Polly Jones - The Dilemmas of Destalinisation A Social and Cultural History of Reform in The Khrushchev Era (Basees Curzon Series On Russian & East European Studies) (2006)
Polly Jones - The Dilemmas of Destalinisation A Social and Cultural History of Reform in The Khrushchev Era (Basees Curzon Series On Russian & East European Studies) (2006)
Polly Jones - The Dilemmas of Destalinisation A Social and Cultural History of Reform in The Khrushchev Era (Basees Curzon Series On Russian & East European Studies) (2006)
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
12 Small-Town Russia
Postcommunist livelihoods and identities: a portrait of the
intelligentsia in Achit, Bednodemyanovsk and Zubtsov, 1999–2000
Anne White
Notes on contributors ix
Acknowledgements xii
Glossary xiii
PART I
Responses to the Thaw(s): de-Stalinization and public
opinion 19
2 From the Secret Speech to the burial of Stalin: real and ideal
responses to de-Stalinization 41
POLLY JONES
PART III
Rewriting Stalinism: in search of a new style 171
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. Per-
mission to reproduce granted by Arkhangel’sk State Museum of Art
(Gosudarstvennoe muzeinoe ob’’edinenie ‘Khudozhestvennaia kul’tura
Russkogo Severa’)
Glossary
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 lich-
nosti).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 specifi-
cally 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 post-
Stalinist 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 discus-
sions 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 post-
Soviet 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 ‘de-
Stalinization’, 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 re-
thinking a whole range of Stalinist priorities and practices in other
domains. Accordingly, many chapters here are directly or indirectly con-
cerned with the modifications of Stalin’s image, and especially the signific-
ance 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 liberal-
ization 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 autar-
kic 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 de-
Stalinization, 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.
4 Polly Jones
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 delimit-
ing 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, accelerat-
ing, 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 under-
represented 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 anti-
Stalin 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 con-
tained 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, popu-
lation. 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 manifes-
tations 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 communica-
tion 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
6 Polly Jones
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 polit-
ical 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 cit-
izens 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 unpub-
lished 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 junc-
tures in the post-Stalin period, this optimism about public opinion trans-
formed 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 reluc-
tance 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 wel-
comed by the Soviet population as is often thought. It also suggests an
uncertainty surrounding the de-Stalinization project from its very incep-
tion 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 con-
cerned with the struggle between innovators and the dead weight of Soviet
bureaucracy.
Part I concludes with Denis Kozlov’s more detailed study of Dudint-
sev’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 ‘de-
Stalinized’ reader response. Instead, readers’ discourse occupied a para-
doxical 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, de-
Stalinization 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 mul-
tiple fissures in public opinion may have been the most lasting legacy of
de-Stalinization.
Conclusion
Viewed through the prism of the ‘re-Stalinization’ which succeeded it, the
‘de-Stalinization’ of the Khrushchev era appears exceptional, an anom-
alous and unique episode in Soviet history. Certainly, looking for prece-
dents 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
14 Polly Jones
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 aggres-
sively public culture of the Stalin era to the more ‘normal’ privacy of the
Khrushchev years inadvertently initiated the ‘privatization’ and even de-
ideologization 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 renunci-
ation 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 final-
ity 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
Introduction 15
Culture from Revolution to Cold War, Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2000.
2 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.
3 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.
4 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.
5 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.
6 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.
7 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).
8 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.
9 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; ‘Torzh-
estvo Leninskikh printsipov’, 29 November 1961, p. 2; ‘Rech’ Tov. Il’icheva’,
Pravda, 19 June 1963, p. 2.
10 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 deroga-
tory, implying amongst other things that Stalin underwent a marked mental
deterioration during the latter half of his rule.
11 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.
12 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.
13 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.
16 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.
14 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, Poststal-
iniskoe obshchestvo: problemy liderstva i transformatsiia vlasti, Moscow: Nauch-
naia 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.
15 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 politich-
eskoi 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.
16 Taubman, Khrushchev.
17 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, pro-
paganda and the 1957 youth festival’, in M. Ilic, S. Reid, L. Attwood (eds),
Women in the Khrushchev era, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004, pp. 75–95.
18 On agriculture, see I.E. Zelinin, Agrarnaia politika N.S. Khrushcheva i sel’skoe
khoziaistvo, Moscow: RAN, 2001; A. Strelianyi, ‘Khrushchev and the Country-
side’, 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.
19 See J. Woll, Real Images. Soviet Cinema and the Thaw, London: Tauris, 2000.
20 See Ilic, Reid, Attwood (eds), Women in The Khruschev Era.
21 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 dvadt-
satogo stoletiia Moscow: Rosspen, 1995.
22 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: Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh Press, 1993; V. Kozlov, Massovye bezporiadki v SSSR pri
Khrushcheve i Brezhneve (1953-nachalo 1980), Novosibirsk: Sibirskii khrono-
graf, 1999; A. Applebaum, Gulag. A History, New York: Penguin, 2003, pp.
435–76; V. Kozlov, S. Mironenko (eds), 58–10. Nadzornye proizvodstva Proku-
ratury SSSR po delam ob antisovetskoi agitatsii i propagandy. Mart 1953–1991,
Moscow: Mezhdunarodnaia fond ‘demokratiia’, 1999.
23 On public opinion in the Stalin era, see e.g. S. Davies, Popular Opinion in
Introduction 17
Stalin’s Russia, Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge 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-totalitar-
ian mindset and atmosphere, c.f. L. Brusilovskaia, ‘Kul’tura povsednevnosti v
epokhu “ottepeli” (metamorfozy stilia)’, Obshchestevennye nauki i sovremen-
nost’, no. 1, 2000, 163–74.
24 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.
25 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.
26 Where letters were anonymous and/or harshly critical of Soviet power, investi-
gations were assiduous e.g. RGANI 5/34/2/47-53; RGANI 5/30/140/161-70.
27 Reid, ‘Cold War in the kitchen’.
28 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.
29 Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization.
30 Very prevalent; a few examples are Ogonek, no. 44, 1955, p. 2; ‘Kommunistich-
eskii 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.
31 E.g. Ogonek, no. 49, 1954, p. 1; Ogonek, no. 52, 1961, p. 2.
32 See D. Field, ‘Communist Morality and Meanings of Private Life in Post-
Stalinist Russia, 1953–64’, PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1996.
33 As argued in V. Buchli, ‘Khrushchev, Modernism, and the fight against petit-
bourgeois 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.
34 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 Advance-
ment of Slavic Studies, Toronto, 2003.
35 ‘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.
36 ‘Plenum TsK VLKSM’, Pravda, 28 February 1957, p. 2; ‘Vospitanie chuvstv. Iz
zapisnoi knizhki pisatelia’, Pravda, 12 November 1961, p. 6; ‘Partiinaia organi-
zatsiia i shkola’, Pravda, 11 June 1962, p. 2.
37 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; ‘vospi-
tyvat’ novogo cheloveka’, Pravda, 15 September, 1961 p. 3; ‘moral’nyi kodeks
strotelia kommunizma’, Pravda, 24 September 1961, p. 1.; ‘Zhizn’, kollektiv –
18 Polly Jones
luchshie vospitateli’, Pravda, 11 January 1963; ‘vospityvat’ aktivnykh bortsov za
kommunizm’, Pravda, 8 June 1963, p. 2; ‘Rech’ Tov Il’icheva’.
38 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.
39 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).
40 E.g. Pravda, 4 February 1962, p. 3; Pravda, 20 June 1963, p. 3.
41 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 poput-
noe (1953–1964), Moscow: izdatel’stvo ‘knizhnaia palata’, 1991.
42 Reabilitasiia, pp. 208–14; Pravda, 19–22 June 1963.
43 Taubman, Khrushchev, pp. 589–602.
44 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.
45 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’.
46 See Alexeyeva, Thaw Generation; c.f. Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2, pp. 485–8, 491–3,
505–15.
47 E.g. ‘geroi nashikh dnei – geroi literatury i iskusstva’, Pravda, 2 April 1961, p. 1.
48 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, Social-
ist Realism. An Impossible Aesthetic, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.
49 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 cau-
tionary message. In order for communism to be achieved, he claimed, the
‘reinforcement and the strictest adherence to socialist legality’ was impera-
tive. He argued that the successful transition from socialism to commun-
ism 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, specu-
lation, the divulging of state secrets, lapses in revolutionary vigilance, and
violations of labour discipline. With no distinction between political, crimi-
nal, 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 particu-
lar, 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
22 Miriam Dobson
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 sen-
tenced by laws now under review. The decree also halved sentences over
five years (though some of the gravest crimes were excluded).4 In a sub-
sequent 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 legal-
ity’ 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 jour-
nalists had once passionately embraced convict labour as a means to trans-
form the erring individual, producing accounts of how social aliens were
despatched to hard labour within the camp system, given intensive re-
education, 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 con-
version. 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 dis-
played an honourable attitude towards their public duty; and their ‘cul-
tural’ 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 revolution-
ary 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 commit-
ment to ‘Soviet humanity’ and its policies of correction. While some intel-
lectuals 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 out-
casts. 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 post-
Stalin 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.
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.
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’:
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
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 interpreta-
tion of revolutionary eschatology was to prevail until 1953. I.V. Stalin, ‘O
nedostatkakh partiinoi raboty i merakh likvidatsii trotskistkikh i inykh dvu-
rushnikov: Doklad na plenume TsK VKP(b) 3 March 1937 g.’, in R. McNeal
(ed.), I.V. Stalin: Sochineniia, vol. 1, Stanford: Hoover Institution Foreign Lan-
guage 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
38 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. Auer-
bach, 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.
8 Pravda, 28 March 1953, p. 1.
9 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.
10 GARF, 8131/32/2386/2.
11 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.
12 GARF, 9401/1a./521/14.
13 Between 20 and 30 of June 1953, for example, 45,400 ex-convicts arrived in
towns and cities. RGANI, 5/30/36/35-7.
14 RGANI, 5/30/36/35-7.
15 GARF, 8131/31/7141/8.
16 GARF, 7523/89/4408/79.
17 R. Medvedev and Zh. Medvedev, Khrushchev: The Years in Power, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1977, p. 9.
18 GARF, 8131/32/2386/28.
19 GARF, 8131/32/2386/32-33.
20 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).
21 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.
22 GARF, 9401/1a/521/14.
23 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).
24 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.
25 GARF, 8131/31/43332/18.
26 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.
27 GARF, 8131/31/50509/22-25.
28 RGASPI, 82/2/1456/2.
29 GARF, 7523/107/189/65.
30 RGANI, 2/1/42/12.
31 Molotov’s personal fond (RGASPI, f. 82) contains a wealth of correspondence
Amnesty, criminality and public response 39
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.
32 J. Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg,
1900–1914, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
33 RGASPI, 82/2/1466/72.
34 RGASPI, 82/2/1466/71.
35 RGASPI, 82/2/1440/78.
36 Neuberger views hooligan behaviour as a response to the relentless poverty
experienced in some of the slum areas of St Petersburg. Neuberger, Hooligan-
ism, 216–78.
37 RGASPI, 82/2/1466/71. The anonymous correspondent mistakes the date of the
amnesty decree.
38 RGASPI, 82/2/1466/71.
39 RGASPI, 82/2/1440/78.
40 RGASPI, 82/2/1466/58.
41 RGASPI, 82/2/1466/71.
42 RGASPI, 82/2/1440/78.
43 The rubric ‘From the courtroom’ (Iz zala suda) was not in itself a new inven-
tion. 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.
44 ‘Vor-Retsidivist’, Pravda, 18 June 1953, p. 4.
45 ‘Khuligany-Grabiteli’, Pravda, 24 June 1953, p. 4.
46 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.
47 ‘Bandit nakazan’, Leningradskaia pravda, 27 September 1953, p. 4.
48 ‘Grabiteli poimany’, Leningradskaia pravda, 4 December 1953, p. 4.
49 ‘Bandity nakazany’, Leningradskaia pravda, 23 June 1953, p. 4; ‘Shaika vorov-
retsidivistov’, Pravda, 4 December 1953, p. 4; ‘Grabiteli’, Leningradskaia
pravda, 27 December 1953, p. 4.
50 ‘Bandity nakazany’, Moskovskaia pravda, 2 December 1953, p. 4.
51 ‘Bandit nakazan’, Leningradskaia pravda, 27 September 1953, p. 4.
52 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.
53 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’.
54 GARF, 8131/32/2386/1-7.
55 On 1 April 1953, the figure was recorded as 2,466,914. See GARF,
7523/89/4408/82.
56 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 ran-
sacked the village. See Kholodnoe Leto 53, directed by Aleksandr Proshkin,
1987, USSR.
40 Miriam Dobson
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 Destal-
inisation, 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
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 ques-
tion of how successful these texts about Stalin were in controlling local dis-
course about de-Stalinization.
Replicating de-Stalinization
Where, in 1956, the party had been cautious in encouraging popular narra-
tives 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 de-
Stalinization.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 gov-
erned the narration of terror.
For example, at the meeting of Kostroma obkom, held in mid-
November, 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, meet-
ings 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 indus-
trial manger recounted his own sufferings in 1937 and further tales of high-
ranking 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 ‘law-
lessness’ 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 ‘pre-
Stalinized’ 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 de-
Stalinization 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 submit-
ted to raion authorities showed far more curiosity about the apparent con-
troversies 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,
54 Polly Jones
or, as one note pointed out, may have indicated that the congress had dis-
pelled 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 hypocrit-
ically 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 correspon-
dents 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 pas-
sionate gratitude for the new revelations about Stalin, suggesting a cathar-
tic 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 mini-
biographies 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:
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 party-
wide) narrative of unjust sacrifice, in which ‘the best’ had fallen victim to
mass terror, did allow the writer to feel like a ‘legitimate citizen’ (polno-
pravnyi 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 monu-
ment’. 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 rehabilita-
tion 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 de-
Stalinization 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 demoli-
tion 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
56 Polly Jones
to find out more about the implementation of this decision went unsatis-
fied; 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 anec-
dotes, 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 self-
restraint:
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
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 de-
Stalinization permitted? The available evidence suggests that open resis-
tance 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 inter-
pretive 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 resis-
tance, 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
58 Polly Jones
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 senti-
ment 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 ‘senti-
ments 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 mid-
November 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 sup-
ported 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 criti-
cisms 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’ pol-
icies 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 de-
Stalinization – 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 con-
tinue 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 Advance-
ment 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 ekonomich-
eskoe 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:
60 Polly Jones
Yale University Press, 2000; P. Jones, ‘From Stalinism to Post-Stalinism: De-
mythologising Stalin, 1953–1956’, in Shukman, H. (ed.), Redefining Stalinism,
London: Frank Cass, 2003.
7 RGANI, 1/2/17/89-91; RGANI, 3/14/4/66.
8 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.
9 For a full analysis of the speech’s rhetoric, see P. Jones, ‘Strategies of De-
Mythologisation in Post-Stalinism and Post-Communism. A Comparison of
De-Stalinisation and De-Leninisation’, DPhil diss., University of Oxford,
2003, pp. 52–63.
10 RGANI, 1/2/18/3-90.
11 RGANI, 5/32/43/62.
12 Reabilitatsiia. Kak eto bylo, vol. 2, Moscow: Rosspen, 2003, p. 22.
13 Ibid., pp. 22, 46.
14 RGANI, 5/32/43/73.
15 RGANI, 5/31/53/101.
16 Reabilitatsiia, p. 38; RGANI, 5/32/43/6; RGANI, 5/32/43/54; RGANI,
5/32/43/145.
17 Reabilitatsiia, p. 22.
18 RGANI, 5/3/43/8.
19 RGANI, 5/32/45/18.
20 Reabilitatsiia, p. 23.
21 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.
22 RGANI, 5/32/43/133; RGANI, 5/32/43/89; RGASPI, 556/1/25/255.
23 Speeches highlighting old Bolsheviks’ Leninism include RGANI, 5/32/44/17;
RGANI, 5/32/44/50.
24 TsDOOSO, 161/27/26/54-8.
25 RGANI, 5/32/45/60.
26 TsDNIVO, 119/20/41/83-4.
27 TsDOOSO, 161/27/26/58.
28 Reabilitatsiia, p. 35; RGANI, 5/32/46/110.
29 Reabilitatsiia, p. 47; RGANI, 5/32/43/6; RGANI, 5/32/44/188.
30 K. Clark, The Soviet Novel. History as Ritual, Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1981, pp. 15–24.
31 Reabilitatsiia, pp. 52–7, 63–5, 47–9.
32 Reabilitatsiia, pp. 41–3, 45–52, 49. For more on these cases, see Pikhoia, Sovet-
skii 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.
33 RGANI, 5/32/45/3-4; RGANI, 5/32/45/54; c.f. TsDOOSO, 4/55/120/13.
34 Reabilitatsiia., p. 48; c.f. RGANI, 5/32/44/1.
35 RGASPI, 566/1/124/57, 156.
36 RGANI, 5/32/43/43. Full stenogram in RGASPI, 556/1/362 (Speeches at ll.
60–2, 69, 90).
37 RGASPI, 556/1/1072/148, 163.
38 RGANI, 5/32/44/135-7.
Real and ideal responses to de-Stalinization 61
39 RGANI, 5/32/45/135-6.
40 RGANI, 5/32/44/134-5.
41 RGANI, 5/32/44/137.
42 RGANI, 5/32/46/176.
43 RGANI, 5/32/46/171.
44 Reabilitatsiia, p. 47.
45 M. Zezina, ‘Shokovaia terapiia: ot 1953-go k 1956 godu’, Otechestvennaia
istoriia, no. 2, 1995, 121–35 (129).
46 RGANI, 5/32/46/60, 63–4.
47 RGANI, 5/32/45/113.
48 RGANI, 5/32/46/60, 68, 181; RGANI, 5/32/46/8.
49 RGANI, 5/31/54/6; RGANI, 5/31/54/6.
50 TsDNIVO, 594/1/15.
51 TsDNIVO, 113/52/20/284-85.
52 Reabilitatsiia, pp. 157–62.
53 Ibid., p. 158.
54 RGANI, 5/31/54/13-21; RGANI, 5/32/46/244.
55 TsKHDMO, 1/32/810/10-17.
56 Reabilitatsiia, pp. 208–14.
57 Ibid., p. 210.
58 TsDNIVO, 113/52/103/164, 196; the attack on the statue was deemed
‘unhealthy’ by the Stalingrad authorities: TsDNIVO, 113/52/110/9.
59 RGANI, 5/16/746/108.
60 RGANI, 5/31/54/8.
61 RGANI, 5/31/54/60.
62 TsKhDMO, 1/32/810/12.
63 Reabilitatsiia, p. 40.
64 RGANI, 5/31/53/134.
65 Reabilitatsiia, p. 23.
66 Reabilitatsiia, p. 39; RGANI, 5/32/43/153; RGANI, 5/32/46/58.
67 RGANI, 5/32/45/38. C.f. Reabilitatsiia, p. 47.
68 RGANI, 5/32/46/64.
69 RGANI, 5/31/54/127.
70 RGANI, 5/30/139/5.
71 TsKhDMO, 1/32/806/111; RGASPI, 82/2/1470/64.
72 RGANI, 5/31/53/133.
73 RGANI, 5/31/54/6 (my italics).
74 Ibid.
75 RGANI, 5/31/54/127.
76 RGANI, 5/32/43/143.
77 This trope appeared in the July resolution, and also in the periodical press,
e.g. Partiinaia zhizn’, no. 6, 1956, p. 20.
78 RGANI, 5/30/140/194-95. On the anniversary, see RGANI, 5/30/141/67.
79 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 Commun-
ism’, London: Methuen, 1962, pp. 127–52, esp. pp. 126, 138.
80 RGASPI, 586/1/235/24, 30; Ibid., d. 305, ll. 200–4.
81 ‘The sixties rejected Stalin as an amoral person’, Genis, Vail, 60-e mir
sovetskego cheloveka Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988, p. 219.
82 XXII s’’ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii, vol. 2, p. 593.
83 Multiple examples in RGANI, 5/32/174 (entire), 175 (entire).
84 RGANI, 5/32/174/68.
85 Ibid., l.135.
62 Polly Jones
86 Ibid., ll.202–3.
87 TsDNIVO, 113/65/76 (entire). C.f. TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/16, 23.
88 TsDNIVO, 116/1/603/187.
89 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.
90 TsDOOSO, 161/34/40/10, 15, 20, 42. They were also dominated by the separ-
ate issue of economic hardship (Ibid., ll.10, 14, 15, 20, 21, 26).
91 Ibid., ll.5, 27, 3, 34.
92 Ibid., ll.15, 28. Knowledge accumulation also stressed in Ibid., ll.29–30 (‘until
now there was a lot we didn’t know’).
93 TsDNIVO, 4120/3/172/126.
94 Ibid.
95 Ibid.
96 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.
97 M. Gorshkov, O. Volobuev, V. Zhuravlev (eds), Vlast’ i oppozitsiia: Rossiiskii
politicheskii protsess dvadtsatogo stoletiia, Moscow: Rossiiskaia politicheskaia
entsiklopediia, 1995, p. 223.
98 RGANI, 5/30/173/13; RGASPI, 599/1/183/3.
99 RGANI, 5/30/173/108-19 (svodka of letters to Pravda, compiled 12 November
1961).
100 XXII s’’ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii, vol. 2, pp. 585–6.
101 RGANI, 5/30/173/110.
102 Ibid., l.111.
103 C.f. letter praising the idea of a monument (yet also pushing for more de-Stal-
inization) from the Fourth International in Paris, RGASPI, 17/96/16/3-7.
104 Details of burial procedures in RGASPI, 558/11/1487/129; ‘Kreml’ – istoriia v
bolezniakh’, Stolitsa, 1994, no. 41, 11–14; V. Strelkov, ‘Svidetel’stvuiu’, Argu-
menty i fakty, 1988, no. 50, 3.
105 RGANI, 5/32/174/69; XXII s’’ezd, pp. 119–21.
106 RGANI, 5/32/175/84. C.f. RGANI, 5/32/174/69; RGANI, 5/31/160/10.
107 RGANI, 5/32/174/135. C.f. RGANI, 5/31/160/10, 73; RGANI, 5/32/161/98.
108 TsDNIVO, 113/65/76/100.
109 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.
110 RGANI, 5/30/173/117-18.
111 Ibid., l.118.
112 S. Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and
Dissent, 1934–41, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 177.
113 Zezina, ‘Shokovaia terapiia’.
114 Gorshkov et al., Vlast’ i oppozitsiia, p. 224.
115 RGANI, 5/31/161/98.
116 RGANI, 5/31/160/13, 42.
117 Ibid., l.56.
118 RGANI, 5/31/60/59.
119 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
estvennye nastroeniia v SSSR v 1953–1964 gg., Moscow: Rosspen, 2004, pp.
339–41.
120 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).
121 RGANI, 5/31/160/42.
122 RGANI, 5/32/175/367.
123 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
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
The fact that members of the Academy of Sciences owed their posts to
patronage and not to expert knowledge even became the subject of anec-
dotes, 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, academi-
cian Ovcharenko! Let him in’, answers the director.70
What sounded funny in anecdotes was the bitter reality for many inven-
tors, 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 engi-
neer 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 com-
plained 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 Vik-
torov, who had surrounded himself with
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 State-
ments 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:
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 dis-
cussion 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 con-
struction process, the party was not willing to replace large number of dir-
ectors.81 ‘In fighting against the personality cult, we are not denying
authorities and their great significance’, wrote Pravda.82 ‘Collective leader-
ship’ meant exploiting the full potential of all engineers, but not any fun-
damental revision of the form and structure of leadership. One year after
the GKIO’s foundation, it was characterized as a ‘bureaucratic and help-
less registration office’, whose staff was dominated by ‘bureaucratic ele-
ments’, 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 con-
crete of the administrative-command style’.89 The bureaucracy formed a
closed system of members who protected each other from attacks from
outside.
76 Susanne Schattenberg
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 communica-
tion between functionaries and working men was not functioning any
more, because both spoke different languages, leading to misunderstand-
ing 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 Zeit-
geschichte, 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’, Otechestven-
naia 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 pred-
posylki 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: Cam-
bridge 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.
78 Susanne Schattenberg
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 Sowje-
tunion 1917–1985, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993; S. Schatten-
berg, 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 liter-
aturnoe 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
I. (1808–10), since 1817 head of the military settlements, known for his cruelty
and violence.
79 Ibid.
80 Pravda, 2 December 1956; Novyi mir, 1957, no. 10, p. 7; RGANI, 5/40/35/9, 49.
81 See H. Schröder, ‘“Lebendige Verbindungen mit den Massen”. Sowjetische
Gesellschaftspolitik in der Ära Chrushchev’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeit-
geschichte, vol. 34, no. 4, 1986, pp. 523–60; O. Kharkhordin, The Collective and
the Individual in Russia. A Study of Practices, Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1999.
82 ‘Leninizm – pobedonosnoe znamia sovremennoi epokhi. Doklad tov. D.T.
Shepilova’, Pravda, 23 April 1956.
83 RGAE, 373/1/6/60.
84 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.
85 GARF, R-5446/124/1/35, 32.
86 See Altrichter, Kleine Geschichte der Sowjetunion, p. 140.
87 C.f. Berry, ‘Science, Technology and Innovation’, p. 76.
88 A. Fedoseev, Zapadnia. Chelovek i socializm, Frankfurt on Main: Possev
Verlag, 1979; Id., Sbornik statei. Iz serii: ‘Socializm i diktatura. Prichina i sled-
stvie’, Frankfurt on Main: Posev, 1971.
89 G.A. Arbatov, Zatianuvsheesia vyzdorovlenie (1953–1985). Svidetel’stvo sovre-
menniks, Moscow: mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1991, p. 70.
90 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.
91 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
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, unfor-
tunately, 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
84 Denis Kozlov
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 apologiz-
ing for the many blots:
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 pro-
fessor 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
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 prof-
itable 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 dis-
covered 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 dis-
persed 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 exception-
ally 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 dis-
turbingly 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 socio-
ethical 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 har-
boured no warmth towards Dudintsev’s inflammatory book.39 After
Hungary, the 19 December 1956 Central Committee letter on ‘The Inten-
sification of the Political Work of Party Organizations among the Masses’
drew unambiguous parallels between the Hungarian events and the activ-
ities of ‘anti-Soviet elements’ in Soviet literature, arts, humanities and the
media, citing as an example Paustovskii’s 22 October speech at the discus-
sion of Dudintsev’s book.40 After late November, the tone of press cover-
age 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
88 Denis Kozlov
book. The tone of letters remained the same, and the motif of combating
bureaucrats even intensified. The exasperated readers perceived the offi-
cial 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 interfer-
ence. 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
But it is not the year 1937 today! The 20th congress has particularly
emphasized that the times are different now. The days of the Droz-
dovs’ 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 Commu-
nist party. They are the fifth column.52
90 Denis Kozlov
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. Rejec-
tion 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 well-
ordered 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 situ-
ation 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 recog-
nition 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, reti-
cent 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 Dud-
intsev’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 precari-
ously 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
92 Denis Kozlov
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, pro-
duced 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 Droz-
dovs.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 blunder-
ing, and inertia. Back in the early 1930s, the breathtaking tempo of indus-
trialization 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 social-
ism 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 repub-
lished, 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 Gor-
pinich, 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 conscious-
ness – themes to which experienced audiences were possibly more recep-
tive 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
94 Denis Kozlov
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 recog-
nized the country’s troubles as structural and deep-seated, and their exam-
ination 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 Kara-
ganda, who had spent ten years in the prison camps, remembered Dudint-
sev’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, com-
pared 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 lan-
guage 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 civil-
ization 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’: Vospomi-
naniia, 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 Univer-
sity, 1999, pp. 299–311.
9 For a persuasive discussion of continuity between Stalin-era and early post-
Stalin (1950s) fiction, see K. Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual,
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981, pp. 216–20; idem, ‘The Chang-
ing 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, ‘Sobstven-
noe 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. 136-
136ob; 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 record-
keeping 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
96 Denis Kozlov
Novyi mir, 1945–1970: Twentieth-Century Experience and Soviet Historical
Consciousness’, PhD Diss., University of Toronto, 2005.
21 RGALI, 1702/6/243/27.
22 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.
23 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.
24 RGALI, 1702/6/241/15.
25 RGALI, 1702/6/241/15.
26 RGALI, 1702/6/241/16.
27 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.
28 RGALI, 1702/6/245/91-92 (original emphasis).
29 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.
30 See, e.g., ‘Dozhdetsia li tokar’ N. Smirnov otveta ot ministra A. Kostousova?’
Promyshlenno-ekonomicheskaia gazeta, 13 May 1956; ‘Ukaz Prezidiuma Verk-
hovnogo Soveta SSSR O nagrazhdenii tov. Kostousova A.I. ordenom Lenina’,
Pravda, 6 October 1956.
31 RGALI, 1702/6/241/53.
32 Engineers and technical specialists were one of Dudintsev’s largest constituen-
cies – 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.
33 RGALI, 1702/6/244/63, 67–8.
34 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.
35 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.
36 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.
37 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 Impos-
ture 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 elu-
siveness developed around 1937, see Weiner, Making Sense of War, p. 35.
38 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 ide-
ologicheskikh 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 che-
lovek?’, Oktiabr’, no. 12, December 1956, 166–73; ‘Pod znamenem kommunis-
ticheskoi ideinosti i sotsialisticheskogo realizma’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 15
January 1957; ‘Sozdavat’ proizvedeniia, dostoinye nashego naroda’, Literatur-
naia 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 Dis-
aster 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. Alex-
eyeva 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.
98 Denis Kozlov
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 report-
edly 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 Commu-
nist Party for the well-being of the people (blago naroda). In a characteris-
tic 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 govern-
ment 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 Govern-
ment 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
102 Christine Varga-Harris
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 prole-
tariat 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 pro-
vided official sanction for comfort and domesticity to the professional
segment of the population, in exchange for its participation in the recon-
struction goals of the state.5 At the same time, the massive housing con-
struction 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 national-
ization immediately following the October Revolution, constituted the
first endeavour to realize the goal of housing for the people.8 The commit-
ment 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 destruc-
tion of the housing stock also contributed to the housing shortage.9 Exten-
sive 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 Five-
Year 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 news-
paper and magazine editors – correspondence that was never published –
belied such proclamations about the achievements of housing construc-
tion. 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. Petition-
ers therefore turned to the Leningrad city soviet to make appeals, while
their letters to other authorities (from housing administrators to news-
paper 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 demon-
strate that, despite grandiose efforts, housing continued to be character-
ized 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) con-
tract, 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 identifi-
cation: ‘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
104 Christine Varga-Harris
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, cultiv-
ated 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
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
108 Christine Varga-Harris
apparently equated the securing of living space with ‘re-acquiring’ cit-
izenship. Such persons had been excluded from the participatory or asso-
ciative 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 funda-
mental justice. As with soldiers returning home, a dwelling could provide
structure and a sense of normalcy, in this case after exile and imprison-
ment.
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 preoc-
cupation 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 predic-
ated upon it perhaps ended up in files other than those of the Leningrad
city soviet. Clearly, however, individuals were reluctant to raise or fore-
front 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 lan-
guage, 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’ iden-
tities, 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
110 Christine Varga-Harris
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 proxi-
mate 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 admin-
istrators was a course followed also by the central authorities. Some schol-
ars 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 compro-
mised 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, petition-
ers 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 des-
perate 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 miser-
able existence and it is better to die immediately than lead it slowly. Such
is our life, like death’.55
Forging citizenship on the home front 111
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 analo-
gous to the phenomenon of ‘speaking Bolshevik’ formulated by Stephen
Kotkin in his research on the 1930s: petitioners deliberately employed offi-
cial 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 dis-
abled 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 social-
ist contract – in accordance with policy tracts on housing and proclama-
tions 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 peti-
tions 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 correspon-
dence 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 ful-
filled 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 effect-
ively rendered moot the rights and privileges of the ordinary person, as
112 Christine Varga-Harris
local officials simply were not able to satisfy the endless requests for better
housing that they received.59 Nevertheless, through their petitions, indi-
viduals were able to elicit official validation for both their living circum-
stances 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 dis-
courses 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 over-
crowded or in extreme disrepair, petitions submitted during the Thaw thus
temporally propel forward both the ‘return to normalcy’ that some schol-
ars 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 appropri-
ate 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 entitle-
ment 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.
Forging citizenship on the home front 113
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.
5 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.
6 These aspects of the Khrushchev-era housewarming and ‘domesticity’ during
the Thaw are elaborated, respectively, in chapters one and three of C. Varga-
Harris, ‘Constructing the Soviet Hearth: Home, Citizenship and Socialism in
Russia, 1956–64’, PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2005.
7 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.)
8 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.
9 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.
10 See for example, J. DiMaio, Jr., Soviet Urban Housing: Problems and Policies,
New York: Praeger Publishers, Inc., 1974, pp. 20–1.
11 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.
12 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.
13 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.
114 Christine Varga-Harris
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. Mar-
shall, 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., Uni-
versity 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 pre-
war 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 frustra-
tions, 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,
Forging citizenship on the home front 115
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 peti-
tions submitted by Muscovites during the Thaw suggests that the discourses
employed by Leningraders do in fact have parallels in the rhetoric used by cit-
izens 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.
27 E. Perovskii, ‘Novosel’e’, Stroitel’, 11 August 1962, 2.
28 See A. Yurchak, ‘The Cynical Reason of Late Socialism: Power, Pretense, and
the Anekdot’, Public Culture, vol. 9, 1997, 161–88.
29 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.
30 TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2083/113, 116, 120.
31 TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2083/113.
32 TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2083/120.
33 TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/103.
34 TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/103. Petrov cited the Decree of the Soviet of Ministers
of the USSR of 24 September 1953 (No. 2508).
35 TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/108.
36 TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/99.
37 ‘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 correspon-
dence pertaining to the cases of N.M. Berezkina (TsGA SPb, 9626/1/291/103-
07) and A.Ia. Shvedova (TsGA SPb, 7384/42/343/360-78, except ll. 362–3).
38 S. Zhitelev, ‘Khronika iubileinykh dnei’, Vechernii Leningrad, 19 June 1957, 1.
39 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/633/44-45, 47–8.
40 TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2083/89.
41 Namely, the Decree of the Soviet of Ministers of 8 September 1955, No. 1655.
42 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/633/79.
43 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/633/68.
44 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/341/503-04, 512.
45 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/341/503-04.
46 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/343/151.
47 The ineffective and callous local bureaucrat was a stock image of the national
satirical magazine Krokodil. See for example, C. Varga-Harris, ‘An Unimagin-
able 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).
48 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 ground-
less’. 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.
49 TsGA SPb, 7384/37a/46/85.
50 TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2070/100.
51 TsGA SPb, 7384/42/343/375-376. Capitals appear in the original.
116 Christine Varga-Harris
52 When émigrés who had left the Soviet Union between 1977 and 1980 were
interviewed about their experiences with certain bureaucracies, they most neg-
atively 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 dissatis-
faction. 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 Civil-
ization, 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 ‘suppli-
cants’ in the same way. See Gitelman, ‘Working the Soviet System’, p. 222.
59 Most of the housing petitions examined remained unresolved or unsatisfacto-
rily 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 Septem-
ber 1953 to March 1958. TsGA SPb, 7384/37/2070/4-35.
61 See, respectively, S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Postwar Soviet Society: The “Return to Nor-
malcy”, 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 behind-
the-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 associ-
ated 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 cit-
izens, some of them were eager to launch targeted structural changes and
reforms.
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:
Kairov pointed to the influence of adults and the street that needed to
be overcome and punctuated his speech with examples of suicides, knifings
120 Ann Livschiz
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 dissat-
isfaction – ‘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:
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 respons-
ibility and social pressure on offenders:
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 reg-
istered in school, so he is registered. Such [young people] should have
been working long ago.19
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 mani-
festations of improper public behaviour, but also to two-facedness and
careerist aspirations, negative attitudes towards physical labour and a disin-
terest 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’:
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:
Nothing was holding her [in the village], yet she could not leave every-
thing 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
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 specula-
tor, 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 unprece-
dented way, others responded to it in the same traditional standardized
manner.
128 Ann Livschiz
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 com-
passion – 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 compas-
sion 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 phenome-
non 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 appropri-
ate 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:
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 expres-
sions in the original Russian convey the sacrilegious tone of the letter.
130 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.
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 chil-
dren, 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 assump-
tion about didacticism in children’s literature. They were quite eager to
take advantage of the relative freedom of the Thaw to achieve their long-
nurtured 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 smart-
alecky 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 cul-
tural 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 differ-
ent direction.
Perhaps the greatest achievement of the Thaw was the opportunity to
discuss and debate important social issues, with the morality and behav-
ioural 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 genera-
tions in particular. Yet, not all hopes for reform and change could be real-
ized. 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 con-
straints had fallen away. Thus, the most dramatic changes occurred not in
132 Ann Livschiz
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 direc-
tion 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 ‘pro-
fessional’ 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 increas-
ingly as a result of parental alcoholism. Mainstream schools with their over-
crowded 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
134 Ann Livschiz
period, which, as Miriam Dobson has shown, were not met with enthusiasm by
the public.
49 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).
50 Files of letters are not available for all years. For comparison, the book
received 85 letters in 1953 and only three letters in 1956.
51 TsGALI SPb, 64/5/87/80.
52 TsGALI SPb, 64/5/87/80.
53 TsGALI SPb, 64/5/87/241.
54 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, M-
1/5/648/145-146 (1957); A. Gusev, God za godom, Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia,
1964.
55 TsGALI SPb, 64/5/110/28.
56 TsGA SPb, 5039/6/67/53, 71.
57 It was also during this period that officials discovered that boys were over-
whelmingly reading adventure stories, which lacked the necessary didacticism
and in fact distracted boys from reality.
58 Children did not seem to write such critical letters in the earlier periods, though
some adults did.
59 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.
60 RGALI, 2190/2/439/77-9. Both boys signed their name. Judging from the hand-
writing, 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 corre-
lation 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 per-
sistent 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 prevail-
ing 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 vocab-
ulary 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
136 Juliane Fürst
process challenges the common assumption that de-Stalinization was syn-
onymous 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 chal-
lenges of youth hooliganism, worship of Western life-styles and political
non-conformism and disobedience. His policies, many of which were res-
urrected from the 1920s and 1930s, aimed to solve problems by addressing
them head on. The politics of ‘lifting the veil’, however, had their own pit-
falls. Ultimately, they resulted in the same rift between official and unoffi-
cial 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 de-
Stalinize 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.
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
Notes
1 See A. Kassof ‘Youth organizations and the Adjustment of Soviet Adoles-
cents’, 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 Sowe-
jetunion’, 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 Trans-
formation 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
The arrival of spring? 151
‘youth problem’ as such, even though youth’s participation in religious prac-
tices worried officials.
5 GARF, R-8131/29/506/135.
6 TsDAHOU, 7/13/110/21.
7 Ibid.
8 In 1952, 98.4 per cent of all hooligan acts in Moscow were committed in public.
GARF, R-8131/32/453/87.
9 E.g. GARF, R-8131/32/453/32, 34, 44, 57.
10 RGANI, 5/15/432/174-176.
11 TsDAHOU, 7/13/109/30.
12 TsDAHOU, 7/13/495/71.
13 TsDAHOU, 1/24/4089/79.
14 J. Neuberger, Hooliganism: Crime, Culture, and Power in St. Petersburg,
1900–1914, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
15 The fact that even Komsomol members protected hooligans was much decried.
See TsDAHOU, 1/24/4054/238.
16 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 hooli-
ganism reveals a strong correlation between concentration of industrial centres
and high incident rates. GARF, R-8131/32/4035/1-7.
17 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.
18 See J. Fü rst, ‘Stalin’s last Generation: Youth, State and Komsomol 1945–53’,
PhD Diss., University of London, 2003, pp. 223–58.
19 RGASPI, M-1/46/175/91-92.
20 M. Menshikov, ‘Zolotaia koronkoa’, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 18 May 1946, 3.
S. Gorbusov, ‘Vecher v Gigante’, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 16 April 1946, 2.
21 See for example Otchetnyi doklad at the 11th Congress VLKSM 1954, pub-
lished in Tovarishch Komsomol, Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1969, pp. 130–1;
RGASPI M-1/2/348/65-70; RGASPI, M-1/32/816 (entire).
22 N. Mesiatsev, ‘Probuzhdenie (Komsomol vtoroi poloviny 50-kh godov)’, in
Pozyvnye Istorii vyp. 9, Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1990, p. 274.
23 RGASPI, M-1/46/192/146.
24 TsAODM, 3/63/56/366-388.
25 Membership remained stable during the war years, but rocketed afterwards,
thanks largely to school recruitment drives in the years 1948–54.
26 TsDAHOU, 1/24/492/6-7.
27 See for example RGASPI, M-1/46/192/145, 153, 185, RGASPI, M-1/32/821/79.
28 V. Ioffe, Etiudy ob optimizme, St. Petersburg: Memorial, 1998, pp. 45–52.
29 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.
30 Archive Memorial Moscow, Files Krasnopevets, Cheshkovyi, Kosovyi. See also
Ioffe, Etiudy ob optimizme, p. 100.
31 L. Silina, Nastroenie sovetskogo studenchestva 1945–64gg, Moscow: Russkii
Mir, 2004, pp. 145–58.
32 Fürst, ‘Prisoners’, p. 355; Ioffe, Etiudy ob optimizme, pp. 45–7.
33 TsDAHOU, 1/24/4274/39-43, RGASPI, M-1/46/192/185, 236.
34 RGASPI, M-1/46/192/85.
35 TsDAHOU, 1/24/4492/9.
36 See A. Shelepin, Ob uluchshenii ideino-vospitatel’noi raboty komsomol’skikh
152 Juliane Fürst
organizatsii sredi molodezhi, Doklad na 7-plenume TsK VLKSM, 26.2.1957,
Moscow, 1957.
37 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.
38 RGASPI, M-1/3/840/11.
39 TsDAHOU, 1/24/4054/236-239.
40 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.
41 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, M-
1/3, perechen’ for 1951.
42 ‘Po povodu bezdel’nikov i vechnykh studentov, Stalinskoe plemia, 8 May 1952,
3; TsDAHOU,7/13/106/63-68.
43 ‘V cheloveke vse dolzhno byt’ prekrasnym’, Stalinskoe plemia, 14 February
1953, 2.
44 ‘Kogda sem’ia teriaet rebenka . . .’, Stalinskoe plemia, 29 November 1953, 3.
45 ‘V poiskakh romantiki’, Stalinskoe plemia, 30 December 1953, 3.
46 ‘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.
47 D. Beliaev, ‘Stiliaga’, Krokodil’, no. 7, 10 March 1949, 10.
48 Typical of a Stalinist treatment of hooliganism is the Komsomol’skaia pravda
article ‘Khuligan nakazan po zaslugam’, KP, 21 September 1952, 3. The hooli-
gan in question was a wayward, violent husband; the hooligan got his deserved
punishment: 18 months imprisonment.
49 TsDAHOU, 1/24/4054/236-239.
50 ‘Kto iz nikh stiliaga?’, Komsomol’skaia pravda, 11 August 1965, 3.
51 V. Beskaravainyi, ‘Oshibka’, Stalinskoe plemia, 17 October 1956, 3.
52 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1660/54-55.
53 For a similar argument see Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media’, pp. 96–9.
54 ‘Ostrym perom satiry’, Stalinskoe plemia, 7 February 1953, 3.
55 V. Nikolaev, Legkaia kavaleriia, Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1958, pp. 3–6.
56 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).
57 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.
58 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1429/13.
59 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1429/70.
60 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.
61 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1537/13.
62 Valerii Ronkin, Na smenu dekabriam prikhodit ianvari . . ., Moscow: Memorial,
2003, 121.
63 Ibid., pp. 69–74.
64 Ibid., pp. 78–9.
65 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1429/70.
The arrival of spring? 153
66 RGASPI, M-1/46/198/182.
67 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1537/22-24.
68 RGASPI, M-1/5/596/89.
69 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1537/8, 23; Roth-Ey, ‘Mass Media’, pp. 73–4.
70 TsDAHOU, 7/13/1537/61.
71 Ronkin, Na smenu, p. 73.
72 Ronkin, Na smenu, pp. 81, 117, 120.
73 Shelepin strongly implied in his speech at the 7th Plenum VLKSM in 1957 that
‘work’ represented the right form of ‘fighting for communism’, mentioning con-
struction of housing, harvesting and general agricultural work: Shelepin, Ob
uluchshenii ideino-vospitatel’noi raboty, pp. 13–15.
74 RGALI, 1702/6/243/38-39.
75 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).
76 N. Mesiatsev, ‘Probuzhdenie (Komsomol vtoroi poloviny 50-kh godov)’,
Pozyvnye Istorii vyp. 9, Moscow, Molodaia Gvardiia, 1990, pp. 274–86.
77 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
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 (1953-
nachalo 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. Neverthe-
less, 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 Commis-
sars 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 Com-
munist 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
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 sen-
tence of two to four months.
5 ‘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 vve-
denii 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 stric-
ture 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.
6 Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism, pp. 22–40.
7 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.
8 Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism, pp. 120–32, 167–76.
9 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.
10 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.
11 ‘Edict of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, 2 October 1940, O
gosudarstvennykh trudovykh rezervakh SSSR’, Pravda, 3 October 1940.
12 GARF, 9507/2/418/1,3; d. 425, l. 8. See also, Filtzer, Soviet Labour and Late
Stalinism, pp. 36–9.
13 GARF, 9507/2/420/9.
14 ‘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.
15 ‘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.
16 Rabochii klass SSSR (1951–1965 g.g.), Moscow, 1969, pp. 112–14.
168 Donald Filtzer
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 tar-
geted for new industrial development – went there via orgnabor. Sotsialistich-
eskii 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 promyshlen-
nosti v SSSR, Moscow, 1964, p. 198. For a more detailed account of the wages
system prior to Khrushchev see Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrial-
ization, 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 disrup-
tions 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 earn-
ings 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 oper-
ators. 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 machin-
ists, 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 Sotsio-
logicheskie 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
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
174 Roger D. Markwick
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 con-
sciousness’, 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 Liter-
ature’.6 Literature became the vehicle for the appearance of a genuine
‘public opinion’ in Soviet life7 and the catalyst for the creative and scient-
ific 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 con-
nection 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 Bur-
dzhalov. All three had hitherto been in the main loyal to the Stalin regime,
especially Sidorov, who had played a leading role in the viciously anti-
Semitic ‘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 Com-
mittee 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 person-
ality’ and demonstrating that the ‘masses [were] the driving force of histor-
ical 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 malev-
olent 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 pol-
icies 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 contribu-
tor in May 1955.11 And historians were still subservient to their political
overlords. It is a telling statement of the degree of political and organi-
zational 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 surveil-
lance. 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, includ-
ing 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.
176 Roger D. Markwick
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 histori-
ography 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 back-
ward’ branch.17 Likewise, Academician Pankratova attributed the over-
simplification, embellishment and modernization of the past by historians
to the ‘cult of the personality’, without mentioning Stalin by name. Reject-
ing 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 tan-
tamount 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, nur-
tured by the millions who had returned from the camps and the posthu-
mous 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 distur-
bances in Poland, the leadership’s retreat from the agenda of the 20th
Party Congress was codified in the June 1956 Central Committee resolu-
tion ‘On Overcoming the Cult of the Personality and its Consequences’.
The resolution baulked at outright condemnation of Stalin and acknow-
ledged his contribution to the party, the nation and the international revo-
lutionary 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 ‘mis-
takes’, and the resolution pointedly repudiated any systemic explanation
for Stalinism.23
This ambivalent attitude of the CPSU leadership toward the Stalin phe-
nomenon, 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 mid-
1960s. 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.
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 Bur-
dzhalov 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.
180 Roger D. Markwick
Ironically, despite the setback that historiography suffered in the wake
of the ‘Burdzhalov affair’, the party’s own initiatives – notably the post-
Stalin 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 Sep-
tember 1955 Pankratova, due to the support of Khrushchev, led a delega-
tion 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 establish-
ment 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 ‘specific-
historical’ research as the antidote to ‘dogmatism’.48 Likewise, Academi-
cian Nechkina’s ambitious initiatives for the systematic study of
historiography, particularly the Scientific Council on ‘The history of histor-
ical 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.
Collectivization
Despite Sidorov’s Stalinist credentials, as director of the Institute of
History he was also father to another revisionist trend, even more politic-
ally fraught than ‘multistructuralism’: the historiography of the collec-
tivization of agriculture, which was pivotal to the Stalin myth. Stalin’s
triumphalist Short Course history asserted that with ‘full-scale collectiviza-
tion’ 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 tech-
nical 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
184 Roger D. Markwick
(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 impera-
tive, in keeping with the requirement in Soviet political culture that histor-
ical 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 there-
fore 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 peas-
antry 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 criti-
cized 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 revi-
sionists from Stalinist antagonists such as Trapeznikov was that they actu-
ally 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 Collec-
tivization 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 tradi-
tional family ownership prevailed, were not ready for full-scale collec-
tivization. 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 neo-
Stalinists 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 with-
draw the proofs of his history of collectivization. The manuscript was
never to see the light of day.
Thaws and freezes in Soviet historiography 185
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 commu-
nist party’s renewed commitment to historical science in the wake of the
Burdzhalov affair. From 1960 onwards the party gave top priority to pro-
fessionalizing 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 resul-
tant 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 fos-
tered 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 posthu-
mous, partial rehabilitation of M.N. Pokrovsky. He was re-instated as a
Bolshevik and accorded guarded recognition of his achievements as a his-
torian.68 Further, the programmatic conviction that communism was on
the horizon impelled the party to convene the 2,000-strong all-Union con-
ference 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-Staliniza-
tion 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
186 Roger D. Markwick
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 con-
summate adherent to partiinost’, survived and prospered by choosing a
field that would demonstrate his loyalty – ‘unmasking’ imperialist instiga-
tion 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, direc-
tor of the institute from 1959 to 1967, was the ‘most influential and power-
ful 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
Conclusion
The ousting of Khrushchev was the beginning of the end for Soviet histor-
ical revisionism. Despite rear-guard resistance, including an attempt by the
revisionists to democratize the Institute of History through its party com-
mittee (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 histor-
ical 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’ de-
Stalinization 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 stalin-
inizma i poststalinizma: 1838–1988 gg.’ in Iu. Afanas’ev (ed.), Sovetskaia istori-
ografiia , Moscow: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi gumanitarnyi universitet, 1996,
pp. 240–73.
4 ‘Perestroika i istoricheskoe znanie’, in Iu. Afanas’ev (ed.), Inogo ne dano – per-
estroika: glasnost’, demokratiia, sotsializm, Moscow: Progress, 1988, p. 498.
190 Roger D. Markwick
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 sered-
ina 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 ‘Doklad E.N. Burdzhalova’, pp. 82–4.
35 Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, pp. 154–5; Sidorova, ‘Ottepel’’, p. 256.
36 Gorodetskii, ‘Zhurnal’, p. 76. C.f. Zubkova, Russia After the War, pp. 195–6.
37 Gorodetskii, ‘Zhurnal’, p. 80.
38 Ibid., p. 73; Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, p. 156.
39 RGANI, 5/35/39/161; Gorodetsky, ‘Zhurnal’, pp. 78–9.
40 ‘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.
41 Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, p. 158.
42 Zhuravlev (ed.). XX s’’ezd KPSS, p. 252.
43 Hösler, Die sowjetische Geschichtswissenschaft, pp. 54–5.
44 Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, pp. 150, 153.
45 ‘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.
46 Savel’ev, ‘Nomenklaturnaia bor’ba’, p. 154.
47 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.
48 Hösler, Die sowjetische Geschichtswissenschaft, pp. 58–9.
49 M. Vandalkovskaia, ‘Militsa Vasili’evna Nechkina’ in G.D. Alekseeva (ed.),
Istoricheskaia nauka Rossii v XX veke, Moscow: Skriptorii, 1997, p. 411.
50 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.
51 V. Kulish, ‘Sovietskaia istoriografiia velikoi otechestvennoi voiny’, in Afanas’ev
(ed.), Sovetskaia istoriografi
ia , pp. 274–81.
52 Ibid., p. 284.
53 Ibid., pp. 284–5.
54 A. Nekrich, Forsake Fear: Memoirs of an Historian, trans. D. Lineburgh,
Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1991, pp. 107, 111, 169, 172.
55 K. Tarnovskii, ‘Put’ uchenogo’, Istoricheskie zapiski, vol. 80, 1967, 233–5.
56 Alexander Gerschenkron, ‘Soviet Marxism and Absolutism’, Slavic Review,
vol. 30, no. 4, 1971, 859.
57 V. Polikarpov, ‘ “Novoe napravlenie” 50–70x-gg.: posledniaia diskussiia sovet-
skikh istorikov’, in Afanas’ev (ed.), Sovetskaia istoriografi
ia , pp. 349–51.
58 Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia, p. 103.
59 K. Tarnovsky, Sovetskaia istoriografi ia rossiiskogo imperializma , Moscow:
Nauka, 1964, pp. 195–6.
60 A. Sidorov, ‘Nekotorye razmyshleniia o trude i opyte istorika’, Istoriia SSSR,
1964, vol. 3, 124.
61 Istoriia vsesoyuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (bol’shevikov): kratkii kurs,
Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1952, 1st edn
1938, pp. 290–8.
62 Danilov, ‘Material’no-tekhnicheskaia baza sel’skogo khoziaistva SSSR naka-
nune sploshnoi kollektivizatsii’, VI, 1956, vol. 3, 3–17.
63 Danilov, ‘Zemel’nye otnosheniia v sovetskoi dokolkhoznoi derevne’, Istoriia
SSSR, vol. 3, 1958, 90–128.
64 V.P. Danilov, interview with the author, 7 April 1992.
65 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.
192 Roger D. Markwick
66 V.P. Danilov (ed.), ‘Kollektivizatsiia i kolkhoznoe stroitel’stvo v SSSR: Kollek-
tivizatsiia sel’skogo khoziaistva v SSSR 1927–32’, Moscow: Mysl’, 1964. Unpub-
lished 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 Coexis-
tence’, Soviet Studies, vol. 16, 1965, 259–62.
70 P. Pospelov, Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie o merakh podgotovki nauchno-
pedagogicheskih 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 istori-
ografiia , 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, Can-
berra: 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 Uni-
versity 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 promot-
ing 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 inter-
est 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 interpre-
tations of Soviet literary culture and history: unsurprisingly, these inter-
pretations 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:
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 politi-
cized, militarized, ideologically rigid and atheist culture of Stalinism. As
Deming Brown has said of the young poets who appeared during the
Thaw:
194 Emily Lygo
They came into prominence at a time when the liberal intelligentsia,
eager for release after long years of cultural repression and stagnation,
hoped fervently for a renaissance. The climate was relatively receptive
to expressions of youthful exuberance, irreverence, idealism and indi-
viduality . . . In their writings and platform performances they spoke
both for their generation and for their more frustrated and inhibited
elders.4
This meeting seems to have been the first time that an anxiety over the
development of the lyric was announced in Leningrad. The powerful con-
sensus 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 encourag-
ing 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 dis-
cussion 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 promo-
tion 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 jour-
nals, 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 Abolish the group for young writers at the Writers’ Union branch,
and, instead, create groups at ‘Leningradskii almanakh’, and hopefully
at the journal Zvezda.
2 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 leader-
ship over their younger counterparts.
3 Recommend that the Committee for Work with Young Writers pay
special attention to the work of the literary groups in the city, at facto-
ries, in clubs, and at institutes of higher education.
4 Examine the state of the long-running seminars and groups of young
writers.
5 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
198 Emily Lygo
special attention from established writers. Although the poet Britanishkii,
who belongs to the post-war generation targeted by these policies, has cyn-
ically 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 aus-
pices.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 com-
mittee’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 liter-
ary 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:
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 our-
selves 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
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 out-
wardly 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 every-
thing 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) suf-
fered 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 author-
ities 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
202 Emily Lygo
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 hun-
dreds 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 com-
mented 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 cre-
ative 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 acknow-
ledged 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 atten-
tion. 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 con-
sidered 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 Brod-
skii 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 sup-
porters 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.
204 Emily Lygo
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 pas-
sages 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!
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 Uni-
versity 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 Inter-
national 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 chil-
dren’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 even-
tually 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 post-
war 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 Linet-
skaia. Materialy k biografi i. Iz literaturnogo naslediia , St Petersburg: Sympo-
sium, 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
208 Emily Lygo
had been severed by both the censorship and purges of the Stalinist period.
See, for example, Kumpan, ‘Nashi stariki’.
25 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.
26 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/299.
27 The poem was first published in M. Borisova, ed., To vremia – eti golosa.
Leningrad. Poety o ‘ ttepeli , Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1990, p. 81.
28 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.
29 ‘Protokoly i stenogrammy zasedanii Pravleniya 1956’, TsGALI SPb, 371/1/267.
30 S. Massie (ed.), The Living Mirror. Five Poets from Leningrad, London: Victor
Gollancz Ltd, 1972, p. 29.
31 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/374.
32 Aleksandr Kushner remembers that he participated in poetry readings as often
as once a week during the height of their popularity during the Thaw. Alek-
sandr Kushner, interview by author, tape recording, St Petersburg, 7 November
2002.
33 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/418.
34 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/440.
35 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/464.
36 B. Rubin, ‘Highlights of the 1962–1963 Thaw’ in Hayward, Crowley, Soviet
Literature in the Sixties, pp. 81–99, here p. 93.
37 E. Evtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography, London: Collins and Harvill
Press, 1963.
38 Viktor Sosnora, interview by author, tape recording, St Petersburg, 21 May
2003.
39 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/463.
40 Originally published in 1969, and republished as V. Sosnora, Vsadniki, St
Petersburg: Pushkinskii fond, 2003.
41 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/463.
42 Y. Gordin, ‘Delo Brodskogo’, Neva, no. 2, 1989, 134–66, here 146.
43 Lerner, ‘Okolo-literaturnyi truten’’, Vechernyi Leningrad, 29 November 1963.
44 For details of Brodskii’s case see Gordin, ‘Delo Brodskogo’.
45 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/476.
46 TsGALI SPb, 371/1/476.
47 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.
48 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
Figure 11.1 Aleksandr Laktionov, Moving into the New Apartment, 1952.
[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 con-
tribution 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 auto-
nomy: 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 cat-
egories as beauty; the aesthetic nature of art and its difference from life;
and of course, style.12
Style
Aleksandr Kamenskii, one of the most outspoken reformist art critics,
scathingly summarized his conservative opponents’ position on the rela-
tionship 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 con-
ventions. 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 corre-
sponding 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 pro-
claimed, 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 deter-
mine a single style to embody it, the equation of realism with the appar-
ently 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 particu-
lar.34 Thus the style of Socialist Realism (as opposed to its method) had
received very little theoretical elaboration, for style implied not only dif-
ference between artistic manners or conventions, but also a non-congruity
between art and life. This, according to Stalinist prejudice, was style’s ori-
ginal 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
216 Susan E. Reid
post-war period, growing in the 1950s as the Soviet Union became more
permeable to diverse outside influences. Style, in the broad anthropologi-
cal rather than art–historical sense, began to function as a marker of dif-
ference 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, dis-
rupting 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 twentieth-
century West European art as well as rehabilitating selected aspects of
early Russian modernism hitherto buried on grounds of formalism or aes-
theticism. 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 disso-
ciating themselves from others.37
Artistic rejuvenation
Exposure to diverse international artistic currents not only made style rel-
ative and visible. It also exacerbated the sense among reformers that artis-
tic 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 publica-
tion 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 con-
structed 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 inter-
national 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 unac-
ceptable 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 festi-
val’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 rele-
vance 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 Sovre-
mennik 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 resis-
tance 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
218 Susan E. Reid
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 main-
tain 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 assign-
ments. 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, contro-
versy 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 con-
stituency 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.
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
222 Susan E. Reid
on before the artists’ eyes, the critics argued, combined with the intense
rhythms of contemporary labour, rendered older forms of depiction inade-
quate, 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:
Reviewing the 1958 youth exhibition under the indicative headline, ‘In
Search of Acute Contemporary Expression’, Bubnova wrote:
Conclusion
‘The question of style is now especially urgent’, a conservative inter-
vention 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,
226 Susan E. Reid
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 assimi-
late’ 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’, Sovet-
skoe 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 Uni-
versity 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, Cam-
bridge: 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,
228 Susan E. Reid
11–12; Dmitrieva, ‘K voprosu’, p. 11; Dmitrieva, ‘Mezhdu skhodstvom i neskh-
odstvom’, Iskusstvo, 1961, no. 2, 51.
36 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.
37 I have developed these ideas further in ‘The Exhibition Art of Socialist Coun-
tries’, 101–32; and ‘In the name of the People: The Manège Affair Revisited’,
kritika 2005, vol. 6, no. 4.
38 M. Alpatov, RGALI, 2329/4/880, 881; RGANI, 5/36/49/9-11; L. Sosset, ‘Brus-
sels Shows Fifty Years of Modern Art’, The Studio, 1958, CLVI, no. 786, 65; A.
Morozov, ‘Sovetskoe iskusstvo 60-kh godov i opyt “novogo realizma” ’, Sovet-
skoe 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 Dia-
logue in Painting, Architecture and the Decorative Arts, Northern Illinois Uni-
versity 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.
39 Pavel Nikonov, ‘Nemnogo o sebe’, in Pavel Nikonov, exh. cat., Moscow: Sovet-
skii khudozhnik, 1990, p. 69.
40 RGALI, 2465/1/75/11, 14.
41 N. Zhukov, ‘Iskusstvo i sovremennost’. Razdum’ia na vystavke’, Literaturnaia
gazeta, 17 January 1959.
42 For detail see S. Reid, ‘Destalinization and the Remodernization of Soviet
Art’, PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1996.
43 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.
44 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’.
45 V. Kostin, ‘Kto tam shagaet pravoi? 1954–1962’ (1982–83), repr. in G. Anisi-
mov, 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.
46 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.
47 RGALI, 2943/1/991/6-7.
48 T. Shatimova, ‘Molodye khudozhniki Moskvy’, Tvorchestvo, 1958, no. 9, 1958.
49 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.
50 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 khudoz-
hnik, 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 khu-
dozhnik 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 formula-
tion. 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 uchred-
itel’nom s’’ezde khudozhnikov Russkoi Federatsii’, Iskusstvo no. 8, 1960, 4–7.
230 Susan E. Reid
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 sovre-
mennosti’, 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 politich-
eskaia’, 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’, Tvorch-
estvo, 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
232 Katharine Hodgson
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 influ-
ential 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 con-
templation 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 Slut-
skii.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 anony-
mously 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 high-
lighted 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 repres-
sion 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 acknowl-
edgement 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 some-
what 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 Cer-
tainly the older poets did not attract so much controversy, and tended to
prefer to encounter their readers on the printed page rather than at read-
ings attended by thousands. Yet their published poetry was not bland and
234 Katharine Hodgson
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 imprison-
ment 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, fol-
lowed 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 col-
lection. 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 col-
lection 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 side-
lines of Soviet literary life, unable to communicate to their readers the cat-
astrophes 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:
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 under-
standing of the war came later:
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 sud-
denly 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:
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
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 manu-
script from the late 1950s.
Naum Korzhavin, like Chichibabin, had first-hand experience of Stalin-
ist 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 feel-
ings 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 so-
called ‘eternal themes’ of lyric poetry: love and nature, the meaning of life
and death, and to contemplate the power of poetic language to renew per-
ceptions. 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 labori-
ous 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:
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!
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 archae-
ologists 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 ances-
tor in the act of creating the first words. The poet receives these new
words and brings them back to the present:
It was the revival of lyric poetry, as well as the first tentative and not-so-
tentative 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:
The revival of Russian poetry in the mid-1950s and early 1960s was some-
thing 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 post-
war 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 Uni-
versity 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 postpone-
ment 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 Uni-
versity 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.
248 Katharine Hodgson
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 sin-
cerity 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 diffi-
cult 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
The teaching of Soviet patriotism and Soviet pride is one of the most
important tasks standing before physics teachers . . . Therefore histori-
cism 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
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:
all the most recent information regarding the details of their constitu-
tion, 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
the Central Committee reminds you that the basis of scientific atheis-
tic 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 sci-
ences 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:
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. Kre-
mentsev, 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 razvi-
tiem 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: uchped-
giz, 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 Univer-
sity 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 nase-
leniia’, 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.
266 Michael Froggatt
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.
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Index
Academy of Sciences 44, 180–1, 185, Communist Party of the Soviet Union:
187, 251, 258 Central Committee 2, 4, 42, 47, 65–6,
agriculture 184, 256 69–70, 74, 87, 91, 123, 175, 177–8,
Akhmatova, Anna 193, 199 183–6, 255, 258; local party
Andronov, Nikolai 219–22, 224 organizations 42–59, passim, 64–5;
‘anti-Party Group’ 51, 53, 179 Third Party Program (1961) 9, 13, 51,
anti-semitism 174 264; 20th Party Congress (1956) 2, 7,
art, painting 13, 209–30 11, 41–51, 64–76, 81, 89–91, 135, 140,
145, 173–6, 178–82, 188, 200, 232, 243;
Berggol’ts, Ol’ga 193, 231 21st Party Congress (1959) 51; 22nd
Beria, Lavrentii 25, 32, 34, 91, 159, 174 Party Congress (1961) 2, 6, 11–12, 41,
biology 250–66 51–9, 173, 185, 188, 193
Brezhnev, Leonid 12, 14, 173, 183–4, comrade courts 36
226 consumer goods 102
Britanishkii, Vladimir 198, 200–1, 205 cosmopolitanism, anti-cosmopolitan
Brodskii, Iosif 12, 195, 201, 203–6 campaign (1948–52) 174
Bukharin, Nikolai 178 Council of Ministers 24, 69, 107
Bulganin, Nikolai 71, 120 crime, criminality: anti-Soviet
Burdzhalov, Eduard 174–5, 177–80, behaviour 25, 27–42, 46, 87, 121; fear
182–5 of crime 30, 118; hooliganism 10, 12,
bureaucracy, bureaucrats 64, 67–8, 26, 30, 36, 50, 117–22, 135–8, 142–4,
71–5, 80–8, 92, 94, 109–11, 117, 147, 147, 152n41, 48, 57; reporting 32–5;
155, 184 speculation 21; 125–6; under
byt 35, 37, 103 Khrushchev 23, 25–6; under Stalin 21,
117–18, 138, 143, 151n8; violent crime
censorship 11, 231–2, 241–4, 247 25–6, 28–34, 118–20
chemistry 252–3, 260–1 criminal justice 9, 13; amnesties see
Chichibabin, Boris 234–5, 242 gulag; rehabilitation 6, 53, 94, 103,
children 9, 10, 117–34, 261, 263; 107–9, 112, 176; ‘socialist legality’ 21,
children’s literature, writers 124–31; 22, 146; terror, repression 7, 43–4, 52,
juvenile delinquency 9, 50, 117–22, 54–5, 59, 65, 81, 85, 87, 89–91, 94, 103,
132, 132n13; see also pioneer 107–9, 146, 174, 176, 188, 232–4,
movement 239–42
citizenship 8, 101–16 ‘cult of personality’ 2, 8, 15n7, 41, 68,
coal mining 160–2 71, 75, 89, 91, 122, 139–40, 173–4, 176,
‘collective leadership’ 64, 66, 74–5, 176 178, 181, 184–5, 187, 189, 255–6
collectivism 9, 102, 126
collectivization 102, 159, 177, 183–5, Danilov, Viktor 183–5, 189
242–3 Dar, David 199, 204–5
Index 277
denunciation 2, 7, 84–5 243; cultural views 11, 12, 178, 189,
dissent, dissidence 5, 12, 14, 27, 45, 47, 232, 258; dismissal 166, 173, 184,
59, 147, 206 186–7, 189; ideology 21, 136, 142,
‘doctors’ plot’ 32 149–50, 154, 264; leadership style 2,
Dudintsev, Vladimir: Not by Bread 66, 179; personality 4, 142–3; popular
Alone (1956) 7, 70, 74–5, 80–98, 139, opinion regarding 66, 149–50, 250
145, 148 Khvostov, Vladimir 186
Korzhavin, Naum 234–5
education 117–23, 133n18, 159–61, Kushner, Aleksandr 201
250–66
Ehrenburg, Il’ia 64; The Thaw (1954) labour 154–69; labour law 154–69;
64, 68–70 labour relations 7, 8, 9, 64–79,
‘enemy of the people’ (vrag naroda) 21, 154–69; labour reserve 158–61;
23, 31–2, 74, 87, 88–9, 92, 94, 107 turnover 155, 157, 162–3; Wages
engineers, engineering 7, 64, 67–76, 86, policy 154–69, passim.
163–5, 168n34, 257 Laktionov, Aleksandr 210–11, 221
Evtushenko, Evgenii 188, 194, 203, Lenin, Vladimir 177–8, 180, 182;
231–2, 242; The Heirs of Stalin 188, Leninism 42–3, 141, 179–80, 185;
232, 242 Lenin mausoleum 43, 51, 55–8
Leningrad 30, 32–3, 101–16, 123, 147,
factories 7, 64–80, 137–9, 154–69 165, 193–208; Leningrad State
formalism 202, 212, 219 University 141; Leningrad Writers’
Union 44, 193–208
Gefter, Mikhail 174, 179, 182, 186–9 letter-writing 6, 7, 8, 29–32, 36, 54, 56,
Georgia 49, 57–8 71–4, 82–98, 102–16, 120, 122–3,
glasnost’ 13 126–30
Gorbachev, Mikhail 13 Levitanskii, Iurii 234, 237–8, 240, 243,
Gor’kii, Maksim 22, 37n7 245
Gulag: amnesties 6, 13, 21–39, 118, 121, light cavalry (legkaia kavaleriia) 145–6
159, 176; political prisoners 23, 27, limitchiki 166
234; returnees 22, 24, 25, 26, 29–31, LITOs 195, 197–9, 202, 206
91, 94, 118, 176, 199, 242; revolts, Lomonosov, Mikhail 251, 253
uprisings 5, 38n26; slave labour 22, Lysenko, Lysenkoism 13, 250–4, 256,
31, 156–9, 162, 167n7; zek culture 262–3
25–29, 35
Malenkov, Georgii 73, 176
historical revisionism 3, 11, 12, 173–92 managers 5, 8, 81–2, 92, 155–6, 163, 165
housing: complaints 6, 8, 101–16; Marxism, Marxism-Leninism 173,
construction 8, 101, 104–5; 175–6, 179–80, 185, 188, 212, 225, 250,
housewarming 8, 101, 105, 107; 264
legislation 106–7 Medvedev, Roy 188
human rights 112 memory 12, 43, 52, 54–5, 91, 93, 94,
Hungarian crisis (1956) 47, 87, 140, 145, 199–200, 231–49
176, 178 Mezhirov, Aleksandr 234, 236, 239–40
Mikhalkov, Sergei 119
industrialization 92, 102, 148, 155, 177, Mikoian, Anastas 45, 176
220–1, 250 Ministry of Interior 25, 34, 120, 158–9
Institute of History 174, 183, 186–8, 189 Mints, Isaac 186–7
inventors 7, 64, 67–76, 81, 86 modernism 210, 212–13, 223–5
Molodoi Leningrad (Young Leningrad)
Kaganovich, Lazar’ 176 198–200
Kassil’, Lev 124, 129–31 Molotov, Viacheslav 29–30, 38n31 45,
Khrushchev, Nikita: attitude to Stalin 2, 176, 258
41, 43, 173, 176, 181, 184, 189, 232, Morozov, Pavlik 125, 128, 134n54
278 Index
Moscow 30, 32–3, 57, 80, 165, 194, ‘scientific-technical committees’ (NTK)
207n20, 241; Moscow Artists’ Union 69, 75
(MOSKh) 209–30; Moscow Art Second World War 30, 69, 102–7, 112,
Theatre (MKhAT) 214; Moscow 125, 138, 140, 156–8, 174, 232, 235–9,
State University (MGU) 140–2 247, 258; historiography 177, 180–2,
235; Leningrad blockade 104–7;
Nechkina, Militsa 180 literature 127–8, 232, 235–9
Nekrich, Aleksandr 181, 189 ‘Secret Speech’ (“On the Cult of
‘New Direction’ (novoe napravlenie) Personality and its Consequences”)
182–3, 185, 189 2, 3, 6–7, 13, 41–51, 64–76, 135, 140,
Novocherkassk 5, 154 145, 173, 176, 180, 200, 214, 232, 243
Novyi mir 7, 80–98, 174, 188, 232 sector of Methodology 187–8
Semenov, Gleb 198–9, 206, 207n21
Old Communists 43, 52 Shepilov, Dmitrii 178
Orgnabor 158, 161, 162, 168n24 Shestidesiatniki 179, 188, 264
Short Course of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union (Kratkii kurs) 11,
Pankratova, Anna 65, 174–6, 177–80, 58, 174–5, 177–8, 182–3, 186
182–3 Siberia 162, 165
parasitism 10, 36, 144 Sidorov, Arkady 174, 182–4
parenting 10, 121–2, 125–7 see also Simonov, Konstantin 80
vospitanie Slutskii, Boris 232, 234–5, 238–9, 241–2,
Paustovskii, Konstantin 80 244–7
perestroika 13, 93, 141, 188 Socialist Realism 10, 13, 82–3, 88, 200,
petitioning 101–16 209–30, 232
physics 250–4, 256–7, 260 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr 26; Gulag
Pioneer movement 119, 122–4 Archipelago 26; One Day in the Life
poetry 12, 13, 124, 193–208, 231–49; of Ivan Denisovich 83, 92–4, 188, 203,
poetry day (den’ poezii) 200, 231 232
Pokrovsky, Mikhail 185 Sosnora, Viktor 195, 201–5
Polish crisis (1956) 140, 145, 176, 178 Sovnarkhozy (Councils of People’s
Ponomarev, Boris 186, 189 Economies) 75, 82, 161
popular opinion 1, 2, 5–7, 14, 23, 27, Sovremennik Theatre 214
29–32, 36, 41–59, 64–76, 80–98, Stalin, Iosif: cult of personality 1–3, 11,
101–16, 120–3, 127–32, 154, 176 13–14, 54, 131, 173, 176, 178, 181, 210,
press, Soviet 21–2, 32–4, 66–8, 70, 75, 235, 240–2, 255–6; death (1953) 1, 4,
82, 85, 88, 101, 105, 111, 118–19, 11, 22, 112, 118, 122, 139, 135, 156,
143–5 174, 193, 209–10, 231, 241–2, 253–4;
privacy, private life 8, 9, 14, 91, 102, direct criticism of 2–3, 6–7, 41–59, 89,
104–5, 112, 125–6 104, 176, 179, 181, 184, 232, 234,
procuracy 21–6, 34, 120, 137 240–3; history writing 173–4, 181,
188–9, 232, 235; ideology 21, 37n3, 87,
religion: and science 13, 250, 257–64; 90, 173; literature 233–4, 244–6;
anti-religious campaigns 13, 151n4, popular opinion regarding 41–59, 89,
250, 257–64 176, 199, 241–2; portraits 48–51, 65;
re-Stalinization 3, 12, 13, 14, 183 renaming 58, 63n120; statues,
revolution, Bolshevik 102, 178, 182–3, monuments 48–51, 56, 65
209, 214 Stalingrad 44, 46, 48, 53–4, 58
Ryvina, Elena 195, 200–1 Stalinism: cultural policy 11, 195,
199–200, 209–30, 231–5, 243–44;
samizdat 12, 199, 206, 232, 236, 239, 242 economics 154–69, passim.; mentality
Samoilov, David 234, 236, 245–6 2, 7, 29, 81–98, 242, 251–6
scapegoating 81, 91, 94 Stiliagi, stiliachestvo 136, 138–9, 143–4,
science 13, 69, 250–66 146–9, 216
Index 279
students 47, 58, 135, 139–42 Voroshilov, Kliment 29, 36, 45
Supreme Soviet of the USSR 29, 36, vospitanie (upbringing) 9–10, 117,
101, 110, 119 120–3, 131
surveillance 9
welfare 2–3, 7–8, 106–7
tamizdat 206 Western influence, interest in West 10,
teachers 121, 253–4, 259, 261–2 13, 136, 138, 180, 210, 212–13, 216,
technicheskie uchilishcha (technical 223–4, 254–57
colleges) 160 Writers’ Union 193–208, 231–2, 234
technology 70, 81, 165, 224, 250, 261
Trapeznikov, Sergei 184, 186, 189 Youth 9, 10, 135–53, 196, 260, 263;
Trotskyism 51, 177–9, 183 crime, deviance 9, 35–6, 50, 135,
Tvardovskii, Aleksandr 93, 174, 188, 142–4, 217; festival (1957) 217;
232, 235–6 komsomol 46–7, 118–19, 124, 135–53,
162, 218, 258; komsomol patrols 143,
Ufliand, Vladimir 200–1, 205 146; subcultures/alternative cultures
Ukraine 141–7 9, 136, 138–9, 144, 149, 216; young
artists, writers 9, 11, 12, 193–208, 209,
Veterans 106–7, 111 217–22
Vinokurov, Evgenii 234, 237, 243–6
Virgin Lands 9, 138, 143, 148, 162 Zhdanov, Andrei, Zhdanovshchina 193,
Volobuev, Pavel 179, 182 251–4
Voprosy istorii (Problems of History) Zhestev, Mikhail 125–8
174–5, 177–9, 185 Zinoviev, Grigorii 178
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