 10, 12. 2 A. Kamenskii, ‘Na blizhnikh i dal’nikh podstupakh’ (1968) in Kamenskii, Vernisazhi, Moscow, Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1974, p. 42; Iu. Gerchuk, ‘Iskusstvo “ottepeli”. 1954–1964’, Voprosy iskusstvoznaniia, 1996, vol. 8, no. 1, 49–114; Id., ‘Iskusstvo “ottepeli” v poiskakh stilia’, Tvorchestvo, 1991, no. 6, 26–9. 3 For an indicative hostile account, see B.V. Vishniakov, ‘Ob odnoi kontseptsii iskusstva 1960–1980-kh godov’, Puti tvorchestva i kritika, Moscow: Izobrazitel’noe iskusstvo, 1990, p. 15. 4 S. Cohen, ‘The Friends and Foes of Change: Reformism and Conservatism in the Soviet Union’, in S. Cohen, A. Rabinowitch and R. Sharlet (eds), The Soviet Union Since Stalin, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980, pp. 11–12. Two major events spanning the main period of artistic de-Stalinization were a debate in MOSKh dedicated to ‘Innovation and Tradition’ held in December 1955, reported as ‘Traditsii i novatorstvo’, Iskusstvo, 1956, no. 2, 17–22, and RGANI, 5/36/25/3-10; and a debate in 1962 at which Dmitrieva gave the keynote lecture on ‘Novatorstvo v iskusstve sotsialisticheskogo realizma’, RGALI, 2465/1/403. 5 Cohen, ‘Friends and Foes’. 6 Garaudy, D’un réalisme sans rivages: Picasso, Saint-John Perse, Kafka , Paris: Plon, 1963. 7 For example, ‘Povyshat’ ideinyi uroven’, sovershenstvovat’ masterstvo’, Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 18 February 1953. 8 A. Dikii, ‘O forme’, Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 25 March 1953. 9 V. Kostin, ‘Khudozhnik i sovremennost’’, Iskusstvo, 1957, no. 3, 43. See S. Reid, ‘Destalinization and Taste’, Journal of Design History, 1997, vol. 10, no. 2, 182–4. 10 N. Dmitrieva, ‘Sorok let nazad’, Tvorchestvo, 1987, no. 11, 22. 11 K. Clark, The Soviet Novel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 222. 12 On the moribund state of Soviet aesthetics in the postwar period see Iu. Riurikov, ‘Lichnost’, iskusstvo i nauka’, Voprosy literatury, 1964, no. 2, pp. 45–71. For its revival see J. Scanlan, Marxism in the USSR, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985; and N. Dmitrieva, O prekrasnom, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1960. 13 K. Verdery, What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 7.

Modernizing Socialist Realism 227 14 For example, V. Kemenov, ‘Aspects of Two Cultures’ (1947), translated in H. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968, pp. 490–6. See also A. Baudin, ‘ “Why Is Soviet Painting Hidden from Us?” Zhdanov Art and Its International Relations and Fallout, 1947–53’, in T. Lahusen and E. Dobrenko (eds), Socialist Realism Without Shores, Durham: Duke University Press, 1997, pp. 227–56. 15 D. Shmarinov (interview), Moskovskii khudozhnik, no. 22, 15 December 1958. 16 S. Reid, ‘The Exhibition Art of Socialist Countries, Moscow 1958–9, and the Contemporary Style of Painting’, in S. Reid and D. Crowley (eds), Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, Oxford: Berg, 2000, pp. 101–32. 17 RGALI, 2465/1/75/2, 11. 18 Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 10; G. Nedoshivin, ‘ “Oshibochnaia kontseptsiia” ’, Tvorchestvo, 1959, no. 5, 14–15. 19 S. Ozhegov, Slovar’ russkogo iazyka, 4th edn, Moscow: Gos. izd. inostrannykh i natsional’nykh slovarei, 1960. 20 A. Smeliansky, The Russian Theatre After Stalin, transl. Patrick Miles, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 16–30. 21 A. Kantor, ‘O sovremennosti v iskusstve’, Iskusstvo, 1960, no. 4, 35–6. 22 For example, the St Petersburg journal Sovremennik (Contemporary), 1836–66, in which Alexander Pushkin, Vissarion Belinskii, Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevskii, Nikolai Dobroliubov and others were involved. 23 Kantor, ‘O sovremennosti’, pp. 35–6. But compare E. Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1977. 24 For detail see Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, chap. 7; and S. Reid, ‘Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror’, Russian Review, 2001, vol. 60, no. 2, 153–84. 25 See A. Kamenskii, ‘Razmyshleniia u poloten sovetskikh khudozhnikov’, Novyi mir, 1956, no. 7, 190–203. 26 Kamenskii, ‘Na blizhnikh’, p. 37. 27 F. Schwartz, ‘Cathedrals and Shoes: Concepts of Style in Wölfflin and Adorno’, New German Critique, 1998, vol. 75, 4. For an overview see J. Elkins, ‘Style’, in J. Turner (ed.), The Grove Dictionary of Art, London: Macmilllan, 1996, vol. 29, pp. 876–83. 28 Editorial, ‘Zerkalo epokhi. K diskussii o stile’, Tvorchestvo, 1959, no. 12, 11; Round table, ‘Cherty sovremennogo stilia’, Tvorchestvo, 1959, no. 10, 9. 29 Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 9. 30 A. Gastev, ‘Dvizhenie k stiliu’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 16 July 1960; G. Nisskii, ‘Poiski formy’, Moskovskii komsomolets, 9 April 1960; Iu. Nagibin, ‘Chto sovremenno?’ Literaturnaia gazeta, 3 December 1960. 31 Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 9. 32 Conservatives continued to insist on tselostnost’ (integrity, unitary wholeness) in the 1970s, in face of young artists’ polystylism. M. Makarov, ‘V poiskakh tselostnosti’, Tvorchestvo, 1976, vol. 8, and the ensuing debate in Tvorchestvo 1976–78. 33 The definition of style and its difference from the ‘method’ of Socialist Realism had already become the focus of theoretical debate in a discussion of realism held in the Gorky Institute of World Literature in 1957. See V. Prytkov, ‘Metod i stil’’, Tvorchestvo, 1958, no. 12, 16–17; O. Larmin, ‘Chto zhe takoe stil’’, Iskusstvo, 1958, no. 10, 40–4; and V. Shcherbina, ‘O khudozhestvennom raznoobrazii’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 14 October 1958. 34 Russian Formalist criticism emphasized the difference of art from life, the mediation of artistic transformations, conventions or ‘devices’. 35 Prytkov, ‘Metod’, p. 16; Iurii Gerchuk, interview with the author, Moscow, 1992; B. Vipper, ‘Neskol’ko tezisov k probleme stilia’, Tvorchestvo, 1962, no. 9,

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11–12; Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 11; Dmitrieva, ‘Mezhdu skhodstvom i neskhodstvom’, Iskusstvo, 1961, no. 2, 51. E. Zubkova, Obshchestvo i reformy, 1945–1964, Moscow: Rossiia molodaia, 1993, p. 138. See also L. Brusilovskaia, ‘Kul’tura povsednevnosti v epokhu “ottepeli” (metamorfozy stilia)’, Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’, 2000, no. 1, 163–74; Reid and Crowley, Style and Socialism; M. Edele, ‘Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945–1953’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 2002, vol. 50, no. 1, 37–61; D. Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 102. I have developed these ideas further in ‘The Exhibition Art of Socialist Countries’, 101–32; and ‘In the name of the People: The Manège Affair Revisited’, kritika 2005, vol. 6, no. 4. M. Alpatov, RGALI, 2329/4/880, 881; RGANI, 5/36/49/9-11; L. Sosset, ‘Brussels Shows Fifty Years of Modern Art’, The Studio, 1958, CLVI, no. 786, 65; A. Morozov, ‘Sovetskoe iskusstvo 60-kh godov i opyt “novogo realizma” ’, Sovetskoe iskusstvoznanie, 1989, no. 25, 39–63; and S. Reid ‘Towards a New Socialist Realism: the Re-Engagement with Modernism in the Khrushchev Thaw’, in S. Reid and R.P. Blakesley (eds), Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture and the Decorative Arts, Northern Illinois University Press, 2006, ch. 11. Conservatives accused Dmitrieva and others of attempting a rapprochement between Socialist Realism and Neo-Realism. D. Osipov, ‘Oshibochnaia kontseptsiia’, Sovetskaia kul’tura, 16 April 1959. Pavel Nikonov, ‘Nemnogo o sebe’, in Pavel Nikonov, exh. cat., Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik, 1990, p. 69. RGALI, 2465/1/75/11, 14. N. Zhukov, ‘Iskusstvo i sovremennost’. Razdum’ia na vystavke’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 17 January 1959. For detail see S. Reid, ‘Destalinization and the Remodernization of Soviet Art’, PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1996. W. Lacqueur and George Lichtheim (eds), The Soviet Cultural Scene 1956–1957, London: Atlantic Books, 1958, pp. 202–4; A. Kassof, The Soviet Youth Program, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965, p. 2; Zubkova, Obshchestvo, pp. 154–5. RGANI, 5/17/498/35-45. I am indebted to Aleksandr Vatlin and to the British Academy for enabling pursuit of the question ‘The Komsomol as Patron of Cultural Innovation’. V. Kostin, ‘Kto tam shagaet pravoi? 1954–1962’ (1982–83), repr. in G. Anisimov, Naedine s sovest’iu, Moscow: Musaget, 2002, p. 209. Youth exhibitions were resumed in 1966 when the eighth was held. On the ‘Manège Affair’ see P. Johnson, Khruschev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–1964, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965. M. Khieninson, ‘Vystavka molodykh priblizhaetsia’, Moskovskii khudozhnik, no. 9, 20 May 1958. It ran from 19 June to 28 July 1958. V. Kostin, ‘Zametki o molodezhnoi vystavke’, Moskovskii khudozhnik, no. 14, 30 July 1958. RGALI, 2943/1/991/6-7. T. Shatimova, ‘Molodye khudozhniki Moskvy’, Tvorchestvo, 1958, no. 9, 1958. Compare C. Greenberg, ‘Modernist Painting’ (1965), repr. in F. Frascina and C. Harrison (eds), Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, New York: Harper & Row, 1982, pp. 5–10. Nikolai Andronov, interview with the author, Moscow, 13 November 1994. Subsequent discussions indicate that Dmitrieva’s readership assumed she had Andronov’s Kuibyshev in mind. Editorial, ‘Cherty sovremennogo stilia’, Tvorchestvo, 1958, no. 10, 7.

Modernizing Socialist Realism 229 51 A. Gastev, ‘Podrazhanie? Zaimstvovaniie? Traditsii?’, Moskovskii khudozhnik, no. 15, 15 August 1958. 52 I. Titov, ‘Sovremennost’ – dusha iskusstva’, Moskovskii khudozhnik, no. 22, 15 December 1958. 53 Nikolai Andronov, interview with the author, Moscow, 13 November 1994. 54 M. Khieninson, ‘Tvorcheskii otchet’, Moskovskaia pravda, 17 August 1958. 55 RGALI, 2943/1/991/28; and V. Kostin, ‘Zametki o molodezhnoi vystavke’, Moskovskii khudozhnik, no. 14, 30 July 1958, 2. 56 RGALI, 2943/1/991/38. 57 Gastev, ‘Podrazhanie?’ 58 L. Bubnova, ‘V poiskakh ostrogo sovremennogo vyrazheniia’, Moskovskii khudozhnik no. 15, 15 August 1958. 59 Compare Pavel Nikonov’s paintings Our Work Days (1959–60, Almaty) and Geologists (1962, State Tret’iakov Gallery). 60 Nikolai Andronov, in interview with E. Zinger, ‘Dialogi. Dvoinoi portret’, Tvorchestvo, 1988, no. 8, 4. 61 ‘Govoriat molodye khudozhniki’, Iskusstvo, 1958, no. 10, 20. 62 Bubnova, ‘V poiskakh’. 63 Ibid. 64 Gastev, ‘Podrazhanie?’ 65 Bubnova, ‘V poiskakh’. 66 See N. Dmitrieva, Izobrazhenie i slovo, Moscow, Iskusstvo, 1962; Dmitrieva, ‘Stankovizm i monumental’nost’’, Dekorativnoe iskusstvo, 1961, no. 1, 1–3; V. and V. Lebedevy, ‘Novoe v oformlenii obshchestvennykh zdanii’, Iskusstvo, 1962, no. 9, 28–32. 67 Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 12; Bubnova, ‘V poiskakh’; RGALI, 2943/1/991/6-7; V. Kostin, ‘Khudozhnik sovremennosti’, Tvorchestvo, 1957, no. 7, 4–9; Kostin, ‘Kto tam’, 207. 68 Iu. Nagibin, ‘Chto sovremenno?’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 3 December 1960, 4. An exhibition of Pablo Picasso in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow in 1956, organized by Il’ia Erenburg, was a formative cultural event. V. Slepian, ‘The Young vs. the Old’, Problems of Communism, May–June 1962, 56–7; I. Golomshtok, ‘Unofficial Art in the Soviet Union’, in I. Golomshtok and A. Glezer, Soviet Art in Exile, New York: Random House, 1977, p. 89. 69 M. Damus, Malerei der DDR: Funktionen der bildenden Kunst im Realen Sozialismus, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1991, 142. An important discussion on ‘Realism and Modernity’ in East Germany may have influenced her formulation. W. Hütt, ‘Realismus und Modernität. Impulsive Gedanken über ein notwendiges Thema’, Bildende Kunst, 1956, no. 10, 565. 70 Dmitrieva, ‘ K voprosu’, p. 9. Compare B. Brecht, ‘Popularity and Realism’, in Frascina and Harrison, Modern Art, pp. 227–31. 71 ‘Zerkalo epokhi’, pp. 9–11. 72 Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 9. 73 O. Roitenberg, ‘Molodye khudozhniki Moskvy’, Iskusstvo, 1958, no. 9, 33. 74 K. Dorokhov, ‘Tendentsioznost’? Uproshchenstvo? Legkomyslie?’, Moskovskii khudozhnik, no. 18, 30 September 1958; ‘Vstrecha s masterami starshego pokoleniia’, Moskovskii khudozhnik no. 15, 15 August 1958; V. Prytkov, ‘Zametki o khudozhestvennoi kritike’, Iskusstvo, 1958, no. 12, 31–2. 75 For example, G. Nisskii, ‘Poiski formy’, Moskovskii komsomolets, 9 April 1960, 4; Gastev, ‘Dvizhenie’; and V. Turbin, Tovarishch vremia i tovarishch iskusstvo, Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1961. 76 D.A. Shmarinov (interview), Moskovskii khudozhnik, no. 22, 15 December 1958; Editorial, ‘K novym uspekham sotsialisticheskogo realizma. Na pervom uchreditel’nom s’’ezde khudozhnikov Russkoi Federatsii’, Iskusstvo no. 8, 1960, 4–7.

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77 Khudozhniki obsuzhdaiut tezisy doklada N.S. Khrushcheva’, Moskovskii khudozhnik no. 22, 15 December 1958, 4; V. Ivanov, ‘Sovremennost’ i khudozhestvennoe novatorstvo’, Kommunist, 1961, no. 6, 53–63. Only on the pretext of a critique of modernism was an exploration of its relation to the contemporary style possible in the Soviet press, for example Kantor, ‘O sovremennosti’, pp. 35–42. 78 ‘Khudozhniki obsuzhdaiut tezisy doklada N.S. Khrushcheva’, p. 4; Ivanov, ‘Sovremennost’ i khudozhestvennoe novatorstvo’. 79 M. Ovsiannikov, ‘Problema sovremennosti v iskusstve – problema politicheskaia’, Khudozhnik 1959, no. 9, 2. 80 V. Skatershchikov, ‘Krestovyi pokhod revizionistov protiv realizma’, Iskusstvo, 1958, no. 8, 5–8; N. Parsadanov, ‘O novatorstve podlinnom i mnimom’, Tvorchestvo, 1958, no. 11, 12. 81 ‘Khudozhniki obsuzhdaiut’; V. Kemenov, ‘Nekotorye voprosy sviazi iskusstva s zhizn’iu’, Iskusstvo. 1961, no. 8, 10–14. 82 On revisionism see W.E. Griffith, ‘The Decline and Fall of Revisionism in Eastern Europe’, in L. Labedz (ed.), Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962, p. 224; V. Kusin, ‘An Overview of East European Reformism’, Soviet Studies, 1976, vol. 287, no. 3, 338–61. 83 ‘Zadachi khudozhestvennoi kritiki’, Tvorchestvo, 1959, no. 12, 2; Ovsiannikov, ‘Problema’, p. 2. 84 T. Napolova, ‘Stil’, manera, original’nost’, Zvezda, 1961, no. 1, 185–92. 85 Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 9. 86 On ‘realism as an open system’ see A. Metchenko, ‘Sotsialisticheskii realizm: rasshiriaiushchiesia vozmozhnosti i teoreticheskie spory’, Oktiabr’, 1976, no. 4, 182–3.

12 ‘Russia is reading us once more’ The rehabilitation of poetry, 1953–64 Katharine Hodgson

The poetry that was published in the post-war years of the Stalin period tested its readers’ commitment almost to destruction, presenting them with numerous turgid epics containing ritualized panegyric to Stalin, but precious little that was original or individual. Poets, meanwhile, were faced with the choice either of making their work acceptable to the censor, or setting it aside until times changed. Critical articles of the early 1950s lamented the dearth of good poetry; it was only after Stalin’s death in 1953 that it was possible to begin to discuss just why this had been the case, and how it could be remedied. Well-known poets such as Nikolai Aseev, Il’ia Sel’vinskii, and Ol’ga Berggol’ts all published articles in the mid-1950s which drew attention to the shortcomings of contemporary poetry and argued for the poet’s right to focus on personal and private themes.1 Efforts were made to revive readers’ interest by inaugurating an annual Poetry Day in Moscow in 1955, when poets gave readings of their recent work; this quickly became a tradition in major cities across the Soviet Union, and annual almanacs containing new or newly published poetry as well as critical articles, began to appear in connection with Poetry Day.2 Such successful innovations were a potential threat to establishment poets who, as John and Carol Garrard put it, ‘made handsome careers from rhyming Pravda editorials and celebrating Soviet triumphs with occasional odes’.3 The appearance of poetry which declared a confident awareness of its own value as poetry, rather than a means for transmitting current party policy, threatened to expose the restricted and impoverished nature of such establishment figures’ work. It promoted a new agenda for poetry: the rehabilitation of a genre which had been gravely damaged by the Stalin era. Establishment figures met this threat to their comfortable status with virulent critical attacks on their rivals. While the public responded eagerly to a new generation of young poets born in the 1930s, such as Bella Akhmadulina, Andrei Voznesenskii and Evgenii Evtushenko, who gave readings to large and enthusiastic crowds, their official reception was mixed, reflecting the increasingly apparent division of the Writers’ Union into conservative and liberal wings. The early 1960s saw a series of

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campaigns headed by conservative writers and critics such as Vladimir Ermilov and Nikolai Gribachev against figures including Evtushenko and Aleksandr Tvardovskii, poet and editor of the liberal journal Novyi mir, to which the liberals responded both in critical articles defending young authors, and in concerted efforts to elect their own supporters to influential positions within the Writers’ Union.4 The struggles among writers ebbed and flowed in tandem with the political line emanating from Khrushchev, who intervened on a number of occasions, either to lecture writers on their proper responsibilities, as he did at meetings between Party leaders and writers in December 1962 and March 1963, or, when it suited his purposes, to sanction the publication of controversial works such as Evtushenko’s poem ‘Stalin’s Heirs’, which helped to promote his policy of de-Stalinization.5 Poets, however, had their own de-Stalinizing agenda. By writing and publishing work which upheld poetry’s integrity and independence, poets set about reclaiming the territory which had been lost by lyric poetry: the intimate and domestic world of personal emotion and experience, the contemplation of nature, philosophical reflections on life and on poetry itself. Poems on Stalin and the Terror did appear occasionally in the early 1960s: Tvardovskii’s long narrative poem Distance Beyond Distance, Evtushenko’s Stalin’s Heirs, and short poems about Stalin by Boris Slutskii.6 In general, however, censorship restrictions meant that work which addressed the legacy of the Terror, and difficult questions of individual guilt and complicity, remained largely unpublished or circulated anonymously in manuscript form. Where prose could adopt a tactic of narrative based around description without apparent authorial comment, as Solzhenitsyn did in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which appeared with Khrushchev’s blessing in 1962, poetry, with its renewed lyrical focus, did not lend itself so easily to displays of objectivity. Bland narrative verse which mixed superficial description with careful authorial interpretation had been a staple of Stalin-era literature. In condemning the Terror, poets tended towards the use of striking metaphor and imagery which was subjective and evocative; their work was often too outspoken to be published. Nevertheless, there was one aspect of the recent past which featured strongly in published poetry of the Thaw period: the war of 1941–45. This can be seen as being broadly in line with the official de-Stalinization agenda. In his 1956 speech at the 20th Party Congress Khrushchev highlighted Stalin’s errors which led to the disaster of June 1941, and stated that Stalin had appropriated credit for the victory, which properly belonged to the people.7 Poets had already begun to publish work which revised ritualized heroic representations of the war, placing an emphasis on the reality of wartime suffering and sacrifice. In one sense this represented a return to efforts made by poets during the war years to break with the conventions of Socialist Realist heroics; now, with the

The rehabilitation of poetry 233 benefit of hindsight, they could also reflect on the peculiar status of the war as a brief period of relative freedom and honesty, acknowledging the repression and Terror which both preceded and followed it. Younger poets remembered their wartime childhoods; this essay, however, will focus on poets born a decade or so earlier, many of whom had been directly involved in the war. These older poets had a more complex perspective, informed both by their wartime experiences, but also by their awareness of Stalinist repression before and after the war. Deming Brown identifies a generation of ‘poets formed during the war’, for whom the war was ‘a time of complex spiritual re-evaluation’.8 As children they had been brought up to believe in the bright socialist future, but they were also uncomfortably aware of the arrests of the late 1930s. They had been told that the Soviet army was second to none, but then came the retreat of summer 1941. Hopes for greater freedom at the end of the war were dashed by a new wave of repression. Many of them, just beginning their literary careers as the war came to an end, found it increasingly difficult to publish their work. As early as 1945 critics were directing young poets to set aside the war theme; it was evident that steps were being taken to avoid the public acknowledgement of a generation of young people who had returned from the war expecting that victory presaged changes at home. During the first post-war decade these poets stayed largely in the background, some unable to publish at all. With the onset of the cultural Thaw, however, came opportunities to publish work in which wartime experience, viewed from a distance, could be used to address broader issues relating to the Stalin era, including the Terror. These poets had been educated and formed, to a greater or lesser degree, by their Stalinist environment. Unlike younger poets who made their debuts in the mid-1950s and were able to represent a departure from the Stalinist past, unburdened by any deep-seated attachment to it, they had reached maturity under Stalin, and so their rejection of the past involved a need to question the self which had been formed by that past. Their poetry reflects the uncomfortable process of confronting values which they had once accepted, if only temporarily and in part, and which had now been publicly discredited. It has been argued by Priscilla Johnson that the Party, in an attempt to pursue ‘a policy of limited concessions’, encouraged critics to promote these poets, whom she describes as: ‘a pleiad of gifted but hitherto somewhat overlooked writers, of whom several belong to the so-called wartime generation now in its late thirties and forties and some to the category of liberals’. The decision to promote this generation is seen by Johnson as a measure to divert attention from younger, ‘temperamental new idols’.9 Certainly the older poets did not attract so much controversy, and tended to prefer to encounter their readers on the printed page rather than at readings attended by thousands. Yet their published poetry was not bland and

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conformist. Without seeking extensive publicity, without being involved to a significant extent in the apparatus of the Writers’ Union, they published work which contributed to the process of the de-Stalinization of poetry, as outlined above, as well as work which was rather more directly allied to the official de-Stalinization agenda through its treatment of the war theme. Work by several of the poets named by Johnson will be considered here: Boris Slutskii, Aleksandr Mezhirov, David Samoilov and Evgenii Vinokurov, together with their contemporaries Naum Korzhavin and Boris Chichibabin, both of whom had experienced arrest and imprisonment or exile in the post-war Stalin years. Korzhavin was arrested in 1947 for having read, quite openly, poems criticizing Stalin, and was exiled until 1954. Chichibabin served five years in the camps after his arrest in 1946. Slutskii, the oldest of the group, was born in 1919, and the youngest, Evgenii Vinokurov and Naum Korzhavin, in 1925. All of them published at least one collection of poetry during the Thaw years. Evgenii Vinokurov’s first collection was published in 1951, his second in 1956, followed by several collections in the early 1960s. Korzhavin was published in the 1961 anthology Pages from Tarusa, and his own collection of verse came out in 1963, the same year that Chichibabin published his debut collection. Iurii Levitanskii’s first collection of poetry was published in 1948 in Irkutsk; others, also published in the provinces, appeared regularly, including ones in 1959 and 1963. Aleksandr Mezhirov published his first collection of poetry in 1947, and continued to publish regularly. David Samoilov had to wait for 1958 for his first volume to appear; a second collection was published in 1963. Slutskii’s debut collection was in 1957; others followed in 1959, 1963 and 1964. Most of the poems to be discussed here, related to the war theme and to the broader agenda of de-Stalinizing poetry, appeared in their collections of the late 1950s and early 1960s; those which addressed Stalin and the Terror directly were, for the most part, only published many years after they were written. Until the mid-1950s these poets had been left more or less on the sidelines of Soviet literary life, unable to communicate to their readers the catastrophes of their age, the prison camps and the war; now, as Boris Slutskii wrote in a poem of the late 1950s which appeared thirty years later, they had finally made contact: Russia is reading us once more, And not just turning over the pages. Once more she catches our sidelong looks And hints, sometimes muffled. The Lazaruses have started to sing quietly, And now ever more loudly we can hear The grief of the hospital, the grief of the prison camp, And the huge grief of war.

The rehabilitation of poetry 235 And, obscurely, like the movement of Clouds across the night skies, Respect for us is awakening, Ears are starting to catch our voices more keenly. And once more we give lessons – Ever more insistently and boldly. And we are not ashamed to take for our lines Seven rubles or more.10 As Slutskii’s poem suggests, it was now possible for poetry to be considered as an honourable profession once more, and for poets to resume their role, established in nineteenth-century Russian tradition, as teacher, truth-teller and national conscience.

De-Stalinizing the war All the poets under discussion were of an age to have served in the war, although Korzhavin, one of the youngest, spent the war as an evacuee. Chichibabin served in the air force, but in a reserve regiment stationed in the Caucasus region. The others served on the front line for at least part of the war. Whether they contributed directly or indirectly to the war effort, however, they knew that the victory appropriated by Stalin as evidence of the virtues of the socialist system had been won by people motivated by a variety of considerations, not exclusively dedication to the tenets of Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism. They also remembered the hopes that had been raised in wartime for a future free from the brutal repression of the 1930s, hopes that had been encouraged by the perceptible relaxation of literary controls, when lyric poetry was tolerated, even encouraged, by some critics and writers who had begun to speak among themselves about greater freedom of expression and the dissolution of the oppressive structures of the Writers’ Union.11 By the summer of 1945, however, there were indications that memories of the war were deemed potentially disruptive and a threat to Stalin’s authority.12 Prominent military figures such as Marshal Zhukov were demoted, others were executed, and Stalin ruled that Victory Day, 9 May, was no longer to be a public holiday after the first anniversary of the end of the war in 1946. Under Khrushchev, however, Victory Day became a public holiday once again, and efforts were put into the construction of war memorials. The Thaw saw the return of one of the most popular fictional figures of wartime literature: Vasilii Terkin, the eponymous hero of Vasilii Terkin: a Book about a Soldier, a long narrative poem written and published at intervals during the war. Terkin was the creation of Aleksandr Tvardovskii, an influential liberal, deeply involved in the cultural life of the Khrushchev era. In the mid-1950s Terkin, a resourceful, cheerful and strikingly apolitical Everyman, reappeared in a satirical narrative poem, Terkin

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in the Other World, which circulated in manuscript form. It was finally cleared for publication in 1963, once it had been read by the author to Khrushchev in the company of distinguished foreign guests.13 This was a tale, set in wartime, of Terkin’s brief sojourn in the infernal regions before he was able to make his escape and return to the land of the living. Terkin’s tour of the underworld revealed features which would have been instantly recognizable to contemporary Soviet readers as satirical representations of their own reality, past and present: the underworld has its own hordes of bureaucrats, and its own organs of state security, presided over by Stalin. As the only living soul in the world of the dead, Terkin represented homely wisdom and decent human values, just as he had done in Tvardovskii’s earlier work. By placing Terkin in a Soviet underworld, Tvardovskii appeared to be implying that the wartime virtues which he embodies set him apart from his infernal and familiar surroundings, and that the soldiers returning from war found themselves strangers in the uncongenial, even hostile environment of the late Stalin years. Terkin’s return to the Russian reading public coincided with the publication of numerous collections by poets, his non-fictional contemporaries, in which war reminiscences played a significant part. The association of war and poetic inspiration, remembered by Aleksandr Mezhirov, can be interpreted both as one man’s creative response to extreme experiences, but also as a reminder of how lyric poetry was revitalized during the war, and, by implication, how it was subsequently suppressed. Recalling the Leningrad front, Mezhirov comments: The Muse lived there too, Genuine, alive. The silence of sentry-duty Was not a burden with her alongside. Because in the days of losses, On the burned-out ruins, She sang more often than she does now, With more inspiration and more purity . . .14 In poems written several years after the war had ended, several of the poets reflected on the long-term effect of their experiences. For Samoilov, in a poem which appeared in the early 1960s, the war was primarily a series of memories of his much younger and naïve self; his deeper understanding of the war came later: How they coincided – War, disaster, dreams and youth! And all those things sank into me And woke up again only later! . . .15

The rehabilitation of poetry 237 Meanwhile, Vinokurov writes of the irresistible pressure to speak fully of the world of war which he encountered at the age of seventeen; his initial response to the strange and dreadful things that confronted him there was, he says in a poem published in his 1964 collection Music, to retreat into the depths of the self. Now, however, he begs for listeners to whom he can reveal the abysses which were revealed to him then: I was filled to the brim with what I had lived through. The suffering which had driven me mad Burst me open, just as the granaries are split By corn in a year of terrifying harvest. And words came. Rushing just like the logs When they float timber down the river . . . Not even for one day Can I be silent, I beg you for the right, Mine – to talk, yours – to hear me out . . .16 In poems which appeared in the early 1960s both Vinokurov and Iurii Levitanskii evoke the sense of a profound inner transformation resulting from their wartime sufferings; this is not related to any sense of their own part in any historical mission, but to their perception of spiritual changes. Vinokurov pinpoints the moment at the end of the war when he is suddenly aware of something new: he can sense the existence of a soul within his body, as distinctly as he can sense the loaf of bread inside his kitbag.17 In a similar vein Levitanskii writes of having survived a close brush with death in a field hospital; his poem ‘Resurrection’ ends with the words: Leaning on a stick, I went out into the town. I looked at the world through new eyes. I consigned its faults to oblivion. I soared above god and man. All the philosophers of the world and all the prophets seemed like little children to me.18 Levitanskii’s ‘My generation’, published in 1963, also explores the transformative effect of war, playing on the ideas of prematurity and belatedness. Becoming part of a ‘late’ generation has endowed the poet – and his surviving contemporaries – with a certain resilience: And so I live now – late. A leaf unfurls – late. A light flares up – late. Snow falls – late.

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Katharine Hodgson My leaf will not sway – it is strong and won’t be torn off. My light burns calmly – it no longer fears the wind. My snow piles up, builds up – it is late, it will not melt any more.19

Poems about the war predominated in Boris Slutskii’s first published collections. They are written in a deliberately dry and unembellished style which contrasts with conventional official accounts privileging the heroic and the extraordinary. Though Slutskii’s representations of the war might seem innocuous to a contemporary reader, they were thought controversial at the time. The poem below was first published in 1956. Its portrayal of a dying soldier omits any description of the action in which he sustained his fatal wounds, showing him as a passive figure. Although the poet concludes by recognizing the soldier’s selfless devotion to the patriotic cause, he departs from convention once more when he mentions, if only to dismiss it, the possibility that it was compulsion, even coercion which had led the man to his death on the battlefield: Weary with the final weariness, Seized by the indifference of impending death, His big hands stretched out limply, A soldier lies. He could have been lying differently, He could have been lying with his wife in his own bed, He could have not been tearing at moss soaked in blood, He could . . . But could he? Really? Is it possible? No, he could not. The recruiting office sent his call-up papers. Beside him officers walked and strode. In the rear the tribunal hammered on its typewriter. And if it hadn’t hammered, could he? Hardly. He would have gone himself, no need for call-up papers. And not out of fear – out of conscience and honour. A soldier lies – lies in a pool of blood, But he does not wish to make any complaints.20 Here, as in other poems of the period, Slutskii gives a sober view of patriotism, not to undermine it, but to extend the recognition of wartime achievements to include those whose deaths were not heroic, and those who may have been awkward soldiers, but who still played their part in bringing about victory.21 When he considers his own contribution to the

The rehabilitation of poetry 239 war effort, he is ambivalent. While poems published in the mid-1950s, ‘I used to speak in Russia’s name’ and ‘How I was admitted to the Party’ express his satisfaction over carrying out his duties as a political officer, other poems, unpublished at the time, express unease and guilt over his participation in military tribunals dealing with disciplinary matters such as desertion and deliberate self-harm.22 He was assigned this work because of his unfinished legal education at the Moscow Institute of Jurisprudence, and so became part of the state’s mechanism of coercion. In ‘I judged people and know full well . . .’ Slutskii rejects the role of judge and wishes to forget his ‘particular and vile’ experience, saying that the only such role he might contemplate is that of football referee, since if they have dreams, they do not cry out in their sleep.23 Another poem, also published in 1987, recalls the poet’s non-regulation sense of sympathy when confronted with a soldier accused of deliberate self-harm, when he imagines the soldier’s own speculations as to whether Slutskii would turn out to be an enemy or a friend.24 His poem ‘My school friends’, which appeared in 1991, contrasts the fate of his school friends who all got killed at the front, with those of fellow law students, almost all of whom came back from the battlefield rather quickly. No explanation is offered, but the reader may guess what their military service consisted of.25

Confronting the Stalinist inheritance Slutskii’s poems remind the reader that ultimately, the war could not be separated from the coercive Stalinist state. Other poets used the war as an allegory for the Terror of the Stalin period, though not in work that was published at the time. Aleksandr Mezhirov’s story of soldiers under ‘friendly fire’, which was circulating in manuscript form in 1956, ends with an unmistakable allusion to a remark used to justify the Terror: ‘when you chop down a forest the chips fly’: We are standing in a bunch near Kolpino, The artillery is firing at its own side. The reconnaissance party Must have given them the wrong reference point. Shells fall short. Overshoot. Fall short. Our own side is being fired at by the artillery. We meant it when we took the Oath. We blew up the bridges behind us, No-one will leave the trenches. Shells fall short. Overshoot. Fall short. We are lying in a bunch near Kolpino And are shaking, riddled with smoke.

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Katharine Hodgson You should really shoot at the others, But they are shooting at their own side, their own men. The battalion commanders try to comfort us, The great Motherland loves us, The artillery batters its own side – They’re not felling a forest, but still the chips fly. 26

Iurii Levitanskii uses another commonplace associated with Stalin-era society – the image of people as cogs in a machine – in a poem of the 1950s, published decades later, which attempts to come to terms with the ‘epoch of the cult’. Levitanskii’s cogwheels are propelled by their loyalty to Stalin, which is as reliable and automatic as mathematical certainties, but they are revealed to be vulnerable human beings, wounded or dead in battle: Cogwheels, cogwheels walk across the field. Stalin is thinking of us. We must not take one step back. Two fours are four, five fives are twenty-five. But above the poor cogwheels a crow soars. And under the white bandage a wound burns. Vasen’kas, Viten’kas? – I can’t recognise you. Cogwheels, cogwheels lie on the snow . . .’27 Levitanskii’s poem attempts to deal with his ambivalent feelings towards Stalin, whom he describes both as teacher – ‘uchitel’’ – and tormentor – ‘muchitel’’. Aleksandr Mezhirov too suggests that the questioning of Stalinist certainties is an uncomfortable experience for those who have lost their ‘faith in the revolution and in Stalin, in the class nature of existence’. Addressing a contemporary, he remembers a shared wartime past: You and I were fellow-soldiers, We swore an oath to Stalin’s flag. We walked on, accompanied by explosions, Caused by us and by others. O, how happy we would have been, If we had been killed in the war!28

The rehabilitation of poetry 241 In the late 1950s and early 1960s Slutskii tackled the question of his own relations with Stalin and Stalinism in poems which emphasize a process of rational detachment. Two of these were published in the Literary Gazette in 1962. ‘The boss’ charts Slutskii’s move away from his devotion to Stalin as a gradual process: But all my life I worked for him, Went to bed late, got up early. I loved him. And was wounded for him. But none of that helped me at all. But I took his portrait with me everywhere. I hung it in the dugout and in the tent – Looked and looked at it, couldn’t look at it enough. And every year I was less and less Upset by his lack of love. And now my mood cannot be ruined By the plain fact that since time immemorial The bosses have not loved people like me.29 A recurring preoccupation for Slutskii is the need to dispel the aura of mystery which surrounded Stalin in his lifetime. In a poem published in 1965 the realization of Stalin’s mortality is presented as the key which releases the poet from his view of the leader as ‘lighthouse and harbour. And everything. And nothing more’. This enables the poet to remove Stalin as if he were nothing more than a crumpled shirt or a speck of fluff on his coat; the comparison of Stalin to a crumpled shirt was removed from the first published version of the poem.30 More poems of the early 1960s appeared in the late 1980s. In one, Slutskii notes his impressions on viewing Stalin’s dead body: yesterday’s supreme ruler now looks like somebody else, being much smaller than expected, grey and pockmarked.31 In another, recalling Moscow on the day of Stalin’s funeral, in ‘Contemporary reflections’, the poet is struck by the city’s sense of emptiness, but also by the frenetic effort to expunge all remaining traces of the dead leader: Moscow was like a house Abandoned, forsaken. How shall we live without Stalin? I looked all around: Moscow was not sad, Moscow was empty. It is not possible to be sad without a break. Everyone was tired to death. Everyone was asleep, only the yard-keepers

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Katharine Hodgson Were sweeping furiously, As if tearing at roots And scraping them up from the earth, As if ripping out of the chill soil The shouts of his orders, the writing of his decrees: The traces of the three-day death And old traces – Of thirty years of power, Grandeur and disaster . . .32

Slutskii concludes by announcing optimistically: ‘Socialism has been built. Let’s move people in’. Boris Chichibabin, however, was concerned that Stalin’s legacy had not been entirely obliterated: And does not Stalin’s spirit lurk In us ourselves, cowardly and predatory, When we do not seek the truth, But are simply afraid of the new? I shall charge at falsehood like a demon, I will not yield in my fight with the old, But what are we to do, when inside us Stalin is not dead? . . .33 Though Evtushenko had been able to publish his poem Stalin’s Heirs in 1962, which covered similar ground but was less forceful, Chichibabin, as a former prisoner, was far less well connected; his poem circulated in manuscript from the late 1950s. Naum Korzhavin, like Chichibabin, had first-hand experience of Stalinist repression, but had begun from a position of youthful idealism which he shared with many of his generation, whom he would later describe as victims of a tragic deception.34 His 1963 cycle ‘Naivety’ reflects on his feelings of guilt at having approved of the enforced collectivization of the peasantry. The Party activists’ decisiveness and devotion to the struggle, which he had once admired, is now seen as the result of violence unleashed by unthinking devotion to an idea.35 Korzhavin’s critique of the mentality on which Stalinism was founded, in poems which could not be published at the time, shows his conclusive detachment from his earlier convictions. Slutskii is unable to be quite so categorical. ‘This is what our descendants will say . . .’, considering how the Stalin era is likely to be viewed in the future, has a tinge of resentment at the prospect that those who lived orderly, dutiful lives will be seen as the villains, while the drunks will be seen as the only people with a conscience. He concludes ruefully: ‘And we – the good ones, We were the bad ones’.36 Written in the late 1950s, it appeared in 1991, when his prediction had been fulfilled.

The rehabilitation of poetry 243

The rehabilitation of poetry Large numbers of poems which addressed the social and political legacy of the Stalin era remained unpublished during Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization. The cultural Thaws did not extend to criticism of collectivization, which was not among Stalin’s crimes enumerated by Khrushchev at the 20th Party Congress. They did, however, enable poets to rediscover the socalled ‘eternal themes’ of lyric poetry: love and nature, the meaning of life and death, and to contemplate the power of poetic language to renew perceptions. The role of poetry and the poet became a prominent concern, with a renewed sense of confidence in the poet as truth-teller and national conscience. The poet’s role in the recuperation of truth is seen as a laborious process in Vinokurov’s ‘So just start to tell the truth!’, published in 1964. This is an exhortation (to the reader, to poets, to the poet himself) to speak the plain, essential truth, go down and search for it in the cellar’s darkest recesses, and come back with a tiny grain quivering in the palm of the hand.37 Levitanskii treats the serious subject of poetic responsibility with a lighter touch in ‘A poem in which a goose appears’, published in 1963. The poet is visited by a talking goose which offers him its feathers for use as quills. They will, it promises, bring him success. But the poet replies: ‘It isn’t pens which lie, but people, in essence’ and adds: O goose, your eternal feathers cannot save a liar anyway. And the point isn’t in the pens, oh no, but in conscience, honour, and taste. . . .38 A theme associated with the poet’s self-imposed task of carrying out his responsibilities honourably is that of memory. Even when poems are not explicit about what is to be remembered and why, the historical context in which they were written, a time when Soviet society’s collective amnesia was undergoing treatment, predisposes readers to look for allegories of the recently unmentionable past. Vinokurov uses apparently innocent nature imagery to consider the theme of memory in a poem published in 1960. While grass growing in spring has no memory of the previous year’s grass and is happy without a memory, the poet has a different view of memory’s reality: But for me it’s like this: I have wandered into a dense forest Of memories and cannot find my way out into the light . . . The world of the past! But it vanished long ago! It’s a long time since it actually existed! It used to exist, then vanished like a mirage. Since then some fifteen years or so have passed . . .

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Katharine Hodgson But I am wandering in thick forest, wandering With grazes on my face from the thrashing twigs.39

The poem withholds any further explanation of the precise nature of these labyrinthine memories; it is open to readers to bring their own interpretations. The act of remembering is accompanied by anxiety and pain, but there is no attempt to deny the continued presence of the past. By maintaining a lack of certainty over the interpretation of his poem, Vinokurov was both ensuring that it would find its way to his readers, and that it would not be limited by the kind of linear thinking which had dominated in earlier published poetry, and which left no room for ambiguity or mystery. Rather less suited for publication were poems which considered the subject of censorship and self-censorship; Slutskii wrote a few succinct and unsparing evocations of the compromises which he had made; these poems appeared many years later. He noted how he had saved a poem from the censor by the simple device of removing one short syllable: ‘not’: NOT – three letters. Not even a word. NOT – I removed. And then it was ready. You cross it out and then curse All the inventors of alphabets. And then you live in a business-like way, Well-fed, washed, comfortably you live.40 The shame of such compromise is evident also in ‘I varnish reality . . .’, in which Slutskii describes the violence he does to his poems in making them adhere to the norm as breaking their arms and chopping off their legs.41 Vinokurov’s ‘Pain’, published in 1956, attributes the difficulties he experiences in expressing painful emotions in his poetry to ingrained habit rather than censorship. The poem makes it clear that this habit has been instilled by the demands of his militarized and disciplined epoch. He describes his habitual rhythm as an ‘infantryman’s iamb’ which is unsuited for sorrow and longing, but admits: My sorrow over you gnaws at me today, And I am sad, and there is nothing wrong with that . . . But my pain still cannot ring out Through the trumpet rhythm of my iron verse.42 Nevertheless, there are hopeful signs that the ‘iron verse’ fostered by the Stalin period is capable of transformation. A common theme is the revitalizing power of the creative word when the poet releases it into the world. One of the most salient features of Stalin-era culture was the atrophy of the language of public discourse, including poetry, into formu-

The rehabilitation of poetry 245 lae which were drained of meaning by repetition and misuse. In poems published in 1962 and 1959, both Vinokurov and Levitanskii delight in the renewal of language. Vinokurov’s ‘The word’ presents an image of archaeologists digging up a vessel from an ancient burial mound; when they rub it, the word is released and cannot be brought back. The poem ends by reminding the reader that not all words have this mysterious power: there are some words your eyes just slide over, empty pods with no peas in them.43 Levitanskii’s evocation of the renewal of language takes the poet back to the primeval forest where he encounters the earliest human ancestor in the act of creating the first words. The poet receives these new words and brings them back to the present: They are still ringing like a bowstring, and like an arrow shot from the bow. They are made of colour, scent, and sound. The dew on them has not yet dried . . .44 This is a declaration of poetry as a process of creative regeneration, returning to its origins in order to make a new beginning. In his evocation of poetic inspiration, published in his 1963 collection, Samoilov goes underground, portraying the poet waiting patiently in a mineshaft, listening for the tapping on the other side of the rock wall which indicates that poetry is about to break through.45 Another poem from the same collection celebrates the mystery of ordinary words: And I realised that there are no Worn out words or things. Their essence, to the very core, Is exploded by a shaken genius. And the wind is far more extraordinary when it’s the wind and not a zephyr. I love ordinary words, They are like unexplored lands. It’s only at first that you understand them, Then their meaning becomes misty. They are polished like glass, And that is what our craft is.46 The re-affirmation of the beauty and mystery of ordinary language goes together with a new confidence in the poet’s right to concern himself with subjects which were previously considered too intimate or trivial, and to illuminate the everyday. Lyric poetry which captures a fleeting mood or perception had been thoroughly marginalized under Stalin, but made a recovery in the mid-1950s.

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This should not be seen as a mere pendant to the politically pointed writing which contributed to the re-evaluation of the Stalin era, but as a move to reclaim the territory proper to lyric poetry, territory which had been turned into forbidden ground because it was apolitical and individual. Vinokurov writes in 1958 of an intimate domestic scene in ‘My beloved was doing the washing’, moved to sympathy at the sight of his wife, believing herself unobserved, going about her laborious laundering.47 Numerous poems by Samoilov evoke and contemplate landscape and weather, and the poet’s fleeting perceptions of his surroundings. Often he chooses to portray a landscape on the brink of change, such as spring, the start of winter, or early autumn.48 Samoilov’s poems often deal with refreshed perceptions which depart from the obvious and conventional: ‘The snow lift’, from his 1958 collection, looks at falling snow and imagines that the snow is in fact hanging stationary while the city rises upwards. The snow is: whiter than a white horse, It is fresher than milk, It is heaped up to the very eaves, It is sifted through hundreds of sieves. Now it hangs motionless, It’s the city which is flying upwards. The city – up, past the nets of snow, The city – up, to the children’s delight. Past the snows Fly lampposts, Windows, Chimneys, Clocks, Cornices – Straight into the slow blizzard . . .49 It was the revival of lyric poetry, as well as the first tentative and not-sotentative explorations of the compromised past, which brought these poets back to their readers. As Slutskii acknowledged, if somewhat grudgingly, readers had made their own contribution to the poetry of the Thaw. His poem ‘Readers’ Opinions’, which appeared only in 1986, notes that although they may have lacked an appreciation of the finer points of grammar, they were quick to respond to authors’ cowardice by leaving their books on the shelf: Forgetting how he had bowed his own spine, The reader pulled us by the tongue, Despised those obedient to the rules And applauded the outspoken.

The rehabilitation of poetry 247 Although it irritated many of us, This hounding by our readers, Although the pressure of the angry masses Made us feel sorry for ourselves, Still this heightened interest Had its effect on the literary process.50 The revival of Russian poetry in the mid-1950s and early 1960s was something which embraced poets of all generations, including young poets at the start of their career, and older poets re-starting careers interrupted by the years of strict censorship. The older poets whose work is discussed here were either completing or about to embark on their higher education when the war broke out; their literary careers were delayed by the war, or by postwar cultural constraints, or both. Not all of them enjoyed immediate success at the time, and, indeed risked being eclipsed both by their elders who had their roots in pre-revolutionary Russian literature, and their juniors who could claim to belong to the post-Stalin world. Their particular vantage point, however, enabled them to draw on the legacy of the war years when it became possible to release themselves and their poetry from the restrictions of the Stalin era, and to play their part in restoring the good name of Russian poetry both in their own eyes, and in the eyes of their readers.

Notes 1 N. Aseev, ‘O strukturnoi pochve v poezii’, Den’ poezii, Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1956, pp. 55–7; O. Berggol’ts, ‘Razgovor o lirike’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 16 April 1953, 3, and ‘Protiv likvidatsii liriki’, ibid., 28 October 1954, 3–4; Il’ia Sel’vinskii, ‘Nabolevshii vopros’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 19 October 1954. 2 See G. Hosking, ‘The Twentieth Century, 1953–80’, in C. Moser (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russian Literature, rev. edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 529–30, and A. Surkov (ed.), Kratkaia literaturnaia entsiklopediia, 9 vols, Moscow: Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1962–78, vol. II, 1964, p. 594. See also P. Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts: the Politics of Soviet Culture, 1963–64, Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965, p. 4, on the postponement of Poetry Day in 1962. 3 J. Garrard and C. Garrard, Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union, London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 1999, p. 66. 4 Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts, pp. 30–44. 5 Ibid., 10–13, 23–7 and 5–6. 6 A. Tvardovskii, ‘Za dal’iu – dal’’ appeared in instalments between 1956 and 1960; E. Evtushenko, ‘Nasledniki Stalina’, Pravda, 21 October 1962; B. Slutskii, ‘Bog’ and ‘Khoziain’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 24 November 1962. 7 Report of the Central Committee to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, Moscow, February 14, 1956, London: Soviet News, 1956. 8 D. Brown, Soviet Russian Literature Since Stalin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. 80–1. 9 Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts, p. 81. 10 B. Slutskii, ‘Snova nas chitaet Rossiia . . .’, Sobranie sochinenii, 3 vols, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1991, vol. I, p. 226.

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11 D. Babichenko, Pisateli i tsenzory: sovetskaia literatura 1940-kh godov pod politicheskim kontrolem TsK, Moscow: Rossiia molodaia, 1994, pp. 98–102. 12 See V. Zhabinskii, Prosvety: zametki o sovetskoi literature 1956–57 g., München: Izdanie tsentral’nogo ob’’edineniia politicheskikh emigrantov iz SSSR, 1958, pp. 118–19. 13 L. Kopelew and R. Orlowa, Wir lebten in Moskau, München: Goldmann Verlag, 1990, p. 25. See also Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts, pp. 68–9. 14 A. Mezhirov, ‘Desantniki’, Izbrannoe, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1989, p. 561. 15 D. Samoilov, ‘Sorokovye’, Izbrannoe, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1980, p. 54. 16 E. Vinokurov, ‘Proshla voina. Rasskazy invalidov . . .’, Izbrannoe, 2 vols, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1976, vol. I, p. 245. 17 E. Vinokurov, ‘Vyzhil’, Izbrannoe, vol. I, p. 254. 18 Iu. Levitanskii, ‘Moe voskresen’e’, Vospominan’e o krasnom snege, Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1975, pp. 59–60. 19 Iu. Levitanskii, ‘Moe pokolenie’, Vospominan’e o krasnom snege, pp. 51–2. 20 B. Slutskii, ‘Posledneiu ustalost’iu ustav . . .’, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. I, pp. 93. 21 See, for example, ‘On prosbami nadoedal . . .’, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. I, 382, and ‘Nashi’, ibid., pp. 392–3, both published in 1987. 22 B. Slutskii, ‘Ia govoril ot imeni Rossii’, vol. I, p. 107 and ‘Kak menia prinimali v partiiu’, ibid., pp. 95–6. 23 B. Slutskii, ‘Ia sudil liudei i znaiu tochno . . .’, ibid., p. 145. 24 B. Slutskii, ‘Pristal’nost’ pytlivuiu ne priacha . . .’, ibid., p. 144. 25 B. Slutskii, ‘Moi tovarishchi po shkole’, ibid., p. 384. 26 A. Mezhirov, ‘My pod Kolpinom skopom stoim . . .’, Izbrannoe, pp. 561–2. 27 Iu. Levitanskii, ‘Vse gaechki da vintiki, a Bog – u pul’ta . . .’, Rekviem, Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989, pp. 263–4. 28 A. Mezhirov, ‘Chto ty plachesh’, staraia razvalina . . .’, Izbrannoe, p. 34. 29 B. Slutskii, ‘Khoziain’, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. I, p. 171. 30 B. Slutskii, ‘Ia ros pri Staline, no pristal’no . . .’, ibid., p. 414. 31 B. Slutskii, ‘Ne pulia byla na izlete, ne ptitsa . . .’, ibid., p. 169. 32 B. Slutskii, ‘Sovremennye razmyshleniia’, ibid., pp. 167–8. 33 B. Chichibabin, ‘Klianus’ na znameni veselom . . .’, http://lib.ru/POEZIQ/ CHICHIBABIN/sbornik.txt 34 N. Korzhavin, ‘Po kom zvonit kolokol’, Vremena, Frankfurt am Main: Posev, 1976, pp. 282–6. 35 N. Korzhavin, ‘Naivnost’, Vremena, pp. 303–10. 36 B. Slutskii, ‘Vot chto skazhut potomki . . .’, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. I, p. 285. 37 E. Vinokurov, ‘Tak nachinai zhe pravdu govorit!’, Izbrannoe, vol. I, p. 241. 38 Iu. Levitanskii, ‘Stikhotvorenie, v kotorom poiavliaetsia gus’, Vospominan’e o krasnom snege, pp. 79–80. 39 E. Vinokurov, ‘Vesnoiu novoi novaia trava . . .’, Izbrannoe, vol. I, p. 130. See also ‘Pamiat’, vol. I, p. 253. 40 B. Slutskii, ‘Byl pechal’nyi, a stal pechatnyi . . .’, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. I, p. 245. 41 B. Slutskii, ‘Lakiruiu deistvitelnost, ispravliaiu stikhi . . .’, ibid., p. 247. The first words: ‘I varnish reality’ allude to Vladimir Pomerantsev’s 1953 article, ‘On sincerity in literature’, Novyi mir, 12, 1953, 218–45. 42 E. Vinokurov, ‘Bol’, Izbrannoe, vol. I, p. 68. 43 E. Vinokurov, ‘Slovo’, ibid., p. 153. 44 Iu. Levitanskii, ‘Otkuda vy prikhodite, slova . . .’, Vospominan’e o krasnom snege, pp. 15–16. 45 D. Samoilov, ‘Vdokhnoven’e’, Izbrannoe, p. 63.

The rehabilitation of poetry 249 46 D. Samoilov, ‘Slova’, ibid., p. 64. The sixth line of the first stanza quoted is difficult to translate adequately, as it plays on two words for ‘wind’: the standard ‘veter’ and the consciously poetic ‘vetr’. 47 E. Vinokurov, ‘Moia liubimaia stirala . . .’, Izbrannoe, vol. I, p. 69. 48 See, for example, Samoilov, ‘Nachalo zimnikh dnei’, Izbrannoe, p. 24; ‘Chernyi topol’’, ibid., pp. 76–7; ‘Krasnaia osen’’, ibid., p. 82. 49 D. Samoilov, ‘Snezhnyi lift’, Izbrannoe, pp. 30–1. 50 B. Slutskii, ‘Chitatel’skie otsenki’, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. I, p. 484.

13 Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia Science in schools under Khrushchev Michael Froggatt Science and technology always played a significant role in the validating ideology of the Soviet Union; Marxism–Leninism claimed to be a scientific doctrine and asserted that it would advance all that was progressive and advantageous in the European scientific tradition, stripping it of bourgeois ideological distortions and self-interest, laying the material and technological basis for the achievement of communism and transforming mankind in the process. This utopian vision of scientific advancement had been very pronounced in the public culture of the 1920s but receded during the 1930s as pragmatic, technological achievements, subordinated to the immediate economic goals of a rapidly industrializing country, received more prominence.1 Theoretical science once again became a focus of attention in the post-war years, as Lysenkoism and its imitators were aggressively propagandized across the USSR and the past triumphs of Russian science were cynically exaggerated by ideologues. Despite dramatic changes in the rhetorical presentation of science during the process of de-Stalinization, the natural sciences remained a prominent topic in propaganda, the arts and such limited forums for public discussion as existed during the 1950s and 1960s. This renewed interest in fundamental sciences, and their broader impact on the ‘worldview’ of Soviet citizens, reached its peak in the early 1960s, when Soviet achievements in physics and the space race coincided with the peak of Khrushchev’s own personal authority. This chapter examines how the ideological framework within which the natural sciences were taught in Soviet classrooms was constructed and evolved during the 1950s and early 1960s. Ideology permeated every subject in primary and secondary education, from Lysenkoist biology to astronomy and the ‘microworld’ of atomic physics. This chapter, by considering the themes of nationalism and ‘scientific atheism’ in scientific education will examine the political and ideological lessons that students were supposed to draw from the natural sciences, how these lessons changed during the course of de-Stalinization and how educators themselves perceived and influenced these changes in the curriculum.

Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 251

Soviet patriotism in science teaching, 1953–64 The ideological campaign led by Zhdanov (Zhdanovshchina) had, from 1947, initiated a radical reappraisal of the history of science in Russia, in an attempt to foster ‘Soviet patriotism’ in the field of natural sciences. Historians, educators, lecturers and authors of works of popular science set out to ‘rediscover’ the achievements of Russian scientists, which had supposedly been neglected both by the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia, deceived by the ‘Germans’ within the Academy of Sciences, and foreigners, who were scornful of the intellectual achievements of the Slavs. The most obvious beneficiary of this reworking of history was the eighteenthcentury scientist Mikhail Lomonosov, whose already considerable reputation was artificially inflated by crediting him with later discoveries such as the law of the conservation of energy (which was also, conveniently, one of the cornerstones of Marxist dialectical materialism).2 This trend towards ‘rediscovering’ the priority (prioritet) of Russian scientists took an increasingly xenophobic course as the Cold War developed and, following the victory of Lysenkoism at the notorious August Session of 1948, ruthless purges swept through the scientific intelligentsia.3 A host of lesser figures were soon added to the pantheon of great Russian (and it was, without exception, Russian) scientists, so that by the end of the 1940s it had been established that Russians had invented, amongst other things, the radio, the light bulb, the aeroplane, arc welding, steam engines and the telegraph. The Soviet regime was determined that Russians should be presented as a people of great practical ingenuity, contrasting with the stereotypical image, both at home and abroad, of Russian scientists as theoretically brilliant but unable to bring work to technical fruition. Therefore, by the early 1950s, Soviet schoolchildren were expected to have very definite ideas about the history of Russian science and its relationship with the capitalist world. The teaching plan for physics in the 1952–53 teaching year noted that: The teaching of Soviet patriotism and Soviet pride is one of the most important tasks standing before physics teachers . . . Therefore historicism in the teaching of physics acquires great significance. Students finishing middle schools must not only know the names of M.V. Lomonosov, A.S. Popov, K.E. Tsiolkovskii, N.E. Zhukovskii, A.F. Mozhaiskii, P.N. Lebedev, A.G. Stoletov, V.V. Petrov, A.N. Lodygin, B.S. Iakobi, E.K. Lents, P.N. Iablochikov, N.G. Slavianov, and I.I. Pol’zunov, but must remember their significance in general science. The question of the priority of the scientists of our country must be put to students with absolute clarity.4 This list no doubt included some undeservedly ignored scientists, but the majority of the names belonged to minor electro-technicians of the

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nineteenth century, whose work had been granted retrospective prominence when Russia became the ‘home of electricity’ under the Soviets. Nonetheless students were forced to learn the significance of their work in mind-numbing detail. A characteristic omission was the absence of the names of any scientists whose reputation had been made after 1917; due to the turbulent state of the Soviet scientific community in the early 1950s, few living authorities were considered reliable enough to be included in textbooks and, indeed, textbooks were curiously silent about recent achievements in Soviet science. Astronomy and Lysenkoist genetics, both considered too ideologically significant to be ignored, were exceptions to this rule, but chemistry, biology and physics textbooks were otherwise largely devoid of Soviet achievements. Knowing that Russians had been pioneers in every field of scientific endeavour was however insufficient; the other vital lesson of ‘Soviet patriotism’ was that Russian scientists had always placed their love of the motherland before their desire for recognition abroad or personal profit. Therefore, according to the curriculum in 1953–54, students were required to know that I.V. Michurin, supposed mentor of Lysenko, was ‘a significant scientist able to create many valuable strains of fruit trees and plants for his homeland, that he was a great patriot and flat-out refused to go and work in America’.5 Similar stories were also recounted about Mendeleev, P.N. Lebedev and other heroes of pre-revolutionary science, but educators also sought more inventive ways of denigrating the scientific mentality of the West, hoping these would appeal to children. One Lysenkoist recommended taking students around a local zoo and telling them that it was only thanks to Lysenkoist doctrines about the ‘importance of environmental factors’ that Soviet zoo-keepers knew how to care for animals; in the West, where such factors would not be taken into consideration, animals would be deprived of food, water and heat.6 A guide to teaching astronomy, written in 1952 and used for many years afterwards, made a crude attempt at guilt by association by noting that the USA printed 20 astrological journals and 3000 syndicated newspaper columns on astrology, and that in this sense it was similar in its philosophical ‘idealism’ to Nazi Germany, whose crimes had also been partially inspired by worship of astrology.7 The level of ‘Soviet patriotism’ considered appropriate varied from discipline to discipline. This can best be shown by the example of a series of posters of famous scientists commissioned by the RSFSR Ministry of Education early in 1953 to decorate the walls of classrooms. The famous faces portrayed on the posters issued for chemistry and biology were almost exclusively those of Russians, with the exception of the Lysenkoists’ great French forebear Lamarck and Soviet favourite Darwin (whose ‘second homeland’ was, of course, Russia). Furthermore, the only living figures worthy of the admiration of Soviet schoolchildren were Lysenko himself and his follower, the uneducated charlatan Olga Lepeshinskaia. By contrast, the posters issued for physics largely portrayed

Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 253 foreigners, including Galileo, Faraday, Newton and Marie Curie, with only a handful of Russians, such as Zhukovskii and Lodygin, present.8 Such an imbalance could also be observed in textbooks; biology textbooks, rewritten by Lysenkoists in the late 1940s, rarely had a good word for any foreign scientist after Darwin, whilst physics textbooks tended to remain more cosmopolitan, partially due to the preponderance of laws which came with Anglo-Saxon names attached, something the discipline could hardly avoid.9 This imbalance is largely explained by the relative resistance of the physics and chemistry communities to the Lysenko-inspired purges of the late 1940s, which contrasted dramatically with the complete disintegration of the biology community under the ideological pressure exerted from above. The education of students in ‘Soviet patriotism’ was undoubtedly strongest in biology, due to the overwhelming dominance of Lysenkoists in the higher echelons of the educational establishment. Students were to be informed that there existed ‘two worlds’ in biology, a ‘materialist’ Soviet biology in the USSR and an ‘idealist’ Mendelist biology in the West, which united the interests of the Catholic hierarchy, the Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan-influenced US government. Having completed their unit on Darwinism, students were expected to answer the following questions: ‘What is the error and class essence of “Social Darwinism?” What significance has a correct resolution of the origin of man in the struggle of materialism with idealism?’.10 They were also to be informed that, apart from justifying racial hatred and oppression, the chief role of biologists in the West was the development of germ warfare for use in Korea. However, this remained insufficient for the Lysenkoists, with one arguing in late 1953: ‘The absence of Timiriazev, Vil’iams, the achievements of Michurin on the introduction of new species, only brief mentions of Lysenko – all this lowers the education of Soviet patriotism’.11 The rewriting of scientific history did not go completely unchallenged in other disciplines, as many educators saw it as detrimental to the education of pupils and therefore an affront to their own professional dignity. A report on standards in chemistry teaching in 1953 admitted as much when it noted approvingly that study of the work of Lomonosov, Mendeleev and others, educated students ‘with feelings of Soviet patriotism and national pride’ but admitted that students’ actual knowledge of chemistry was extremely poor, leading them to ‘confuse atoms and molecules, atomic and molecular weight, bases and acids’. Nonetheless, it smugly concluded that teachers were doing a good job, as the ‘majority of students leaving middle school . . . understand the achievements of our chemistry and the priority of Russian scientists in scientific discoveries’.12 However, even prior to Stalin’s death, the ‘patriotic’ distortions in the curriculum were not accepted so complacently by educators. During a discussion of textbooks for physics in January 1953 one of the authors argued against yet another attempt to appropriate scientific discoveries for Lomonosov; in this case

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he was to be credited with the discovery of absolute zero, which had allegedly been unjustly ignored until its ‘rediscovery’ a century later by the ‘idealist’ Lord Kelvin. The author stated: ‘It is entirely unnecessary that, in order to prove the priority of our science, we need to denigrate the achievements of scientists of other nations’.13 Such complaints began to mount after Stalin’s death and, during a discussion of new biology textbooks in December 1954, another author noted: ‘It is impossible to write in a distorted form about science in the West. They are ahead of us in many questions of physiology. It is often said officially at conferences that we are decades behind. The West has its science too. We must consider our own science, but this does not mean relating thoughtlessly towards foreign science’.14 This more liberal approach to educating students about Western science mirrored attempts to expose the scientific community itself to more Western influence after 1953, with increased attention being paid to organizing international conferences and exchanges of scientists. The USSR also ended its boycott of the Nobel Prizes following Stalin’s death, receiving as a reward its first laureate, as Academician N.N. Semenov was awarded the prize for chemistry in 1956.15 Teachers and authors of textbooks do seem to have generally believed, with some justification, that the Russian contribution to science had been neglected in the past; however, there also seems to have been a growing consensus that the inflated boasts of the Zhdanovshchina were harmful rather than constructive. One textbook author, also speaking in December 1954, noted: We do not cover the question of the illumination of the role of great scientists correctly in our textbooks in some disciplines. Quite correctly, during 1948, we decided to throw out pictures of famous foreign scientists, in order to make a break (perelom). But today we are lagging behind and this, to a certain extent, also applies to higher schools. There are teachers who come to middle schools not knowing the names of the great scientists connected with the development of certain areas of chemistry.16 The ignorance of teachers in some disciplines was hardly surprising; as the director of one pedagogical institute’s biology department noted, teachers were told ‘it is necessary to know about world science. That’s all very well, I’m very interested by world science, but try, under our conditions, finding out about world science’. He noted that the idea that teachers could request biology textbooks through libraries was ‘largely a fiction’, which was hardly surprising given that any foreign works which could be used to disprove the work of Trofim Lysenko were quickly relegated to a restricted section (spetskhran).17 The precedent for gradually diminishing the influence of ‘Soviet patriotism’ in the science curriculum was established within higher schools by a

Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 255 decree of the Ministry of Higher Education, issued on 25th February 1955, which praised the increased attention paid to the history of science since 1950 but decreed that lecturers must now turn their attention to the ‘achievements not only of native [otechestvennaia], but also world, science and technology’.18 This theme was further developed during the Central Committee plenum of July 1955, which renewed calls for scientists and technologists to study the experience of the capitalist world in areas where the enemy was ahead of the USSR; the old criticism of those who ‘bowed and scraped’ to Western authorities was now quietly dropped.19 The decisive turning point for secondary education came a year later, with a circular sent to teachers following the 30 June 1956 Central Committee decree ‘On Overcoming the Cult of Personality and its Consequences’. This circular outlined a series of corrections both in style and content that needed to be introduced into all areas of the school curriculum, and the natural sciences were not excluded: In school textbooks the whole development of science and technology is ascribed to a number of individually outstanding scientists and engineers. Not denying the great service of outstanding personalities – the authors of great discoveries and inventions – it is necessary to turn attention to the creative achievements of the masses. . . . It is necessary to show that each great discovery in science, each invention, is prepared by many people. This is insufficiently covered in present textbooks. . . .20 Not only did the circular thus criticize the ‘great man’ approach to the study of history, which had been so characteristic of late Stalinism, it also called for science to be taught to students in a context that emphasized its internationalist, universal attributes: The names of national scientists and innovators in production and the practical activity of the masses, the base for the development of scientific and technical ideas, must be known to students. However, science and technology develop not only on the basis of the accumulation of national experience, but also on the basis of the experience of the whole world. Students must have general concepts of the worldhistorical basis of the development of science and technology. Teachers should select and introduce factual material covering this. Showing the priority of our country in a series of discoveries, inventions and technical improvements, we cannot at the same time forget the achievements of foreign countries in this or that historical epoch. It must be explained to students that for the further elevation of all areas of the economic and cultural life of our country we must study all aspects of foreign science and technology, using in the interests of the Soviet people all that is best from other countries.21

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It should be noted that demonstrating the achievements of ‘foreign countries in this or that historical epoch’ in no way ruled out denigrating current achievements in capitalist countries and assuming, unquestioningly, that the socialist USSR was now outstripping the West. The decree also indicated that science teaching needed to place more of an emphasis on creative discussion of scientific issues: ‘With the goal of overcoming the consequences of the cult of personality, it is necessary to explain to students that scientific theory is not frozen dogma, but requires creative development and perfection’. It was especially noted, in a rebuke to the Lysenkoists, that when studying Michurinism, ‘it is not necessary to name Michurin himself many times’ or ‘blindly follow his methods’ but instead agricultural methods should be demonstrated with practical examples.22 However, it should be noted that the decree generally avoided attaching the taint of ‘the cult of personality’ or of Stalin’s name to any particular scientific schools, as debate remained heated within the scientific community over the various Stalinist dogmas in genetics, evolutionary theory, psychology and astronomy which had been imposed upon the scientific intelligentsia in the late 1940s. Even Lysenko, the most visible exponent of ‘Stalinist science’, who appeared particularly vulnerable in 1956, and was removed as President of the All-Union Agricultural Academy that April, had already begun to sway Khrushchev’s ideas on agriculture and was therefore to a certain extent shielded from public criticism.23 Despite these uncertainties, the decree seemed to hold the promise of a substantial change of emphasis in the science curriculum and indeed, after 1956, the ‘patriotic’ content of the science curriculum became considerably less prominent, although in many places it was retained in a milder form. The most conspicuously exaggerated statements were removed from textbooks, such as the following claim about the study of the nature of galaxies, included in a 1952 textbook on astronomy but removed from its 1962 edition: all the most recent information regarding the details of their constitution, the composition of their ‘populations’, the form of their stars and planets, in a word everything that is now known about galaxies, has been established by Soviet scientists.24 A meeting in July 1958 to assess demands on physics textbooks stated that students should now study ‘not the dead physics and technology of the past, but living science, always developing and enriched by the practical activity of many people’. One of the speakers also took evident satisfaction in the cosmopolitan content of Soviet physics textbooks, noting students could find in their pages Italians, Frenchmen, Germans, a Pole (Marie Curie) and a Dane (Bohr). However, he could not resist comparing this to parochial French and English textbooks, which engaged in ‘blatant falsification’ by claiming Edison as the inventor of the light bulb, and

Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 257 ignored the works of the Russian electro-engineers Iablochkov and Lodygin ‘although their works are known to the whole world’.25 These ‘rediscovered’ heroes of Russian physics and engineering were now falling out of favour, with the authors of textbooks requesting permission to remove these ‘pioneers’ from their own books, arguing the ‘steam engines’ and ‘telegraphs’ invented by their Russian forebears had little in common with these machines as they were usually understood, a situation which only confused students about the scientific principles behind important technological milestones.26 The 1958 reform of education, which increased the number of hours allotted to scientific education and especially emphasized practicality, saw a further reduction in the historicism of the scientific curriculum, as practical knowledge now came to be valued over ‘Soviet patriotism’ in the sciences. However, it should be noted that contemporary Soviet scientists were still not found to fill the newly created gaps and, at least in the official science syllabus, the achievements of Soviet science remained largely ignored; one physics textbook published in 1958 for the final year of secondary schools required students to be acquainted with only one postrevolutionary innovation, an electro-plating technique, the significance of which was hardly earth-shattering.27 Therefore, by the late 1950s the science curriculum in schools had been largely liberated from the stifling ‘patriotic’ requirements of the late 1940s, a move which received widespread support from scientific educators, who were concerned that ignorance of foreign scientific achievements was having a detrimental impact on the scientific knowledge of their students. These educators, themselves genuinely proud of the Russian scientific heritage, continued to defend those claims to priority that seemed most justified and remained aggrieved about perceived Western arrogance long after the most glaring historical distortions in the syllabus had been removed. They now encouraged students to think of science as a global phenomenon which, despite the progressive role of the USSR, required them to pay attention to advances in the capitalist world in order to further advance the science and technology of their homeland. Teachers were also instructed to de-emphasize the role of ‘great men’ in the history of science, instead presenting science as a collective endeavour in which ‘the masses’ played a crucial role. Despite these changes, it is by no means true that the science curriculum in schools had become any less ‘ideological’ during the years immediately after Stalin’s death, as was demonstrated by a renewed focus on another aspect of scientific education – ‘scientific atheism’.

‘Scientific’ atheism in science teaching, 1953–64 Open attacks on the Russian Orthodox Church and vocal anti-religious agitation had not had the prominence in post-war Stalinism that they had

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received in the 1930s, when uncoordinated and aggressive propaganda campaigns accompanied physical attacks on priests, believers and churches.28 Stalin’s central concerns in restoring a stable relationship with the Orthodox patriarchy during the Great Patriotic War had been the reestablishment of Soviet control in the areas recaptured from the Nazi occupiers in 1943 and 1944, and the need to create an impression of moderation to secure the support of the Western powers.29 The desire to achieve these political aims had led to the ‘statization’ of the Orthodox Church between 1943 and 1948, and less of an emphasis on combating ‘vestiges of the past’ in the mentality of the people. The political value of the Orthodox Church subsequently fell in the late 1940s, as the Soviet state once again imposed its full internal security apparatus and the Cold War hardened. Nonetheless, despite a September 1944 decree encouraging renewed anti-religious propaganda, ‘scientific atheism’ remained a low priority at all levels of the Soviet propaganda establishment in the late 1940s, and by the time of the 19th Party Congress, in late 1952, the issue was ‘hardly raised’.30 This situation was reflected in the science curriculum for post-war Soviet schools, where the emphasis was increasingly, as we have already seen, on nationalistic themes rather than on the struggle between progressive ‘materialism’ and reactionary ‘idealism’. Although the need to develop a ‘materialistic’ worldview amongst students continued to be mentioned in teaching manuals and textbooks up to Stalin’s death, it was clearly no longer a priority in Soviet education. Science teachers were well aware that anti-religious propaganda was no longer a central, or even compulsory, part of their duties, with one justifying this by stating simply: ‘It seems to me that the Soviet state relates differently to religion now’.31 This policy of moderation was radically modified by a decree that the Central Committee accepted on 7 July 1954, initiating a press campaign that began later that month. This decree, which appears to have been the work of Khrushchev and his aides, was heavily criticized by Molotov and others within the collective leadership, who feared it would provoke widespread social unrest.32 This is exactly what it did, by unleashing a wave of aggressive and uncoordinated anti-religious activity, widely reminiscent of the 1930s and mostly conducted by eager young Komsomol activists. The other social organizations that the decree had ordered to focus on the issue, such as the Academy of Sciences and the ‘Znanie’ society, were slower to respond and did not manage to organize meetings to respond to the decree until well into September and October. This was also true of the Ministry of Education, which was intended to play the central role in eliminating religious belief amongst youth, with the decree noting that ‘the teaching of school subjects (history, literature, natural sciences, physics, chemistry etc.) should be saturated with atheism . . . the anti-religious thrust of school programmes must be enhanced’.33 The Ministry of Education therefore held a meeting on 29 October 1954 to discuss a document entitled ‘Anti-Religious Education in Secondary

Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 259 School’, which officials had already spent two weeks drafting. Presenting the document, it was noted the type of student who was in need of a more thorough understanding of the materialist nature of science was one who ‘mastered the laws of physics and chemistry, the laws of the conservation and preservation of energy, but then, going home, took down her gospels, read them and sang religious hymns at meetings’. It was therefore essential not only to teach science in an objective, materialist fashion but to drive home to students the ideological ‘worldview’ implications of the science which they studied. The decree to increase the emphasis on atheistic education did not meet with universal approval, with some teachers complaining the curriculum already over-stretched both them and their pupils and others querying whether they should be ‘for or against’ independent anti-religious circles set up by their students. There also remained considerable disagreement on how best to approach the subject; whilst one delegate demanded a greater focus on the persecution conducted by the Inquisition against progressive scientists during the Renaissance, another asked for more ‘contemporary material’ relevant to the lives of Soviet students.34 The militant campaign that had provoked this meeting was, however, cut short by a decree issued under Khrushchev’s name on 10 November 1954, which admonished activists for being too radical in their attacks, and ‘insulting believers’. Despite this, it continued to note: the Central Committee reminds you that the basis of scientific atheistic propaganda must be the popular explanation of the most important phenomena of nature and society, such as questions of the formation of the universe, the origins of life and man on Earth, achievements in the areas of astronomy, biology, physiology, chemistry and other sciences which affirm the correctness of materialist views of nature and society.35 Therefore, although the furore of the summer had died away by early 1955, leaving teachers and propagandists confused and lacking direction, it remained clear that scientific education should continue to focus more attention on combating religious belief, and in the teaching plan for 1955–56 scientific atheism therefore received far more attention than in previous years.36 An article in Uchitel’skaia Gazeta that October indicated how one teacher had set about her task: I described how the law of the conservation of matter discovered by Lomonosov [sic] can be seen in the endless and eternal universe, in the eternal cycle of matter. The lecture provided an opportunity for explaining the erroneousness of both religious conceptions about the creation of the world ‘out of nothing’, and of superstitious fears of the ‘end’, the ‘destruction’ of the world . . .37

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This was the essence of scientific atheist propaganda; an assurance that the world was essentially comprehensible, benign and subject to human agency. Such teaching continued to enjoy greater prominence in schools in the late 1950s than during the immediate post-war years, despite the fact that the visible campaign against the churches ceased in 1954 and was only reinitiated in 1958. There was also a growing awareness from the mid1950s that youth had to be especially targeted by those espousing scientific atheistic values; it was reported to the Komsomol that in 1956 there had been 311 applicants to seminaries who were aged 18 to 20 and possessed full secondary education, and that these had included Komsomol members.38 There also remained concern at the number of youngsters participating in pilgrimages of a ‘mass character’ to any of the more than thirty ‘holy sites’ scattered across the RSFSR, where it was believed they were exposed to mystical, and potentially anti-Soviet, ideas while beyond the reach of Party, state or Komsomol supervision.39 The prospect of a generation who had known only socialism developing such firm religious convictions was clearly alarming to ideologues, and increased calls to target youth with scientific atheistic propaganda; as religious believers tended to be less likely to read the Soviet press, attend public lectures or visit the cinema than other sections of the population, the only place that propaganda could be guaranteed to reach them was the classroom. What form did the scientific atheism that was now emphasized in teaching take? The truth is that scientific atheism remained remarkably similar, both in form and content, to the anti-religious propaganda which had first been seen during the Civil War, although teachers seemed to be developing an increasing sense of the futility of their task as the years went by. Biology teachers were expected to contrast Biblical teachings on the origins of life and mankind with the evidence of evolutionary biology, and to demonstrate that ‘holy water’ was nothing of the sort by using microscopes to show the bacteria that infested it. Chemistry teachers specialized in engineering ‘miracles’ and then explaining their scientific basis; such miracles included the transformation of water into wine, the transformation of copper coins into silver ones or the production of ‘crying icons’. Physics teachers were to disprove the idea that mirrors and lens held any mystical significance and explain to students the material causes of thunder and lightning. During the final year of middle school students were to have the nature of comets and eclipses explained to them (it had been noted that school attendance fell noticeably during the solar eclipse of 30 June 1954, as superstitious parents kept their children at home),40 and the theory of the ‘Big Bang’ was to be decisively repudiated, with students being reassured that the universe was infinite both in time and space. Students were also to be encouraged to make their own observations of the heavens with cheap, mass-produced Maskutov telescopes, supposedly available in every Soviet school.41 However, it remains open to question how many of the physical demonstrations suggested in textbooks were

Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 261 practical in Soviet schools of this era that, especially in rural areas, remained starved of scientific equipment. The dramatic successes of the Soviet space programme in the late 1950s and early 1960s also played an obvious role in attempts to inculcate a materialist worldview amongst students, with Soviet man’s ability to conquer space (which was definitely not inhabited by God or angels) driven home to them. These highly visible triumphs of Soviet technology did appear to make some impact on the outlook of students, with one girl from Kursk, studying in the eighth grade, noting bluntly in a letter written in 1957: ‘I don’t believe in religion anymore, and after the launch of the first satellite of the Earth my disbelief has become greater’.42 Other students of the time recall how, after Gagarin’s flight, they ‘all became atheists’ but also remember the gentle mockery and condescension they met when, returning home from school, they attempted to convert their more pious grandparents.43 Thus, even if the achievements of the Soviet space programme did have a tangible effect on the ‘worldview’ of some students, any hopes that this would have wider resonance amongst believers in their families appear to have been groundless. The supposed saturation of the science curriculum with scientific atheism entailed further difficulties for teachers. Science teachers seem to have been content simply to teach ‘materialist science’, and assume that this would create the necessary worldview in their students, rather than overburden the curriculum with active attacks on established religions and religious belief.44 Although such a lack of militancy was criticized within the ideological establishment it was understandable, as teachers were both overworked and loath to interfere in areas beyond their professional competence. Some teachers appear to have been concerned that they would effectively be providing a free, if highly critical, religious education; for instance, one suggested course in zoology for the seventh grade required the students to be thoroughly schooled in the narrative of the book of Genesis, if only to ensure they would learn the scientific facts to refute it.45 There was also the concern that teachers were educating students in superstitions that were already outdated, and which they would not otherwise have heard about. When chemistry teachers were told to explain the phenomena of ‘will-o’-the-wisps’ by explaining the nature and origin of marsh gas, one noted: ‘What if you tell a student about a superstition they didn’t know anything about, and now they’re interested by it? This is a very dangerous path’.46 There was also the risk that by using science in such a crude fashion, science itself might come into disrepute; the author of one textbook wrote as early as 1952 that ‘chemical miracles’ should not be used, as they reduced science to ‘charlatanry’ and weakened the resolve of teachers to engage in more serious propaganda.47 Teachers were therefore very keen to define whether they should be engaged in teaching ‘materialist science’, ‘scientific atheism’ or even ‘anti-religious atheism’, although they never received a clear answer to these queries.48 It is notable that the

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course in scientific atheism introduced at all pedagogical institutes from 1959 enjoyed no success until it was made compulsory in 1964, and that as late as 1972 only a third of teachers had received any training in scientific atheism.49 Apart from using the natural sciences to demonstrate the false nature of religious doctrine and superstition, students were also educated in the ‘history of the struggle of science with religion’. This subject was almost invariably studied with reference to the persecution of Galileo and Giodorno Bruno by the Inquisition, with students often encouraged to stage mock trials or build lovingly crafted dioramas of Bruno being burnt at the stake. However, attempts were made to expand this range of subjects, with one teacher suggesting covering ‘how hostile the Catholic Church was to the invention of the steam engine, and how religious superstition hindered the introduction of this important invention for the masses’.50 However, such stories inevitably had two drawbacks. The first was that the events they related were over 300 years old and the second was that they referred to the Catholic Church, whose adherents were only a minority of the believers in the USSR. Teachers and educators were obviously aware of the irrelevance of much of this material to students’ own beliefs (whether Russian Orthodox or other denominations), but they failed to find anything to replace it. One speaker at the conference in October 1954 also muddied the waters by pointing out that Galileo himself was a loyal Catholic and the struggles over his ideas had a class essence which must be taught to students, otherwise they would ‘simply say “people were ignorant then, they didn’t know anything, but now they do” ’ and this would lead to scientific atheistic education simply being a list of ‘who was burnt and when’.51 The issue of the relevancy of historical material continued to divide ideologues, putting educators in a difficult position. Discussing two prototypes for a new astronomy textbook in February 1961, reviewers noted that one of the textbooks said ‘nothing of significance for worldview’, and especially criticized the authors’ failure to pay due attention to Copernicus. The second text was criticized for including a lengthy digression on the struggle of Copernicus with the church, and thereby giving attention to articles of Catholic doctrine already 400 years out of date.52 Alongside the establishment of the Copernican system, the other great story of the ‘struggle of science with religion’ was that of the development of Darwinism, but Russia again here lacked striking narratives to compare with the Oxford Debate or the Scopes Trial. Furthermore, the amount of curriculum time devoted to evolutionary theory had to be cut back from 1955, apparently due to the ongoing controversy over the work of Lysenko, so students were less likely to receive a full education in the historical development of Darwinism than they had previously.53 Students were therefore likely to conclude that, while Catholicism, and to a lesser degree Protes-

Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 263 tantism, were hostile to scientific development, the Russian Orthodox Church had largely remained silent on the issue. Given the inherent flaws in much scientific atheistic education, its failure to address the majority of its audience and the unwillingness of teachers to engage fully with the subject, it is hardly surprising that five years after the initiation of Khrushchev’s second anti-religious campaign, in March 1964, Pravda was still criticizing the authors of science textbooks for failing to find ‘concrete examples’ to combat religious prejudice in schools.54 There was no sign that religiosity amongst Soviet youth, or amongst the population in general, was declining and a survey carried out amongst readers of Komsomol’skaia Pravda in 1961 indicated that religion was still considered to be less of a ‘social evil’ than drunkenness, greed, nihilism, ‘petty bourgeois mentality’ (meshchanstvo) or apathy.55 It should also be noted that even those pupils who were converted to materialism were not always grateful for this, as one child who attended school in the early 1960s recalled: ‘Unfortunately, I believed “science”, but for some reason I always envied those people from the past to whom science had not yet shown that God didn’t exist. It seemed to me that life with faith was much better than materialism’.56 The continuing failure of scientific atheistic teaching in schools to provide a sense of moral and spiritual identity for pupils can also be clearly demonstrated by the healthy growth in the 1960s of denominations other than the Russian Orthodox Church, which drew their support from cohorts who were increasingly in their teens and twenties. It must also be noted that the general attitude towards science fostered in the Soviet Union at this time may not have been conducive to developing a ‘materialist worldview’ amongst students. One article aimed at teachers, for example, condemned as a ‘vestige of the past’ the medicine woman Afon’kina, who had been exposed in Moscow as having treated her patients with remedies derived from common hay. This writer saw no problem in recommending that a ‘materialist’ antidote to such nonsense was for students to study the work of the uneducated Lysenkoist fraud, and Old Bolshevik, Olga Lepeshinskaia, who had gained fame through advocating rejuvenation by means of prolonged baths in soda water, a sensation which had promptly led to shops all over the USSR selling out of baking soda.57 How students were supposed to recognize the distinction between these two uneducated old women, one officially denounced and one officially lauded, is difficult to determine. For similar reasons, the job of serious science teachers was to become increasingly difficult from the 1960s as dubious new ‘materialist’ phenomena, such as extra-sensory perception, received greater attention in the Soviet popular press. Therefore a curriculum which aimed at inculcating a rationalist, scientific approach to nature often ran at cross-currents with more esoteric aspects of ‘science’ as portrayed in the Soviet media, making the already difficult task of educating students in ‘scientific atheism’ near impossible.

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Conclusion The ideological light in which science was presented in Soviet schools changed gradually, yet markedly, during the course of the 1950s. The narrow interpretation of ‘Soviet patriotism’ as revived Great Russian nationalism was increasingly frowned upon, and science ceased to be presented as part of a linear narrative of uniquely Russian achievements. Instead, science could once again be portrayed as the fruit of the work of an international fraternity of scientists, engaged in a constructive exchange of ideas conducted across national frontiers, a change in emphasis which it was hoped would open up the Soviet scientific community to new ideas and foster economic development. However, this in no way meant that the natural sciences became purely utilitarian subjects in the 1950s, concerned solely with developing narrowly technical skills and training a technocratic elite, as might be imagined given the accusations of ‘economism’ often levelled at Khrushchev. Rather, scientific Prometheanism became a core component of the radically utopian agenda that Khrushchev increasingly came to espouse in the late 1950s, culminating in the new Party Programme of 1961, and this was expressed in science teaching in schools.58 The ‘worldview’ that accompanied teaching in science, rational, materialist and atheistic, therefore became, if anything, more important during the course of the 1950s, and during de-Stalinization science education in Soviet schools became more, rather than less, imbued with Marxist–Leninist ideology. This is certainly not to suggest that Soviet science education in the 1950s and 1960s succeeded in breeding a generation of unquestioning rationalists who believed, as they were encouraged to, that science and Marxist dialectical materialism went hand-in-hand. Science was to become one of the central concerns of the ‘men of the sixties’ (shestiadesiatniki) for the obvious reason that the ideal of scientific truth was too powerful to be constrained within the stifling ideology of the Soviet state.

Notes 1 See J. Andrews, Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917–1938, College Station: Texas University Press, 2003. 2 See, for example, I.I. Sokolov, Metodika prepodavaniia zfiiki v srednei shkole , Moscow: uchpedgiz, 1951, pp. 12, 34. 3 For the most recent and comprehensive appraisal of these events, see N. Krementsev, Stalinist Science, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 4 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/2864/2. 5 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/2866/13. 6 V.P. Gerasimov, ‘Primery upravleniia razmozheniem i individual’nym razvitiem dikikh zhivotnykh’, Estestvoznanie v shkole, 1955, no. 5, 75–7. 7 V.A. Shishakov, V pomoshch’ uchiteliu astronomii, Moscow: uchpedgiz, 1950, p. 86. 8 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/831/9-10; Ibid., 2306/75/839/24-26; Ibid., 2306/75/739/40.

Renouncing dogma, teaching utopia 265 9 Compare, for example, M.I. Mel’nikov, Osnovy Darvinizma, Moscow: uchpedgiz, 1952, and Sokolov, Metodika prepodavaniia zfiiki . 10 M.I. Mel’nikov, Osnovy Darvinizma, Moscow: uchpedgiz, 1952, p. 196. 11 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/742/10. 12 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/2868/23-26. 13 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/730/29. 14 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/3708/146. 15 For the debate surrounding Semenov’s nomination, see A.M. Blokh, Sovetskii soiuz v inter’ere nobelevskikh premii, St Petersburg: gumanistika, 2001, pp. 271–7, 321. 16 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/3704/72. 17 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/5195/37. 18 Order No. 144 of the USSR Ministry of Education, in Vysshaia skhola: osnovye postanovleniia, prikazy i instrukstii, Moscow: Sovetskaia nauka, 1957, pp. 86–7. 19 For an analysis for the plenum, see M.J. Barry ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’, in Martin McCauley (ed.), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism, London: Macmillan, 1987, pp. 72–4. 20 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/5268/30-31. 21 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/5268/31. 22 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/5268/32-33. 23 See V. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Russian Science, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994, pp. 243, 253 and I.E. Zelinin, Agrarnaia politika N.S. Khrushcheva i sel’skoe khoziaistvo, Moscow: RAN, 2001, pp. 261–2. 24 Shishakov, V pomoshch’ uchiteliu astronomii, p. 130. 25 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/6490/17, 92–3. 26 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/1689/78. 27 A.V. Peryshkin, Kurs zfiiki – chast’ III , Moscow: uchpedgiz, 1958, p. 115. 28 For recent studies of the 1930s anti-religion campaigns, see D. Peris, Storming the Heavens: The Soviet League of the Militant Godless, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998, and A. Luukanen, The Religious Policy of the Stalinist State: A Case Study: The Central Standing Committee on Religious Questions, 1929–1938, Helsinki: SHS, 1997; the use of natural science propaganda in the campaigns is specifically covered in Andrews, Science for the Masses, pp. 99–118. 29 S. Merritt Miner, Stalin’s Holy War: Religion, Nationalism and Alliance Politics 1941–1945, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003, pp. 9, 115–21, 140. 30 M.V. Shkarovskii, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ i sovetskoe gosudarstvo v 1943–1964 godakh: ot p ‘ eremiriia’ k novoi voine , St. Petersburg: DEAN ⫹ ADIA-M, 1995, p. 46. 31 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/741/50. 32 Shkarovskii, Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’, p. 50. 33 ‘O krupnykh nedostatkakh v nauchno-ateisticheskoi propagande i merakh ee uluchsheniia’, in Voprosy ideologicheskoi raboty, Moscow: gospolizdat, 1961, pp. 61–5. 34 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/852/5-6, 18, 22, 54. 35 ‘Ob oshibkakh v provedenii nauchno-ateistichskoi propagandy sredi naseleniia’, Pravda, 11 November 1954, p. 1. 36 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/4563/1-2. 37 S. Valgard, ‘Nauchno-ateisticheskoe vospitanie detei’, Uchitel’skaia Gazeta, 29 October 1955, p. 2. 38 V. Alekseev, ‘Shturm Nebes otmeniatsia?’: Kriticheskie ocherki po istorii bor’by s religiei v SSSR, Moscow: Rossiia Molodaia, 1992, p. 219. 39 See, for example, RGANI, 5/16/642/20.

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40 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/852/28. 41 These methods of scientific atheistic teaching are summarized in D. Powell, Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Study in Mass Persuasion, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1975, p. 114. 42 GARF, 6903/10/14/28. 43 V. Bezrogov, ‘Mezhdu Stalinym i Khristom: religioznaia sotsializatsiia detei v sovetskoi i postsovetskoi Rossii’ (unpublished MS: Conference Paper for ‘Study, Study and Study! Theories and Practices of Education in Imperial and Soviet Russia, 1861–1991’, University of Oxford, 14–16 May 2004). 44 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/1022/17, 19–20, 23. 45 O.L. Perishina and A.M. Tsuzmer, ‘Izuchenie zakliuchnitel’noi temy kursa zoologii’, Estestvoznanie v shkole, 1955, no. 1, 53–4. 46 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/1022/29. 47 D.M. Kiriushkin, Metodika prepodavaniia khimii, Moscow: uchpedgiz, 1952, p. 29. 48 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/1022/14-17. 49 Powell, Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union, pp. 54, 122. 50 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/852/17. 51 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/852/58. 52 GARF RSFSR, 2306/75/1869/75-76, 80. 53 GARF RSFSR, 2306/72/4565/9. 54 Pravda, 6 March 1964, p. 2. 55 B.A. Grushin, Chetyre zhizni Rossii v zerkale oprosov obshchestvennogo mneniia: epokha Khrushcheva, Moscow: Progress-traditsiia, 2001, p. 180. 56 Bezrogov, ‘Mezhdu Stalinym i Khristom’. 57 V.I. Prokof’ev, ‘Nauka i religiia’, Estestvoznanie v shkole, 1955, no. 1, pp. 3–13. 58 See Programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961, especially pp. 17, 59–60, 66, 110 for utopian visions of the utility of space travel, atomic power and cybernetics, and the impact that these were expected to have on the worldview of the population.

Select bibliography

Archives Arkhiv Memorial (Archive of the organization ‘Memorial’, Moscow). GARF (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii; State Archive of the Russian Federation, Moscow). RGAE (Rossiisskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomii; Russian State Archive of the Economy, Moscow). RGALI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva; Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow). RGANI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii; Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, Moscow). RGASPI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial’no-politicheskoi istorii; Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, Moscow). TsAODM (Tsentral’nyi arkhiv obshchestvennykh dvizhenii Moskvy; Central Archive of Social Movements of Moscow). TsDAHOU (Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromadskikh ob’ednan Ukrainy; Central State Archive of State Organizations of Ukraine, Kiev). TsDNIVO (Tsentr dokumentatsii noveishei istorii Volgogradskoi oblasti; Document Centre for the Contemporary History of Volgograd oblast’). TsDOOSO (Tsentr dokumentatsii obshchestvennykh organizatsii Sverdlovskoi oblasti; Document Centre for Social Organizations of Sverdlovsk oblast’, Ekaterinburg). TsGAIPD SPb (Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv istoriko-politicheskikh dokumentov Sankt-Peterburga; Central State Archive of Historical and Political Documents of St Petersburg). TsGA SPb (Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sankt-Peterburga; Central State Archive of St Petersburg). TsGALI SPb (Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva SanktPeterburga; Central State Archive of Literature and Art of St Petersburg). TsKhDMO (Tsentral’nyi khranitel’ dokumentatsii molodezhnykh organizatsii; Central Archive of documentation of youth organizations; also referred to as RGASPI-m, Moscow).

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Dissertations Dobson, M., ‘Re-fashioning the Enemy: Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of Destalinisation 1953–1964’ (PhD diss., University of London, 2003). Field, D., ‘Communist Morality and Meanings of Private Life in Post-Stalinist Russia, 1953–1964’ (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1996). Fürst, J., ‘Stalin’s last Generation: Youth, State and Komsomol 1945–53’ (PhD diss., University of London 2003). Gorlizki, Y., ‘De-Stalinisation and the Politics of Russian Criminal Justice, 1953–1964’ (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 1992). Harris, S., ‘Recreating Everyday Life: Building, Distributing, Furnishing and Living in the Separate Apartment in Soviet Russia, 1950s-1960s’ (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2003). Jones, P., ‘Strategies of De-mythologisation in Post-Stalinism and Post-Communism: A Comparison of De-Stalinisation and De-Leninisation’ (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2003). Livschiz, A., ‘Growing Up Soviet: Childhood in the Soviet Union, 1918–1958’ (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2005). Kozlov, D., The Readers of Novyi mir, 1945–1970: Twentieth-Century Experience and Soviet Historical Consciousness’ (PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2005). Loewenstein, K., ‘The Thaw: Writers and the Public Sphere in the Soviet Union 1951–57’ (PhD diss., Duke University, 1999). Pohl, M., ‘The Virgin Lands between Memory and Forgetting: People and Transformation in the Soviet Union, 1954–1960’ (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1999). Reid, S., ‘De-Stalinization and the Remodernization of Soviet Art’ (PhD diss; Universiy of Pennsylvania, 1996). Roth-Ey, K., ‘Mass Media and the Remaking of Soviet Culture 1950s-1960s’ (PhD diss., Princeton University 2003). Varga-Harris, C., ‘Constructing the Soviet Hearth: Home, Citizenship and Socialism in Russia, 1956–64’ (PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005).

Primary sources: memoirs and document collections Adzhubei, A., Te desiat’ let, Moscow: Interbuk, 1991. Alexeyeva, L., Goldberg, P., The Thaw Generation, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993. Allilueva, S., Twenty Letters to a Friend, transl. P. Johnson, New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Arbatov, G., Zatianuvsheesia vyzdorovlenie, Moscow: ‘Mezdunarodnye otnosheniia’, 1991. Baibakov, N., Ot Stalina do El’tsina, Moscow: ‘Gazoil’, 1998. Bianki, N., K. Simonov, A.Tvardovskii v N ‘ ovom mire’: Vospominaniia , Moscow: Violanta, 1999. Bukovsky, V., To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter, trans. M. Scammell, New York: Viking, 1979. Chuev, F., Sto sorok besed s Molotovym, Moscow: Terra, 1991. Chukovskii, K., Dnevnik (1930–1969), Moscow: ‘sovremennyi pisatel’’, 1995.

Select bibliography 269 ‘Delo Berii: Plenum TsK KPSS, iiul’ 1953 goda – stenograficheskii otchet’, Izvestiia Tsk KPSS, no. 1, 1991. Doklad N.S. Khrushcheva o kul’te lichnosti Stalina na XX se’’zde KPSS. Dokumenty, Moscow: Rosspen, 2002. XX s’’ezd Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza: stenografi cheskii otchet , Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1956: Gospolitizdat, 2 vols. Vneocherednyi XXI s’’ezd Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza: stenogracheskii otchet , Moscow: Gospolizdat, 1959, 2 vols. fi XXII s’’ezd kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza: stenografi cheskii otchet , Moscow: Politizdat, 1961, 2 vols. Evtushenko, E., A Precocious Autobiography, London: Collins and Harvill, 1963. Kaganovich, L., Pamiatnye zapiski rabochego, kommunista-bol’shevika, profsoiuznogo, partiinogo i sovetsko-gosudarstvennogo rabotnika, Moscow: Vagrius, 1996. Khrushchev, N., Vospominaniia – vremia, liudi, vlast’ (Vospominannia v 4-kh tomakh), Moscow: Moskovskie novosti, 1999, 4 vols. ‘Khrushchevskie vremena: neprinuzhdennye besedy s politicheskimi deiateliami “velikogo desiatiletiia” ’, in Neizvestnaia Rossiia. XX vek: arkhivy, pis’ma, memuary, vol. 1, Moscow: Istoricheskoe nasledie, 1992. KPSS o kul’ture, prosveshcheniia o nauke: sbornik dokumentov, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1963. KPSS v rezoliiutsiiakh i resheniikah s’’ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK, vols 8–10, Moscow: Politizdat, 1985–86. Kul’tura i vlast’ ot Stalina do Gorbacheva. Ideologicheskie kommissii TsK KPSS, 1958–1964. Dokumenty, Moscow: Rosspen, 1998. Kul’tura i vlast’ ot Stalina do Gorbacheva. Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1953–1957. Dokumenty, Moscow: Rosspen, 2001. Kul’tura i vlast’ ot Stalina do Gorbacheva. Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1958–1964, Moscow: Rosspen, 2005. Kopelev, L., Orlova, R., My zhili v Moskve, 1956–1980, Moscow: ‘kniga’, 1990. Kozlov, V., Mironenko, S. (eds), 58–10. Nadzornye proizvodstva prokuratury SSSR po delam ob antisovetskoi agitatsii i propagandy. Mart 1953–1991, Moscow: Mezhdunarodnaia fond ‘demokratiia’, 1999. Kozlov, V. (ed.) Neizvestnaia Rossiia: XX vek, Moscow: Istoricheskoe nasledie, 1992. Lakshin, V., Novyi mir vo vremia Khrushcheva: dnevnik i poputnoe (1953–1964), Moscow: Izdatel’stvo ‘knizhnaia palata’, 1991. Mikoian, Tak bylo: Razmyshleniia o minuvshem, Moscow: Vagrius, 1999. Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich. 1957: Stenogramma iiun’skogo plenuma TsK KPSS i drugie dokumenty, Moscow: mezhdunarodnyi fond ‘demokratiia’, 1998. Nekrich, A., Forsake Fear: Memoirs of an Historian, trans. D. Lineburgh, Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991. ‘Novocherkasskaia tragediia, 1962’, Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 1, 1993. ‘N.S. Khrushchev: “U Stalina byli momenty prosvetleniia”. Zapis’ besedy s delegatsiei Ital’ianskoi kompartii’, Istochnik, no. 2, 1994. ‘ “O kul’te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh”: Doklad pervogo sekretariia TsK KPSS tov. Khrushcheva N.S. XX s’’ezdu Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiza’, Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no. 3, 1989. ‘Osobaia papka’ N.S. Khrushcheva (1954–1959gg.). Perepiska MVD SSSR s TsK

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KPSS: iz materialov sekretariata MVD SSSR. Katalog dokumentov, Moscow: ‘Blagovest’, 1995. Prezidiium TsK KPSS. Chernovnye protokol’nye zapisi zasedanii, stenogrammy, postanovleniia, v trekh tomakh, Moscow: Rosspen, 2003, vol. 1. Reabilitatsiia: kak eto bylo. Dokumenty Prezidiiuma TsK KPSS i drugie materialy, Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond ‘Demokratiia’, 2000–03, 2 vols. Sakharov, A., Memoirs, trans. R. Lourie, New York: Knopf, 1990. Shepilov, D., Neprimknuvshii, Moscow: Vagrius, 2001. Simonov, K., Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia. Razmyshleniia o I.V. Staline, Moscow: Novosti, 1989. Taubman, W., The View from Lenin Hills: Soviet Youth in Ferment, New York: Coward-McCann, 1967. Troianovskii, O., Cherez gody i rasstoianiia, Moscow: Vagrius, 1997. Tvardovskii, A., ‘Iz rabochikh tetradei’, Znamia, nos. 7–8, 1989, nos. 6–7, 2000.

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Select bibliography 271 Borev, Iu., Fariseia. Poslestalinskaia epokha v predaniiakh i anekdotakh, Moscow: ‘konets veka’, 1992. Borisova, M. (ed.), To vremia – eti golosa. Leningrad. Poety o ‘ ttepeli’ , Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990. Breslauer, G., Khrushchev and Brezhnev as Leaders, London: Allen and Unwin, 1982. Brooks, J., Thank you Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Brown, D., Soviet Russian Literature Since Stalin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Brumberg, A., Russia under Khrushchev. An Anthology from P ‘ roblems of Communism’, London: Methuen, 1962. Brusilovskaia, L., ‘Kul’tura povsednevnosti v epokhu “ottepeli” (metamorfozy stilia)’, Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’, 2000, no. 1. Brusilovskaia, L., Kul’tura povsednevnosti v epokhu o ‘ ttepeli’: metamorfozy stilia , Moscow: URAO, 2001. Buchli, V., ‘Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight Against Petit-Bourgeois Consciousness in the Soviet Home’, Journal of Design History, vol. 10, no. 2, 1997. Buchli, V., An Archaeology of Socialism, Oxford: Berg, 1999. Burg, D. Oppozitsionnye nastroeniia molodezhi v godi posle o ‘ ttepeli’. Munich: Institute for the Study of the USSR, 1962. Burlatskii, F., Vozhdi i sovetniki. O Khrushcheve, Andropove i ne tol’ko o nikh, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1990. Burlatsky, F., Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1991. Chulanov, M. Iu., ‘Postanovlenie TsK KPSS ot 30 Iunia 1956 g. “O preodolenii kul’ta lichnosti i ego posledstvii” v kontekste svoego vremeni’, in T. Islamov and A. Sytalkin (eds), Avtoritarnye rezhimy v tsentral’noi i vostochnoi Evrope (1917–1990-e gody), Moscow: Institut slavianovedeniia RAN, 1999. Clark, K., The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981. Cohen, S., Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History since 1917, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Cohen, S., Rabinowitch, A. and Sharlet, R. (eds) The Soviet Union Since Stalin, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. Conquest, R., Power and Policy in The USSR, London: Macmillan, 1961. Crankshaw, E., Russia without Stalin, New York: Viking, 1956. Crankshaw, E., Khrushchev’s Russia, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1959. Davies, S., Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia. Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Deutscher, I., Russia After Stalin, London: Jonathan Cape, 1969. Deutscher, I., Ironies of History. Essays on Contemporary Communism, London: Oxford University Press, 1996. DiMaio, Jr., J., Soviet Urban Housing: Problems and Policies, New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1974. Edele, M., ‘Strange Young Men in Stalin’s Moscow: The Birth and Life of the Stiliagi, 1945–53’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 50, 2002. Field, D., ‘Irreconcilable Differences: Divorce and Conceptions of Private Life in the Khrushchev era’, Russian Review, vol. 57, no. 4, 1998.

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Filtzer, D., Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization. The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953–1964, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Filtzer. D, The Khrushchev era: De-Stalinisation and the Limits of Reform in the USSR, 1953–64, London: Macmillan, 1993. Fishcher, L., Russia Revisited, London: Jonathan Cape, 1957. Fitzpatrick, S., ‘Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s’, Slavic Review, vol. 55, no. 1, 1996. Fitzpatrick, S., Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Frankel, E., Novy Mir. A Case Study in the Politics of Literature 1952–58, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Fürst, J., ‘Prisoners of the Soviet Self? Political Youth Opposition in Late Stalinism’, Europe-Asia-Studies, vol. 54, No. 3, 2002. Garrard, C. and Garrard, C., Inside the Soviet Writers’ Union, London: I.B. Tauris, 1999. Genis, A. and Vail’, P., 60-e. Mir sovetskogo cheloveka, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988. Gibian, G., Interval of Freedom: Soviet Literature during the Thaw, 1954–1957, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960. Gori, F., Il XX Congresso del Pcus, Milan, 1988. Gorlizki, Y., ‘Party Revivalism and the Death of Stalin’, Slavic Review, vol. 54, no. 1, 1–22. Gorshkov, M., Volobuev, O. and Zhuravlev, V. (eds), Vlast’ i oppozitsiia: Rossiiskii politicheskii protsess dvadtsatogo stoletiia, Moscow: Rossiiskaia politicheskaia entsiklopediia, 1995. Grinevskii, O., Tysiacha i odin den’ Nikity Sergeevicha, Moscow: Vagrius, 1998. Grushin, B., Chetyre zhizni Rossii v zerkale oprosov obshchestvennogo mneniia: epokha Khrushcheva, Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2001. Hellbeck, J., ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931–9’, in S. Fitzpatrick (ed.), Stalinism: New Directions, London: Routledge, 2000. Heller, M. and Nekrich, A., Utopia in Power: History of The Soviet Union from 1917 to Present, New York: Summit Books, 1986. Ilic, M., Reid, S. and Attwood, L., Women in the Khrushchev Era, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2004. Johnson, P., Khrushchev and the Arts: the Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–64, Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1965. Jones, P., ‘From Stalinism to Post-Stalinism. De-mythologising Stalinism 1953–1956’, in H. Shukman (ed.), Redefi ning Stalinism , London: Frank Cass, 2003. Jones, P., Apor, B., Behrends, J. and Rees, A. (eds), The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc, London: Palgrave, 2004. Joravsky, D., The Lysenko Affair, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970. Kelly, C., ‘Retreat from Dogmatism. Populism under Khrushchev and Brezhnev’, in Kelly, C. and Shepherd, D. (eds), Russian Cultural Studies. An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kelly, C., Refi ning Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Select bibliography 273 Kelly, C. and Shepherd, D., Russian Cultural Studies. An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kemp-Welch, T., ‘Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” and Polish Politics: The Spring of 1956’, Europe-Asia Studies, vol. 48, no. 2, 1996. Kharkhordin, O., The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A study of practices, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Khrushchev, S., Khrushchev on Khrushchev: An Inside Account of the Man and His Era, by His Son, Boston: Little, Brown, 1992. Khrushchev, S., Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. Knight, A., Beria. Stalin’s First Lieutenant, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Koval’ev, G. and Kuz’minskii, K., The Blue Lagoon Anthology of Modern Russian Poetry, Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1986. Kozlov, V., Massovye bezporiadki v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve (1953nachalo 1980), Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khronograf, 1999. Kramer, M., ‘New Evidence on Soviet Decision-Making and the 1956 Polish and Hungarian Crises’, CWIHPB, nos. 8–9, 1996–97. Krementsev, N., Stalinist Science, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Khrushchev, N.S. (1894–1971). Materialy nauchnoi konferentsii posviashchennoi 100-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia N.S. Khrushcheva, Moscow: RGGU, 1994. Kulavig, E., Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev: Nine Stories About Disobedient Russians, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Lacqueur, W. and Lichtheim, G., The Soviet Cultural Scene 1956–1957, London: Atlantic Books, 1958. Leibovich, O., Reforma i modernizatsiia v 1953–1964 gg., Perm’: Istoriia otechestva XX vek, 1993. Lelchuk, V.S. and Sagatelian, G.Sh. (eds), Sovetskoe obshchestvo: budni kholodnoi voiny. Materialy k ‘ ruglogo stola’, Institut Rossiiskoi istorii. RAN 29 Marta 2000 g., Moscow-Arzamas: Institut Rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2000. Linden, C. Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966. Markwick, R., Rewriting History in Soviet Russia. The Politics of Revisionist Historiography 1956–1974, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001. Massie, S. (ed.), The Living Mirror. Five Poets from Leningrad, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, 1972. McCauley, M., Khrushchev and the Development of Soviet Agriculture: The Virgin Lands Programme 1953–1964, London: Macmillan, 1976. McCauley, M., Khrushchev and Khrushchevism, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1987. McLean, H. and Vickery, W. (eds), The Year of Protest, 1956: An Anthology of Soviet Literary Materials, New York: Vintage Books, 1961. Medvedev, R., Khrushchev, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982. Medvedev, R. and Medvedev, Zh., Khrushchev: The Years in Power, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Naumov, V., ‘Bor’ba N.S. Khrushcheva za edinolichnuiu vlast’’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 2, 1996. Naumov, V., ‘K istorii sekretnogo doklada N.S. Khrushcheva na XX s’’ezde KPSS’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 4, 1996.

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Neuberger, J., Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900–1914, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Novak-Deker, N.K. (ed.), Soviet Youth: Twelve Komsomol Histories, Munich, 1959. Openkin, V., Ottepel’: kak eto bylo (1953–55gg.), Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Znanie, 1991. Ottepel’ 1953–1956. Stranitsy russkoi sovetskoi literatury, Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1989. Ottepel’ 1957–1959: Stranitsy russkoi sovetskoi literatury, Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1990. Ottepel’ 1960–1962, Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1990. Pikhoia, R., Sovetskii soiuz. Istoriia vlasti 1945–1991, Moscow: RAGS, 1998. Powell, D., Antireligious Propaganda in the Soviet Union: A Study in Mass Persuasion, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1975. Pyzhikov, A., Genezis ofi tsial’noi pozitsii KPSS po voprosu o kul’te lichnosti (1953–64 gg.), Moscow, 1998. Pyzhikov, A., ‘20 s’’ezd i obshchestvennoe mnenie’, Svobodnaia mysl’, vol. 21, no. 8, 2000. Pyzhikov, A., Khrushchevskaia ottepel’, 1953–1964, Moscow: ‘Olma-Press’, 2002. Radio Svoboda, ‘Istoriia i sovremennost’: XX s’’ezd – sorok let spustia’, 1996, http://www.svoboda.org/programs/cicles/XX/xx. Reid, S. (ed.) ‘Design, Stalin and the Thaw’, Journal of Design History, vol. 10, no. 2, 1997. Reid, S., ‘De-Stalinization and Taste’, Journal of Design History, vol. 10, no. 2, 1997. Reid, S., ‘Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev’, Slavic Review, vol. 61, no. 2, 2002. Reid, S., ‘Khrushchev in Wonderland: the pioneer Palace in Moscow’s Lenin Hills, 1962’, The Carl Beck Papers, no. 1606, Pittsburgh, 2002. Reid, S. and Crowley, D., Style and Socialism. Modernity and Material Culture in Post War Eastern Europe, Oxford: Berg, 2000. Rothberg, A., The Heirs of Stalin: Dissidence and the Soviet Regime, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972. Rush, M., The Rise of Khrushchev, Washington, D.C: Public Affairs Press, 1958. Saechnikov, V.S. and Sagatelian, G.Sh., ‘Sovetskoe obshchestvo: politicheskie kampanii 50-kh godov’, in V.S. Lelchuk and G.Sh. Sagatelian (eds), Sovetskoe obshchestvo: budni kholodnoi voiny. Materialy k ‘ ruglogo stola’, Institut Rossiiskoi istorii. RAN 29 Marta 2000 g., Moscow-Arzamas: Institut Rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 2000. Salisbury, H., Moscow Journal: The End of Stalin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Service, R., ‘The Road to the Twentieth Congress’, Soviet Studies, no. 2, 1981. Shkarovskii, M., Russkaia pravoslavnaia tserkov’ i sovetskoe gosudarstvo v 1943–1964 godakh: ot p ‘ eremiriia’ k novoi voine , St. Petersburg: DEAN⫹ADIA-M, 1995. Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power. The Post-Stalin Era, London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 1990. Sidorova, L., Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke: Sovetskaia istoriografi ia pervogo poslestalinskogo desiatiletiia, Moscow: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli, 1997. Slonim, M., Soviet Russian Literature. Writers and Problems 1917–1967, New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

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Index

Academy of Sciences 44, 180–1, 185, 187, 251, 258 agriculture 184, 256 Akhmatova, Anna 193, 199 Andronov, Nikolai 219–22, 224 ‘anti-Party Group’ 51, 53, 179 anti-semitism 174 art, painting 13, 209–30 Berggol’ts, Ol’ga 193, 231 Beria, Lavrentii 25, 32, 34, 91, 159, 174 biology 250–66 Brezhnev, Leonid 12, 14, 173, 183–4, 226 Britanishkii, Vladimir 198, 200–1, 205 Brodskii, Iosif 12, 195, 201, 203–6 Bukharin, Nikolai 178 Bulganin, Nikolai 71, 120 Burdzhalov, Eduard 174–5, 177–80, 182–5 bureaucracy, bureaucrats 64, 67–8, 71–5, 80–8, 92, 94, 109–11, 117, 147, 155, 184 byt 35, 37, 103 censorship 11, 231–2, 241–4, 247 chemistry 252–3, 260–1 Chichibabin, Boris 234–5, 242 children 9, 10, 117–34, 261, 263; children’s literature, writers 124–31; juvenile delinquency 9, 50, 117–22, 132, 132n13; see also pioneer movement citizenship 8, 101–16 coal mining 160–2 ‘collective leadership’ 64, 66, 74–5, 176 collectivism 9, 102, 126 collectivization 102, 159, 177, 183–5, 242–3

Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Central Committee 2, 4, 42, 47, 65–6, 69–70, 74, 87, 91, 123, 175, 177–8, 183–6, 255, 258; local party organizations 42–59, passim, 64–5; Third Party Program (1961) 9, 13, 51, 264; 20th Party Congress (1956) 2, 7, 11, 41–51, 64–76, 81, 89–91, 135, 140, 145, 173–6, 178–82, 188, 200, 232, 243; 21st Party Congress (1959) 51; 22nd Party Congress (1961) 2, 6, 11–12, 41, 51–9, 173, 185, 188, 193 comrade courts 36 consumer goods 102 cosmopolitanism, anti-cosmopolitan campaign (1948–52) 174 Council of Ministers 24, 69, 107 crime, criminality: anti-Soviet behaviour 25, 27–42, 46, 87, 121; fear of crime 30, 118; hooliganism 10, 12, 26, 30, 36, 50, 117–22, 135–8, 142–4, 147, 152n41, 48, 57; reporting 32–5; speculation 21; 125–6; under Khrushchev 23, 25–6; under Stalin 21, 117–18, 138, 143, 151n8; violent crime 25–6, 28–34, 118–20 criminal justice 9, 13; amnesties see gulag; rehabilitation 6, 53, 94, 103, 107–9, 112, 176; ‘socialist legality’ 21, 22, 146; terror, repression 7, 43–4, 52, 54–5, 59, 65, 81, 85, 87, 89–91, 94, 103, 107–9, 146, 174, 176, 188, 232–4, 239–42 ‘cult of personality’ 2, 8, 15n7, 41, 68, 71, 75, 89, 91, 122, 139–40, 173–4, 176, 178, 181, 184–5, 187, 189, 255–6 Danilov, Viktor 183–5, 189 Dar, David 199, 204–5

Index 277 denunciation 2, 7, 84–5 dissent, dissidence 5, 12, 14, 27, 45, 47, 59, 147, 206 ‘doctors’ plot’ 32 Dudintsev, Vladimir: Not by Bread Alone (1956) 7, 70, 74–5, 80–98, 139, 145, 148 education 117–23, 133n18, 159–61, 250–66 Ehrenburg, Il’ia 64; The Thaw (1954) 64, 68–70 ‘enemy of the people’ (vrag naroda) 21, 23, 31–2, 74, 87, 88–9, 92, 94, 107 engineers, engineering 7, 64, 67–76, 86, 163–5, 168n34, 257 Evtushenko, Evgenii 188, 194, 203, 231–2, 242; The Heirs of Stalin 188, 232, 242 factories 7, 64–80, 137–9, 154–69 formalism 202, 212, 219 Gefter, Mikhail 174, 179, 182, 186–9 Georgia 49, 57–8 glasnost’ 13 Gorbachev, Mikhail 13 Gor’kii, Maksim 22, 37n7 Gulag: amnesties 6, 13, 21–39, 118, 121, 159, 176; political prisoners 23, 27, 234; returnees 22, 24, 25, 26, 29–31, 91, 94, 118, 176, 199, 242; revolts, uprisings 5, 38n26; slave labour 22, 31, 156–9, 162, 167n7; zek culture 25–29, 35 historical revisionism 3, 11, 12, 173–92 housing: complaints 6, 8, 101–16; construction 8, 101, 104–5; housewarming 8, 101, 105, 107; legislation 106–7 human rights 112 Hungarian crisis (1956) 47, 87, 140, 145, 176, 178 industrialization 92, 102, 148, 155, 177, 220–1, 250 Institute of History 174, 183, 186–8, 189 inventors 7, 64, 67–76, 81, 86 Kaganovich, Lazar’ 176 Kassil’, Lev 124, 129–31 Khrushchev, Nikita: attitude to Stalin 2, 41, 43, 173, 176, 181, 184, 189, 232,

243; cultural views 11, 12, 178, 189, 232, 258; dismissal 166, 173, 184, 186–7, 189; ideology 21, 136, 142, 149–50, 154, 264; leadership style 2, 66, 179; personality 4, 142–3; popular opinion regarding 66, 149–50, 250 Khvostov, Vladimir 186 Korzhavin, Naum 234–5 Kushner, Aleksandr 201 labour 154–69; labour law 154–69; labour relations 7, 8, 9, 64–79, 154–69; labour reserve 158–61; turnover 155, 157, 162–3; Wages policy 154–69, passim. Laktionov, Aleksandr 210–11, 221 Lenin, Vladimir 177–8, 180, 182; Leninism 42–3, 141, 179–80, 185; Lenin mausoleum 43, 51, 55–8 Leningrad 30, 32–3, 101–16, 123, 147, 165, 193–208; Leningrad State University 141; Leningrad Writers’ Union 44, 193–208 letter-writing 6, 7, 8, 29–32, 36, 54, 56, 71–4, 82–98, 102–16, 120, 122–3, 126–30 Levitanskii, Iurii 234, 237–8, 240, 243, 245 light cavalry (legkaia kavaleriia) 145–6 limitchiki 166 LITOs 195, 197–9, 202, 206 Lomonosov, Mikhail 251, 253 Lysenko, Lysenkoism 13, 250–4, 256, 262–3 Malenkov, Georgii 73, 176 managers 5, 8, 81–2, 92, 155–6, 163, 165 Marxism, Marxism-Leninism 173, 175–6, 179–80, 185, 188, 212, 225, 250, 264 Medvedev, Roy 188 memory 12, 43, 52, 54–5, 91, 93, 94, 199–200, 231–49 Mezhirov, Aleksandr 234, 236, 239–40 Mikhalkov, Sergei 119 Mikoian, Anastas 45, 176 Ministry of Interior 25, 34, 120, 158–9 Mints, Isaac 186–7 modernism 210, 212–13, 223–5 Molodoi Leningrad (Young Leningrad) 198–200 Molotov, Viacheslav 29–30, 38n31 45, 176, 258 Morozov, Pavlik 125, 128, 134n54

278

Index

Moscow 30, 32–3, 57, 80, 165, 194, 207n20, 241; Moscow Artists’ Union (MOSKh) 209–30; Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT) 214; Moscow State University (MGU) 140–2 Nechkina, Militsa 180 Nekrich, Aleksandr 181, 189 ‘New Direction’ (novoe napravlenie) 182–3, 185, 189 Novocherkassk 5, 154 Novyi mir 7, 80–98, 174, 188, 232 Old Communists 43, 52 Orgnabor 158, 161, 162, 168n24 Pankratova, Anna 65, 174–6, 177–80, 182–3 parasitism 10, 36, 144 parenting 10, 121–2, 125–7 see also vospitanie Paustovskii, Konstantin 80 perestroika 13, 93, 141, 188 petitioning 101–16 physics 250–4, 256–7, 260 Pioneer movement 119, 122–4 poetry 12, 13, 124, 193–208, 231–49; poetry day (den’ poezii) 200, 231 Pokrovsky, Mikhail 185 Polish crisis (1956) 140, 145, 176, 178 Ponomarev, Boris 186, 189 popular opinion 1, 2, 5–7, 14, 23, 27, 29–32, 36, 41–59, 64–76, 80–98, 101–16, 120–3, 127–32, 154, 176 press, Soviet 21–2, 32–4, 66–8, 70, 75, 82, 85, 88, 101, 105, 111, 118–19, 143–5 privacy, private life 8, 9, 14, 91, 102, 104–5, 112, 125–6 procuracy 21–6, 34, 120, 137 religion: and science 13, 250, 257–64; anti-religious campaigns 13, 151n4, 250, 257–64 re-Stalinization 3, 12, 13, 14, 183 revolution, Bolshevik 102, 178, 182–3, 209, 214 Ryvina, Elena 195, 200–1 samizdat 12, 199, 206, 232, 236, 239, 242 Samoilov, David 234, 236, 245–6 scapegoating 81, 91, 94 science 13, 69, 250–66

‘scientific-technical committees’ (NTK) 69, 75 Second World War 30, 69, 102–7, 112, 125, 138, 140, 156–8, 174, 232, 235–9, 247, 258; historiography 177, 180–2, 235; Leningrad blockade 104–7; literature 127–8, 232, 235–9 ‘Secret Speech’ (“On the Cult of Personality and its Consequences”) 2, 3, 6–7, 13, 41–51, 64–76, 135, 140, 145, 173, 176, 180, 200, 214, 232, 243 sector of Methodology 187–8 Semenov, Gleb 198–9, 206, 207n21 Shepilov, Dmitrii 178 Shestidesiatniki 179, 188, 264 Short Course of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Kratkii kurs) 11, 58, 174–5, 177–8, 182–3, 186 Siberia 162, 165 Sidorov, Arkady 174, 182–4 Simonov, Konstantin 80 Slutskii, Boris 232, 234–5, 238–9, 241–2, 244–7 Socialist Realism 10, 13, 82–3, 88, 200, 209–30, 232 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 26; Gulag Archipelago 26; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich 83, 92–4, 188, 203, 232 Sosnora, Viktor 195, 201–5 Sovnarkhozy (Councils of People’s Economies) 75, 82, 161 Sovremennik Theatre 214 Stalin, Iosif: cult of personality 1–3, 11, 13–14, 54, 131, 173, 176, 178, 181, 210, 235, 240–2, 255–6; death (1953) 1, 4, 11, 22, 112, 118, 122, 139, 135, 156, 174, 193, 209–10, 231, 241–2, 253–4; direct criticism of 2–3, 6–7, 41–59, 89, 104, 176, 179, 181, 184, 232, 234, 240–3; history writing 173–4, 181, 188–9, 232, 235; ideology 21, 37n3, 87, 90, 173; literature 233–4, 244–6; popular opinion regarding 41–59, 89, 176, 199, 241–2; portraits 48–51, 65; renaming 58, 63n120; statues, monuments 48–51, 56, 65 Stalingrad 44, 46, 48, 53–4, 58 Stalinism: cultural policy 11, 195, 199–200, 209–30, 231–5, 243–44; economics 154–69, passim.; mentality 2, 7, 29, 81–98, 242, 251–6 Stiliagi, stiliachestvo 136, 138–9, 143–4, 146–9, 216

Index 279 students 47, 58, 135, 139–42 Supreme Soviet of the USSR 29, 36, 101, 110, 119 surveillance 9 tamizdat 206 teachers 121, 253–4, 259, 261–2 technicheskie uchilishcha (technical colleges) 160 technology 70, 81, 165, 224, 250, 261 Trapeznikov, Sergei 184, 186, 189 Trotskyism 51, 177–9, 183 Tvardovskii, Aleksandr 93, 174, 188, 232, 235–6 Ufliand, Vladimir 200–1, 205 Ukraine 141–7 Veterans 106–7, 111 Vinokurov, Evgenii 234, 237, 243–6 Virgin Lands 9, 138, 143, 148, 162 Volobuev, Pavel 179, 182 Voprosy istorii (Problems of History) 174–5, 177–9, 185

Voroshilov, Kliment 29, 36, 45 vospitanie (upbringing) 9–10, 117, 120–3, 131 welfare 2–3, 7–8, 106–7 Western influence, interest in West 10, 13, 136, 138, 180, 210, 212–13, 216, 223–4, 254–57 Writers’ Union 193–208, 231–2, 234 Youth 9, 10, 135–53, 196, 260, 263; crime, deviance 9, 35–6, 50, 135, 142–4, 217; festival (1957) 217; komsomol 46–7, 118–19, 124, 135–53, 162, 218, 258; komsomol patrols 143, 146; subcultures/alternative cultures 9, 136, 138–9, 144, 149, 216; young artists, writers 9, 11, 12, 193–208, 209, 217–22 Zhdanov, Andrei, Zhdanovshchina 193, 251–4 Zhestev, Mikhail 125–8 Zinoviev, Grigorii 178

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