Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70 9780300187212

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
1. The Secret Speech
2. From Thaw to Freeze: Party History and Soviet Literature, 1956–57
3. Forgetting within Limits: Censorship and Preservation of the Stalin Cult
4. Trauma and Redemption: Narratives of 1937 in Soviet Culture
5. Between Myth and Memory: War, Terror, and Stalin in Popular Memory
6. The “Cult of Personality” in the Early Brezhnev Era
Conclusion
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

my t h , m e m o ry, trau m a

eura sia past a n d pre se n t General Editors catr iona kel l y University of Oxford

do ugl as roge rs Yale University

mark d. steinb e rg University of Illinois

p olly jon e s

Myth, Memory, Trauma r et hinking th e stali n i st p as t i n t h e so viet uni o n , 1953– 70

n e w h a v e n an d lo n do n

Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2013 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup. co.uk (U.K. office). Set in Scala type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh, India. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jones, Polly, 1975–, author. Myth, memory, trauma : rethinking the Stalinist past in the Soviet Union, 1953–70/ Polly Jones. pages ; cm. — (Eurasia past and present) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-18512-6 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Political rehabilitation—Soviet Union. 2. Stalin, Joseph, 1879–1953—Cult. 3. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1953–1985. 4. Collective memory—Soviet Union. 5. Political persecution—Soviet Union--Attitudes. 6. Political persecution—Soviet Union—Historiography. 7. Terror in literature. I. Title. II. Series: Eurasia past and present. DK274.J565 2013 947.085—dc23 2012050755 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my parents, Peter and Jennifer Jones, with love and gratitude

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Introduction

ix

1

1 The Secret Speech

17

2 From Thaw to Freeze: Party History and Soviet Literature, 1956–57

57

3 Forgetting within Limits: Censorship and Preservation

of the Stalin Cult

97

4 Trauma and Redemption: Narratives of 1937 in Soviet Culture

129

5 Between Myth and Memory: War, Terror, and Stalin in

Popular Memory

173

6 The “Cult of Personality” in the Early Brezhnev Era

212

Conclusion 258

notes

263

bibliography 331

index

357 v ii

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a very long time in the making, and many people and institutions have helped to bring it to publication. Parts are based on research conducted for my DPhil at Oxford, which was funded by the Fay and Geoffrey Elliott studentship at St Antony’s College. Subsequent research was funded by the Max Hayward junior research fellowship, also at St Antony’s, and by a British Academy Small Research Grant. The latter phase of research and writing was carried out during my seven very happy years at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, where I received generous fieldwork and sabbatical funding from the school’s Research Funding Committee and from the university Dean’s Travel Fund. I am also grateful to the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University for providing sabbatical funding and a calm, yet intellectually stimulating, environment in which to complete the final draft. I wish to thank the staff of the many libraries in which I conducted research, especially UCL-SSEES, the British Library, the Bodleian, Princeton’s Firestone Library, and, in Moscow, The Russian State Library and the State Public History Library. I am also grateful to the staff of the archives where I worked over many years to complete this book: in Moscow, RGASPI, RGASPI-m, RGANI, GARF, RGALI, TsAOPIM, TsMAM; and in Volgograd, GAVO and TsDNIVO. I would also like to ix

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thank Ekaterina Kirillovna Simonova for her kind permission to access the archive of her father, Konstantin Simonov, at RGALI. My greatest intellectual debts are to my teachers and mentors in Oxford. From the final year of my undergraduate degree onward, I was deeply fortunate to be taught and then supervised by Catriona Kelly, who is now a colleague. Her unstinting support of my decision to embark on graduate work, and of all my subsequent endeavors, has been invaluable. Gerry Smith, a man of fine literary taste, would probably be horrified to know that my enthusiasm for Soviet literature partly stemmed from my graduate work and discussions with him and Barbara Heldt. I thank both not just for their intellectual inspiration, but also for their kindness over the years. Mike Nicholson would be less horrified, I hope, that his inimitable tutorials and lectures on Socialist Realism and Solzhenitsyn also put me on the path to writing this book. In the very final stages of editing it, I had the enormous pleasure and honor of becoming his successor at University College, Oxford, where he has been unfailingly helpful and good humored in helping me to adjust to the new job. I also thank my new colleagues in the Russian sub-faculty and at the college, who have helped me to settle in, and helped to minimize the disruption to the final stages of editing. Much of this book was written while I was a lecturer at UCL SSEES. I thank, and still miss, my colleagues there, who always helped me to strike the right balance between the obligations of research and those of teaching the many wonderful students, especially my PhD students, Katya Shulga, and Vicky Davis; Vicky also provided valuable assistance with copyediting the manuscript, with typical care and efficiency. Pamela Davidson and Phil Cavendish were unfailingly helpful heads of department, and Robin Aizlewood, as head of school, was always encouraging. Sarah Young and Julian Graffy offered helpful information and insights, Susan Morrissey was a true mentor and friend, and Kristin Roth-Ey and Richard Mole talked me out of writer’s block over numerous lunches and coffees in Bloomsbury. More broadly, SSEEES was a fantastic place in which to discuss all things Russian and East European, and this book benefited from the insights that I gained from the many conferences and seminars held there. I would like to thank in particular those friends and colleagues who generously read the whole manuscript. David Brandenberger has been a

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mentor and friend from a very early stage in my career, and his willingness to read my manuscript and to send meticulous comments was typically generous, and enormously helpful. Jan Plamper has also been supportive from the start, and his comments on my manuscript were penetrating and constructive. Miriam Dobson not only offered detailed and encouraging feedback on the manuscript, but also provided accommodation during my final stage of fieldwork. Our evenings spent drinking tea and admiring the view high above the New Arbat are among my favorite memories of the many months that I spent in Russia. I am also grateful to Susan Morrissey, Simon Huxtable, and Geoffrey Hosking for their comments on all or part of the manuscript and book proposal, and to Juliane Fuerst, Anne Gorsuch, and Susan Reid for their support throughout this project. The detailed reviews by the three anonymous readers for Yale, and the comments of the series editors, were tremendously helpful in producing the final version of the book. Finally, I have given conference and seminar papers on parts of this book in Oxford, Cambridge, London, Nottingham, Sheffield, Exeter, Berlin, Giessen, Pennsylvania, and Princeton, and at several ASEEES and BASEES conferences, and received invaluable comments and criticisms on each occasion. At Yale University Press, I am grateful to my editors Vadim Staklo, Jaya Chatterjee, and William Frucht. The series editors, Mark Steinberg, Catriona Kelly, and Doug Rogers, were supportive of this book from the start and it is an honor to be part of their new series. I also thank the production editor, Margaret Otzel, and the copy editor, Mary Petrusewicz, for their work on the manuscript. My greatest debt is to the family and friends who have supported me through good times and bad over the last decade. I will be forever grateful to Angela Vescuso for all that she has done, especially during my last two years in London. Sian Armstrong has been a true friend for much longer than this book has taken to write. Charlotte and Andrew Barlow have provided me with a home away from home, together with a beautiful goddaughter, and I cannot thank them enough. Tanvi Rai, John ApplebyAlis, Giles Harrison, Nicole Giles, Vicky Weddell, Tom and Sophie Attree, Emily and Mike Gonzalez, Shari Modur and Ashwin Balagopal and Claire and Franklin Steves have also provided unstinting friendship and support, and I am grateful to all of them. My greatest gratitude, though, is to my

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family: my late grandparents, Elizabeth and Athol Gilbody; my sister, Alice Jones; and my parents, Jennifer and Peter Jones. I wish that my grandparents had lived to see this book completed, but they never doubted that it would be, and they remain an inspiration to me. My many theater trips and lunches in London with Alice provided much-needed light relief from Soviet history, but equally as valuable is the practical help, support, and love that she has always shown to me. My parents encouraged and supported me throughout this project, as throughout my life. The debt that I owe them is enormous and impossible to put into words. I hope that the dedication of this book will go some way to expressing my love and gratitude for all that they have done.

Introduction

During the night of 31 October 1961, two trucks drove onto Red Square, and their occupants entered the mausoleum on the side nearest to the Kremlin wall. Removing Iosif Stalin’s embalmed body from where it had lain beside Lenin since Stalin’s death eight years earlier, they hastily buried it and left no marker for the burial place. Two days later, the Soviet population woke to a picture in Pravda of the mausoleum, with Stalin’s name now erased from the frontage. “Operation mausoleum” was never explained to the Soviet public.1 The stealth and speed of Stalin’s disappearance suggest that he had become a “non-person” overnight, falling victim to the same kind of memory erasure meted out to many of his victims, and most recently to his first “heir,” Lavrentii Beria.2 However, while Stalin’s actual removal from the mausoleum was secretive, the decision to implement it had been highly publicized. During the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held in the Kremlin palace not far from the mausoleum in the second half of October, criticism of Stalin’s role in the terror of the 1930s and 1940s had crescendoed into calls to remove his body from the mausoleum. Most famously, toward the end of the congress, a rehabilitated Old Bolshevik terror victim, Dora Lazurkina, had offered harrowing testimony of her arrest and imprisonment, and then claimed that Lenin was uncomfortable sharing the mausoleum with 1

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Stalin, as culprit of the terror. Soon after, Stalin’s body was removed and buried. Almost a year after it had printed the picture of the new mausoleum frontage, Pravda published a poem by the writer Evgenii Evtushenko. Entitled “The Heirs of Stalin,” it luridly dramatized both Stalin’s residency in the mausoleum and his more recent move to a new grave. In the poem, Stalin appeared as an undead ghost, directing his “heirs” to carry on his legacy from inside the mausoleum. These heirs, the poem claimed, were paying lip service to the party’s policies of de-Stalinization, but in their hearts remained Stalinists, unable to renounce the Stalin cult. At the end, the recent removal of the body was noted, but it too did not suffice to de-Stalinize Soviet life fully: “How can we remove Stalin from Stalin’s heirs?” the poem concluded.3 Iconoclasm, terror testimony, and lustration, in life and in literature: the implementation and discussion of Stalin’s removal from the mausoleum involved several different approaches to memory, some familiar, others more unusual or even unprecedented in the Soviet context. The complexity of this episode of remembrance (and forgetting) was characteristic of Soviet efforts to rethink both the Stalinist past and also Soviet memory itself throughout the first decade and a half after Stalin’s death: the subject of this book. Between Stalin’s death and the 22nd Congress, and then again between the 22nd Congress and the early Brezhnev era, the party took an almost bafflingly diverse range of approaches to “the cult of personality,” or the legacies of Stalin and Stalinism. The closest parallel to the 22nd Congress’ revelations was Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” performed after the end of the 20th Congress in 1956, but the approaches of both congresses to the cult of personality were repeatedly modified throughout the 1950s and 1960s. At times, the party leadership minimized the traumatic impact of Stalinism, allowing commemoration of Stalin’s merits, but at other times they minimized (though never entirely erased) Stalin’s significance in the Soviet past— justifying this by recalling his role in the terror, as at the 22nd Congress for instance. These repeated shifts in the public memory of the Stalinist past were accompanied and influenced by debates about Soviet public memory itself. Was it primarily supposed to celebrate the Soviet past, or was it morally necessary—as the 22nd Congress seemed to imply—to confront the traumatic aspects of that past, recognizing victims as well as

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victors? And should the perpetrators of the suffering of victims be punished by being unmasked and then consigned to oblivion, drawing on well-established precedents of “forced forgetting,” or could their flaws and merits be remembered in a different way?4 Finally, and perhaps most important, who should participate in these decisions? While Stalin’s stealthy disappearance in late 1961 might suggest that little or no popular participation was desired, the revelations of the 22nd Congress, like other shifts in the memory of Stalinism during this period, explicitly mobilized citizens (including writers such as Evtushenko) to reflect on the Stalinist past and to participate in exposing and overcoming the Stalinist past. This prolonged uncertainty about Soviet memories of Stalinism raises the broader question of how to define the de-Stalinization of the 1950s and 1960s as an exercise in coming to terms with the past, a question central to this book. De-Stalinization was in many respects a quintessentially Soviet process, shaped by Stalinist and Leninist precedents and by post-Stalinist political imperatives. However, while it revived Leninist and even pre-revolutionary traditions of glasnost’ regarding societal defects, and drew on Stalinist precedents of denunciation and forgetting, its methods also broke new ground. After all, in attempting to break with the Stalinist past, it was logical and necessary to break with Stalinist practices of commemoration and forgetting. New images of Stalin therefore attempted to find a middle ground between the traditional polarities of heroization and demonization, and Soviet historical and literary narratives of terror were sometimes strikingly explicit about injustice, suffering, guilt, and shame.5 All this made de-Stalinization, as an exercise in coming to terms with the past, innovative in the diversity and complexity of “memory work” that it invited and generated. Over the course of the first fifteen years after Stalin’s death, the period during which the cult of personality emerged and then again fell out of the Soviet political agenda, participants in de-Stalinization enacted, or at least proposed, many of the practices of coming to terms with the past more commonly associated with post-communist and non-communist societies: lustration of perpetrators of atrocities, prosecution and “degradation” of a former leader, testimony and commemoration of their victims’ trauma, and the attempted excavation of full historical “truth.”6 While the Soviet leadership possessed (and deployed) vastly greater resources to control discussion of the past, they had also initiated the

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discussion more forcefully and quickly than leaders of some political systems where difficult issues have remained latent in public memory for far longer.7 In thus taking the initiative to expose the “cult of personality,” party leaders in turn exposed themselves to difficult, disruptive questions from writers and citizens about the Stalinist past, and about the prerogative(s) to discuss and narrate it. This contestation over the Stalinist past again resembles the “contested pasts” of other political systems and countries.8 By propagandizing diverse narratives of the Stalinist past, and promoting several different approaches to memory, the party leadership helped to detonate a decade and a half of unpredictable, sometimes uncontrollable, discussion about memories of Stalinism and about Soviet memory itself: the subject of this book. T H E S TA L I N I S T L E G A C Y

When Stalin died on 5 March 1953, his cult did not die with him. In fact, in the early days and weeks after his death, it even seemed to take on new life. Placed on public display in central Moscow, and then granted the highest honor of placement in the mausoleum, Stalin’s body was an object of veneration after his death, just as his idealized physical representation had dominated Soviet public culture during his lifetime. Many Soviet citizens unable to travel to Moscow to view Stalin’s body instead dispatched to the members of the new “collective leadership” inventive suggestions for posthumous commemoration, ranging from elaborate pantheons and commemorative rituals to renamings of streets, districts, even the city of Moscow itself.9 These proposals, though never implemented, drew on the discourses and practices of the Stalin cult, but also extended them in new directions, indicating the powerful traditions of commemoration—even worship—that had come to surround Stalin during his three decades as Soviet leader. These popular reactions to Stalin’s death underscored for his successors the critical importance of addressing the Stalinist past in order to move forward to the post-Stalinist future. Quickly subsumed under the shorthand phrase “the cult of personality,” these diverse and often difficult legacies preoccupied the Soviet leadership for the next decade and a half. During the entire Khrushchev era and in the early Brezhnev era, the cult of personality returned repeatedly to the party’s agenda, its meanings changing and proliferating as the leadership experimented with different

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approaches not just to the discourse and symbolism of the cult, but also to the complex memory of the Stalin era as a whole. Before turning to the production and popular reception of this posthumous discourse about the cult of personality, though, the Stalin cult during Stalin’s lifetime merits further attention. Though initially slow to emerge in the late 1920s and the early 1930s, the cult of Stalin had assumed gigantic proportions by the time of his death in the 1950s, dominating Soviet public culture both verbally and visually.10 Disseminated through Soviet journalism, film, literature, sculpture, historiography and biography, portraiture and painting, the cult’s symbolism was ubiquitous and remarkably coherent in the messages that it conveyed across its various media.11 Like leader cults in other political systems, the images and narratives of Stalin produced for public consumption in the Soviet Union were intended to give human shape to the virtues and values of the state.12 In the Soviet Union, its legitimacy grounded in Marxist-Leninist dialectics, Stalin was portrayed as the “continuer” of Leninist ideas, but also as the personification of an otherwise dry, depersonalized historical process.13 Nevertheless, Stalin’s personality was evoked in particular, careful ways. Drawing on precedents from the Lenin cult and older pre-revolutionary depictions of revolutionaries, details of Stalin’s personal life were elided in order to bolster a myth of his total devotion to the party-state. Stalin was father to the Soviet family, caring for his charges and directing the population’s potentially centrifugal interests toward the Kremlin, and Stalin himself, at the center of the Soviet empire.14 Over the course of the Stalin era, Soviet historiography and journalism as well as film and literature confirmed Stalin as the key agent of Soviet progress, and as the leader of the revolution and Civil War as well as of the transformative experiences of “socialist construction”—the World War II victory and post-war reconstruction that had taken place after his capture of the party leadership.15 The myth of Stalin’s military and civilian prowess and the discourse of popular gratitude to him— expressed through verbal tributes and physical gift giving, especially on major birthdays (in 1929, 1939, and particularly 1949)—were mutually constitutive.16 The more Stalin gave to the Soviet people, the more thanks were due to him. In the post-war era, literary, artistic, and cinematic portrayals of Stalin’s relationship with the Soviet people expressed an

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ever-intensifying gratitude to Stalin for his remarkable achievements in victory and post-war reconstruction, but also a growing distance between ordinary Soviet citizens and the sublime realm inhabited by the superhuman, sacralized Stalin.17 Whether the gratitude and veneration performed so insistently in Soviet public culture reflected, or produced, genuine popular admiration of the leader remains difficult to uncover, given the harsh penalties that applied at the time to public criticism of Stalin or assaults on cult imagery.18 Some historians have concluded that the sheer ubiquity and coherence of the Stalin cult, like other Stalinist propaganda, made it inescapable.19 And, indeed, the cult dominated the canonical history and propaganda texts at the heart of Stalin-era school and university curricula and agitprop programs, posing enormous practical problems when education and propaganda had to be de-Stalinized after 1956, as explored in subsequent chapters.20 Public engagement with Stalin cult rhetoric had long been obligatory in other realms of everyday life too, though in all of them cult rhetoric and rituals were sometimes used by local leaders and ordinary citizens to pursue ends other than those intended by the central leadership.21 Recent scholarship using more ostensibly private Stalin-era sources has suggested that Stalinist discourse was both inescapable and deeply internalized; rather than being only strategically adopted, it may have fundamentally shaped the subjectivity of Soviet citizens.22 Jochen Hellbeck, for example, argues that Stalinist propaganda endowed citizens’ lives with meaning, a sense of a historical process larger and more significant than their individual selves; given that the Stalinist grand narrative was increasingly centered on the larger-than-life figure of Stalin, this “Stalinist subjectivity” was also tightly intertwined with the mythology of Stalin, as constructed during his long leadership.23 And indeed, postStalinist leaders and authors participating in de-Stalinization would often encounter resistance and hostility from citizens still deeply invested in the images and narratives of the Stalin cult. At the same time, Soviet propaganda systematically distorted and erased whole realms of Stalin-era experience, notably the terror.24 According to some accounts, Soviet citizens responded by narrating their lives—even if they included traumatic experiences at the hands of the Stalinist state, such as stigmatization or arrest—in the discourse of Stalinist public culture. Indeed, “working on the self” in this way offered a means for some

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stigmatized citizens to rejoin the Soviet collective.25 Others have suggested that traumatic or troubling experiences that were not adequately explained in Stalinist public culture created a sense of lingering unease or even frustration, albeit largely unexpressed during Stalin’s lifetime.26 The Stalin cult’s survival—even, in some respects, intensification— after Stalin’s death therefore presented a pressing problem for his successors: the ghost of Stalin could not continue to haunt post-Stalinist culture and politics.27 In order for any leader—whether individual or collective— to emerge as a credible successor, Stalin would have to be at least partly displaced from his overwhelmingly dominant position in Soviet culture. Equally, reforming the Stalinist system—or the parts that had become manifestly dysfunctional, including agriculture, the Gulag, and the Soviet arts—necessitated deconstructing the cult’s insistent, interlocking claims of Stalin’s infallibility in policy and ideology.28 Though the enormous scale of the Stalin cult made it urgent (yet also challenging) to address, some form of “regicide,” to lessen the influence of a leader (especially a charismatic predecessor) on a successor regime, is common in political transitions, as Paul Connerton and others have argued.29 As Connerton also argues, though, such “forgetting” might take many different forms, and also often encounters obstacles, notably the “historical deposit” of former narratives and beliefs.30 In the Soviet case, the need for “regicide” and the strategy of “inverse legitimacy” was complicated not only by lingering attachment to Stalinism among the party elite and the Soviet population, an important theme in my account, but also by the need to reform rather than revolutionize the Soviet system, preserving a usable Stalinist past while guarding Leninism from criticism.31 Though it moved quickly to curtail any further growth of the cult within weeks of Stalin’s death, the collective leadership remained deeply divided over whether and why to proceed further with de-Stalinization, in view of the multiple hazards (though also potential benefits) that it entailed; these divisions did not heal once Khrushchev won the leadership battle in 1956–57.32 Moreover, precisely because these ongoing leadership disputes over whether to de-Stalinize were so rancorous, and any consensus so fragile and temporary, they left little time to consider how this should be done. The ambiguous memory discourses and practices that resulted, and the Soviet population’s responses to them, are my focus in the chapters that follow.

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SOVIET OFFICIAL AND POPULAR MEMORY

The day after Khrushchev performed his Secret Speech about Stalin to a closed session after the end of the 20th Congress, the Soviet literary critic and journalist Lazar’ Lazarev already knew about it. As a major (if initially secret) event in the life of the party, news of the speech reached his newspaper, Literaturnaia gazeta, almost immediately, though Lazarev heard the speech in full only a while later. On both occasions, when hearing about the speech, and then when listening to the speech itself, this journalist was struck not so much by the information about terror (some of which he and his colleagues already knew), but, he later explained: “above all by the fact that all this was said in a speech to the congress and not in a halfwhisper in a kitchen in the company of good friends, that this speech was being read out at meetings going on all over the country, in all collectives, and not only being transmitted to the select, carefully chosen few, who were also charged with not revealing it to anyone.”33 In this sense, what the Secret Speech revealed may have been less important than who had revealed it, and where: the party leadership, at its first post-Stalinist congress. Lazarev’s observation captures a crucially important feature of the Secret Speech and indeed of Soviet de-Stalinization throughout the 1950s and 1960s: its “official” criticism of Stalin, and the party’s encouragement (albeit sporadic) of public dissemination and discussion of these criticisms.34 Whatever “half-whispers” about Stalin and Stalinism had preceded the speech, and however “partial,” “selective,” and “limited” its revelations and those of subsequent party statements, these official statements made criticism of Stalin and exploration of terror—the two most important themes explored during de-Stalinization—a legitimate focus of public discussion and an obligatory theme for Soviet literature and historiography.35 Though the Khrushchev era was certainly a time of growth in private life, including discussions of the Stalinist past conducted in nonpublic forums such as kompanii (private gatherings) and samizdat, it was also a time of extraordinary mobilization of public activities and discussion.36 The exposure of the cult of personality, substantively initiated by the Secret Speech, was orchestrated within this context of revived optimism about public criticism and self-criticism as a tool of reform, though it also often tested the limits of this glasnost’. As a Soviet journalist, Lazarev was now obliged not just to “work through” his own memories, but also to

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guide readers of his newspaper toward suitable new memories of Stalin and Stalinism. More broadly, after the Secret Speech and then again after the 22nd Congress, writers were invited to rewrite the Stalinist past, and citizens were authorized and even encouraged to rethink their memories of Stalinism in light of these new narratives of the cult of personality. In fact, as Lazarev went on to describe, the first and perhaps the most important of these narratives released by the Soviet authorities was curiously unauthoritative. After hearing the Secret Speech, Lazarev walked home “trying to order my confused thoughts and feelings,” and on the way he saw another man “staggered by what he had heard,” speaking to himself, cursing Stalin, and “trying to formulate his attitude” to the former leader.37 Both listeners were staggered not only by the shocking revelations about Stalin and Stalinism, but also by the party’s decision to reveal them. The information about terror and war death not only assaulted the narrative of Stalin and Stalinism propagated over the previous three decades of cult building, but also more broadly challenged the norms and traditions of Soviet memory, especially the long-standing preference for celebration of the past as a means of legitimating the socialist present and communist future.38 Even though Stalinist public culture had long demonized its enemies and mourned its martyrs, it had never before accommodated such a complex narrative of guilt, shame, and trauma.39 In fact the speech itself did not become fully public in the Soviet Union until the glasnost’ of the late 1980s, but its dissemination all over the country in 1956 was still enough to convince these and many other listeners of a profound change in public memory.40 In the early 1960s, another wave of de-Stalinization again opened up the Stalinist past to even deeper scrutiny, criticism, and debate. For well over a decade, therefore, the cult of personality was a part, albeit highly unstable and provisional, of Soviet public memory. Party discourse about the Stalinist past, and published historical and literary texts about the cult of personality, were the main “vectors” of this era’s new public memory of Stalinism, since Stalin’s victims were not commemorated before the Gorbachev era in museums or monuments (though countless Stalin monuments and Stalinist museum displays did fall victim to the Khrushchev-era campaign against Stalin’s cult, especially in the 1960s, as is explored in the chapters that follow).41 These texts became the focus for discussion and debate by the Soviet population,

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who publicly and more privately compared them with their own memories, sometimes challenging the narratives, yet also often finding in them a way to make sense of their past. In this sense, the process of de-Stalinization, which invited the Soviet population to rethink the Stalinist past by releasing (albeit hesitantly) new evidence into the public domain and by encouraging (albeit sporadically) the narrativization of traumatic experiences, challenges the tenacious belief that Soviet public memory consistently falsified and silenced popular memories, and so produced private (and oppositional) countermemories.42 The collapse of communism in the Eastern bloc and the Soviet Union, while it quickly destabilized many other historical paradigms (by making a wealth of archival evidence available), largely strengthened this conviction that “real” memory had been silenced, even killed, throughout the Soviet period.43 If the archival boom of the 1990s further complicated understandings of Soviet power, the memory boom, partly spurred by fascination with the return of the repressed in post-socialism and by the possibilities of oral history research in the formerly socialist East, has often reinforced traditional, even totalitarian, views of the publicprivate memory divide in state socialism.44 Studies of memory in the Soviet Union, and other socialist systems, have only recently, cautiously begun to complicate this long-standing binary, revealing more complex and dynamic interplay within and between official and popular memory.45 These recent analyses have themselves benefitted from analyses of memory in other societies, which convincingly argue that public memory (or, equally, public forgetting) is usually shaped by interplay and contestation between different narratives of the past and different framings of memory.46 Those memories not reflected in public commemoration have been analyzed as a “counter-memory,” in opposition to “official” memory, but also as a “communicative memory” sustained in private alongside the “cultural memory” of a society.47 This relationship between cultural and communicative memory often remains dynamic, however, subject to ongoing contestation and lobbying by individuals or groups eager for more “truthful” acknowledgement of their experiences and memories in public culture.48 Despite the tight restrictions on public debate in the postStalinist Soviet system, I argue, de-Stalinization involved similar kinds of contestation, especially as the party had explicitly invited writers and the broader population to rethink the Stalinist past and to reveal the truth

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behind the “cult”; moreover, this contestation only intensified as the party tried to control, and ultimately to silence, the discussion of the Stalinism that it had done so much to unleash in the first place. Acknowledging these complex memory dynamics of de-Stalinization also necessitates a more nuanced view of the post-Stalinist thaw. The Khrushchev era (and, in some analyses, the early Brezhnev era too) has long been acknowledged as a time of more honest discussion of Stalinism in selected works of Soviet literature and historiography.49 However, the canon of thaw narratives of Stalinism—dominated by the historiography produced by revisionist historians in the Russian Academy of Sciences and the journal Voprosy istorii, and the literature published under the editorship of Aleksandr Tvardovskii in Novyi mir, the most liberal Soviet literary journal—has all but eclipsed more conservative or conventionally Soviet narratives of the cult of personality produced and published elsewhere in the Soviet literary and historical professions.50 This canon has also fundamentally shaped understandings of the thaw as an “interval of freedom” in which liberal writers defied party controls and asserted their right to tell the truth about the Stalinist past, inviting inevitable persecution from the state (but also gratitude from Soviet readers for the truth about the past).51 Courageous and groundbreaking as they were, these revisionist and liberal texts and writers must, I argue, be contextualized within the broader Soviet project of exposing the cult of personality. They need to be situated not only within their respective professions, where a variety of other narratives of Stalinism were being published and debated, but also within the broader “field” of Soviet culture, its engagement with the Stalinist past dictated by the party’s own (albeit inconsistent) appeals to “expose” and “dethrone” the “cult.”52 In fact, it proved consistently difficult for Soviet literature and historiography to narrate terror, and to criticize Stalin, within the limits of party-mindedness and Socialist Realism, as is traced in the following chapters through the tortuous editing and censorship and controversial reception of Soviet narratives of the cult. However, although such texts consistently provoked anxiety and controversy throughout the Khrushchev era, it was only in the late 1960s that narratives of the cult of personality retreated fully into non-state networks, becoming a “counter-memory” marginalized and silenced by the new priorities of Brezhnev-era public memory.53

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Published in large (though eventually declining) numbers from the mid-1950s until this late 1960s crackdown, Soviet narratives of the cult of personality provoked their readers to reflect on individual and collective memories of Stalinism, even if some certainly supplemented their reading with samizdat publications.54 The effects of these texts on their readers are now possible to trace using records of party discussions and readers’ letters to journals, publishing houses, and individual authors.55 In these public and more private discussions, Soviet citizens proposed a range of analyses of Stalinism, some alarming to the Soviet leadership, even when (as frequently occurred) these responses logically extrapolated from aspects of the leadership’s own discourse. The exposure of the cult of personality, initiated by the party leadership and developed in different directions by Soviet writers and readers from 1956 to the end of the 1960s, was therefore a unique episode in Soviet memory politics. It differed from the preceding era, not only in the ambiguities of its rhetoric, but also in its active mobilization of public opinion and of the emerging post-Stalinist public sphere.56 It was also distinct from subsequent interventions in the memory of Stalinism, under Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Putin, and Medvedev, though it both shaped and anticipated the memory politics of each of these subsequent eras. What was initiated in the mid–1950s, and only curtailed at the end of the 1960s, was a unique attempt at criticism, self-criticism, and glasnost’, and the confrontation of trauma, shame, and guilt, within the barely loosened constraints of Soviet censorship and democratic centralism.57 Yet, as I also argue, the constraints on de-Stalinization were not uniquely or pathologically Soviet; indeed, de-Stalinization can and should be compared with the confrontation of difficult pasts in other political systems, in order to understand what was distinctively Soviet about the ways in which it was initiated, developed, and ultimately curtailed.58 In particular, the timing of de-Stalinization, a campaign started relatively quickly after Stalin’s death (though inconsistently implemented over the following decade), and the asymmetry, yet also vitality, of the exchanges about the cult between Soviet leaders, writers, and readers (or listeners), can be compared and contrasted to episodes of coming to terms with the past in some very different political systems and societies. Shameful memories and difficult pasts can long remain suppressed and latent before being confronted in public memory. In post-war France,

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for example, the memory of the Vichy regime was suppressed in public life for almost three decades, before the start of an “obsessive” examination of the period.59 In post-war East and West Germany, too, the Nazi past was silenced or at least sublimated for two decades, before the start of substantive debates about how to “master,” “normalize,” or otherwise come to terms with the past.60 After all, societies do not behave like traumatized individuals: difficult memories do not automatically or spontaneously return after a certain time.61 Jeffrey Herf, among others, has illustrated the importance of top-down interventions in public memory, showing how leaders often (though not always) provide the crucial impetus to come to terms with the past, as in post-war West Germany, for example.62 With its forceful interventions in the Stalin question in 1956 and again in 1961, the Soviet leadership in a similar way put the cult of personality—and in particular, discussion of terror and radical criticism of Stalin—on the public agenda, though their commitment to it thereafter was wavering at best. While there were certainly pressures from below in the Soviet Union before 1956—from returning prisoners, and from parts of the literary profession, where bold criticisms of Stalinist culture (though not Stalin himself) had briefly surfaced in 1953 and 1954—Stephen Cohen rightly points out that “profound and loud truthtelling could only be initiated from above.”63 Consequently, my account begins with the party’s first direct criticism of Stalin, and the first direct appeal to the population to discuss the cult of personality: the Secret Speech of 1956. That the emergence of shameful or traumatic memories into public discussion has usually been less swift and spectacular than the performance of the Secret Speech is testament to the difficulties of “making the past matter.”64 In fact, shameful or traumatic events usually need to be framed as a necessary and useful focus of public memory by individuals, groups, or leaders, who perform “memory work” to legitimize events as worthy of remembrance, thus “securing public articulation of the past.”65 While more democratic systems undoubtedly provide better conditions for such lobbying, they also make it more likely that any framing or construction of an event, or of the necessity of its remembrance, will be disputed, even rejected.66 Dealing with the Nazi past in both France and West Germany, for example, provoked fierce debates over whether the “wounds” of the past would be healed or painfully reopened by

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retrospection and repentance.67 The German “historians’ debate” centered around the “exceptionalism” of the Holocaust, and thus also the need to remember it in an exceptional, rather than normal, way.68 Though the balance between “glorious” and “traumatic” memories in national identities may have shifted recently toward a more “negativistic” identity politics of trauma, the balance between remembering and forgetting, and between “glorious” and “shameful” pasts in national identities, is frequently elusive and contested.69 Similar kinds of memory work and contestation were present in de-Stalinization, but in different forms, reflecting the different constellation of forces that initiated and then managed public discussion of Stalinism. Though it did much to initiate public discussion of Stalinism, the party leadership’s subsequent inconsistent commitment to de-Stalinization meant that supporters of further exploration of the Stalinist past had to engage in almost constant negotiation—not just after Khrushchev’s fall, but also before it—to maintain the cult of personality as an important concern for Soviet literature, history, and ultimately public memory.70 Their assertions of the “right to remember” involved similar kinds of framing of the healthiness and morality of remembrance that have shaped debates over coming to terms with the past in other countries, such as the need to heal the wounds of the past or to work through painful or shameful memories to prevent their dysfunctional effects on the present and future.71 Moreover, such framings—as their proponents consistently reminded leaders—could in fact be found within the party’s own, contradictory discourse, especially the chaotic narrative of the Secret Speech and the impassioned appeals to explore the terror and lustrate its perpetrators issued at and after the 22nd Congress. Indeed, the striking durability of hopes, almost until the end of the 1960s, that Soviet literature and historiography might accommodate the truth about the Stalinist past largely derived from the latter, spectacular resumption of de-Stalinization, with which this chapter began. Nevertheless, both before and after 1961, the official meanings and limits of the cult of personality remained unstable, as party leaders continued to adjust their rhetoric of memory in response to the evolving pressures of domestic and international politics: the latter concerns dominated by the threat of revolution in the Eastern bloc, deteriorating relations with China, and fluctuating Cold War tensions with the West, which

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all brought contradictory pressures to bear on de-Stalinization. In fact, such instability and ambiguity in party rhetoric was nothing new, though it was exacerbated in the Khrushchev era by the above policy considerations, and also by Khrushchev’s often impulsive interventions in de-Stalinization. Stalinist discourse had, however, itself been riven with ambiguities. It had incorporated several different models of gender and Soviet identity, and key terms such as “cosmopolitanism” or “revisionism” had been repeatedly reinterpreted to fit shifting circumstances, not only by Stalin and party leaders, but also by competing camps in Soviet professions.72 In the post-Stalin period, the consequences of ideological deviation were no longer lethal, but the meanings of the term “cult of personality,” and indeed of “revisionism” and “anti-Soviet” criticism (accusations often meted out to those perceived to have transgressed the limits of de-Stalinization), likewise changed frequently, according to leaders’ perceptions of the relative threats that they posed.73 There was some scope to challenge these definitions (and the associated punishments), especially given the ambiguities of the leadership’s own interventions in the Stalin question, but the definitional prerogative still rested disproportionately with the party leadership. Some key, enduring beliefs about memory can be discerned within these definitions of the terms “cult of personality” (and “revisionism”) throughout the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev eras. Overall, I argue, celebration of the Soviet past was consistently deemed less hazardous, harmful, and revisionist than deep retrospection and repentance. Moreover, these framings of public memory, as predominantly celebratory and optimistic, also enjoyed considerable support among Soviet writers and readers, as will be traced through writers’ disputes and readers’ responses to historical and literary narratives of the cult of personality.74 Therefore, despite the party leadership’s periodic encouragement of retrospection, repentance, and remorse, de-Stalinization was above all characterized by wariness of retrospection and by a desire to limit the “gloom” and “horror” of new narratives of Stalinism. Similarly, despite several party appeals to expose Stalinist psychology and to shame the heirs of Stalin (as in Evtushenko’s poem), the Khrushchev era was more frequently punctuated by criticism and punishment of writers who pushed de-Stalinization too far. Criticisms of supposedly unhealthy, obsessive interest in reopening the wounds of the past—akin to the

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“neurasthenic” memory that Charles Maier has criticized, decades later, in a very different cultural context—were a regular feature of Khrushchev-era memory politics, setting a significant precedent for the definitive shift to a more celebratory memory in the early Brezhnev era, with which this book will conclude.75

chapter one

The Secret Speech

For nearly three years after Stalin’s death, the power struggle among the supposedly “collective” leadership was not resolved, nor was the question of how to deal with the memory of their towering predecessor. Indeed, Khrushchev did not emerge as the winner of this power struggle until he performed his “Secret Speech” about Stalin in February 1956. Before that, from 1953 to late 1955, Central Committee (CC) discussions of postStalinist domestic and foreign policy had often expressed or implied a desire to break with Stalinist precedent, and some changes implemented, especially during Lavrentii Beria’s dramatic “100 Days” of reform, in fact did so quite dramatically (including the massive Gulag amnesties, the recalibration of the balance between heavy and light industry in the planned economy, and the rethinking of Soviet attitudes toward the Eastern bloc and the West). However, even in confidential discussion, Stalin’s successors refrained from criticizing him directly, in contrast to the vitriol that Beria attracted (notably for his role in Stalinist terror) after his defeat and death in summer 1953. In this respect, private elite discussions during this interregnum were not much more frank about Stalin than the public discussion in the Soviet press, which condemned the cult of personality from the earliest days after Stalin’s death but never before 1956 linked it directly to Stalin.1

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The CC investigation of the cult of personality, which began in late 1955 and ultimately led to Khrushchev’s speech “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences” in February 1956, was a different matter altogether. From the start, this investigation foregrounded its historical and moral credentials in claiming to resurrect the truth about Stalin’s destruction of the Leninist Old Guard in 1937–38. While Khrushchev had many motives for “exposing the cult of personality,” including the “logic” of the power struggle, his advocacy of it to colleagues and then to Soviet citizens emphasized the necessity of historical truth and moral reckoning with past crimes.2 The majority elite consensus around these ideas made the Secret Speech an unprecedented intervention in Soviet memory: an attempt to reveal and judge the complex truth about a (indeed, the) leading Bolshevik, without entirely forgetting or demonizing him. The idea of raising the cult of personality at the 20th Congress arose less than four months before the congress, and the speech was finalized less than four days before Khrushchev performed it, to a closed session after the congress’ end, on 25 February 1956.3 At every stage of this short but complex gestation, the Secret Speech provoked contestation and controversy. CC discussions of the content, form, and performance of the speech anticipated several key arguments about the memory of Stalin(ism), later voiced by audiences as it was disseminated across the Soviet Union. In its final draft, by now the work of many hands, the speech contained multiple views of the Stalinist past and of the discussions of Stalinism that it should generate among its listeners. When the Secret Speech’s audience engaged in all these forms of discussion, as well as others unanticipated by the party leadership, the regulation of memories of Stalinism became both urgent and uniquely challenging. In dispatching the Short Course’s co-author, Petr Pospelov, to excavate the truth about the late 1930s terror, the party leadership signaled a rupture with the form and content of the canonical Stalinist narrative.4 This historical research into terror was supplemented by attempts to recover select victims’ memories. Indeed, the creation of the Pospelov commission in December 1955 had been partly a response to appeals from rehabilitated Old Bolshevik victims of the terror, who lobbied Khrushchev and Mikoian to acknowledge the terror at the first major post-Stalin gathering of the party.5 The party leadership responded by

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inviting several well-known victims and perpetrators to send or perform detailed testimony of the Great Terror to the CC.6 These memories, together with the historical data collected by the Pospelov commission, were initially the object of historical and moral judgment within the party elite. Together with other material, they were then woven into a statement on the Stalinist past, performed to the party, and eventually to the majority of the Soviet population. This statement was written in a hurry. Though the initial research into the truth about the cult of personality was commissioned at the end of 1955, most discussion of it took place mere weeks before the 20th Congress. The decision for Khrushchev to give a speech on the topic was only finalized on the day before the congress opened, and revisions of the speech continued throughout the congress’ first week.7 That the speech was finalized so soon before its performance was largely due to a debate within the party elite concerning different approaches to the memory of Stalinism, which continued almost until Khrushchev took to the tribune. In the weeks leading up to that moment, Khrushchev and his colleagues had read and heard a remarkable, and remarkably shocking body of evidence.8 Pospelov’s report, intended as a focused investigation of the fate of the delegates of the 1934 17th Party Congress, in fact revealed a depth of suffering, and a breadth of complicity in the “sickly” practices of terror, that was truly staggering in scale: these were “scandalous infractions of Soviet law, mass arrests of absolutely innocent people, cruel beatings and torture.” Radiating outward from elite victims’ harrowing case histories, the terror of 1937–38 was revealed to have caused “enormous,” irreparable “damage” and “harm” to the party and its cause, not least to the war effort a few years later.9 The report concluded that in the party’s history “there was no more difficult or bitter page than the mass repressions of 1937–38, which cannot be justified in any way,” thus casting the terror as deeply traumatic as well as utterly immoral.10 Despite the strictly empirical brief issued to the authors, their report thus intermingled objective historical and statistical analysis and condemnation of the “shameful” actions of Stalin, producing a narrative of terror very likely to evoke outrage. Nonetheless, Pospelov’s report did not evoke a unanimous response among its elite readers, nor could they agree on whether and how these revelations about the cult of personality should be shared with a wider audience.

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The majority of the presidium did share the report’s sense of outrage about the terror, partly driven by a desire for self-exculpation, but also by a belief that the cultic commemoration of Stalin, which had continued since his death, was now grotesquely incongruous with the new information. “What sort of leader [vozhd’] is it,” asked one member, “who destroys everyone”?11 For Aristov, one of the authors of the first draft of the speech, the revelations about the “fearsome years” of the terror had entirely reversed Stalin’s reputation: “we wanted to make a God, but he turned out a devil,” he lamented. Such judgments insisted that the terror was a “crime,” incommensurate with Stalin’s other actions, an irredeemable sin.12 For Khrushchev, for example, Stalin’s “barbaric means” of dealing with his enemies transgressed both the party code of conduct (“he’s not a Marxist”) and general moral standards (“he erased all that is holy in man”).13 To that end, Khrushchev advocated a “definitive dethroning,” while Pervukhin wanted the speech to “tell it like it is,” excising all positive references and concentrating instead on Stalin’s multiple crimes: his usurpation of power, his liquidation of the Leninist Central Committee and his obstruction of industrial growth.14 Although some other members of the presidium suggested that Stalin’s actions before the terror might be praised, the majority agreed that the terror had irreparably damaged Stalin’s reputation, leaving it in tatters after 1937, or even 1934.15 Such judgments of Stalin at these pre-congress meetings helped to ensure that the speech also passed moral judgment on Stalin (albeit initially to a highly restricted audience, and with some praise for Stalin’s early career). Many CC members also agreed that the terror was a uniquely traumatic event, which now had to be worked through in Soviet memory: as Ponomarenko argued, “the death of millions of people leaves an ineradicable trace.” Moreover, by remaining “ineradicable” but also unconfronted, the memory had become a recurrent “nightmare,” which “tortures communists.”16 The congress therefore had to orchestrate the public exposure of the party’s shameful, previously repressed, past. In this sense, the Secret Speech originated in a belief, familiar from other countries’ attempts to come to terms with the past, that repressed memories had dysfunctional, unhealthy effects on the present. Presidium members argued for exposure, however, not primarily in psychoanalytical terms, but according to the principle of collective leadership, dictating that “Leninist documents” must be shared at least with the party’s leading

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cadres, though not necessarily the population at large.17 The collective exposure of the whole truth was also imagined as useful, helping to cleanse the party, and resurrect Lenin, though it is important that party leaders did not specify how long or what forms this purification and re-Leninization would take.18 These “framings” of the exposure of the cult of personality in terms of moral necessity and the restoration of the health and integrity of the Soviet order, made in elite arguments about the Secret Speech, shaped the final “framing” of the speech for its dissemination to the public.19 In turn, popular responses to the speech echoed, but also often intensified, both the moral judgment and the trauma discourse present in the party elite’s discussions. At the same time, the lack of unanimity in popular responses to de-Stalinization was also partly foreshadowed by these debates, which did not merely enact a power struggle, but also staged a clash of perspectives on the Stalinist past and on Soviet memory itself.20 Although in a distinct minority, and forced into a minimal acknowledgement of the “shameful” new revelations, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov repeatedly argued for a more positive view of the Stalinist past. Their simplest, and least effective, strategy of resistance to their colleagues’ iconoclastic attacks was simply to reiterate the claims of the cult, as in Molotov’s insistence that the speech must still commemorate Stalin as “a great continuer of Lenin’s cause” and a “great leader.”21 These cultic claims were easily dismissed in light of the copious historical sources now at hand.22 Nevertheless, this tenacious attachment to cult rhetoric was not limited to these few “Stalinists” in the leadership, as popular, pro-Stalinist reactions to the Secret Speech would soon reveal.23 Some other arguments against de-Stalinization were more substantive, such as these presidium members’ prescient claim that the party’s philosophy of history might be incompatible with revelations of its shameful past. By drawing attention to the inherently celebratory nature of party history, they highlighted the threat posed by this proposed shift to a memory politics of shame and repentance. All three figures argued that Stalin’s overall contribution to party and state history still ought to be celebrated because the overall outcome of the Stalin era had been positive. Thus Molotov, while admitting that “shameful things” happened under Stalin’s leadership, highlighted the key achievement of his thirty-year tenure: “under Stalin’s leadership, socialism triumphed,” he insisted.24

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Refusing to accept his colleagues’ allegations that the terror was an ineradicable stain on Stalin’s reputation, Voroshilov likewise claimed that Stalin deserved his “share” of praise, because the nation under his leadership had progressed along the path of Marxism-Leninism.25 In fact, this teleology had been present even in the Pospelov report, which dramatized the devastating effects of terror but also insisted that they had been overcome (albeit despite Stalin, not because of him). The narrative proposed by Voroshilov and Molotov was more logical, but their assumption that Stalin’s ends justified his means clashed with the dominant mood of moral indignation at these elite discussions. Instead, therefore, the Secret Speech retained Pospelov’s twin, contradictory emphases on the outrage and trauma of terror and on the progress of Soviet history, a tension that many listeners would be quick to highlight. Indeed, Kaganovich in these pre-congress discussions urged his colleagues to foresee that the speech would “unleash the elements” (razviazat’ stikhiiu), and might result in the “rethinking” and even “erasure” of a “thirty-year period.”26 Criticism of Stalin’s role in terror could easily snowball into outright condemnation of Stalin, and then into dismissal of the Stalin era: thus, Voroshilov likewise urged his colleagues not “to throw the baby out with the bathwater.”27 Such arguments remained in a distinct minority before the congress, and were even explicitly mocked within the speech itself.28 However, they were resurrected soon after the Secret Speech, when the party’s attempts to regulate popular memories of Stalin(ism) increasingly appealed for historical “objectivity” in assessing Stalin’s role, and delineated a more optimistic trajectory of Soviet history. The speech, its editing and performance authorized within days of these meetings, did not just reflect the evidence submitted and debated at the CC presidium. The most significant subsequent addition was the personal testimony, and individual moral judgment, of the speech’s strongest advocate, Khrushchev.29 While the majority of the Pospelov report was imported wholesale into the speech, providing its empirical backbone and theoretical heft, nearly half of the final draft consisted of additions from Khrushchev himself: less than a week before he performed the speech, Khrushchev dictated a report on Stalin almost equal in length, but quite different in genre, to the Pospelov report, and much of it survived into the performed version. Drawing mostly on anecdotes, rather than the historical sources referenced by Pospelov, and deepening

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the report’s judgments into emphatic denunciations, Khrushchev transformed the original text.30 Of Khrushchev’s many personal memories and savage judgments, the most consequential concerned Stalin’s role in World War II. Though toned down in the final version, the shocking picture of Stalin’s military incompetence still provoked some of the strongest reactions among listeners when the speech reached them a few weeks later.31 The final round of editing in the run-up to performance sought to soften some of the harshest criticisms. Crucially, however, even these final edits to the speech assumed that it would remain within the closed elite community present at the first performance. Even at the congress, in fact, it stunned and shocked its listeners.32 When the speech became considerably less “secret” a week after this first performance, after a CC decision to disseminate it to every party organization in the Soviet Union, and to large numbers of non-members too, no supplementary guidance was provided for this new mass audience.33 What the Soviet leadership hoped to achieve with the Secret Speech— and what it did in fact achieve—has long been debated.34 Although the Secret Speech was clearly a weapon in the power struggle between Khrushchev and his rivals, and played an important role in reforming the Soviet political and economic system, it was primarily debated within the leadership and presented to the party and public as a reckoning with the past. As the title itself made clear, the speech aimed above all to “expose” the “cult,” and thereby to change how Stalin was remembered. Deconstructing the cult would—and did—allow Stalin’s authority to be questioned more profoundly in a range of policy domains, facilitating deeper reform.35 Before that could happen, though, the cult had to be exposed, and a new memory of Stalin and Stalinism imposed in its place. However, when the speech expanded well beyond its initial audience, becoming a “secret for all the people,” it famously wrought havoc in Soviet “public opinion,” leaving the party leadership struggling to impose a single “party line” on the Stalinist past.36 In fact, though, as this textual analysis has shown, the speech itself did not contain a uniform line on the memory of Stalinism. Rather, thanks to its multiple authors, iterations, and intended audiences, it offered multiple perspectives on the Stalinist past and indeed on Soviet memory itself.37 Consequently, the

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majority of listeners initially attempted to clarify and resolve the contradictions of this new public memory, rather than trying to construct a counter-memory of Stalin or his era.38 Nevertheless, party leaders’ insistence that many such popular responses were oppositional and deviant, together with swift retractions of many of the harshest judgments of Stalin and Stalinism, undermined the legitimacy of this new public memory. ASKING QUESTIONS AND SPEAKING MEMORY

Most of the speech’s audience had no other outlet for their concerns than notes to the local leaders who performed the speech. Party organizations’ meetings about the speech usually featured speeches by a tiny proportion of members, mostly high-ranking figures deemed the most ideologically reliable in the organization (though even they often interpreted the speech mistakenly). Readings of the speech to assemblies of non-party members featured no oral discussion at all. In both party and non-party meetings, written notes were therefore the main, and the only, way for listeners to respond to what they had heard.39 These notes, especially if anonymous, offered greater freedom of expression than speeches, which were constrained by the attempt (albeit often futile) to stay within the limits of acceptable criticism of Stalin and Stalinism. In fact, both anonymous and signed notes to local leaders often expressed deference to the party authorities’ prerogative to narrate the past on behalf of the people— a belief perhaps even strengthened by the recent proof of the party’s truthtelling credentials.40 They also evinced a belief that further top-down revisions and clarifications of the new narrative of Stalinism would soon be provided—as the speech itself had promised. The Secret Speech intervened in the mythology of the Stalin cult by subjecting Stalinism to historical analysis (the sources collated by Pospelov) and attacking Stalin through a series of scandalous, sarcastic anecdotes (almost all inserted by Khrushchev). It also promised its listeners a sweeping revision (peresmotr) of Stalin-era historiography and other artistic and academic genres that had fueled the growth of the “cult of personality.”41 It was therefore inevitable—though poorly anticipated by the party leadership—that the Secret Speech would prompt thousands of requests for clarification of Stalin’s new status, and for the truth about every key event in Soviet state and party history. These thousands of

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questions echoed the sprawling range and hybrid tone of the speech, requesting both historical and anecdotal information about numerous aspects of Stalin and Stalinism. They included appeals for further statistical information on the death toll of terror (some facts and figures had been provided, but the speech had largely maintained a narrow focus on a few victims) and war (the speech had been tantalizingly vague on this point, even though war was a vastly more relevant and resonant memory than terror for most of the Soviet population).42 They also expressed curiosity about all of the historical events and processes mentioned in the speech, especially those less thoroughly documented in Khrushchev’s hasty additions to the text, such as the wartime deportations, the Civil War (only mentioned during a brief but potent criticism of Stalinist historiography), and many episodes from World War II.43 The latter two topics were particularly resonant in Stalingrad, reflecting the city’s special importance to the myth of Stalin’s military prowess, but there too, listeners appealed to party leaders to clarify for them the truth about local events.44 Although such factual questions dominated popular responses to the speech, the speech did also prompt oral and written expression of local or personal memories. Most of these can also be viewed—and were evidently intended by most who offered them—as legitimate, even helpful, responses to the speech’s revelations. At the heart of the speech, after all, was a series of individual testimonies of terror, radiating out to broader reflections on the damage that it had wrought to the party. Correspondingly, local discussions of the speech often featured similar remembrance of terror.45 Listeners eagerly, sometimes angrily, supplemented the picture sketched in the speech with more information about local manifestations of this national, systemic catastrophe, in their region, city, community, even within their own family. For instance, speaking in Lvov, a nurse responded to the speech by recounting the personal dimensions of the “great evil” of the cult of personality: four members of her family had died in 1937–38. This made her enthusiastic about “uprooting” the cult.46 While the controlled dissemination and limited discussion of the speech made it difficult to aggregate such individual testimonies, there were still some attempts to begin to articulate collective memories of Stalinism. In Leningrad, for example, a large meeting of the intelligentsia held in late March to discuss the cult of personality generated hundreds

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of written responses from the audience, many insisting on Leningrad’s particularly acute suffering during the pre-war and post-war terror. These individual utterances were not publicly discussed, but they still confidently projected a sense of collective experience, lobbying the central authorities (via Anna Pankratova, the CC delegate sent to calm local passions about the speech) to recognize the city’s trauma more fully.47 Professional collective memories also started to emerge; the Soviet Institute of Law’s discussion of the 20th Congress, for example, was dominated by testimony and analysis of the damage wrought by terror.48 Speakers enumerated the death toll within the profession, surviving victims attempted to identify those responsible, and members of the institute engaged in an unusually wide-ranging analysis of the damage that the terror had caused to the Soviet legal system and to the concept of “socialist legality.”49 Discussions of the Secret Speech also witnessed the public expression of new, or reemerging, generational collective memories. In Saratov, “many people termed ‘enemies of the people’ in 1937–38 spoke,” in a collective expression of the older generation’s “agitation” and its refusal “to forget the repressions against honest people.”50 In Kharkov, too, the speech prompted expressions of a generational collective memory, when a university rector explained that: “We old members of the party felt something wasn’t right [chto-to ne ladno] in the past, and many of us understood what the matter was. But I could not at all imagine that improbable terror which developed. The truth must be told.”51 These expressions of Old Bolshevik memory were a logical response to the speech’s hagiographic reconstruction of the Leninist Old Guard and its traumatic fate, but they posed a potential challenge to the party’s prerogative to define Soviet memories.52 A closer connection between central and local memory discourses was evident in local remembrance of the elite victims who had been central to Khrushchev’s speech. In one meeting in the Ukrainian republic, for example, a local agricultural boss described the terror as a “horror” on a scale to rival the repressions of the time of Ivan the Terrible, but also focused on one particular victim, Postyshev, whom he had known in the 1930s, but who until now was presumed to have died in hospital.53 Meanwhile, an office director in Orel found in the speech echoes of his own horrific experience in an Irkutsk prison, and also confirmation of the

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truth about the death of Postyshev, whom he had personally known.54 Other local meetings witnessed testimony from acquaintances and friends of other elite victims featured in the speech.55 Local leaders’ memories of terror also sometimes echoed Khrushchev’s rhetoric of self-exculpation, raising but then dismissing the possibility of resistance to terror. In Altai, for example, an obkom secretary recounted how he had been forced to designate “enemies” in 1937 to make up quotas of arrests, while in Volynskaia oblast’ of the Ukrainian republic, a factory worker party organization head remembered how impossible it had been to resist in 1937–38, and claimed that the cult could not have been “exposed” earlier.56 In the Tatar republic, too, a factory director offered testimony of the late 1930s terror, admitting that he had not protested against it, instead praising Stalin. However, unlike Khrushchev, he also used his speech to express feelings of guilt and to allege that everyone was complicit in the evils of Stalinism.57 While perpetrators and bystanders thus sometimes admitted their own guilt, it was victims of terror whose testimony posed the greatest challenge to the speech’s calculated avoidance of lustration and repentance. As Miriam Dobson has argued, the amnesties had previously freed many victims of Stalinist terror, but only the Secret Speech allowed their stories to be told.58 The terror victims who responded publicly to the Secret Speech largely echoed the speech’s heroic narrative of victims’ survival, but they often challenged the speech’s avoidance of lustration of terror’s perpetrators.59 In Kalinin, for example, the chief engineer at a local leather factory recounted that he had been arrested as an “enemy of the people,” but had kept his faith in the party, much like the victims featured in the Secret Speech. Having survived the terror, though, he now wanted those responsible for his suffering to receive their comeuppance, and openly condemned the local mayor for having tortured him despite knowing that he was innocent.60 Elsewhere, too, rehabilitated victims named and shamed the local figures responsible for their plight.61 In Saratov, for example, a former raikom secretary was glad to have been rehabilitated and found work again, but could not understand how his accusers had retained their jobs. “How can this be?” he asked. “Why don’t people ask how they were guilty of the fact that Soviet people were in prison . . . for nothing?”62 These calls for lustration remind us that terror was central to the Secret Speech itself, not only as a source of historical enquiry and a

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subject of testimony, but also as a focus for moral judgment. Among the agents of terror identified in the speech were a large proportion—perhaps even the overwhelming majority—of state security employees, and an unspecified number of people “infected” with the mentality of terror and complicit in its practices of denunciation and “spymania.”63 These listeners’ appeals to “expose” local agents of terror were therefore a more focused performance of the vague, but powerful, accusations that Khrushchev himself had leveled at terror’s perpetrators in the party and state apparat.64 However, in real life, the party imposed strict limits on lustration.65 D E N O U N C I N G S TA L I N

While many listeners thus blamed local agents of terror, they did not now exonerate Stalin, as had often happened during Stalin’s lifetime.66 After all, the Secret Speech had emphatically identified Stalin as the main culprit of terror, and this prompted an unprecedented wave of personal criticism of the leader himself. The thousands of questions submitted to party authorities about scandals in Stalin’s private life (including his second wife’s suicide and his son’s wayward behavior) clearly relished the novel opportunity to treat Stalin as a human (and a deeply dysfunctional one, at that), but also still strongly resembled Khrushchev’s use of personal anecdotes and his hyperbolic criticism of Stalin’s personality flaws.67 However, both written and oral responses to the speech often also moved beyond questions to outright condemnation, far exceeding that in the speech. Indeed, observers across the Soviet Union reported that the main—but by no means unanimous—reaction was “sharp” (rezkoe; ostroe) condemnation of Stalin, above all for his role in the terror, the crime most copiously documented (and repeatedly attributed to Stalin) in the speech.68 Many of the hundreds of attacks on Stalin portraits, monuments, and other symbols, committed at and after readings of the Secret Speech, were likewise demonstrative expressions of “outrage” and revulsion at Stalin’s crimes.69 One example can suffice: when a senior technician Kuznetsov at the firm Tokhogres in Lvov oblast’ of the Ukrainian republic heard the Secret Speech, he “arrived the next day at work, tore down a Stalin portrait from the wall and threw it in the rubbish bin.” When factory managers asked him why he had done so, the technician “apologized for what he had done, and said that he could not react calmly to the

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anti-party actions of Stalin.” Kuznetsov at once recognized his own failure to think through the revelations “calmly,” yet also defended his categorical judgment as proof of his ideological credentials: Stalin had clearly offended against Leninist principles, and this ultimately justified Kuznetsov’s offended reaction.70 Kuznetsov’s anger and revulsion also illustrates that, among the myriad verbal criticisms leveled at Stalin, the most powerful were accusations of evil, criminality, and, above all, anti-Leninism. Taken together, these criticisms implied (as had some of Stalin’s former colleagues during the pre-congress CC discussions) a wide-ranging infraction of the moral, criminal, and party code. Typical of the broad scope of some accusations was a claim in Ukraine’s Drogobych region that Stalin’s actions were “opposed not only to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism but even to common sense itself.”71 Stalin was openly demonized in accusations of evil (zlo) and malefaction (zlodeiianiia), in numerous locales.72 His “criminal” acts, meanwhile, were indicted from East (Magadan) to South (North Ossetia), to North (Komi).73 In deeming Stalin a criminal, accusers cited above all his illegal behavior during the terror, though Stalin’s “war crimes” also generated some opprobrium.74 For the party organizations who first heard the Secret Speech, though, it was Stalin’s assault on Leninism that constituted the most serious, and self-evident, charge against him. Allegations of Stalin’s “anti-party,” “antiLeninist,” and “anti-Marxist” conduct were rife at party meetings, but also at meetings with large numbers of non-party listeners, who perhaps did not fully understand the alleged ideological revision, but still could perceive Stalin’s breach of party regulations.75 This logic was apparent within the speech itself: Khrushchev had repeatedly termed Stalin’s actions “anti-Leninist,” and from the very start, the “cult of personality” had been set up in opposition to the philosophy of Marx, Engels, and especially Lenin. To essentialize Stalin into an opponent, or even an enemy, of Lenin, from this copious evidence, did not require a huge conceptual leap. Indeed, several party organizations were so sure of their collective judgment of Stalin that they proposed or passed resolutions expelling him posthumously from the party, only to have such decisions swiftly reversed by their party superiors.76 Individuals also passed judgment, such as a literary scholar at Leningrad’s Institute of Russian Literature, a certain Alekseev, who unsuccessfully petitioned for a posthumous trial of Stalin,

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to establish whether he was a “state criminal.”77 Confident claims that Stalin must soon be officially designated an “enemy of the people” were made all over the Soviet Union, but these too would end in disappointment.78 Other attempts to delineate Stalin’s ideological otherness, by aligning him with already confirmed “enemies” such as Beria or Trotskii, or with leaders of the ancien régime (through comparisons with Nicholas 1st or Ivan the Terrible), likewise earned their speakers reprimands.79 I argued earlier that the speech had emerged out of a broad (though not unanimous) elite condemnation of Stalin’s wrongdoing in 1937. It is therefore unsurprising that many listeners, given their more limited prior knowledge of the “truth” about Stalin and terror, were shocked into even less equivocal moral judgments by what they heard. Most broadly, Stalin’s orchestration of terror was frequently deemed “unforgivable” and irredeemable by listeners. Its “unforgivable wounds” could not be healed, alleged one obkom worker in Komi, while a factory worker in Sumskaia oblast’ of the Ukrainian republic alleged irreparable damage to Stalin’s reputation: “Stalin’s great authority and the respect that the people had for him are undermined,” he announced.80 In such determinations of Stalin’s new reputation, listeners rarely needed to draw on evidence beyond the speech. Instead, they quoted back to party leaders the speech’s most striking evocations of the scale of terror in order to frame their own judgments and those that they hoped the party would soon make. They cited the “thousands” of deaths for which Stalin had been held personally responsible, and repeated the speech’s allusions to the “immeasurable damage” that they had caused.81 Some others made their own moral calculus explicit, in an echo of the sweeping dismissals of Stalin’s merits made by many speakers at the original CC meetings (though these had been toned down in the speech itself). For one doctor in Lvov, for example, despite the fact that Stalin had played “a certain role” in the Soviet Union’s development, “everything pales in comparison with the evil” that he had committed.82 Another listener in Leningrad found that the equation was simple: knowing “even onehundredth” of Stalin’s wrongdoing was “enough to erase all memory of him forever.”83 Finally, a speech by a Mordovan victim of terror, deemed by party observers one of the most “extreme” popular judgments of Stalin, elaborated on the staggering scale of arrest and imprisonment under Stalin, alleging deaths in the hundreds of thousands, and arrests in the millions,

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and concluded that “these merits have been washed away by the blood of his victims. Stalin was a murderer and maniac.”84 Stalin now deserved to be forgotten, or remembered only in the most hyperbolically negative terms. These widespread denunciations of Stalin revealed a clear debt to Stalinist Manichean thinking and attitudes toward commemoration.85 The Stalinist practice of “unmasking” (razoblachenie) was embedded in the project of de-Stalinization from the start, and many listeners responded to the speech with harsh exposés reminiscent of the show trials and of the more recent “exposure” of another “enemy,” Beria.86 At the same time, these requests to the Soviet leadership to observe the moral logic of their own revelations, by fundamentally changing the commemoration of Stalin, posited such changes as a means—indeed, the only means—to progress toward a post-Stalinist and neo-Leninist future. Moreover, while indebted to Stalinist and Leninist traditions of memory and forgetting and still expressing deference to the party’s prerogative to define Soviet memory, these appeals also tentatively asserted the right to discuss and even to criticize the party’s memory politics, as was also clear in popular reactions to party decisions (or nondecisions) on local and central symbols of the cult. The Secret Speech had itself criticized many such cult symbols, including the Soviet national anthem, the Stalin prizes, monuments, and the naming of streets and cities after leaders.87 These sweeping yet superficial criticisms had prompted hundreds of listeners’ questions about the decisions that the leadership would, or should, now take to address these distortions in commemoration.88 A conspicuous absence from the speech, however, was the mausoleum, despite (or perhaps because of) its obvious physical and symbolic centrality. Along with portraits and monuments (the local manifestations of the cult most visible to ordinary citizens, and further highlighted by Khrushchev himself), the mausoleum stimulated the greatest number of questions and suggestions about how to commemorate Stalin in light of the speech.89 Indeed, within the first six months of the speech, two hundred letters about the mausoleum had been sent directly to the Central Committee, enough to prompt a CC discussion of “mass opinion” about the site.90 The number of questions and suggestions addressed to local leaders was far higher. Despite the absence of official guidelines, these numerous calls to remove Stalin’s body expressed very similar arguments, grounded in clarity about the

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memory of Lenin and Stalin respectively, which had been strengthened by the stark binary division between the two leaders in the speech. These arguments were also grounded in an equally clear sense of the sacral significance of the mausoleum as a commemorative space.91 Requests for the removal of Stalin’s body—like the appeals for an official condemnation—represented Stalin’s “guilt” (vina) and “shame” (pozor) as ineradicable and irredeemable.92 He was “drenched in blood,” his reputation permanently “dirtied” and “stained” by his crimes, they claimed.93 One letter that combined several such accusations was sent to the CC by a party member and economist in Kazakhstan, which claimed that “Stalin has stained himself with blood, and none of his merits in the revolution can justify his behavior, they will not wipe away the shameful acts that he committed.”94 Removal of his body would be a fitting punishment—a damnatio memoriae—for these enormous crimes and the “damage” and “harm” that they had caused to the party.95 These appeals expressed an abiding Soviet belief that commemoration (especially in the mausoleum) was an act of tribute, even sacralization, which Stalin demonstrably no longer deserved. Indeed, by remaining in the mausoleum, Stalin threatened to pollute the entire “holy” space at the center of Moscow, and by extension the neo-Leninist ideal at the heart of de-Stalinization.96 Visitors could not engage with the site “with a clean heart,” claimed one party organization secretary in the Ukrainian republic.97 Another listener, a certain Starovoitova in Minsk, noted that when visitors visited the mausoleum to pay their respects to Lenin, Stalin’s proximity implied “that love also applies to him, even though that’s not the case.” In light of the revelations about Stalin, she felt it no longer appropriate to “extend the fame and praise due to Lenin, to Stalin, whose guilt before the party is very great.”98 According to these appeals, the only purpose of this memory site, and perhaps of Soviet memory more broadly, was celebratory. To try to combine the two starkly different “memories” of Lenin and Stalin was uncomfortable, perhaps even harmful to the resurrection of the Leninist ideal that was the aim of de-Stalinization.99 Instead—as long-standing Soviet tradition also dictated—Stalin should be punished through demonstrative forgetting and erasure.100 The Secret Speech’s own rhetoric of “overcoming” the Stalinist past and its emphasis on correcting the long-distorted memory of Lenin encouraged such thinking, as did Khrushchev’s punitive attacks on Stalin

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as anti-Leninist. Nonetheless, in most parts of the Soviet Union, iconoclastic words and deeds were discouraged, if rarely punished, by local leaders. Local officials usually viewed strongly worded attacks on Stalin as “extreme,” though excusable, reactions to the shocking revelations of the speech.101 As long as they were not generalized into a critique of Stalinism, or of the party leadership, they did not attract further investigation or punishment.102 Nonetheless, from the start of the dissemination of the speech, local leaders implicitly criticized these categorical judgments by issuing warnings against deeming Stalin an “enemy” or erasing all trace of former commemoration.103 Moreover, within a month of the speech’s first performance, before many communists and non-communists had even heard it, Pravda had already published two emphatic warnings not to discount Stalin’s merits.104 The second of these, published in early April, was an editorial originally published in the Chinese Communist Party newspaper, in an early—and prescient—attempt by Mao and his CCP colleagues to prevent Stalin criticism from running out of control and to clarify the causes and effects of the cult of personality (an issue undertheorized in the speech, as the next section argues).105 In this way, even before the Secret Speech had reached all corners of the Soviet Union, its (already ambiguous) judgment of Stalin was being moderated still further. “Forgetting” Stalin and reviving worship of Lenin, as envisaged in these responses, was not, though, the only way that the speech’s audience imagined overcoming the legacies of Stalinism. Another, much smaller, portion of the Secret Speech’s audience instead proposed that mastering the Stalinist past required a full reckoning of the damage caused to the Soviet system and Bolshevik ideology, and an honest confrontation of the profound challenges of re-Leninization. This “memory work” had also been implicit within the speech itself, but it was the first to be defined by party leaders as anti-Soviet, remaining their gravest concern in and after 1956. R E F O R M O R R E V O L U T I O N ?: R E F L E C T I O N S O N S TA L I N I S M A N D P O S T - S TA L I N I S M When the historian Anna Pankratova visited Leningrad three weeks after the speech began to be disseminated, in order to regulate local responses to the speech, she was overwhelmed with questions and comments regarding the “objective reasons” for the cult.106 These ranged from

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deceptively simple requests for a definition of the “cult of personality,” to appeals for more information on the cult’s social, psychological, and economic roots, and claims about its consequences, notably allegations that Stalinism had created a new class in Soviet society. Pankratova deemed these latter reflections excessively “philosophical,” even “a direct resurgence of Trotskyist-Bukharinist views,” but also blamed these “unhealthy moods” on the absence of a “deeper and more concrete explanation of the issue of the cult of personality.” Pankratova’s observation highlights the difficulty of categorizing these “philosophical” reflections on Stalinism, which were also voiced in many other regions of the Soviet Union.107 Were they alien to party discourse, imported from Trotskyism, or did they somehow originate in the speech’s inadequate explanation of the cult of personality as a socio-political phenomenon? The authors of the speech had emphasized from the very start that their approach to the cult of personality was objective, and grounded in Marxist-Leninist theory.108 They sought to pre-empt allegations of personal attacks on Stalin and subjective views of historical agency by presenting the cult of personality as the consequence of historical and social processes, rather than the influence of a single man. Thus the speech explicitly, though only briefly, posed the question of the cult’s origins and the sources of its support and persistence. From beginning to end, the speech also concentrated on the consequences of the cult, constructing a devastating—albeit clearly incomplete—picture of the damage that it had caused. Alongside his recurrent invocations of the damage that terror had caused to the party ranks, Khrushchev also painted a grim picture of the systemic costs of Stalinism as a whole. Stalinism had fostered not only an army of willing perpetrators of terror, but also a mentality of fear, subservience, deceit, and stifled initiative. A caste of “flatterers” and “alleluia singers” had become entrenched in the party and state bureaucracy; indeed, Khrushchev alleged, Stalinism may even have caused a “bureaucratization” of the entire Soviet system.109 Thus the speech offered a suggestive, but far from complete, theoretical and socio-economic analysis of the causes and consequences of the cult of personality. Most of it consisted of off-the-cuff comments, ultimately making the speech less an objective analysis of Stalinism than an ad hominem attack on Stalin.110 Nevertheless, these hints of systemic analysis were enough to provoke some listeners—especially party

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members, with their grounding in Marxist-Leninist thought—to reflect more deeply on the objective, socio-economic causes and consequences of the cult. The wide-ranging discussions of Stalinism that sometimes occurred, notably the debates at Moscow’s Thermo-Technical Laboratory (examined in more detail below), generated enormous domestic controversy at the time, and were later widely interpreted as proof of the emergence of the “liberal subject” and dissent in the Soviet Union.111 Yet there was little in these discussions of the Stalinist past that had not been anticipated or stimulated (albeit inadvertently) by Soviet discourse itself. The “explosive” effect of the Secret speech and the “snowball”-like momentum of the subsequent rethinking of the past were partly fueled by the speech’s own suggestive, though confused, hints about the true extent of Stalinism’s difficult legacies.112 In this sense, accounts that emphasize listeners’ audacious transgression of the “limits” of the speech construct too stark an opposition between official and popular discourses of de-Stalinization, imposing a coherence of rhetoric and purpose on the speech that was patently absent before and immediately after its public performance.113 The lack of initial guidelines for the appropriate memory work about Stalinism led a minority of listeners toward radical exposure of the cult of personality in its local and systemic manifestations. Though potentially (albeit often not intentionally) subversive, such glasnost’ had a long Leninist and even nineteenth-century pedigree, and the exposure of the systemic legacies of Stalinism was rarely imagined by those who performed it as a prelude to revolution rather than reform.114 Nonetheless, these responses were immediately and categorically deemed anti-Soviet. A year after the Secret Speech, Milovan Djilas’ seminal analysis of the “new class” appeared in print for the first time in Yugoslavia and abroad.115 However, a year earlier, the speech had already prompted similar, albeit fragmentary, claims about Stalinism and class from its domestic audience.116 For example, a party meeting held in the bastion of party orthodoxy, the Academy of Social Sciences, sparked controversy and a CC investigation when one speaker, the son of an Old Bolshevik terror victim, Igor’ Kedrov, alleged that Stalinism had created a “caste of ‘high-ranking people,’ ” a class apart, of “gigantic dimensions.”117 Similarly, a literary specialist at Moscow’s Institute of World Literature, a certain Bialik, argued that “as a consequence of historical factors, a stratum has formed

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in the party and state apparatus.”118 Analysis of the nature of this class or stratum remained limited for the most part, thanks to the regulation of public discussion and the fact that many listeners were often stupefied into silence by what they had heard.119 Economic analysis, for example, rarely went beyond generalized resentment at disparities between “us” and “them.”120 There were, though, more frequent expressions of revulsion at the morality (or immorality) that united this Stalinist “class,” full of “flatterers” and “careerists,” who had placed their material comfort and concern for rank above Bolshevik principles of honesty and asceticism. Though they echoed Khrushchev’s own denunciations of “careerism,” such criticisms also had a longer pedigree, drawing on intelligentsia critiques of poshlost’ (vulgarity), and on persistent tensions between reward and sacrifice within Bolshevik ideology.121 These critiques of the moral and psychological flaws of this Stalinist class also performed distinctively Soviet forms of “exposure” and penetration of its members’ souls.122 Some listeners subjected individual members of the CC to such “exposure,” turning Khrushchev’s critique of flattery and subservience back on him and his colleagues, and blaming them for not challenging Stalin during his lifetime.123 In fact, besides the radical popular judgments of Stalin examined earlier, the most common enquiry submitted to party meetings concerned the posthumous timing of the CC’s attacks.124 Local propagandists were at a loss to provide answers, usually just repeating the relevant sections of the original text. Some listeners therefore filled the gaps themselves, pinpointing junctures in Stalin’s lifetime when the cult could and should have been curtailed by Stalin’s colleagues, for example the two congresses after the 17th Congress (whose devastating aftermath had been at the heart of the speech).125 One “demagogic” statement at a meeting of a Leningrad hospital party organization called on Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov to explain why they had not used the 18th and 19th congresses to stop Stalin and his cult of personality.126 Others saw Stalin’s death as the obvious moment for a radical intervention in public memory, yet the leadership had inexplicably chosen to commemorate Stalin with a “sumptuous” funeral and the highest party honor of placement in the mausoleum.127 Some individuals and party organizations therefore proposed, and even in some cases passed,

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resolutions criticizing the tardiness of the speech.128 In Chkalov, such criticism of the CC was quashed by the CC itself, who saw it as a highly worrying sign of “anti-Soviet” sentiment “emerging” after the Secret Speech.129 Some listeners also argued that the party’s highest leadership had not only failed to criticize Stalin, but had even actively “inflated” his cult, making them guiltier than anyone else of the vices of “flattery” and “toadying” criticized in the speech. One listener in Novgorod, for example, sarcastically enquired: “who on earth forced members of the Politburo and Central Committee to praise Stalin in oral and written form?”130 In an ironic echo of Khrushchev’s historical citations, others provided concrete examples of past tributes, such as the bonanza of seventieth birthday tributes in 1949.131 Echoing the personal critique of the speech, but extending it to other individual leaders, listeners named and shamed Kaganovich, Molotov, Mikoian, and Malenkov as especially enthusiastic participants in the cult.132 Such condemnations of CC members were particularly widespread before the CC issued its edict on the limits of permissible criticism in April 1956, but some defiantly continued afterward too.133 Although these criticisms of the current leadership were often sarcastic and scandalous, they still expressed a distinctively Soviet worldview.134 The disgust at the CC’s lack of “sincerity” drew on established ideas of glasnost’ and on more recent “thaw” ideas of “sincerity” as a key communist virtue. These communist virtues were explicitly invoked at one meeting of the Armenian Writers’ Union, where several members condemned the harm caused by CC members to the Soviet project of engineering human souls. One, Pargev Martirosian, reacted to the speech by claiming that not a single member of the CC had “shown boldness . . . no one displayed the example of how to be a fearless communist. . . . We can educate [vospityvat’] our pioneers on Zoia, Matrosov, et al., but which example of leaders’ conduct should be used for education, if none of them acted courageously?” While affirming the necessity of inculcation and inspiration from Soviet ideals, this writer viewed recent party practice as a deviation from those ideals. One of his colleagues, Zar’ian, also raised the issue of leaders’ apparent fear, asking, “surely a coward doesn’t have the right to be a leader? We don’t forgive cowardice even in a rank-and-file soldier. . . . And when state actors show cowardice, it becomes an appalling misfortune for the whole people.” This claim of “appalling

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misfortune” challenged the party leadership’s optimistic framing of Stalinism, but at the same time it appealed for a stricter, less forgiving observance of party standards. Despite the Sovietness of both appeals, the speeches and speakers underwent comprehensive investigation and punishment by city and republican authorities.135 Some listeners, though, alleged that the vice of flattery had permeated not just the top echelons, but also the whole of the party, perhaps even all of Soviet society.136 In Kuibyshev, for example, a military representative of a local factory blamed the “cult of personality” on the “incorrect inculcation of members of the party in subservience, toadying, and cowardice,” and was expelled from the party for his criticisms.137 In Chkalov, a senior figure in a district branch of the ministry of state control, a certain Ternovskii, also attributed the long reign of the “cult of personality” to the exceptionally widespread mentality of “flattery,” and he too was expelled.138 In Bashkiriia, the head of the local party school urged his audience to appreciate that the “cult of personality” was so “lodged in our psychology” that only a “major reform” (krupnaia perestroika) would be able to uproot it.139 Ironically, this warning about the ubiquity of the mentality of the cult of personality was not authorized for mass distribution, after the obkom secretary criticized it as too sweeping. Such reflections on Stalinist psychology and collective behavior also sometimes generated radical analysis of the nature of Stalinism as a political system. For example, claims of a “crack” between Soviet leaders and people were made at meetings of Leningrad State University and in Kuibyshev.140 The speaker at Leningrad State University, a certain Gaevskii, extended the metaphor by claiming that only radical reform could provide enough “cement” to fill in this gap, and thus to repair the damage to the political process. Other statements communicated a sense of frustration at the chronic lack of communication between “top” and “bottom”: “the main reason for Stalin’s cult of personality is the distance between party and government leaders and the people,” concluded one party member at a meeting of a beer factory in the Ukrainian republic’s Volynskaia oblast’.141 At another factory party meeting, in the city of Gor’kii, one member of the party organization, a certain Godiaev, complained about the lack of communication “from below” with “those on high” during the Stalin era. However, he also claimed that the new criticisms of Stalinism had already increased the “activism” of the masses,

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and with it, his love for the party; this optimistic framing of his political critique spared him punishment.142 As with the socio-economic analysis of the Stalinist “new class,” these broad claims about the division between “us” and “them” sometimes developed into a more focused political analysis. Several listeners termed Stalinism a dictatorship, expanding on the implications of Khrushchev’s attacks on Stalin’s disproportionate power.143 For example, an academic at the Institute of Russian Literature, Alekseev, performed a wide-ranging polemic against Stalin’s “military dictatorship,” deeming it worse than any other tyrannies in history, and the terror worse than the Spanish Inquisition.144 Others reached a similar conclusion, by drawing attention to the political institutions damaged and even destroyed over the last three decades. Under Stalinism, the Leninist system of soviets “was not just destroyed, but also distorted,” leaving the people seriously alienated from power, alleged one speaker at a meeting of the Znanie society in Moscow.145 Elections remained a “farce,” and the soviets a sham “organization for the people,” similarly claimed a graduate student, Shastitko, at the Moscow Institute of Eastern Studies.146 The broadest analysis of the political culture of the cult of personality took place at Moscow’s Thermo-Technical Laboratory. Here, a handful of unusually bold allegations about Stalinism, from speakers frustrated at the speech’s halfhearted socio-political analysis, gave rise to a multifaceted, collective investigation of Stalinism, only curtailed by CC intervention. Speakers there openly termed Stalinism a “dictatorship,” strongly criticizing Stalin’s absolute hold on power and the people’s total “alienation” from political participation; had power become any more concentrated in the hands of the elite, one alleged, an armed uprising would have been necessary to put the party back on the right path.147 Another went so far as to liken Stalinism to slavery.148 One of the speakers later expelled from the lab, Iurii Orlov, concluded that the Stalinist system had ceased to be Soviet in an economic as well as political sense: “socialist democracy” had ceased to exist, as both power and property had been concentrated at the very top of the party-state. When more conservative members tried to rebuff these views, some members of the party organization sided with the controversial speakers, criticizing the lack of real “democracy” and the disproportionate power of the Supreme Soviet. This in turn prompted the more comprehensive measures of

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punishment and correction directed at the laboratory in subsequent weeks.149 Such critiques drew some devastating conclusions about Stalinism’s damage to Soviet principles of glasnost’, democracy, and equality, fundamentally questioning Khrushchev’s optimistic, teleological narrative. At the same time, by expressing outrage at damage to these ideals, they revealed how attached they still were to them, even though some already imagined them in ways that were incompatible with “democratic centralism.”150 In a similar way, most evocations of the harm of Stalinism proposed radical, but often distinctively Soviet, cures. These ranged from calls for individual repentance, to be performed through Soviet rituals, to broader personnel and institutional reforms, again drawing heavily on Soviet traditions. Thus, some of the ad hominem criticism of CC members expressed a hope that these leaders would now perform their own samokritika (selfcriticism).151 In Vladimir, a factory worker named Kolchigin expressed just such a hope in claiming that “CC members should have admitted their mistakes, the fact that they didn’t restrain Stalin from carrying out these acts,” but his suggestion was deemed “incorrect” by party authorities.152 A more radical, but still Soviet, method of de-Stalinization was the party purge. In Sakhalin, for example, a local geological researcher and party member named Daragan reacted to the 20th Congress with a call for a further, extraordinary congress, at which CC leaders explained their mistakes, and with an appeal for a complete change of the party leadership. Khrushchev himself had hoped that de-Stalinization would “purify” the Soviet system, but understandably did not view himself as an appropriate target of purges.153 The Sakhalin district party committee therefore came under heavy criticism from the city and republican authorities for a lack of “vigilance” and for their failure to provide a forceful “rebuttal” and punishment of Daragan’s controversial views.154 In a broader sense, too, the purge was seen as the only effective way to rid post-Stalinist politics and society of the pervasive taint of Stalinism. Bialik, at the Institute of World Literature, for instance, followed his allegations of the Stalinist “class” by asking: “There used to exist such a thing in the party as the purge. Why have we renounced it?”155 Reviving this Leninist tradition, he argued, would be an excellent way of ridding the party of those “people, who had accidentally got into the party to pursue

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their careers.” At the Armenian Writers’ Union, too, several writers proposed a thorough purge to address the bureaucratization of the partystate.156 And in Stalingrad’s Pedagogical Institute, a wide-ranging discussion of the causes of the cult of personality ended with calls for press freedom and the wholesale replacement of the party apparat. Even though the main instigator of this appeal later clarified that he was not calling for a total purge, he was expelled for one year.157 In fact, what all these listeners proposed was a removal of the obstacles hampering the revival of Leninism, akin to that envisaged in the speech itself. In a compilation of questions of faculty from three of Moscow’s leading academic institutions, the Leninist rationale for purging was abundantly clear: “A purge is as necessary now as the air we breathe. How much filth [nechist’] has accumulated in the party, how much careerism, flattery and flat-out deformation . . . how grateful the Great Lenin would be, after the rout of the cult of personality, if a good, comprehensive purge of the party were to be carried out.”158 The final Leninist solution proposed was the revival of the system of soviets. In Arkhangel’sk, a timber plant worker and Komsomol member distributed leaflets soon after the Secret Speech, calling for re-sovietization. “We sacredly honor Lenin and his learnings,” the leaflet explained, “and we consider that in the situation that has developed we need to act as Lenin taught us: all power to the soviets, that is, to the local soviets of workers’ deputies. Only via this road can we reach communism.”159 The local authorities distrusted the good intentions of their author, perhaps because of the “underground” method of delivering his message, and its dire warnings of popular “bloodshed” were the soviets not swiftly restored: this self-avowed “Leninist” was arrested and condemned as “anti-Soviet” and “hostile” soon afterward.160 Many other critiques of Stalin’s destruction of Leninist political institutions also posited the soviets as an ideal to be restored, albeit with great difficulty, in the post-Stalin era.161 Of course, some responses challenged not just the strict limits of partiinost’, but also any reasonable definition of Soviet socialism.162 Iurii Orlov himself had already started to imagine a different political system (arguing in his speech for “a full democratization of our life”), and his ill treatment at the hands of the authorities only radicalized his thinking further.163 Others went further still, projecting total “freedom” from ideology. An anonymous leaflet circulated in Tuva soon after the speech

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called not just for a “change of power” (smena vlasti), but also for an all-out assault on the ideological foundations of socialism: “all works by the classical scholars, starting with Marx, will be burned,” it announced. Upon investigation, the author was identified as a local man named Nikitin, and diagnosed as schizophrenic, confirming how seriously his actions had breached Soviet norms.164 Though perhaps an example of the apocalyptic discourse of popular protest, rather than a serious vision of the future, Nikitin’s proposal presented an unequivocal challenge to Soviet language and ideology.165 However, most of these initial responses to the Secret Speech did not. Although sometimes aggressive and cynical, these critiques of the Stalinist system were largely logical inferences and extrapolations from the party’s own arguments. Moreover, the ways that they reflected on the historical problem of Stalinism and the party’s future remained deeply Soviet, though their maximalism was also indebted to pre-Soviet intelligentsia traditions. While some of the arguments may have sounded Trotskyist—and, to party observers, they certainly did—this was partly because Khrushchev had himself veered toward a Thermidorian critique of Stalinism during his long, chaotic speech. Understandably, though, party leaders deemed such popular memories of Stalinism “anti-Soviet,” rather than interrogating the Sovietness of the new public memory. The most lenient treatment meted out to such responses was instant criticism of the speaker, which a few meetings accomplished instantly. At Leningrad State University, when allegations of a “gap” between party and people were voiced, for example, they were decisively criticized by many of the following speakers, obviating the need for further investigation. However, more often, party organizations struggled to discern or enforce the limits of discussion, at least initially.166 Some meetings simply did not recognize such comments as subversive, and failed to respond to them at all before the meeting concluded, necessitating follow-up meetings or the intervention of party superiors. Equally worrying, though, were meetings where local leaders had tried to criticize or punish speakers, but had been criticized themselves by other members of the collective. In the Thermo-Technical Laboratory and at Moscow’s Eastern Studies Institute, attempts to correct and limit systemic critiques had been openly mocked and criticized, probably accounting for the intensive attention that these incidents attracted at the CC level. Even

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where there were not open objections to these attempts to police discussion, there were often gestures of solidarity, such as substantial votes cast against motions to expel or stigmatize “anti-Soviet” speakers.167 A decisive shift in defining and punishing anti-Soviet sentiment came in the wake of the Thermo-Technical Laboratory controversy. Almost a month to the day after the CC decision to disseminate the speech, an article in Pravda identified “rotten elements” and “stagnant moods” manifested in response to the speech, identifying the laboratory as one of their most fertile grounds.168 It clearly assigned the political and social critiques made by Orlov, and others like him around the country, to the wrong side of the ideological divide: these critiques were “slander” and a “parroting of alien discourse.”169 In this way, the potential Sovietness of these critiques of the Stalinist system was decisively denied. Local party leaders responded to the new guidelines by intervening more aggressively in individual controversies, offering proof of their heightened “vigilance.”170 In all, it took less than one month for these systemic critiques of Stalinism to be marginalized within the national debate over how to come to terms with the Stalinist past.171 It was such domestic reactions to the Secret Speech that first alerted the party authorities to the apparent dangers of de-Stalinization and prompted the first moves, within a month of the speech’s initial dissemination, to retract its more radical claims and to punish those who had responded eagerly to them. Within weeks of these decisions, the speech, leaked to the West, had started to generate radical criticism of both Stalinism and the post-Stalinist leadership.172 Simultaneously, in parts of the Eastern bloc, criticisms of Stalinism, building on a similar logic to these early Soviet claims, had started to spiral into more radical critiques and calls for reform in Poland, and especially in Hungary.173 Although these radical critiques issuing from the near and far abroad underscored the urgency of curbing de-Stalinization, the initial impulse to do so had already arisen in reaction to the systemic critiques that the Secret Speech had provoked within the Soviet Union itself.174 R E S I S T I N G D E - S TA L I N I Z AT I O N

The clearest deviations from the speech’s argumentation, and from the broader aims of de-Stalinization, were not these allegedly “deviant” discussions. Rather, the most radical challenge to the speech’s arguments

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came in protests against the speech’s criticisms of Stalin. In fact, the only mass protests caused by de-Stalinization within the Soviet Union were the popular demonstrations that started in Tbilisi around the third anniversary of Stalin’s death (protesting the lack of official commemoration of the date), spreading within days to other parts of the republic, and only put down by brutal force on 10 March 1956.175 Though this protest may have intertwined pro-Stalinist sentiment with proto-nationalist concerns, the insult to Stalin provided a powerful initial impulse for the demonstration (which called, partly successfully, for republican-wide mourning of the dead leader), and undoubtedly helped to sustain its momentum. Yet proStalinist sentiment, though more fragmented than the collective defense of Stalin staged in Tbilisi and other Georgian cities, also surfaced in many other parts of the Soviet Union in response to the Secret Speech. Scattered speeches, and a much larger body of anonymous correspondence (especially to leaders thought to be pro-Stalinist, such as Molotov), expressed arguments that were in some cases similar to those made on the streets of Tbilisi, but in others even more verbally “seditious” than the “sedition” observed, and punished, in the Georgian republic in March 1956. In expressing nostalgia for Stalinist times, such responses fundamentally challenged de-Stalinization, by denying any necessity or desire to expose and overcome the Stalinist past; in turn, this sometimes led to denials of the authority and popular legitimacy of the post-Stalin party leadership.176 As in the Georgian protests, letters protesting de-Stalinization often began from the assumption that the party had now embarked on a total obliteration of Stalin’s memory (despite the speech’s claims to the contrary, which had frustrated many of the anti-Stalinist listeners analyzed earlier). Soon after the Secret Speech, Molotov received an anonymous letter from Moscow, which claimed that “Stalin is now being covered in shame, people are breaking his monuments and tearing his portraits.”177 Similar distressed reports of iconoclasm, and descriptions of de-Stalinization as a radical public “shaming” and “forgetting” of Stalin, were common in many other letters of protest against both excessive iconoclasm of the Stalin cult and also excessive (or in some cases any) criticism of Stalin himself.178 Above all, this supposedly punitive iconoclasm and criticism was thought to be wrong because it “denied” Stalin’s obvious merits. “Knowledge” and evidence of these “merits,” together with some

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emphatically positive appraisals, appeared in some public speeches and also in much of the correspondence provoked by the speech. “We know Stalin’s merits,” typically insisted one speaker at a collective farm party organization in Tuva, pleading for these merits to be acknowledged, and for Stalin to remain in the mausoleum.179 In other letters and speeches of protest, the merits cited included his contributions to individual events, such as the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and especially his leadership of larger processes, such as the war victory and the “transformation” of the country during the three decades of his rule.180 Indeed, the compiler of letters about de-Stalinization for Molotov noted that one of the most popular arguments against de-Stalinization was this leadership of the war and the construction of socialism. Both the war victory and also this economic and social transformation had the power to redeem (or permanently secure) Stalin’s good reputation. One letter, from a Muscovite named Dudorov, expressed hostility to the posthumous reassessment of Stalin, emphasizing that Stalin had transformed the country from a backward, agrarian nation to an industrialized power that had defeated the “dastardly enemy.”181 For a group of workers who collectively petitioned Molotov, Stalin’s transformation of the country likewise made him immune from posthumous judgment. No matter the means used to achieve it, and the personal flaws of the leader, the achievement remained transcendent: “What’s done is done. In the people’s memory, he remained as a great leader [vozhd’],” they concluded.182 Propaganda for the Five Year plans, collectivization, and the war effort had justified virtually any means (and any collateral damage) in the pursuit of the higher goal of communism. During the cultural revolution, this orientation toward the future had even generated attempts to accelerate and transcend time, perhaps explaining why some letters now remembered Stalin as a leader who had sped up history, achieving an improbable amount during his leadership.183 These claims that Stalin’s ends wholly justified his means reflected the enduring influence of these cultural constructions of both time and morality. As in CC discussions of the Secret Speech—and to some extent in the speech itself—other reactions to the speech explicitly calculated a balance between Stalin’s merits and failings, rather than merely overlooking or dismissing the latter.184 One letter sent to multiple CC members by a pair of communists conceded that Stalin’s role in the terror should be

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condemned, but insisted that this did not eclipse his achievements in other realms of Soviet life: “that name is not so easy to erase and forget,” the authors warned.185 Another likewise argued that “for the majority of the people, Stalin will remain a great person in their memories. But the fact that he had flaws . . . was also well known by many people.”186 Many listeners, as shown earlier, disagreed profoundly with such calculations, insisting that the terror was a crime incommensurate with any of Stalin’s other deeds. In fact, such a dispute between the pragmatic balance of Stalin’s achievements and misdeeds, and the moral condemnation of terror, emerged into the open at a meeting of a district party aktiv in the Tatar republic. One member argued that Stalin had “certain merits in the past” and thus could not be “thrown out of history.” Another immediately retorted that leaders “could enter history in different ways”; above all, Stalin would be remembered for “having permitted the completely unjustified destruction of many cadres of the party, and he can’t be forgiven for that.”187 As it had within the CC, the Secret Speech thus revealed a clash between different notions of history and memory. For some listeners, and the majority of authors of letters of protest, though, the Stalinist grand narrative of history and the cult image of Stalin remained wholly intact. “I believe in Stalin. He’s truly a genius,” insisted one student in Tuva, in one typical performance of cult rhetoric.188 Such fervent belief in the cult was often twinned with outright disbelief in the revelations of de-Stalinization. Letters of protest, anonymity often permitting them to transgress the limits on public speech, offered a particularly rich vocabulary of distrust and disdain, variously terming the speech “lies,” “slander,” “gossip,” and “nonsense.”189 Perhaps the starkest contrast between the truth of the Stalinist narrative and the falsity of the Secret Speech came in an anonymous letter sent to Molotov from Stalingrad. Throughout, it used cult language to describe Stalin, calling him a “great and consistent Leninist” and “an outstanding proletarian revolutionary and a genius leader of the Leninist school.” By contrast, the Secret Speech was “lies from start to finish,” its supposedly historical investigation based on “little so-called facts.” This author believed that anyone who tried to “belittle or not perceive” Stalin’s “immeasurable” merits was a “cretin, ignoramus, or evil enemy.”190 Such Manichean oppositions between truth and untruth, and between belief and disbelief, appeared in more public statements too.191

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In Dagestan, one collective farm chairman publicly denied the “incorrect” accusations of despotism and lamented the “shame” now being heaped on Stalin, a criticism reported to republican authorities as a “misunderstanding.”192 In Gomel’, Belarus, the day after Stalin’s death-day anniversary, an anonymous note was found on the street, alleging that “enemies of the people . . . are slandering the name of Stalin. . . . Comrades, citizens don’t believe it, it’s a lie that Stalin is an enemy. Stalin is with us, Stalin will be with us forever.”193 Almost the same slogan appeared on a leaflet found in Vologda’s central food shop, distributed by members of the city’s Komsomol.194 Some protests analyzed this growing gulf between official and poplar memory in more detail. One letter to Molotov dismissed de-Stalinization as a “campaign, inflated from above [sverkhu].”195 An anonymous letter to Malenkov, sent toward the end of the process of the Secret Speech’s dissemination, likewise warned leaders that they were not at liberty to impose new memories at will “from above”: the “masses” had their own memories of Stalin that would not be easily or willingly forgotten.196 Indeed, a further letter claimed that “the people continue to love Stalin and to weave legends about him.”197 This sense of the widening gulf between popular and public memories also led some supporters of Stalin to launch personalized attacks on current leaders, and occasionally to engage in broader systemic critiques. Khrushchev increasingly became the butt of popular jokes during his tenure as party leader.198 However, the pro-Stalinist audience of the speech were among the first thus to caricature the leader, savagely lampooning him as “a little Napoleon” (in contrast to the purportedly towering figure of Stalin) and as a “vulgarian and hooligan.”199 The posthumous timing of the speech, for these pro-Stalinist listeners, offered further proof of the contrast in stature: Khrushchev had feared Stalin too much to raise the issue during his lifetime.200 By criticizing him now, in an apparent bid for “political capital,” he had exposed his lack of natural authority and legitimacy, sowing distrust among the Soviet populace. 201 In a few cases, this debunking of the party’s attempt to debunk Stalin translated into a broader cynicism. One letter claimed that Soviet leaders “were not accustomed to reckoning with the opinions of the masses,” while another argued that if a “popular opinion survey” (narodnyi opros) were to be held, the vast majority would be opposed to de-Stalinization.202

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The latter missive ended with a cynical claim that such surveys would never supplant the current system, where people went through the motions of voting, but left the polling station “cursing Khrushchev and his band of lackeys.”203 Though less cogently argued, and more deliberately scandalous, than the systemic critiques examined earlier, such attacks were just as alarming. Of course, not all pro-Stalinist criticisms of the speech were predicated on total rejection of the party’s memory politics. Some listeners accepted the necessity of de-Stalinization, but still viewed their own attachment to Stalin (or to the previous official images and narratives) as a very difficult, even “painful,” obstacle to overcome.204 The party authorities were far more tolerant toward such people, who were reluctant or unable to break with the Stalin cult, than they had been toward those advocating a broader, systemic exposure of the cult of personality, as was clear in the mild treatment of one militant pro-Stalinist in the Tatar republic. There, one meeting about the Secret Speech was interrupted by a passionate defense of Stalin from a woman named Alsaeva, who insisted that “under Comrade Stalin’s leadership, we won the war, and he has many merits and they can’t be taken away. Stalin’s not guilty of this, it was enemies at work.” At the next meeting of the organization, held after the party’s warnings in Pravda, Alsaeva was criticized for her behavior, but escaped severe punishment by repenting of her actions.205 In this way, pro-Stalinist sentiment was treated with greater leniency, even after the tightening of the limits on permissible responses. Another public defender of Stalin, though, met with a rather different fate. At a meeting of the Vladimir obkom, a certain Vozzhanikov vociferously objected to the “blackening” of Stalin’s reputation, saying: “I am for Stalin, and I fought alongside him for thirty years.” Like Alsaeva, he was investigated at a subsequent meeting, held a short time after the April Pravda article. Unlike her, though, he ended up expelled from his party organization. The explanation for his much harsher punishment lay in what Vozzhanikov had added to his performance of pro-Stalinism: he had moved on to criticizing Khrushchev, claiming that the speech was a form of self-promotion, suspicious by virtue of its “late” performance, after Stalin’s death.206 Such criticisms of current leaders and their motives were far more worrying to the authorities than either extreme criticism of Stalin or fervent praise for him. In fact, many letters of protest sent to the

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Soviet authorities in response to the Secret Speech made similarly broad criticisms, but their anonymity made it much harder to track down the authors and punish them. Sheila Fitzpatrick suggests that, while “criticism accepting of Soviet values” was encouraged (at least in theory) by the party, criticism of party policies was usually deemed unacceptable if it was “disrespectful or irreverent, and when it was generalized rather than local.”207 By no means all the anti-Stalinist criticisms of the Stalinist political system, or of the timing of the speech, examined in the previous section, were “respectful,” but they were largely “accepting of Soviet values.” By contrast, the proStalinist protests examined here, although in thrall to Stalinist values, were often far more “disrespectful and irreverent” toward Stalin’s successors. Total adherence to the discourse of the Stalin cult led them to reject the new public memory of Stalinism, and to “seditious” and “generalized” attacks on the post-Stalinist political order. Such wholesale rejection of de-Stalinization was more extreme than any pro-Stalinist sentiment voiced at the CC discussions of the Secret Speech, and was in some cases far more radical than the demands being made on the streets of Tbilisi, Sukhumi, and Gori in March 1956. However, pro-Stalinism was never as much of a concern to party authorities as radical anti-Stalinism: the CC’s authorization of the use of force against the Georgian protests reflected not so much alarm about their pro-Stalinist content as the need to send a clear message that it would not tolerate “mass disorder” (or collective opposition) of any kind.208 The protests in Hungary, some six months later, which combined similar forms of mass opposition with radical systemic and ideological critiques of the kind examined in the previous section, were much more worrying. In fact, though, even before the Hungarian protests developed into this mass, radical form, the Soviet authorities had already been persuaded by domestic reactions to the speech—above all by systemic criticism, rather than the pro-Stalinism examined here—of the need to clarify and moderate its line on Stalin and Stalinism. These domestic anxieties were the most important influence on the party’s first official statement on the cult of personality, which would itself, in turn, exert lasting influence on de-Stalinization throughout the rest of the 1950s and 1960s.

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R E W R I T I N G T H E S E C R E T S P E E C H A N D R E G U L AT I N G P O P U L A R M E M O R Y I N 1956 Attempts to control the range of domestic interpretations of Stalinism and de-Stalinization began very soon after the Secret Speech started to be disseminated to the Soviet population. These ranged from the use of armed force (as in Tbilisi) to party sanctions (as in the Moscow ThermoTechnical Laboratory and many other institutions and party organizations around the country) to prescriptions in the press and secret circulars (notably the late March and early April 1956 articles in Pravda). After this initial press coverage of the cult of personality, but before the December “closed letter” on anti-Soviet sentiment (examined in the next chapter), the two most important leadership statements on the cult of personality came in June 1956. Both were shaped by the proximate crisis of the June uprisings in Poznan, Poland, and the growing international scandal surrounding leaked extracts of the speech.209 Both, though, also reflected longer-term anxieties about de-Stalinization, which had been fueled by domestic responses to the speech well before this uprising and Western debate about the speech.210 The first of these two CC texts, indeed, was entirely concerned with internal reactions to the speech, taking the form of a secret circular summarizing and categorizing the range of “demagogic” and “anti-Soviet” views expressed across the Soviet Union in spring 1956. The second text was a party resolution on the cult of personality, widely propagandized from the end of June, offering a more balanced picture of Stalin’s merits and failings and a more positive account of the Stalin era.211 Party leaders’ desire to manage the process of de-Stalinization was equally evident in the things that they did not do, before and after these two decisions. A party plenum, scheduled for May and intended as a wide-ranging discussion of the cult of personality and ideology, was cancelled in light of the chaotic domestic response to the speech.212 Though removal of the cult of personality from Soviet propaganda and education began immediately after Khrushchev’s attacks, and continued (albeit more slowly) throughout the rest of the year, publicity and analysis of the process was rare.213 The initial CC guidelines on how to deal with local symbols of the Stalin cult, including those criticized in the speech (such as monuments and place names) had advocated gradualism and the avoidance of a “campaign” (kampaniia) to obliterate the memory of

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Stalin.214 To that end, it had even reversed some local changes to portraits, monuments, and place names, citing the need for a more orderly and rational approach to identifying and reducing the cult.215 This already limited campaign against cult symbolism was further limited by the refusal of the central party authorities to authorize change to the vast majority of symbols of the Stalin cult under their jurisdiction. Among the major symbols preserved throughout and after 1956 were Stalin’s body in the mausoleum, central monuments in many cities (such as Stalingrad’s giant statue of Stalin, specifically criticized in the speech, but not authorized for removal), and all of the cities named after Stalin.216 These decisions and non-decisions expressed a range of anxieties about de-Stalinization, most of which had emerged very soon after the speech began to be disseminated, or even during pre-performance discussions, though the fact that many of these worries had materialized during the dissemination of the speech undoubtedly strengthened the case for a change to the party line. Like the Secret Speech, too, there were some ambiguities within these new guidelines, partly because, like the speech, the resolution on the cult of personality required multiple drafts, involving multiple authors.217 By the time that this editing got underway, conservative and pro-Stalinist sentiment had rebounded within the CC, pushing for a substantive retraction of the Secret Speech. Nevertheless, as the focus of a lengthy and tumultuous propaganda campaign, the original text could not be erased, and nor did many CC members want it to be. The result was a hybrid picture of Stalin, Stalinism, and de-Stalinization, which conspicuously failed to clarify many of the confusions and controversies from the original speech, and thus failed to satisfy large swathes of its audience. When this resolution first started to circulate, though, it was publicly acclaimed for providing “answers” to remaining questions about the Stalinist past.218 And, indeed, compared with the Secret Speech, it did offer explicit rebuttals to allegations about the systemic causes and systemic damage of the cult of personality and about the CC leadership’s guilt. To the latter, it tersely responded that leaders did not resist Stalin because they recognized it as “senseless,” rather than because of selfinterest.219 In explaining the “objective” reasons for the “cult of personality,” it reminded readers of the “objective” historical circumstances of the early Soviet period: surrounded by “enemies,” and faced with the

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tough task of implementing the cultural revolution, the Soviet leadership had been right to institute “iron discipline” and “some limitations on democracy” in order to achieve the “feat” (podvig) of building socialism. The resolution’s minimization of the significance of terror was even clearer in its summary of the Stalin era, which stated that “the negative consequences of these errors were quickly swept aside by the colossal growing life forces of the party and Soviet society.” To a much greater extent than the Secret Speech, then, the resolution subsumed the terror into a broad, optimistic narrative of progress and achievement. The “negative consequences” of Stalinism were minimized, and so too was the need to work through memories of them: “we’re talking about a stage in the life of the Soviet country that is now over,” the authors emphasized at the start. Once their brief recapitulation of the Stalin era was over, they again orientated readers toward the future, claiming that “the most difficult phase in the development . . . of socialism is now left behind.” This minimization of the traumatic consequences of terror was clearly intended to quash domestic and later international allegations of systemic damage, which the resolution additionally addressed by denying that any individual had the “improbable, supernatural strength” to change the system. At the same time, the resolution did still criticize both the terror and Stalin, albeit in a much more sober tone than Khrushchev’s attacks, a fact of decisive importance throughout the next decade’s struggle over de-Stalinization. It still blamed Stalin for the “mass repressions” and “the fact that many honest party and non-party people suffered,” though its brief summary of the events of 1937 lacked both the searing personal detail and the moral outrage of the Secret Speech’s account. Moreover, by removing many of the speech’s criticisms of Stalin (including all reference to his wartime and post-war errors), and also adding further praise for Stalin (as an “outstanding theoretician,” for example), the resolution intensified the speech’s reluctance to condemn Stalin outright. One of the most disputed sections of the resolution, in fact, was the conclusion to the section on Stalin, which would set the overall guideline for commemoration. The first draft calibrated the balance thus: “One must not forget alongside this that Stalin, for all his faults and errors, manifestations of personal arbitrariness and infractions of socialist law, fought for the interests of socialism, for the protection of the Soviet Union from the

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incursion of enemies.” The final draft shifted this balance still further: “One must not forget alongside this that the Soviet people knew Stalin as someone who always rose up to protect the USSR from the incursions of enemies and fought for the cause of socialism.” What was clearest of all, in both the secret circular and the public resolution, was the intolerance of “anti- Soviet” responses to de-Stalinization. Indeed, neither offered much new insight into this issue, which had been one of the first and only issues to be clarified in the early aftermath of the speech. The April criticisms on anti-Soviet and demagogic responses to the speech in fact contained a more detailed analysis of inappropriate criticism than did the resolution, which targeted foreign “slander,” while making only passing reference to the fact that it had “naturally evoke[d] feelings of sadness and deep sympathy” within the Soviet Union itself. The secret circular did offer more quantitative and qualitative analysis of the “bourgeois,” “rotten,” and “liberal” views that had been expressed at home, but these remained heavily indebted to the warnings issued several months previously. Compared with the conspicuous shifts in the presentation of Stalin and Stalinism, these warnings about dissent were a far less significant change to the discourse of spring 1956. Though intended as a definitive statement on the Stalinist past and a reassertion of the party’s prerogatives over Soviet memory, the resolution in fact provoked the same variety—though probably not the same quantity—of “memory work” among Soviet citizens as the Secret Speech. Now, though, readers were more aware than in March and April that their opinions about Stalinism and de-Stalinization might be dismissed (or punished) as “anti-Soviet,” leading some to frame their responses as dangerous or defiant transgressions of party controls, which in turn renewed official alarm about “unhealthy” and “hostile” popular moods.220 The most conspicuous failure of the resolution was its attempt to explain away the issue of CC responsibility for the cult of personality. Claims of cowardice and hypocrisy were the most commonly recorded criticisms of the resolution, present in one third of responses, and far exceeding any other theme.221 These demonstrated that the resolution had failed to dispel the previous suspicions about the timing of the attacks on Stalin.222 The “answers” provided in the resolution in fact only produced more questions, such as the rapid-fire queries in one letter from

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Sverdlovsk oblast’: “where on earth were the members of the Politburo and later the Presidium of the CC CPSU? Why did they allow things to go so far? Why didn’t they point out Stalin’s mistakes to him and restrain him in time?”223 Another such enquiry from Leningrad, asking “why it was necessary to write about Stalin’s mistakes after his death,” was more fearful, perhaps because of the recent intensification in criticisms of dissent. “I would like to have full clarity regarding these questions, but I can’t sign this letter,” wrote the mystery author. “I’m afraid, I don’t even know what I’m scared of, I’ve never been subjected to any repressions, but I’m scared.”224 Renewed appeals for party purges, “healthy criticism,” and public shaming still clearly drew on Soviet traditions, but their authors were now less certain that they would not be viewed as anti-Soviet. One call for “healthy criticism” of those responsible for the cult was signed, but another suggestion, to demote all the “embourgeoisified” members of the party and to move rank-and-file members “from the bottom to the top,” took cover in anonymity.225 The resolution thus revived criticisms of the post-Stalinist leadership, first aired after the Secret Speech, and may even have intensified them, by rescinding the speech’s most radical critiques for obviously pragmatic political reasons. This apparent desire to curtail debate and to cover up some of the previously exposed “truth” also led to criticisms of the failure to implement the radical glasnost’ and re-Leninization hoped for after the speech. For one reader, the resolution’s publication in Pravda had only confirmed that the newspaper was only really concerned with “untruth” (nepravda); it had “ceased to be the mouthpiece of communist morality.”226 Another anonymous letter reacted to the resolution by concluding: “everything is being done not as Lenin taught us. There’s no freedom.”227 Although Leninist principles remained sacred for both readers, they suspected that these traditions had now been abandoned by Soviet leaders. The more “balanced” view of Stalin in the resolution also exacerbated the dissatisfaction of anti-Stalinist and pro-Stalinist forces in the Soviet population. Two letters sent to Pravda in the wake of the resolution, for example, defied the resolution’s partial rehabilitation of Stalin. One, from a reader from Moscow named Solov’ev, rejected the narrative of Soviet progress by depicting the entire Stalin era as a radical deviation from the Leninist cause. “Starting from 1929, Stalin’s policies were Trotskyist,” he

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claimed, citing de-kulakization and forced industrialization in particular.228 Another reader, a party member in the Armenian republic named Kotandzhian, built his polemic around a single phrase from the resolution: its description of Stalin as an “outstanding Marxist-Leninist.” In an ironic echo of Khrushchev’s use of rhetorical questions and catechistic structures in the Secret Speech, he repeatedly asked, “How can one consider Stalin an outstanding Marxist-Leninist?” each time citing a different infraction of Marxist-Leninist principles, including the “shedding of so much more innocent blood than the revolution itself had demanded.” Both of these readers insisted on expanding the anti-Stalinist critique from the original speech, even though the resolution had tried to soften it. Though they rarely contained such ideological critiques as these two letters, the continuing flow of requests to remove Stalin from the mausoleum also expressed a similar desire for definitive condemnation, rather than the resolution’s pragmatism.229 The correspondence sent to Pravda after the resolution also contained the mirror image of these polemics: a pair of fervently pro-Stalinist letters, which dismissed the resolution as a wholly inadequate rehabilitation of Stalin. One, from a reader named Pobedonostsev in Erevan, openly accused Khrushchev and his colleagues of wanting to “belittle Stalin,” before an overt performance of praise, which concluded: “Stalin will forever live in history and in the hearts of progressive humanity.” However, the second letter, though it praised Stalin’s “general line” and his wisdom, viewed such praise as dangerous. “There are millions of us,” he claimed of his fellow Stalin supporters, “but they’re just afraid to speak out.” Apparently sharing their fear, he identified himself only as “a voice in defense of Stalin.”230 Further proof of the failure to appease Stalin’s supporters came in the unceasing stream of letters sent to Molotov throughout 1956, which demonstratively rejected both the speech and the resolution. The tumult in Hungary only intensified praise for Stalin’s leadership, and disdain for his successors.231 Several letters sent to Soviet leaders and publications after the events in Budapest provided a counter-factual account of how Stalin would have dealt “in a Stalinist way” with the insurrection.232 The increasingly chaotic present strengthened nostalgia for the Stalinist past, but this was a “utopian nostalgia,” dismissing not only the attacks of the Secret Speech but also the murky compromise of the resolution.233 Such a

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desire for a total rehabilitation of Stalin was evident in a letter to Molotov from Krasnodar toward the end of 1956, which argued that “the name of Stalin must be raised up and cleansed of all the dirt that Khrushchev, Mikoian, and others have stuck to it.”234 That these pro-Stalinist letters referred so often to the Hungarian crisis was no accident. Within months of the resolution, and its aggressive attacks on foreign misinterpretations of the “cult of personality,” the crowds on the streets of Budapest furnished concrete proof of the dangers of de-Stalinization. This in turn led not only to the intervention in Hungary, but also to increasingly strict domestic controls over de-Stalinization. After all, anxieties about (perceived or actual) domestic dissent had already driven many of the shifts in party policy earlier in 1956, as this chapter has argued. The next chapter examines how the increasingly stricter limits in late 1956 and 1957 were negotiated and contested within two of the main professions shaping public memory: Soviet literature and party history.

chapter two

From Thaw to Freeze P a r t y H i s t o ry an d So v i et L i teratu re, 1956–57

In late December 1956, the Central Committee circulated a warning to all party organizations about the need to “strengthen political work . . . and to curtail the emergence of anti-Soviet elements.”1 Issued nine months after the Secret Speech, the letter was shrouded in far greater secrecy, its existence never mentioned in the Soviet press. Nevertheless, its calls for greater ideological militancy had an immediate effect. Party meetings were held across the country to discuss the letter, and calls for ideological “purity” noticeably intensified in Soviet public culture, as did punishment of anti-Soviet sentiment in Soviet society.2 The December 1956 “closed letter” was a crucial juncture in the de-Stalinization campaign, and it generated a decisive shift in party attempts to freeze the thaw initiated by the Secret Speech. Although the letter was clearly a response to the unrest in Hungary over the preceding two months, the primary focus of its prescriptions and proscriptions was domestic; indeed, it seemed calculated to curtail the emergence of Soviet equivalents to the forces that had radicalized the Hungarian revolution, such as the reformist Hungarian Writers’ Association, or, worse still, the underground “Petofi Circle.”3 Focusing on the places where this threat might be lurking, the letter outlined key errors that had been made in Soviet literature, historiography, and higher education over the course of 1956. In fact, it was mistakes by Soviet 57

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writers and party historians in interpreting the cult of personality that were above all blamed for the ideological “waverings” among Soviet students. In Soviet literature and party history respectively, the first, and principal, errors to be mentioned concerned Vladimir Dudintsev’s novel about a persecuted late Stalin-era inventor, Not by Bread Alone, and an article about pre-revolutionary relations between leftist parties, appearing in the journal Voprosy istorii, by a party historian from the faculty of Moscow State University (MGU). Specifically, the speech given by Konstantin Paustovskii about Dudintsev’s novel, at a meeting organized by the Moscow Writers’ Union, was cited as the prime example of writers’ attempts to “criticize the Soviet social system” and to “blacken the Soviet way of life.” In that speech, Paustovskii had praised Dudintsev’s exposé of the “Stalinist” forces hampering innovation and creativity, extrapolating from the novel’s chief villain, a Stalinist bureaucrat named Leonid Drozdov, to the “thousands of Drozdovs” still in positions of power. They represented “a new caste of vulgarians . . . with nothing in common with the revolution, our country, or socialism,” he alleged, in a sweeping socio-political critique reminiscent of the most controversial discussions of the Secret Speech earlier in the year. The meeting had been packed with listeners, including a large contingent of Moscow students, so Paustovskii’s critique had had a broader impact than other scandalous statements made by writers in more private settings, also cited in the letter.4 Ivan Moskalev’s article on the 1905 revolution, meanwhile, was criticized as “an attempt to smooth over the differences of principle between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks on the crucially important question of the hegemony of the proletariat in the revolution.” Voprosy istorii had already aroused controversy earlier in the year, thanks to its attempts to deepen and radicalize the de-Stalinization of Soviet historiography and the historical profession, but Moskalev’s was the only article of the “few, published in the journal, downplaying the harm of . . . Menshevism” to be named and criticized in detail. A very different statement to Paustovskii’s performance, in form and content, the article’s “distortion in illuminating questions of the history of the CPSU” was nonetheless linked to “revisionist moods” noted among students, including at MGU.5 In this way, the party’s critique of “anti-Soviet” responses to de-Stalinization was principally based on errors committed by the

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Moscow Writers’ Union and the party historians of MGU. This was not the last time that the freeze of the 1956 thaw would bring together these two institutions, but they made unlikely companions. Indeed, scholarship on the thaw has tended to view Moscow’s writers and MGU’s party historians as polar opposites. The Moscow Writers’ Union is widely viewed as an island of liberalism, and a microcosm of the post-Stalinist public sphere.6 The union’s promotion of Dudintsev’s novel, peaking with the speech by Paustovskii that was so worrying to the party leadership, is commonly seen as a key moment of the thaw in Soviet culture.7 By contrast, the party historians at MGU are often characterized as the “Stalinist” extreme of party history, which was itself the branch of the history profession apparently least affected by the thaw.8 Voprosy istorii and MGU conventionally, and respectively, represent the thaw in Soviet historiography and its conservative opposition; indeed, the only time that the two ever meet in accounts of the thaw is in descriptions of MGU’s key role in attacking Voprosy istorii in 1956 and 1957.9 Yet this CC warning challenges these binary oppositions, often erected between party history and history, between history and literature, and between conservatism (or even Stalinism) and liberalism. By highlighting the “revisionist” threat lurking in both conservative and liberal institutions and professions, it throws the nature and location of the thaw into question. Recent studies of the Khrushchev era have complicated earlier binary models of the “friends and foes“of Stalinism (or antiStalinism) by showing that individuals and institutions could endorse some features of the thaw while rejecting others.10 This was not only because of the legacies of the recent, Stalinist past, although these were crucially important in shaping hopes and fears about de-Stalinization. It was also because, living through it in the present, participants did not perceive the thaw as a unitary or teleological phenomenon.11 These insights into the splits within, as well as between, individuals and institutions as they negotiated the thaw also dictate a nuanced understanding of the freeze that followed this CC warning. This freeze was not simply the top-down re-imposition of Stalinist controls over the intelligentsia.12 Such lethal controls were no longer available to a party that had pledged only to use “bloodless” methods.13 The party leadership also wanted, and needed, to tackle some Stalinist legacies in literature and history, rather than reimposing the status quo ante, which had been

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recognized as a crisis even before the Secret Speech.14 Veniamin Kaverin, one of the victims of this freeze, later viewed the thaw and freeze of 1956–57 as united by “the evident impossibility of returning to Stalinism and to Beria methods.”15 A close examination of the process reveals, rather, that both external and internal forces helped to implement a new party line in the literary and historical professions after the closed letter, and they did so using a blend of familiar and more innovative techniques. Writers and historians participated in this taming of the thaws in their respective professions not just because of habits of obedience (even subservience) to top-down diktats, honed as a survival skill under Stalin, but also because of shared anxieties about the impact of de-Stalinization on Soviet culture and ideology. Both literature and party history had a crucial, and well-established, role in celebrating the Soviet past, and thus in legitimating the Soviet system’s present and future.16 The statements of Moskalev and Paustovskii were worrying precisely for what they claimed about the past: the first intruded too far into the founding myth of the revolution and the untouchable cult of Lenin, the second darkened the recent past, and was pessimistic about the survival of bad Stalinist habits in the present. The desire to celebrate both the Leninist and the Stalinist pasts, rather than to expose their flaws or even to provide a more balanced, objective account of them, was not exclusive to the party leadership; it was supported by a wide range of writers, even though resisted by others. Despite this broad alliance of forces participating in it, the antirevisionist campaign was constrained by the desire to differentiate it from “Stalinist” persecution of “enemies”—a hazard noted not just by beleaguered writers, but also by party leaders themselves.17 Indeed, the letter that initiated this campaign struck a tense balance between blaming and absolving domestic forces (foreign, “bourgeois” forces were the greater evil, as they always would be), and between correcting and punishing embryonic anti-Soviet sentiments.18 The drive to eliminate potential dissent was also haunted by nagging anxieties about the revival of dogmatism (and even Stalinism) that might result from this clampdown on the radical de-Stalinization of 1956.19 In this way, it was leaders’ fears, as much as writers’ resistance, that prolonged and complicated the freeze of this thaw. They also left its outcome provisional,

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even “inherently unstable,” helping to explain the further pendulum swings in de-Stalinization later in the 1950s and 1960s, as explored in subsequent chapters.20 This chapter travels backward and forward from this turning point in the thaw of 1956, exploring the internal debates within these two institutions and the professions that they represented, along with their interactions with the party leadership. It traces the emergence of these agendas and “errors” back to the Secret Speech, and reveals their persistence up to, and even beyond, December’s shift in the party line on the cult of personality. It also examines the complex processes of regulating and punishing these agendas after the closed letter. The freeze of the 1950s thaw reveals not only the multiple meanings of the cult of personality within the Soviet cultural intelligentsia, but also fierce contestation over the socio-political role and autonomy of the intelligentsia itself.21 At the start of the 1960s, the 22nd Congress would reignite these debates, as later chapters explore. THE SECRET SPEECH

The Secret Speech was a watershed for the Moscow Writers’ Union. The “stormy” party meeting to discuss the 20th Congress and the Secret Speech has been widely acclaimed as a seminal moment in the literary thaw.22 Raisa Orlova, then a member of the union’s criticism section, described this “meeting, where one after another people spoke the truth, either only now discovered by them, or known, but hidden for many years. . . . Of course, there were empty phrases and empty speeches, but surprisingly few. The majority spoke about the main thing, the most difficult thing—about how we lived all those years, and what we must do now.”23 This “heart-to heart conversation” imagined a new moral and political order, in which Stalinist ills would be confronted and cured, and the future line (of the party and of the union) dictated by Leninist principles.24 The meeting initiated the union’s long, and partly successful, defense of alternative definitions of Soviet literature’s partiinost’ (party mindedness) and narodnost’ (popularity), rather than alternatives to these principles. Until the Secret Speech, the Moscow Union had had cause for only cautious optimism. After Stalin’s death, the Moscow section of the Writers’ Union had struggled, ultimately successfully, for a degree of independence from the union-level Writers’ Union. Subjected to criticism and controls by the then head Aleksandr Fadeev, the Moscow section

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was saved from further attacks by a CC intervention in late 1953.25 In 1955, the CC expressed further trust in the Moscow section by destroying the union-level union’s party committee and giving the Moscow section its own party organization, with the same rights and responsibilities as other primary party organizations.26 The incarnation of the Moscow Union discussed below was institutionally post-Stalinist, and in many respects it was anti-Stalinist too. It was formed in an attempt to revitalize and democratize Soviet literary relations, and its founding aim was to bring together Moscow’s writers in discussion and debate, to eradicate the “dogmatism” and “varnishing of reality” of the Stalin era’s literature and literary criticism.27 From the start, therefore, it acted as a magnet for many liberal writers, though its large size meant that it harbored substantial, less liberal constituencies too.28 The party authorities’ trust in the Moscow Union, expressed in these measures of institutionalization in 1955, was somewhat surprising in light of its anxieties about the Moscow section’s conduct since the death of Stalin. The thaw of 1953–54, centered on the eponymous novel by Il’ia Ehrenburg as well as Vladimir Pomerantsev’s earlier essay on “sincerity in literature,” had been deepened by controversial discussions that took place in the Moscow section (as well as its Leningrad equivalent).29 In fact, many of the debates in and after 1956 reignited concerns that had first been raised in the discussions of 1953–54 concerning truth in literature and about the nature and extent of state literary controls. After the Secret Speech, these debates about literary truth and freedom would become richer, while memory work around the Stalinist past emerged as a key feature of union activities. Despite its backing for the new organization, the party leadership knew from experience that it would require close monitoring, and it was already well-used to punishing its thaw agenda. Nonetheless, the Secret Speech temporarily eclipsed previous thaws and invalidated old habits of punishment and regulation. As Orlova’s ecstatic reaction testifies, the Secret Speech galvanized new forms of discussion, and, for a while, the party leadership did not know how to react. Orlova’s reference to the March 1956 meeting’s few “empty phrases and empty speeches” referred above all to the keynote address by Surkov, which only started to address the “pernicious consequences of the so-called cult of personality” rather late, and took even longer to address the cult’s specific impact on literature (“it’s about time!,” came the jeers

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from the floor).30 Even then, Surkov warned his listeners that his goal was not to “reopen wounds, and shake up the past, but to free literature from a series of complications, which hounded its development in the last two decades.”31 The rest of his speech epitomized this tentative approach to memory, touching on the real-life impact of the terror only briefly (which he described as the “butchery and dirty work of the Ezhovshchina and Berievshchina,” without reference to Stalin), before concentrating on the aesthetic impact of the cult of personality. As Orlova suggests, the majority of responses to Surkov’s speech expressed disagreement with this limited probing of the “wounds” of the Stalinist past. In the three remarkable days after Surkov’s address, Moscow’s writers reflected on nearly thirty years of Stalinism, and made an unprecedented attempt to delineate the political, aesthetic, and moral impact of the cult of personality. As shown in the previous chapter, testimony of terror featured in many meetings about the Secret Speech, but the exploration and construction of collective memories of victimhood and perpetration was unusually intensive and far-reaching in the Moscow Union. At the same time, the large number of eloquent testimonies constructed a distinctively Soviet narrative of suffering, recognizing terror as a moral catastrophe for its perpetrators, but not a lasting trauma for its victims. One Gulag returnee, Leonid Makar’ev, elicited the biggest cheer of the meeting by narrating his memories of terror in this optimistic way: despite the terror’s “mass psychosis” and its horrific effects on him as a victim, he had not suffered a mental breakdown. He continued to sense the party and its ideals, he explained, “even behind the barbed wire.” He then turned to another returnee in the room, a certain Zuev, to confirm that he too had managed the same feat.32 Given the slow progress of rehabilitation, itself the source of much bold criticism at this meeting, victims’ memories represented a small, though disproportionately powerful, presence here, outnumbered by equally troubling memories of perpetration and collaboration. Again, this approach enacted a radical break with Surkov’s attempt to limit blame for the terror to Ezhov and Beria, but it also enacted radical samokritika and kritika, as Soviet literature tried for the first time to assign blame for past injustices and to establish a new moral and administrative order for the future.33 Thus, for Makar’ev, “living the life of the country and the party” during the Stalin era automatically meant being complicit.34 For others,

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such as Vasilii Ermashov and Bogdanov, the picture was more complicated.35 Both alluded to the resistance that underlay some people’s silence during Stalinism, and distinguished this forgivable silence from the unforgivable, active participation in terror of some other colleagues; the latter, Bogdanov termed Stalin’s “willing executioners” and “eager perpetrators.”36 Despite some disagreements over the nature and extent of complicity in terror, the meeting’s final resolution named Anatolii Sofronov and Nikolai Gribachev as the worst such perpetrators.37 While careful to differentiate their assault from a “new 1937,” many of those present called emphatically for Soviet literature to be purged of their influence. Identifying and then excluding those responsible for terror was integral to the broader aim of “uproot[ing] all remnants of the moral and ethical rot, linked to the cult of personality.”38 Participants also assessed this Stalinist “rot” in broader terms, engaging in similar ideological and socio-political analysis as was occurring in some other Moscow intelligentsia institutions and in scattered meetings around the country.39 Their glasnost’ of Stalinism’s defects was unusually far-reaching, owing to the length of this meeting and the enthusiastic revival (already underway since Stalin’s death, and perhaps even before it) of literature’s duty to provide social commentary.40 At the same time, it was if anything more emphatically optimistic about the Leninist future than many other such discussions.41 For example, Makar’ev, having denounced the deviation from Marxism caused by the cult of personality, expressed fervent hope that the party could now return to the “democratism and simplicity of the first years of Soviet power.”42 The writer Vershchadskii proposed that the “butchery” of the perpetrators of terror must be exposed, returnees’ interests prioritized, and a full analysis of the systemic, structural causes of Stalinism undertaken, but he also expressed a similarly optimistic hope for the restoration of Leninism, perhaps through the revival of the institution of the rabkrin (the workers’ and peasants’ inspectorate).43 Vasilii Ermashov, meanwhile, after causing agitation with his allegation that Stalinism (sic) was a “whole system of anti-Leninist views, an anti-Leninist organized system,” then proposed a return to exactly those abandoned Leninist principles.44 This, then, was a hopeful moment, positing this discussion of the cult of personality as the start, not the end, of a long process of coming to terms with the past. It hoped for the full lustration of the perpetrators of

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terror, the reintegration of terror victims into the Soviet literary community, and a full exploration of Stalinism’s “defects” and “damage.” In fact, attempts to prosecute those responsible for the pre-war and post-war terror were quickly curtailed, although they would resume and enjoy greater success after the 22nd Congress.45 A significant constituency within the union persisted, however, in investigating the cult of personality, subsuming “truth telling” about terror into a broader project of glasnost’ of the defects of the Stalinist past. At the March meeting, the determination to expose the “moral rot” of the cult of personality had focused on life more than literature, but this glasnost’ would quickly transfer to literary texts themselves. As this agenda widened, opposition to it was already emerging, fueled by a nationwide anxiety about anti-Soviet sentiment, and a more specific set of concerns about literature, and Moscow writers in particular. In the wake of the party’s resolution on the cult of personality, the union embarked on internal criticisms of most of the notable speeches from the March meeting, deeming incorrect Vershchadskii’s and Bogdanov’s attacks on the perpetrators of terror and Ermashov’s allegations of systemic “Stalinism,” among other statements.46 Yet amid this criticism, the critic Chicherov was one of many members who pushed for the March conversation to be prolonged rather than criticized: “surely we haven’t really thought through the harmful consequences of the cult of personality relative to literature, was there really a specialized and serious conversation on this topic?” he asked in August 1956.47 This exchange foreshadowed the embattled continuation of the union’s “conversation” about the cult of personality, whose focus became the text that prompted Paustovskii’s passionate and, according to the December letter, “antiSoviet” polemic: Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone, to which we turn shortly. First, however, a brief analysis of the equivalent meetings held at MGU illustrates the contrast between the two institutions’ initial reactions to the 20th Congress and Secret Speech. MGU’s “department of party history” (kafedra istorii KPSS), like the Moscow union, was largely post-Stalinist. It had only emerged as a separate department within MGU’s history faculty in 1953, although its organization had begun in the last year of Stalin’s life.48 Connected to this was the fact that the teaching by members of the kafedra was subsumed until 1956 into the overall syllabus of the “Foundations of Marxism-Leninism,” which itself relied overwhelmingly

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on the Short Course and works by Stalin.49 The creation of a separate university syllabus for party history (and the other constituent disciplines of the “Marxism-Leninism” syllabus) was both an opportunity and an obligation arising out of the 20th Congress’ criticisms of Stalin and the Short Course.50 Only very limited discussion of the influence of the cult of personality had taken place among MGU’s party historians before the congress, led by a few individuals with a particular antipathy toward Stalinism. Nothing like the literary thaw of 1953 and 1954 had occurred, leaving the syllabus and profession dominated by the Stalinist framework.51 As such, the 20th Congress and the Secret Speech was an “exploding bomb,” destroying swathes of the syllabus in a single stroke and forcing most party historians to confront the cult of personality for the first time.52 The dissemination of the Secret Speech at MGU was chaotic; some members of the history faculty missed the speech when it was read out to staff in March 1956, while history students (along with other MGU students) did not hear it until a month later.53 The speech’s peculiar discourse and methods of dissemination made many historians anxious about how to interpret and explain it to their students, both before and after it had been read out to the student body. As one historian explained to his colleagues, prior to the start of this dissemination: “Our students have become acquainted with Com. Khrushchev’s speech from one or another source, but we, agitators, have been told that the speech is totally secret. And we of course have observed party discipline and not answered questions. But now they’re saying that we must all become acquainted with the speech.”54 Other historians called for the speech to be read out more quickly to students, since they were already gleaning its content from Yugoslavian and other foreign sources, and should hear the full text before further exposure to such dangerous variations.55 Even after the speech had been read out, though, disagreements continued over whether and how to answer the hundreds of student questions arising from it.56 From the beginning, therefore, the speech represented a threat to party history, not only because it attacked the Stalinist grand narrative (and its bible, the Short Course), but also because it disrupted conventional hierarchies of information dissemination (and concealment), and transgressed academic and even party discipline. As a profession used to receiving and then following a clear party line, party historians most often reacted to the Secret Speech with personal and professional panic.57

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The collapse of the “aura of infallibility” around Stalin’s works and the Short Course deprived party history (which was itself at the center of universities’ social sciences instruction, obligatory for students of all disciplines) of its curricular, disciplinary, and professional core.58 An authoritative textbook to replace the Short Course would not be quickly forthcoming, not only because of the time required to write it, but also because of the paralyzing uncertainty that now engulfed many key episodes and leaders of the last thirty years.59 The most urgent task facing MGU’s party (and Soviet) historians was therefore to write lectures to replace the now out-of-date syllabus, to fill the remaining hours of the 1955–56 academic year.60 In the slightly longer term, party historians were also tasked with working on a new, separate syllabus for party history, to be taught from the start of the 1956–57 academic year.61 The extreme time pressure made both of these tasks inherently challenging, but they were further complicated by disagreement over the extent of the appropriate break with the cult of personality, and the difficulty of achieving it, especially for party historians.62 Some of the lectures written and delivered in the spring of 1956 were deemed too critical and iconoclastic of Stalinism, leading to investigation, criticism, and even bans of the lecturers concerned.63 Other lectures and classes, by contrast, exhibited only minor differences from the Short Course, or were accused of avoiding “difficult questions” raised by de-Stalinization.64 Party historians were also, often reluctantly, compelled by the public and private proceedings of the 20th Congress to confront not just this Stalinization of the syllabus, but also the broader Stalinization of their profession. Even before they heard the Secret Speech, MGU’s historians started to engage in kritika and samokritika of their pedagogical and research culture, in response to the congress’ public criticisms of Stalinist historiography. In light of the Secret Speech, historians identified many more manifestations of the cult of personality, ranging from practices of “administrative arbitrariness” and “dogmatism” to a shortage of publication outlets for historical research and the excessive “citation” of Stalin and deference to his supposed wisdom.65 During one such discussion, the party historian Smirnov admitted that “in ideological work, the cult of personality came from party historians.”66 This claim epitomized a tendency for party history to be identified (sometimes by its own practitioners) as the branch of history most affected by and implicated in the cult of personality, and therefore most in need of de-Stalinization after the

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20th Congress. Party historians, previously the most loyal ideological servants of the Stalin regime, now appeared as ideologically backward, “unable to move beyond the boundaries of the Short Course.”67 “The task now,” proclaimed one faculty member, “is to revise the whole conception of party history for the Soviet period.”68 The urgency and scale of the task made any resistance, or signs of delay while “waiting for signals from above,” incomprehensible to some colleagues.69 However, the university leadership also warned from an early stage against questioning “issues that are beyond argument,” and thus requiring no “new treatment.”70 These contradictory indications of the need for a total rethinking of party history alongside the existence of issues “beyond argument” meant that party historians and their colleagues could plausibly defend very different visions of the limits of de-Stalinization. At one meeting of the academic council of the faculty a month after the dissemination of the Secret Speech, the party historian Bushuev warned of the dangers of total rejection of all recent history and historiography. He claimed that the recent anti-cosmopolitanism campaign had had some positive aspects, and that the Stalinist view of Ivan the Terrible offered a useful example of the “creation of a centralized state.” This defense of some key pillars of Stalinist historiography was disputed by several other historians present, including E. Gorodetskii, motivated not only by memories of his own victimization in the anti-cosmopolitanism campaign, but also by his conviction that Stalinist historiography of tsarism had been seriously falsified.71 As the new academic year began, and the new syllabus was rolled out, the party history department’s head, Shapkarin, advertised his colleagues’ commitment to eliminating the many consequences of the cult of personality, but they still remained internally divided on the question.72 At a faculty meeting later the same month, for example, several historians criticized the conservative journal Partiinaia zhizn’ for recent attempts to limit the scope of party historians’ de-Stalinization, but others present turned the accusations of “Stalinism” back on these critics, accusing them of pinning politically charged “labels” (iarliki) on their opponents.73 The faculty leadership itself encouraged deeper “rethinking” of its teaching and research while also pointing to the dangers of excessively “motley opinions” about de-Stalinization.74 The Secret Speech therefore caused an acute crisis in Soviet historiography, and above all in party history. The cult of personality had had a

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more profound impact on party history than any other branch of the profession, but it was precisely this long process of Stalinization that now hampered its de-Stalinization. In the wake of the Secret Speech, the most far-reaching criticisms of MGU’s party historians came from outside, motivated by long-standing interpersonal tensions within the diverse history faculty, but also by other historians’ better-preserved and more sophisticated methodological and intellectual traditions.75 Among party historians themselves, there was no settled consensus on the limits of de-Stalinization, with some advocating total rethinking, and others highlighting the need for caution, or even retaining unreconstructedly Stalinist views. The unique role of party history in ideological instruction made it urgent to embark on the enormous task of removing the cult of personality from the syllabus and profession, but it also magnified the hazards of getting it wrong. The errors that MGU’s party historians committed in their own revisions and reforms paled into insignificance, though, compared with the threat of revisionism emerging elsewhere in the discipline, in the reform agenda of the journal Voprosy istorii. When these drew a member of the department into their orbit, however, MGU’s party historians had to rethink the limits of de-Stalinization once more. DUDINTSEV AND MOSKALEV: AMBIGUOUS TEXTS FOR AMBIGUOUS TIMES

By December 1956, the CC closed letter would bring together these seemingly very different institutions and professions, accusing both of antiSoviet sentiments. The road to convergence began in summer, in between the Poznan crisis (which influenced the more moderate party resolution on the cult of personality, examined in the last chapter) and the Polish and Hungarian crises of October 1956 (which would directly lead to the decision on the closed letter). In August 1956, Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone appeared in Novyi mir, and Moskalev’s article came out in Voprosy istorii.76 Both journals had attracted suspicion, albeit at different times, since Stalin’s death. Before the decision to publish Dudintsev, the peak of controversy for Novyi mir had been the publication of works by Pomerantsev, Valentin Ovechkin, and Fedor Abramov, which had led to the sacking of Aleksandr Tvardovskii from the editorship in 1954; two years later, Dudintsev’s novel was accepted for publication by his

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seemingly more reliable replacement, Konstantin Simonov.77 Voprosy istorii, for its part, had already started to pursue a daring agenda of de-Stalinization in the months leading up to the Secret Speech, and Khrushchev’s revelations only intensified the editors Eduard Burdzhalov’s and Anna Pankratova’s attacks on Stalinist historiography. The encounter between these journals, these authors and texts, and the institutions and professions that they represented, would fundamentally change the thaw in Soviet history and literature. Yet initially the reception of the two texts was ambiguous, reflecting the unclear limits of de-Stalinization and the initial indeterminacy of the anti-revisionist assault on the thaw. If the March meeting of the Moscow Union has often been seen as the true beginning of the literary thaw, Dudintsev’s novel Not by Bread Alone brought it to a head.78 The novel recounted the trials and tribulations of an inventor, Dmitrii Lopatkin, whose attempts to introduce technological innovation in pipe manufacturing are sabotaged at every turn by the conservatism and pettiness of the Stalinist bureaucracy, embodied above all (though by no means exclusively) in the figure of Drozdov. Particularly innovative was the novel’s depiction of Lopatkin’s denunciation by Drozdov, and his trial and sentencing to a term in the Gulag (though the Gulag itself was not shown, as indeed it would not be in Soviet literature until publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich some six years later). At first sight, this rather primitive story, written with little literary finesse, would seem an odd choice of text to champion during attempts to revitalize Soviet literature. Indeed, Dudintsev’s text, as numerous scholars have pointed out, is in many respects a quintessentially Socialist Realist, even Stalinist, text, replete with a “production” theme and a positive hero martyred to the Soviet cause.79 Nonetheless, the centrality of the novel to the thaw was no accident. Its depiction of Lopatkin’s unbreakable faith and idealism (also reflected in the title) and of the materialism, pettiness, and cruelty of Drozdov and other Stalinist bureaucrats reflected and also intensified the moral tenor of the debate over the cult of personality begun with the Secret Speech. This clear, even crude, delineation of good and evil characters made it an especially useful tool for writers still trying to embed such clear-cut moral criteria within Soviet literature and Soviet life.80 It was precisely the text’s limited literariness that permitted the debate over the cult of personality to cross the boundaries between literature and life, ethics and aesthetics.81 Like the

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novel itself—and like the union’s response to the Secret Speech—the debates surrounding Not by Bread Alone expressed hope for party reform and society’s moral rejuvenation.82 However, the literary and party leadership increasingly, though at first hesitantly, caricatured Dudintsev and the union’s praise for him as anti-Soviet. “How can one wash clean a person without taking off both his outerwear and underwear?” Such was the question posed by the novelist Valentin Ovechkin, as part of the union’s first discussion of Dudintsev’s novel, several days before the larger meeting where Paustovskii spoke.83 The rhetorical question brought the purge’s discourse of unmasking into the present day, and reversed its direction, much as the Secret Speech had done with its metaphors of unmasking (razoblachenie); now it was the Stalinists’ turn to have not just their masks, but also all their clothing, stripped from them.84 Ovechkin’s speech represented one of several connections forged between the party’s discourse of de-Stalinization and Dudintsev’s text in union discussions during the remainder of 1956. The novel was confidently aligned with the agenda of the 20th Congress because it exposed “one of the gravest consequences of Stalin’s cult of personality.” The “careerist” and dogmatic Drozdov epitomized the moral and political lapses of Stalinism. By contrast, the work’s inventor-hero, Lopatkin, had persevered bravely in the militant “struggle” for a better Soviet future, despite the persecution meted out to him by the “Drozdovs.” This, then, was a text fully in harmony with the party’s goals: the novel was “able really to agitate all honest communists,” mobilizing them for the fight against the “cult of personality.”85 When the union first discussed the Moscow-wide meeting about Dudintsev, many members expressed solidarity with the speakers, including Paustovskii. The discussion had not been “dilettante”; rather, like the novel itself, it was “party-minded.”86 The union’s newly created bulletin, Moskovskii literator, reinforced this support by printing a detailed account of the meeting intended to “fill in” and correct the hostile coverage in Literaturnaia gazeta.87 As Karl Loewenstein has argued, editorial decisions to publish such articles expressed a deep commitment to Soviet values of obshchestvennost’, or public debate; the articles’ content, meanwhile, argued for the partiinost’ of this interpretation of the cult of personality.88 The union then further sought to confirm the novel’s Leninist credentials by nominating it for the Lenin prize, itself one of the key innovations

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introduced by the Secret Speech.89 During attempts to nominate it, the novel was praised for its “investigation and exposure of the sources of evil” and its attention to the “remnants of the cult of personality.”90 As clarification of Paustovskii’s sweeping critique, though, this praise also emphasized that these “evil” “remnants” were not endemic and the “Drozdovs” were merely a “foreign body in the healthy Soviet organism.”91 The novel was thus aligned with the 20th Congress’ aims of “recovery of health” (ozdorovlenie) and “exposure” (razoblachenie), placing Drozdov’s excision from the Soviet body politic within the party’s optimistic, purgative trajectory of de-Stalinization.92 It was also deemed popular, not only because it was welcomed by ordinary readers (much more so than by critics), but also because it reflected their collective memories. It did not “blacken what has been achieved by the people”; rather, like the best early Soviet novels, it highlighted the magnitude of “achievements” by showing the enormity of the obstacles surmounted.93 This performance of the novel’s ideological correctness was also intended to deflate “inflated” fears of foreign “enemies’ ” reactions.94 On the other hand, the domestic hostility already manifested toward the novel revealed a much darker threat: the revival of Stalinism. Stepan Zlobin, already a controversial figure after his participation in the 1953–54 thaw, decried the “fuss” in Literaturnaia gazeta as “the kind of thing, [for which] a few years ago, good-for-nothings dispatched honest people off to Kolyma.”95 He thus instantly linked the novel’s dramatization of the late Stalin-era persecution of Lopatkin and the early post-Stalin era persecution of the novel and its supporters. His allusions, later in his long and much-applauded address, to the “editorial Drozdovs” who were at the time blocking the novel’s book edition, again shifted the book’s villains from the realm of fiction to real life (as Paustovskii had also done a few weeks earlier). It was precisely the fear of exposure felt by “Stalinist” forces that motivated their attempt to silence the novel and “weaken the force of [Lopatkin’s] unmaskings [razoblacheniia].”96 When the union management later rebuffed Dudintsev’s nomination, other writers also exposed and critiqued lingering Stalinist practices, such as wariness of pronouncing judgment on a work before the party leadership had clarified its stance, and, at the other extreme, aggressive criticisms or even bans on works and their authors: “the time has passed when for some kind of flaws in a work it was normal to hit a person around the head until

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he died,” proclaimed the writer Elizar Mal’tsev.97 This desire to forget Stalinist literary behavior thus ran parallel to the urge to expose and reject Stalinist defects through Soviet literary texts. These two impulses would provide powerful motivation to resist the deepening freeze over the following months. Until almost the end of 1956, though, this freeze was only incipient. In the final quarter of the year, neither press coverage of Dudintsev nor leadership statements on Soviet literature offered a clear verdict on their ideological credentials. Nevertheless, the criticisms that were already being expressed outside the union began to be reflected in internal discussions. The Lenin prize discussions at union level were less unanimously supportive of Dudintsev than his colleagues in the prose section, voicing the first criticisms within the union.98 “The disproportion between the talented depiction of negative aspects and a somewhat inscrutable depiction of positive heroes” was identified as the “principal flaw” and key “ideological” error of the work by the writer (and soon to be editor of Moskva), Atarov. S. Smirnov, who would soon emerge as one of the key opponents of the Moscow Union’s liberals in the nationwide freeze, also argued that the novel was too negative.99 These ideological and historical critiques would quickly take hold within the union in early 1957, but at the end of 1956, they still remained a minority view. Indeed, it was precisely this sense of weak, or non-existent, opposition to the union’s defiant defense of Dudintsev that pushed the campaign against the author and his union patrons into another gear, especially in the wake of the Hungarian crisis. A few days prior to the union’s Lenin prize discussion, the CC department of culture had compiled and dispatched to the presidium a body of evidence of the union’s mistaken “line” on the “cult of personality.” Recalling the March discussion, it alleged that some members had claimed that the “cult of personality” was a product of the Soviet system (rather than an epiphenomenon), while others had argued that the “cult” had corrupted the system. Later in the year, Dudintsev’s novel, and its “one-sided” reception in the union (including Paustovskii’s scandalous response), had continued to exaggerate the systemic damage caused by the “cult of personality.”100 The union management, it alleged, had not reacted to all these many signs of the “reactivation . . . of harmful, hostile elements,” failing to point out individual members’ errors and/or to speak out against the union’s more

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radical members. The report thus blamed the “ideological drift” of 1956 on the union’s internal politics, rather than on the ambiguous policies of the central leadership.101 The closed letter circulated around party organs soon afterward used very similar language to describe the emergence of anti-Soviet sentiments, while also identifying the Moscow Union as a key locale for such sentiments and their weak rebuttal. Between the dissemination of this letter and the end of the following year, the thaw led by the Moscow union was successfully frozen, and the cult of personality all but excluded from the organization’s agenda. This defeat, however, involved multiple party and state institutions (some even created for this purpose), and it necessitated both discursive and administrative sanctions. The tenacity of the union’s agenda in the face of these attacks, which we examine shortly, derived directly from its confidence in the partiinost’, narodnost’, and morality of its interpretation of the cult of personality. As these early debates about Dudintsev show, this alternative interpretation of the agenda of the 20th Congress developed and deepened in the months after the novel’s publication, before the emergence of a clear party line on Not by Bread Alone and on the broader issue of Soviet literature’s engagement with the cult of personality. This agenda was further strengthened by fear and revulsion at the prospect of a return to Stalinist criticism, or even repression, embedded in the union’s institutional memory by the recent anti- cosmopolitanism campaign and the devastating pre-war terror. Although the party leadership ultimately judged “revisionism” to be a more alarming prospect, it also to some extent wanted to “forget” Stalinist methods. The desire to break with Stalinism, while reversing key features of de-Stalinization, complicated the subsequent literary freeze of 1957, as will be examined in the next section. While the Moscow Union continued to offer a principled defense of the literary thaw, though, MGU’s party historians were already leading the ideological assault against the thaw in the history profession. As Voprosy istorii continued to deconstruct Stalinist narratives of the revolution and the terror (among other topics), and to pursue an agenda of historical “truth” similar to that developing in the Moscow Union, MGU’s party historians spearheaded the assault on it that would culminate in the CC resolution on the journal several months later.102 Along with the Academy of Social Sciences, the chief provider of the party’s ideological

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staff, with whom it held at least one joint Moscow-wide meeting, MGU emerged as one of the earliest and most committed opponents of Voprosy istorii.103 Although the editors mounted a spirited defense, to some murmurs of support, these meetings of autumn and winter 1956 were a rout, and it was MGU’s historians who led this charge against the journal’s interpretation of de-Stalinization. This reinforced the department’s status, alongside the ideological journal Partiinaia zhizn’ and the Academy of Social Sciences, as a leading guardian of ideological orthodoxy.104 So too did its participation in the growing condemnation of Dudintsev’s novel and its harmful influence on students in late 1956.105 More privately, though, there was growing anxiety about the fact that a member of staff had published an article in Voprosy istorii. The article in question, by the party historian Moskalev, recounted Lenin’s outstanding theoretical and practical contribution to the rise of social democracy. However, it did not uphold the conventional chronology of Lenin’s thinking on the class question, implying that it had only fully emerged in the 1890s. Its de-Stalinizing revisions to the Short Course had thus blurred the difference between Bolshevism and other parties, including the Mensheviks.106 However, it took many weeks for this controversial article to emerge in departmental discussions, and longer still for a colleague to condemn in Pravda its “coarse errors,” and to pledge improved ideological “purity” in the department’s future output.107 The publication had first surfaced briefly in internal discussion in October, but even after this Pravda article, Moskalev’s department’s condemnation of the article remained infrequent and inconsistent, with the department head Shapkarin one of several colleagues to reserve judgment.108 By the end of 1956, therefore, MGU’s party historians had still not confirmed their stance on the article, even though their hostility to the journal was already beyond doubt. On the one hand, then, in stark contrast to the Moscow Union’s defiance of party criticism in late 1956, these party historians did not need an explicit statement of a shift in the party line: even the criticisms of Voprosy istorii (and indeed Dudintsev) that had started to emerge in spring and summer 1956 were enough to spur them into action against “revisionism”. Their eagerness to assault Voprosy istorii revealed a long habituation and acute sensitivity to ideological interventions in history (dating back to the dawn of the Stalin era), and to harsh methods of ridding the

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discipline of ideological deviations.109 On the other hand, the deferral of judgment of Moskalev’s contribution to Voprosy istorii complicates this picture of a return to Stalinism. This delay might simply have been a way to avoid criticism and punishment; by delaying in defining the article’s error, the institution itself might escape censure, especially given the chaos convulsing the profession in 1956. Traumatic memories of previous (and, in some cases, very recent) Stalin-era campaigns probably heightened such a desire to stay under the leadership’s radar. The unwillingness to define Moskalev’s article also, however, suggests uncertainty about how to read individual historical accounts, even though the journal as a whole was increasingly clearly “mistaken.” Perhaps, like Dudintsev’s novel and the reactions to the Secret Speech at the Moscow Union, Moskalev’s account could still be construed as a “party-minded” attempt to return to the party’s Leninist roots, and to deconstruct Stalinist historiography, both objectives promoted in the propaganda and education policy of 1956? Nonetheless, there remained an enormous difference between such hesitations and the more principled neo-Leninist stance of the Moscow Union. After the 20th Congress, therefore, both Soviet literature and party history reflected on the Stalinist past, and on the Leninist traditions that might now be revived in their professions: there was a genuine attempt, especially in Soviet literature but also to some extent in party history, to revive principles, values, and methods lost or marginalized under Stalinism. However, the meanings of the terms “cult of personality” and the “return to Leninism” were not stable in 1956 (nor, indeed, throughout the Khrushchev era). Therefore, both Soviet writers and party historians had to respond to shifts in the official meaning of these two terms— although the sensitivity to shifts in the party line was particularly pronounced among party historians, given the profession’s long and particularly strict (even dogmatic) subjugation to Stalinist ideology. At the same time, both professions also strategically appropriated the terms to defend their convictions and to safeguard their professional futures. Stephen Bittner’s account of the thaw emphasizes both the strategic (and often persuasive) “framings” of texts as ideologically correct, and also an acute anxiety about the official limits of de-Stalinization, expressed in frequent appeals for their top-down clarification.110 The reactions of Moscow’s writers and party historians to the thaw and beginnings of the

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freeze in 1956 illustrate that both responded in all of the above ways, though to different degrees, in part because of their differing institutional and professional histories prior to the Secret Speech. It was their reactions to the more pronounced freeze of 1957, however, that made the differences between these institutions and between their respective thaws much more clearly apparent. ANTI-REVISIONISM ON THE MARCH

The closed letter of December 1956 set the agenda for MGU’s party historians in a literal sense, since long-standing tradition dictated that central policies and initiatives had to generate “discussions” at the local party level, but the local relevance of this nationwide ideological shift was sharpened by the naming and shaming of a member of their own community. Within the department, some party historians endowed Moskalev’s revisionism with alarming potential, justifying its decisive punishment. However, this pathologization was contested, and the script of outright condemnation performed at MGU’s public critique of Voprosy istorii proved more difficult to apply privately, within their own community. Although Moskalev’s article led ultimately to a departmental- and university-wide increase in ideological vigilance, internal discussions disputed the necessity of Stalinist practices of denunciation and exclusion. Well before the formal CC resolution on Voprosy istorii in March 1957, the department’s discussions had already repeatedly, emphatically condemned the journal, intensifying an already well-established hostility to its “incorrect,” “anti-party,” and “harmful” line, especially on the Menshevik question and Stalin’s reputation.111 The few who tried to resist this harsh condemnation increasingly risked being named and shamed.112 The department’s line on the journal as a whole thus became increasingly aggressive; in fact after the department’s last major meeting held to discuss Voprosy istorii in early 1957, the journal’s editors were so outraged by the violence of the attacks that they complained to the CC secretariat. While conceding that some of the “rude attacks” might require mild intervention, the secretariat claimed that the discussions “had gone well and testified to the correct understanding of . . . the tasks raised in the Central Committee letter.”113 In this way, the department once again showed itself to be ideologically correct with regard to the journal.

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However, Moskalev’s unorthodox article within this journal introduced greater ambiguity. By the start of 1957, no one tried to claim any more that the article was correct. The closed letter’s singling out of the article placed its fundamental error beyond doubt, but these general indications of the article’s problematic status did not fully define its transgression. Many of Moskalev’s colleagues categorically deemed the article “harmful,” “pure revisionism,” “anti-Soviet,” even “counterrevolutionary”; it was a text that had failed to discern “where MarxismLeninism ends and revision of Marxism begins.”114 Some others, though, took a more moderate view of it as a mere “mistake” on the part of the author and the department.115 These divergent views of the seriousness of the article’s deviation from the party line also generated different explanations for the author’s deviance. Those who viewed the article as Trotskyist were also most inclined to deem the author a Trotskyite, pursuing a hidden, subversive agenda in the department and in the profession.116 His blurring of the dividing line between Menshevism and Bolshevism was imagined as part of a long tradition of ideological unreliability, directly linked to evidence uncovered of the author’s Menshevik leanings in the 1920s. As one of his attackers put it, the article constituted proof that Moskalev was a “diabolically politically unstable comrade.”117 Such biographical unmaskings were also performed on other colleagues taking de-Stalinization too far. One lecturer, Smirnova, who had supervised a dissertation with allegedly Trotskyist leanings and publicly supported Voprosy istorii as the only journal to respond correctly to the 20th Congress, also had her early biography scrutinized for proof of chronic doubts about the revolution. As with Moskalev, her “mistakes” after the Secret Speech were imagined by some colleagues to “represent some kind of system,” and her radical perspective on the Stalin question (and the Kamenev and Zinoviev issue) became proof of her “out and out anti-Sovietness.” The most vicious criticism she faced—that she was “gambling with the party and with Leninism”—caused her to faint outside one meeting.118 These investigations of the biographical and biological roots of revisionism contended that attempts to rethink Stalinist historiography betrayed an individual’s own “enemy” characteristics and their conscious desire for sabotage. There were objections to such arguments, though.119 Moskalev himself countered the claims of “rightist” or “enemy” sentiments with evidence of

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his past commitment to fighting the “right opposition.”120 Some of his colleagues went further still, and objected in principle to the revival of the Stalinist practices of denunciation and unmasking.121 Moreover, some colleagues argued that de-Stalinization was not an opportunity for “enemies” to resurface and pursue their dastardly aims, but rather a time of uncertainty when well-intentioned historians might easily misinterpret the party line. This view of party historians as loyal servants of the regime was central to Moskalev’s own self-defense, which claimed that the article had been his “party-minded” response to party calls to “expose the cult of personality.”122 Such was also the argument advanced by Burdzhalov and Pankratova in their appeals to the CC.123 However, Moskalev’s argument to his colleagues rested on the difference between himself and the editors; he claimed that the original article had been less subversive, but that it had been cut by the editors and transformed into something far more radical. Other colleagues, including the head of Moskalev’s department, agreed that Moskalev may have been “swept away” by the tidal force of Voprosy istorii’s dissent; he himself, though, was not a “conscious” opponent of the regime.124 In these arguments, the party historian was doubly distanced from his text. The article had been an object of intervention by subversive editors, and he as a historian was a subject in only a very limited sense. Party history did not reflect the subjective views of the historian, and could not therefore be read biographically; rather, individual historians were servants of the party line, and party history was constructed out of their communal efforts to interpret it. Where the party line was blurred, party historians risked misinterpreting the line through no fault of their own.125 Such arguments forgave Moskalev’s mistaken attitude to the cult of personality, while criticizing his attackers for their fondness for the methods of the cult— personalized attacks, suppression of criticism, and hyperbolic claims of ideological deviation.126 This too threw into question the necessity of harsh punishment. Expulsion from the party and from the department were mentioned, and at times enthusiastically endorsed (although arrests were never mooted).127 However, a significant constituency in the department insisted that this was too severe a punishment. The department head himself was loath to sack either, insisting they were not intrinsically “enemies” or “counter-revolutionaries.” The resolution of the final

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meeting to deal with the Moskalev case termed the article a “distortion,” while his colleague Smirnova’s views counted as a “gross distortion,” of the party line. Moskalev was issued a “strict” warning; Smirnova’s case, after referral to the organization’s party bureau, was also ultimately resolved without dismissal.128 Neither historian, then, was essentialized as irredeemably anti-Soviet, and neither was forced to suffer Burdzhalov’s fate of enforced isolation from the profession and party. Individual historians were thus shielded from the harshest punishment, but doubts remained about the solidity of community norms. Colleagues who had cited “evidence” of individual anti-Soviet sentiment were also the most likely to claim that the whole department must have lapsed into wholesale deviance.129 While some other speakers were less extreme, a majority consensus emerged that there had been a serious lapse of ideological standards. Some berated themselves for these lapses in “vigilance,” but most blamed the department or faculty leadership. 130 The department head Shapkarin was almost guiltier than Moskalev, since he had “continued to waver this way and that,” and while he did not adopt an anti-Soviet line, he was guilty of something almost as bad: no line at all.131 Although he kept his job for the time being, the final meeting protocol noted ominously that the department’s leader was one of several party historians who had “reacted more toothlessly than other members of the party.”132 These sharp “teeth” of the rank and file were subsequently rewarded with appointments to an enlarged party organization, ultimately leaving the community more dominated by Stalinists, even though Moskalev and his like-minded, moderate colleagues had avoided Staliniststyle repression.133 Therefore, at both the national and local level, the outcome of the tumultuous year that followed the Secret Speech was the entrenchment of a much more conservative interpretation of de-Stalinization in party history, empowering conservative historians to outflank and outrank their more liberal colleagues.134 Nationally, attacks on Stalinism had now ground to a halt, praise for Stalin cautiously resumed, and national assemblies of historians and social scientists in 1957 and 1958 devoted no time to furthering de-Stalinization but instead lavishly expounded on the revived doctrine of anti-revisionism.135 At MGU, the dastardly threat posed by revisionism (both domestic and international, notably in Yugoslavia) dominated discussions of student ideological education

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(vospitanie) in 1957 and 1958, and led to the convening of university-wide anti-revisionism events, and the inclusion of anti-revisionism as a topic on party history syllabi.136 Nevertheless, this freeze had been neither instantaneous nor instantly comprehensible to party historians. Diverse interpretations of the cult of personality, and more tolerant attitudes toward their proponents, had persisted, and not only among the most liberal institutions, such as Voprosy istorii. Even conservative party history institutions such as MGU reveal, on close scrutiny, a spectrum of interpretations of the cult of personality, and of the justifiability of Stalinist measures of discipline. Nevertheless, this relatively swift imposition and adoption of the antirevisionist line in party history still presents a stark contrast to the protracted taming of the Moscow Union after the closed letter. This taming required not just increasingly strident accusations of revisionism, but also the dissemination of an alternative, more positive narrative of the Stalinist past, and, ultimately, the use of administrative sanctions to ensure full unanimity and ideological rigor among the union’s leaders. Viewed in retrospect, the attacks look coherent, but they were also improvised in response to fast-developing domestic and international events, and to the ongoing search for new, post-Stalinist ways to control dissent.137 While trying to avoid the ferocity of Stalin-era ideological interventions in literature, the leadership’s actions ultimately confirmed the party’s prerogative to regulate literature’s ideological commitment, and it reinforced the traditional asymmetry of writer-state relations. It also reaffirmed traditional definitions of Soviet literature’s obligations toward the party (its partiinost’) and toward the mass of Soviet readers (its narodnost’). Once the ambiguity of 1956 started to evaporate, most writers submitted quickly to this new, clearer party line, either out of habitual obedience (or fear), or because they identified with the more positive, optimistic view of the Stalinist past and of Soviet literature’s social and ideological role. A few, though, persistently resisted the Stalinist content and form of this intervention in Soviet literature. Ideological accusations of anti-Soviet sentiment in the Moscow Union quickly gathered momentum in 1957, extending the arguments of the closed letter. The letter itself roughly coincided with a CC meeting with senior Soviet writers in December. This became the first extended performance of an ideological assault on Soviet literature’s “unhealthy moods,”

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which would dominate writers’ discussions and further meetings with the party leadership in the first half of 1957. Although Dmitrii Shepilov emphasized that the meeting’s warnings to the Moscow Union were not intended as “directives” or “instructions,” Leonid Brezhnev’s concluding warning to writers to “keep their ideological powder dry” forcefully evoked the explosive power of mistakes made over the foregoing months.138 Many of those present, including Moscow Union members who had not previously spoken up in discussions of Dudintsev, now responded with enthusiastic accusations of slander, nihilism, bourgeois sentiments, even Trotskyism.139 The call for greater ideological militancy was enthusiastically supported, and even intensified, by many writers in attendance.140 Calls for increased ideological commitment (ideinost’) in literature continued to intensify throughout the first half of 1957. The union-level Writers’ Union at its first plenum of the year condemned the “unhealthy moods” within the Moscow Union, though it did depict the union as a whole as “politically healthy.”141 In the weeks either side of this plenum, further meetings with the party leadership were organized, where Khrushchev personally condemned the “rot” that had set in at the union after the discussion of Dudintsev, calling for a swift cure to the “political illness” that had infected some writers after the 20th Congress.142 However, as Shepilov’s wariness about “directives” suggests, it was no longer possible or desirable simply to impose a strict ideological line on literature. Thus, the party leadership also sought to invalidate the Moscow Union’s agenda of truth about the past by proposing an alternative historical narrative, according to which Dudintsev’s novel (and other works about the Stalinist past promoted by the union, such as the stories in the union’s new almanac Literaturnaia Moskva) would appear less “true,” even an outright falsification of Soviet history. Throughout the same series of meetings that confirmed the ideological error of the Moscow Union’s attitude to the Stalinist past, the leaders of the party and of Soviet literature constructed a new narrative of Stalinism that supplanted the revelations of the Secret Speech, outshining the gloomy picture of the recent past in works such as Not by Bread Alone. “We’re rightly proud of our achievements,” proclaimed Shepilov at the December 1956 CC meeting, identifying writers’ main duty as “showing the greatness of [those] achievements.” Although he himself allowed a certain role for “criticism, which helps to build communism

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and elevates our country,” most other ideologists and writers present ignored this nuance, and instead went on the assault against “criticism” of “defects,” caricaturing it as nihilism. Korneichuk, who had accused Moscow writers of nihilism and petty bourgeois sentiments, also accused them of being “black varnishers of our life, people who don’t see our achievements.” Nikolai Tikhonov likewise rejected Paustovskii’s speech and instead urged his fellow writers: “we must literally defend all the achievements of Soviet power.”143 Once the Soviet past, encompassing the entire Stalin era, was defined as a time of “achievements,” writers’ determination to focus on the period’s “shady sides” became, at best, shortsighted.144 Petr Pospelov therefore instructed writers to correct their vision so as “to be able also to see our many achievements.” At the congress that had codified Socialist Realism in 1934, Andrei Zhdanov had famously urged writers to “show reality in its revolutionary development.” Pospelov now similarly enjoined writers to adopt the correct perspective on the overall development of Soviet history (indeed, the Secret Speech, co-authored by Pospelov, had also implied this optimistic teleology, though this had been overshadowed by the shocking revelations about Stalin): “the pathos of affirmation.”145 Pospelov’s criticism of some writers’ myopic vision of the Stalinist past was made more explicit by Vadim Kozhevnikov, editor of Znamia. Honing in on the main problem with the “mood” of the Moscow Union, he identified it as “a striving to dig around for the sake of it in the wounds [rany] of our society.” Where the Moscow Union had emphasized the purifying and “healthy” effects of literary glasnost’, now its conservative opponents deemed such retrospection compulsive and painful. The “healthy” approach was now to celebrate and “affirm” the past, rather than to focus pathologically on its “wounds.”146 Again, it was Khrushchev himself who elaborated most fully on this discourse of history and memory, in order to reinforce his ideological criticisms. In his two addresses to Soviet writers in May 1957, he sought to replace the revelations of the Secret Speech with a new, more benign assessment of Stalin and Stalinism. To an even greater extent than the Secret Speech, both speeches relied on anecdotes and improvisation, which made his historical narrative considerably less authoritative than it might have been.147 However, combined with the threats issued to renegade writers (especially the second meeting, whose violent threats

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“smelled of arrests,” according to Veniamin Kaverin, one of those criticized), the turn away from de-Stalinization was clear enough.148 On both these occasions, Khrushchev urged listeners not to “forget” Stalin’s merits, including the correct line that he pursued against the state’s “enemies”: “we respect him no less, and indeed more than, those who would trample the name of Stalin,” he confirmed. From that assertion, it logically followed (as it had for Shepilov and Pospelov earlier in the year) that the party preferred so-called varnishers of reality, whose positive view of the Stalinist past was closer to its true “revolutionary development,” to “those who want to use our defects to blacken our yesterdays” and “those who want to besmirch our party.” Dudintsev, Khrushchev confirmed, fell into the latter category, as a writer who “relishes defects.” As at the December CC meeting, such a focus on past problems was viewed as perverse, and Soviet literature’s principal “aim” was defined as celebrating, rather than criticizing, the Soviet past and present.149 This centrally orchestrated campaign had immediate local consequences: both the discourse of ideological deviation and the new narrative of the Stalinist past quickly began to be performed within the Moscow Union. Very soon after the December letter and CC meeting, the party committee head repeated verbatim Brezhnev’s ominous warning about ideological “gunpowder.”150 The union’s first plenum of 1957, in March, also set its ideological priorities clearly, with a keynote address, which criticized the “ideological errors” and “nihilism” in Dudintsev and Literaturnaia Moskva, where “we find those extremes, those infractions of the critical principle from Socialist Realism, which caused creative and ideological warping.”151 Such enthusiastic local performances of the party’s anti-revisionism were accompanied, as they had been on the national level, by the rapid emergence of a celebratory narrative of the Stalinist past. At the first meeting of the party organization in 1957, the promotion of positive “memories” of the Stalinist past was spearheaded by a certain Ovalov, a recently rehabilitated terror victim. Having conceded that, “yes, speaking retrospectively the cult of personality was repellent, yes it caused us a fair bit of harm and grief,” Ovalov nevertheless distanced himself from what he called the “critical direction” of the union regarding the “cult of personality.” Claiming not to “remember [his] grievances,” he concluded his recollection of Stalinist terror by announcing that “I’d agree again to

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become a victim of a judicial error and see sitting around me the isolated fifth column, rather than to have my freedom and see that thousands of columns are also acting and are out there living in freedom.”152 This victim testimony was strikingly different from the testimony of imprisonment aired immediately after the Secret Speech. Then, memories of terror had stoked moral outrage, against Stalin and “Stalinists,” preparing the ground for the more generalized critique of the “Drozdovs” later in the year. Now, recollections of wrongful imprisonment expressed calm acceptance of Stalin’s policies, and upheld two principles of Stalinist terror: the real existence of a fifth column, and Stalin’s justifications of the collateral damage of the fight against it. Memories of victims’ suffering were now decisively secondary to the celebration of Soviet society’s rightful defeat of its “thousands” of enemies; in fact, they were barely memories at all, the “grievances” long ago forgotten.153 However, neither the strident anti-revisionism nor the new narrative of the Stalinist past performed at these early meetings ensured full unanimity and conformity. Even in the January meetings, the closed letter fresh in their memory, some writers had continued to defend Dudintsev against conservative members’ attacks.154 In March, too, the targets of the union management’s critiques reaffirmed their right to their own memories of Stalinism and their own vision of partiinost’.155 Margarita Aliger, for example, continued to deem the union’s activities an appropriate response to the 20th Congress. Dudintsev meanwhile condemned the harsh criticisms of his novel (echoing Stepan Zlobin’s arguments from 1956), and also recalled the “change in [his] soul” after seeing the losses of the early war and the post-war devastation, thus defending his right to remember negative aspects of the Stalin era, and to expose them to Soviet readers.156 The response to this resistance was an even more strident performance of alternative memories of Stalinism. Among the many speakers who immediately turned on Dudintsev was the rehabilitated victim of the Great Terror, Galina Serebriakova. Echoing the testimony of Ovalov earlier in the year, Serebriakova narrated her twenty years of incarceration under Stalin, claiming to have emerged from prison less embittered than Dudintsev; in fact, she claimed that she would have preferred to stay in prison rather than being released into the country, full of Drozdovs, which Dudintsev had falsely depicted.157 Powerful as Serebriakova’s riposte was, CC observers did not feel that it had quite done the job. The CC

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department of science therefore instructed Konstantin Simonov, himself struggling to rebuild his reputation after the Dudintsev controversy and other mistakes in 1956, to intervene and oppose Dudintsev’s claims about memory and history from another angle: that of an eyewitness to war. As well as criticizing the seriousness of Dudintsev’s errors (which he likened to Paustovskii’s speech), Simonov countered Dudintsev’s memories of war and late Stalinism with his own, more optimistic observations and recollections. Dudintsev again resisted though, deeming Simonov’s attack “prosecutorial,” all too reminiscent of the previous era.158 This unexpectedly intense contestation over the memories and methods of Stalinism rapidly intensified the CC’s campaign against the union’s attitude to the cult of personality. Khrushchev’s first meeting with the Soviet intelligentsia in May 1957 was preceded (and informed) by a lengthy surveillance report from the CC department of culture, painting an alarming picture of the influence of the cult of personality on Soviet literature and literary politics.159 It alerted Khrushchev to the “unhealthy,” “non-conformist” moods in the capital’s literary life, and urged him to stem the ongoing flow of literary works that “rubbed salt into old wounds,” intensifying the critique of compulsive return to traumatic memories first aired at the end of the previous year. It argued not only that the entire “line” of the Moscow Union was mistaken, but also that the original decision to form a separate Moscow organization may even have been a mistake, encouraging the spread of “unhealthy moods” throughout Soviet literature. The same department sounded the alarm again when Khrushchev’s second address to writers still failed to elicit a full recantation from the union’s last remaining dissenters.160 In a report at the end of May, it analyzed every major meeting of the Moscow Union since March 1956, from its Secret Speech discussions to its party meeting after Khrushchev’s two interventions, as cumulative evidence of the ideological “rot . . . harmful and mistaken tendencies” and the “one-sided, accusatory critical direction” that had taken over the union, its spread facilitated by the union leadership’s excessive liberalism.161 This report confirmed what the party leadership already suspected: discursive sanctions were not enough to freeze the thaw.162 The result, as Raisa Orlova observed, was a “bureaucratic comedy,” a panoply of internal and external reforms implemented to marginalize the alternative “line of the 20th Congress” within Soviet literature.163 Between spring and winter,

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a wave of dismissals and re-elections swept through the union. It systematically demoted and sacked figures responsible for the union’s “critical direction,” including the editors of the union’s two major publications founded after (and in response to) the Secret Speech. Elections held at the end of the year generated a 50 percent turnover in union management posts, leaving former strongholds of liberalism, such as the prose section, with a far more conservative leadership.164 It was no coincidence that this election also saw the union’s most confident and unanimous performance of both anti-revisionism and positive memories of the Stalinist past.165 The discursive and administrative attacks on the union’s previous stance on the cult of personality now finally reinforced one another. Further reinforcing this perestroika of the Moscow Union was the institutionalization of the RSFSR Writers’ Union, mooted soon after December’s closed letter and CC meeting, and entrusted to the same figures who had viciously attacked the Moscow Union there (and also at subsequent gatherings).166 Formally inaugurated in May 1957, but only fully articulating its conservative stance at its inaugural gathering the next year, the RSFSR Union was from the start explicitly designated as a counterweight not only to the Moscow Union’s metropolitan bias but also to its attitude to the cult of personality.167 Although it arose out of the freeze of 1957, the union was not established enough to play an active role in the imposition of the new ideological and historical norms that year, even though many of its leading figures contributed to key discussions.168 Once fully instituted, however, it played a central role in policing the new party line throughout the late 1950s, insisting on Soviet literature’s ideological commitment, and promoting a celebratory attitude to the Soviet past.169 In fact, even after the sharp shift in the party line after the 22nd Congress, it continued to dispute the Moscow Union’s interpretation of the cult of personality.170 For now, though, the Moscow Union’s switch to ideological militancy and “the pathos of affirmation,” along with these principles’ centrality to the RSFSR Union, decisively marginalized the cult of personality within Soviet literature. A F T E R T H E F R E E Z E : B E T W E E N D O G M AT I S M A N D D I S S E N T

“Those illnesses that were observed in the Moscow organization over the last year and a half are now liquidated, and the new leadership begins its

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activities at a happy time,” claimed Leonid Sobolev on the eve of 1958, just after the elections that had brought this “new leadership” to power.171 By this point, the Moscow Union was a very different organization than the community that had greeted the Secret Speech a year and a half earlier. The union’s watchwords were now ideinost’ and anti-revisionism, and its agenda the promotion of heroism and celebration of Soviet achievements.172 The correct party line and “ideological consolidation” had finally taken root in the union.173 The union’s failure to offer public support to Boris Pasternak during the 1957–58 campaign of persecution for the foreign publication of his novel Doktor Zhivago (itself a powerful critique of Stalinist and more generally Soviet violence and dogmatism) offered further proof of this success.174 Or did it? In the nearly four years until the 22nd Party Congress confirmed a change in the party line, there was sporadic cause for anxiety among the local and central leadership about the sincerity of some members’ adoption of the new line. For example, although it was now union policy to deem Not by Bread Alone an ideological error, some union members still refused to stigmatize Dudintsev, indicating the survival of the Leninist “humanity” for which members had hoped after the Secret Speech.175 These sporadic signs of public resistance, however, were less worrying to the authorities than their suspicion that revisionist forces now confined their activities to more private settings. After all, many of the most militant proponents of de-Stalinization had only reluctantly repented of their actions in 1957, and none had “shown through deeds that they have revised their incorrect positions.”176 State and party monitoring of Moscow Union members in the late 1950s reflected anxiety about the activity taking place in liminal, or private spaces: in corridors or in dachas, rather than in the more visible, official gatherings organized and controlled by the union management. When in 1958 the union discussed Kochetov’s thinly veiled novelistic attack on the thaw, The Ershov Brothers, for example, very few prominent members participated, but their public silence stood in stark contrast to the relentless stream of gossip about the “Stalinist” novel and its author, overheard at writers’ dachas and sanitoria.177 Heightening the anxiety about the subterranean (and suburban) survival of the union’s revisionist line, the CC department of science raised the alarm several times about the private socializing of Moscow

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writers—especially the group that had formerly clustered around Literaturnaia Moskva. Their suspicions aroused by the group’s decision to holiday together in Yalta in 1959, the department investigated further, and surmised that these writers now had not one, but two, lines, both in contradiction to the union’s anti-revisionist stance imposed by the end of 1957. Emanuil Kazakevich now advocated the “line of silence,” tacitly resisting the union’s new stance, while Kaverin and Rudnyi were engaged in more active, albeit covert, subversion, peopling major journals with supporters, for example.178 In this sense, the success in quelling the Moscow Union’s resistance and establishing a new party line for Soviet literature was only partial. The union now reliably performed its new script, but the performance often featured understudies, and conversations backstage proved more vibrant than anything happening on the main stage. Indeed, the prose section became virtually moribund after its taming in 1957, its discussions, by its own admission, quickly turning dull and unproductive.179 This sense of stagnation led the CC to reject further suggestions to tame the Moscow Union and to reduce further its overall influence on national literary life, by resubordinating it to the union-level Writers Union, for example.180 And, though Khrushchev himself had earlier defended the elder statesmen of Soviet literature against accusations of “varnishing,” the CC remained concerned at the “systematic ageing” and conservatism of the union.181 Toward the end of the 1950s, therefore, Khrushchev started to orchestrate a different balance between liberal and conservative forces in literature, as shown at the Third Writers’ Union Congress in 1959 and in the decision to reinstate Tvardovskii as editor of Novyi mir a year earlier, laying the ground for renewed debates about Stalinism after the 22nd Congress. While satisfied with the defeat of revisionism in the late 1950s, the party leadership was therefore worried about the stagnation and dogmatism liable to worsen in the future, even as it remained anxious about dissent lurking at and beyond the periphery of the Moscow Union. Ironically, however, it was in an apparently ideologically orthodox institution and profession where these fears of private dissent masked by public dogmatism fully materialized. When MGU’s party historians discovered dissidents within their own community, in 1957 it reignited the debate about the respective dangers of “revisionism” and excessive ideological “vigilance.”

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In May 1957, the KGB discovered some leaflets on the person of a British citizen brought in for questioning, and matched them to literature that had been circulating in several Moscow neighborhoods. These leaflets criticized the Soviet system, and Khrushchev as leader, and indicted the party’s policies of de-Stalinization for not interrogating the Soviet system and for failing to put those responsible for Stalinist terror on trial. The police’s investigations quickly led them to the authors: a small group of historians and students based in MGU’s party history department. Meeting in secret for the previous few months, their discussions and criticisms had started to range ever more widely, while their conspiratorial activities had intensified. The ringleader, a graduate student and Komsomol leader of the party history department, Lev Krasnopevtsev, had received his undergraduate history qualification from MGU in 1952, and returned to the department to start his graduate degree in 1955. Within two short years of this return to the university, though, this apparently model student had been sent to serve the maximum term in the Gulag, along with some dozen other students and faculty from MGU, the majority from the history faculty.182 Krasnopevtsev’s crime, and the scale of his punishment, cast Moskalev’s recently discussed article into the shade. This student’s revisionism was more devastating, in its criticisms and its tactics, than any other instance of dissent uncovered in MGU since Stalin’s death, and it was easily as serious as the other incidents of anti-Soviet sentiment at other academic institutions around the country, including Moscow’s Thermo-Technical Laboratory and Leningrad State University.183 To make matters worse, while most such activity had been ruthlessly punished within months of the Secret Speech, as the previous chapter showed, the activities of the Krasnopevtsev circle had remained hidden for far longer. Moskalev’s article had caused anxiety, but Krasnopevtsev’s leaflets, circulating and growing in radicalism during and especially after the imposition of a national and local freeze on de-Stalinization, generated all-out panic.184 The crisis forced both local and central investigators to acknowledge that party history had somehow produced the party’s worst nightmare: a radical regime opponent able to attract support from others with seemingly irreproachable ideological credentials. Unlike the Moskalev case, the investigation and punishment of Krasnopevtsev and his associates very quickly moved beyond the university, to be dealt with by the

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city’s party and police authorities. Nevertheless, both the department and the discipline of party history were the “soil” for Krasnopevtsev’s dissent, and needed to be investigated and reformed.185 Unlike in the Moskalev case, there was a rapid and clear consensus reached on the anti-Soviet character of Krasnopevtsev’s behavior, making both his expulsion from the party and his removal from society inevitable.186 Furthermore, all analyses of the Krasnopevtsev case could agree that the emergence of dissent was somehow intimately linked to de-Stalinization: even a brief acquaintance with the circle’s writings revealed that they had closely followed the party’s critique of the cult of personality and that they consistently compared it—unflatteringly, of course—with their own thinking about the Stalin question.187 However, the discussion of the Krasnopevtsev case and of the broader problem of student dissent and disillusionment then generated a striking variety of interpretations of where, and how, party history had gone wrong during de-Stalinization. One interpretation of “unhealthy” and “rotten” behavior, such as that shown by Krasnopevtsev, was that it proved the folly of attempting any de-Stalinization at all and exemplified the dangers of polluting the “purity” of party ideology.188 These arguments equated party historians’ inappropriate “liberalism” with the “rotten liberalism” of their audiences, especially students, forever susceptible to temptation. The university’s verdict on the case named and shamed several historians who, they claimed, “incorrectly considered that, in uprooting dogmatism in the fight against the consequences of the cult of personality in the area of historical science and especially in party history, it was necessary to reconsider many fundamental conclusions reached by historical science under Stalin.”189 The investigators went on to allege that students witnessed their teachers’ thirst for destruction of the Stalinist past and, gripped by the “harmful idea of all-out revision,” applied it to the present as well as to the past, suggesting radical alternatives to the whole Soviet system.190 Thus, the teachers’ small deviations from partiinost’ had escalated into the students’ large-scale deviance.191 Throughout the university, it also became commonplace to single out the history faculty’s delays and undue leniency in policing the “revisionism” and “liberalism” of some of its members, as the cause of MGU’s national shame.192 Conservative party historians within the department agreed, and urged the university to strengthen its opposition to “rotten liberalism” among their colleagues.193

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The identification of “de-Stalinizing” revisions with revisionism, and of revisionism with “rotten liberalism,” first emerging in local and central interpretations of Moskalev’s article, thus proved resilient, and even strengthened, in MGU during the summer of 1957. In Moskalev’s own department, some party historians sought to draw a straight line from the waverings of 1956 to the outright heresy of Krasnopevtsev as well as to other “serious problems with the ideological and political education of students” in other MGU faculties.194 The suspicion that had then surrounded “revisionist” members of staff also resurfaced. Colleagues were now reminded that one of the department’s problem historians, Smirnova, had “never admitted her mistakes,” and so had been able to continue spreading subversive views in her lectures.195 The attacks on Smirnova reached such a pitch that she threatened to resign. The earlier criticisms of the “liberalism” of the department head, Shapkarin, also received fresh impetus from the evidence of its supposed consequences; as a result of the Krasnopevtsev affair, he did have to resign.196 As well as resuming past personal attacks, the conservative forces in the department also used the Krasnopevtsev case as ammunition in newly emerging historiographical controversies, such as a 1958 debate over collectivization in the department. At this debate, conservative historians used the evidence of the emergence of disobedient and dissenting students to justify a return to the Stalinist definition of the kulak as an incorrigible enemy; revisions to this and other keystones of Stalinist historiography were simply too dangerous.197 Stalinist-style “biographical” investigations of supporters of de-Stalinization, last seen during the Moskalev affair, also resumed during this debate, with at least one participant accused of holding suspiciously rightist sentiments in the early 1930s.198 Thus, Krasnopevtsev’s dissent empowered conservative historians to push for re-Stalinization of the content of party history, and for Stalinist-style suspicion of party historians who still supported de-Stalinization. Powerful as this discourse proved, it was not just the liberalism of the campaign that was held responsible for students’ incorrect reactions; other interpretations blamed the ambiguities of de-Stalinization. One friend of a member of the Krasnopevtsev circle was investigated by the university authorities in early 1958 for having known about the group’s ideas and publications without alerting the relevant staff to them. The accused, a certain Muravinskii, offered as explanation the fact that he had

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simply not known how to read the texts, especially in light of the mixed signals sent by the department’s discussions of the cult of personality. A few speakers agreed that the department had not adequately elucidated the cult of personality in the wake of the Secret Speech: as one pointed out, the many student questions that arose “should have been followed up and should have been explained to students.” Muravinskii’s expulsion garnered majority support, but about 10 percent of those present failed to support this decision, or suggested the kinder alternative of allowing him to be a party candidate.199 Likewise, when the faculty delivered its overall, official judgment on the Krasnopevtsev case, it looked back over party historians’ disputes during 1956–57, and agreed that these had “demonstrated to all students the disagreement between teachers over the question of the liquidation of the cult of personality in historical science.” Lacking a firm answer from the usual source of authority, they alleged, students, “remaining unsatisfied with our explanations, started to seek out answers from Krasnopevtsev and his ilk.”200 They had then submitted to the lure of his “underground group” and ended up “beyond the authority of the teachers,” submitting to the dubious authority of the charismatic Krasnopevtsev and consuming his transgressive theories about the Soviet system. However, there was yet another possible interpretation of student behavior in this time; perhaps they had received answers of a kind, but the party line had been so intellectually unsatisfactory and analytically superficial that they had been forced to look outside the classroom for better analysis. Rote learning, dogmatism, and mechanical citation of doctrine (nachetnichestvo, tsitatnichestvo) had been diagnosed as some of the more virulent symptoms of the cult of personality from 1953 onward, far predating the identification with Stalin himself. Ironically, however, the party’s attack on the cult of personality had in many instances deepened these cult practices. The silences and inconsistencies of the Secret Speech may have led some speakers and listeners to fill these gaps with daring critiques, but many others shrank from the challenge of supplementary analysis. Historians at MGU had noted within weeks of the speech that the faculty, and especially the party historians, were not coping well with fielding student enquiries, preferring to deflect or avoid them, or, at most, to claim that answers could be found in the speech.201 Dissatisfied with the inadequate answers and lack of “stormy discussion” taking place in

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class or in Komsomol meetings, students had then looked to other, nonofficial sources of information and analysis, discussing their “areas of confusion,” with some, like Krasnopevtsev, graduating to full-blown conspiracy.202 Such scenarios contained more than a grain of truth. Krasnopevtsev later described this journey from conformism to dissent as partly the consequence of alienation from the unresponsive, stagnant discipline of party history.203 Many other dissidents, including Iurii Orlov, likewise saw the lack of real discussion and convincing answers in the years after the Secret Speech as the reason for their defection from their orthodox ideological backgrounds.204 One study of Soviet student unrest in the period concludes more generally that “student questions remain[ing] unanswered . . . was one of the most important sources of the emergence of oppositional moods.”205 Some observers therefore used the Krasnopevtsev crisis of 1957 to intensify their already harsh attitude to “liberalism”, honed during earlier discussions of the Secret Speech and of Moskalev’s article. Others, however, blamed the inadvertent public exposure of disputes between liberal and conservative interpretations of the cult of personality, or even a failure to think about the cult at all. The solutions to this crisis in party history were likewise far from clear-cut, expressing a persistent tension between the central ideological watchdog function of party history and its manifest failure to engage intellectually with the party’s past or to make it engaging to its audience. In between the 20th and 22nd congresses, these disagreements generated a dizzying succession of syllabi and multiple local and national shifts in the prestige and prominence that party history and the social sciences occupied within education and propaganda.206 An intensification of ideological vigilance was the policy proposed by those who advocated the strictest disciplining of manifestations of revisionism and dissent. This attitude was premised on the view that there was a single correct perspective on party history, and that the party historian’s job was simply to impart it wholesale to the listener. This intensely sacralized view of party history had practical implications for its instruction (debate would be kept to a minimum), as well as normative implications for its (very high) importance relative to other subjects. Thus, ideologically conservative historians protested vociferously against local and central authorities’ increasingly “conservative” calculations of the hours required to train students in party history, describing them as a

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“negligent and unkind attitude to our subject,” as the rector’s “notorious under-valuing of our discipline, and of the political-educational significance of party history,” and even as a form of “nihilism” that “added grist to our enemies’ mill.”207 Party historians at the university campaigned throughout the late 1950s for more hours to be allotted to their discipline, and for it to lie at the heart of ideological training.208 If such reforms (or counter-reforms) were not implemented to reverse the decline in ideological discipline and in the prestige of party history as a discipline, they warned that the result would be more Krasnopevtsevs. However, although this argument proved persuasive at MGU, leading to the reversal of many of the earlier de-Stalinizing reforms of party history teaching, there remained nationwide anxiety that such an insistence on ideological purity and deference to party history’s elevated status could exacerbate, rather than eliminate, students’ disillusionment.209 This tension between party history’s ideological vigilance and its pedagogical and methodological primitivism pervaded ideological discussions right up to the highest party echelons, and did not dissipate even after Khrushchev’s defeat of the conservative “anti-party group” in 1957.210 The Ministry of Higher Education at both USSR and Russian republic levels also expressed frequent concerns in the late 1950s (and beyond) about the low quality of social sciences teaching, linking dogmatic attitudes and methods to students’ refusal to attend lectures.211 Finally, the Komsomol leadership repeatedly drew attention to these same defects, which in turn had led “astronomical” numbers of students to abandon lessons altogether; a key “link” in the ideological training process had thereby been broken.212 In early 1957, the Komsomol drafted a major resolution on the improvement of students’ ideological training, presenting today’s students as curious and opinionated, but frustrated at being presented with information that had to be “taken on faith . . . and to memorize and parrot back what they hear from the teachers.”213 However, the higher education ministry’s section of party history, the main transmission belt for policy on the discipline, was dominated by conservative representatives of the profession, including several of the more conservative historians from MGU (such as the department head, Savnichenko, who replaced Shapkarin after the Krasnopevtsev investigation). It therefore showed little interest in methodological or syllabus reform, especially after the emergence of a textbook that could take the

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place of the Short Course, both in terms of unimpeachable content and authoritative status.214 In this sense, some of Krasnopevtsev’s colleagues, though unlike him in so many ways, did to some degree share his feeling that slavish orthodoxy in party history might ultimately result in disillusionment or even dissent. Renewed ideological vigilance, while far less strongly linked to dissent than radical de-Stalinization, was therefore still not the perfect solution for party history, as indeed for Soviet literature. In fact, the most durable legacy of the freeze of the late 1950s in both professions was not ideological conformity, but rather the realization of the critical need for an ideological relaunch, which would transcend both the regressive pull of dogmatism and the insistent retrospection of anti-Stalinist glasnost’.215 The next chapter explores the effects on commemoration of Stalin of this shift from anti-revisionism to ideological relaunch during the rest of the Khrushchev era.

chapter th ree

Forgetting within Limits Ce n s o r s h i p an d Pr es erv ati o n o f th e Stalin Cult

In January 1957, Khrushchev raised a toast to Stalin at the Chinese embassy in Moscow, asking that “God grant that every communist will fight for the interests of the working class as Stalin did.” This was the clearest sign yet of how far the leadership had retreated from the antiStalinism of the Secret Speech, or even of the milder party resolution of summer 1956.1 This was also not the first leader’s toast to be interpreted as a shift in party policy, but the unusually close domestic and international attention paid to Khrushchev’s tribute highlights how Stalin’s official posthumous reputation was constructed out of a variety of statements, some official (such as the CC resolution half a year earlier), and some more spontaneous, maybe even in this case drunken.2 The toast reveals an even messier, more provisional side to the memory politics of de-Stalinization than the shifting party lines examined in the previous two chapters. In fact, during the Khrushchev era, there were only two formal party resolutions on Stalin and the cult of personality: the resolution of summer 1956, and the resolution of the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, examined below. These formal resolutions were often contradicted, or at least complicated, by party statements about Stalin in other settings, especially by the impulsive Khrushchev.3 Despite the provisional quality of this decision making, many historians have divided Stalin’s posthumous reputation into relatively neat, 97

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discrete phases: “three funerals,” or the transitions from death to “dismantling” and then “destruction” of the Stalin cult.4 While the more ambiguous intervals surrounding each of these “funerals” are acknowledged, the arc of Stalin’s reputation in the Khrushchev era heads broadly in the direction of demonization and forgetting. These attempts to periodize Stalin’s posthumous reputation highlight the key importance of certain assaults, such as the Secret Speech and the 22nd Congress, but they do not capture the persistent instability of Stalin’s image and the frequent reversals of the seemingly irreversible “destruction” of his reputation. Indeed, even the fact that at least three official phases of Stalin’s reputation can be identified within the first decade after his death is revealing. It suggests an unusually rapid succession of calculations of Stalin’s reputation, which presents a striking contrast to the single calculation of the predominantly positive balance of Mao’s legacy made by the Chinese Communist Party in the early 1980s.5 This decision to deflate (or “routinize”) Mao’s charisma, humanizing him by revealing some errors but preserving most of his legacy (for example, “Mao Zedong thought”), meant that cult iconography from the late 1980s onward became “a ‘floating sign’, a vehicle for nostalgic reinterpretations.”6 While this was partly a product of China’s late twentieth-century economic reforms (which commercialized cult symbols), it provides an instructive contrast to the treatment of Stalin’s legacy in the Soviet Union of the 1950s and the 1960s.7 For in the first decade after Stalin’s death, the absence of a single, clear calculation of Stalin’s reputation—or even a logical succession of calculations—meant that it remained subject to both official and popular reinterpretations, which were anything but playful.8 For the Soviet leadership, Stalin remained intensely meaningful as a regime symbol. On the one hand, his name was inextricably tied up with the formative years of the Soviet system, and its greatest triumph, the war victory: “forgetting” Stalin risked “forgetting” the achievements of the 1930s and 1940s, as the assault on literary and historical glasnost’ in 1956–57 had already started to indicate. On the other hand, the postStalinist Soviet Union wanted to project a more modern image to its citizens and global audience: both terror and dogmatism were backward and immoral, and changes to Stalin’s image were a useful shorthand for the break with these practices. In fact, the 22nd Congress and the early 1960s campaign against the cult of personality, on which this chapter will

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principally focus, explained at length this moral equivalence between praise of Stalin, terror, and dogma, though the righteous fervor of this campaign was itself moderated in the late Khrushchev era. The inherent contradictions of Stalin’s legacy made it consistently dangerous for the Soviet leadership to err too far toward either praise or blame. The tensions between Stalinism (or dogmatism) and reformism, which continued even after Khrushchev’s defeat of the conservative “anti-party group” in mid-1957, were further exacerbated by the unpredictable domestic and foreign politics of the early 1960s.9 “Reputational trajectories,” according to Robert Jansen, depend on a complex interplay between the “salience,” “valence,” and “ownership” of particular historical figures.10 Changes to the reputations of historical figures are constrained by their previous salience (that is, their former prominence, or lack of it, in public debate), valence (how they were previously assessed: unambiguously good or bad reputations take special effort to reverse or modify), and the ownership of their reputation (whether by the state or particular political or social groups). At the start of the Khrushchev era, Stalin was the most salient figure in the Soviet pantheon, the positive valence of his image honed by decades of cult building by the party-state, who owned the rights over his image. Ironically, the period of least salience for Stalin may have been the deflation of his cult in the first three years after his death, when his name all but disappeared from public view, though his influence was pervasive in policymaking by the collective leadership. The Secret Speech made the Stalin question once again highly salient to Soviet politics, arguing that progress was impossible without directly confronting the practical, theoretical, and moral legacies of Stalinism. Jansen himself describes this denunciation as an attempt to dissociate from the “symbolic liability” of Stalin; at the same time, he argues that it “entail[ed] at least some loss of symbolic resources and continuity.”11 In fact, the Soviet leadership was not only aware of this risk, but also took concrete measures to address it in the years after the Secret Speech. As this chapter will argue, Stalin’s image continued to be manipulated in the 1950s, and even after the 22nd Congress, both in order to regulate de-Stalinization’s unintended consequences and in order to instrumentalize the Stalin question to pursue domestic and foreign policy objectives, the latter dominated in the early 1960s by the worsening Sino-Soviet split and the abrupt rises and falls in Cold War tensions. These manipulations

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maintained the salience of Stalin’s image, while continuing to de-stabilize its valence. Khrushchev’s toast in 1957, the starting point of this chapter, offers one indication of his attempts to assert ownership over Stalin’s status, in that instance clearly shaped by a desire to placate the more proStalinist Chinese leadership. From this year onward, Khrushchev wielded unprecedented (though not unlimited) power to define Stalin’s reputation, yet he remained unsure of the balance between good and bad, and between principle and pragmatism: in this sense, throughout the Khrushchev era, Stalin remained far from a figure of “uncontested evil,” even though there were sporadic attempts to “shame” and “disgrace” him and his followers, notably at and after the 22nd Congress.12 The consequences of these ongoing manipulations of Stalin’s image for those writing and reading Soviet texts about Stalin were twofold, as argued below. On the one hand, there was enormous anxiety and confusion in the propaganda state about the valence of Stalin’s image; only in the year following the 22nd Congress was the party line on Stalin clear and easy to implement, though this radical shift in the cult of personality also led, as we will see, to punishment (or scapegoating) of writers who had rehabilitated Stalin too far during the foregoing anti-revisionist campaign. For the most part, authors of history and propaganda texts— one or more levels lower down the hierarchy of the production of the party line on the past—negotiated the shifts in Stalin’s image by deferring to the ownership of party leaders. They attempted to collate the contradictory images of Stalin into a coherent whole, operating in a virtual reality of meta-commentary on party leaders’ discourse.13 On the other hand, the shifts in valence had a somewhat different effect on the readers of these texts. Their responses to the succession of Stalin images during the Khrushchev era suggest that they generated confusion, as readers tried, like authors, to reconcile the successive, contradictory statements on Stalin. However, popular responses to the shifting balance of Stalin’s reputation also reveal some frustration at the lack of moral, as well as historical, consistency in official assessments. In this sense, although the Soviet state maintained disproportionate ownership over Stalin’s image, these responses asserted the right to judge official judgments of the leader, articulating “contested and subcultural” reputations in response to Stalin’s shifting official reputation (albeit often ones that drew on elements of the party’s own discourse).14

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Stalin’s image during this decade was therefore neither a “floating signifier” nor “routinized,” as Mao’s image became from the early 1980s. Rather, Stalin’s continuing reinventions maintained him as a salient figure who provoked intense, often emotional debate rather than playful reinvention.15 However, the pragmatism and moral relativism expressed in these ongoing manipulations of Stalin’s image set an important precedent for later attempts to defuse the moral charge of the Stalin question in the early Brezhnev era.16 B E T W E E N C U LT A N D C R I T I Q U E : I M A G E S O F S TA L I N ,

1957–61 In February 1957, nearly a year after its first plenum since the Secret Speech, the Komsomol held an all-union meeting to discuss the worsening defects in “ideological education” of youth. In 1956, the Komsomol leadership had drawn attention to the harm of Stalin’s cult, but a year later attention had shifted to the terms “Stalinism” and “Stalinist,” exploited by domestic and foreign critics of de-Stalinization in their arguments that the Soviet system had undergone an irreversible deviation—into “Stalinism”— since Lenin’s death. Aleksandr Shelepin explained to his audience that “in our understanding, ‘Stalinist,’ like Comrade Stalin himself, is inseparable from the great calling of communism.” Claiming that “it’s difficult to weigh everything in the balance,” Shelepin nonetheless made clear that the official view of Stalin was now more positive than negative (“in the main things, and in all decisive matters, Stalin was a great fighter for our cause”).17 Where the eradication of the cult of personality had been one of the Komsomol’s top priorities in 1956, by the start of the following year its leadership had resurrected the language of commemoration, and even praise, in order to combat the greater danger of revisionism, especially the iconoclastic claims about Stalinism and Soviet power made at home and in the Eastern bloc (especially Yugoslavia).18 Educational and propaganda materials now emphasized the need to respect leadership in general, and Stalin’s leadership in particular: the “main fundamental thing is the undoubted devotion of Stalin to communism, Marxism-Leninism, and the working class,” advised one primer on leadership and personality in 1957.19 At this time, Soviet agitprop was entering a more stable phase after the ructions of 1956.20 Publications due that year, but then delayed by ongoing policy shifts, such as the Great Soviet Encyclopedia’s entry on Stalin and Maksim Kim’s History of the USSR, the first post-Stalinist

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history textbook to appear after the speech, finally went to press in spring and summer 1957.21 Kim’s History, in particular, bore the scars of the previous year’s tumult. Its first draft, completed before the 20th Congress, had been found by its publishers to be “saturated with the cult” in light of the Secret Speech. The authors of its second draft, constrained by a tight deadline, had then decided that the most efficient way to de-Stalinize the text was to remove all references to Stalin (and indeed to most other leaders). Its final draft, though, had gone too far in the opposite direction, criticizing Stalin and Stalinist terror too strongly.22 Subjected to criticism in the Soviet press, by critics mindful of the increasingly anti-revisionist party line, Kim’s text lacked authoritative status from the start.23 Readers therefore continued to await a more definitive image of Stalin, and their (im)patience was rewarded in 1959, with the new edition of the History of the Communist Party, and an eightieth anniversary tribute to Stalin in Kommunist.24 However, the production and reception of these apparently authoritative texts in fact reveal a crisis in the authority of party discourse.25 The authors and editors of these texts, conscious of the penalties imposed on excessive revisionism and still habituated to a hierarchical model of historical knowledge, wanted to defer to the authority of party discourse about Stalin. Yet even in the short amount of time that had elapsed since the 20th Congress, Stalin’s image had been redefined several times over, from the radical critique of the Secret Speech to the more moderate commemorative discourse of the 1956 resolution and the 1957 revival of praise. James Wertsch has argued that Soviet party history narratives succeeded one another seamlessly, but the difficulties that these writers faced in negotiating between these multiple images of Stalin suggests otherwise.26 Even the CC, whose advice was eagerly sought and closely followed during the editing of both texts, struggled to find a balance between praise and blame. The text’s readers, meanwhile, craved an authoritative text about Stalin, but doubted both texts’ attempts to strike such a balance. Although materials on the drafting of the History are fragmentary, a CC review of the final draft reveals the balanced picture of Stalin and Stalinism that the party leadership intended for the text.27 One key objective had already been fulfilled by late 1958: the text was now “free of the encrustations of Stalin’s cult of personality,” and was clearly distinct from

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its predecessor, the Short Course.28 In prescribing a final round of revisions, the party propaganda sector urged the authors to reduce still further Stalin’s presence in the text, through removing references to Stalin’s death as the defining event of 1953; this was a new era that needed to be lifted out of Stalin’s shadow. On the other hand, it insisted on a more emphatic assertion of the essential importance of collectivization and the early Five Year plans. The resulting text criticized some of Stalin’s errors, including his mistakes in April 1917, but it failed to condemn his role in the Great Terror. Its praise for Stalin’s role in the Civil War and World War II also represented significant retreats from the Secret Speech’s criticisms.29 This elusive balance between deconstructing the Stalin cult and reinforcing the Stalin-era usable past was again sought in the Kommunist article about Stalin, published less than a year later. Although the article came out after the History, and was on a far smaller scale, its authors and editors knew that it would still attract enormous attention, given its sensitive subject matter and its publication on a date that had not been marked with a tribute since 1955. “Everyone is going to read between the lines, weigh it all up . . . to see if there is something here that looks like a revision of the established stance. . . . People react to every new publication as though it might be a new statement on the issue,” explained one member of the journal board during the discussion in early December 1959. This eagerly awaited statement was an “exceptionally complex task”: as a “jubilee article,” it needed to contain a certain amount of praise for its subject, yet, as a statement issued after the party’s 1956 resolution on the cult of personality, it needed to distinguish its language of tribute from that of the cult, while also keeping criticisms within the limits set by that resolution.30 On the one hand, therefore, the editors knew that they had to avoid “any kind of rehabilitation” of Stalin, especially with regard to policies where the post-Stalinist leadership had proclaimed a decisive break with the past (such as foreign policy). The 1956 resolution imposed a further obligation to engage in at least some criticism of Stalin’s failings. Indeed, commentators noted that the first draft of the article adhered slavishly to the text of the resolution, though also conceded that this caution was understandable given that “it’s not easy to write about Stalin.” After all, the dangers of improvisation had already been amply demonstrated by the punishment of incorrect interpretations of Stalin(ism) in 1956–57. 31

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Nonetheless, even if the article did not digress beyond these official statements on Stalin, it remained difficult to weave criticisms together with the praise that the jubilee celebrations also demanded: as the editor Konstantinov admitted, “the line between positive and negative [is] a ticklish business.” The initial approach taken by the authors was to counterbalance each instance of praise with a criticism of Stalin, almost as if they “feared” any mention of his merits. Editors called instead for praise “to be concentrated in one place,” advising the authors to “calmly state his real merits without going back on yourself after every paragraph.” This impetus to “broaden the positive” and to “mark the historical significance of Stalin” verged on a revival of the cult, with commentators alluding to Stalin’s enormous stature (calling him “not just . . . a man, but a man who stood at the head of the CC for more than thirty years”) and above all to his significant theoretical legacy to Marxism-Leninism.32 This revival of praise was justified by Khrushchev’s various statements of praise for Stalin in 1957, and by the jubilee genre of the piece, but above all by the significance of the Stalin question in the fight against revisionism, which had endured since Shelepin’s address to the Komsomol over two years earlier. Throughout the internal discussion, again as Shelepin did, praise of Stalin was used to “strike at bourgeois ideology, at revisionists,” in particular to debunk the use of the term “Stalinist” and other revisionist claims by foreign leaders. When Fedor Il’ichev and Mikhail Suslov vetted the article on behalf of the CC, they too argued against the draft’s “excess of critical material” and in favor of “positive material about the life and revolutionary activity of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin,” reminding the journal of the generic requirements of the “jubilee article,” but referring above all to the need to defend the party’s line on de-Stalinization against revisionist definitions of the “cult of personality.”33 The image of Stalin in this period was the closest that de-Stalinization came to the balanced calculation of Mao’s predominantly positive legacies later attempted by the Chinese Communist Party, with a similar concern to maintain a usable past at a time of potential disorder.34 However, the production of these two narratives also reveals a key difference: the absence of a single, clear calculation of Stalin’s legacy. Instead, historians and journalists had to negotiate between the many different images of Stalin that had accumulated in the years since his death. Robert Tucker, writing about de-Stalinization within a year of Stalin’s death, already

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noted the presence of multiple different approaches to Stalin’s memory.35 The Secret Speech, and its subsequent reinterpretations, introduced further contradictory images of Stalin and Stalinism. As a result, when these supposedly canonical replacements for the Short Course and the Short Biography were published after tortuous editing, they offered a “muddled image” of Stalin, albeit one that represented progress away from the cult, by “reduc[ing] him to a human scale.”36 How, then, did readers cope with this “humanization” and “muddle”? Much of the available evidence of reception of these two narratives— readers’ letters to Kommunist and surveys of reactions of party historians and propagandists, gathered by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism—can hardly be said to be representative of the Soviet population as a whole. Nevertheless, they still reflect the diversity of interpretations that the new commemoration of Stalin provoked, even within communities with pronounced tendencies toward conformity and a strong desire for an unambiguous party line.37 Like the Secret Speech, the new History provoked hundreds of questions as soon as extracts started to appear in the Soviet press, and these questions continued even after the book appeared in its vast print run and instantly became the centerpiece of university syllabi and propaganda. Frequent requests sent to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism for clarification of Stalin’s theoretical legacy, and the status of his works, suggested that the History had still not answered questions, dating back as far as the Secret Speech, such as whether Stalin was a “founding figure” of the party, or a “great Marxist.”38 Others were more assertive in claiming that Stalin was indeed such a “great” figure. One letter, for example, accused the authors of the History of “denigrating the outstanding merits of Stalin,” and of a total “volteface,” since the new History revealed no positive aspects to Stalin at all. Another letter, from no less a figure than Sergei Trapeznikov (already a CC member, and later a leading opponent to de-Stalinization after the end of the Khrushchev era), offered a similarly extreme interpretation, pointing to a disjuncture between the text’s limited evidence of Stalin’s wrongdoing (“half a page” at most) and its apparent attempt to equate him with Trotskii and other enemies. A third response also saw the History as too extreme: “the main thing,” the author explained, “is that the generation growing up now will be able to undervalue [Stalin], even to hate him.”39 Such reactions to the new commemoration of Stalin

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illustrate the tenacity both of belief in the cult, and also of the mentality of denunciation; the presence of any criticisms of Stalin at all signaled to these readers that Stalin must have transformed officially from hero to enemy.40 The possibility of an intermediate, or more balanced, historical assessment between these two commemorative approaches was hard to countenance.41 The elusive nature of the middle ground was also visible in the opposite, and somewhat less frequent, interpretation of the two narratives as insufficiently critical. One propagandist, after reading the History, urged the authors not to “guard Stalin,” and called for a full list of his crimes and for the full “historical truth.”42 In a similar vein, reader responses to the Kommunist article also found that it fell far short of the necessary reckoning with Stalin’s crimes. One claimed that the anniversary tribute had “diminished the mistakes of Stalin, which took place not just in the last years of his life, but over some two decades.” Another begged the editors: “don’t print any more such articles as they soften the stunning impression of those most heinous crimes that Stalin committed against the people and party.”43 Where pro-Stalin arguments could cite Stalin-era and early post-Stalin tributes to Stalin, these anti-Stalin criticisms drew on evidence about the terror, and other crimes revealed in 1956, to portray the new historiography’s softened criticism as an ethically dubious attempt to overlook these recent revelations. In fact, these revelations had made the Stalin cult impossible to revive in party discourse. However, the Secret Speech’s tumultuous consequences made a full denunciation of Stalin equally impossible, since it threatened the collapse of Soviet legitimacy at home and abroad and signaled sympathy with “revisionist” arguments about Stalinism, neither of which the party was remotely prepared to countenance.44 The period between the 20th and 22nd congresses therefore saw experiments, often reluctant, with new forms of praise and criticism of Stalin. The overwhelming importance of the struggle against revisionism dictated a preponderance of praise over criticism, reflected not only in direct representations of Stalin (such as the texts examined above), but also in the revived respect for his works and ideas within Soviet propaganda and education.45 This new moderate commemoration of Stalin did little, however, to moderate opinions of the leader; in fact, it only deepened the polarization

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between “remembering in the glorifying mode and forgetting of the morally repugnant record.”46 Both the panegyrics of the Stalin cult and the radical criticisms of the Secret Speech were more powerful narratives of the Stalinist past than the new balanced, but contradictory, representations of Stalin. This balance outraged those who saw anything less than full recognition of Stalin’s merits as an unforgiveable slight, but it also provoked those who saw any sign of praise for Stalin as an equally unpardonable moral amnesty of his crimes. Stalin’s new image, suspended between cult and criticism, and between moral judgment and pragmatism, therefore remained unstable, despite its inclusion in these supposedly stable texts.47 In the early 1960s, as the party sought to delineate a radically new future in the Third Party Program, while trying to reassert its hegemony over a splintering international communist movement, it needed to address these historical and moral ambiguities. Khrushchev, having celebrated his victory over his Stalinist CC rivals at the 21st Congress, therefore used the next congress in 1961 not only to deepen condemnation of these surviving “Stalinists”, but also, and more important, to initiate a radical shift in Stalin’s posthumous reputation. 48 T H E I M M O R A L I T Y O F C O M M E M O R AT I O N : T H E

22 N D C O N G R E S S Looking back on the 22nd Congress, Lev Kopelev and Raisa Orlova highlighted the contrast with previous party discussions of the Stalin question: the congress “was already not about the mistakes of Stalin, but his crimes . . . they were spoken about more clearly and harshly than at any time previously, and all the speeches were published in the press.”49 After the congress, Orlova observed, it was “not only shameful, but also strange” to continue to believe in the cult image of Stalin.50 Kopelev and Orlova emphasize two new features of the congress’ denunciation of Stalin: the lack of secrecy compared with the Secret Speech and the moral clarity of the public shaming of Stalin and Stalinists, a contrast to the ambiguous balance set in 1956 (especially in the June CC resolution). For Petr Vail’ and Aleksandr Genis, meanwhile, late 1961 marked the true beginning of the Soviet sixties. Of the congress’ culminating decision on the inappropriateness of keeping Stalin’s body in the mausoleum, they observed: “in the spirit of the 1960s, the inappropriateness was not professional, but moral. The sixties rejected Stalin as an immoral person.”51

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While both of these judgments of the congress were intertwined with the intelligentsia myth of the “sixties generation” (shestidesiatniki), they emphasize an important development in the party’s memory politics, which resonated well beyond the liberal intelligentsia, and in some senses beyond the Soviet sixties too. The congress’ criticisms and its decision on the mausoleum effected a shift toward shaming and disgrace that had lasting effects on public and popular memory of Stalin (as well as on the exploration of terror, examined in the next chapter), even though Stalin’s demonization was not permanent, owing to the rapid reemergence of CC opposition to de-Stalinization and the intensification of foreign policy pressures. Still, this temporary shaming permanently stigmatized Stalin for many citizens, and it pathologized the cult of personality, with similarly lasting effect. The congress’ attacks on the cult of personality initiated a comprehensive campaign of criticism and censorship against its symbolism, discourse, and supporters. Even though this never became a campaign to erase the memory of Stalin, this assault on the cult impeded later attempts to revive praise for Stalin by both Khrushchev and his successors. The congress in fact publicized more new information about the role of the anti-party group in the terror (finally making public some of the allegations about terror that had been made in the CC discussions in 1957) than about Stalin’s own role, but there were still plenty of new and shocking revelations about both.52 Stories of elite victims, such as Iona Iakir, which were already familiar from the Secret Speech, had new details added to them, providing more elaborate explanations of the guilt of both Stalin and the anti-party group. New stories of terror told at the congress largely furnished proof of the latter’s culpability, but they also frequently conflated the two sets of culprits, passing collective judgment on both.53 Even testimony that repeated the revelations of the Secret Speech was still striking by virtue of its public performance at this official gathering, as Kopelev and Orlova observed. A similar moral clarity illuminated the congress’ guidelines on commemoration, at least as far as Stalin was concerned. There was some disagreement over the punishment of Stalin’s surviving accomplices, Molotov, Malenkov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov, reflecting the support that the latter group still had within the CC (which would continue to affect party policy on the cult of personality later in the Khrushchev era).54

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However, this did little to soften the congress’ advocacy of posthumous punishment of Stalin himself. The lack of explicit calls for moderation in party statements, of the kind added to the end of the Secret Speech and amplified in the June 1956 resolution, along with the powerful rhetoric of Khrushchev’s concluding speech to the congress and the “highly symbolic decision” on the mausoleum, all suggested that the party line had switched to vengeful condemnation and iconoclasm of Stalin and his cult of personality.55 Indeed, while condemning Stalin’s flouting of party rules during the terror, Khrushchev announced: “Any leader who forgets this will pay a harsh price for such mistakes. I should say, pays the price during his lifetime, otherwise the people will not forgive him after death, as happened with the condemnation of the cult of personality of Stalin.” 56 Reacting earlier to the Secret Speech, many individuals—and a few party organizations—had appealed for just this kind of definitive judgment and wholesale iconoclasm.57 After the 22nd Congress, moral judgment of Stalin and enthusiastic support for removal of cult symbolism was finally not only possible, but even became obligatory. As the congress was discussed throughout the Soviet Union in late 1961, it was overwhelmingly understood as an outright condemnation of Stalin and a radical shift in his commemoration. From the congress’ potentially ambivalent discourse, listeners appropriated and performed a script of moral revulsion and punitive iconoclasm, expressing a mixture of genuine disgust together with confidence in reading the newly clarified official image of Stalin. Across the Soviet Union, party meetings about the 22nd Congress featured far more coherent and uniform discussion of the cult of personality than had occurred after the Secret Speech, though these discussions did revive some key elements of the 1956 discussions: terror testimony, claims of the sanctity of the mausoleum and, above all, angry judgments of Stalin.58 At the core of most local meetings was testimony of the local ramifications of Stalinist terror, imitating the congress’ succession of terror narratives from republican, regional, and city leaders, and responding to Khrushchev’s invitation to document the “whole story” of each victim. Much of this testimony also maintained the party leadership’s predominant focus on 1937. In North Ossetia, where there had been resistance to de-Stalinization in 1956, a construction director listed local leaders who had been repressed “without any basis” during the Great Terror.59 The

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head of the Buriat writers’ union meanwhile revealed that the cult of personality had not only prevented Soviet literature from telling the full truth, but had also led to the arrests of ten local writers in 1937: therefore, as he explained, “we have our own literary scores to settle with the period of the cult of personality.”60 At one meeting in Kabardino, though, the most striking and locally resonant example of Stalin’s wrongdoing was the later, 1944 deportation of the Balkar people, who, it was recounted, “were dispersed to various regions of our Central Asian republic, where they live in difficult circumstances.”61 Another feature of the 20th Congress’ discussions that was revived, but this time actively encouraged, was advocacy of changes to the mausoleum. Indeed, responses to the congress were dominated by endorsements of the mausoleum decision (which had already been implemented before most discussions of the congress took place). These replicated the congress’ own framing of the decision, but also sounded echoes of the futile popular requests of 1956, notably their tropes of sanctity and incongruity.62 In late 1961, local performances of approval for the changes to the mausoleum could quickly and easily reprise this discourse, describing the mausoleum as a “shrine” and the “holy of holies,” no longer to be defiled by Stalin’s presence.63 Stalin no longer deserved to be in the mausoleum, and did not belong there (ne mesto), confidently asserted speakers at party meetings around the country.64 Stalin’s removal from the mausoleum was not only a way to address the “incongruity” with the “holy” Lenin, but it was also a way to perform his “guilt” and “responsibility” for the heinous crimes of the period.65 As one Moscow plant manager explained, the “logic” of the decision derived from the guilt of Stalin “on whose conscience is the blood of thousands of innocent people.”66 Such sentiments were also expressed in individual letters, which suggested that Stalin’s continuing presence in the mausoleum had been genuinely troubling, and the new judgment a sincere relief. One letter sent to Pravda, for example, was glad to see an end to the “offensive situation with the mausoleum,” where Stalin had been honored alongside Lenin despite having “sown grief and horror in families and among the people with his illegal and monstrous acts.” The sense of disgust was especially pronounced in letters from victims of terror, who “knew” Stalin’s guilt only too well, but could now assert it confidently to party

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leaders, since they had themselves publicly confirmed it at the congress.67 A certain Krylova, from Leningrad, for example, described herself as “one of the sufferers” in her letter to Khrushchev, offering detailed testimony of imprisonment and rehabilitation. She urged Khrushchev, who had himself revealed “terrible truths” at the congress, to remember the Gulag return—“imagine how people looked in their ripped padded prison jackets, without shelter, without family”—and to “listen to the voice of human suffering,” concluding “I am their witness, I’m already fifty-eight years old, burn Stalin’s body and let Voroshilov take the ashes.”68 A similar letter, from a male victim of the Great Terror, also approved removal of the “remains of Stalin (I can’t bring myself to say, his body or ashes)” from the mausoleum. This writer, Gorskii, opened his letter with a description of an encounter with a fellow victim in an NKVD prison in 1938, who had assured him that “the people have been humiliated. The people will not forget this.” Fulfilling this prediction about memory, the remainder of the letter insisted on remembering how “every second or third person was suspected and accused of treason and betrayal of the motherland for no reason,” and then linked these memories to the forgetting of Stalin, whom the author could “not bring [him]self” to imagine in human, corporeal terms.69 A final example of the linkage between testimony of terror and the impossibility of commemorating Stalin came in a letter from a man arrested soon after Kirov’s murder in 1934, a certain Chukanov. “Such injustice rained down on me,” he explained, “I lost all of my best conscious life.” After his release from the camps, he had not been able to visit the mausoleum “while Stalin was there, who had caused my loved ones, my relatives, members of the party, too much grief.” However, the decision to criticize Stalin at the congress and then to remove Stalin’s body had made him feel “as though nothing had happened in the past, and such a broad space opened up before us all.” Now the congress’ criticisms and the subsequent iconoclasm had “put an end to Stalin’s identity,” enabling this victim to put an end to his own trauma and to advance towards the “broad space” of the future together with the Soviet collective.70 Similar, though less searingly personal, evocations of the possibility of moving forward from suffering through the purging of the Stalin cult also featured in several public meetings, a sign of its centrality to the congress’ own discourse.71

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Individuals and local organizations frequently also proposed local changes to cult symbolism to purge their immediate environment of the cult of personality.72 While such local initiatives on renaming and changes to visual culture had almost always been reversed or quashed in 1956, now they were encouraged, and invariably approved and implemented by local (and then, if necessary, central) authorities.73 At the “Stalin” mine in Lugansk, for example, a rehabilitated terror victim (now editor of the mine newspaper) framed his request for renaming the mine with harrowing details of his personal experience of arrest and imprisonment. The decision was approved by the party organization, and swiftly implemented by the obkom.74 Where renaming required sanctioning from higher authorities, as with city names, they were equally quickly implemented, though the Soviet press was careful to emphasize that they had originated as demands from local populations keen to free themselves of the cult of personality.75 Collective memories of suffering also justified requests for other kinds of changes to symbolism, as in Chechnia-Ingushetiia, where one raikom secretary, “speaking about the difficult experience of the ChechenIngush people in the period of the cult of personality, asked on behalf of the district party organization and all workers to remove all monuments and portraits of Stalin, wherever they might be.”76 Again, such changes were already being implemented even as discussion of the congress continued: a mere fortnight after the end of the 22nd Congress, Moscow was all but stripped of Stalin monuments and portraits, whether through stealthy removal or awkward repaintings, which erased Stalin from portraits of particular aesthetic or historical worth.77 Major Stalin monuments previously displayed in cities including Leningrad, Rostov, Volgograd, and Stavropol’ had all been removed by the end of 1961.78 Anecdotes about the methods used to remove the symbolism of the cult were inventive and varied wildly, reflecting the lack of popular participation.79 The party’s harsh criticisms, and these emphatic local performances of condemnation, largely dispelled doubts concerning Stalin’s official status and the appropriate treatment of his cult, with local party officials reporting far fewer questions from the Soviet population than the enormous number of enquiries submitted after the Secret Speech.80 There were some isolated requests for Stalin’s “merits” to be clarified, probably

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reflecting Khrushchev’s use of the term early in the congress, before the “mud-slide descended on Stalin’s reputation.”81 A few observers were also perplexed by the swift and secretive removal of monuments and portraits, as in a question in Belorussia, which wondered why such removals were happening when they had not been explicitly ordered by the congress.82 The virtual absence of such questions suggests, though, that most listeners grasped that the congress had definitively tipped the balance away from Stalin’s merits, and necessitated radical changes to his cult. Faced with a tidal wave of condemnation and iconoclasm, both proStalinist and preservationist sentiments also disappeared almost completely from public view. In the Georgian republic, for example, where the Secret Speech had generated open protest in 1956, heavy surveillance of reactions to the 22nd Congress uncovered only isolated expressions of discontent.83 There were a few covert protests against the mausoleum decision, such as the daubing of a tribute to Stalin on the side of a tank in Tbilisi during the night after the resolution, and the distribution of anonymous leaflets in the city immediately after the removal of the body.84 More characteristic, though, was a sullen silence, especially after the end of the congress and the formal ratification of the mausoleum decision: as one disgruntled listener in Batumi explained, “it’s hardly as if anyone is going to come out against that decision now.”85 Even so, there was some evidence of “moods against renaming” in the republic.86 In one Tbilisi factory named after Stalin, for example, some workers tried to oppose the renaming decision, referring to Stalin’s “merits.” The renaming went ahead, and further “explanations” of the necessity of stripping Stalin’s name from the factory were implemented among the worker population.87 Such “moods against renaming” were not, however, limited to the Georgian republic. A similar incident occurred in the Perm’ Stalin factory, where one worker spoke out against plans to rename the factory, claiming that workers had been fed better under Stalin. The speech was openly supported by two other workers, and in the overall vote on renaming, objections and abstentions outnumbered the votes in favor of the proposal. Factory authorities responded by holding another meeting, at which the ringleader of the protest was forced to repent. The new vote on renaming, held at the end of this meeting, passed the motion unanimously, the workers now evidently understanding the impossibility of

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further protest.88 In Stalingrad, too, the decision to rename the city, to remove its tribute to Stalin, was supposed to be as swift and unanimous as the other city renamings rushed through the Supreme Soviet in the winter of 1961, but in fact it provoked significant opposition and controversy among the local population, which was much harder to quell than this minor controversy in Perm’.89 Local inhabitants’ resistance to the name change revealed the polyvalence of symbolism defined by party and state authorities in purely cultic terms, but, just as elsewhere, this attachment to the city’s place name, and associated traditions, was quickly silenced, and stigmatized as attachment to Stalinism. Like local leaders around the country, Stalingrad’s leaders had immediately grasped the implications of the 22nd Congress for the numerous local symbols of the cult of personality, which had lingered after the incomplete de-Stalinization of the city in 1956. Like their counterparts in other locales, they swiftly implemented measures to tackle these remnants, removing the enormous Stalin monument from the banks of the Volga-Don canal and instructing museum directors to remove the cult of personality as quickly as possible from exhibitions.90 The name of the city, the most conspicuous of the city’s tributes to Stalin, was part of this wave of reforms, and the resolution to change the name as swift and straightforward as these other decisions. The city party organization’s discussion was unanimous from the start, not only on the question of whether to rename Stalingrad, but also on what the new name should be.91 However, the local population’s discussion of this renaming (though the decision was by then a fait accompli) was much less unanimous, necessitating a campaign to marginalize and silence attachment to the city’s old name. The local propaganda campaign to secure popular support for the name change focused overwhelmingly on the reasons for eliminating the old name, rather than the adoption of the new one.92 The scale of this campaign and the ferocious intensity of its anti-Stalinist rhetoric (far outstripping the bland discussions at the city party organization, and even the angry discussions of the 22nd Congress in other parts of the Soviet Union) suggest that the local authorities had anticipated resistance from the city’s population.93 The campaign emotively highlighted both the toll of Stalinist terror among the city’s population and the genuine heroism of the population in the Civil War and World War II, which had been largely silenced in Stalinist historiography. Typical of this tense blend of negative

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and positive memories was a meeting of a party organization of a local supermarket, where the party organization secretary elaborated on the local dimensions of 1937 (as well as referring to some of the elite victims mentioned at the congress) to prove Stalin’s responsibility for the terror, concluding, “for thirty-four years our town has borne Stalin’s name. But now we say no! We need to give the city a name worthy of its traditions, achievements, and fame!” These intertwined memories presented the name change as both a morally justified purging of the city’s tribute to Stalin and an overdue commemoration of the city’s real heroes.94 This name change was presented as both an emotional catharsis and a rational response to the new historical revelations about the cult of personality. At a meeting at the local communications administration, for example, inhabitants were urged “to put [them]selves in the place of the relatives of the dead and to understand that our city cannot bear Stalin’s name.” The rationale of the name change thus depended not just on understanding the facts of terror, but also on sympathy with the feelings of terror victims and disgust at Stalin’s deeds.95 A speech by a factory worker elsewhere in the city likewise evoked the feelings of horror of watching the search for enemies in 1937, but also urged a rational acceptance of the need to change the city’s name, saying: “the name of Stalingrad is a glorious name, but we must be governed by reason, not emotion, and we must honestly and directly state that the city cannot bear Stalin’s name.”96 Thus, while there were few limits on the emotive expression of terror memories, other more positive memories of the Stalin era—such as nostalgia for the old name—had to be brought under the control of reason. The rational acceptance of the need to abandon the old name was further exemplified in the exemplary attitude of “native inhabitants” (korennye zhiteli), used in many meetings to assure listeners that the city’s name could be removed without causing distress or damage. 97 Some other inhabitants, though, took a different attitude to the memories embedded in the city’s old name. Visiting the city soon after the name change, foreign observers noted widespread, but mostly tacit, frustration with the disappearance of the city’s old name.98 Earlier, when this name change was still (apparently) up for discussion, opposition sometimes emerged into the open: substantial votes were cast against the renaming in several institutions around the city, for example, and a few inhabitants voiced their disagreement publicly.99 Some of these

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objections expressed pro-Stalinist sentiment similar to that occasionally uncovered in other parts of the Soviet Union after the congress: at the Red October factory, for example, a handful of workers objected to the name change because it was too “cruel” toward Stalin, and ignored his “merits” completely.100 At a technical college in the city, one student, a certain Trushkin, had understood more clearly that the new criticisms of Stalin overshadowed such merits, but still found it hard to part with belief in Stalin inculcated since childhood. “I didn’t have such facts at my disposal,” he explained, “and it’s hard for me to get my head around it.”101 For the most part, though, opposition to changing the city’s name was grounded less in an attachment to Stalin than in the belief that this invented tradition had accumulated new meanings and resonances over the course of the Stalin era, especially the wartime period. Though fragmented, these memories of Stalingrad’s brief but eventful history expressed a strong sense of local pride, but also represented Stalingrad as a source of national pride and international prestige, a myth whose power might be forfeited if the name were forgotten. One student at the mechanical institute, for instance, argued for preservation on the grounds that “the whole world knows about Stalingrad’s feats, so the city’s historical significance must be preserved.”102 Another such incident occurred at a closed enterprise in the city, where a certain Vrublevskaia, a native Stalingrader, referred to the city’s “unionwide and worldwide fame,” and concluded: “no name could resonate like Stalingrad.”103 The closest that this local collective memory came to collective expression was in the city’s pedagogical institute, where several students engaged in “attempts to speak out against the renaming of the city, since it had worldwide fame and was famous far beyond the borders of our fatherland as Stalingrad,” causing a complete breakdown of the meeting.104 The renaming discussion and voting resumed only a few days later, after intensive propaganda work by the Komsomol and party authorities to rid the students of this “habituation to the name of the town.”105 This heavy-handed intervention suggests that, despite Stalingrad’s exceptional resonance and fame, there could be no exceptions to the nationwide campaign against the cult of personality. Multi-faceted arguments about the city’s old name were immediately dismissed as intellectually backward and morally dubious, reductively diagnosed as a symptom of resistance to the truth about Stalin and terror. For instance, at

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the technical college, Trushkin, who had tried to elicit sympathy for his difficulty in adjusting to the truth about Stalin, provoked only scorn from his fellow students. They responded to his admission of difficulty in assimilating the new facts about Stalin by overwhelming him with yet more facts about Stalin’s “great illegal acts.” They also described his failure to grasp the moral and practical implications of these facts as “backward,” as in one attack from a student, only a year older, who claimed of Trushkin that “he hasn’t seen anything of life yet, and doesn’t know that previously people were arrested for one word, whereas now there’s total democracy.” The “total democracy” of this discussion then resulted in unanimous approval of the name change.106 At the mechanical institute, where the objection to the name change had not even mentioned Stalin, it too was caricatured in a similar vein, as a failure to grasp the true extent of Stalin’s “most grievous crimes.” In response to the suggestion to preserve the name, fellow students and faculty unleashed a flood of testimony of terror, including emotive tales of individual and family memories of repression, and of the collective trauma of the institution in the late 1930s, when many students had been arrested or killed. This testimony reemphasized that Stalin’s name could only evoke “shame” and “hatred,” taking precedence over any other associations that the name “Stalingrad” might evoke. A new name, free of the taint of Stalinism, would be the only way to recapture and reflect the city’s true “historical significance.”107 Multi-faceted arguments about the city’s collective memory were thus consistently reduced to the immoral desire to deny and forget Stalin’s crimes. This was a blunt but effective weapon, helping to ensure full unanimity when new votes on renaming were organized.108 In fact, even after public unanimity had been achieved, terror testimony remained a useful means to invent traditions around the city’s new name. At the meeting of Stalingrad obkom, held to discuss the 22nd Congress two weeks after the renaming, pride of place was granted to a Civil War veteran and victim of the Great Terror, a certain Stepaniatov. He first reiterated the case for stripping the city of Stalin’s name, referring to his traumatic autobiography, and then inserted the new city name into a heroic narrative of his, and the city’s, triumphs, announcing: “more than once, with weapon in hand, it’s been necessary to defend the Volga fortress—our dear town. And in that proud name—Volgograd—we see the embodiment of our military and labor achievements.”109

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The new attitude to the cult of personality ushered in by the 22nd Congress could not tolerate the more nuanced views of many inhabitants of Stalingrad. Their objections to the name change were shamed as nostalgia for Stalinism, rather than being treated as an expression of pride in the city’s achievements in the Stalin era (or as reasonable warnings about forgetting them). Although the propaganda campaign surrounding the city’s name change was particularly intensive, there was little else to distinguish it from other decisions to rename cities with considerably less fame and resonance.110 The only concession to the strength of local feeling was the decision to allow the word “Stalingrad” to be used in the Museum of the Defense of Stalingrad, but only in the context of the battle.111 Otherwise, as soon as the name change had been confirmed, the city name was subjected to the same censorship as in the nationwide campaign against the language of the cult, which continued beyond 1961. Like the quashing of local resistance in Stalingrad, this campaign combined elimination of the cult’s symbolism with moral judgment of its defenders, as the next section explores. THE NECESSITY OF CENSORSHIP

In February 1963, the state censors (Glavlit) investigated a book about World War II published in Dneprpetrovsk, and reported its findings to the CC ideological department. Its report noted that the book’s account of the war was written “without critical enough analysis and without taking account of the decisions of the 20th and 22nd congresses about the cult of personality.” As proof, it offered the fact that the book contained many documents signed by Stalin and workers’ tributes to the leader, cited “without any good reason.” The book, the censor concluded, “cannot help in the correct understanding of the Central Committee about the cult of personality,” and measures had been taken to remove the book from circulation. Having discussed the “wrong [porochnyi] practice of publishing this kind of literature,” the CC ideological department sent employees to Dneprpetrovsk to deal with the issue locally, instructed the Institute of Marxism-Leninism to exercise stricter control over publications, and held a large meeting of archivists to warn them about the seriousness of such errors.112 The same month, another investigation uncovered similar problems in Krasnoiarsk. “Vulgar political errors” had been found in a textbook for

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the city’s pedagogical institute, sent to press more than a year after the 22nd Congress. In direct contradiction of the congress’ resolutions, the book contained many Stalin speeches, cited “with no necessity whatsoever.” Glavlit blamed the regional party authorities, and also the Russian republican educational ministry, for failing to catch this and other “harmful [vrednye], out-of-date materials and textbooks” before publication. It instructed local authorities to destroy all existing copies of the books, and to ensure that those responsible were identified and punished, while also warning the education ministry not to allow any more such mistakes. Two days after receiving Glavlit’s report, the CC itself also passed a resolution denouncing the “vulgar political errors” in the local publishing industry and reiterating the obligations on the local leadership and education ministry.113 These interventions by Glavlit and the CC indicate a decisive shift in the meaning, and official tolerance, of the cult of personality beginning immediately after the 22nd Congress and fully entrenched by the time of these controversies in early 1963. Any tribute to Stalin, or any vestige of the old Stalin-centric narrative, was now “harmful” and “wrong.” In April 1962, for instance, when Glavlit discovered that many museums in Leningrad were still heavily influenced by the cult, they instructed the Leningrad obkom to take immediate “measures to exclude the display of materials propagandizing the cult of personality of Stalin . . . whose display . . . will cause serious harm to workers’ education.”114 When censors uncovered several similar problems in museums elsewhere, they instructed museums around the country to “purge” (ochistit’) their displays of remnants of the cult.115 As the tone and terminology of these interventions illustrate, Glavlit’s involvement in policing the cult after the 22nd Congress was reminiscent of the Stalinist kampaniia, though it still maintained a distinction between erasing the cult and erasing all mention of Stalin, deeming the latter excessive.116 After the 22nd Congress, the many remaining traces of the cult of personality were swiftly identified and purged from Soviet publications and public spaces. Soon after the congress, for example, the Ministry of Culture issued instructions to censor or remove from circulation any texts, or parts thereof, where Stalin was praised, and all commemorative materials about Stalin’s sixtieth and seventieth birthdays and the 19th Party Congress.117 Censors’ definition of the term “cult of personality”

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included praise for Stalin, narratives structured as though Stalin was the sole agent of any importance, and even the use of the adjective “stalinskii.”118 This expansion of the definition of the cult and the initiation of a decisive purge of its language offered a much clearer set of guidelines for censors and editors than the ambiguous party line between the 20th and 22nd congresses, but it also imposed heavier penalties for failing to catch the cult. Not all texts found to contain the cult of personality necessitated CC intervention, as in the 1963 incidents in Krasnoiarsk and Dneprpetrovsk. Most such mistakes were instead dealt with internally by Glavlit, though their consequences were still serious, sometimes triggering wholesale investigations of the regional censorship bodies responsible, to underscore the urgency and importance of eliminating the cult.119 While such failures to recognize and censor the cult after the 22nd Congress were difficult to understand, in light of the congress’ emphatic critique of Stalin, the presence of the cult in texts published before this volte-face was surely more understandable. As argued in the previous chapter, some praise for Stalin had been revived for anti-revisionist purposes in and after 1957, and it was generally safer in the late 1950s to err toward reviving the cult than to risk being accused of revisionist attacks on Stalinism. Yet after the 22nd Congress, texts published in the preceding few years were also swept into the wave of criticism of the cult of personality. In the first few months after the 22nd Congress, for example, Gospolitizdat and the Soviet Higher Education Ministry, between them responsible for the majority of educational and propaganda texts, took a fresh look at their existing textbooks and curricula, scrutinizing them for signs of the cult.120 Many works written in line with the anti-revisionist priorities of the late 1950s were now found to contain entirely unacceptable levels of the cult. As in 1956, editors apologized and pledged to remove it to very tight deadlines, promising to complete even daunting tasks such as rewriting the History of the Communist Party within a few months (though the new edition, analyzed below, actually came out toward the end of 1962). Such internal samokritika and promises to abide by the new party line on the cult were usually enough to forestall any more emphatic or public punishment. There was one notable exception, though: several history texts by members of the MGU history faculty, published before the 22nd Congress, most notably a 1961 lecture course on party history sources,

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were found to be saturated with the cult.121 These Stalinist texts had already attracted some criticism before the congress; after it, they became national emblems not only of the persistence of cult language, but also of the deeper, more insidious problem of cult belief. The local shaming of opposition to Stalingrad’s renaming had stigmatized it as a sign of belief in the Stalin cult, and the national humiliation of MGU’s historians expressed a similar intolerance of both the language and beliefs of the Stalin cult. The attempted relaunch of the Soviet project in 1961 had sharply intensified concerns about the dangers of Stalinism and dogmatism, which had never entirely abated even at the height of late 1950s anti-revisionism. MGU’s party historians had played an important role in that anti-revisionist drive, but in the early 1960s, they were repeatedly, demonstratively punished for their serious errors with regard to the cult of personality.122 Like Moskalev’s article and Krasnopevtsev’s leaflets in the 1950s, MGU’s new transgressive texts instigated a campaign of criticism and punishment, but unlike in the Moskalev case, the immediate involvement of the CC provided a set of guidelines from the very start to criticize the books and their authors as “harmful” and politically “unsound,” from departmental right up to national level.123 Singing in this chorus of criticism were victims of MGU’s earlier anti-revisionism, such as Burdzhalov, who relished the chance to take revenge on the department at the allunion historians’ congress in 1962.124 In a further switch from the priorities of 1956–57, there was now greater concern about pro-Stalinist students “under the influence of the cult of personality,” such as the presence of the cult in these party history texts, than about those whose “youth” and “inexperience” led them temporarily to take de-Stalinization too far.125 Like the revisionism of the 1950s, too, MGU’s Stalinism of the early 1960s required not just exposure, but also explanation. Private accusations of the department historians’ personal attachment to Stalin and Stalinist methods were legion among the Soviet intelligentsia, and at the all-union historians’ congress of late 1962, some of these allegations went public.126 Some colleagues sympathetically admitted that de-Stalinization was not “mechanical,” but rather “a torturous process” of “changing values.”127 However, the recalcitrant author of one of the condemned texts was also criticized as a willful adherent to the Stalin cult, likened to party

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officials who publicly criticize Stalin, but “arriving at home, atone for their sins in front of a Stalin portrait.”128 Ultimately, though, historians’ personal Stalinism was less important than the institutional Stalinism, which had rendered the department a “remnant of the cult.”129 Chief among the failings identified was dogmatism and a corresponding lack of scholarly discussion—both of which had left the party historians unable to react properly to de-Stalinization. This was partly a bureaucratic problem—the proper review process had simply not been organized for the textbooks—but above all it was a matter of the department’s culture of debate, or lack of it.130 Now the fervent antirevisionism of the late 1950s was reconceptualized as “Stalinist” suppression of debate. For instance, the aggressive attacks on the 1958 collectivization debate, justified at the time in terms of fear of dissent, were now blamed for “prevent[ing] the carrying out of creative discussion of academic problems in the future,” and for preventing the overcoming of the cult more generally.131 Summing up the switch in priorities, the faculty now claimed that the department, “leading the fight against revisionism . . . didn’t notice that it had crept into incorrigible dogmatism.”132 While at least one author of one of the offending texts still insisted on defending his prioritization of anti-Trotskyism over anti-Stalinism, the department and faculty understood the new priorities almost immediately.133 The department and faculty engaged in rituals of self-criticism for their mistakes with regard to the cult of personality, including a historiography conference at which criticism of Stalinism was made obligatory.134 Thus, although MGU’s party historians were indeed “subject to considerable attention because of the charges of crypto-Stalinism,” they escaped severe punishment by showing themselves willing and able to submit to the new “party line.”135 The maximum punishment meted out to offenders was a “warning” on their party records, and even the much-criticized head of department, Savnichenko, retained his post for years to come. 136 For MGU’s party historians, then, the move against the cult of personality in 1961 was initially catastrophic and shameful, but in the longer term, it signaled a clearer party line than the mixed signals of the late 1950s. Indeed, the harsh criticisms of Stalin during the rest of the Khrushchev era were generated not only by genuine moral outrage, but also by a desire (and ability) to follow the new, more clearly critical party line on Stalin. However, this line itself did not remain clear and

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consistent. In the late Khrushchev era, Stalin’s image continued to be manipulated under pressure from political imperatives, blurring his reputation and reigniting debate over the Stalin question and the party’s policies of de-Stalinization. S TA L I N ’ S

“ R E P U TAT I O N A L T R A J E C T O R Y ,” 1962–64 After the 22nd Congress, Stalin was not a non-person.137 Although Stalin’s cult of personality now invited censorship and punishment, Glavlit continued to differentiate between Stalin and the anti-party-group, subjecting only the latter to a kampaniia. A typical censorship circular, of January 1962, consigned seventeen texts by members of the anti-party group to the special depository (spetskhran), but only one work by Stalin (his Short Biography) accompanied them there.138 Although Stalin’s works were heavily criticized, and removed from university syllabi revised after the congress, they were not formally withdrawn from circulation.139 Indeed, when censors in one region of Mordovia ordered the complete withdrawal of all literature by and about Stalin, the central censorship authorities deemed this excessive (peregib), and warned against “organizing a campaign.”140 Likewise, at the end of 1962, censors did not allow publication of several Soviet history school textbooks where “Stalin’s surname was entirely excluded.” Sending the books back for “reworking,” the officials explained that this total erasure of references to Stalin was also excessive.141 Instead of being obliterated, therefore, Stalin’s image continued to be redefined after the 22nd Congress. At least in the first year after the congress, the clearest guideline was the obligation to criticize Stalin, as MGU’s party historians had rapidly surmised. Indeed, immediately after the congress, this line had been confirmed at a CC ideological department three-day meeting where almost all of the high-ranking speakers criticized Stalin and the harmful effects of his cult at length.142 Subsequent meetings of Soviet writers and historians in late 1961 and 1962 continued to engage in broad and deep criticism of Stalin and his legacies.143 In contrast to the 20th Congress and its aftermath, even very strong criticisms of Stalin at such gatherings did not attract investigation and punishment. While this tolerance of Stalin criticism might be attributed to the iconoclastic momentum generated by the congress, the obligation to criticize Stalin in fact continued, and even strengthened, after the propaganda

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campaign surrounding the 22nd Congress ended. In an echo of the punishment of MGU’s historians, several historical journals were criticized and investigated in 1962 for insufficient eradication of the cult of personality.144 The proportion of anti-Stalin articles in the journals increased notably, and remained high throughout the remainder of the Khrushchev era. They formed part of a larger wave of Stalin criticism that swept through Soviet journalism, historiography, and literature in the early 1960s.145 Particularly conspicuous was the increased criticism of Stalin’s errors in collectivization and war planning, as well as a marked intensification of condemnation of Stalin’s role in the terror (which the next chapter analyzes in further detail).146 The second edition of The History of the Communist Party was hastily drafted and published during the peak year of Stalin criticism, 1962, and the contrast with the guidelines for the first edition reflected the new commemorative priorities. In October 1962, the party propaganda sector instructed Ponomarev and his team of authors to increase still further the criticism of the cult of personality in their final draft, and to give a more detailed account of Stalin’s mistakes in 1917, the opposition to him at the 17th Party Congress in 1934, his role in the terror, the damage that he had caused to Soviet science, and his erroneous formulations of the nature of the state.147 All of these criticisms had been at best muted, and at worst dangerous for those who made them, between the 20th and 22nd congresses. Now they were deemed obligatory in the most authoritative narrative of the party past. Party historians who gathered at the Moscow gorkom to discuss the new edition in early 1963 voiced approval of this intensified criticism of Stalin’s errors, and some even openly called for a more detailed reckoning of Stalin’s errors and crimes, showing again that such critiques of the cult of personality were no longer transgressive.148 However, even as the new History was being published and discussed, there were signs that the historical and moral clarity of this party line might not endure. As early as summer 1962, Petr Pospelov, editor of the official multi-volume histories of World War II and of the Communist Party, had advertised a more moderate line on Stalin than the press of the time, promising to historian colleagues that his forthcoming history of the party would be “absolutely free of any kind of exaggeration of either the positive or the negative role of Stalin,” and would not be

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“one-sided.”149 Later that same year, he observed at a gathering of Soviet social scientists that the second edition of the History of the Communist Party had “fundamentally revealed the many mistakes of Stalin,” indicating a desire to curtail any deeper investigation.150 Later still, in revising volumes of his war history that had been published prior to the 22nd Congress, he agreed to ensure that “in future print runs, the number of mentions of Stalin’s name is reduced wherever possible,” and to increase criticism of Stalin’s errors, but at the same time asserted that “this has nothing to do with silencing his name” or of confusing the history of war with “the history of the cult of personality during the war.”151 An enormously influential figure in shaping public memory of Stalinism, not least because of his tight control over the archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Pospelov suggested through these interventions that commemoration of Stalin was in practice starting to lean toward a more moderate balance between positive and negative, and toward curtailing exploration of the cult of personality.152 Other signals from the party elite after 1962 also suggested that the clarity of the 22nd Party Congress’ condemnation was starting to diminish. At a meeting with the artistic intelligentsia in March 1963, held to rein in the thaw, Khrushchev criticized Stalin’s faults, but nonetheless deemed him a “Marxist,” “devoted to communism,” the first praise since the 22nd Congress.153 This “good Stalin” image was not durable either, though: a few months later, both Khrushchev and Il’ichev switched back to harsh criticism of Stalin.154 These pendulum swings in 1963 were typical of the party’s manipulations of Stalin’s image in response to broader political and ideological imperatives, which had been ongoing ever since the Secret Speech. Although much more short-lived than the revival of praise between the 20th and 22nd congresses, Khrushchev’s March 1963 reassertion of Stalin’s merits was intended to fulfill a similar function: to counter the more serious threat of anti-Soviet tendencies in the Soviet intelligentsia (largely based on their “gloomy” picture of the 1930s, as the next chapter investigates). The reversion to obligatory harsh criticism in late 1963 and early 1964 was a response to growing tensions with China and Albania, which once again made neo-Stalinism a more serious danger than excessive criticism of Stalin.155 Khrushchev’s final years in power were marked by intensified leadership rivalry, and by increasingly chaotic shifts in domestic and foreign policy.156 The Stalin

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question played an important role in these policy debates and in-fighting, as it had in the 1950s. Now, though, the emphatic moral critique of the early 1960s made these ongoing shifts in reputation especially problematic, particularly for those explaining the party line to the Soviet public. In the late Khrushchev era, as indeed throughout it, the principal ideological journal Kommunist came under pressure from its readership to clarify the contradictions in Stalin commemoration. One exasperated reader in mid-October 1964 wrote to the journal with a question that evoked the confusion that these contradictions were still causing in what would turn out to be the final weeks of Khrushchev’s leadership: “in the end, who was Stalin really? When will we finally find out the whole truth about Stalin?” The writer, a pensioner and party member from Kursk, could not reconcile Khrushchev’s sporadic tributes to Stalin with journalists’ claims that Stalin was “the greatest criminal, thief, and good-for-nothing”: these clashing discourses of praise and criticism did not add up to the “whole truth,” but contradicted each other, leaving only consternation. The only way to develop a full picture of Stalin, this reader advised, would be through publication of all documentation about the cult of personality. The history department of Kommunist responded, promising that the journal “has conducted, and is conducting, work to liquidate the consequences of the cult of personality,” but implying that progress would be only incremental.157 A set of correspondence on the cult of personality, received by the same journal over the course of the preceding year, reveals a wider range of areas of confusion, and shows how this supposedly authoritative ideological journal attempted to clarify them in its correspondence with readers.158 One of the key questions that still troubled readers in 1963–64 was the exact nature of Stalin’s theoretical contribution to MarxismLeninism, as in one letter from a certain Alshavskii, who was confused by the coexistence of an overall image of Stalin as “an oprichnik, who erased everything that had existed under Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, and muddleheaded in matters of theory” with Il’ichev’s differentiated assessment of the value of each of Stalin’s works (at the 1962 gathering of social scientists), and Khrushchev’s March 1963 warnings against the entire rejection of Stalin’s legacy.159 Other letters asked questions, or made bold allegations, reminiscent of reactions to the Secret Speech, about the causes and

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effects of Stalin’s dictatorship. One, from a certain Krasnov, claimed that Stalin had been the head of a conspiracy that had aimed to change the nature of the Soviet system (Alshavskii’s letter had likewise asked if Stalin had changed the Soviet system irreversibly). Another claimed that Stalin was certainly cruel, but that the cruelty of his regime had been facilitated by the undemocratic nature of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” 160 Kommunist’s responses to this array of questions were infused with the same blend of pragmatism and principle that had shaped Stalin’s reputation throughout the Khrushchev era. They answered Krasnov’s demonization of Stalin with a restatement of Stalin’s merits, a reassertion of the need to give him his due as a Marxist-Leninist, and a reminder that the 1956 resolution on the cult of personality had deemed Stalin “tragic,” rather than a figure equivalent to the “evil” Beria. The 1956 resolution was also used to refute readers’ criticisms of leadership and authority, and to counter their subversive claims about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kommunist thus again resorted (as it had in the 1959 commemoration) to replicating the discourse of the only authoritative party decision on the cult of personality. It also reiterated a long-standing party preference for commemoration of Stalin over iconoclastic attacks on the Soviet system: encouraging anti-Stalinism was, as ever, less urgent than controlling antiSoviet views. By contrast, though, when responding to Alshavskii’s attempt to rehabilitate Stalin and his theoretical legacy, the journal was notably critical of Stalin, dismissing most of his works as populist and a façade for unprincipled behavior.161 Countering anti-Soviet views with praise of Stalin, and combating pro-Stalinism with critiques of the leader, Kommunist’s attempts to explain the party line on the cult of personality reveal the large number of images of Stalin that had accumulated in party discourse by the end of the Khrushchev era. Henri Rousso, in his study of Marshal Petain’s posthumous reputation in post-Vichy France, observes that a major obstacle to definitive judgment of the marshal and his collaboration with the Nazis—a symptom of what he termed the “Vichy syndrome”—was a pattern of “retroactive blurring of boundaries, calculated provocation, uncontrolled reaction, and ultimately diversion.”162 The parallels with Stalin’s complex “reputational trajectory” in the Khrushchev era are striking: “diversion” of full judgment was often a response to “uncontrolled reaction” from the population in response to party leaders’ own

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“provocations” (such as the attacks of the Secret Speech and the 22nd Congress). These chaotic shifts also reflected, though, the more complex legacy of Stalinism, distinct from the “uncontested evil” of Nazism. 163 These continuing manipulations of Stalin’s image sustained, and even strengthened, Stalin’s power to symbolize broader historical and ideological concerns. They kept the Stalin question alive and unpredictable, rather than “routinizing” Stalin’s reputation or “defusing” it.164 These pragmatic shifts in Stalin’s image also, however, muddied the moral clarity of the judgment passed on him and his cult at the 22nd Congress, which left Khrushchev and his colleagues open to accusations of historical and moral inconsistency, but also paved the way for the more effective defusing of the Stalin question in the Brezhnev era.165 Before turning to this gradual disappearance of the cult of personality from Soviet culture in the second half of the 1960s, though, the next two chapters explore how Khrushchev-era historiography, and especially historical fiction, narrated some of the consequences of the cult, provoking in readers both moral outrage and wounded pride.

chapter four

Trauma and Redemption N a r r a t i v es of 1 937 i n So v i et C u lt ure

“Perhaps we should build a monument to the victims of terror?” Khrushchev’s proposal at the 22nd Party Congress to erect this memorial is one of the most notorious unfulfilled promises of his time in power.1 Crowning a congress dominated by testimony of terror, especially the Great Terror, the planned monument promised remembrance of the cult of personality, to complement the forgetting of the Stalin cult also mandated by the congress (as examined in the previous chapter). Yet, while Stalin’s body hastily disappeared from the mausoleum after the congress, the monument to his victims failed to appear. In fact, the first monument would only go up nearly thirty years later, the appearance of the “Solovetskii stone” near the KGB headquarters crowning several years of glasnost’ of terror in film, literature, historiography, and journalism, and of excavation of the stories of victims of terror from archives and their bodies from the earth.2 This Gorbachev-era memory work surrounding terror contrasts not only to the Khrushchev era, but also to present-day amnesia regarding terror, as manifested in its minimal treatment in official historiography (including school and university syllabi), its fragmentary presence in the nation’s museums, and the scattered “hardware” of commemoration in post-Soviet public space. Post-Soviet public and popular memory underplay the memory of terror (even reject it) so as to preserve the war victory as a national usable 129

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past. Moreover, the suicidal nature of the terror, the fact that many perpetrators themselves became victims, and the complex nature of popular complicity in terror all continue to hamper the creation of the kind of morally and intellectually lucid narrative of good and evil that has facilitated coming to terms with the past elsewhere.3 The Gorbachev and post-Soviet eras can serve as points of comparison with the ways in which Stalinist terror was selectively remembered during the Khrushchev era. Not only did Khrushchev fail to authorize a monument to terror victims, but Soviet museums also did not fill the space vacated by the cult of personality (Stalin’s cult) with exhibits about the consequences of the cult of personality (the terror). This very limited “hardware” of Soviet terror memory provokes a search for where else memories of terror were being confronted, including in more private discussions of terror in professional organizations and among ordinary readers of terror narratives, especially in Soviet literature.4 Post-Soviet memory politics also suggest that not all the limits on narrating terror in the Khrushchev era were imposed by Soviet ideology alone. The failure, even after the collapse of Soviet power, to grasp terror’s historical and moral complexity invites us to explore the particular challenges that terror posed to Soviet memory, and to trace how its exposure was aligned (or not aligned) with the narrative norms of party discourse, Soviet historiography, and Socialist Realism. This chapter explores the expansion of memories of terror in Soviet public life, especially after the 22nd Congress, when terror became the primary connotation of the cult of personality in party discourse, and when, as Denis Kozlov argues, terror temporarily overtook war as the primary focus of both public and popular memory.5 This remembrance of terror was still intrusively regulated, however, and often suspected of being un-Soviet, if not necessarily anti-Soviet. This regulation of memories of terror therefore already anticipated their further constriction after Khrushchev’s fall.6

22 N D C O N G R E S S The 22nd Congress and its narrative of terror, especially the Great Terror, resumed and intensified the revelations of the Secret Speech. Yet to draw a straight line from the 20th to the 22nd Congress is to overlook the ways in which terror was both remembered and regulated in between these two T E R R O R N A R R AT I V E S B E F O R E T H E

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junctures. Party historiography, whose break with the Short Course had to continue despite the anti-revisionist drive, needed to find a place for terror in its new narrative of the Soviet past. Meanwhile, the similar controls placed on Soviet literature did not (and were not intended to) silence the terror within the Stalinist past. The 1956 CC resolution on the cult of personality remained in force and, though less forceful than the Secret Speech, it still dictated some criticism of the consequences of Stalin’s dictatorial rule, the Great Terror chief among them. The attempt to acknowledge the memory of the Great Terror, while aligning it with the anti-revisionist line between the 20th and 22nd congresses, can be traced through two narratives of 1937, both embedded within longer accounts: the new party History of 1959, and Vera Ketlinskaia’s pioneering novel about the 1930s, It is not Worth Living Otherwise, published the following year. After the Secret Speech, as party historians drafted and redrafted the new history textbook behind the scenes, their public discussions of the 1930s suggested the retention of many aspects of the Stalinist narrative. History journals, and gatherings of the history profession, often praised Stalin’s achievements in tackling Trotskyism in the early 1930s, as a useful parallel to contemporary anti-revisionism.7 The party history university syllabus for 1958, the year before the History of the Communist Party finally came out, also devoted minimal attention to the “consequences of the cult of personality” in 1937–38, and even that limited time was supposed to be spent partly on justifying the suspicious attitude to “enemies” in light of the growing threat of war.8 The flaws of the new History, and in particular its account of 1937, were apparent to its domestic audience as soon as the work came out the following year. Party historians, themselves plagued by questions for the previous three years, responded to the History by directing a barrage of queries back at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and the book’s authors. Why was the History still so incomplete in showing the toll of terror within the party’s highest echelons? If victims were now innocent, did they not now deserve to be further commemorated and the injustices done to them investigated? The text’s first readers also reacted with disappointment to the text’s failure to explain why victims had been repressed, and by whom. They expressed consternation, too, at the fact that the text offered a less full account than even the Short Course, especially with regard to the show trials.9

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These anxieties had in fact been anticipated by the CC itself. When the party propaganda sector read the manuscript just before publication, it noted that the History—and especially its section on terror—was unlikely to answer all the questions from the Soviet public. The text, they warned, would have to be supplemented by further explanations from propaganda workers, as they would be “unable to get away from” questions about the show trials, given the “silence” that the book had imposed on the issue. Propagandists would have to compensate for its flaws by offering “a general political assessment, noting, if necessary, that together with guilty people, innocent ones also suffered during the course of the trials.”10 These supplementary guidelines still failed to denote a clear dividing line between the guilty and the innocent, and they also failed to clarify how much victims’ suffering should be revealed. The new History therefore did not put an end to the processes of improvisation that propagandists had wanted to curtail since the earliest days of de-Stalinization, and it left many key issues in the Great Terror unresolved. Despite this, teachers and propagandists quickly resumed old habits of citation when using the new History. The unresolved questions about terror were therefore instead more fully debated within Soviet literature. Between the 20th and 22nd congresses, Stalinist terror most often appeared in Soviet literature at one remove, remembered in the postStalinist present by returning Gulag prisoners or by relatives and friends of terror victims.11 Although these fictionalized memories nominally accorded with the 1956 resolution’s acknowledgement of the memory of terror, they were often criticized by critics and party authorities, still uncomfortable with excessive or excessively resentful reflection on the Stalinist past.12 Aleksandr Tvardovskii’s poem Distance Beyond Distance, which included reflections on a childhood friend repressed during the terror, was one of few such narratives to be unanimously acclaimed— largely thanks to Khrushchev’s personal involvement in the text’s publication in 1960.13 That same year saw the publication of Soviet literature’s first detailed, direct representation of 1937, whose editing and reception was considerably more complex, exposing the constraints on representation of terror during this “confused interval” of de-Stalinization.14 Vera Ketlinskaia’s It is Not Worth Living Otherwise was serialized in Znamia, soon after the journal published Konstantin Simonov’s The Living and the Dead, with its more indirect reflections on 1937.15 This was

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a production novel, like Dudintsev’s, that dramatized Stalin-era obstacles to industrial innovation, in this case the dogged attempt by a trio of Soviet youths to implement an underground gasification plan in the Donbass, which is repeatedly thwarted by Stalinist bureaucrats.16 Like Dudintsev, too, Ketlinskaia directly linked Stalinist bureaucratic conservatism to Stalinist repression, but went much further than Dudintsev in depicting denunciation, arrest, and—most innovatively—the experience of imprisonment.17 Although the author had started work on her novel in the 1940s, the de-Stalinization and literary thaw of the 1950s compelled her to rewrite the novel’s representation of Stalin and the Great Terror.18 The final version of the novel still presented Stalinism in an ambiguous light, however. It was most confident in its critique of local manifestations of the cult, dramatizing the clash between the industrial innovations proposed by the heroes and the careerism of their opponents in the party and state administration. The depiction of terror itself occupied a much smaller proportion of the novel, but it would disproportionately preoccupy its editors, critics, and readers. Four of the novel’s characters, including one of the main trio, Palka, are expelled or arrested between 1934 and 1938, engulfed in the wave of repressions that convulses the region—and, by extension, the country—during this time. Two characters escape arrest, but two, including the regional party secretary Chubakov, are imprisoned. Although the novel does not directly depict their ultimate fate, these latter victims are last shown in a striking scene set in an NKVD prison, alongside dozens of other terror victims, some guilty and some, like themselves, protesting their innocence. These poignant depictions of innocent victims of terror are complemented by the representation of victims and perpetrators’ embryonic doubts about the necessity of extreme “vigilance” (bditel’nost’), the term “enemy” (vrag), and Stalin’s justifications of the terror’s collateral damage (“when wood is cut, chips fly”). Inwardly, the four victims all deny that they are enemies, even if they do not question the broader necessity of punishing such enemies elsewhere in the system. As well as failing to condemn terror fully, the novel also did not entirely deconstruct the Stalinist narrative of the 1930s, or the Stalin cult itself. The decade as a whole is depicted in a positive light, as a time of progress and innovation, leading directly to the successful war effort that begins at the end of the novel. Moreover, this positive outcome is partly thanks to Stalin

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himself, who decides to help the heroes of the novel and their project after meeting one of them, Sasha, in the Kremlin. In this scene, as in Tvardovskii’s and Simonov’s roughly contemporary portraits of the leader, Stalin’s image is suspended between cult and realism. Sasha is terrified by Stalin and cannot see him as an ordinary mortal, yet ultimately he stands up to him for the sake of his cause. Stalin, despite hints at cruelty, ultimately endorses this cause, while Beria is identified as the real patron of the gasification project’s opponents, and the true agent of terror.19 This ambivalent representation of Stalinist terror and of Stalin himself emerged out of a debate between different memories of Stalinism, and different notions of Soviet memory, among the historians, editors, and censors who vetted the novel prior to publication. Once the novel appeared in Znamia, it provoked ordinary readers to reflect on these questions too. All these discussions revealed how difficult it was to align the trauma of victims and the lustration of perpetrators with the principles of Socialist Realism and the new historiography of the 1930s. Ultimately, the novel’s contested editing and reception revealed a strong preference for celebration of the past and an intolerance of victims, “gloom,” and “wounds,” which continued to influence the larger body of terror fiction following this pioneering novel after the 22nd Congress. One of the key reasons that the novel’s editing was so tortuous was that the party line on the Great Terror, which Ketlinskaia was representing for the first time in Soviet literature, was itself in flux. When the novel’s manuscript was sent out for review to the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in 1959, the novel elicited a much fuller—if still contradictory—analysis of the Great Terror than had appeared in the official History a few months earlier: this historical narrative of 1937 took precedence over the author’s opinions and shaped those of her editors.20 In these pre-publication discussions, Stalin himself played a surprisingly small role, with most reviewers unwilling to make a firm statement on the leader’s overall reputation, perhaps because recent party statements had not done so either.21 Party historian reviewers wanted the author to avoid demonizing Stalin, but also to emphasize his primary responsibility for the Great Terror, recalling the precarious balance struck in the Secret Speech.22 Journal reviewers almost never mentioned Stalin, but the one editorial member who did called Stalin a “wise leader” overall, a sign of how far the rehabilitation of Stalin had progressed since the speech.23 In a reflection of the

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much greater clarity of Beria’s reputation, several reviewers called for the NKVD head to be demonized even more thoroughly than in Ketlinskaia’s original manuscript. The uncertainty about Stalin’s status continued after publication, with published reviews reaching strikingly different judgments about his character.24 By contrast, the majority of the manuscript’s readers much more openly defended a celebratory, heroic narrative of the 1930s, encompassing both the achievements of industrialization and also the more dubious feat of defeating the party’s enemies. The party historians who read the manuscript accused the author of omitting the “main signs of the times”: the optimism and utopianism of the 1930s. One appealed for a more satisfactory balance between the “dark tones” appropriate for 1937 and the “light, even bright, tones” that should be used to illuminate the triumphs of the decade.25 This celebratory narrative was echoed in the internal discussions at the journal, where many editors demanded that the author depict the “atmosphere of burning creativity and feats of labor,” the “victories” and “successes” that defined the epoch and explained the stunning progress achieved in the first Five Year plans.26 This positive narrative of the 1930s may have reflected individual and collective memories of the decade, but it also strongly echoed its optimistic framing in public memory of the time. As part of this discussion of the 1930s, one editorial board member in fact claimed that 1937 was itself a “year of triumph.”27 Implicitly reinforcing this view was the fact that well over half of the editorial board appealed in one way or another for the author to shift the balance from innocent “victims” to correctly punished “enemies.”28 They expressed a pronounced discomfort with Ketlinskaia’s alleged portrayal of “only victims,” bemoaning the exclusive focus on the repression of “the best flower of the party”—and thus on the needless damage wrought by terror.29 In appealing for more “real enemies” and justifications of terror to be inserted into the novel, these reviewers revealed how little the revelations and revisions of the previous half decade had deconstructed the Stalinist rhetoric and narrative of “enemies.”30 Responding to this broad critique of her terror narrative, Ketlinskaia strongly resisted the attempt to subjugate her fictional narrative to party history. At the same time as defending her personal opinions and literary prerogatives, however, the author also revealed much common ground

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with her critics, notably their shared, fundamentally optimistic view of Soviet history and literature. For example, in defending herself against claims of a disproportionate interest in 1937, the author asserted her right to represent the terror, but still embedded it within a teleological narrative of progress.31 While insisting that 1937 had “slowed down” that progress, more than her reviewers were prepared to admit, she concurred that the “victory of socialism” had been the ultimate outcome of the decade, and of the Stalin era as a whole.32 Likewise, even as she defended her representation of innocent victims and their complex reactions to their predicament (they were “confused by the repressions,” and deserved to be shown “in psychological depth”), the heroism of her heroes remained recognizably Soviet.33 Refuting one party historian’s description of her protagonists as fearful, cynical, and even Trotskyist, she insisted that her fictional victims “remain communists. . . . They do not vent their wrath on the party, they cannot refer to the party as ‘they’. . . . That is how it was in real life,” and that they “retain[ed] their conviction in the victory of socialism.”34 Ketlinskaia’s defense of realism did not therefore question fundamental Socialist Realist principles of heroism, optimism, and party-mindedness.35 Darius Tolczyk has argued of Khrushchev-era Gulag fiction that its fundamental purpose was to “mask” the trauma of victims, even as it appeared to be revealing the truth about Stalinism.36 Ketlinskaia’s narrative of terror, published well before this camp fiction, suggests that this “masking” may also have derived from a broad consensus about the limited damage wrought by Stalinism. At this very early stage in Soviet literature’s deconstruction of the Stalinist narrative of terror, writers such as Ketlinskaia who tried to broach 1937 were certainly subject to very intrusive controls, including attempts to subjugate literature to the conservative party line of the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, these strict controls also “masked” the beliefs that both sides shared: the denial of trauma and of the loss of party faith, the inevitability of overcoming 1937, and the fundamental faith in the progress of Soviet history. This broadly optimistic framing of terror was only emphasized by the author’s final revisions, and by the censors’ interventions to reduce still further the manuscript’s focus on the “wounds and offences of the past.”37 Despite these cuts, the now small portion of the novel devoted to the “gloomy era” and “very difficult pre-war years” dominated the popular reception of the text, as can be traced in transcripts of readers’ conferences

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(discussions at libraries and workplaces, sometimes with the author herself present) and in the dozens of letters sent to the author by individual readers of the novel.38 Both types of sources represent only partial snapshots of popular attitudes to Ketlinskaia, let alone of popular attitudes to the broader issues raised by her novel: readers’ conferences, as public discussions, were unlikely to elicit entirely frank debate, and only readers with especially strong (positive or negative) feelings would be likely to write to the author. Yet what is striking in these various reader responses is the overlap in content and tone between public and more private discussions. Both individual letters and more public performances often featured similar expressions of gratitude for the groundbreaking confrontation of a difficult past, yet equally often sought to make the theme of terror less difficult, seeking to fit the experience into more familiar and comforting Soviet narratives and paradigms. Unlike the novel’s reviewers, readers overwhelmingly welcomed this attempt at a literary representation of 1937, “about which much is said, but little written,” as one Leningrad reader described it at a conference in the author’s native city.39 Many saw the emergence of such Soviet terror narratives as an overdue reflection of Soviet experience: “I trembled when I read it . . . and with great difficulty forced myself to read the scene at Stalin’s office and the scene in prison, because I had to live through that,” recounted one participant. Another had derived a greater sense of enjoyment from reading about the “difficult times” that she had lived through, but only because she was now confident that “different moods” had dawned in Soviet life.40 Ketlinskaia also received many letters from terror victims and perpetrators, grateful to see their memories reflected in published fiction.41 These responses all expressed a belief that Soviet literature could, and should, reflect popular experience, aggregating and analyzing individual memories to make sense of the collective past. Precisely because the terror had been so little discussed at the time, or indeed for many years afterward, the narodnost’ of Soviet literature now involved representing what the narod lived through then.42 “You’ve explained what we ourselves couldn’t understand for many long years,” claimed one Leningrad reader.43 Nonetheless, like the authors and editors of the manuscript, ordinary readers of the published novel also sought to insert its innovative, and potentially disturbing, subject matter into more established Soviet

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traditions.44 Above all, much like in the pre-publication discussions, readers transformed the novel’s victims into heroes, treating them as subjects for emulation and admiration rather than objects of sympathy. The novel itself encouraged this heroic perspective, but readers could also draw on a long genealogy of positive heroes in Soviet literature, and on the Secret Speech’s more recent attempt to reinvent elite victims of 1937 as heroic martyrs. Arrestees’ behavior in the cells showed the strength of the “Soviet character,” while, of one victim, another letter claimed “he stood firm, as many other communists stood firm in those dark days.”45 Other readers acclaimed the “pathos” of the characters’ struggles, and found their ability to overcome their difficulties inspirational.46 Even in the scattered negative responses to the novel, this model of behavior remained dominant. One speaker at a 1960 readers’ conference, for example, reproached the author’s depiction of the prison for showing that “people ceased to fight and ceased to get outraged”; the embedded expectation of militancy and resistance, though frustrated in this case, was clear.47 In turn, reading about terror was not traumatic, or “offensive,” as editors and censors had feared.48 One reader, indeed, claimed that he had been “enriched in [his] soul” by reading the novel. This argument recurred in readers’ responses to hostile criticism of the work—notably the aggressive review in the RSFSR Union newspaper—where readers wrote in to protest that they did find the characters inspirational.49 This was uplifting, to the point of generating “happiness” in some readers.50 At the same time, especially in the more private setting of individual correspondence with the writer, readers occasionally articulated troubling memories of Stalinism—and especially of Stalin himself—which had been softened, or even silenced, in the pre-publication discussion and in the majority of readers’ responses.51 For example, a pensioner from Moscow oblast’, a certain Rubtsova, wrote to criticize the novel as part of a recent “tendency to blacken the past”; in a more extreme statement of the celebratory rhetoric of the novel’s editors, she urged Ketlinskaia and other Soviet writers not to “drown all of our great glorious past in shadow.” She also requested that they “say a kind word in memory of the person who for all that most difficult period stood at the head of the party and people, and sustained so many great victories.” Where the manuscript’s reviewers had appealed for a balanced view of Stalin, if they mentioned him at all, Rubtsova’s appeal for “kindness” and her attacks in the author’s

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“boldness” in her physical description of Stalin quickly escalated into a performance of cult rhetoric: “It’s all untrue! Stalin was of medium height for a man. He kept his moustache extremely neat. He always walked with a calm, even, firm step. I doubt that on his face were noticeable pockmarks.”52 The previously ubiquitous and highly standardized visual tropes of the Stalin cult (Stalin’s moustache, his walk) were more real and truthful, in this reader’s eyes, than the unmasking of Stalin’s “real” appearance and “true” nature that both Khrushchev and Ketlinskaia were now attempting. A more radical challenge to the novel’s view of Stalin and Stalinism came in a fervently anti-Stalinist letter of protest from two rehabilitated terror victims. The authors’ main point of dispute was Ketlinskaia’s apparent attempt to “shield” or “protect” the leader. In truth, they argued, the terror was a crime of such magnitude that Stalin could not be thought of as anything other than a “hangman of history”; as they reproached the author, “you ought to know (and you know well) how many millions of people that despot killed.” This harsh judgment of Stalin was reminiscent of the disgust and revulsion generated by the Secret Speech, but now it carried particular obligations for Soviet literature: to “write about this horrific so-called Stalinist epoch.”53 Unlike the satisfied readers at the Leningrad readers’ conference, whose memories the novel had already explained, these readers had thus far found little reflection of their traumatic experiences within Soviet terror fiction. However, the terror narratives that they envisaged posed a radical challenge to Socialist Realism, challenging the Soviet master plot and transforming Soviet literature’s positive heroes into tragic victims. The author, editor, and most readers of this terror narrative had not yet questioned these fundamental principles, leaving the terror only partially confronted. Ron Eyerman and Jeffrey Alexander have argued that the first step in the recognition of a “cultural trauma”—slavery and the Holocaust, respectively—is the rejection of former, more positive narratives of the event.54 Alexander, for example, has traced the emergence of the traumatic memory of the Holocaust from non-recognition, through more redemptive narratives (of salvation and the overcoming of evil), to the final, universal recognition of it as an irredeemable tragedy.55 Before the 22nd Congress, Soviet narratives of terror failed to confront its tragedy or horror. Ketlinskaia’s attempt to recover some of the truth about 1937 was

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constrained by not one, but several, extant narratives of terror and cultural understandings of trauma, some of which the author herself endorsed. For instance, the Stalinist narrative of terror, as the justified excision of enemies, proved surprisingly robust in wake of the Secret Speech, dictating that the majority of those arrested still be defined as enemies rather than innocent victims. Moreover, the unjustified suffering of innocent victims remained embedded within a heroic narrative of party devotion and martyrdom, just as the revelations of 1956 had celebrated the overcoming of terror. This teleological narrative of overcoming obstacles itself had deep roots in Soviet culture, embedded in the master plot of the Stalin-era novel and in the Grand Narrative of Stalinist history. The utopian impulse behind de-Stalinization only strengthened this Promethean belief, and thus continued to hamper recognition of the full horror of 1937.56 The 22nd Congress, held in the year after publication of One Should Not Live Otherwise, returned to the memory of 1937 with a vengeance, dissipating many of the uncertainties that had surrounded Ketlinskaia’s text. In the wake of the congress, there was an unprecedented exploration of terror in Soviet journalism, history, and especially literature. In the scale and depth of their acknowledgement of victimhood and suffering, both the congress and the subsequent memory work around terror more closely resembled what Jeffrey Alexander terms a “trauma drama.”57 Yet this discussion and narration of terror also remained subject to similar pressures to those exerted on Ketlinskaia’s novel, not just by party and state officials, but by many writers too, as the rest of this chapter explores.

22 N D C O N G R E S S The proceedings of the 22nd Congress, published in Pravda and broadcast on Soviet radio, revealed more about terror (both pre-war and post-war) than any other party statement before or after it, until the peak of glasnost’ in the late 1980s. As the last chapter argued, the congress significantly reduced official tolerance for any commemoration of Stalin in print and visual culture, condemning it as “remnants of the cult.” At the same time, and as justification for the wholesale destruction of the Stalin cult, it expanded markedly the limits on the articulation of memories of the suffering caused by the cult of personality. Terror’s R E W R I T I N G T H E T E R R O R AT A N D A F T E R T H E

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perpetrators, although limited to the culprits identified in the Secret Speech plus the anti-party group, were repeatedly condemned on the basis of detailed evidence of their participation in pre-war and post-war political terror. There were also some hints at broader participation, and complicity, in the denunciations that had fuelled the Great Terror. 58 Significantly, though, the severest punishment for the lustrated culprits was posthumous. This precedent of limited lustration of the living would apply to subsequent decisions made on the punishment of terror’s perpetrators in Soviet professions, especially within Soviet literature, as explored below. The congress also dramatized the suffering of victims: the “ruined lives” of relatives left behind (whose “sobs,” claimed Shelepin, “should haunt the nightmares” of perpetrators); the physical and mental torture meted out to (almost exclusively high-ranking) victims; the “fear,” verging on psychosis, of the general population.59 The congress also clarified what it hoped to achieve by thus returning to memories of terror: the purification of the system, and the health of the Soviet collective.60 The congress posited terror as a trauma requiring urgent narrativization: as Khrushchev himself pointed out, “one can’t return the dead to life, but it’s necessary that in the history of the party all this is correctly narrated.” In thus deeming “every person a whole story,” the party itself intervened to remove terror victims’ “stories” from the semi-latent state in which they had been languishing in public culture since summer 1956.61 Nevertheless, the gathering also anticipated the limits that the party would come to impose on remembrance of 1937 and Stalinist terror. First, the party’s discourse made memories of terror conditional on their contribution to the system’s health, and thus implicitly reserved the right to define the health, or unhealthiness, of particular memories, or types of “memory work,” paving the way for the assault on the wrong kinds of memories, in Soviet literature in particular. Second, the congress accorded pride of place to speakers who had survived terror, such as the Old Bolshevik Dora Lazurkina, who balanced outrage at the terror’s traumatic effects with reassurance of the untainted memory of pre-Stalinist times; in fact, by virtue of their enforced absence from Stalinist public life, such rehabilitated victims also embodied the possibility of an uncorrupted Bolshevik tradition. These redemptive Old Bolshevik autobiographies provided a narrative of terror and rehabilitation that would shape not only

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the biographies of their dead colleagues, published later in the 1960s, but also the broadly optimistic emplotment of the experiences of terror victims in Soviet literature after the congress. Last, the congress provided an ambiguous blueprint for how Soviet literature itself should remember terror. The congress featured a strong defense by Aleksandr Tvardovskii of Soviet literature’s duty to recover the “whole truth” about the country’s past and present. Though his speech emphasized the indomitability of victims’ spirits, and posited the remembrance of terror as a way to move forward, “laughing,” from the past, it was criticized by the conservative novelist and editor Vsevolod Kochetov, who condemned the excavation of victims’ stories as an unhealthy, even pathological, type of remembrance.62 Soviet literature’s subsequent exploration of terror would deepen the schism between these two approaches to memory. After the congress’ dramatic performance of terror memories, the party leadership knew that it had to revise the official history of terror. History curricula were reconceived to allot considerably more space to 1937 and to the cult of personality more generally.63 This obligatory increase in recognition of terror was also clear in the CC’s editing of the centerpiece of this curriculum, the new edition of the party history textbook. When the party propaganda sector received the draft manuscript of this new edition, they sent it back demanding above all “major correction” of the account of the Great Terror.64 They criticized the positive gloss still being put on 1937 (euphemistically imagined as the reactivation of kritika and samokritika), given that these were clearly outweighed by “the crude errors and distortions caused by the Stalin cult.” They also demanded that the authors expand their account chronologically: “it’s well known,” they explained, “that after the 18th Congress too, there died many communists including well-known party actors (Eikhe, Postyshev, Kedrov).”65 Despite these changes, some party historians surveyed for their reactions to the published text complained that 1937 was “not fully illuminated”; the text still had not “fully got to grips with why many, many millions of people died,” they complained.66 Though no historical monograph exclusively devoted to 1937 ever appeared in the Khrushchev era, these appeals for more illumination of 1937 would have been partly satisfied by the expanded analysis and exploration of terror in Soviet publications of 1962–64. Throughout the rest of

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the Khrushchev period, this steady stream of revelations about terror in historiography, memoirs, and journalism (more steady than the rises and falls in publication of terror fiction, as explored below) explored its causes, culprits, and consequences to an unprecedented extent.67 Readers of Soviet journals and newspapers encountered harrowing tales of unjust persecution, harsh judgments of Stalin and the NKVD’s role in terror, and even some tantalizing glimpses of the feelings of “suspicion” and “fear” among the Soviet population during 1937.68 At the same time, this confrontation of Stalinist terror was orchestrated within the boundaries of the new party rhetoric of selective blaming and shaming, and followed the same redemptive trajectory. The accounts of terror that appeared in the Soviet press and historiography after the 22nd Congress repeatedly blamed Stalin and his theory of the intensification of class war, which had first been condemned in the Secret Speech, but was only publicly criticized in late 1961.69 These accounts reaffirmed Stalin as the main culprit and theoretician of terror, with the anti-party group now his willing accomplices. There were also some harsh criticisms of the NKVD and Soviet judiciary, and unprecedented opportunities to analyze the institutional and legal arrangements facilitating the cult of personality.70 This criticism, though, was vaguer than that of Stalin (or Beria), and it was counter-balanced with celebrations of the postStalinist police and legal system.71 The KGB leadership was instrumental in lobbying for a positive contemporary and historical image of the police, including some successful appeals to cut or ban negative portrayals of the Stalinist NKVD.72 These limits on depicting the causes of terror also applied to the documentation of its human consequences. Biographies and autobiographies of victims of 1937 were published in unprecedented quantity in the Soviet press, and dominated the agenda of the State Political Publishing House, during the early years after the 22nd Congress.73 Nonetheless, there were still stringent limits on which victims’ stories could be published, and how they could be told. At least as far as these prestigious, high-profile publications were concerned, only high-ranking victims with impeccable Leninist credentials stood any chance of publication. The vast majority of unsolicited memoirs of terror from more ordinary victims were instead consigned to a specially created archive closed to all but the most high-ranking historians (such as Petr Pospelov).74

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The commemorative articles and biographies of elite victims, which were authorized for publication (after stringent review of their party records for any sign of ideological deviation), excised the detailed description of arrest, imprisonment, or death that had been present in relatives’ and colleagues’ petitions.75 They were thus primarily intended to resurrect the Leninist ideal embodied in these individuals rather than to dwell on their destruction under Stalin, and readers responded to them in similar terms, above all praising these texts for rescuing these heroic Leninists from forgetting.76 In this sense, the discussion of terror in party discussions, journalism, and historiography evaded many of terror’s causes and consequences, and it revealed almost nothing about the ramifications of terror in the lives of ordinary people. Soviet literature, its commitment to both socio-historical analysis and emotional complexity already revived by the two thaws of the 1950s, was uniquely placed to explore aspects of the memory of 1937 that history and journalism could, or would, not. At the same time, as the rest of this chapter explores, a variety of internal and external constraints prevented it, too, from fully confronting the terror. THE LITERARY POLITICS OF TERROR,

1961–64 In late November 1961, the party organization of the Moscow Writers’ Union met to discuss its agenda in light of the 22nd Party Congress. In his keynote address, the head of the union board, Stepan Shchipachev, called upon those present to honor the memory of the 617 members of the union who had fallen victim to Stalinist terror. Continuing this emphasis on terror, the writer Isidor Shtok then claimed that “we all suffered rather a lot during the times of the cult,” while the head of the party committee, Boris Vasil’ev, referred to the “countless losses” and “many ruined souls” that terror had left in its wake. The meeting concluded with a call to commemorate the community’s terror victims, with a plaque in the union headquarters, and a promise to open (or reopen) investigations of those responsible for their persecution.77 This rapid resurgence of memory work around terror illustrates that the desire to expose and explore the cult of personality had remained latent in Soviet literature after the freeze of 1957, until catalyzed by the centrality of terror to the discourse of the 22nd Congress. The Moscow party leader Nikolai Egorychev was also present at the meeting, and his

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address confirmed this shift in party attitudes. He recounted the tearful reaction of rehabilitated terror victims to the congress’ revelations about terror: “many delegates openly wept,” he reported, thus presenting the confrontation of “the abuses of power during the cult of personality” as a painful, but cathartic, necessity. He then explicitly confirmed that the “abuses of the cult of personality” were now a legitimate literary concern, though he still deemed the congress’ overriding achievement to be the codification of the Third Party Program.78 This meeting anticipated key features of Soviet literature’s “memory work” around terror from the 22nd Congress to the fall of Khrushchev. Mourning terror victims, testimony of survivors, and perpetrator lustration would all remain central to the Moscow Union’s agenda throughout the following three years, though this meeting’s optimistic vision of victim commemoration and perpetrator punishment remained unrealized.79 The union would enjoy greater success, however, with assisting the publication of terror narratives, and insisting that they represented an important part of the Soviet literary canon. As it had after the Secret Speech, the union consistently sought to align this agenda of terror remembrance with the neo-Leninist relaunch of the Soviet project, a particularly resonant idea in the context of the new party program. Unlike in 1956, however, the union’s agenda partly survived attempts to marginalize it (similar to the bureaucratic reshuffles and discursive shifts of the more successful freeze of 1957), and it persisted up to, and even beyond, the end of the Khrushchev era. Meanwhile, Egorychev’s acknowledgement of the need to explore the terror, and his simultaneous attempt to reorientate writers away from the past toward the future, expressed at the local level a persistent dilemma faced by the central authorities for the remainder of the Khrushchev era. Throughout the following three years, the central authorities intervened repeatedly to regulate Soviet literature’s interest in terror, and to prevent it from overshadowing the party’s glorious past, present, and future. At the same time, the revelations from the 20th and 22nd congresses meant that the party could no longer forget terror, and nor did it want to: carefully controlled, terror remained a potent memory to be wielded in domestic and international politics, especially (but not only) in relations with China. The most extreme hostility to memories of terror in fact came from within Soviet literature rather than from outside it. The institution

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born out of the freeze of 1957, the RSFSR Writers Union, developed a very different discourse of the cult of personality, and of 1937 in particular, over the course of the late Khrushchev era.80 Its arguments exploited the party authorities’ persistent wariness of the memory of terror and of the agenda of the Moscow Union, but transformed it into an extreme vision of memory and forgetting. Dominic LaCapra, in his study of Holocaust memory, outlines three possible approaches to “working through” a traumatic past. The first is a “redemptive, fetishistic narrative that excludes or marginalizes trauma,” and the second, its polar opposite, is a fixation on the past, repeatedly “acting out” past trauma. Only a third approach, in his view, is healthy; it “turns the lamp” on the past, acknowledging “scars that will not disappear and even wounds that will not heal,” but then mourns and properly buries the past’s “haunting objects,” putting an end to compulsive repetitions of trauma.81 The way in which terror memories were contested within Soviet literature dramatized all three of these contrasting modes of memory. The “teleological story” was the default preference of both the conservative wing of Soviet literature and the party authorities, although their narratives of the 1930s varied in the degree to which they sought to silence the trauma of 1937. The confrontation of “scars” and “wounds,” meanwhile, was frequently invoked in the Moscow Union’s exploration of prewar and post-war terror. It had been weakly present in party leaders’ own discourse at the 22nd Congress (and central to Tvardovskii’s speech), but the union developed its implications more fully. However, the Moscow Union’s focus on terror was often criticized by literary rivals and party leaders as a compulsive reopening of the “wounds” of the past. Again, such pathologization of the union’s supposed obsession with terror took the most extreme form in the conservative wing of Soviet literature, but the party authorities also consistently judged redemptive and teleological narratives of the past to be more healthy than deep exploration of trauma. These norms of healthy, rather than pathological, remembrance became a powerful force in literary texts themselves, shaping and limiting their representation of terror, as explored later in this chapter. For over a year after the 22nd Congress, the Moscow Union engaged in an exploration of both pre-war and post-war terror that was unprecedented in Soviet literature. By the time of the publication of Ivan Denisovich, in the penultimate month of 1962, both the criticism and

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prose sections could claim that the work had been “prepared” by a preceding sequence of works about the cult of personality, such as Iurii Bondarev’s Quietness and also works concerning the impact of terror on victims’ families, including Nina Kosterina’s recently published Diary, Liubov’ Kabo’s Tale about Boris Bekleshov, and Viktor Nekrasov’s Kira Georgievna.82 This emerging canon of terror literature required not just celebration, though, but also active support, as it faced many obstacles, especially before Solzhenitsyn’s publication (temporarily) authorized the theme. Throughout 1962, therefore, Stepan Zlobin, leader of the prose section and a veteran of the 1950s thaws, consistently supported new works about terror while attacking the obstacles to their publication.83 In May, for example, the prose section enthusiastically endorsed the plans of one member, Arsenii Rut’ko, to research and write a novel about 1937, which he said he was “called to write by the graves of dear people who died in vain.”84 It also offered substantial support to a new work about the cult of personality by Vladimir Pomerantsev, holding a discussion in which “there spoke those who in their personal fates carry deep wounds, inflicted by the regime of Stalin’s cult”; these included the 1937 victim Andrei Aldan-Semenov, who would later author a highly critical account of the Gulag.85 The union framed Soviet literature’s engagement with the cult of personality as a necessary confrontation of the “wounds” and losses of terror, intensifying these aspects of the discourse of the 22nd Congress.86 At the same time, Zlobin resumed his attacks (last elaborated during the Dudintsev controversy) on publishers’ excessive caution (perestrakhovka) in dealing with manuscripts about the cult of personality, targeting Nikolai Lesiuchevskii, head of the Sovetskii pisatel’ publishing house in particular.87 By autumn 1962, the evidence of obstacles had become overwhelming, especially where works about 1937 were concerned. Among the works then being held back from publication were Lidiia Chukovskaia’s Sofiia Petrovna, a novel about a woman traumatized by the Great Terror; Nina Kosterina’s diary, with its harrowing account of her father’s arrest in 1937; and an account of Kolyma in the years leading up to 1937, by Kosterina’s recently rehabilitated father, Aleksei Kosterin.88 Kosterin’s manuscript provoked a fuller explanation from Zlobin as to why the cult of personality was an “important issue” for Soviet literature:

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“Publishing houses, in my opinion, should be attentive to such works, directed toward the liquidation of the cult of personality, in light of the resolutions of the party congresses. However, the opposite happens. These kinds of books are silenced, the decisions on their fate are long drawn out. If we don’t talk about these times, our enemies, foreign writers, will illuminate them as they see fit [po-svoemu],” he explained. The necessity of writing about terror was also a matter of narodnost’, with participants expressing a strong desire to understand the national catastrophe of 1937, hailing Kosterin’s account as exemplary. “The time has come,” announced one critic, “to look back, to think through the past, to work out what happened, how it could have happened.” And only the full truth would do; “half truth” about the terror, Zlobin warned, would only lead to “confusion in people’s minds.”89 These claims for the partiinost’ and narodnost’ of terror literature dominated union discussions throughout 1962. At the end of the year, Vasil’ev reaffirmed that the party itself had pioneered such remembrance and exposure of terror, saying: “We mustn’t forget this: before the excellent poems of Boris Slutskii, before the good poems of Evtushenko, before the tale of Solzhenitsyn, the party told the people the whole bitter truth at the 20th and 22nd party congresses. We have the right (and we are obliged to use that right) to develop that theme deeply.”90 He imagined an uninterrupted party commitment to exploring the cult of personality, ignoring the freezes in between the 20th and 22nd congresses, and set a guideline of “not caution, but a responsible approach” in writing about terror.91 Again, this discourse of partiinost’ was intertwined with arguments about the moral obligation for Soviet literature to tackle the trauma suffered by the people. Vasil’ev, much like Egorychev a year earlier, claimed to have witnessed terror victims at the congress crying as they listened to Dora Lazurkina’s speech and “remembering their own ruined biographies.” This emphatically reiterated the moral case for Soviet literature’s deepening engagement with the cult of personality: works about “that bitter and difficult time, which we all lived through” would help to transform distressing personal memories into cathartic public memory.92 As well as calling for the continued literary exposition of victims’ suffering, this same meeting also further intensified the union’s commitment to expose the culprits of terror. During 1962, it was Lesiuchevskii who was identified not only as a key obstacle to publication of narratives

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of terror, as shown above, but also as an agent of terror. In March, and again in December, the union tried to expel him on the grounds of his conduct in 1937: specifically, the “denunciation reports” that he had written for the NKVD about the writers Nikolai Zabolotskii and Boris Kornilov.93 In March, Lesiuchevskii survived the motion against him, though the case mounted at the same meeting against the less famous critic El’sburg, for his conduct in 1937, did succeed.94 When the union again returned to the Lesiuchevskii case in December 1962, the discussion was led by the Great Terror victim Lev Kopelev and Aleksandr Borshchagovskii, a victim of the anti-cosmopolitanism campaign, but now secretary of the party committee. During the discussion, Kopelev shared his own sense of guilt as a “servant of the cult,” even though he had eventually fallen victim to the terror himself. He also argued, however, that there were different levels of responsibility for terror; while not in favor of making perpetrators pay (rasplata), Kopelev insisted that “Stalin’s heirs” had forfeited the right to define how terror should be tackled in Soviet literature.95 In his defense, though, Lesiuchevskii claimed that his reports were written “on the level of the understanding that [he] had at that time, burdened by the psychosis that is familiar to us all,” and the review of his case agreed that they were indeed excusable, having been “written in the circumstances of the cult of personality, in a situation of mass repressions.”96 The case was therefore dropped. This failed investigation of Lesiuchevskii’s actions in 1937 did not, however, curtail the union’s exploration of the complex issues of guilt and complicity in terror. A similar conviction informed the union’s vehement response to emerging signs of conservative hostility to texts about terror, such as the January 1963 article by the critic Ermilov, attacking Il’ia Ehrenburg’s claims in his memoir about a conspiracy of silence during 1937.97 The critic Chicherov, for example, could scarcely contain his anger at Ermilov’s attempts to “somehow blur it, and turn it into a different sort of era.” He urged his colleagues to affirm their own memories of terror against this willful amnesia: “Surely,” he asked, “one cannot forget, comrades, the whole complexity of that time?” Perhaps because no fictional account of 1937 had yet appeared, Iurii Bondarev’s dramatization of post-war terror, Quietness, served to illustrate the conflict between the complexity of terror, on the one hand, and the crude generalizations and normative assumptions now being imposed on terror narratives: having

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condemned Ermilov’s attempts to “justify the mass repressions of the 1930s,” the critic Svetov then criticized Bondarev’s harshest critic, Idashkin, for his attempt to “varnish the tragedy of the people.”98 In this way, the agenda developed by the Moscow Union after the 22nd Congress was more far-reaching, and yet more tightly focused on terror, than its calls for glasnost’ after the 20th Congress. This contrast between these two thaws was partly due to the fact that the party authorities did not intervene as quickly to police this discussion of Stalinism as they had after the Secret Speech.99 This reluctance derived in turn from the pronounced shift in the party leadership’s own discourse and policy, toward acknowledgment of terror and the need to work through memories of victimhood and perpetration. Indeed, for the first year after the 22nd Congress, the party leadership continued to appeal for both “affirmation” (or celebration of the past) and the exposure of the truth about terror, demanding a difficult balancing act of writers and editors. The publication of Ivan Denisovich toward the end of the first year after the congress was an extraordinary gesture of party support for literature about terror victims. However, it also necessitated extraordinary effort to make the text appear Soviet: first, personal intervention from the party leader (whom the text only reached by bypassing the usual vetting processes at the journal and in the CC), then Tvardovskii’s framing of the text for its CC readers and for Novyi mir’s audience, and finally the copious, initially unanimously positive, commentary of Soviet critics.100 Publication of Ivan Denisovich helped to make the theme of victims’ suffering less exceptional within Soviet literature, but it also warned presciently of the exceptional effort required to make it fit within Soviet culture. In fact, this discomfort became much more evident very soon after publication of Solzhenitsyn’s work. The two meetings held between the CC and the Soviet intelligentsia in late December 1962 reveal the party’s realization that the cult of personality could overwhelm Soviet literature’s agenda.101 At the second meeting, between the ideological commission and young writers, Il’ichev asked rhetorically whether artists should “allow the theme of the camps to push aside the life of the Soviet people, their great achievements of their noble aspirations.” He also attempted to insert and contain terror within a broader teleology of “progressive development” and “great achievements,” urging artists not to focus “only

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on the negative aspects of life in that period.”102 These arguments explicitly drew on the discourse of the CC meeting held with a broader cross-section of the intelligentsia a week earlier. Here, similar warnings about focusing on terror had been exemplified by “memory work” about 1937 specifically. On that occasion, Khrushchev had begun by pointing out that the party leadership at the 22nd Congress had set an example of openness about “negative phenomena of life,” thus confirming that glasnost’ about the past remained a form of partiinost’, in contrast to the treatment of Dudintsev. However, he also highlighted that “the thing is, when boldly exposing all that hampers us, not to strike at Soviet society itself.”103 These dangers were illustrated by exploring an earlier episode of “arbitrariness” than that evoked by Solzhenitsyn (or Dudintsev): the Great Terror. Galina Serebriakova, who had also participated in the 1957 disciplining of Dudintsev, now again elaborated on the “tortures” that she and other “Leninists” had undergone in 1937. She invoked this physical torture, however, to emphasize mental fortitude, as in her emotive interpretation of stab wounds inflicted by an investigator: “The five scars on my breast are testimony to the fact that the party and Soviet people educated me as a firm and loyal Leninist.” She went on to explain that “communists as a rule remained communists in Stalinist incarceration,” and “torture,” though “fearsome,” had broken the will of only a handful of victims; most were insulated by their “ideological forging [zakalka].” At the same time, it was precisely this Leninist belief that made the terror a distressing experience: the tragedies of torture, starvation, and forced labor paled into insignificance compared with the “tragedy . . . of the fear for the fate of the proletarian revolution, for the fate of the party.” 104 In this sense, Serebriakova replicated the tense balance, orchestrated at the 22nd Congress, between denial of destruction of the party’s core beliefs (embodied in untraumatized victims) and outrage at terror’s potential (but not actual) damage to the party’s Leninist foundations. By minimizing the trauma of seemingly “horrific” experiences, Serebriakova could then argue against the “sensational” literary depiction of the “horrors” (uzhasy) of arrest and imprisonment. Her own scars, transformed from badges of trauma to symbols of ideological steadfastness, were not an invitation for Soviet literature to transform into “scar literature.”105 Nevertheless, like Khrushchev, she was careful to

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distinguish between regulation of the representation of terror and an outright ban on the theme, saying: “Of course, there is very little said and generalized about the cult as yet. Books about 1937 and 1949, if they’re historically truthful, are capable of bringing benefit. . . . I’m just saying that this theme is exceptionally dangerous, difficult and important, and can be as useful as it is harmful; and for that reason the writer who tackles this theme needs to take into account that he is touching on a big tragedy. . . . The theme is highly party-minded.”106 Serebriakova here appeared to authorize Soviet literature’s ongoing engagement with the theme of terror, but also wanted to limit its overall significance within Soviet literature, to match terror’s limited impact on her autobiography. A more decisive shift in party discourse and policy came in March 1963, as terror narratives continued to flood publishing houses, and the canon of terror literature continued to expand and to detonate controversy, such as that between Ehrenburg and Ermilov. At an infamous CC meeting with the intelligentsia in March 1963, Khrushchev emphatically articulated a positive memory of the Stalin era, marginalizing 1937 and all but eliminating moral outrage against terror perpetrators, notably Stalin.107 In drafting this speech, Khrushchev worked most intensively on the section about the 1930s, foregrounding his own memories of the decade (rather than using a proxy like Serebriakova), in order to highlight that this was a decisive shift in Soviet memory. In the first version, he was already explicit about his positive memories of the 1930s, drawing a sharp contrast with Ehrenburg’s recollection of the times: “You describe the best years of our life . . . it’s interesting for me how you looked out of your garret window on events in which I actively participated. I didn’t feel the kind of heaviness that you write about. You now remember how difficult those years were. And I now remember: how happy and joyful those years were, the years of struggle, of victories, the years of triumph, happiness, and intoxication with victory.”108 Over the following days, Khrushchev became anxious that his speech must not seem like a “strike” against the writer.109 Nevertheless, his subsequent drafts developed an even fuller critique of Ehrenburg’s version of events: “We also lived in that time, when there were these abuses of power, and we, for example, didn’t grit our teeth, I lived in that time, so did others. We approved it. Why did we approve it? Because we believed in Stalin. We believed in Stalin because we were in a period of most acute class war.”110

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In his public performance, Khrushchev combined historical evidence of socialist construction with personal reminiscences of the 1930s, a similar combination as in the Secret Speech, but used now for very different ends. Khrushchev now aimed to show that both historical truth and collective memories were being traduced by “gloomy” literature about the period, as in his claim that “from my own experience, as a participant in the events of those years, which are sometimes painted in gloomy colors and dull shades, those were bright, happy years, years of struggle and victories, of the triumph of communist ideals.”111 This “bright, happy” memory of the Stalinist past meant that Soviet literature and art also must contain “bright artistic imagery of the great and heroic epoch of communist construction.” With “1937” marginalized within the Stalinist past, the Soviet leader could justify denouncing some writers’ obsession with this “dangerous . . . spicy” theme, drawn to it like “huge, fat flies.”112 This pathologization of literature about terror was enthusiastically seized upon by the conservative artists in the audience. The writer Petr Brovka now felt able to voice his suspicion of terror victims and his distaste for their dominance in public culture, saying: “Of course in our life there are a few victims (stradaltsy), but journals and newspapers aren’t just sacks that you throw everything into.” The painter Boris Ioganson was kinder to victims, but still asserted that the “best monument to those no longer among us is the pathos of affirmation,” rather than the “description of rubbish heaps.” The writer Leonid Sobolev likewise called for “pathos, so that we can feel a sense of excitement about ourselves,” rather than “twilight tales,” and was more explicit than Khrushchev about the need to select good memories: “we saw bad things in the war,” he explained, “but after all we didn’t write about that, and nor should we now.”113 Sobolev, himself a war veteran, had been head of the RSFSR Union since its creation during the freeze of 1957.114 His calls in March 1963 for “excitement,” rather than “twilight tales,” were a public expression of outright hostility to terror literature that had already started to emerge within the union after Ivan Denisovich, and escalated into open proStalinism after this CC meeting. The first sign of this pro-Stalinism came in the union’s investigation of an article by the critic Lidiia Fomenko, published in the union’s newspaper in January 1963, which claimed that

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“our days are still closely linked to the past,” and analyzed a series of works dealing with terror and the Gulag.115 The article incensed the RSFSR union leadership, including the editor of Znamia, Vadim Kozhevnikov, who asked during the investigation of how it came to be published: “it’s one thing when we destroy the consequences of the cult of personality, but in what way are we still closely linked [to it]?” The playwright Anatolii Sofronov then expressed an even more radical opposition to literature about terror: “The cult of personality was not the main thing for us . . . otherwise, where did our strength come from? Where was that strength born? What, was it born in the concentration camps? Why no! It was born in our society, in our party, in the war . . . this is an elementary, basic truth.” He also urged that “we really mustn’t return to this question again . . . it’s incomprehensible why we’re still raking over this theme.”116 Sofronov’s overwhelmingly positive memories of the Stalin era led him to condemn the literary representation of terror as an irrational, compulsive raking over of an irrelevant episode from the past. Although the newspaper printed a series of repudiations of Fomenko’s article after this meeting, such extreme hostility to the cult of personality was not yet made public.117 By contrast, in its first plenum after Khrushchev’s March 1963 statement, the RSFSR Union openly expressed hostility to the terror theme, and suspicion of victims’ innocence. Sobolev’s speech at this later gathering illustrates how this hostility to terror memories was framed within a larger discourse of “normal” and “healthy” memory.118 He began with an attempt to “normalize” the difficult aspects of the Stalinist past, seeing them as no worse than other nations’ memories, saying, “The historical memory of every people preserves very many things that are sometimes extremely tempting for the artist, but they demand writers’ discernment. As it were, it’s a cruel memory that often puts pressure on the imagination.”119 This disdain for writers who lacked the “discernment” to cope with the theme, returning compulsively to it under “pressure,” was then contrasted to Sobolev’s superior ability to select other themes: “The twentieth century, the year 1937/I know it’s also a theme for the poet/But my voice is concerned with other things.”120 Another colleague, Smirnov, went further still, expressing suspicion not only of the literary theme of victimhood, but also of victims themselves:

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Some kind of victims (stradaltsy) come along, trying at all costs to evoke pity for themselves. There are comrades who suffered during the cult of personality . . . a low bow to them! But there are people who for very different reasons spent time in some far-off place, and begin to boast about it. . . . He was imprisoned for cowardice And then he returned And to the point of indecency he trumpets That he’s a victim of the cult of personality.121 These claims, met with rapturous applause, shows that the shift in the party line in March 1963 justified—for these writers at least—an extreme revision of the line of the 22nd Congress, akin to a revival of the Stalinist narrative of terror that had shaped the production and reception of Ketlinskaia’s novel before the congress. This performance of neo-Stalinist rhetoric was unsurprisingly triumphalist. This period represented the apogee of the RSFSR Union’s fortunes and the nadir for the Moscow Union.122 As in 1957, the party leadership had realized by this point in 1963 that moderate rhetoric was not enough to tame the Moscow Union. It therefore escalated its rhetoric of “healthy” memory and “glorious” history, while also implementing harsh administrative measures, an approach reminiscent of the freeze of the last literary thaw. Shchipachev lost his leadership post and was replaced with a more conservative figure, Georgii Markov, with the explicit aim of ensuring greater ideological “militancy” in the union.123 The union’s party organization, where much of the most intense “memory work” around terror had previously taken place, was dissolved and its members instead attached to party organizations of factories around the city.124 Attempts to tame the Moscow Union continued well beyond March 1963, with a reorganization of its management in summer, and of its sections at the end of the year. At each of these junctures, the new union management emphasized the union’s new line of hostility to the “dark sides.” In July 1963, for example, Vartkas Tevekelian reacted to the latest CC plenum with positive memories of Stalinism and hostility toward a “trivial” focus on peripheral themes, saying, “As Khrushchev was speaking, there rose up before me the days of my youth . . . now we look back on the path traveled and think how petty we were, digging around in

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some trivial things, and not noticing what was done by the people during those years.”125 In fact, though, this continuing party interference in the Moscow Union masked a relatively rapid shift away from extreme denial of terror to a more moderate and enduring preference for happy memories over “dark sides.” The RSFSR Union plenum was therefore as far as Soviet literature ever went, during the Khrushchev era at least, toward outright denial of terror.126 Instead, party policy from mid-1963 onward expressed something closer to “teleological denial” of terror’s lasting damage, with subsequent CC plenums endorsing both glasnost’ of the difficult past and celebration of the future.127 After a short ban on literature about the cult of personality, critical works about the Stalinist past once again began to be published, notably Aleksandr Tvardovskii’s Terkin in the Other World, and, in the next year, a wave of fictional and autobiographical accounts of terror and Gulag, which reopened debate about the place of the cult of personality in Soviet literature.128 This contestation over how Soviet literature should remember terror, left unresolved by the end of the Khrushchev era, evokes comparison with attempts to confront difficult episodes in other societies and political systems. The emergence of a traumatic past into a country’s public memory usually requires that such remembrance be framed or constructed as more healthy or normal than extant, more celebratory narratives or silences.129 Steve Stern’s analysis of Chilean memories of the Pinochet era describes the “pushy, politocultural performance of memory,” orchestrated by “dissident knots”: by this, he means groups or individuals lobbying not just for the confrontation of painful memories, but also for a new view of memory itself, for example as a “wound” in need of healing.130 Others have drawn attention to the importance of metaphor and framing in “making the past matter,” including the transformation of the “critical reevaluation of the past” into a legitimate and “honorable” practice, and have emphasized how arguments about “normal” or “healthy” memory, and associated narratives and metaphors (notably of “wounds”), can help to legitimate different subject positions in memory politics.131 The Soviet debate over how to remember 1937 was prolonged and complicated not only by the particular contradictions of the Stalinist 1930s (as both a “heroic” and a “criminal” era), but also by similar

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contestation between different metaphors and framings of memory.132 Though the metaphor took on unique connotations within the Soviet context, the debate over whether de-Stalinization would heal, or painfully reopen, old wounds echoed debates in very different political systems, and assumed more than metaphorical significance, influencing chances of publication and even reshaping the institutions of Soviet literature, as with the 1963 reforms to the Moscow Union. This debate over normal and healthy attitudes to the Stalinist past was inevitably heavily skewed toward the Soviet leadership’s own discourse of memory, which in turn expressed a long-standing hostility to excessive retrospection. At the same time, the debates of the early 1960s exposed the contradictions within recent party discourse. Arguments for the curative power of revealing the truth about terror were not “dissident,” to use Steve Stern’s term, but rather elaborated on certain features of the party’s new framing and metaphors of terror memory at and after the 22nd Congress.133 It was precisely the belief that confronting terror was not dissident or damaging and that it would improve the health of the party and the people—the belief, in other words, in its partiinost’ and narodnost’—that sustained the union’s writers and critics in the face of recurrent attacks in the late Khrushchev era. Indeed, though recurrent, these attacks were also inconsistent. The party leadership consistently expressed a belief in mastery of the past, but, unlike some conservative writers, allowed a certain, albeit strictly finite and utilitarian, role for retrospection and lustration.134 This “multihistorical” approach to terror was in turn reflected in the striking diversity of early 1960s Soviet terror fiction.135 Nonetheless, the same ideological pressures that marginalized the Moscow Union’s agenda in the late Khrushchev era ultimately dictated the consolidation of a literary master plot of recovery from 1937, rather than prolonged working through of terror memories, as the rest of this chapter illustrates. O F W H I R LW I N D S A N D B O A C O N S T R I C T O R S : S O V I E T N A R R AT I V E S O F 1937 In the early 1960s, “the year 1937” enjoyed unprecedented prominence in Soviet literature, as it had in literary politics.136 It was not quite an obligatory theme, certainly after the 1963 crackdown on “gloomy” topics, to which at least one narrative of the Great Terror Lidiia, Chukovskaia’s

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Sofiia Petrovna, fell victim.137 Nevertheless, it became a typical element of work set in the Stalinist past. In fact, by far the most common way for 1937 to be remembered was as a juncture within the broader sweep of the Stalin era. That 1937 was now an episode that had to be acknowledged rather than denied was clear, for example, in Leonid Zorin’s epic play Friends and Years, where 1937 was one of the years allotted a full scene from the two and a half decades that the play encompassed.138 The year 1937 also returned in the play’s post-Stalinist scenes, which explored the regrets of the prosecutor, Derzhavin, as he reflected on his actions in the Great Terror.139 At the height of party tolerance for memories of 1937, in 1962, this year would even be highlighted from within the longer time span of epic novels. Konstantin Fedin’s Lenin prizewinning Campfire, for example, was much praised for the chapters where the principal character remembers the Great Terror, while Mikhail Stel’makh’s novel of the same year, Truth and Lies, attracted unanimous plaudits for its episode about the “painful wounds,” caused by “the events of the year 1937.”140 The theme of the “year 1937” haunted Soviet literature and its protagonists throughout the rest of the Khrushchev era. As the next chapter explores, Konstantin Simonov’s 1963 novel People Are Not Born Soldiers presented 1937 as an unavoidable memory for the protagonists. Other works showed “the year 1937” looming in the future. Endorsed by the Moscow Union and published in the liberal Iunost’, but widely praised across the literary spectrum (and then successfully adapted into a film), Boris Balter’s 1962 novella, Goodbye Boys!, subtly but insistently shadowed its halcyon portrayal of 1930s youth with the twin tests to come: the Great Terror (to which one of the three eponymous boys is lost) and World War II.141 Nina Kosterina’s diary, published in Novyi mir late the same year, was often twinned by critics with Balter’s fictional work to highlight the texts’ shared concern with Soviet youth’s experience of the two sides of the pre-war decade—the optimism of the early 1930s, succeeded by the tragedy of 1937–38.142 Such attempts to balance these two sides of the 1930s remained as important to Soviet literature after the 22nd Congress as during the editing of Ketlinskaia’s novel before it. This balance was most fully dramatized in a novel promoted by the RSFSR Union to argue that the achievements of the Stalinist 1930s were at least as important to remember as the tragedy of 1937.143 In 1963 and 1964, Anatolii Nikul’kov’s novel In a

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Frenzy became the key emblem of the union’s ongoing commitment to the cult of personality, but also of its distinctive way of narrating it.144 In the literary debates of the late Khrushchev era, the novel became the union’s trump card: not only was it written by a regional (Siberian) writer, rather than a member of the Moscow elite, but it also got to grips with the causes of terror, and placed it in its proper historical context. It was therefore promoted as an objective alternative to more subjective accounts of pre- and post-war terror, including Bondarev’s Quietness, Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich, and the accounts of 1937 published in Novyi mir after 1962, as examined below.145 Central to the novel’s positive reception in the conservative wing of the Soviet literary establishment was its narrator—a party official—and its balanced picture of the party and of the 1920s and 1930s.146 In fact, for most of the novel, the hero, Ivan Moskalev, is an enthralled observer and supporter of Stalinist modernization, mercilessly imposing collectivization in his region, and attending several party congresses, during which he encounters all the major political figures of the Stalin era, including Stalin himself (presented as inscrutable rather than evil).147 All of the major milestones of the Stalinist 1930s are present, from the daring of the Cheliuskin pilots to the 17th Party Congress, presented in a “balanced” way as both the “congress of victors,” but also the start of the party’s descent into the Great Terror.148 Thereafter, the progressive encroachment of the terror into Ivan’s region is mirrored psychologically by Ivan’s growing doubts about how to justify it. Initially a keen exponent of repression, punishing the kulaks and supporting the fight against the “right deviation” at the end of the 1920s, Ivan finds his enthusiasm and obedience waning as the terror looms ever closer. However, he has to experience terror directly, among his closest associates, before he finally accepts that it might be wrong.149 By this time, though, the fear for his own life and the trauma of confronting his doubts about party policy render Ivan helpless to understand his predicament. He pictures the terror as a “whirlwind of neurosis,” the natural and irrational imagery conveying the failure to understand its causes.150 When Tukhachevskii is arrested as part of the purges of the army leadership, Ivan’s world becomes “dark” and “horrifying”; the terror no longer makes sense, and the identification of people as “enemies” has become utterly arbitrary.151 When Ivan himself

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is arrested, the narrative itself plunges into total darkness; Ivan’s disappearance at the hands of the NKVD is mirrored by the disappearance of Ivan from the narrative, and the silencing of the victim’s experience of arrest and incarceration—to an even greater degree than in Ketlinskaia’s earlier novel. Instead, Ivan’s arrest is conveyed through the “spiritual drama” experienced by his son, Vladimir, left alone in the family home.152 He cannot make sense of his father’s disappearance and his horror is exacerbated by the suicide of his friend’s father, fearing that he too will be arrested. In privileging Vladimir’s disorientated and terrified perspective, the narrative emphasizes that terror is a traumatic experience, damaging those left behind, and impossible to understand. However, the novel does not end on that note. At his mother’s behest, Vladimir applies for entry to the Komsomol and is accepted, despite his father’s arrest. As Ivan’s son and wife celebrate this unlikely restoration of the family name and of justice, the narrative comes to a sudden end, with a confident expression of hope in the future. Ivan’s fate remains unknown. In seeking to maintain the division between justified—anti-Trotkyist and anti-kulak—and unjustified uses of terror, Nikul’kov’s novel presented 1937 as inexcusable, but also inexplicable. Furthermore, in its reluctance to dwell on arrest and imprisonment, it failed to confront it at all. Submerging the trauma of 1937 into a celebratory narrative of the 1930s, the novel did not suggest a way to integrate or reconcile the two memories. A similar failure to reconcile the trauma of terror and the progress of Soviet history was also evident in Ivan Stadniuk’s People Are Not Angels, another work championed by the RSFSR Union. This novel painted a strikingly frank picture of suffering during collectivization and 1937 (when one character is arrested, and another commits suicide for fear of arrest), but its conclusion effected a sudden, jarring change of tone, with characters reflecting optimistically on the future.153 This tendency to minimize and evade the trauma of 1937 was countered by an insistence on a closer focus on the victims and perpetrators of the Great Terror, most vigorously promoted by the Moscow Union (as the last section explored) and Novyi mir.154 In fact, Tvardovskii, like other journal editors sifting through a mountain of works about the Stalinist past, himself rejected many manuscripts about 1937, recognizing that this could never be the main focus of Soviet literature.155 Nonetheless, he

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and his team of editors consistently promoted high-quality fiction and non-sensationalist documentary accounts that would help to make sense of the Great Terror; in turn the Moscow Union often promoted these works.156 In the late Khrushchev era, defying both conservative attacks and the wariness of the party leadership, Tvardovskii succeeded in publishing a series of fictional and non-fictional narratives of the Great Terror, to succeed and complement Bondarev’s and Solzhenitsyn’s pioneering narratives of post-war repression.157 In fact, one of the earliest narratives of the Great Terror published after Ivan Denisovich was also by Solzhenitsyn. His short story Incident at a Station in Krechetovka, though set in wartime, represented the legacies of the Great Terror in that period.158 It recounts how an NKVD officer Zotov initially tries not to be suspicious when he discovers a man with no identity papers, but cannot ultimately resist reverting to Stalinist habits of vigilance, arresting the man at the end of the story. Though he embodies and perpetuates the mentality that drove the Great Terror, Zotov ironically only remembers 1937 as the year of the Spanish Civil War (though the Spanish Civil War had intensified the concerns about a fifth column, and thus played a role in the Soviet terror). While conservative critics seized on the story to begin to criticize Solzhenitsyn (reversing the initial praise for Ivan Denisovich), more liberal writers and critics praised its sophisticated exploration of the “psychosis of suspicion” as a cause of terror.159 The first of several landmark non-fictional accounts of 1937 were Nina Kosterina’s aforementioned diary and extracts from Il’ia Ehrenburg’s memoirs, followed by Aleksandr Gorbatov’s Years and Wars, the fullest memoir of arrest and imprisonment, published in 1964.160 It was in this same year that Noyyi mir also published the fullest fictional portrait of “the year 1937” to appear in the journal, or indeed anywhere in Soviet literature, during the 1960s: Iurii Dombrovskii’s The Keeper of Antiquities.161 The only work of 1960s Soviet fiction to take place entirely within the year 1937, Dombrovskii’s novel was completed at around the same time as Nikul’kov’s novel, but only appeared in Novyi mir a year later than it, following a lengthy and stressful process of editing and censorship.162 Despite these changes to the original text, The Keeper of Antiquities was undoubtedly the climax of Soviet literature’s exploration of the Great Terror, depicting 1937 in unprecedented depth and breadth.163 At the same time, it also signaled the limit of Soviet literature’s ability to

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represent 1937, pushing at the limits of Socialist Realism, in describing the experience of terror, and at the limits of objectivity and rationality, in probing its causes. The eponymous hero of The Keeper of Antiquities, a curator in an Alma-Ata museum, is the first-person narrator. Unlike the party-minded narrator of In a Frenzy, he provides an idiosyncratic view of the Stalinist 1930s that combines bewildered observation of the growth in violence and repression with delighted digressions into the history of the ancient world and of his beloved Kazakhstan. The keeper wants nothing more than to keep to himself, cataloguing artifacts in the attic, and in this way to keep the whole span of human history alive: the original title of the work, The Keeper of Antiquity, captured this broader impulse, while the final title emphasized the breadth of his historical interests.164 However, as the sole published review of the novel explained, the keeper could not stay at one remove, as “down below 1937 was proceeding.”165 The encroaching terror sees the museum inexorably subjugated to Stalinist ideology and historiography, with staff under increasing pressure to remove any trace of “enemies of the people” from the displays. The keeper openly resists these dictates, but the majority of museum staff obediently removes “enemy” portraits. The violence of 1937 therefore initially takes the form of iconoclasm and philistinism. As 1937 inexorably progresses, though, the keeper’s understanding of violence gradually shifts from the figurative to the literal. Within the museum, he is present at one NKVD search and interrogation of a colleague denounced by the museum’s chief propagandist. He himself directly encounters the threat of denunciation when he writes a newspaper article criticizing a local library, which incurs the disfavor of the library boss, Aiupova, a notorious NKVD informer. Lucky to avoid a denunciation on that occasion, the keeper is not so lucky the second time, when he is forced to visit the local kolkhoz to organize an archaeological dig, during which he finds himself embroiled in a far more serious— though absurd—controversy, linked to alleged sightings of a boa constrictor. The NKVD accuse the kolkhoz chairman of deliberately inciting panic by spreading untrue rumors about the snake to the Germans, among others. The boa constrictor conveys the suffocating force of terror, but also the grotesque, hysterical distortions to which the terror gives rise—transforming a normal grass snake into a lethal animal.

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Dombrovskii in one of his first appeals to the Soviet authorities for rehabilitation in the 1950s (after multiple arrests and Gulag terms in the Stalin era) referred to the terror’s creation of “fearsome doubles,” transforming innocent people into “enemies.”166 The boa constrictor in his novel is likewise the uncanny double of an innocent grass snake, and these two snakes also form part of a network of biblical references, evoking parallels with the serpent in the Garden of Eden, while associating the terror’s agents with the devil. In the terrifying conclusion, the keeper is taken on a nighttime visit to the local police headquarters and interrogated at length. Although the keeper refuses to inform on the chairman, he is forced into hiding. At the climax, proof surfaces that the snake existed, and the keeper and the chairman rush to forestall their own arrests. The novel in its published form ends with the keeper evading arrest, although the original manuscript described both his arrest and his time in the Gulag. Novyi mir immediately recognized the “unique,” “unusual” qualities of this terror narrative.167 Anna Berzer, who worked closely with Dombrovskii from his first disheveled appearance in the Novyi mir offices throughout the tortuous editing process, made it her main priority to “preserve in the manuscript that main theme, 1937.”168 Other editorial board members praised the novel as a “fresh” work, from which the Soviet readership would find out “much that is new” about “the atmosphere of those difficult years.” What was new in their view was not simply the amount of space devoted to 1937, though this itself was unprecedented, but also the depth of Dombrovskii’s investigation of the experience of terror. More than any writer before him, he had captured the “atmosphere” of that year, and the emotions of those living through it. In prepublication discussions, editors reflected on their own memories of terror, acclaiming the accuracy with which Dombrovskii had rendered the “dim fear,” “suspicions,” and “anxiety” of the time.169 Even though Novyi mir remained committed to non-fictional narratives of terror, and wary of excessively literary approaches to the theme, Dombrovskii’s manuscript was exciting because it exploited literature’s unique ability to penetrate these complex emotions and to evoke the character of the era through play with symbols and genres. The year 1937 was, as several editors observed, “fantastical” and “phantasmagorical,” so a realistic representation demanded more than realism. 170 Vladimir Lakshin acclaimed Dombrovskii’s “principled success” in form as well as

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content, while Tvardovskii himself deemed the whole novel “brilliant from a literary point of view.”171 Anna Berzer was especially keen to preserve the rich symbols in the story, including the snake. They were all essential, she argued, to convey the “suffocating” anxiety of the times, and the ways in which “fear acting as an independent protagonist” had spread throughout the population.172 At the same time, part of the appeal of the novel was also the hero’s refusal to submit entirely to the pressures of 1937. Though frightened by the inexorable progress of the Great Terror, the keeper continues to protest (inwardly, and sometimes outwardly) against the immorality and philistinism of the forces of the cult of personality. For Tvardovskii, the “humanity” and caring attitude that the keeper preserved throughout 1937 was a significant point in the novel’s favor; despite its fantastical, playful form, the novel had a “serious moral foundation,” comparable with that of Gorbatov’s contemporary narrative of terror.173 The hero was thus appealing to Novyi mir not just for his emotional and psychological complexity, but also because he heroically embodied the survival of intelligentsia ideals in spite of the cult of personality. The novel thus exposed a tension between Novyi mir’s commitment to reveal the traumatic truth about Stalinism and its optimistic resurrection of intelligentsia ideals. Publication of this highly unusual narrative of 1937 was by no means inevitable, even in the slightly more benign climate of early 1964, and so Novyi mir intervened heavily in the manuscript prior to sending it to the censors. The largest cut excised a long section depicting the keeper’s life in the Gulag. For some editors, the scene was too obviously controversial and provocative, risking prohibition of the entire novel; others editors objected on principle to its excessively “horrific” and “despairing” tone, a jarring contrast to the subtle, allusive portrait of the keeper’s fears in 1937.174 Tvardovskii also insisted that the snake be rendered less large and terrifying, in order not to lose this key symbol altogether.175 His intervention was prescient, as one of the main causes of the long delays to the text was another, more minor symbol of fear in the text, the sinister lullaby that the keeper hears as he tries to evade arrest.176 Although censors were also uncomfortable with the “atmosphere” that Novyi mir had praised, this was easier to preserve; the final round of cuts made over a dozen interventions, but Dombrovskii’s achievement in capturing the experience of 1937 remained.177

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So too, though, did its radical challenge to Soviet and Socialist Realist principles. Soviet critics virtually ignored the novel, and not just because its publication happened so soon before Khrushchev’s departure from power: the novel was also not fully legible through the lens of Soviet literary criticism. The sole published review of the novel praised it as an unprecedented narrative of terror: while others had shown only the “surface of the tragedy,” Dombrovskii had gone “beyond these boundaries,” exploring 1937 in depth and placing it within a broader historical and cultural context. Yet even the critic’s brief summary of the manifestations of the cult of personality in the novel—despotism, fanaticism, and spiritual “deadness”—highlighted their radical implications.178 According to fragmentary evidence of the predominantly positive popular response to the novel, ordinary readers alternated between acknowledging the novel’s unique and challenging qualities and drawing comparisons with more familiar narratives.179 For some, the novel’s portrait of the “fear” of victims and the “diabolical” perpetrators offered a strikingly “fresh” representation on the past. Other readers praised above all the moral clarity and heroism of the keeper, calling him an “exceptional personality,” with great “strength of spirit,” capable of resisting and overcoming the forces of evil.180 Indeed, Dombrovskii himself believed that the novel was partly about the “invincibility of goodness.”181 Nonetheless, his deepening interest in the tragic fate of such goodness under Stalinism ultimately took him and the novel’s sequel beyond the boundaries of Soviet literature. Ironically, and inadvertently, his conservative rival Nikul’kov had arrived at the same conclusion, his novel’s truncated narrative of terror expressing the incompatibility of 1937 with the heroic, optimistic requirements of the Soviet novel. This impossibility of fully confronting terror was nonetheless masked in public discussion by insistent claims that the suffering of victims had been adequately worked through and overcome, in literature as in life. Time and again, reviews of Soviet literature about 1937 stressed victims’ “unbreakable,” “supreme” spirit (even when the characters themselves had physically perished), and stressed their typicality, extrapolating their indomitability to the whole Soviet collective.182 One review, for example, broadened its perspective from Stadniuk’s People Are Not Angels, where a central character had died in 1937, to reflections on the survival of the “Soviet national character” in and after 1937.183 This emphasis on

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overcoming and defeating terror was no surprise. Indeed, every major party statement on the Stalin era, from the Secret Speech and 1956 CC resolution to the 22nd Congress, had insisted that the terror—and indeed the cult of personality as a whole—was a temporary, if painful, setback in progress toward the Soviet future.184 As the variety of 1937 narratives analyzed in this section suggests, there was no master plot to narrate the experience of terror itself, but the depiction of this overcoming of terror could draw on more familiar plots of triumph and transcendence.185 Here too, though, the progress from terror to transcendence was sometimes disrupted by the traumatic persistence of 1937 in post-Stalinist memories, as Soviet literature of the time also dramatized. BLACK BIRDS AND WHITE FLAGS: REMEMBERING

1937

I N S O V I E T L I T E R AT U R E

In 1961, a few months before the 22nd Congress, Viktor Nekrasov’s story Kira Georgievna appeared in Novyi mir. The short prose work recounted the story of a victim of 1937, Vadim, returning from the Gulag to Moscow and reuniting with his wife. In the nearly twenty years since Vadim’s disappearance in the Great Terror, his wife had remarried and had also contemplated an affair with a much younger man, hampering a full resumption of her relationship with her returnee husband. Where Vadim is able to testify to his memories of arrest and imprisonment, Kira has repressed these painful memories and lives “on the surface,” conducting superficial relationships and producing mediocre artworks.186 It was Kira and her flaws that dominated Soviet critics’ discussion, focusing on her “bourgeois” behavior, and making little allowance for the trauma that she had clearly suffered as a result of terror.187 However, in letters sent by readers to the author and journal, Kira’s flaws were far overshadowed by Vadim’s virtues. Specifically, readers— especially those who shared Vadim’s experience of the Great Terror— questioned the plausibility of his physical and mental health: how was it possible, many asked, for Vadim to survive 1937 so undamaged, and with so little resentment against his denouncers?188 One reader reproached the author, for example, for showing Vadim’s forgiveness of the “damage” and “waste” that terror had wrought in his life. Why, she asked, do writers “touching on this terrible theme . . . become proponents of the principles of Christian religion?” Vadim’s “Christian” ability to forgive and forget

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was at odds with the truth about the damage that terror had caused: “I could give you dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of the death of entirely innocent people and tell you about the lives of the members of their family who bore the stigma of being the family of an enemy of the people.” Soviet literature, she contended, should be honest about the “horror that was lived through” rather than “telling an untruth.”189 This letter, like the earlier anti-Stalinist letter to Ketlinskaia, demanded that Soviet literature henceforth be truthful, in this case, about the impact of terror on returnees and on their families and friends when reunited. Certainly, within a few months of her request, survivors of terror proliferated in Soviet literature after the 22nd Congress, just as they had starred in the congress itself.190 However, as in the congress and also in Nekrasov’s novel, they still usually functioned as exemplars of a healthy, conscious approach to memories of terror.191 Like returnees, “remnants of the cult” also multiplied in Soviet literature of the early 1960s, especially in the first year after the 22nd Congress (which had engaged in similar recriminations with “Stalin’s heirs” in real life), and especially in theater, producing a gallery of “denouncers” (donoschiki) and “careerists” whom Soviet critics guided spectators to despise and ridicule.192 Several Soviet plays after the 22nd Congress staged encounters between such victims and perpetrators, notably Nikolai Pogodin’s 1962 play Black Birds/Loyalty and Kamil’ Ikramov and Vladimir Tendriakov’s play of the same year, The White Flag. Both plays staged the clash between returnees and those responsible for their incarceration in 1937, but they experienced very different Soviet receptions.193 Only one dramatized an acceptable attitude to the memory of the Great Terror, and only it reached the stage, while the other was vilified and its publishers punished. Nikolai Pogodin’s play Loyalty, the first play written by this prolific Soviet playwright after the Secret Speech, only reached the Soviet stage more than half a decade later. In the interim, it had been redrafted (and retitled Black Birds), to reflect the new revelations about terror from the 22nd Congress.194 The play was first staged, to considerable critical acclaim, at Moscow’s Vakhtangov theater in spring 1962, and went on to be performed in dozens of other Soviet theaters during the rest of the Khrushchev era.195 Both versions of the play dramatize the return of a victim of the Great Terror, the engineer Aleksandr Pervozvanov, to his family home after a long term in Kolyma. As the play’s twin titles suggest,

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this victim’s return revived “black” memories of terror, but also resurrected an example of “loyalty” to Leninist values. Successive drafts of the play recalibrated this balance, but the latter remained paramount throughout. The first act, set in 1948, shows the continuing ramifications of Pervozvanov’s 1937 arrest in the lives of his relatives. His son’s career is blocked, as if by an impenetrable “wall,” by his association with an “enemy.”196 However, rather than becoming embittered and resentful, Aleksandr decides to join his father in Magadan. Pervozvanov’s wife, Maria, is more clearly traumatized by “that nightmare year.” Exhausted by the “unceasing” return of “difficult thoughts” about her husband’s arrest, she is on the brink of drifting into a relationship with her neighbor, Evgenii, seemingly resigned to the fact that her husband will never return. Evgenii’s brother, Krutoiarov, is meanwhile revealed to be the author of the 1937 denunciation against Pervozvanov. News of Pervozvanov’s survival therefore revives Krutoiarov’s “burdensome memories” of his own guilt, well before Pervozvanov’s return in the next act. When Pervozvanov reappears in 1956, however, the most acute conflicts flare instead between Krutoiarov and his own family: his brother Evgenii and, above all, his disillusioned daughter, Nina, who both confront Krutoiarov repeatedly for his past cowardice and deception. By contrast, the returnee Pervozvanov is unaffected by the past, and therefore uninterested in excavating it. Like the real-life returnee Serebriakova, his “loyalty” to Leninist beliefs sustained him in the Gulag, therefore terror is not a traumatic memory that needs to be worked through; nor is he vengeful or resentful, claiming: “I’m not about to start taking revenge on anyone, I don’t know how to settle scores. We’re from the generation of revolutionaries.”197 The memory that causes Pervozvanov much more pain concerns Krutoiarov’s abandonment of his invention in the late 1930s, and the resulting lack of scientific progress since his departure. Nevertheless, Krutoiarov’s insistent preoccupation with excavating the past transforms their final argument into a dispute about his role in the terror, during which Krutoiarov endures a fatal heart attack. The aftermath of this death was the point of greatest divergence between the scripts of Loyalty and Black Birds. In the first, Krutoiarov’s death was punishment enough; both his daughter, Nina, and his victim, Pervozvanov, remembered him fondly in the final scene, with Pervozvanov even claiming that death had “cleansed Krutoiarov.” When Pogodin first

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read the play to fellow writers at Peredelkino, the playwright Samuil Aleshin (who would himself later write a merciless exposé of a “remnant of the cult,” The Ward, premiered in the same year as Black Birds) had taken him to task about this mild punishment of the “denouncer,” and this became increasingly untenable in light of the 22nd Congress.198 Accordingly, Black Birds removed the claim that death had absolved Krutoiarov from punishment, leaving his image intertwined with the black birds, which he sees as he dies, reminding him and the audience of his guilt.199 At the same time, Pogodin’s editing of the final scene also strengthened the play’s optimistic orientation toward the future. As the characters sit in the garden and reflect on their future plans, they are surrounded by brightly colored bluebirds. This symbolic shift from Krutoiarov’s “black” demise to Pervozvanov’s radiant resurrection was further emphasized through the addition of the latter’s final soliloquy: “Don’t deceive yourself with memories of the past. What an offensive lie! . . . Let life flow on, as it is meant to in nature. And may those black times never be repeated in the lives of our children. May our land forever shine with the Leninist sun of purity and truth.”200 Pogodin’s play was thus fraught with tension over how to handle memories of the past, of the “black times” of terror. On the one hand, terror was an outrage, which could not be forgotten or forgiven. Indeed, the Vakhtangov production emphasized this by making the final confrontation between victim and perpetrator akin to a “trial scene.”201 On the other hand, the lustration and trauma of terror had to be finite. In fact, in Pogodin’s representation of this model victim, the urge to lustrate remained weak even in the second draft of the play, while references to trauma remained virtually absent throughout successive edits. Pervozvanov’s orientation toward the future, rather than the past, thus emerged even more strongly in the second draft than in the first. This unambiguous optimism guaranteed that this was one of few plays about Stalinism to attract consistently positive reviews from both critics and party and state authorities throughout the thaws and freezes of 1962–63. As Soviet theater (like Soviet literature as a whole) was subjected to increasing critical scrutiny for its “gloomy” preoccupation with terror, Loyalty/Black Birds remained above the fray.202 In 1962, the play was praised for both its lustration of terror and optimism about life after terror, reflecting the tense balance set by the

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22nd Congress.203 From the following year onward, the play’s preponderant optimism meant that it continued to fit within the more conservative limits imposed on literature about the cult of personality.204 One 1963 production crossed out the play’s new title on the curtain, and replaced it with the old title, highlighting the optimism present from the start, as one reviewer explained: “To put on Black Birds means recounting how pangs of conscience led to the death of Krutoiarov. This is a salutary tale, but all in all purely melodramatic and in no way corresponding to the important questions of the present day. But putting on Loyalty means talking about how no suffering and none of the most fearful and evil encrustations of the era of the cult of personality could break the spiritual steadfastness of real communists.”205 As the freeze in theater hardened, critics increasingly emphasized that “this is a play not about the black birds of 1937, but rather about loyalty to great ideas.”206 As a result, Pogodin’s play continued to be publicly performed and praised, though more private criticisms of it continued within parts of the intelligentsia.207 At the end of 1963, at a meeting of the CC ideological commission, it was one of the few plays about the cult of personality to be acclaimed by the minister of culture Elena Furtseva, within a wide-ranging polemic against Soviet theater’s obsession with terror.208 At this same meeting, criticism of another play about the return of victims, and memories, of 1937 reached a climax. The White Flag, by Vladmir Tendriakov and Kamil’ Ikramov, had been published in the Komsomol journal Molodaia gvardiia a year earlier. Immediately after publication, the Komsomol leadership realized that publication of this play constituted a serious lapse, since it contained “serious ideological and aesthetic errors,” including an excessive emphasis on generational strife and an “aggressive, panicky, black” tone. The journal’s editors had failed to follow the party’s instructions on how to distinguish between “life-affirming” and “critical” works, and were sharply condemned and punished.209 Although the investigation was quickly concluded, the play remained paradigmatic of Soviet theater’s errors in tackling the cult of personality after the 22nd Congress.210 Khrushchev himself mentioned The White Flag in March 1963, when he called for literature to stop fixating on the “dark sides” (tenevye storony) of life under Stalin.211 A few months later, at the ideological commission meeting, both Furtseva and Il’ichev criticized the play.212

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The White Flag depicts a fraught relationship between father and son, set in post-Stalinist times. The father, Petrov, is beset with guilt for his cowardice during the Great Terror, refusing to stand up for his brother Mitya when the latter was arrested on trumped-up charges of wrecking. The son, Iarik, who constantly needles his father with accusations of cowardice, has got a local girl pregnant but refuses to acknowledge his responsibilities, making him a dubious judge of morals. Into this already fraught situation comes Mitya, a returnee from the camps. Contrary to the son’s expectations, Mitya forgives his brother for renouncing and denouncing him during the terror, and urges both father and son to move on from their intractable debates about past misdemeanors. Thus far, the contrast with the Gulag return depicted in Black Birds was not particularly stark. Iarik’s criticisms of his father were stronger than those leveled at Pogodin’s denouncer by his family, but were not qualitatively different. Mitya’s philosophy of limited lustration of the past, and his overriding concern with the future of his scientific invention, also resembled the views of Pogodin’s heroic returnee, Pervozvanov. The real difference, and ideological error, came with the play’s subsequent dramatization of 1937 as an insuperable barrier to moving on to the future. Both father and son reject Mitya’s appeal to move on from memories of terror: Iarik turns on his uncle’s “vile, unprincipled submissiveness,” insisting that his father must be condemned, while the father himself is stricken with grief and self-loathing, and destroys the invention for whose sake he had originally disavowed his own brother, before trying unsuccessfully to commit suicide.213 Unable to overcome the memory of 1937, he thus waves the eponymous white flag not once, but twice. The life of his son likewise remains inextricably intertwined with, and weighed down by, terror: at the end of the play, Iarik vows to run off to the coast or to the Virgin Lands, but his aim is to escape the “vicious circle” and “plague-ridden barracks” created by his family’s shameful past.214 His escape thus represents the polar opposite of the purposeful, optimistic travel of Soviet youth to the periphery. The memory of terror here permits no such transcendence into the utopian optimism of the post-Stalin era for either generation. Soviet critics denounced this father-son pair as “base,” cowardly, weak-willed, and indifferent, and the family as a “nest of vipers.”215 The moral flaws shared by father and son appeared to doom them, and by implication society as a whole, to endless recurrences of the cowardly

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conduct of the father’s generation.216 It was precisely this sense of “fatalistic” resignation to the “impossibility of overcoming evil in our society” that Il’ichev singled out in his November 1963 critique.217 The “dubious” notion that history was cyclical and repetitious, rather than teleological, was fundamentally at odds with the “upward, not downward, trajectory” traced both in Pogodin’s play and in broader party discourse about de-Stalinization.218 One review made it clear that the fundamental error indeed lay in the play’s attitude to memory and trauma: “The authors have touched many of the fresh and unhealed wounds of our life, the kind of wounds that, if you touch them roughly will only cause pain all over again. It’s easy enough to cause that kind of pain, but it is cruel and senseless to pick at these wounds. We need to know the truth, but that truth must be the full historical truth, embodied in art in psychologically plausible characters.”219 While admitting that terror was traumatic (through this imagery of a wound), this critic insisted that literature could only explore memories of terror if its intent was curative and forward-looking; the pain of remembrance had to be balanced with the anticipated relief of recovery. This was exactly what The White Flag had not shown, unlike Pogodin’s play. What therefore united the contrasting reactions to both plays was the concern with how to overcome, and move on from, the experience of terror. Each play imagined the place of 1937 in individual biographies and collective memory differently, while the reception of both works demonstrated the overriding belief that the memory of terror had to be finite, rather than an unhealed wound, as in The White Flag. More broadly, Soviet literature of the late Khrushchev era consistently reaffirmed the necessity of healing and overcoming the memory of 1937 and other experiences of Stalinist terror. Many works of Soviet literature at this time showed victims and victims’ families transcending the memory of terror through physical healing, reintegration into the Soviet collective and the Soviet workforce, and even through the quintessentially Stalinist motif of flight.220 In this sense, even at the height of tolerance for Soviet literature’s exploration of terror, the theme remained subject to tight constraints, shaped by a persistent wariness of trauma, repentance, lustration, and ultimately, of retrospection itself.

chapter five

Between Myth and Memory W a r , T e r r o r , an d Stali n i n So v i et P o p u l a r M e m o ry

In 1960, a librarian from Smolensk wrote to the Soviet novelist and poet Konstantin Simonov about a readers’ conference held to discuss his recently published novel, The Living and the Dead; it had concluded, she reported, that the novel was a “hymn to the Soviet person, struck by great grief on his military path.”1 This report was just one of many hundreds of letters received by Simonov and by Znamia, the “military-patriotic” journal that published The Living and the Dead and its 1963 sequel, People Are Not Born Soldiers.2 Both novels were among the most widely disseminated and important literary works concerning war, terror, and Stalin published during the Khrushchev era.3 The public discussion of this first groundbreaking work in Smolensk, a locale particularly important to Simonov’s war poetry, hints at the multi-faceted character of the controversy that it evoked. The novel at once “hymned” the heroism of the ordinary soldier (as opposed to Stalin), but also highlighted the “great grief” of war, as the title itself had promised. Yet this pithy summary, perhaps because of its public performance, also evaded some other controversies: Who was responsible for the grief that had struck the soldiers in the early war? And was it really possible to explain away this great catastrophe as a temporary digression from the war’s glorious forward trajectory? In fact, both of these questions—the trauma of war and the question of Stalin’s responsibility—were tackled at the time, albeit usually in less public 173

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discussions of The Living and the Dead. The debate continued in Simonov’s sequel, People Are Not Born Soldiers, and in the popular responses that it, in turn, generated. During the Khrushchev era, Simonov was by far the most famous Soviet author of war literature (and arguably, the most famous Soviet writer of all), his fame and print runs outstripping those of his younger colleagues, such as Iurii Bondarev and Grigorii Baklanov, whose “trench prose” started to appear around the same time that The Living and the Dead was published. While other thaw authors may have been more pessimistic or nihilistic about the war (notably the writers mentioned above), more shocking in their depiction of terror (see the previous chapter), or more audacious in their portraits of Stalin, no other writer of the period combined all three of these central questions about the cult of personality and fashioned them into quintessentially Soviet novels for a mass audience.4 In this sense, Simonov’s novels and their popular reception provide unparalleled insight into the way in which post-Stalinist literature and its readers grappled with the two principal, but contradictory (even mutually exclusive), legacies of Stalinism: war and terror. The author’s deployment of the familiar epic novel form to narrate the still fragmentary new history of both episodes left the novels uneven, vulnerable to both aesthetic and factual critique from professional critics and ordinary readers. However, the very scope of Simonov’s enterprise led readers to engage with the works on a grand scale, to use them to make sense of their recent past, as well as to reflect on the current state of Soviet public memory. The dozens of column inches devoted to both novels across the Soviet press were exceeded by the hundreds of letters that Simonov received from Soviet citizens, and from avid readers of the originals and their multiple translations around the world.5 These best-selling novels of the 1950s and 1960s and the contestation that they provoked suggest that the Khrushchev era witnessed new (though not permanent or consistent) changes to the memory work performed, and stimulated, by Soviet culture. The increased dose of realism in Socialist Realism surprised readers, producing new modes of engagement with it, though these responses drew on a variety of precedents (such as reader response to wartime literature, including Simonov’s earlier works, and traditions of literary fandom).6 This diverse and impassioned reader

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response sharpened the debate over Soviet literature’s capacity to tolerate realism in the form of tragedy, trauma, and truth about terror and war, while also suggesting new ways in which Soviet public culture and memory might reflect individual memories as well as collective, supposedly typical, experience. At the same time, readers’ responses to this de-Stalinized narrative of the war years also expressed popular investment in redemptive myths of war, and in some cases even a lingering attachment to the Stalin cult, which was still so tightly, even inextricably, intertwined with the war victory. In this way, Simonov’s readers mirrored his own contradictory attitude toward the memory of Stalin and Stalinism, while also revealing paradoxes and difficulties of de-Stalinization not fully apprehended by the author himself. W R I T I N G A N D R E - W R I T I N G T H E W A R , T E R R O R , A N D S TA L I N

Konstantin Simonov became increasingly convinced after the 20th Congress that the war could not be understood or properly remembered without an honest confrontation of the harrowing experiences of the early war, and that the explanation for them lay, in turn, with the Great Terror of 1937–38 and with Stalin.7 Simonov’s post-Stalinist novels demythologized the Stalinist narrative of Stalin’s flawless leadership and its claims concerning the relatively low cost of victory. They also debunked the Stalinist principle of “vigilance,” and the category of “enemy of the people,” to which the main characters fall victim. At the same time, Simonov remained deeply committed to a heroic myth of war, and could not entirely abandon the notion that Stalin’s leadership (or popular faith in it, at least) had contributed to the victory. Moreover, precisely through their unprecedented representation of war trauma, the works remythologized the war as a time of extraordinary and heroic sacrifice, making the eventual victory perhaps even more redemptive than it had been in the Stalin-era war narrative. The drafting of each novel drew on Simonov’s personal memories of war and Stalin, and on the author’s archival and oral history research, but was also informed by the public revelations of de-Stalinization, especially at the 20th and 22nd party congresses. Both novels thus emerged out of the dynamic intersection between individual memory, public memory (the party-sponsored revelations about the cult of personality), and, perhaps most important, the collective and individual memory of his readers, the majority veterans.8

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After Stalin’s death, changes to the party line on the war had opened up a space for both Soviet historiography and Soviet war literature and film to deconstruct the Stalinist narrative of World War II.9 Simonov’s The Living and the Dead was the first epic literary narrative of the early war retreat and losses. In it, the retreat at the start of the war is anything but the “strategic defense” that Stalin tried to claim; in fact, it is deeply painful and chaotic for those caught up in it. This was also the first post-Stalinist Soviet novel to reflect on the role of Stalin, and to suggest linkages between the leader, the Great Terror, and this early chaos.10 The Living and the Dead did not just rewrite Stalinist historiography, tackling previously excluded themes, however; it also rewrote, and to some degree atoned for, Simonov’s Stalin-era fiction and poetry.11 The Living and the Dead was most obviously linked to his novel Comrades in Arms, published in the penultimate year of Stalin’s life.12 Several of the characters first introduced in the 1952 work, including the main protagonist Sintsov, reappear in the 1959 sequel. Both novels were written on the basis of materials gathered during the early phase of Simonov’s career as a war journalist, in Khalkhin Gol in 1939, and at key fighting locations during the early Soviet war effort.13 Later, in People Are Not Born Soldiers, Simonov would similarly rewrite the narrative of his wartime novel Days and Nights, revising the material (both published and unpublished) gathered on the Stalingrad front. What started out as a straightforward sequel to his Stalin-era war novels became a much more complicated task following the “switch in values” that he experienced after hearing the revelations of the 20th Congress.14 Having started on The Living and the Dead, then entitled The Forty-first Year, before the Secret Speech, Simonov was forced to reevaluate the whole text in light of what Khrushchev revealed about 1937 and 1941, and about Stalin himself.15 Returning to his own diaries, he set about elaborating the embryonic doubts about Stalin and the terror that he had felt even at that time.16 In the resulting novel, characters voice some of the thoughts that Simonov had confided to his wartime diary.17 Simonov’s 1941 record of meeting a certain Kutepov in Mogilev also provided the biographical outline for the Gulag returnee Serpilin, perhaps the most important character in the two novels.18 However, Simonov did not base his Khrushchev-era war narratives solely on personal observation; in fact, he would later denounce the

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overreliance of early drafts of The Living and the Dead on his own diaries.19 Both of these novels, whose publication would elicit so many veteran memories, were themselves based on Simonov’s gathering of what he termed “the memories of other more direct participants in the war,” a practice begun in earnest in the mid-1950s and continuing right up until his death two decades later.20 These war novels thus demonstrate the “diversity of authorship” of war memory.21 The veteran testimony gathered during the drafting of the novels was most useful in deepening Simonov’s picture of the chaotic early war, making him realize that “the year 1941, with its heroic tragedies, with its sadness, with its countless graves, ha[d] cut into the souls of people with unusual force.”22 The Living and the Dead in particular abounds in harrowing descriptions of the death, injury, distress, and hysteria caused by the retreats of summer and autumn 1941. The author’s own reflections on the causes of these losses, enriched by the revelations of de-Stalinization, and inspired by Tolstoi’s philosophy of history, then allowed his novels to erect an argument about (and increasingly against) Stalinism.23 The sheer complexity of the issues raised by this historical and mnemonic investigation compelled Simonov to narrow the breadth of The Living and the Dead from its initial panoramic perspective: “it was precisely via Sintsov and his fate,” he later explained, “that I could show that tragic epoch more completely and deeply.”24 In fact, this decision to discard the original draft’s multiple storylines in favor of a narrative focused on the political commissar Sintsov would later provoke rebukes from Soviet critics, and from the characters’ real-life counterparts in the Soviet Army, for the failure to apprehend the big picture of war, the sheer improbability of Sintsov’s multiple misfortunes.25 For Simonov, not content with depriving his hero of (almost) all contact with his family, and inflicting numerous serious injuries on him, also insisted that Sintsov be encircled several times over, and that he should then face the enduring “suspiciousness” that greeted paperless okruzhentsy (escapees) when they finally broke back through to the Soviet side.26 Sintsov’s traumatic fate condenses the key misfortunes caused by the sudden, swift advance of the Nazi troops into Soviet territory—and by Stalin’s failure to prepare for it. Simonov, by his own admission, had not “set out to write a book about lucky people,” and Sintsov’s repeated encounters with the other main character, Serpilin, a former survivor of the army purges and Gulag, also

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allowed for parallels to be drawn between Sintsov’s victimization (the result of the terror mentality surviving into the war) and Serpilin’s earlier victimhood (the result of the Great Terror itself, which had deprived the war of good military leadership at its start).27 In The Living and the Dead, nevertheless, the characters’ reflections on the terror and on Stalin remained embryonic, a fact reflected in the very limited discussion of either topic (and the very few references even to the generic cult of personality) in Soviet critics’ responses.28 At the time of writing and publication of this first post-Stalinist work, Simonov insisted that he (and, perhaps, any Soviet writer) lacked the knowledge and understanding to write about 1937 directly, or in any depth.29 At a readers’ conference at the Frunze Military Academy, held after the publication of The Living and the Dead, where many military readers criticized the lack of direct analysis of Stalinism, Simonov categorically stated: “We can’t yet allow ourselves to say the whole truth about 1937–38. That’s my sincere conviction. I don’t intend to write about that.”30 He also, as we shall see later from his correspondence with readers, remained convinced that popular belief in Stalin had been sincere, albeit based on a fiction, and that it had positively influenced the outcome of the war. This helps to explain why, in The Living and the Dead, questions about Stalinism take precedence over direct critique. The novel’s two main characters, Serpilin and Sintsov, do wonder about the causes of the misfortunes around them, and question how they can be aligned with the claims of Stalinist propaganda about Stalin’s strategic “genius” and prescience, but they do not ultimately indict Stalin or the Stalinist system.31 Serpilin’s difficult biography—“of the type that bends [a person] but does not break [him]”—is largely contained within one chapter, which briefly recounts his arrest in 1937 and the four years spent in Kolyma.32 Serpilin himself expresses anger and disdain only toward the proximate cause of his misfortune, his “careerist” denouncer at the Frunze academy, Baranov.33 As with so many Soviet accounts of the terror (especially before the 22nd Congress), the agents—and causes—of terror are considerably murkier than their radiant victims: Serpilin conceives of his own arrest as the result of “fate” and “ill will” toward him, depersonalizing its causes.34 Serpilin only once links Stalin to terror; while watching the November 1941 parade on Red Square, he involuntarily, but only briefly, wonders how he had allowed the purges to happen.35 Meanwhile, Sintsov’s misfortunes and the unwarranted

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distrust that he faces are clearly the legacy of Stalinist terror. However, like Serpilin, he does not extrapolate beyond the individuals who victimize him, drawing no conclusions about the Stalinist leadership or system. Neither main character dwells on his victim status, except insofar as it affects the wider war effort and his own ability to contribute to it.36 Thus, while the criticism of Stalinist vigilance is clear, the criticism of Stalin himself is oblique, as much due to Simonov’s own slow rethinking of Stalinism as to editorial and Glavlit censorship, even though the latter interventions in the texts were also significant.37 As he started to draft the novel that would become the sequel to The Living and the Dead, Simonov was also working on the original’s film adaptation, and he repeatedly insisted in negotiations with the Mosfil’m studio that the film must show both the living and the dead, optimism and triumph, but also despair and loss.38 In the middle of the film adaptation and the first novel’s reception, one further event also influenced the drafting of People Are Not Born Soldiers: the 22nd Congress, with its much more radical criticism of Stalin, which deepened Simonov’s impetus to delve into the history of Stalinism. Later, he would liken The Living and the Dead to an anesthetic, administered prior to the probing dissection of Stalinism in People Are Not Born Soldiers.39 And indeed, the 1963 sequel does not shy away from the most painful questions of the recent past, and the expansion of the preceding novel’s tentative representation of Stalin and the Great Terror is particularly noticeable. Certainly, Soviet critics— emboldened by the 22nd Congress as well as by the novel’s innovations— filled their reviews with harsh criticism of the cult of personality and emotive reflections on the flaws in Stalin’s character.40 Where previously 1937 had seemed forbiddingly inscrutable, too enormous and traumatic an event to be narrated at all, now its very scale made it more urgent for Simonov to start revealing it, albeit incrementally, to the Soviet public.41 The same was true of the “unusually large amount of difficult information” that he now knew about Stalin.42 As he drafted the much-desired sequel, moving closer to the turning point of Stalingrad and further along the path to the Reichstag, Simonov therefore also moved backward, becoming engrossed in the pre-war Great Terror and in exploring Stalin’s culpability. This growing preoccupation with excavating the memory of terror and the truth about Stalin is reflected in the novel’s advocacy of a new approach to remembrance. It is no longer acceptable or possible, as it was

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in The Living and the Dead, to sublimate difficult memories into the preoccupations of military combat. In People Are Not Born Soldiers, Serpilin repeatedly returns to the twin questions of terror and Stalin’s true nature, at first involuntarily, and then in an increasingly conscious effort to confront and explain his own and society’s suffering. Though his confrontation of memories of Stalin(ism) remains imperfect, he is a vanguard figure in the process of de-Stalinization, whose historical consciousness is contrasted to the ignorance and naïvety of the work’s more backward, though still sympathetic, characters. At first, Serpilin’s memories of 1937 are triggered involuntarily, by his return to his Moscow apartment on the occasion of his wife’s death. The apartment itself is saturated with memories of his arrest and of his return from Kolyma four years later, leading to the first of his wife’s heart attacks (the last one kills her in 1942).43 His return to the apartment also raises questions about his son’s renunciation of him as an “enemy of the people.” These memories of terror can no longer be suppressed; they represent “the most unresolved issue in his life,” 44 traumatically “erupting” into the present until fully confronted: “The conversation with his son stirred up everything that he normally did not think about, not because he feared those thoughts but because the war had overshadowed them. Over the course of the war it was not exactly that those thoughts had totally disappeared, but they had buried themselves in such a distant corner of his memory that there was neither the time nor the direct necessity to look into it. But now they had erupted, and it was necessary to sift through them, just as if he was in an open field that he had to get across, even though he was under fire.”45 Ultimately Serpilin concludes that the terror and camps must be remembered as the “other side” of the triumphant Stalinist 1930s, and also that the only possible way for the son to expiate his sins is to enlist to fight.46 When news comes that his son has been killed in battle, Serpilin grieves the loss, but stays true to the moral logic that dictated his son’s departure to the battlefields. The “eruption” of memories then continues to be triggered by encounters with Frunze academy colleagues, and by visits to other memory sites. However, these “spontaneous” memories increasingly give way to a more “conscious” process of historical contemplation, where Serpilin insistently deconstructs the Stalinist explanation of terror in terms of a “conspiracy” orchestrated by “enemies.”47 The shift from spontaneous to

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conscious remembrance of terror and Stalin is well illustrated by Serpilin’s response to the Stalingrad landscape, a palimpsest of “memories preserved” from the Civil War, Stalin, and terror.48 Standing on the same hill where he stood in Tsaritsyn with Stalin in 1918, Serpilin remembers how his colleague, Grin’ko, had been arrested during the Great Terror and then consigned to the Gulag. The landscape generates involuntary memories, but it also then generates an act of volition: Serpilin resolves to write a letter to Stalin, in order to resolve the mystery of Grin’ko’s fate, and thus to confront the Great Terror as a whole.49 Stalin’s direct representation in the novel’s climactic Kremlin scene, where Serpilin’s letter is discussed, was a break with Simonov’s previous practice, and it was also a significant step forward for Soviet literature’s “images of dictatorship”; Rosalind Marsh’s eponymous study in fact deems it “the fullest realistic portrait of Stalin published in this period.”50 Vera Ketlinskaia’s It is Not Worth Living Otherwise, examined in the previous chapter, was the first such attempt to depict Stalin in a new light, in the same Kremlin setting (and the same epic genre) as Simonov would use three years later.51 In the year before Soldiers came out, published portraits of Stalin had started to proliferate, with poetic portraits ranging from the ghost in Evtushenko’s “The Heirs of Stalin” to the inscrutable “master” and Godlike figure in Slutskii’s short cycle of poems, published, like Evtushenko’s, in the Soviet press of 1962. In Soviet prose of the 1960s, however, direct representations remained less common than the indirect evocation of Stalin’s failure to respond to appeals for help (as in Ivan Stadniuk’s People Are Not Angels, or Anatolii Nikul’kov’s In a Frenzy). Simonov’s portrait provided for the first time a close-up view of Stalin’s response to one such appeal, and, unlike Ketlinskaia’s portrait of Stalin in a similar setting, relying entirely on external “portraiture,” it also attempted to evoke Stalin’s inner life.52 Stalinist novels had often used such encounters with Stalin to dramatize the hero’s final coming to consciousness. In Simonov’s post-Stalinist novel, though, Serpilin’s meeting with Stalin thwarts the hero’s attempt both to narrativize the terror and to apprehend the full truth about the leader. Through a shifting narrative viewpoint, the reader is privy to Serpilin’s inner thoughts about terror and war, a strikingly bold narrative of suffering, but also to the far less coherent narrative that he is capable of articulating with Stalin’s “pitiless, calm eyes” trained upon him.53 It is this

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same gaze, and indeed Stalin’s entire despotic demeanor, which also prevents Serpilin from forming a realistic picture of the leader. At the start of the encounter, Serpilin can only perceive Stalin through the prism of cult imagery: he confuses the real-life Stalin with a portrait, and his perception of the leader is crowded with cult accoutrements (his soft boots, his pipe).54 When Serpilin also notices features that seem the polar opposite of the cult’s epithets—Stalin’s cruel eyes, his apparent disregard for the suffering of the early war—he experiences not a moment of revelation, but a kind of cognitive dissonance.55 Serpilin leaves Stalin’s office musing that he would still die for Stalin’s sake, but now can no longer suppress the uncomfortable memory of Stalin’s cruelly dismissive attitude to the victims of terror and war.56 Subsequently, when Serpilin tries to recount this meeting to a fellow Civil War veteran, he still cannot find a way to work through these contradictions. He finds it easier to lean toward the imagery of the cult than to embrace the devastating alternative image of the leader, even though his interlocutor offers him more facts about the terror, which make veneration of Stalin yet more untenable.57 This conversation takes place in a half-darkened room, a symbol of the liminal space that Serpilin still inhabits between ignorance and full enlightenment about Stalin.58 After Serpilin’s departure from Stalin’s office, the chapter’s narrative perspective shifts to Stalin’s thoughts, suggesting that Serpilin’s confusion might partly be explained by Stalin’s own conscious attempts to disguise his real nature.59 Stalin wishes to maintain the image of a decisive, infallible leader, and so “steps over” any memories of his own uncertainties, including his initial hesitations over whether to sentence Grin’ko to death (which he did, on the second review of his case, in 1942). 60 Externally, too, he consciously projects an image of inscrutability, becoming irritated if anyone catches him without this facial expression in place.61 Stalin has thus rendered his real self invisible; if he himself is trapped in the imagery of his cult, how could others possibly get to know the real Stalin? In this way, the novel ultimately excuses Serpilin’s failure to “see” the real Stalin, but it still depicts other, less critical believers in the cult’s rhetoric as naïve.62 Tania Ovsiannikova, for example, the nurseheroine whose courage in war astounds those who initially dismiss her as a “bird-like girl,” remains child-like in one important respect: she believes wholeheartedly in the Stalin cult and displays a febrile curiosity about

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others’ encounters with him.63 Tania’s eventual lover, Sintsov, meanwhile represents an intermediate point between Tanya’s unquestioning belief and Serpilin’s ambivalent “knowledge” of the leader. To a greater degree than he did in The Living and the Dead, he now starts to contemplate Stalin’s responsibility for the enormous death toll of both 1941 and 1942.64 However, he is reluctant to transform these subconscious anxieties into conscious thoughts, fearing that he would “dislodge something in his soul,” which had helped him and others through the war.65 Both of Simonov’s Khrushchev-era novels were therefore groundbreaking, and the author’s decision to tackle the themes of terror, Stalin, and war death sent a strong signal to readers that these topics were now available for discussion and comparison with personal memories (especially given both novels’ highly “personal” focus on a handful of characters). At the same time, as this brief textual analysis of the novels has shown, both works contained significant ambiguities and silences, exacerbated both by Simonov’s personal ambivalence about the tragedy of war and the evil of Stalin, and by the ongoing ambiguities of the party line on de-Stalinization. These lacunae and inconsistencies in the novels’ treatment of Stalinism, as much as their “authorization” of previously taboo subject matter, provoked readers to write to Simonov and Znamia in the hundreds. These copious responses were conditioned by existing habits of readership, to which we now briefly turn. SIMONOV AND HIS READERS: CELEBRITY, FANDOM, AND TRUST

In 1943, a soldier enjoying a ceasefire used his unexpected leisure time to visit the local theater, to watch Simonov’s play Russian People. In a letter to the writer, he outlined both his reaction to the play and his recent experiences of fighting in Stalingrad; in fact, the traumatic events that he had witnessed in the city conditioned his response to the play. As he recounted to the author, “tears even sprang from my eyes, which is only the second time that that’s happened to me during the war. . . . Out of an excess [izbytok] of feeling, I didn’t know what to do.”66 Almost exactly the same “hydraulic” release of emotions occurred a decade and a half later, when another reader, a certain Grabovskaia, wrote to Simonov about The Living and the Dead: “I have to express my feelings, which overflow in me,” she explained, “the thing is, I had to live through this terrible war, and you have transmitted the psychology of people wonderfully.”67 This replication,

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across two decades and two very different literary works, of the trope of readers’ “excessive” and “overflowing” emotions and memories illustrates the character and durability of Simonov’s bond with the Soviet reading public. Winning his readers’ trust and forging a symbiosis between private emotion, individual memory, and published literature, Simonov had apparently achieved the narodnost’ required of Soviet literature, but perhaps only because of a degree of emotional and historical truth unusual (and perhaps damaging) to Socialist Realism. This set of tributes also reveals that Simonov’s enormous celebrity during and after the war had already shaped his public persona and his relationship with the Soviet readership, well before The Living and the Dead (and, later, Soldiers) appeared. “He always insisted that we let him go further and further in . . . to feel the conflict on his own skin”: this was how David Ortenberg, Simonov’s editor at Krasnaia zvezda, remembered the author during his celebrated stint as war correspondent.68 During World War II, Simonov’s vertiginous rise to fame and popularity centered on his closeness to the war and to frontline soldiers; according to one veteran, who later dedicated his career to Simonov scholarship, soldiers had a “special relationship with Simonov,” endowing the author’s name with a “romantic aura.”69 His public persona blurred the boundaries between writer and soldier, sword and pen, perhaps more so than other famous Soviet war correspondents, including Vasilii Grossman and Il’ia Ehrenburg: readers’ wartime letters had frequently alluded to Simonov as the most daring of all correspondents, closest to the action and to the story on the ground. 70 Now, in the post-Stalin era, many of those same readers again praised Simonov’s direct perspective on the conflict, remembering anew how he had gathered his material in the trenches among the soldiers. Indeed, the Soviet press encouraged readers to draw such parallels between Simonov’s wartime writing and his present-day project.71 Accordingly, readers acclaimed his post-Stalinist novels for being written “not out of fantasy, but out of . . . personal unmediated contact with his heroes”; proof of this was the fact that the letter writer had himself encountered Simonov in the trenches in 1941.72 Others remembered Simonov “in the thick of it,” his closeness to the conflict validating the information in The Living and the Dead, as in his previous works.73 The military masculinity of Simonov’s wartime persona was combined, however, with emotional expressiveness and a sympathetic

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awareness of the traumatic toll of war. The emotions saturating Simonov’s wartime poetry, fiction, and journalistic reporting range from the “hatred” campaign of the early war years to the grief that shadows his Stalingrad story Days and Nights and his poem “Do you remember, Alesha?” and the powerful valorization of love and private emotion in his most famous poem, “Wait for me.” As Lisa Kirschenbaum has argued, wartime culture permitted many such expressions of individual emotion and of attachment to “home and hearth,” but Simonov was undoubtedly foremost among them.74 Whether Simonov was shaping, or simply expressing, the popular mood remains an unresolved question.75 What is clear, however, is that readers quickly became accustomed to viewing Simonov as a hyper-masculine daredevil, but also as the reflector and recipient of their deeply personal and emotional reactions to war.76 During the conflict, and immediately after it, Soviet readers turned to Simonov, perhaps more than to other “healers of wounded souls,” to make sense of their experiences.77 When Simonov himself returned to that past some fifteen years later, thousands of his wartime fans joined the queues at libraries and kiosks to find out how their favorite author’s view of the war and Stalin had now changed.78 Grabovskaia’s allusions to an overflow of emotion offer some clues as to the intensity of the post-Stalinist readership’s engagement with what they read. Given this widespread evidence of undimmed enthusiasm for Simonov’s works, bolstered by the strong bonds of readerly trust formed during and after the war, the scholarly neglect of Simonov’s post-Stalinist popular reception is surprising. One critic has referred to Simonov’s lifelong “closeness” to his readers, and offered as proof the unceasing flow of “thousands” of readers’ letters sent to him; however, sustained investigation of this popular reception has remained limited to the wartime period.79 This is despite the acknowledgement by both the author and his critics that Simonov was overwhelmed with a “flood” of “hundreds,” if not thousands, of readers’ letters in response to these two groundbreaking novels of the Khrushchev era (and indeed also to the final novel of the series, The Last Summer, published in the Brezhnev era).80 Investigation of Simonov’s personal archive, as well as the overlapping, smaller archive of letters held at the journal Znamia, yields over seven hundred unique letters sent in response to The Living and the Dead and People Are Not Born Soldiers, which confirm Boris Pankin’s tongue-in-cheek tribute to the

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geographical diversity of Simonov’s fan base: “The addresses! The addresses! . . . Petropavlovsk, the Kazakh republic, the village of Maiskii in Kabardino-Balkariia. . . . People write in from the back of beyond [glukhoman’ie]! Perhaps from the back of beyond, things are clearer?”81 Simonov’s readers included decorated veterans, terror victims, and former POWs, and women who had experienced war at the rear and at the frontline; the broad geographical distribution of Simonov’s fans, as noted by Pankin, also offers poignant insight into the geography of war’s aftermath. The addresses reveal honored veterans clustering around prestigious neighborhoods in Moscow, while more ordinary soldiers struggled to cope with war injury and trauma in peripheral neighborhoods and regions, and recently rehabilitated terror victims and POWs faced an ongoing search for a home in mainstream Soviet society. At the same time, this geographical breadth also emphasizes the supra-regional (and perhaps supra-national) appeal of Simonov’s works, suggesting that they helped to forge a new Soviet myth of war. Moreover, as has again been acknowledged by critics, Simonov responded assiduously to a large proportion of these letters, almost certainly at greater length than the rigors of wartime had permitted for his earlier works. While these letters sometimes perpetuated the traditionally pedagogical role of the Soviet writer, they sought explanation and clarification too, as Simonov asked his readers for more information about terror and Stalinism, and compared their opinions with his own, still incomplete, thoughts on the topic.82 These letters profoundly affected Simonov’s own understanding of his, and the nation’s, recent past, and the author’s carefully crafted replies offer insight into how Soviet literature could generate productive dialogue about memory between writers and readers. One reason for the scholarly neglect of Simonov’s popular reception in this period might be that these two novels followed closely the twists and turns of the party’s campaign of de-Stalinization. Indeed, many of Simonov’s colleagues, including Tvardovskii and many fellow writers at the Moscow Union, criticized the novels as aesthetically undistinguished, their content too “official” to be taken seriously.83 Yet this suspicious attitude was not shared by the majority of Simonov’s readers, who believed that Simonov’s works reflected personal and national memory, if at times imperfectly. Simonov’s novels therefore invite us to look beyond the

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literary intelligentsia’s canon of thaw-era works, and to assess the importance of such mainstream Soviet literature in the nationwide process of coming to terms with the Stalinist past.

“I

R E M E M B E R I T A L L ”: R E A L I S M ,

(WAR)

TRAUMA, AND

SOCIALIST REALISM

In 1959, one of Simonov’s readers living in Lvov, a certain Drobchenko, wrote him a heartfelt letter of thanks for The Living and the Dead. The novel, he said, had transported him directly back to the war. “I remember it all,” he claimed. “The terrible [groznyi] year 1941 looms up before my eyes.”84 The letter’s allusions to memory, eyewitness testimony, and stark realism were typical of the exchanges between this Soviet writer and his readers after the publication of his first major fiction since the war. A decade and a half after the end of war, and with nearly two decades separating them from the “terrible” conditions of 1941, readers of The Living and the Dead were allowed, even forced, to reexperience the early war, and to measure their own painful memories against the more realistic picture of war newly authorized for publication.85 The novel’s sequel moved forward to a slightly more optimistic period, but simultaneously became more deeply preoccupied with Stalinism’s appalling waste of human life. Memories of World War II were a source of patriotic pride and a foundational identity myth for the post-war era.86 They were also intricately intertwined with the Stalin cult, rendering their de-Stalinization a complex task.87 How, then, did ordinary readers in the first decade after Stalin’s death react to Simonov’s attempts to debunk the Stalinist narrative of the early war, to document the effects of terror on the war, and to replace the Stalin cult with a more realistic portrait of Stalin? All three of these challenges to Stalinist public memory will be examined in turn. The Living and the Dead has often been praised as a “break” with previous representations of war.88 Even at the time, the Soviet critical consensus was broadly in favor of Simonov’s audacious representation of the “bitter truth” about war.89 This innovation was most enthusiastically welcomed, though, in the novel’s popular reception, as readers almost universally acclaimed the rupture with Stalinist historiography and war fiction.90 According to them, Simonov had lifted the “cover” imposed on the truth about war by the Stalin cult, shown the “other side of the medal” from the celebratory Stalinist rhetoric of war, and reversed the former

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historiographical emphasis on unbroken advances and triumphs by bringing retreats and losses to the forefront.91 While Simonov had told the truth consistently since the early war, now the truth was different, encompassing defeats and retreats: this was “fearsome,” “life-like,” the “whole truth.”92 Here, at last, was the “dark” (chernyi), “shadowy” face of war so long masked in Stalinist public memory.93 If the novel constituted a break with past, and even present, Soviet public culture, it was not necessarily a break in Simonov’s own aesthetic practice. Most of his readers, as the previous section suggested, saw the realism of these novels as a continuation of his wartime gathering of facts, crafted into narratives that chimed with the reality of soldiers’ experiences.94 Only isolated letters to the author expressed dismay at the author’s apparently abrupt abandonment of his former interest in “simple Russian” themes and at his sudden fascination with death and suffering.95 The majority, however, found this brutal realism unsurprising in the context of Simonov’s oeuvre. More important, they also found it reassuring, since the realistic confrontation of painful memories finally allowed for a closer alignment of “vernacular” and official memory.96 In acclaiming Simonov’s “courageous” truth and its capacity to “shake” previous representations of the war, readers nonetheless recognized what he was recounting: the chaos and grief of the early war, which they themselves had seen at the time.97 Veterans already knew about “the war as it was,” but it was still refreshing to find within Soviet literature “that side of the war about which people are usually silent.”98 Reader response now accordingly experimented with a new military vocabulary where the emphasis shifted from triumph to “tragedy,” resulting in descriptions of war that transgressed even the expanded limits of the official war narrative.99 Readers confirmed Simonov’s view that the early war was utterly dominated by deep retreats, not advances, and by defeats, not victory.100 There were evocations of the almost total “chaos,” “disorder,” and “mess” (kasha) that this retreat had caused at the local level.101 Hundreds of letter writers also alluded to the “suffering,” even the “tortures,” that they and their fellow citizens had endured during the early war.102 Furthermore, it was precisely the terminology that was used in party attacks on excessive de-Stalinization that took on a positive valence in readers’ praise: finally, here was a Soviet war narrative that confronted, rather than evaded, the “gloom” (mrak) and “horrors” (uzhasy) of the war.103 One of the most

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extreme combinations of this new lexis came in a letter from a certain Koniakhin, who summed up the early war as “total rout, fractured divisions, total despair, physical torture, and the anguish of solitude.”104 Veterans now confidently asserted the truth of their intimate witnessing of this harrowing experience.105 One wrote to express his approval of Simonov’s account rather formally, saying that “personally, being a witness to all the horrors of this war, I again confirm the accuracy of the events transmitted by the author.”106 Another, a certain Volkov, wrote with a partial challenge, asking the author to insert into his Stalingrad narrative “more broken tanks, weapons, and corpses.” After all, he explained, “I know the landscape during the battles.”107 Simonov himself encouraged this deference to veteran experience and eyewitness testimony; he emphatically accorded them the “right to be the strictest judges” of his representation of war. Even the author’s direct witnessing of the war was no match for the experience of those who had “gone through war and known on their own backs what it was all about.”108 Indeed, reader testimony echoed this sense of the physical as well as visual impact of the early war.109 This emphasis on the visual, the corporeal, the personally witnessed and experienced, enacted a break with the spectacular and hierarchical public culture of Stalinism.110 Encouraged that Socialist Realism might now tolerate a realistic account of ordinary people’s experiences, scores of readers offered to the author their own testimonies of the early war. Far from the “incommunicable” traumas to which Paul Fussell refers in his study of World War I memory, these memories came flooding out, in letters suffused with gratitude for the long-delayed validation of popular memories of wartime hardship and sacrifice.111 Readers powerfully argued that the dominant emotion of early war was sadness and grief (gorech’, gore) and, to a lesser but still significant degree, fear (strakh).112 This rewriting of the emotional script of war was enough to stimulate the release of long-suppressed emotion in readers, both male and female. Tears drenched many letters: “copious tears ran down my cheeks, the borscht bubbled away in the saucepan, but I didn’t notice anything,” recounted one woman, echoing many other letters from Simonov’s extensive female audience.113 But emotion was not the sole preserve of women, as the novels also authorized the expression of emotion by male readers: “We’re all boys [ parni],” explained one group of students from Tbilisi, “but we ourselves almost

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cried along with the heroes when our people died.”114 Indeed, it was one of Simonov’s many male veteran readers, a pensioner from Berdichev named Dmitrienko, who most eloquently described the shift from suppression to permitted release of emotion: “During the war, my heart was hardened with hatred toward the enemy and for all its horror [uzhas] not one tear fell from my eyes during the whole war, but reading your work my heart contracted so much that tears more than once moistened my eyes.”115 Dmitrienko’s testimony revealed that the “civic duty to hate,” together with the overwhelming demands of the conflict (and the strict norms of soldier conduct), had combined to suppress his personal emotional response to the enormous trauma of war.116 Simonov’s novel, published many years later, had performed a vital function in releasing these feelings. However, for some readers, the emotions and pain aroused by full remembrance of the war were potentially more damaging than curative, and in some letters the imagery of psychological wounds (rany) was sometimes coupled with reluctance fully to confront trauma.117 A certain Nikitina, for instance, presented her war losses as a “wound [that] won’t heal,” while other correspondents alluded to the presence of a scab, albeit a fragile one, that had gradually formed to protect the wound.118 Another correspondent, Teushenkova, described her “quietened wounds of war” and her initial reluctance to “agitate” them by reading the novel, while a certain Mishina described her psychological injuries as too fresh to risk any further pain through the act of reading and remembering.119 However, ultimately, the former considered the novel absorbing, and an antidote to “the emptiness of solitude,” and the latter, brought to tears by reading, found the emotional release to be both timely and helpful. Only one reader who used the language of psychological wounds, a certain Novozhilova, who had lost both her sister and son to the war, remained resistant to the notion of reading as cure. When reading The Living and the Dead, she explained to Simonov, her “wounds started to bleed again, the wounds to my heart, like a mother losing her last son as he protected our native land.” The act of reading had only caused further pain.120 In an attempt to persuade this reader toward a more positive view of the confrontation of traumatic memories, Simonov said that he sympathized with her “as yet unhealed wounds” but also that he considered it absolutely “necessary” to narrate war trauma in literature.121

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Most readers, unlike Novozhilova, needed little persuading. They themselves, in fact, expressed an instinctive awareness of the curative powers of remembrance and narrativization. For example, a certain Lopatin wrote to Simonov from Ul’ianovsk in spring 1960 to express his individual and family memory of war.122 One of three brothers, Lopatin had witnessed close to home the variety of different endings that the war could have: he himself had been injured, while one of his brothers had died, and the other had survived the war entirely uninjured and was now in the military elite, teaching at the Frunze Military Academy. “The whole story” of the impact of war on his family was of paramount importance to him, though “nothing special” in the broader narrative of the war as a whole. Still, he had taken the time to write to Simonov because, he explained, “it is as though it’s easier when I tell you about my living and dead.” Re-voicing The Living and the Dead within his own “home and hearth,” Lopatin’s letter epitomized the relief at the new alignment between public and private memory, which dominated Simonov’s reception.123 Many readers, though, were less fortunate than Lopatin. Deprived of conclusive confirmation of the circumstances of their relatives’ deaths, and offered no site or commemorative ritual in which to mourn them properly, many readers had, predictably, remained haunted by their losses.124 For many, though, Simonov’s novel now provided a “site” in which to remember and make sense of their bereavement, where fictional characters’ fates could be substituted for the fractured biographies of absent family members.125 One letter from a war widow, for example, began with expressions of regret that there was “nowhere to lay flowers” to honor her husband’s memory, and resentment that “war crippled the lives of many families.” However, there was some comfort in Simonov’s novel: “In this book there’s also something about my Misha,” she admitted, seeing it as a tribute to her lost husband and partial compensation for the lack of a physical memory site. Simonov, responding to this letter, expressed sympathy for her grief, and agreed that literature could function as a kind of monument, here inspiring the son to emulate his father.126 Other letters enacted a similar conflation of literary and real-life war heroes.127 Some readers, though, expected too much of this conflation. A mother from Omsk and a son from Moscow both wrote to Simonov expecting him to be able to clarify the manner of their relatives’ deaths,

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since they had perceived unmistakable parallels between their biographies and those of the fictional heroes.128 Another widow, Kuznetsova, wrote more angrily, complaining about Simonov’s failure to mention her husband’s contribution to the battle at Borisov. While sympathetic to the anguish of not having her husband’s memory honored, Simonov refuted her accusations of carelessness, reminding her that he was writing “not history, but a novel, with fictionalized characters.”129 Despite such reminders, many readers continued to use Simonov’s novel as a way to narrate their lost relatives’ lives to a more satisfactory conclusion. In response to both novels, there were only rare extrapolations from individual bereavement to the mass death occasioned by the war effort. This partly reflected the narrow focus of the plots, a cause for complaint from many critics and military officials who bemoaned the lack of “overall context” of the war (although they had in mind its triumphs more than its losses).130 However, a few readers did try to confront the nationwide toll that the war had taken. One letter, from a certain Aksenov, was dominated by the writer’s grief for his first son lost at war, and his fear that his second son would also die, but it did express some sense of the “enormous losses . . . horror and suffering” that the war as a whole had caused.131 More specific statistical estimates ranged from “thousands” blamed on Stalin, or on the “Baranovs,” to seven million (blamed on the Germans rather than domestic policy errors), right up to the eighteen to twenty million deaths proposed in one semianonymized missive from a woman too fearful to identify herself in any more detail than her first name, “Elena.”132 Generally, however, readers responded primarily to Simonov’s novels through the prism of their personal experience of war, using them to make sense of individual and familial tragedies, rather than to reflect more broadly on the colossal losses that the nation had suffered (indeed, neither Soviet public culture nor Simonov’s novels offered much information on this). Simonov’s acknowledgement of the reality of war, limited as it may have been, already contained enough realism to make these veterans’ experiences more “real”: their personal memories now echoed in public culture and could now be articulated and confronted in the semi-private forum of correspondence with their favorite writer. This alignment between popular and public memory indeed generated an overflow of feelings, but the long-delayed confrontation of war trauma

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seemed overwhelmingly curative and reassuring for Simonov’s readers. Yet, within just over half a decade, readers’ gratitude for this de-Stalinized narrative of early war was eclipsed by the argument that such emphasis on the tragedy of war was too depressing for the Soviet readership. V I C T I M S , N O T H E R O E S : V O I C I N G T H E T R A U M A O F S TA L I N I S M 133

“Sintsov—that’s me,” wrote a certain Shydkov to Simonov in 1960. Shydkov’s letter went on to explain how he identified, on the basis of his own suffering during the war, with Simonov’s fictional hero. As he continued to elaborate his autobiography, however, the comparison became more tenuous, and he eventually concluded: “Sintsov is me, it’s just that he was lucky.” For, unlike Sintsov, this real-life victim of encirclement had suffered years of distrust, culminating in a recent re-arrest.134 Shydkov’s letter suggests that Simonov’s portrayal of the fate of victims of encirclement was not nearly so easily aligned with the victims’ memories as his portrayal of the early war had been. In reacting to Simonov’s attempt to narrate both the suspicion and vigilance toward escapees from enemy encirclement and imprisonment, and the experiences of victims of the Great Terror, readers expressed gratitude for the recognition of personal memories, but also articulated more aggressive calls for greater realism and critique. Simonov’s narration of the difficult fate of Sintsov, the political instructor who loses his identity papers while on enemy territory, was pioneering at the time that The Living and the Dead was published. The rehabilitation of former POWs had taken a decisive step forward with the amnesties of 1955 and 1956, but mentalities could be slower to shift. 135 Literature and film had made some tentative steps toward a more sympathetic portrayal of those held captive in enemy territory, most notably with Sholokhov’s Fate of a Man, released as a story in the year of the Secret Speech, and as a film in the same year that The Living and the Dead was published.136 As such Simonov’s treatment of this theme, barely broached in Soviet literature, garnered instant interest and recognition. Those who had been encircled or imprisoned, and those who had witnessed their treatment on their attempted reintegration, both confirmed that Simonov’s portrait was not only correct, but also necessary.137 Among witnesses who claimed a “right” to comment on Simonov’s portrayal of Sintsov was a surgeon who had witnessed how okruzhentsy had been

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literally “quarantined . . . like sworn enemies” on their return, and a lieutenant who had seen the problem from both sides; having escaped from encirclement himself, he ended up in charge of processing other returnees, a complex biography that so intrigued Simonov that he requested a phone conversation to gather more testimony.138 It was victims of encirclement, though, who authored most responses to Sintsov’s story, and they formed a substantial minority of Simonov’s veteran readership as a whole. Like the relatives seeking traces of their loved ones, many victims identified with Sintsov’s life story and used it to make sense of their autobiographies. One identified vividly with Sintsov’s “road to Calvary,” suggesting a shared burden of suffering, yet also the possibility of resurrection and redemption.139 Indeed, the term vosstanovlenie (renewal) appeared in many letters, denoting not just the technical process of readmission to the party and rehabilitation, but also the resurrection of a coherent Soviet identity and reinsertion into the Soviet collective.140 One letter, from a certain Glukhov, was grateful for Sintsov’s story since it advertized to a wide readership that okruzhentsy like himself were no longer “traitors,” though he himself had found rehabilitation tortuous.141 For others, this recognition and reinclusion was posthumous, albeit still a vindication of victims’ honor.142 Several letters to Simonov from non-victims suggested that they did now recognize the contribution to the war effort made by okruzhentsy: using stigmata imagery to dismiss past practices of stigmatization, one claimed that escapees could now “be proud of their past, like military scars.”143 Like the other war scars long recognized in post-war identities and hierarchies, the experience of encirclement had here become a badge of honor rather than shame.144 However, this smooth insertion of the experience of encirclement into public memory and war myth was widely challenged, hampering the full alignment between personal and public memory. Veterans’ memories and raw trauma often proved harder to fit within Soviet language. A certain Demidov in fact used precisely this imagery in opening his long letter to Simonov: “the trauma of Sintsov to a certain degree is like a burning needle wounding my heart,” he claimed. He went on, over several pages, to outline the “enormous grief” of his own life after encirclement, including a recent re-arrest, although he ended by urging Simonov to create a happy ending for Sintsov, even if in real life such happiness continued to evade him.145

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Other lengthy narratives of encirclement expressed a sense of the authorization of personal memories and hope for reinclusion in the Soviet war myth, but their sprawling evocations of suffering continually strayed beyond Socialist Realist conventions, and beyond the limits of Sintsov’s suffering.146 One six-page epic from a veteran in Petropavlovsk, Gavrilov, repeatedly failed to fit his experience of “injustice, cruelty,” and “whole series of . . . trials and deprivations” into a short letter. In fact, he explained: “I won’t hide it: the immodest desire to describe all that which I’ve had to witness and suffer comes upon me very often, but you can see yourself: where would I go with my clumsy way of expressing myself . . . but I really do want people to find out about all that which many people never had to find out about, and to remember and never forget about the torture, sufferings, and adversity on the thorny path of those who gave the best years of their lives for the sake of our today and for the sake of our radiant future.”147 While nominally conforming his autobiography to the generic conventions of the Socialist Realist novel, with its happy ending and its didactic purpose, Gavrilov repeatedly lapsed into a “clumsy” narrative without a tidy ending, where suffering could not be tidily curtailed or its “thorns” painlessly extracted.148 The challenge posed by such narratives of suffering was implicit, but Simonov also faced explicit challenges to his portrayal of Sintsov. Veterans asserted that the process of reinsertion into the Soviet collective often took far longer than in the novel (“sometimes one had to search for one’s identity [iskat’ sebia] not for months, but for years”), could be far more painful, or indeed might never happen at all.149 A certain Plotnikov not only claimed that “I didn’t attain the main thing—trust,” but also confidently asserted that neither did thousands of others.150 This evidence of ongoing distrust and vigilance was implicitly confirmed in one prepublication review of the manuscript by a Znamia editor who wanted Simonov to emphasize not only the injustice of “vigilance,” but also its utility in policing society and excluding enemies.151 However, the strongest attack on Simonov’s supposed realism came not from a victim, but from someone who had witnessed “very many Sintsovs who had gone down a more tragic path,” ending up in camps such as the one in his home city, Vorkuta. The letter writer, Aksenov, urged Simonov to abandon the “half statement” and “fantasy” of Sintsov’s happy ending, and to consign his hero instead to his only possible fate, a

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term in the Gulag.152 Simonov resisted this vision of encirclement, however, responding to another call to kill off Sintsov with a defiant defense of the truth about the survival of some okruzhentsy.153 Simonov’s representation of “the year 1937,” largely through the prism of the biography of the other main hero, Serpilin, likewise provoked real-life victims to reflect upon the alignment between their own memories of terror and those of the fictional characters. Some victims, as with the okruzhentsy and their relatives examined above (and as with Ketlinskaia’s terror victim readers examined in the previous chapter), were simply grateful to see their memories and experiences represented in published literature at all.154 As with Simonov’s representation of war trauma, some readers gratefully responded with testimony of their own painful experiences of terror. A woman named Baritskaia, for instance, wrote Simonov a long letter about how she had “suffered through the cult of personality,” recounting her arrest and imprisonment, and evidently finding in the act of testimony a sense of comfort and relief.155 Others sought, and found, points in common with the particular victim that Simonov had depicted, among them Struzhkina, a daughter of a terror victim, who saw “very, very” close parallels with her father’s life: he had been arrested but then returned to fight in the war, just as honorably as Serpilin.156 Nevertheless, the non-resentful, valorous terror victim Serpilin garnered recognition much more often from non-victims, eager to retain their belief in victims’ recovery and reintegration, than from those who had directly experienced the terror.157 Both Serpilin’s experiences and his optimistic attitude rang far less true for the majority of Simonov’s terrorvictim readers. One substantial factual obstacle to identification with Serpilin was his release from the Gulag and his resumption of military service. One reader, a certain Brovtsinov, at first identified strongly with Serpilin “perhaps . . . because he and I have something in common.” However, it was precisely the shared experience of arrest that had kept him, unlike Serpilin, “far from the fighting.”158 Other writers had likewise been kept in the Gulag, “living through a different feral comedy,” sometimes not amnestied until well after Stalin’s death.159 Terror victims also struggled to identify with Serpilin’s behavior after the Gulag. As a certain Adamova explained, she was grateful to Simonov for the representation of that which she herself had “experienced,

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suffered,” but she nonetheless challenged Simonov regarding the effect of that suffering. It would, she thought, surely have left him less sanguine and stoical about his “lost years.” Serpilin, like the author herself, might have been “devastated, having lost faith in everything,” unable to rejoin the Soviet war effort because of his raw trauma and rage.160 Sensing that Simonov did not know the full truth about 1937, she offered her “human, psychological material,” and professed herself “delighted to be of use in the illumination of this unique tragedy.”161 Not all appeals to Simonov to explore further the trauma of 1937 were so benign. A certain Grachev recounted to the author his denunciation, arrest, and two decades spent in the “far north.” Compared with his own experiences and analyses of the “cult of personality,” he found that The Living and the Dead provided only a “weak” reflection of the theme. Like Adamova, he offered a sample of his own “cult material” to help Simonov to develop the theme further, but made it clear that this was less an offer than an obligation.162 Meanwhile, another correspondent, Olensiuk, wrote to Simonov in order to “break [his] silence of twenty-two years,” giving vent to a horrifying narrative of his time in the Gulag after his 1938 arrest. Like Grachev, he goaded Simonov to draw back the “half-open curtain,” and to document the “millions” of innocent people who had lost their lives or freedom as a result of the Great Terror.163 Confident, even aggressive, assertions of the novels’ lack of “unvarnished truth” about the vast scale of terror in Simonov’s portrayal appeared in several other missives, urging Simonov either to confront the whole “truth” about the terror or not to treat it at all.164 One letter, from a certain Shpakov, for example presented the terror as an “offense” to the whole of Soviet society, which could not be so easily dismissed or declared resolved, as Serpilin (and Simonov) seemed to claim in The Living and the Dead.165 Even when Simonov engaged in fuller treatment of 1937, in People Are Not Born Soldiers, the memory of terror sometimes remained traumatic, an “unhealed wound” that Soviet literature, with its ongoing evasions, still had not succeeded in fully remembering and narrating.166 The portfolio of readers’ letters assembled by Znamia and sent to the Lenin prize committee in the journal’s second attempt to win the prize placed considerable emphasis on criticizing Stalin, or the terror, or both. However, even though such criticism was de rigueur by 1964, the genuinely radical criticisms above were not included in this prize submission:

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as the last chapter argued, the trauma of terror was strictly circumscribed even in literature of the late thaw. Instead, the journal editors selected letters that cleaved closely to the party’s discourse of de-Stalinization, emphasizing that the damage wrought by the terror (the mentality of suspicion and the moral failings of its perpetrators) was limited in scope, and already lay firmly in the past. A letter from a certain Solov’ev from Baku was typical: while praising Simonov for showing “cult” behavior “in all its blackness,” it still asserted that the harm done by the cult was not irreparable, and had not ultimately prevented war victory and postStalinist moral rejuvenation.167 However, by no means all readers narrated the terror in such optimistic terms. For many victims, haunted by memories of imprisonment and all too aware of how hard it was to overcome suspicion, the gulf between public and private memories of terror and war remained wide indeed. T H E G E N E R A L I S S I M U S : I M A G E S O F S TA L I N I N R E A D E R S ’ L E T T E R S

In 1964, a reader named Anna Shabat wrote to Simonov to praise the recently People Are Not Born Soldiers. “With all my soul and my memory I assimilated every line,” she assured the author, before discussing the work’s dramatic portrait of Iosif Stalin. Calling him “complicated and cruel,” the letter writer mused that Stalin had “left an incommunicable, fearsome, and sometimes inexplicable memory. One wants to know: what kind of a person was he, really?” Simonov’s novel, though not answering this question fully, represented a step away from the previous, cultic images of Stalin. “How can such former descriptions remain among the people alongside the reality that has been discovered?” Shabat enquired, in concluding.168 Shabat’s letter indicates one possible reaction to Simonov’s portrait of Stalin: gratitude for the help that the novels (especially People Are Not Born Soldiers) provided in getting to know the “real” Stalin.169 While only 5 percent of readers of the first novel commented at any length on Stalin when responding to The Living and the Dead, four times as many engaged with the Stalin question after publication of People Are Not Born Soldiers, the majority referring to the lengthy dramatization of Serpilin’s personal encounter with Stalin, also a prominent focus of Soviet critics’ attention. This expansion of readerly engagement with Simonov’s expanded portrait of Stalin suggests that readers were using the novels to reflect on the

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legacy of the leader, deepening their reflections as the portrait of Stalin itself became deeper. At the same time, even in Shabat’s broadly positive response, knowledge itself was problematized, raising the question of whether readers or writers could ever really know what kind of a person Stalin was, and whether his memory might forever remain inexplicable. Certainly, readers’ attempts to assess the truth of Simonov’s portrayal of Serpilin’s meeting with Stalin almost universally lacked the knowledge that such a direct encounter might have produced. Even Simonov himself had spent only a few hours in Stalin’s presence, although his research for both novels also drew on archives and on eyewitness testimony from those who had had more sustained contact with the leader.170 Lacking the direct experience and visceral personal memories that they had deployed to read and judge Simonov’s narrative of the war, readers instead interpreted Simonov’s portrait of Stalin through bricolage of tropes from the Stalin cult, fragments of historical knowledge and eyewitness testimony, and moral judgments regarding the guilt or innocence of the leader. This unstable blend of myth, mimesis, and morality infused the often starkly dichotomous images of Stalin in readers’ responses—viewing him, respectively, as war hero and architect of victory, and as a villain whose strategic incompetence and decisions on the terror had nearly resulted in defeat. It also disposed a large proportion of Simonov’s readership to disagree with Simonov’s view of Stalin, and with each other, setting precedents for the “holistic denunciations” still convulsing post-Soviet debates about Stalin.171 The Living and the Dead did not criticize Stalin directly, and neither did the majority of its critics writing in the Soviet press, but some dozen of its ordinary readers did. While Simonov’s novel had not “given answers” to the questions raised by Serpilin about Stalin, these readers knew the “truth,” and urged Simonov to show it.172 The main “truth” cited was that Stalin was guilty of terror, and by extension responsible for its effects on the early war; this guilt overshadowed any claims to popular acclaim or ongoing commemoration.173 Among the readers who asserted this “truth” and “reality” about Stalin were victims of terror themselves, whose understanding of their own predicament, and decision to blame Stalin for it, carried a moral legitimacy that largely eclipsed the lack of firm historical evidence. The terror victim Olensiuk, whose attempt to

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persuade Simonov to write more about the terror was quoted above, had ended his testimony, for example, with the confident, yet ultimately vague, assertion that “Stalin, or some enemy behind his back” should be held “guilty of this crime.”174 Another strategy used to try to persuade Simonov to condemn Stalin more emphatically was the citation of eyewitness testimony. Aksenov, the letter writer from Vorkuta whose desire to see Sintsov in the Gulag was also cited earlier, used evidence of his close encounters with terror victims in his hometown to try to persuade the author that Serpilin would have had much clearer “knowledge” of Stalin’s guilt, and should be allowed to condemn him.175 Those who lacked either individual experience or eyewitness testimony could still construct the case against Stalin out of publicly available historical data. A certain Pavlov, for example, quoted statistics on the decimation of the military, urging Simonov to stop being “liberal” with the “truth,” and to document the “reality” of Stalin’s crimes.176 Another correspondent, Snegov, likewise urged Simonov to end his “moral amnesty” of Stalin, as even the information about the terror contained in the June 1956 CC resolution was sufficient to condemn him outright.177 Finally, the most emotional case against Stalin to be based on the official historiography of de-Stalinization came from a certain Mikhailova, for whom Khrushchev’s unmasking of Stalin’s “real identity” and his responsibility for the terror had generated an absolute “hatred” toward the leader. Two things infuriated her in the wake of de-Stalinization: any attempt to criticize Khrushchev for having revealed the truth about Stalin (she wanted to “beat up” those responsible), and any attempts, in which she included Simonov’s novel, to perpetuate the Stalin cult. What had particularly outraged her in The Living and the Dead was Serpilin’s failure to hold Stalin responsible for the injustices of the terror (despite what he must have known about Stalin’s guilt), and characters’ claims that they would die in Stalin’s name. The language of wartime devotion to Stalin had no place in Soviet public culture after the revelations of de-Stalinization, she “bitterly” concluded.178 Simonov himself was not ready, though, to let the new information about Stalin overshadow the equally powerful “truth” about past attitudes to him.179 In his response to Mikhailova, he emphatically accorded equal status to the “truth” about the importance of the Stalin cult during the war and the “truth” about the cult of personality revealed during

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de-Stalinization: “One can’t in retrospect make out that in 1941 people knew about Stalin that which they know today and related to him in the way that they related to him today. That would be an untruth. The truth is that people related differently to Stalin then. The truth is also that, however much he’s devalued now, very, very many people died with a limitless love for him, died with his name on their lips. That’s the absolute truth, perhaps the tragic truth.”180 Simonov thus overwhelmed Mikhailova’s “untruth” with a fourfold repetition of his “truth” (pravda), dismissing her anachronistic extension back into wartime of the recent revelations about Stalin.181 Simonov’s claims about the historical reality of the cult were in fact amply borne out in the nearly equivalent volume of pro-Stalinist correspondence stimulated by The Living and the Dead. Reviving the vocabulary that had framed popular objections to the Secret Speech some four years earlier, some of those who objected to Simonov’s portrait of Stalin dismissed it outright as “slander” (kleveta) and “rubbish.”182 Such laconic dismissals suggested a persistent, undifferentiated belief in the claims of the Stalin cult. However, other letters based their arguments on more complex combinations of cult discourse with the new realism about the war. The Living and the Dead, in dramatizing Stalin’s famous July and November 1941 speeches, allowed some readers, as we have seen, to express outrage at the novel’s unreconstructedly cultish view of the speech, but pro-Stalinist letters could just as easily use the speech as genuine evidence of Stalin’s significant contribution to the war. Two veterans wrote to Simonov making exactly the latter argument. One, Moshenkov, while hoping that Simonov would “excuse [his] frankness,” decried the author’s apparent “fear” of showing the true impact of the speech: “I know what the parade means and what impression Stalin’s speech produced. But in your account this event is shown only through the conversations of soldiers, saying Stalin will be coming out on to the tribune.”183 A second veteran, Khavronov, also alluded to personal and collective experience in asking Simonov to represent in more detail the “significance” of the speech. “I don’t know how it was from the point of view of the writer,” he began, “but from the point of view of the soldier, the parade of 7 November and I. V. Stalin’s speech at it had a huge significance at that time—it inspired in the hearts of soldiers the kind of

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strength that undoubtedly helped to defeat the Germans at Moscow. But the thing is, in the book unfortunately the emotions felt at that time by the Soviet soldier are not shown.”184 The coexistence of realism and myth was even more striking, and noticeably more tortured, in a letter from another veteran, a certain Naumov. Like the previous two writers, he acclaimed Stalin’s inspirational speech, and expressed dissatisfaction with Serpilin’s “sharply dissonant” doubts about the leader. At the same time, Naumov also expressed emphatic agreement with Simonov’s de-Stalinized narrative of the “fearsome,” “difficult days.” Ultimately, though, the balance tipped in favor of myth: it proved too hard to apply the stark realism of the portrayal of 1941 to Stalin himself. Toward the end of his letter, increasingly agitated, Naumov denied that the “truth” about the war, including Stalin’s contribution, had to be fully de-Stalinized; the Secret Speech had been traumatic enough, when it had “seemed as though someone had spat in my soul and ground in the spittle with a dirty boot.” Enacting his fervent resistance to the “erasure” of Stalin’s leadership of war, the last page of the letter catechistically recited Stalin’s merits: Saying that the people won the war, but the party led them . . . and who led the party? Stalin. The marshals put together the plans . . . and who led them, who confirmed these plans? Who shouldered the responsibility for them? Stalin. As in a catechism, the language became increasingly sacralized, until the climax: Stalin remained who he was, and we sacredly cherish [sviato khranim] his memory in our hearts, and we teach our children to do the same.185 The inability to demythologize Stalin, coupled with an apparent readiness to demythologize much of the rest of the war, was not unique to Naumov, although Simonov sent a long letter back, to try to cure this particular case of Stalin worship.186 These pro-Stalinist letters indicate several features of the Stalin cult that made it invulnerable, or at least resistant, to the historical reevaluation that Simonov (and, earlier, Khrushchev) attempted in the 1950s. Most simply, they draw attention to the former ubiquity and consistency

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of the cult’s discourse. The language of hyperbolic tribute, incessantly recited in Soviet public culture over two or more decades, could easily resist—in some cases, at least—the hesitant and inconsistent assault on the cult of personality of the preceding few years. The cult was more than mere habit, however: its language and imagery had become part of some citizens’ personal memories, complexly intertwined with the heightened emotions of wartime (and, albeit anachronistically, of victory). For others still, the image of Stalin in wartime was not a past memory, but rather an icon worthy of worship in the present. If the Stalin cult was a form of political religion, as Naumov’s catechism strongly suggests, its most successful moment of communion was the war. Simonov’s own hesitant attitude to Stalin’s wartime role was no match for some readers’ impassioned memories of the leader’s reassurance at the conflict’s most desperate moment. When People Are Not Born Soldiers appeared, four years after The Living and the Dead, and two years after the radical de-Stalinization of the 22nd Congress, both the volume and intensity of discussion around the figure of Stalin increased. Many of the anti-Stalinist letters now expressed frustration with the author’s failure to be fully iconoclastic toward a leader who was now utterly disgraced because of the vast death toll in terror and war now directly linked to him. With a confidence no doubt bolstered by the more open and angrier discussion surrounding the Stalinist past in early 1960s public culture, several readers attacked Simonov for being too “fearful,” “benign,” brief, and non-committal, or even for committing an “egregious aesthetic untruth,” in his portrait of Stalin.187 Instead of the novel’s ambiguous view of the leader, readers wanted a realistic portrayal of him as the “undeniable” culprit for “twenty million deaths,” which would “generat[e] the deepest hatred for him.”188 Typical was one veteran, a certain Lashmanov, who was now convinced that Stalin, having “decapitated the higher military leadership and science, had delayed the development of the country by a quarter century.” The effects of this historical analysis on Stalin’s image were dramatic: bestial and demonic tropes now clustered around the leader, described as a “wild beast” and “evildoer,” among other derogatory epithets.189 Lashmanov’s portrait shows a characteristic technique used by readers urging Simonov definitively to “dethrone [razvenchat’] Stalin”: the scandalous inversion of the tropes of the Stalin cult.190 Stalin’s divinity

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transformed into demonism, the cool-headed genius and “coryphaeus” became irrational and ignorant, and kindly “father Stalin” turned into a “cruel” “despot.”191 One of the most savage of such attacks came from Simonov’s regular correspondent, Kargin, whose reaction to People Are Not Born Soldiers took the form of a sarcastic deconstruction of the cult’s “unearthly gibberish about the greatness and infallibility of Com. Stalin.” Kargin also debunked the cult’s tributes to Stalin as a “genius” and “coryphaeus”; Stalin’s strategic “genius” was in reality so wrongheaded that ultimately “our country couldn’t have been better prepared for defeat.” Finally, he challenged the Secret Speech’s benign view of Stalin before 1934, by claiming that Stalin’s evil was “not masked at all” by 1933.192 Karen Ryan has argued that tropes of insanity and devilry are common in descriptions of Stalin in Russian satirical literature; in readers’ letters to Simonov, however, we see these tropes circulating in popular discourse, well before these images became canonical in samizdat.193 Margaret Ziolkowski, in her study of this literature about Stalin, points to the failure of most writers to move beyond a set of canonical tropes, even clichés, in their description of Stalin. Lacking reliable knowledge or eyewitness testimony of Stalin, writers adapted the tropes of the Stalin cult—his moustache, his boots, his eyes—and added in scandalous rumors from popular folklore—his pockmarked skin, his diminutive height—rather than producing a truly realistic portrait of the leader.194 A letter from a certain Korets, expressed such tensions between myth and mimesis. Beginning with an assertion of Stalin’s “fearsome evil,” he went on to object to Simonov’s depiction of the “glitter” in Stalin’s eyes during the meeting with Serpilin. Surely such imagery made Stalin seem larger than life, devilishly charismatic? In fact, he said, Stalin “didn’t possess that ‘demonic’ gift.” Instead, his stature was literally and figuratively much smaller, “a pygmy, a political parvenu.” He urged Simonov to “remember his short figure, his truncated height, . . . the pockmarks on his grey face.”195 While trying to demythologize Stalin, this imagery still remained trapped in anti-Stalinist folklore, with well-known clichés, such as pockmarks, substituting for the unique details that close-up observation would have allowed.196 A few other letter writers, indeed, expressed discomfort with the fact that the “inverted” Stalin cult still endowed Stalin with a mythic aura, failing to depict him realistically or to demote him fully. A certain Egorova, for instance, expressed to Simonov her desire,

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and her ability (as a long-term inhabitant of Gori, Stalin’s birthplace), to show Stalin’s “innards,” an appropriately visceral image for this proposed realism.197 Pro-Stalinist letters declined slightly in number from The Living and the Dead. The few defenders of Stalin who still spoke out did so in the unreconstructed language of the cult, by now a truly scandalous act, given the more thorough de-Stalinization of the 22nd Congress. A certain Blazhnevskii, for example, unleashed a torrent of sacred and biblical language, referring to Stalin’s “holy name” and claiming that Stalin represented the country’s “salvation” from the “plague” of fascism. Unsurprisingly, he deemed “slanderous” any attempts to introduce “severe truth” to depictions of Stalin.198 Another letter, from a certain Anokhkin, meanwhile alleged that the portrait of Stalin was caricatural, “untruth,” and “defamation.” Such “untruths” were damaging on a global scale, persuading “imperialist” powers of the weakness of the Soviet system.199 This brief reference to imperialism was massively expanded in the longest pro-Stalinist letter that Simonov received, from a man named Efimov, taking up most of a school exercise book. As befitted its academic packaging, it attempted a scholarly analysis of the war, placing Stalin’s actions (especially his alleged “mistakes”) in the context of global imperialism and Stalin’s interpretation of the Soviet Union’s foreign policy needs. The author’s true intention, it gradually emerged, was to rehabilitate the central premise of Stalin cult historiography: Stalin’s strategic “genius,” including his doctrine of “strategic defense.”200 The difficulty in apprehending the objective truth about Stalin, in the absence of personal knowledge or complete historical revelations, thus led in many cases to retrenchment into mythologies of Stalin as divine or demonic. Nevertheless, the volume of these pro- and anti-Stalinist attacks on the novels was almost matched by praise from readers for the “truthful” balance achieved between realism and myth, and between Stalin’s positive and negative traits.201 These readers explained the ongoing need for balance in terms of the indivisible poles of Stalin’s legacy: the terror and the war.202 For example, a second reader named Kargin who wrote to Simonov expressed much more moderate views of Stalin than the Kargin whose virulent anti-Stalinist views were cited above; this reader remembered Stalin both for his actions during the terror, and for the inspiration that he had provided in wartime.203 One letter, indeed, justified Stalin’s

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dictatorial methods as the only possible route to victory at such a “fearsome time.”204 Others conceded the “virtual reality” of the cult, but nonetheless pointed to its very real consequences: a certain Malinovskii viewed popular belief (even if deluded) in Stalin’s infallibility as crucial to the war effort, albeit less justifiable in the post-war period.205 Finally, a certain Abramenko elaborated on the “tragedy” of the contradiction between the positive effects of his “name in battle” and the “grave consequences of his iron hand.” Trying to untie these contradictions, he postulated that Stalin may have transformed from a positive historical figure into a more harmful one as a result of his increasingly abstract view of the “masses,” or “generally something like that.”206 This unsatisfactory conclusion revealed both the inherent contradictions of the Stalin question and the incomplete public debate about him at this time.207 Simonov himself was aware of this debate, not only from the variety of responses that his novels generated, but also from readers’ reports of the local controversies that his novels caused.208 He viewed such arguments as natural, in view not only of the complexity of Stalin’s legacy but also of the simplification of debate that resulted from the large gaps in public knowledge; lacking the “full truth” (polnaia pravda) about Stalin, Soviet society would naturally remain mired in ambivalence. He himself remained somewhat ambivalent too, acknowledging Stalin’s “significance,” especially during the war, while also condemning him as the main culprit for the terror: the truth about Stalin, he still believed, was “complex.”209 Even so, here, there were also signs that Simonov’s attitude had shifted; where he had rebuked readers of The Living and the Dead for ignoring the “reality” of the cult in the past, now he reproached proStalinist readers of People Are Not Born Soldiers for thinking that past “worship” conferred the right to dismiss the newly available information about Stalin.210 Simonov’s continuing journey toward the “full truth” would lead him still further away from the cult, but it also deprived him of the mass audience that he had garnered with his ambivalent portrait of Stalin in People Are Not Born Soldiers.211 Simonov’s attempt to de-Stalinize the Soviet war narrative, by admitting early failures, linking them to terror, and linking the terror to Stalin, therefore gave rise to three, sometimes overlapping, types of “memory work,” each with a different balance between myth, memory, and history. The most widely accepted aspect of Simonov’s war narrative was the

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“bitter truth” about 1941–42, welcomed by veterans eager to find resonance between personal and public memory and to ease war trauma through its private narrativization and public recognition. Simonov’s depiction of the suffering of his fictional victims of Stalinist terror and vigilance, by contrast, did not chime so harmoniously with some readers’ experiences of persecution. Simonov’s rehabilitation of victims such as Serpilin and Sintsov authorized their real-life counterparts to reveal memories of suffering and injustice, but often these challenged the redemptive, heroic framing of the characters’ biographies by revealing the enduringly traumatic effects of Stalinist victimization. Lastly, Simonov’s increasing preoccupation with the figure of Stalin revealed that ordinary Soviet citizens’ knowledge of Stalin was overwhelmingly mediated through the tropes of the cult. For some, these tropes had become an affective reality, an embodied memory every bit as visceral as their other experiences on the battlefield. For others, the only way to damn the memory of Stalin was to invert the cult; such gestures of reversal granted some popular agency in the deconstruction of Stalin’s former image, but failed to construct a full historical portrait of Stalin in its place. Whether demonized, heroized, or suspended in an awkward balance between the two, Stalin remained an uncomfortable and disruptive presence in war memory, as he would for many decades to come. L I V I N G T O F I G H T A N O T H E R D AY ? T H E S U R V I VA L O F M Y T H

War memory rarely tolerates complete candor; the desire for consolation and redemption in war remembrance, rather than brute realism, is often shared by state and society.212 Perhaps readers had read Simonov’s work not just for its realism about war, terror, and Stalin, but also to be consoled, entertained, or inspired—all functions of war myth, especially in popular literature.213 Uniting and overarching all these diverse functions, as George Mosse points out, is the need to render death “palatable” and meaningful, “masking” and “transcending” any sign of needless wastage of life.214 The mass death in the early months and years of the Soviet war effort was not only unprecedented in scale, but also particularly vulnerable to charges that it was unnecessary, given Stalin’s strategic errors in spring and summer 1941 and the decision to decimate the Red Army leadership in the late 1930s. Despite all this, readers still largely expressed a belief that these deaths had been redeemed, and subsumed into victory.

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Thus, Simonov’s attempts to de-Stalinize the narrative of the late 1930s and early 1940s ultimately left the myth of the mid-1940s victory intact. Indeed, by far the most common trope of readers’ letters, alongside praise for the “truth,” was the request for the novels or series to be “finished,” for sequels to extend the “compressed” ending all the way to the victory in Berlin.215 Simonov himself, in the midst of this onslaught of correspondence, observed that overall “many readers want the characters’ lives rounded off . . . a more solid ending.”216 Such appeals, explicitly made in at least a quarter of letters, represented more than idle curiosity about the fates of the heroes; they expressed a craving for redemption, for a happy ending for heroes and a nation that had suffered too much already.217 “It has to finish at least with Victory Day,” explained one reader, “it seems to me that military themes have to be taken to their conclusion.”218 This observation cast the “conclusion” in Berlin not just as historical fact, but also as normative logic, making wartime sacrifice worthwhile and its memory bearable.219 Many readers expressed the relationship between suffering and redemption in just such binary terms, with the suffering of the early period (often described in searing detail) being justified and cancelled out by the push to victory. The two existed in a symbiotic relationship, and had to be soldered into a single whole: east with west, start with finish, tragedy with optimism.220 This symbiosis of suffering and redemption was especially well captured in a letter that balanced the “sadness of retreat” against the “happiness of advance.”221 The proportion and duration of such “sadness” might vary, but the joy of victory did not.222 Simonov responded to such pleas for a happy ending by reassuring his readers that a sequel was on the way, even though he himself doubted that any tidy “full stop” could be placed after the events of 1941.223 For many readers, however, the macro-narrative of continuation to war victory had also to be reflected in microcosm, within the heroes’ lives: Sintsov and Serpilin could not be sacrificed to the war victory, even if it was theoretically acceptable for some (even many) lives to be sacrificed to the greater cause.224 “Don’t kill off your heroes,” urged one reader, having chronicled in detail her own nearly fatal suffering as a result of war.225 Teushenkova, the widow whose war “wounds” were so painful, likewise wanted the kind of happy ending for the fictional heroes that had eluded her, however much of a “fantasy” that might be.226 Here, fiction provided

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not just recognition of suffering, but also its transformation into a more palatable narrative; having lived through trauma, some readers wanted fiction to provide a comforting alternative, where loved ones might live on. In this sense, the traditional optimism of Socialist Realism still had an important role to play alongside the new realism that the thaw had introduced into Soviet literature. In fact, Simonov’s heroes did not survive till Berlin, but his readers would only find this out nearly a decade later, with the publication of The Last Summer.227 For the time being, by the end of People Are Not Born Soldiers, Sintsov and Serpilin had survived the most difficult period of the war. Their survival in turn provoked reflections on the character traits that had survived the immense trauma of the early war, and planted the seeds of victory, and readers and critics largely concurred that it was the “national character” that had secured victory.228 One letter from a certain Kostin, for example, praised both the “naked truth” depicted in The Living and the Dead and also the “greatness of the people.”229 “Popular heroism” (narodnyi geroizm) could survive the “tragedy” of the war’s early days, and in fact had been the key factor in rendering that tragedy “optimistic.”230 The narod implied in such statements was sometimes Russian, occasionally Soviet, but most often the term denoted an amorphous collective spirit of patriotism forged and strengthened by the confrontation with immense hardship.231 This was a genuinely popular myth of war, which viewed both the national character and the war effort as sustained from below.232 To be sure, there were a few readers who desired the kind of bald realism that George Mosse sees as incompatible with war myth, with isolated responses appealing for more “truth” about the chaos and destruction of war, and one letter even calling for Simonov to broach the taboo of Vlasov’s army.233 There were, likewise, a few responses that cursed war and never wanted to see it repeated.234 However, far more typical was the enthusiasm of a certain Denisov, who assured the author that his novels helped “to heal oneself and enter battle once again, to go at it for the sake of LIFE (sic).”235 Indeed, several correspondents claimed that realism in the depiction of war hardship and sacrifice itself had significant value for education.236 Simonov himself espoused this position in a letter to one reader of People Are Not Born Soldiers who wanted only “feats” (podvigi) and “romanticism” in war literature. Correcting her,

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he claimed that “we must educate youth on the truth about war and not on elevated romanticism. There was also romanticism in the war but it’s only a part of the truth.”237 The suffering during the early defeats could thus still be configured as a form of heroic martyrdom contributing to the victory several years later, and tempering the Soviet character. In this sense, the author and many of his readers did not challenge the traditional didacticism of Soviet literature, but rather reinvented the original master plot of the Soviet novel, seeing the war as an obstacle (albeit on a much larger scale than those in the 1930s production novel), whose overcoming attested to the strength of national character.238 Readers’ reactions to these two novels suggest therefore that the Khrushchev era witnessed not just de-Stalinization (debunking Stalin’s role, revealing the damage of terror and other Stalinist policies), but also the contested beginnings of a new myth of World War II, well before the “war cult” was instituted in the Brezhnev era.239 It also suggests that the “demythologization” of elements of the war (its early period, Stalin’s leadership, the effects of the Great Terror) did not interrupt or fundamentally alter the mythologizing tendencies of the process of “making sense of war” begun in the immediate post-war period: war heroism was, if anything, more pronounced for being achieved in such challenging circumstances, some of the leadership’s making.240 For the vast majority of readers, greater truth about war death, terror, and leadership incompetence still did not preclude the myth of a transcendent victory. In 1964, as both People Are Not Born Soldiers and the film of The Living and the Dead were publicly acclaimed for combining unprecedented realism about suffering and demythologization of Stalin with optimistic projections of victory, Soviet culture seemed to have settled on a new war myth that balanced realism with consoling redemption, eliciting strong resonance with popular memory.241 At the same time, the tensions between realism and myth in these novels and in their reception foreshadowed persistent difficulties in demythologizing the war, which generated a variety of different approaches to commemoration after the fall of Khrushchev.242 The debate over Stalin’s errors and achievements, far more complex in readers’ letters than in public criticism, also presciently revealed the enduring dangers and difficulties of “de-Stalinizing” Stalin’s role in the war, or of focusing exclusively on his guilt for the terror: memories of victory, then

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as now, “interfered” with this condemnation or forgetting.243 The next, and concluding, chapter traces the emergence of a different solution to these tensions in public memory, in light of the enormous, enduring significance of war victory as a usable past for the Soviet regime; indeed, it was precisely through allusions to the harm to this usable past—and the consequent harm to ideological mobilization—that both terror and war trauma would be marginalized within Soviet public memory in the second half of the 1960s.244

chapter six

The “Cult of Personality” in the Early Brezhnev Era

In late 1964, a prose work by the writer Anatolii Rybakov appeared in the journal Novyi mir.1 Entitled Summer in Sosniaki, the novella was set in the early post-Stalin era, but mainly concerned the effects of the Great Terror on the population of the eponymous factory town. The novella had originally been planned for publication in 1965, but after Khrushchev’s ouster in October 1964, the journal’s editor Aleksandr Tvardovskii expedited publication, moving it forward to the penultimate issue of the year. Much later, Rybakov reflected that Tvardovskii had “understood how things were going to turn out,” and hurried to publish a work whose “antiStalinist pathos” he admired, but feared would be unwelcome under the new post-Khrushchev leadership.2 Was Tvardovskii right? Did “anti-Stalinist” works instantly fall into disfavor after Khrushchev’s departure from power?3 Summer in Sosniaki would be the last fictional narrative of 1937 to be published under Tvardovskii’s editorship, and even it had to be heavily censored before publication.4 However, it was far from the last narrative of the cult of personality that Novyi mir would attempt to publish after Khrushchev’s fall. Moreover, similar narratives of the Stalinist past continued to be published in other venues—albeit increasingly infrequently—in the second half of the 1960s. At the same time, the second half of the 1960s witnessed the gradual reemergence of pro-Stalinist sentiment, and a 212

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broader and deeper reorientation of Soviet public culture away from the tragedy and trauma of the Stalin years. The cult of personality and its place in Soviet fiction and historiography remained a point of fierce contestation until and even beyond the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. This concluding chapter analyzes the contestation over the cult of personality, playing out over this half decade, and ultimately resulting in its extreme marginalization—if not total elimination—from Soviet discourse and public memory. A period when the limits of what could be said about the cult of personality were in flux, the early Brezhnev era was a time of intensified, not declining, “memory work” about Stalinism and about the form and content of Soviet public memory. Only at the very end of the decade was a predictable public discourse about the cult of personality achieved, but it left Stalinism an unresolved episode in Soviet collective memory. IMAGINING THE FUTURE OF THE

“ C U LT

OF PERSONALITY” AFTER

KHRUSHCHEV’S FALL At the time of Rybakov’s publication, the future of the cult of personality was far from clear. Tvardovskii himself had mixed feelings about Khrushchev’s fall, reflecting in his diary that it might herald the beginning of less arbitrary treatment of writers and editors and their works about the cult of personality.5 The departure of the increasingly erratic Khrushchev, together with signs that de-Stalinization was continuing and a new relationship with the intelligentsia was under consideration by the party leadership, all offered tentative grounds for hope.6 Summer in Sosniaki was a bold and sophisticated narrative of the Stalinist past, even by the standards of the Khrushchev era, and so its authorization for publication invited further optimism about the new regime’s tolerance for criticism of the cult of personality. At the same time, the novella also revealed to its readers the limits of what had been said thus far on the theme, and so it provoked them to imagine, in different ways, the future of the cult of personality within Soviet culture. Opening with a senior factory worker, Kolchin, poisoning himself, Rybakov’s novella dramatized the local community’s attempts to make sense of this “incomprehensible suicide.”7 The narration of the factory’s halfhearted investigation of the incident alternates with another

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narrative, woven out of a series of flashbacks, which probes the causes more fully. Eventually, the reason for Kolchin’s unbearable guilt is shown to be his denunciation of his manager, Kuznetsov, in 1937. The link between these two narratives is the burgeoning relationship between Kolchin’s manager, a man named Mironov, and the woman he loves, Kuznetsov’s daughter, Lilia. With both parents arrested after Kolchin’s denunciation, Lilia Kuznetsova had spent her remaining childhood years as the ward of one of her parents’ colleagues, and as an adult struggled with the “stigma” of being a daughter of “enemies.”8 It gradually emerges, though, that Kolchin’s own father had earlier been arrested and shot, making Kolchin’s decision to denounce Kuznetsov his only real choice, faced with the threat of his own arrest. The real villain of the novella is the factory’s personnel manager, Angeliuk, who exemplifies the “suspiciousness” and “vigilance” of the Great Terror. Summer in Sosniaki presented terror as traumatic. Lilia refuses to renounce her father but suffers severe hardship as a result. Her mother, a rehabilitated Gulag returnee, is humiliated still further, reduced to begging to survive. Kolchin, meanwhile, is in a state of perpetual fear, forced into acting against his conscience. Like the Kuznetsov family, he continues to suffer even after Stalin’s death, his pangs of conscience eventually leading him to take his own life. Despite all this, the novella offered hope for recovery. The manager Mironov is committed to overcoming the legacies of Stalinism in the factory. Many other characters in the novel oppose Angeliuk, suggesting that the mentality of the cult of personality might eventually be overcome; indeed, the emergence of the truth about the suicide represents a victory over Angeliuk’s determination to conceal it. These signs of resistance to Stalinism offer hope that Sosniaki might be able to bury the ghosts of 1937, and to resurrect the glorious traditions of the early 1930s and the hopes of the factory’s visionary founder, Kuznetsov. Readers’ reactions to this narrative of the cult of personality revealed a range of perspectives on the future development of the theme in Soviet culture. Most broadly, as in the Khrushchev era, many welcomed such works as a means of understanding the recent past, with one reader typically claiming: “it forced me to think about my past life.”9 The belief that Soviet literature needed to continue thus to explore the cult of personality was variously expressed. For one reader from Leningrad oblast’, for example, the trajectory of “literature about the cult of personality” was

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linear: it had started with Solzhenitsyn in 1962, developed through 1964 works by Zalygin and Bondarev, and was now continuing with Summer in Sosniaki.10 In Rybakov’s work, the “fearsome image of Angeliuk” had strengthened his conviction that such “scoundrels” (merzavtsy) should be exposed and tried, and more such works would further this process of lustration. By contrast, another letter, also from Leningrad, hoped that future literature about the cult of personality would reveal victims more accurately. Of the portrayal of Lilia’s mother as a beggar, she observed: “I can see that there could have been such people who were capable of going to request alms. But why, when showing in literature for the first time this category of people who suffered during the time of the cult, did you give us exactly her?”11 The author, Solunova, claimed that returnees whom she had encountered in real life deserved not pity, but deep respect for retaining their human dignity. Toward the end of her letter, she revealed that she herself was a returnee, but was writing “not only on my behalf, but also on behalf of many of my friends in misfortune [druz’ia po bede].” Rybakov’s novella had shown this “category” of victims (wives of “enemies of the people”) “for the first time,” and more such works would continue to transform victims from enemies into loyal Soviet citizens.12 For another reader, though, future works on the cult of personality needed to break with tradition. Though he admired the complex composition of Summer in Sosniaki, he also complained that Rybakov’s work fundamentally resembled other literary treatments of the “cult of personality” in “speaking about [it] through such incomprehensible ambiguous half statements [obtekaemymi nedomolvkami].” The novel in this sense seemed “unfinished”: people talked about the “cult” in much more “concrete” ways than literature did, meaning that communicative memory of Stalinism still far outstripped its representation in Soviet public culture.13 All these letters to Rybakov, as with many letters responding to the journal’s previous works on the theme, appealed for further, deeper exploration of victims, perpetrators, and the “many lives ruined” by Stalinism.14 Yet even at the height of the Khrushchev-era thaw, Soviet literature’s capacity to accommodate the truth about terror had been strictly limited. Would the new era, then, offer any better prospects for the cult of personality? Tvardovskii had his own answer to this question, elaborated even as these responses to Rybakov’s publication continued to arrive at the journal: in an “anniversary article” in the first issue of 1965, he emphasized the

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journal’s previous publications on the cult of personality, and his intent to continue such publications, just as Rybakov’s readers had hoped.15 However, the fact that the article itself was long-delayed by censors, and heavily criticized, served as an early warning that such publications would face considerable, even insuperable, obstacles. Before turning to these obstacles, including the particular difficulties faced by Novyi mir later in the 1960s, the chances and consequences of publication of narratives of the cult of personality in this initial period merit further exploration. A R O U N D A N A N N I V E R S A R Y : N A R R AT I V E S O F T E R R O R , W A R , A N D

1965 In October 1964, the writer Grigorii Baklanov received a phone call from the journalist and literary critic Lazar’ Lazarev, who informed him that Khrushchev had just been ousted. “I felt,” he remembered later, “as though a door that had opened up a crack would soon slam, and I hurried to write up my novel July 1941.”16 After these revisions had been completed, the novel was contracted by Znamia and passed for publication in the journal’s first two issues of 1965.17 July 1941 was one of the most emphatic denunciations of Stalin’s strategic errors and terror’s impact on the war effort ever to appear in Soviet literature. Belying the narrow chronological focus promised by its title, it was Baklanov’s most wide-ranging work to date, encompassing wartime and pre-war history, politics, morality, and psychology.18 Its publication came less than half a year after Znamia had finished serializing Simonov’s People Are Not Born Soldiers, with its similar emphasis on the twin tragedies of 1937 and 1941.19 However, the possible changes in the party line on the cult of personality in the even shorter period since Khrushchev’s fall concerned Baklanov and especially his editors. Although these changes did not ultimately prevent publication of the novel, they did influence its reception. The anxieties that started to be expressed formed the basis of a more robust critique of the cult of personality, used to justify more extensive censorship of later works on the theme. The publication and reception of this sharply anti-Stalinist novel can therefore serve to illuminate the complex mixture of tolerance and intolerance toward publications on the cult of personality in the early Brezhnev era. As has been noted, but little analyzed, a number of literary works about Stalinism, very similar to Khrushchev-era fiction, were published in VICTORY IN

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the Soviet Union in the first year after Khrushchev’s fall.20 Overlapping with Baklanov’s publication, Znamia also published Iurii Trifonov’s Fireglow, the author’s attempt to reconstruct the life of his Old Bolshevik father, a victim of the Great Terror. Though allusive and subtle, the novella powerfully evoked the traumatic effects of Stalinism on the Old Bolshevik community and the Leninist foundations of the party.21 In early 1965, a war novel with very similar concerns to July 1941, Aleksandr Rozen’s Last Two Weeks, was also authorized for publication.22 Taken together, as they often were by Soviet critics, Baklanov’s and Rozen’s novels suggested that the tragedies of 1937, 1941, and criticism of Stalin were still legitimate, even central, concerns for Soviet literature as the twentieth anniversary of victory approached. Roi Medvedev suggests that publication of such texts was simply a result of inertia: already in press by the end of the Khrushchev era, they went forward to publication in the absence of compelling reasons to stop them.23 At the same time, like many other observers of the early Brezhnev period, he also noted signs of disagreement within the party elite over whether and how to abandon de-Stalinization after Khrushchev’s fall, suggesting that the publication and reception of these texts reflected deeper ideological tensions.24 And indeed, July 1941 revealed the stakes of the debate over de-Stalinization, which would develop into a more ferocious polemic after 1965. Baklanov’s novel, crafted in several bouts of documentary research and writing (interrupted by long hiatuses until the fall of Khrushchev suddenly made publication more urgent), is principally set in the month of the title.25 The narrative of summer 1941 alternates between horrifying frontline scenes and tense discussions of strategy among mid-level military leaders, including the hero Shcherbatov. The early weeks of war are utterly chaotic and painful, a time of “senseless” destruction and “humiliation” of Soviet troops. Many of the principal characters—including Shcherbatov’s own son—are killed, injured, imprisoned, or encircled. Of the major characters, only two reflect at length on the origins of this debacle, but one is Shcherbatov, the character whose perspective is closest to that of the work’s third-person narrator, thus expanding the narrative significantly beyond (and before) the summer of 1941. In episodes of retrospection occupying approximately one-third of the novel, he and other characters remember the month before the war, when preparations for combat were largely absent, and the terror of

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1937–38, when the army’s readiness for war was seriously compromised by the military purges. From the start, as with Simonov’s hero Serpilin, Shcherbatov’s memories of the Great Terror are triggered involuntarily, but they also form part of his more conscious attempts to analyze the reasons for the problems of the early war. His first extended flashback to the arrests within his apartment block in 1937 is triggered by witnessing the dogmatic and aggressive accusations leveled by an NKVD officer, Shalaev, at another colleague during a 1941 discussion of military strategy.26 These and other memories of his behavior in 1937 inform Shcherbatov’s conduct immediately before and after the outbreak of hostilities in 1941, when he protests against leadership decisions, and insists on telling the truth about the military catastrophe.27 The novel thus argues for the inextricable links between the carnage of summer 1941 and Stalin’s actions in the months and years before World War II. After twenty chapters of almost unremitting defeat and horror, the concluding chapter offers a faint hope that the ramifying effects of 1937 might be overcome: the plan to fight has finally been authorized, and the troops begin their slow progress away from total defeat. This embattled advance signals a victory of common sense over the cult of personality, but the optimistic conclusion struggles to transcend the foregoing exposure of the cult’s destructive effects. Baklanov’s first choice of publication venue, Novyi mir, reviewed the manuscript in summer 1964, when the cult of personality was still a central concern for Soviet literature.28 For the journal’s editorial board, the fact that “the novel [wa]s not so much about the war as about how the crimes of the times of the cult of personality were reflected in the progress of war” was key to the novel’s merits and its more substantial failings.29 They criticized the “artificial” insertion of long flashbacks to 1937; it was “as though the author wanted to cram in everything that he’d heard from others about the arrests,” concluded the deputy editor Kondratovich. July 1941 therefore became one of hundreds of manuscripts about terror to be turned down by Novyi mir, even (or perhaps especially) in the heyday of its publications on 1937, for failing to meet the editors’ exacting standards of historical authenticity and stylistic clarity.30 Baklanov then sent the manuscript to the journals Moskva and Znamia, still a month before Khrushchev’s ouster. At Moskva, it received a hostile reception, especially for its claims about lack of resistance to

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terror (a controversial issue since Ehrenburg’s claims of observing the Great Terror with “gritted teeth” in the part of his memoir published in 1963).31 At Znamia, though it was perhaps the most conservative of the three journals, reviewers acclaimed the tragic elements of the narrative, evidently seeing them as a legitimate concern for Soviet literature; one urged the journal to publish the work soon, so as to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of victory, a ringing endorsement of the manuscript’s political correctness and its potential contribution to patriotic education.32 Their suggestions for improvement, however, revealed the caution with which the cult of personality had to be handled even before the end of the Khrushchev era. The critic Dymshits, for example, asked the author to show that “even in the time of the greatest catastrophes (1937–38), the country lived and developed, and the people built socialism . . . even if one gives oneself over to retrospection, then one can’t limit oneself to a one-sided view.”33 Another warned that “the writer is carried away by the depiction of the general atmosphere of 1937 . . . showing it one-sidedly, only negatively, whereas a true depiction of the time requires a synthetic demonstration of that which was not just bad, but that which was also dear to us, then, now, and always shall be.”34 This “true depiction” also meant showing what was achieved “despite the cult of personality.” These warnings about the need for balance and optimism echoed warnings about the cult of personality issued earlier in the Khrushchev era, suggesting that by (and indeed before) the time of Khrushchev’s fall, many editors understood that these were preconditions of publication. 35 In this sense, Khrushchev’s departure from power only increased an already palpable anxiety about the limits of Soviet literature’s exploration of terror and war trauma. However, the contract that Znamia issued in early November expressed the journal’s confidence that the cult of personality, handled correctly, was still a part of Soviet literature, and indeed of the broader commemoration of war in the run-up to the victory anniversary. Nonetheless, both the author and his editors struggled to read the party line in the early weeks and months of the post-Khrushchev era, and the latter in particular were inclined to caution, urging Baklanov to remove or at least move the longest sections on 1937, which the author refused to do.36 The editorial board meetings passing the manuscript for submission to Glavlit took place before there were “firm instructions” on the “cult of personality,” and the journal therefore decided to risk sending the novel to

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the censors as it was.37 Glavlit apparently had no firmer instructions, passing the novel for publication without major corrections. Despite this successful outcome, the novel’s reception deepened the anxieties about the cult of personality that had been expressed before publication. Most readers’ letters and published reviews about the novel agreed that the cult of personality was an ongoing, legitimate concern of Soviet literature and public memory. One review, in a conservative newspaper, emphasized the depiction of Shcherbatov’s “worrying, at times torturous memories,” seeing Baklanov’s concern with the “bitterness of retreat” and the “torturous memories” of 1937 as “completely justified.” 38 Ordinary readers were even more enthused: the majority not only praised the novel, but also specifically acclaimed Baklanov’s ability to “show the link between 1937 and 1941” and his treatment of the cult more generally.39 “Memories of 1941 can’t help but arouse pain,” explained one retired colonel’s letter, but the novel had also provided him with the pleasure of recognition of his own struggle to cope with the chaotic early war. Another veteran’s letter affirmed Baklanov’s treatment of the cult of personality, saying: “the thing is, we know about the consequences of the cult in military matters, and military people know especially well.” 40 Nonetheless, as the manuscript’s reviewers had also insisted prior to publication, it remained important to place memories of 1937 and of 1941 within an optimistic teleology. Published reviews balanced an emphasis on the “sharp, cruel, at times wounding truth” about 1937 and 1941 with the novel’s evocation of the faith in victory, despite the catastrophes of the early war and the damage wrought by terror.41 The majority of readers’ letters, as had also been true of Simonov’s readers, expressed a similar faith in redemption. One letter from a certain Pospelov in Moldavia found in the novel a balance of traumatic and redemptive memories: “People of my generation remember, as it were on their own skin, the ways of the times of the cult. They remember also the sadness of the retreat of our troops at the start of war, the happiness and pride of advancing and routing the fascist aggressors.” Thus, although Pospelov had felt the cult “on his own skin,” the memory was not a lasting wound—terror victims had been “resurrected” and the “improbable difficulties” of 1941 overcome through victory.42 More broadly, the progress of Soviet history had left Stalinism’s problems behind: “This book again made me feel how good it is that we are living in such a time, when the fearsome 1937 can’t

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be repeated, when we can be sure that the terrible days of 1941 will never happen again,” rejoiced a certain Bugoenko from Odessa.43 However, not all readers, as was also true of Simonov’s readership, were invested in this myth of redemption and resurrection. One challenge to this myth, for example, came from a female reader in Leningrad, Nina GagenTorn, who greeted the outbreak of war “in the Kolyma camps, having been arrested in 1937.”44 Nevertheless, like Baklanov’s other readers, she confirmed his narrative of 1941 on the basis of her own memories of suffering: “I went through forty interrogations, investigation, prison, convoys, Kolyma . . . and I thought I knew the whole sadness of human helplessness. But you were able to show a different vulnerability—the helplessness of the military man who understands the madness of what is happening and has no right to stop this madness.”45 Having thus equated the “victims” of Stalin’s war with the victims of Stalinist terror, Gagen-Torn then placed July 1941 within the broader literature about the cult of personality. Unlike Ivan Denisovich, the novel encompassed “multiple facets” of the Stalinist past, showing “what the system of evil and lies, which gripped the country like a disease in the period of the cult of personality, did to a person.” Gagen-Torn believed that the only true remedy for the “disease” of the “cult” lay outside the Soviet mainstream: “We, being imprisoned, understood a lot,” she claimed, “and above all, we learned to discern the smell of a lie.” Now freed, Gagen-Torn had retained these powers of discernment, finding that most published literature contained a “percentage of the usual essential lies,” but was pleasantly surprised to find that July 1941 was not “just another set of lies [vran’e] about the war.” Nonetheless, what surprised and delighted her in Baklanov’s novel was its potentially radical challenges to Soviet literature: the emphasis on helplessness, not heroism; the evidence of the wholesale “infection” of Soviet society; the radical criticism of Stalin and Stalinism; and the rejection of habitual “lies” in favor of “real-life truth.” Gagen-Torn viewed this “truth” not as proof of the Soviet system’s strength, but as revelation of its weakness. It was these challenges to Socialist Realism and Soviet ideology that would eventually dictate the marginalization, and then prohibition, of the cult of personality in Soviet literature and historiography. A different, though related, challenge was posed in a letter from a certain A. Stolbovskaia in the Crimea, who sent a letter to Baklanov in her husband’s name. Having been arrested in November 1937 and

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imprisoned for “nineteen long years,” A. Stolbovskii had returned from the camps unable to testify to the experience.46 His wife didn’t “want him to take such material to the grave,” but, she explained, “I can’t, without good cause, agitate his unhealed wounds [nezazhivshie rany].” The solution, she hoped, was for Baklanov to invite her husband to talk about how “in front of his eyes so many of the best people died, such an awful death, hundreds and thousands of people.” Stolbovskaia envisaged that this testimony would help to resurrect the memory of victims (“no one remembers them”), and would “perhaps be a lesson for the future,” yet, despite these attempts to present memories of terror as constructive, they appeared overwhelmingly destructive. Her own traumatic memories of terror were tacit, but eloquent; at the beginning of the letter, there was only a brief allusion to what “happened to me, you see, I had three little children . . .,” the final ellipses suggesting trauma. Meanwhile, her husband’s “as yet unhealed wounds” haunted the letter, casting doubt on the possibility of recovery. Stolbovskaia’s traumatic narrative posed a less conscious challenge to the myth of redemption than had been articulated by our first victim of 1937. Nonetheless, her letter highlighted the “gloom” inherent to the topic, which conservative critics of the “cult” would increasingly come to emphasize. However, in the initial public reception of Baklanov’s novel, this subversive threat was only rarely evoked; most Soviet critics still expressed confidence in the compatibility of the cult of personality with Soviet literature and historiography. The fullest critique of the novel’s treatment of the cult came, rather, in an ordinary reader’s letter, the only one to express negative feelings toward the work.47 From a certain Shesterin in Cherkasskaia oblast’, it expressed a range of objections to the cult of personality, most of which would only later emerge into public discussion. For Shesterin, the key question raised by Baklanov’s work, and similar works by Gorbatov and Simonov, was “WHO IS GUILTY” (sic) for the “oversights and mistakes” at the start of the war. All of these works expressed a similar desire, he explained: “Through inertia, and because it’s better and simpler, and also fashionable and not dangerous, and even profitable, to try to prove that I. V. Stalin is guilty.” The rest of his letter attempted to deconstruct these claims of Stalin’s “guilt,” first by questioning the military credentials of imprisoned army leaders, and then their ideological credentials, asking: “How long can one chew this over,

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shed tears over the repressed people? It’s already more than ten years that we’re crying over them. And we still don’t know if we’re doing the right thing, crying over them or not.” This might not be the “right thing,” he explained, because these victims, left free, might have joined Vlasov’s army. In this way, Shesterin, like some of Ketlinskaia’s earlier readers, expressed adherence to the Stalinist narrative of terror. Elsewhere, though, this Stalinist narrative overlapped with arguments about memory voiced throughout the post-Stalin era. For example, in an echo of Khrushchev’s warnings in 1963, Shesterin rebuked writers for “put[ting] a black stripe on an era, on a period when many new things were being built and the defenses were being strengthened, with inspiration, energy, and songs. It’s . . . criminal to spit on that period when socialism was built.” He also argued that public memory ought to focus on celebration rather than repentance, echoing earlier arguments made by conservative writers and party leaders: “Why do writers and our press so insistently appeal to readers to cry over people who were repressed? Where’s the necessity and what’s the aim of that? The thing is, the wounds in the healthy organism of our society have healed and now people are starting to pick at them again,” he claimed.48 Shesterin’s letter therefore contained a wide range of possible arguments against the cult of personality. These included not only its distorted picture of Stalin and its “gloomy” view of the 1930s, terror, and war, but also its distortion of the purposes of Soviet memory itself (through its excessive focus on “black” memories and “wounds”). Some of these arguments had already been expressed in the Khrushchev era, while others, such as the insistence on the overall heroism of the 1930s and wartime period, emerged publicly very soon after Baklanov’s novel was published. At the RSFSR Writers’ Union Congress of March 1965, for example, there was widespread criticism—to which some of Baklanov’s readers referred in their letters—of Soviet literature’s excessive focus on “repressions, camps, and suffering.”49 Other objections to the cult of personality, which Shesterin had raised, long remained confined to private settings or veiled public references: notably doubts about the innocence of terror victims, or attempts to reverse earlier criticisms of Stalin. The strictly limited objections that could be publicly expressed toward the cult of personality in spring 1965 are discernible in the controversy surrounding the most negative published review of July 1941. Appearing

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in Oktiabr’ soon after the novel’s publication, the article by the critic Kuzmichev excoriated both Baklanov and Simonov’s People Are Not Born Soldiers for focusing on the moral flaws and cowardice of the army, reducing the war to “deaths” rather than celebrating it as a remarkable feat.50 These “tendentious” and aggressive criticisms were quickly denounced in Pravda.51 This authoritative rebuttal of Kuzmichev’s aggressive attacks indicated the party leadership’s desire to avoid a definitive statement on either the war or on the broader range of historical and moral issues that it raised. Indeed, Leonid Brezhnev himself rejected a draft of his speech for the war anniversary containing fulsome praise for Stalin, preferring a draft with minimal mentions of the leader.52 This lack of consensus generated a wide variety of assessments of Stalin’s wartime role across the Soviet press in April and May 1965, which were far from a rehabilitation of Stalin or a definitive shift away from the difficulties of 1941 (and their origins in 1937).53 Indeed, the new history of World War II published just before the twentieth anniversary contained substantial references to terror and a strong emphasis on Stalin’s mistakes in 1941, as did Aleksandr Nekrich’s 1941. June 22, also published in 1965, though soon after denounced and banned.54 This refusal to announce a new party line further deepened some writers’ commitment to exposing the truth about the war. Meeting at the end of April to discuss commemoration of World War II, the Moscow Writers’ Union played host to a remarkable discussion of war memory, at which Baklanov and Simonov led a near-unanimous appeal to explore further the twin catastrophes of 1937 and 1941.55 Expanding on his recently published People Are Not Born Soldiers, Simonov insisted that: “We firmly know the following. Had it not been for 1937, there would not have been the summer of 1941, and that’s the root of the issue.” He went on to argue that this “severe truth about the past” and the “genuinely complex and difficult truth of history” needed to be “remembered” in the face of recent attempts to rewrite the period in a more optimistic vein. As he had in the Khrushchev era, Simonov did not deny the need to “remember the happiest things—the victory,” but he insisted that this had to be balanced with remembrance of the prior difficulties and mistakes. Of the remaining speakers, only a quarter expressed any reservations to Simonov’s programmatic statement on memory of terror and war. The strongest objections to Simonov’s statement came from a representative

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of the military archives, Dudarenko, who warned that archival research was not an invitation to expose the “naked truth” about war. Rather, as he explained, “the truth must be founded on some kind of ideological line.” Soviet literature should show primarily heroism and “feats,” he argued, since its purpose was not so much to “expose” as to educate (vospityvat’). Evidently buoyed by Simonov’s pre-emptive strike against such beliefs, subsequent speakers openly mocked this notion that war commemoration should ignore traumatic memories. Baklanov trenchantly argued that not all past events could be heroized: “sending people to slaughter” would remain resistant to such retrospective reinvention. The audience would perceive any falsification, and thus: “there is nothing more unprofitable than untruth.” The quarrel between these two visions of historical truth and memory’s ideological utility remained unresolved, at this meeting and indeed for several months afterward. On the one hand, the discussion illustrated the strength of the constituency in favor of further exposure of the truth about terror and war, and largely positive press write-ups further reinforced the sense that these arguments about memory remained far from taboo.56 On the other hand, the dispute made visible the (re)emergence of open opposition to the agenda of the “cult of personality.”57 The fact that Simonov subsequently failed to publish his address to this meeting, owing to the intervention of the head of the Political Administration of the Armed Forces, Aleksei Epishev, offered further proof of the “creeping” advance of this alternative view of memory.58 However, the decline of the cult of personality was neither immediate nor predictable, as the following section explores through Simonov’s next work on the theme, and that of another Moscow Union colleague, Aleksandr Bek.

“THE

W O N D E R F U L M A N U S C R I P T S T H AT H AV E N O T B E C O M E

B O O K S ” 59 : N A R R AT I V E S O F T H E

“ C U LT

OF PERSONALITY”

BETWEEN PROHIBITION AND PERMISSION

In summer 1965, undeterred by his failure to publish his address to the Moscow Union, Simonov turned his attention to publication of his new, longer work on the same theme, One Hundred Days of War. Consisting of his diaries from the early months of the war, annotated with present-day commentaries, One Hundred Days of War bore obvious similarities to Baklanov’s and Rozen’s fictional representations of the war’s opening

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weeks and to Aleksandr Nekrich’s historical account of the same period. Unlike these novelists and historians, however, Simonov did not live to see his work published in full in the Soviet Union.60 Simonov’s fellow historical novelist, Aleksandr Bek, shared his fate, though the work that he failed to publish was in certain respects very different. Bek’s novel, The New Appointment, spanned the entire Stalin period, extending into the two years after the Secret Speech. Although it contained some wartime scenes, its main theme was the development of Soviet industry, and the ways that the mentality of the cult of personality hampered industrial and economic progress from the 1930s to the 1950s. Through its main character, Onisimov, the head of Stalin-era metallurgy, the novel explores the destructive effects of Stalinist terror and criticizes the extreme centralization and hierarchy of the Stalinist political and economic system.61 The New Appointment, like One Hundred Days of War, is haunted by the figure of Stalin and by the memory of 1937. Stalin is a source of inscrutable fascination for Onisimov, and this leads him to choose loyalty to the leader over protest against the terror. Amply rewarded with promotions, Onisimov is punished by nagging recurrences of shameful memories of 1937 and mysterious nervous illnesses symptomatic of a profound crisis of conscience.62 Like Simonov, Bek submitted his manuscript to Novyi mir soon after the fall of Khrushchev. Like Simonov, too, he repeatedly failed to publish the work in the ensuing years; the most intensive negotiations surrounding publication of The New Appointment, in 1966 and 1967, coincided with key developments in the saga of One Hundred Days of War. Ultimately, these negotiations yielded even fewer results than they had for Simonov, who did at least see a partial version of his manuscript published in his lifetime. Only well after Bek’s death did Znamia, edited by none other than Baklanov, publish The New Appointment, making it one of the first of hundreds of previously samizdat narratives of Stalinism to be published during glasnost’.63 That both narratives failed to be published in the second half of the 1960s was no coincidence. As their authors, editors, and readers came to realize, both works were increasingly out of sync with the emerging ideological priorities of the new regime. From late 1965 onward, a determined, if “incremental” and stealthy, “offensive” against the “cult of personality” got underway in Soviet culture.64 This marked a decisive

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shift away from the uneasy tolerance of Baklanov’s novel and other early Brezhnev-era publications on the theme. A potent combination of party warnings against the cult of personality (many issued in private meetings with editors and writers) and increasingly restrictive censorship of antiStalinist works led to a precipitous fall in publications and an abrupt rise in manuscript prohibitions.65 The harsh treatment meted out to Bek and Simonov, both well-established and well-connected Soviet novelists, seemed an ominous sign of a determined assault on the truth about Stalinism.66 On the other hand, both works came remarkably close to publication on several occasions, suggesting a persistent uncertainty about the place of the cult of personality in Soviet culture. These texts’ prolonged liminal position between “manuscript” and “book” (to use Raisa Orlova’s memorable image) left them suspended between the shrinking canon of Soviet publications on the cult of personality and the burgeoning genre of samizdat. This meant that they generated particularly intensive discussion among Soviet leaders and writers, attempting to assign the texts definitively to one or the other side of this publication divide.67 This “open struggle” concerned the place of Stalin and Stalinism in the Soviet past, and the place of the cult of personality in Soviet literature and historiography.68 Although there were several “Stalinists” in his Politburo, Brezhnev himself—and some colleagues, including several responsible for the management of culture—was still loath to move decisively towards “re-Stalinization.”69 The Soviet leadership therefore had to justify its growing hostility to the theme without rehabilitating Stalin or denying the terror. The regular attacks on the cult of personality during the Khrushchev thaw provided some precedent for this assault, but some arguments made against the cult of personality now signaled a deeper shift in attitudes toward Stalinism and Soviet memory. Novyi mir had the strongest commitment to resisting this shift, and its attempts to sustain the agenda of the cult of personality, through attempted publication of works such as these two texts, were supported by a broader constituency within the Soviet intelligentsia. This “fight-back” against prohibition did not generate permission to publish, but it did produce new, conflicting understandings of the Soviet intelligentsia’s rights and responsibilities toward Soviet history and memory.70 When the two works were

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definitively banned, and with them increasing numbers of other such manuscripts, they coalesced into a symbol of censorship of the cult of personality, with important consequences for Soviet literature, and for samizdat’s exploration of the Stalinist past. The fates of the two manuscripts were not initially intertwined. Bek’s initial attempt to publish his novel preceded by several months Simonov’s submission of his manuscript to the same journal. However, by the time that the initial practical and legal problems of Bek’s manuscript had been addressed, his work had become embroiled in the same, broader ideological disputes by then enveloping Simonov’s manuscript, and indeed many other works on the cult of personality. In fact, though, even the initial, apparently personal objections to Bek’s manuscript in 1964 and 1965 contained embryonic traces of the ideological and historical arguments that would determine its ultimate fate and that of the broader agenda of the cult of personality. The author first submitted the manuscript of The New Appointment to Novyi mir one morning in October 1964. On the evening of the same day, he heard news of Khrushchev’s ouster; “I would probably have held back the novel if that news had got to me earlier,” he reflected in his diary that night.71 Even so, like Rybakov and Baklanov, Bek and his editors could detect little change in the party line on the cult of personality in the immediate aftermath of the Kremlin coup. Novyi mir was notably enthusiastic about the novel, predicting that it would deepen the journal’s engagement with the “cult of personality,” especially Stalin and Stalinist psychology.72 For Anna Berzer, for example, Bek’s portrait of Onisimov evoked “an epoch of brilliant executors of orders. And, at the top, the despotic Stalin.”73 Neither editors nor author initially worried about the book’s chances of publication under the new regime; only one board member warned of the difficulties that might arise from Onisimov’s resemblance to the real-life figure of Ivan Tevosian.74 Indeed, it was from exactly this direction that the initial threat emerged. When Tevosian’s widow, Ol’ga Khvalebnova, complained to Novyi mir and to the CC soon after the manuscript was submitted, alleging a slanderous likeness between Onisimov and Tevosian, she began a long epistolary campaign that would keep the problem of personal slander central to the novel’s fate.75 She was insulted by the image of Onisimov as servile, “a devoted dog of Stalin,” and by the depiction of Onisimov’s

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conduct during the terror of 1937, when he betrays Ordzhonikidze and justifies the repressions to save his own skin.76 The novel’s depiction of 1937 would later become a key element of the case against it, expanding beyond personal slander to slander of an entire era. Responding to this initial complaint, though, both the author and his editors assumed that there was a simple solution: removing any resemblance between Onisimov and his real-life counterpart(s).77 Bek embarked on several months of editing, notably adding Tevosian as a character to help to distinguish him from Onisimov.78 However, in responding to Khvalebnova’s complaints, Bek also revealed how the controversy immediately triggered debate about the Stalin era, and about the place of such memories in Soviet literature, which would only intensify as the publication saga continued. At this point, Bek disputed Khvalebnova’s characterization of Onisimov by elaborating a different, more subtle understanding of Stalinist psychology. Onisimov was not extraordinary in his “blind belief” in Stalin, he explained; rather, “many thousands of party workers” shared this subservient attitude. Similarly, Onisimov was a typical component of the “sclerotic system of management under Stalin, not offering any scope for initiative from below.”79 In this way, it was the author, rather than his accusers, who first highlighted the potential for extrapolation from his novel’s individual hero to the collective psychology of Stalinism, and from individual behavior to the dysfunction of the Stalinist system. In subsequent publication attempts, such claims would loom even larger, emerging into stark contradiction with the emerging new historiography of Stalinism. When Bek resubmitted the edited manuscript in summer 1965, the national ideological climate had not yet noticeably changed. Warnings against the cult of personality had started to appear in the press and in meetings between party leaders and writers, but these were not yet conspicuously different from the warnings of the Khrushchev era.80 Moreover, as the case of Baklanov illustrated, this period was also notable for the public disavowal of more militant attacks on the cult of personality agenda, even though rumors had started to circulate of attacks on the cult of personality in more private settings. Overall, then, Novyi mir was reasonably confident of its chances of publishing the new draft. The failure of this second attempt resulted from contingent factors but also from broader, if gradual, currents of ideological change. As in

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November 1964, specific charges of slander were an important factor, and Khvalebnova reinforced her personal complaints with several other letters of protest from her husband’s former colleagues in Soviet industry, all alleging misrepresentation of Tevosian.81 This widening defense of Tevosian also widened the arguments against the novel’s portrayal of Stalinism. One typical letter, from a group of sixteen metal industry leaders, shifted repeatedly between correcting Bek’s slanderous representation of Tevosian and addressing his broader misrepresentation of the epoch as a time of mass arrests and imprisonment (only avoidable through moral compromise), authoritarianism, and paralysis of innovation.82 The winning combination of legal objections and already wellestablished criticisms of excessively “negative” views of the Stalinist past defeated Novyi mir, which renounced its publication attempt in August 1965.83 By the time that the journal resumed efforts to publish, the historical and ideological justifications of the attacks on The New Appointment had taken deeper root in public discourse and party policy.84 They became a prima facie reason to ban publication, no longer requiring the additional justification of the kinds of specific (in Bek’s case, legal) problems that had initially delayed publication. The stricter limits on the cult of personality, and the ongoing contestation over these limits, were evident in the increasingly intertwined fates of Bek and Simonov during this time: 1966 saw three failed attempts by Novyi mir to publish both works. Each attempt coincided with, and was influenced by, turning points in party ideological policy. Bek’s attempts to publish The New Appointment in summer 1966 had to negotiate the ambiguous new party line articulated at the 23rd Party Congress, while Simonov’s chances of publishing One Hundred Days of War in the autumn were influenced by a major CC ideological conference. The emphasis on ideological rigor at both these events expressed a broader anxiety about ideological vigilance, which had acquired decisive momentum with the arrests of two colleagues of Simonov and Bek, the writers Andrei Siniavskii and Iulii Daniil’, in late 1965.85 Nevertheless, despite the growing power of arguments about the ideological hazards of de-Stalinization, an alternative view of the ideological benefits of exploration of the Stalinist past continued to be articulated, ensuring that the ongoing non-publication of the manuscripts still became an “event” for the Soviet intelligentsia.86

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In between the arrest and the trial of Siniavskii and Daniil’, and before the renewed publication attempts of 1966, one such event was a “triumphant” defense of The New Appointment and of the cult of personality by Bek’s colleagues at the Moscow Writers’ Union.87 The meeting in December 1965 was intended to overcome the “numerous serious obstacles” to publication, and participants therefore emphasized the “partymindedness” of Bek’s historical fiction, describing the novel as an exemplary response to the party’s appeal to show “what hampered our great people in its very difficult and grandiose struggle for the creation of socialist society.”88 Bek had traced the “complex dialectic” between “great deeds,” on the one hand, and on the other hand: “How all these monstrous phenomena of our party and state life, which we inaccurately term the ‘cult of personality,’ hampered and placed obstacles in the way of those trying to create socialist industry, retarding and sometimes suffocating them.”89 This powerful evocation of the “monstrous” obstacles to historical progress was reminiscent of the union’s earlier defense of Dudintsev’s portrait of the “Drozdovs,” logically extrapolating from the party’s own discourse, but also radically transforming it: after all, even the 22nd Congress had stopped short of claiming that the cult of personality had suffocated any part of the Soviet system. In a further echo of the union’s discussions of Dudintsev a decade earlier, this discussion of Bek’s novel also witnessed debates about the psychology of Stalinism and its literary exposure. Veniamin Kaverin (one of the key protagonists in the Moscow Union in 1956–57, now struggling to publish his own novel about Stalinist persecution of scientists) offered an eloquent analysis of Onisimov’s “moral collapse” and psychological “deformation.” As Bek himself had done at the very start of the publication saga, Kaverin extrapolated from the hero’s character to the entire era and system, explaining that such attitudes “were without a doubt the root of Stalinist arbitrariness and consequently of all those terrible losses, which the country went through in connection to that arbitrariness.” Other speakers deemed Onisimov a “tragic” hero, the novel charting his descent into a moral vacuum.90 This text, as yet unpublished, was thus already generating reflections about the Stalinist past, some potentially subversive, though here presented as emphatically “party-minded.” Indeed, although several speakers alluded to the isolated warnings against the cult of personality that had started to appear, they remained

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largely confident that the theme would remain party policy. In fact, Bek’s sophisticated portrait of the era had enriched and enlivened a hitherto rather empty rubric by portraying a “large stage of our life . . . that stage which we superficially term the ‘cult of personality.’ ” Aleksandr Borshchagovskii likewise saw Bek as one of the first worthy responses to the party’s “demand . . . to honestly and deeply get to grips with what happened.” Alluding to recent criticisms of the “cult of personality,” Borshchagovskii then dismissed them, seeing the novel, with its “enormous . . . explosive force” as a worthy riposte to the party’s earlier criticisms of “the insufficient seriousness of our works on this theme,” and a fitting encouragement to other writers to tackle the “cult of personality” with equal “seriousness.”91 Even after the trial of Siniavskii and Daniil’, Bek’s colleagues remained optimistic, even defiant, calling publicly for the novel to be rescued from the limbo of non-publication.92 The contrast between Siniavskii and Daniil’s ideological error in publishing abroad, and the faith in this novel’s suitability for domestic publication, indicates a persistent belief that the cult of personality remained a legitimate concern for Soviet literature.93 Held soon after the two writers’ trial, the 23rd Congress in fact remained ambiguous about Stalin and the cult of personality, barely mentioning either.94 At the same time, though, it staged a militant defense of ideological “vigilance,” verging on a revival of Stalinist denunciation and ideological intolerance for some observers.95 The congress’ emphatic warnings about “gloomy” narratives of the Stalinist past and its clarion calls for heroism constituted the clearest set of criteria for Soviet literature and historiography issued since the party warnings to writers in 1962 and 1963. The congress also posed specific problems for Novyi mir, with several speakers criticizing the journal’s particular attachment to “gloomy,” non-heroic themes.96 These criticisms deepened at a nationwide ideological conference half a year later, where speakers again criticized Novyi mir in particular, and “gloomy” literature and historiography in general.97 They also continued to sketch a more heroic narrative of the Stalin era, and indeed of Stalin himself, though praise for the leader had not yet revived in more public settings. Novyi mir had already resumed attempts to publish The New Appointment before the 23rd Congress.98 Despite the stridency of its appeals for more heroism and less “gloom,” the congress did not in fact have any

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immediate ill effects on the novel’s publication chances. Indeed, in the following months, thanks to the lack of any detailed party statement on the cult of personality, the novel came closer to publication than ever before.99 Passed by censors at the end of May 1966, it went to print in June, but the print run was stopped in the middle of the month, and all copies pulped.100 Khvalebnova had once more played a leading role: she had again written to the state and party authorities, and had again mobilized further protests from erstwhile colleagues of her husband.101 However, while these protests still referred to the problem of individual slander, their key argument now rested on the ideological necessity of a heroic historical narrative, a sign of the increasingly clear new party line. The metal workers could now deem the novel a contradiction of the resolutions of the latest party congress, likely to generate skepticism toward the past rather than assisting in the key task of inspiring and educating youth (vospitanie).102 Glavlit officials, meanwhile, revealed the normative narrative of Stalinism that now governed (and justified) their decisions on the cult of personality: Bek’s novel, they claimed, “silences the heroism of the period of the Five Year plans and the Great Fatherland War, the selfless work of Soviet people to create the country’s industrial base and the defense industry.”103 This heroic narrative of the 1930s was resurgent in Soviet public culture by this time, with celebrations of the romance of the first Five Year plans increasingly prevalent in journalism, historiography, literature, and film.104 The heroic view of industrialization, which had never been seriously questioned in the Khrushchev era, was now reinforced by more stringent controls over historical and fictional narratives of collectivization, aiming to curtail explorations of its tragic costs.105 As Glavlit’s comments on Bek’s manuscript show, this resurgent positive view of the 1930s contributed in turn to an emerging narrative of war preparedness. This had tentatively surfaced even as Baklanov’s novel was being published the previous year, and now it began to permeate many published accounts of the early war, especially during the twenty-fifth anniversary commemoration of the 1941 battle for Moscow.106 These arguments against Bek’s text bespoke a desire to expand the “usable past” of the Stalin era, seeing the past’s usefulness in terms of its capacity to inspire and mobilize, rather than to provoke remorse.107 As this heroic narrative and these norms of Soviet public memory became further entrenched in Soviet public culture, they exerted

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increasing pressure on writers trying to publish their works.108 Glavlit’s trenchant rejection of Bek’s novel was one of dozens of “interventions” that censors meted out in 1966 (and in subsequent years) to fictional and non-fictional narratives concerning the Stalinist past, especially to works with a pronounced focus (or, as it was increasingly caricatured, an unhealthy fixation) on the terror of 1937 or the tragedy of 1941.109 It was in this very context that Konstantin Simonov engaged in his most concerted attempt to publish One Hundred Days of War. Despite the rapidly changing ideological climate, there were similarities with Bek’s attempts at publication earlier that year: after heavy editing, Simonov’s manuscript was passed for publication in mid-October, but Glavlit then abruptly withdrew this prior permission during the production process.110 As with Bek’s manuscript, too, the justification of this decision revealed the emerging contours of the new official narrative of the Stalinist past. The decision to rescind permission for One Hundred Days of War was initially taken by Glavlit, and then confirmed by the CC in consultation with the political administration of the army.111 In rejecting the manuscript, all three bodies clearly articulated a heroic narrative of war, marginalizing and even silencing its tragic elements. This new narrative was justified in terms of its political utility, and also its historical correctness. Meanwhile the author’s and editor’s protests further honed an alternative, but still distinctively Soviet, discourse of history and memory.112 Initiating the ban in September 1966, Glavlit argued that One Hundred Days of War was unambiguously “catastrophic”; Simonov had shown 1941 as a “chain of serious military failures,” caused by an “absolute lack of preparation” and by the lingering consequences of 1937. Censors also impugned Simonov’s credentials as an eyewitness and a historian, pointing to the narrative’s “removal” of the “question of the heroism of the soldiers and commanders,” and alleging that Simonov “relied on personal impressions” and on “psychological guesswork.” The fact that Simonov’s firsthand knowledge of the front and his penetrating insight into Stalin’s psychology had been widely acclaimed in People Are Not Born Soldiers only two years earlier illustrates the speed of the changes that had since occurred.113 In their responses to Glavlit’s warnings about the manuscript, both the army and the party leadership asserted the historical and normative truth of their narrative of war, and confidently asserted the ideological

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hazards of Simonov’s narrative. Aleksei Epishev, who had been aggressively lobbying for a heroic narrative of war throughout the early Brezhnev era, accused Simonov of distorting the early days of war and the pre-war years.114 The “objective” truth, which Simonov had failed to discern, was that the army was prepared for war (by the “enormous” industrial and agricultural progress of the 1930s). Confidently asserting that the war was a “feat” (podvig) from start to finish, Epishev was also confident of the ideological harm that this “quasi-bourgeois account” of war, like Nekrich’s work, would cause, if published.115 By the time that Epishev made these claims, the Politburo had reached a similar conclusion, indicating a growing elite consensus. Their discussion of the cult of personality and history, held a week earlier, had affirmed the necessity of ensuring a more heroic narrative of the entire Soviet period.116 Simonov’s manuscript formed part of the discussion, as did several other “slanderous” accounts that “debunked the history of our party and people” and focused on “some kind of debris,” prompting one speaker to ask: “what do people not now write about the Great Fatherland War?” As the censors had done, the Politburo presented their heroic narrative as not only better suited to education, but also as more accurate than the claims of authors who “joke around with history.” When Glavlit sent Epishev’s denunciation of the text to the CC, it therefore reached a receptive audience, and the ban was confirmed within days.117 This was not a simple re-Stalinization of the war and the Soviet past. In fact, none of the bodies involved in banning Simonov’s text discussed Stalin himself at any length. Nor did they attempt to elaborate an alternative narrative of terror, preferring instead to marginalize 1937 within a broader sweep of historical progress from the Five Year plans to the war victory. Even the desire to impose a single, heroic historical narrative, though couched in ideological terms and infused with nostalgia for the Short Course, was framed as historical truth as much as party truth, avoiding the appearance of a revival of ideological top-down diktats, as in 1957. However, authors and editors continued to challenge these decisions with urgent warnings about the historical and ideological hazards of re-Stalinization. Responding to Glavlit’s criticisms of his historical methodology, Simonov retorted that he had conducted significant research in the archives; there were documents to back up every one of his assertions, and no invention on his part (otsebiatina). At the same

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time, although these documents “show[ed] far from the whole truth about the reasons for our defeats in our early days,” even the partial picture was enough to confirm Stalin’s principal responsibility for the difficulties at the start of the conflict; thus, “there can’t not be criticism of Stalin’s cult of personality.” In this way, the author defended his right not only to his own historical analysis, but also to personal moral judgment of the events and people under investigation: “I don’t forget, and will never forget, about Stalin’s responsibility for 1937–38, or for the situation in which we greeted the war,” he asserted in one letter to Brezhnev.118 A few months after the 1966 publication ban, Simonov again voiced the same argument about the need for truth, this time at the otherwise blandly celebratory Fourth Soviet Writers’ Union Congress.119 In protests against the ban(s) of Simonov’s work, both the author and the editor Tvardovskii condemned Soviet leaders’ own apparent amnesia about the facts and moral judgments that they themselves had voiced at the 20th and 22nd Party Congress: “we need to forget them, not remember them, do we?” asked Simonov sarcastically of CC officials.120 In this sense, both the author and his editor argued that their narratives of the cult of personality were more, not less, party-minded than the new heroic narrative now being hailed as the exemplar of partiinost’. The ideological offensive of the early Brezhnev years thus provoked similar contestation to the anti-revisionist drive after the 20th Congress; on both occasions, writers could cite party resolutions that remained in force, as justification for their ongoing commitment to glasnost’ of Stalinism. Later in the decade, as the party moved further away from the “line” of the 20th and 22nd congresses, the 1956 resolution on the cult of personality assumed decisive importance in constraining re-Stalinization. Along with accuracy, morality, and party-mindedness, the final argument in favor of publication was its ideological utility. In defending One Hundred Days of War, Simonov continued to refine arguments made during the Khrushchev era about the need to “educate” people using not just examples of heroism and triumph, but also instances of tragedy and defeat, even shame. Although his arguments about the progressive benefits of glasnost’ were distinctively Soviet, Simonov also evoked more broadly the dangers of repressing difficult memories, claiming: “We need to move forward, but with our head turned backward we won’t get very far, if we’re going to ban telling the truth about our history, if we’re going

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to be afraid to speak about Stalin’s crimes.”121 Telling the truth was healthy for the party and for the national psyche, more emancipatory and progressive than the denial of past crimes, which was now increasingly the norm in Soviet literature and historiography. Therefore, as the cult of personality became increasingly marginalized in Soviet culture, the moral and ideological panic around it intensified, with both sides making dire predictions about the consequences of either repressing or exposing the tragic past. Although the heroic, celebratory model of memory prevailed in the decision to ban both texts in 1966, the victory was not decisive. The following year, both texts again came close to being published, and in fact gained more support than ever before from within the party apparat, especially the CC culture department.122 For these officials, continuing to ban—or even to freeze—these texts now presented a different ideological problem: that of notoriety at home and abroad.123 Even before—and especially after—the renewed failure to publish both texts in 1967, they increasingly featured in Soviet writers’ public discussions and more private complaints as twin victims of excessive restraints on freedom of expression.124 More worryingly still, the protracted struggle over both texts had by now made them a news story abroad, with the foreign press ignoring the complexity of the negotiations over publication, and instead presenting the manuscripts’ persecution as straightforward proof of regime illiberalism. Examples of such hostile foreign press reports and rumors of foreign publication circulated around the CC in 1967, as part of the renewed discussion of publication.125 These renewed controversies over both texts revived a persistent uncertainty over the Sovietness of their representations of Stalinism. For some officials, the texts were still sufficiently close to the party line that the ideological hazards of publication were now outweighed by the ideological damage of not publishing them.126 Colleagues of Bek and Simonov, meanwhile, grew increasingly frustrated with the insidious interference in Soviet writers’ “civic” obligations toward the nation’s past; “surely you can see that historical experience demands its artistic embodiment?” enquired Veniamin Kaverin, in one typical appeal to the Soviet Writers’ Union management.127 In another, he warned of the subversive effects of prohibition: “there is no more reliable way to deepen hundredfold the interest in the past than to try to hide or distort it, which is what is being done.”128

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Nevertheless, during this same period, the heroic narrative of the 1930s and the war had also become more firmly entrenched in party policy and discourse, further marginalizing both of these tragic narratives.129 When Khvalebnova again rallied her troops in 1967 against Bek’s portrayal of the 1930s, their allegations of personal and historical slander now fully resonated with Soviet historiography, which had long glorified the early 1930s and now increasingly marginalized the terror of the late 1930s.130 Comparing Bek’s unflattering portrait of industrialists as “manmachines” with their own positive memories of industrialization, they persuaded the ministry to lobby Brezhnev to ban the novel, and sealed its fate once again.131 Likewise, by 1967, not only was a triumphant narrative of war fully entrenched in Soviet historiography, but signs of the rehabilitation of Stalin himself had even started to appear.132 Aleksandr Nekrich’s expulsion from the party had been followed by vilification in the press, intensifying the ideological panic surrounding “tragic” narratives of 1941 and criticism of Stalin.133 In August, Glavlit therefore again refused to pass One Hundred Days of War for publication, accusing it of “a non-objective and tendentious depiction of . . . the opening period of the war.”134 There had always been some room for maneuver and negotiation in Soviet literature; even at the height of the Stalin era, powerful writers and editors could sometimes secure permission for publication for works that apparently transgressed the rules.135 Simonov, Tvardovskii, and to a lesser extent Bek, were immensely influential figures in post-Stalinist literature (as they had been in the Stalin era), so the failure of their attempts to publish these texts seemed an especially ominous sign of the rigidity of the new party line. In the two years after the final failure to publish both texts, a series of bans on other literary and historical narratives about the cult of personality, including Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward (finally banned, after similarly protracted negotiations, in 1968); Rybakov’s sequel to Summer in Sosniaki, his novel Children of the Arbat (banned in 1968); Roi Medvedev’s Let History Judge (banned in 1967); and Tvardovskii’s By Right of Memory (banned in 1969) confirmed the growing party hostility to such fiction and history writing.136 At the same time, the fact that Simonov and Bek repeatedly veered so close to publication reveals the Soviet leadership’s own uncertainty about whether and how to prohibit the cult of personality. Indeed, as the two

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novels’ chances of publication waxed and waned, there were occasional publication permissions that bucked the apparently inexorable trend toward prohibition: a much-expanded book version of Trifonov’s Fireglow (1966); Veniamin Kaverin’s novel about Stalin-era science, The Double Portrait (first in a Kazakh journal in 1966, and then in a separate book edition the following year); and, most astonishingly of all, the release of a partial text of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, a sign that powerful patrons (here including Simonov himself) could still sometimes secure a positive outcome.137 Nonetheless, the dominant trend was toward a more heroic narrative of the 1930s and 1940s, and a reaffirmation of Soviet literature’s obligations to celebrate Soviet history. What role, then, did this emerging memory of Stalinism allot to Stalin himself? T H E C U LT R E V I V E D ?

The drive to re-heroize the Stalinist past in the second half of the 1960s did not reinstate Stalin as the leading hero of Soviet history. Nonetheless, it required a certain revival of tribute to Stalin and his leadership of the key events and processes from the new usable past: notably, the “construction of socialism” and the victory in war.138 As with the growing hostility toward the cult of personality, this increasingly benign attitude to Stalin himself had to be justified in terms of its ideological and historical correctness. The “gradual, careful” alteration of Stalin’s reputation had to abide by past party criticisms of Stalin, though the late 1960s—like the late 1950s—still witnessed fierce contestation over the interpretation of these criticisms, especially those of 1956.139 In the half decade from Khrushchev’s ouster to the first major Stalin anniversary of the Brezhnev era (in late 1969), Stalin’s official reputation underwent a pronounced, but deeply contested, shift. Until the commemoration of Stalin on his ninetieth anniversary in 1969 (examined in the final section below), no sustained analysis of Stalin’s life and works appeared in Pravda or in the party leadership’s public statements. Nonetheless the orchestration and reception of this 1969 celebration was influenced by the foregoing “memory work” about Stalin and his cult, which had taken place in less public forums (including, but not only, samizdat). The public commemoration on which the late socialist regime settled stabilized Stalin’s posthumous reputation, but did not resolve these disputes.

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Although the Khrushchev era in fact never fully curtailed praise of Stalin, its alleged “forgetting” provided a convenient foil for the earliest attempts to revive Stalin’s reputation. Soon after the Kremlin coup of 1964, which had not specifically indicted Khrushchev’s attitude to Stalin, the CC’s more “Stalinist” figures (notably Sergei Trapeznikov) started to appeal at CC events for greater balance and fairness in Stalin’s posthumous commemoration, far more directly than the Soviet press of the time.140 From early 1965, ideological meetings often featured strong criticism of the last decade’s commemoration (or forgetting) of Stalin, accusing it of “heaping” onto Stalin all manner of “sins” and transforming him into an “evildoer.”141 Others alleged that Stalin had been transformed into a Menshevik or ideological enemy by the relentless posthumous criticisms. This was blamed on an “irrational” desire to “seek out” Stalin’s errors at all costs, on the part of “specialists” in Stalin criticism. Iudin, from the Institute of Philosophy, lamented that recent war historiography was “opposed to Stalin to the point of irrationality. What do people not say against Stalin now?” he wondered.142 Concerns about the misrepresentation of “personalities” (lichnosti— at first unnamed) punctuated a series of 1965 CC department discussions about the need to expand the usable past and the “positive experience” on which Soviet propaganda—and party history teaching, the focus of several of these meetings—could draw. Typical of this linkage between personalities and events was a keynote address to one such gathering in June 1965 by Trapeznikov, who claimed that “the unobjective illumination of historical events, the subjective approach to evaluating outstanding personalities causes harm to the formation of young people’s worldview.”143 The aggressive “dethroning” (razvenchanie) of the reputations of key, “outstanding” figures thus became semantically and causally linked to the nihilistic “dethroning” of key events in the Soviet past, an increasingly urgent concern for the party and state authorities.144 None other than MGU’s party history head, Savnichenko, claimed a link between the excessive criticism of Stalin in party historiography and students’ subversive questioning of the war victory and the harm of Trotskyism, his performance heralding a shift toward rehabilitation of the department’s Stalinist views.145 Toward the end of 1965, Trapeznikov again complained that excessive criticism of the cult of personality had led to the erroneous dismissal of the entire Stalin era as “the era of the cult of personality”;

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therefore, partially rehabilitating the wrongly maligned Stalin would help to rehabilitate a wrongly maligned era. The criticism of the notion of the “era of the cult of personality” would appear soon after in the Soviet press, but the associated claims about Stalin himself would not.146 These more private CC meetings, though, started to call for Stalin’s “positive qualities” to be acknowledged, and some of these “acknowledgments” were framed in strongly positive language (deeming his merits “very significant” and “not inconsiderable,” for example). Perhaps because of the particular pedagogical and propaganda concerns of ideological heads, specific praise most often focused on Stalin’s publications. For instance, Trapeznikov called Stalin a “notable propagandist of Lenin,” while others called for Stalin’s works to be restored to the party’s “ideological arsenal.” These calls did not go unopposed, even in this notably conservative setting, with some other speakers insisting on the flaws of works such as The Economic Problems of Socialism.147 This praise for Stalin was also justified by reference to the June 1956 CC resolution on Stalin and the cult of personality. In CC departmental discussions of 1965, this resolution was deemed an “objective” statement on Stalin, from which subsequent, harsher criticisms of Stalin had deviated. Even within such meetings, and certainly outside them, not everyone was convinced by these claims about the resolution. After hearing Trapeznikov’s praise for the “objective” resolution, for example, one speaker wondered where the rollback of recent criticisms would end. Though he agreed with certain changes to the image of Stalin as an “evildoer,” he craved reassurance that criticisms of “seeking out” of Stalin’s errors would not bring criticism of Stalin to a complete halt. He was also nervous about other speakers’ attempts to highlight Lenin’s praise for Stalin: did this herald a revival of the cult’s claims that Stalin was “the Lenin of today,” he wondered?148 Although Pospelov reassured him that a balance between Stalin’s merits and failings would be maintained, these fears materialized within a year. An ideological gathering in autumn 1966, held in the wake of the Siniavskii-Daniil’ trial and the strongly anti-revisionist (though not explicitly pro-Stalinist) 23rd Congress, featured many “openly Stalinist speeches.” What was “open,” compared with the equivalent gatherings a year earlier, was the expression of personal attachment to a more positive image of Stalin, rather than merely formal adherence to the party

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resolution, as in one Georgian delegate’s claims that: “I am a Stalinist because the name of Stalin is linked with the victories of our people in the years of collectivization and industrialization. I am a Stalinist because the name of Stalin is linked with the victories of our people in the Great Fatherland War. I am a Stalinist because the name of Stalin is linked with the victories of our people in the post-war reconstruction.”149 The ideological meetings of 1965 had featured several attacks on the use of the word “Stalinist” as a derogatory epithet for those opposed to excessive de-Stalinization. Strura’s speech now also used it to flaunt pro-Stalinism: being a “Stalinist” entailed a deep investment not only in a heroic narrative of the Stalinist 1930s and 1940s, but also in the cult narrative that placed Stalin at the helm of this glorious progress. This “Stalinism” was applauded by many in the audience, but mildly rebuked by the party’s ideological chief Petr Demichev, who pointed out that the speech violated the June 1956 resolution.150 Moreover, cult language was less common even at this meeting than more general criticisms of the agenda of the cult of personality (especially in Novyi mir). Even in this less public setting, then, it remained more acceptable to praise the Stalinist past (without identifying it in such personalized terms) and to criticize the cult of personality than to try to revive the Stalin cult. In public discourse, therefore, praise for Stalin remained muted and fragmented. Stalin effectively became a “historical unperson” in the party’s landmark celebrations of its past in the second half of the 1960s, because Brezhnev repeatedly elected to reject overt praise or blame in favor of a less divisive silence, especially during celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution.151 Nevertheless, the rise in indirect praise and the covert rejection of some former criticisms in less programmatic texts meant that Stalin’s reputation underwent a considerable recovery, especially after 1967. Typical was the first volume of the multi-volume history of the Communist Party to be published under Brezhnev. As outraged Old Bolshevik reviewers pointed out (though fruitlessly), this new account had silently removed many Khrushchev-era criticisms of Stalin; while some criticisms remained, the overall balance had therefore shifted toward a more benign (and false) picture, reminiscent of the Short Course.152 Likewise, historical and memoir accounts of the war started to acclaim Stalin’s “leadership” of war (gradually allotting more space, and praise, to the State Defense Committee, before naming Stalin explicitly from late 1966

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onward) and engaged in increasingly open attacks on the biases of the previous era’s historiography.153 It was easier, in fact, to burnish Stalin’s reputation as a war leader then to rehabilitate his pre-war leadership.154 After all, the resolution of 1956—as well as the Secret Speech and the 22nd Congress—had focused on this pre-war period, and this dictated a minimum acknowledgment of the events of 1937 and Stalin’s role in them. The new edition of the party history textbook—the third since Stalin’s death—revived praise for Stalin’s theoretical and practical contributions to the party cause in the late 1920s and early 1930s, but also continued to acknowledge (though only briefly) Stalin’s wrongdoing in the late 1930s terror.155 Although this reemergence of praise for Stalin into public discourse was thus constrained by past party resolutions, it also possessed a powerful ideological rationale in the present: expanding the Soviet usable past. Thus, when the ideological vigilance of the Brezhnev regime increased after the intervention in Prague, so too did signs of “neo-Stalinism” and “genuine re-Stalinization,” including a marked intensification in praise for Stalin in the Soviet press.156 However, well before this more open pro-Stalinism emerged, some careful readers of the Soviet press and of samizdat reports of confidential elite discussions had detected a real threat of re-Stalinization, and their alarm only intensified as praise of Stalin intensified toward the end of the 1960s.157 Throughout this period, their concerns were often articulated in public speeches or in signed letters and petitions to the Soviet leadership. This openness emphasized the contrast to the covert, tacit orchestration of re-Stalinization, and claimed to be more fully in accord with the party’s own proclaimed agenda of glasnost’. Despite these insistent claims of Sovietness, however, these protests also raised challenging questions about the place of individual historical knowledge and moral judgment within the Soviet collective. Throughout the early Brezhnev era, the key argument against revived praise of Stalin was the fact that it contradicted the resolutions of the 20th and 22nd congresses: particularly the June 1956 resolution on the cult of personality and the resolutions of the 22nd Congress. It is no accident that some of the most well-known protests against re-Stalinization, the intelligentsia petitions of March 1966, took place in the run-up to the 23rd Congress. Aware that the party often used such congresses to codify ideological change, the authors viewed this first

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congress of the post-Khrushchev era as a make-or-break moment, with the potential to unite thus far scattered signs of re-Stalinization into a new “line” on the Stalinist past. The petitions of March 1966 therefore proceeded from strong warnings about the impossibility of even the most minor “revision” (reviziia) or “rethinking” (peresmotr) of the decisions of the 20th and 22nd congresses. These and other such protests usually presented the impossibility of reversing party resolutions as self-evident, but there were also attempts to elaborate more fully on the political consequences, with one collective petition warning of inevitable damage to relations with foreign communist parties, for example.158 In the months and years after the congress, as this de facto rehabilitation indeed took hold, warnings about the effective repudiation of party decisions became more forceful. Two years after the 1966 petitions, Lev Kopelev made explicit the hints of the earlier petitions: the potential “revision” of the line of the 20th and 22nd congresses amounted to revisionist “slander” of previous party resolutions, thus reappropriating the rhetoric of historical “slander” and ideological deviation from opponents of the “cult of personality.”159 In the same year, the writer Grigorii Svirskii’s objections to the (re)appearance of pro-Stalinist literary works deemed them not only a “direct strike against party resolutions,” but also “blasphemous,” a “mockery” of the decisions of the 20th Congress. Placing himself and many authors of unpublished anti-Stalinist literature on the correct side of the “divide” over the 20th Congress, Svirksii’s use of religious language emphasized the sacred inviolability of party resolutions on the “cult of personality.”160 When the 23rd Congress indeed respected the party’s earlier decisions on de-Stalinization (probably partly because of protests such as the March 1966 petitions), it too could then be cited as further confirmation of the party’s continued commitment to de-Stalinization. Meeting soon after the congress to discuss the latest tome of the multi-volume history of the party, for example, a group of Old Bolsheviks justified their objections to the book’s “embellishment of Stalin” by reference to the 20th, 22nd, and 23rd congresses.161 One, Izmailov, cited all three congresses together, as cumulative confirmation of the party’s condemnation of the cult of personality, a stance contradicted by the draft narrative’s more positive picture of Stalin. Aleksei Snegov elaborated further, in characteristically defiant fashion: “The whole point is that some people counted on the fact

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that the 23rd Congress would rehabilitate Stalin. It didn’t work out, and won’t work out. . . . The 23rd Congress reaffirmed the line of the 20th and 22nd congresses. There is no return to the times of Stalin.” With the ideological correctness of Stalin criticism thus reaffirmed, Snegov enumerated a long list of such criticisms to be inserted into the final draft.162 As tolerance for pro-Stalinist discourse visibly increased over the subsequent months and years, the line of the 23rd Congress became an increasingly important weapon. Kopelev’s protest against the “restorers of Stalinism,” for example, presented the previous fourteen years as a continuum of revelations about Stalin throughout all four of the period’s party congresses (from 20th to 23rd).163 Protests in the early 1970s against proStalinist literary works (such as Vsevolod Kochetov’s What Do You Want?) still claimed a fundamental similarity between the party line of all four congresses of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras, and such literature’s flouting of that line.164 Such interpretations of the post-Stalinist (and, allegedly, strongly anti-Stalinist) party line were not merely a formal exegesis of party rhetoric. They also argued that the revelations of de-Stalinization had successfully embedded new memories of Stalinism in Soviet collective and individual memory, with one intelligentsia petition sent just prior to the 23rd Congress claiming that “no one can erase these decisions from his consciousness or memory.”165 Lev Kopelev’s later criticisms also emphasized the depth and breadth of knowledge acquired through these public, official exposés: “to undertake an attempt today to rehabilitate Stalin,” he explained, “is to make it seem as though there weren’t the 20th and 22nd congresses, to pretend that we don’t know the documents exposing Stalin.”166 Such claims elided individual, collective and state memory: what the people now knew was what the party had told them. If the acquired knowledge could not be forgotten by its audience, neither should it be denied by those who had originally disseminated it. This undeniable knowledge of Stalin’s crimes in turn made moral condemnation inevitable and irreversible, as the party had itself suggested, especially at the 22nd Congress. “To this point we do not know one fact, one argument, that would allow one to think that the condemnation of the cult of personality was in any way incorrect,” claimed one of the petitions before the 23rd Congress. The party’s own moral condemnation of Stalin, like the facts on which it was based, had become deeply

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embedded in Soviet collective memory, as another petition argued of Stalin: “Through his crimes and incorrect deeds, he so distorted the idea of communism that the people will never forgive it. Our people will not understand or accept a departure—even if only partial—from the decisions on the cult of personality.”167 As frustration grew with the creeping public rehabilitation of Stalin, it intensified feelings of moral revulsion. For Svirskii, for example, Sergei Smirnov’s 1967 pro-Stalinist poems were akin to a “laurel wreath of murdered, trampled souls,” a grotesque tribute to a leader who deserved only condemnation for sending “millions to their graves.”168 The radicalization of his claims about Stalin’s criminality was a reaction to Soviet public’s culture’s slow retreat from the outrage expressed at the 20th and 22nd congresses. In a similar vein, Petr Iakir crafted an entire “posthumous indictment of Stalin” and sent it to Kommunist to protest its 1969 tributes to Stalin’s military leadership. While he believed that “tens of thousands of pages could be written on Stalin’s crimes,” Iakir limited himself to the “crimes” outlined in the 22nd Congress’ resolution, and passed sentence on each according to the statutes of the Soviet criminal code.169 His “indictment” thus exhibited “radical obedience” to party and state discourse, but also claimed the right to individual moral judgment, no doubt partly fuelled by his own family history of repression.170 Both the party’s “judgment” of Stalin (in which his treatment of Iakir’s father had featured prominently), and that of the Soviet criminal code, were morally and judicially correct, but the recent, insidious changes to Stalin’s image were not, prompting the concluding, rhetorical question: “On what grounds, then, do the authors of the articles that we have mentioned and the editorial staff of Kommunist rehabilitate the greatest criminal that our country has known in its recent history?” Iakir’s statement was poised between hope that the party would stand by its own judgments of Stalin, and disillusionment that the de jure condemnation of Stalin would give way to his de facto rehabilitation. By this point, in the wake of the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia, disillusionment about the thaw was widespread in the Soviet intelligentsia.171 Yet Iakir’s intermingled anxiety and confidence about the future of de-Stalinization had been consistent throughout protests in the second half of the 1960s. For Roi Medvedev in 1966, for example, “after the denunciation of Stalin, all the most intelligent and capable people in the

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country turned away from Stalin and Stalinism.” Supporters of de-Stalinization thus stood in the vanguard of historical progress, able to resist the regressive pull of neo-Stalinism.172 Despite growing evidence to the contrary, Lev Kopelev in 1968 was still optimistic about popular attitudes toward Stalin, arguing that “the mythology of the Stalin cult has been once and forever destroyed.” While it took many years, and two party congresses, to demolish this “blind faith” in Stalin, the shift in attitudes was now decisive and irreversible. These arguments in favor of continuing de-Stalinization imagined it as more progressive and liberating than current attempts to revive the Stalin cult.173 Given this success in altering popular memories of Stalin, any changes to the way in which Stalin was officially remembered could now sow only division and discord. Petitions prior to the 23rd Congress claimed, for example, that “no explanations or articles can force people to believe in Stalin again; on the contrary, that will only create confusion and irritation.” The authors predicted that Soviet youth was especially likely to be “confused” by re-Stalinization, thus targeting pro-Stalinist arguments about the need to address youth disillusionment and nihilism through re-heroization of the Soviet past.174 Svirskii, meanwhile, took aim at another conservative argument about memory: the warnings (issued to writers including Bek) not to “stir up the past” or to “rub salt into the wounds.” Turning such claims back on pro-Stalinist authors and their patrons, he argued that: “No one but them—Zakrutkin, Smirnov, Chuev, and others of their ilk—is reopening old wounds and stirring up the past by turning the enraged attention of the people toward it and distracting from today’s concerns.” This ingenious reversal of conservative arguments presented the party’s previous revelations about Stalinism as less “wounding” and disruptive than current attempts to re-falsify the recent past.175 However, this resistance to re-Stalinization ended in failure; as a result of this speech, Svirskii was expelled from the party organization.176 Authors of samizdat criticisms of Stalinism also faced an intensifying campaign of harassment in the late 1960s.177 Nonetheless, some of the arguments that they made— about the potential disruption of re-Stalinization, and the ideological necessity of abiding by past party resolutions—resonated within the party elite, as is clear from their commemorative decisions at the very end of the decade.

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F I X I N G S TA L I N ’ S R E P U TAT I O N : S TA L I N ’ S N I N E T I E T H A N N I V E R S A R Y

The ninetieth anniversary of Stalin’s birth, in December 1969, was an obvious opportunity to clarify the confused image of Stalin that had developed in Soviet public culture since Khrushchev’s fall. Consequently, several months ahead of this landmark date, the possibility of commemoration already loomed large for Stalin’s friends and foes. In the CC, commemorative procedures were formally discussed in the secretariat at the end of October, in response to a letter from the predominantly conservative agitprop and academic institution departments, and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism.178 Drawing attention to the lack of press materials about Stalin in the run-up to this anniversary, the authors presented commemoration as normal on such a landmark occasion; after all, Stalin’s eightieth anniversary had been celebrated.179 Not to mark this anniversary, therefore, risked “being incorrectly understood and serving as the pretext for all kinds of different misinterpretations.” They proposed publication of a Pravda article, offering a “party evaluation of Stalin,” which was commissioned two weeks later, with several drafts discussed and edited by the CC over the following month.180 Well before publication of this article, speculation and anxiety about commemoration had already started to mount outside the party elite. It gave rise to samizdat criticisms, such as a pre-emptive protest (written under the sobriquet “A. Ivanov”) against the “seeping” of obsequious tributes to the “dead despot” into the Soviet press.181 For Tvardovskii, meanwhile, the anniversary promised to bring out into the open the recent covert changes in policy. In a September diary entry, he observed that: “If 21 December 1969 turns out as people assume (a secret jubilee for Stalin), then there can be no more doubt . . . about where we’re heading, or more exactly, where we’re leading, against Leninism.”182 The commemorative article, when it appeared three months later, did indeed show where the Stalin question was heading, but it was not quite in the pro-Stalinist direction that Tvardovskii had assumed. Rather, the anniversary proved important in stabilizing Stalin’s public image, generating a language of mild praise and mild blame, which was easily reproducible for future commemorations. However, this image of Stalin satisfied neither militant pro-Stalinists nor outraged anti-Stalinists (some of whom responded in a similar vein to “Ivanov”). The commemoration thus deepened fissures in popular memory, first exposed by Khrushchev-era de-Stalinization.

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The CC’s decision to commemorate Stalin with a Pravda article was virtually unanimous.183 Nonetheless, even in the CC’s confidential discussions, openly pro-Stalinist sentiment remained taboo. Roi Medvedev suggests that the December discussions were the final phase of a longer debate, whose early stages had seen more ambitious plans for Stalin commemoration, which had been stymied by protests from foreign communist parties.184 This may explain why so many speakers at the Politburo meeting spoke out against rehabilitating Stalin, while keeping any praise for the leader implicit. Typical was the opening speech by Mikhail Suslov, who claimed not to want to “whitewash” Stalin, but rather to outline his positive and negative aspects strictly in line with the June 1956 resolution; this was both historically “objective,” and ideologically correct.185 In a similar fashion, many other supporters of the article presented it not as a tribute to Stalin, but rather as a corrective to recent distortions of the historical and “party truth.”186 Nonetheless, by criticizing only recent “distortions” or dismissals of Stalin’s merits, several participants hinted at pro-Stalinist sentiment lurking beneath this discourse of objectivity. Petr Shelest, for example, urged his colleagues that they must “say how it was in history,” but wanted the article to reflect Stalin’s achievements—in war and industrialization—more fully than recent historical accounts.” Several other CC members also presented the article as not only a restatement of the June resolution, but also a corrective to recent historiography and literature that had exaggerated the cult and Stalin’s errors. Viktor Grishin, for instance, saw the article as a chance to “balance the issue . . . balance the facts” after a flood of critical memoirs, while Solomentsev presented strict adherence to the resolution as more “conscious” than the “confusing” recent wave of anti-Stalinist literature, which had left Soviet youth knowing nothing about Stalin beyond the revelations about the cult.187 All of these speakers, like their counterparts in the 1965 CC ideological discussions examined above, presented the 1956 resolution as a balance sheet of Stalin’s good and bad points, rendering the two sides of his legacy historically and morally commensurate. Thus neutralized and balanced, Stalin’s memory could be celebrated in a normal way, on a normal schedule. Within the party elite, there were only isolated protests against this balanced memory of Stalin. Nikolai Podgornyi, for example, reminded

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Suslov that the revelations of the 20th and 22nd congresses—in which Suslov himself had participated—were just as binding as the more moderate June 1956 resolution, dictating that any article “must write who died, and how many died, at his hands.” In a similar vein, when Shelest later warned against distorting history (by “forgetting” Stalin’s achievements), Podgornyi retorted that any genuinely “historical” approach would also have to enumerate the deaths for which Stalin was responsible. The only other CC member to evoke the catastrophe of terror was Arvid Pelshe, who claimed of Stalin: “He really did cause a lot of harm and this pain is felt to this day. That generation is still among us.”188 Since the terror was a memory that remained all too traumatic for survivors, any celebration of Stalin would generate a “painful” and “harmful” dissonance. These attempts to present terror as a memory incommensurate with other parts of Stalin’s legacy, and less “masterable” than other episodes in the Soviet past—claims reminiscent of the CC drafting of the Secret Speech—were far outnumbered in the discussion and concluding vote. Both Shelest, and later Brezhnev himself, warned Podgornyi that commemoration was “not a matter of counting the people who died”: the time for detailed remembrance of terror was now over. At the same time, though, Brezhnev placed more emphasis on Stalin’s “serious mistakes” than did many colleagues, recognizing that they would have to be acknowledged alongside his “revolutionary merits,” in order to determine the “place he occupied in history.” Above all, what Brezhnev sought was a “calm” statement on the Stalin question: “then there won’t be two, or even several, opinions on this issue,” he explained.189 The desire to harmonize polarized “opinions” of Stalin also helps to explain why the editing of the article left some sharp critiques in place but softened others.190 Among the praise for Stalin added in to the original draft was a tribute to the length of time that Stalin had served as leader and the insertion of positive epithets, such as “active,” to describe his participation in matters of state. There was considerable pressure, too, to remove many of the original draft’s criticisms, which succeeded in cutting the word “serious” to describe Stalin’s “theoretical and political mistakes,” and in eliminating references to the “obstacles” created by the “cult of personality” and the “harm” that it had caused to the party-state (the latter rewritten to suggest that the only negative impact was upon the task of constructing socialism). However, despite multiple requests from CC

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members to remove references to Lenin’s criticisms of Stalin and to Stalin’s “oversight” at the start of World War II, both of these criticisms survived into the published version. Overall, as the article shrank to a modest quarter-page piece, it sacrificed roughly equal amounts of praise for Stalin and criticism of the cult of personality.191 The end result was less positive about Stalin than his eightieth anniversary celebrations, mildly praising his pre-revolutionary and revolutionary activities, and his quashing of the Trotskyist opposition, but also criticizing (though vaguely) his mistakes from the 1930s onward.192 As a result, Aleksandr Tvardovskii spent most of the day of the article’s publication receiving phone calls from intelligentsia colleagues “sharing a happy feeling” that the article could have been considerably worse.193 Roi Medvedev too concluded that “we’re not talking about the rehabilitation of Stalin. For that reason, the majority of the Moscow intelligentsia took this article with a certain sense of satisfaction.”194 As this was a statement intended to curtail, rather than provoke, discussion, no formal party discussion of the article among the wider population was organized. Nevertheless, popular reactions came under surveillance, and the article also provoked many (unpublished) letters to the Soviet press, offering insight into its broader popular reception. Party and KGB reports were, as usual, careful to highlight the overall “unanimity” of popular approval of the article.195 However, even the “model” popular approval that they reported (before moving on to more extreme, supposedly atypical, opinions) belied the biases of this apparently “objective” statement. In the very first report after publication, exemplary responses were already dominated by gratitude for the more positive picture of Stalin in the article. “It has long been time to remember Stalin,” claimed one engineer, acclaiming this reversal of the chronic amnesia regarding Stalin’s “unforgettable personality” (nezabyvaemaia lichnost’).196 Others expressed a similar sense of relief that Stalin’s “rightful place” in history was now receiving official recognition, and that his “merits” were no longer being “silenced.”197 These responses, like the Politburo’s emphasis on “objectivity,” revealed the assumptions about Stalin’s positive historical role that underlay this supposedly objective commemoration. Many responses, however, remained unconvinced by the idea of objectivity, highlighting instead Stalin’s ongoing potential to divide

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collective memory. Some mocked the article’s apparent attempt to pacify both “sides” of this divide. “We have the impression that our leadership doesn’t quite know how to treat him,” observed one member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, while a technician criticized it as a “cunning article . . . moving first to one side, then the other”198 Others warned that the article, though intended to curtail the debate over commemoration of Stalin, would inevitably revive it: “why stir it up again [snova voroshit’], everything that everyone already knows,” typically lamented one official from the state committee on the press.199 The party leadership had hoped that marking the anniversary would be less disruptive than ignoring it, but their public intervention in fact stirred up both sides of the Stalin debate, much as this reader had predicted. It provoked a resurgence of two, deeply polarized, memories of Stalin: as cult hero, and as dethroned villain, highlighting divisions in collective memory underlying this public commemoration.200 Some readers, for example, were outraged by what they saw as the article’s inadequate, or even absent, praise. One reader complained that the article perpetuated the views of “the works of the Solzhenitsyns and other such gasbags,” while another, a lecturer in Kharkov, speculated that the article could be exploited by Solzhenitsyn and his ilk to begin a new campaign “for the total uprooting of the cult of personality.”201 In fact, KGB observers calculated that the article’s attention to Stalin’s errors was the most frequent cause for complaint overall.202 Readers pointed out, for instance, that these errors had “already been duly condemned by the party,” or even argued that they did not merit condemnation at all: “he could let slip some mistakes in a complicated situation,” was one engineer’s forgiving view.203 In pushing for a fuller, or full, rehabilitation of Stalin, such readers openly sought to “rethink” the 1956 resolution and its insistence on acknowledging and condemning certain “errors” in perpetuity.204 The pre-publication Politburo discussion had not gone nearly so far; participants had frequently cited the June resolution, in name, if not necessarily in the spirit that it was originally intended. A survey of letters to Pravda also highlighted many readers’ attempts at “defense of Stalin’s name.”205 This took several forms, from moderate suggestions for commemoration to the full-blown revival of the cult. Characteristic of the latter was the adornment of a Lvov district party headquarters with leaflets proclaiming that “we remember the Stalinist

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Five Year plans, the Stalinist constitution, Stalin’s firmness, Stalin’s hatred for enemies, Stalin’s love for the people.”206 This recitation of key tropes from the Short Course and the Short Biography was clearly at odds with the calculatedly bland tone of the official commemoration. Another, non-anonymous letter of protest against the article, from a certain Mosar, made this contrast explicit: Stalin was “much purer and more holy” than the article had suggested. He was “the most significant historical actor” (krupneishii deiatel’), with no equal today.207 Such idolization of Stalin also generated denunciation of the previous era’s iconoclasm, again in much stronger terms than in the Politburo in 1969 or even in the most conservative CC departments in 1965–66. One letter from a certain Burtsev from the Carpathian region responded enthusiastically to the article, seeing it as a sign of the resurrection of Stalin’s “name,” appropriate given its significance during the war. This made Khrushchev’s earlier interventions in public memory of Stalin especially outrageous: “The name of Stalin was stained by a pretender [samozvanets]. For ten years, that loudmouth stood up there on the pedestal. . . . Hooligans, deviants, pathetic sell-outs are openly blaspheming against Stalin.” These verbal attacks by the “pretender” Khrushchev and his pitiful entourage of supporters were compounded, in Burtsev’s view, by the “criminal” and “barbarous” actions of those who had “destroyed all of the monuments to Stalin,” so he now called for installation of a bust marking Stalin’s grave, to begin to reverse this earlier iconoclasm.208 Other responses likewise combined criticism of de-Stalinization with suggestions of commemoration, to consolidate further the article’s restoration of Stalin’s good name.209 For instance, a certain Markovskii from Lvov criticized the “hurried, ill-thought-through dethroning of Stalin,” and proposed that the article should now lead to more extensive printed tributes, such as new editions of his collected works, memoirs, and a new biography.210 Two other readers, who likewise criticized the “denigration” and “spiteful slander” of de-Stalinization, suggested that a fitting tribute in the wake of the article would be the “resurrection” of the city of Stalingrad.211 All of these responses revealed not only an attachment to the content of the cult—its highly positive image of Stalin—but also to its forms and scale. A single commemorative article was not enough to return Stalin to his rightful place in Soviet memory; a larger commemorative apparatus, with multiple forms of

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tribute (statues, busts, place names, texts), now had to be revived to resurrect Stalin from his posthumous disgrace. In fact, one small, but significant, piece of “hardware” did appear soon after the article, in early 1970: a Stalin bust at the Kremlin wall, unveiled with no fanfare.212 Reactions to the article were gathered before this commemorative development, but even the article’s mild tributes were themselves enough to provoke vehement anti-Stalinist protest.213 Thus, one letter from a certain Siianov in Zaporozh’e, insisted (in sharp contrast to the above narratives of Stalin’s “name”) that Stalin was a synonym for “extreme injustice,” and that “the appearance of such an article offends the glorious memory of those who fell victim to unjustified repressions.” Instead of this tribute, Stalin only deserved the most “severe punishment” (surovaia kara).214 Siianov’s attacks (and indeed Iakir’s samizdat protest) were echoed in another letter, which lamented that “sentence” had never been passed on Stalin’s “crimes” according to the Soviet criminal code.215 Other letters dramatized this as-yet absent “sentencing” and “punishment,” contrasting their own condemnation with the euphemistic language of the article, by arguing that Stalin’s “mistakes” should be recognized, and retermed, as “crimes,” for example. Characteristic was a letter from Volgograd, which argued passionately that “mass murder and imprisonment in concentration camps (sic) of innocent people” and “betrayal of the people” should never be termed “mistakes.”216 Another letter from a Moscow party member, Grigor’ev, replaced the article’s reference to “mistakes” with his own tripartite condemnation of Stalin’s criminality, inhumanity, and anti-party behavior: all this, he claimed (in another echo of Iakir’s protest) made Stalin “a criminal the likes of which has never been known in human history.”217 Several letters presented this criminal and moral case against Stalin as self-evident, but still evidently in need of elaboration given its absence from the article. A certain Kompakov from Moscow refuted the article, saying, “you see [ved’], Stalin is a criminal.” Although Stalin’s crimes should be easy to “see,” Kompakov listed them anyway, including in his indictment the deaths of the “middle peasants” during collectivization and the failures of Soviet agriculture in the 1930s.218 Another anonymous letter enquired: “why would you seek to defend this false leader [lzhe-vozhd’], murderer, and maniac?” The older generation, the author claimed, could never forget or forgive the “gloomy

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time of the cult of personality, when the wives, fathers, mothers, children paid for the non-existent sins of their relatives.” Moving beyond these family traumas, he then held Stalin responsible for the national trauma of the enormous wartime loss of life.219 Such moral revulsion had been slowly but surely eliminated from Soviet public memory of Stalinism since Khrushchev’s ouster, ultimately giving rise to a “soft-focus view of the dictator.”220 Now, party observers explained its persistence in this correspondence by a deficit of “objectivity.” Noting that “several of them, judging by the responses, suffered in the years of the cult of personality,” they lamented that this trauma had rendered them shortsighted: “up to this point, they are still unable to assess objectively, and as a whole, the entire activities of Stalin.”221 Soviet collective memory was now supposed to be bigger than the sum of individual citizens’ memories (however traumatic), just as Stalin’s entire posthumous reputation now transcended isolated character flaws and “mistakes.” Beyond these highly polarized memories of Stalin, there was one more category of responses to the article: questions about the nature of Stalinism itself, which, as Pravda’s editor explained, craved a “broader, deeper analysis” of the reasons for the cult, rather than the “formal statement” offered by the article.222 One such reader simply asked, in an echo of responses to the Secret Speech, how the “cult of personality” had flourished if it was contrary to socialism, and what the party leadership had done to limit Stalin’s “absolute power” during his lifetime.223 The June 1956 resolution, substantially replicated here, had sought to seal off these questions, but evidently without success. Another response to the article, from a certain Nikolaev from Ufa, noted that, as in these earlier statements, “the problem of the cult of personality of Stalin is only posed, but not resolved.” He suggested that perhaps the cult had arisen from a combination of objective factors (the need for centralization during the accelerated construction of socialism) and subjective factors (Stalin’s personality flaws).224 A final letter expressed an even greater confidence in the author’s individual analysis of the cult of personality: a party member from Leningrad, a certain Dubrovskii, mocked the article’s attempt at “rehabilitation” of Stalin, and warned that the “cult of personality” was likely to recur in the absence of systemic analysis of its causes: the “bourgeois” political system, and its “quashing of initiative.” 225

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None of these attempts to push the leadership toward a deeper analysis of the cult of personality was successful. Like the moral repugnance of anti-Stalinist protests, this excavation of the ideological and historical origins of the cult of personality was incongruous with the new “formally impeccable” narrative of Stalinism whose content would not require, or indeed tolerate, further reflection or redrafting.226 Instead, both the moral protest and the historical and philosophical enquiries articulated in these latter two types of response became typical of samizdat and dissident analyses.227 “The rehabilitation of Stalin didn’t happen in December 1969 or afterward,” concludes Roi Medvedev.228 The December 1969 memorial article, as many disgruntled readers pointed out, was far from a revival of the Stalin cult. Though it revived the tradition of anniversary tributes (which had in fact never been fully dormant even in the Khrushchev era), it also signaled that the Brezhnev regime would largely “discontinue the use of Stalin as a regime symbol.”229 Both the criticisms of the Khrushchev era (enthusiastically developed by parts of the Soviet intelligentsia well beyond the fall of Khrushchev himself), and the controversial re-Stalinization attempted by some “Stalinist” forces in the Brezhnev era, made Stalin too “symbolic” within post-Stalinist politics: they raised disruptive questions about the ideological and moral credentials of the current leadership, and of the Soviet system itself.230 The 1969 text, though it too detonated disagreement despite the leadership’s efforts, represented the most morally and historically neutral form of commemoration. Proof of its success was its replication for Stalin’s 1979 centenary.231 Medvedev suggests that another outcome of this retreat from re-Stalinization was the preference for a “golden mean” on representations of Stalin and Stalinism. However, this overlooks the fundamental, enduring imbalance in attitudes toward anti-Stalinist and pro-Stalinist texts. The early Brezhnev years (and indeed the earlier freezes of the Khrushchev era) reaffirmed a prevailing preference for celebrations of the Stalin era over critical exposure of terror and Stalin’s other crimes. In the 1970s, the chances of publishing positive portraits of the Stalin era, and even of Stalin himself, remained far higher than publication of critical works, though the Soviet authorities also remained wary of the disruptive force of pro-Stalinist texts.232 This mild endorsement of

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pro-Stalinist texts contrasted starkly to the harsh assault on Novyi mir and its exploration of Stalinism, which reached a climax in the early 1970s.233 Even before this assault, most discussion of the crimes of Stalin and the Stalin era was already taking place in samizdat. After it, party hostility toward this kind of discussion was clearer still. Some Soviet writers, notably Iurii Trifonov, found new, indirect ways to critique Stalinism, enabling Soviet publication, and leaving the line between acceptable and unacceptable narratives of Stalinism blurred even after the early Brezhnev era.234 Nonetheless, the kinds of ambitious, critical historical fiction attempted by Simonov and Bek (and even Solzhenitsyn, all nearly published in the early aftermath of Khrushchev’s ouster) now stood no chance of publication. It was not until Gorbachev’s glasnost’ that such narratives of the cult of personality were finally granted Soviet publication, as part of a renewed, and much more profound, Soviet investigation of the truth about Stalinism.

Conclusion

In summer 1987, more than two decades after its first (and only) public performance, Simonov’s 1965 address to the Moscow Union was finally published in the Soviet Union, becoming the most popular article of the year in the journal Nauka i zhizn’.1 The next year, some of the most controversial passages of Simonov’s 1941 diaries appeared in the same journal, again reversing their Brezhnev-era prohibition, and again eliciting an enthusiastic popular response.2 The decision to publish these works in 1987–88 and their importance to the historical debates of the time was no accident.3 This was a unique phase of glasnost’, and the agenda of war memory—and Stalinist memory more broadly—which had been defended two decades earlier by Simonov and his colleagues, resonated deeply with its debates about Soviet memory and legitimacy. On the one hand, this was a time of extraordinarily rapid rejection of late socialist public memory, resurrecting and researching many topics that (as the last chapter argued) had been almost entirely silenced by the late 1960s, remaining so for almost two more decades. The well-overdue publication of Simonov’s texts symbolized the breaking of this silence, and was part of a broader wave of revoking censorship bans on literary and historical texts that entered a new and exhilarating phase in “thick journals” in 1987–88. On the other hand, Simonov and like-minded colleagues had earlier advocated not an alternative to Soviet memory, but 258

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rather an alternative vision of it, imbued with the conviction that it could accommodate “truth” (albeit still viewed through a Soviet prism), and that this would ultimately legitimate Soviet power more effectively than “varnished” accounts of the past. It was these texts’ optimistic (though ultimately disappointed) embrace of the expanded possibilities of Soviet culture and their imagination of new forms of Soviet legitimacy, as much as their scandalous infraction of Soviet rules, that resonated with this phase of glasnost’, and its optimistic, even utopian, belief in the Soviet system’s reform. In fact, as this account has argued, Simonov’s defense of the Sovietness of his approach to the cult of personality in 1965 was typical of the broader dynamics of de-Stalinization in the 1950s and 1960s. The enduring belief that Soviet culture could and must accommodate the truth about Stalinism drew directly on the party’s own discourse of memory, which recurrently (though far from consistently) invoked the necessity of lustration of Stalinist practices and practitioners, and of confronting traumatic memories of the Stalinist past.4 After the Secret Speech, with its exceptionally wide-ranging (even chaotic) discussion of the cult of personality, and then again after the dramatic performance of trauma and shaming at the 22nd Congress, many writers and ordinary Soviet citizens embarked on ambitious discussions of guilt, shame, and trauma, believing them to be legitimate, as well as beneficial to the re-legitimation of Soviet rule. At the same time, post-Stalinist party discourse always contained “escape clauses,” permitting (albeit with some difficulty) the imposition of a very different approach to the Stalinist past and to memory more broadly.5 Even at the height of the thaw, extreme condemnation of Stalin or Stalinism was frowned upon, and remorse, repentance, even retrospection itself, were regarded with suspicion, and at times outright hostility. Nonetheless, this hostility, while it could draw upon betterestablished Soviet traditions of celebratory memory and historical progress, had to negotiate, and acknowledge, the Sovietness of party resolutions on the cult of personality. These resolutions constrained the disciplining of Soviet writers and their alternative agendas of the cult of personality in the late 1950s and again in the late 1960s. They also gave rise, at the height of the thaw in the early 1960s, to attempts to elaborate a “normal,” “healthy” model of memory in party discourse and in literary

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texts, which could not deny the terror and other traumatic memories, so instead minimized their significance in the present. These attempts to discipline and to pathologize alternative approaches to remembering the cult of personality—and eventually the cult of personality as a whole— encountered resistance throughout the Khrushchev era and into the early Brezhnev era, from writers and citizens convinced of the partymindedness and civic health of their reflections on the Stalinist past. As the last chapter suggested, these clashes between different narratives of Stalinism and different models of Soviet memory influenced the subsequent forms of late socialist culture, both official and unofficial. The marginalization of remembrance of terror and other traumatic experiences from Soviet culture and the softening of public judgment of Stalin by the end of the 1960s contributed directly to the rise of samizdat and the institutionalization of the dissident movement, whose “moral mission” centered on continuing the kinds of remembrance of the Stalinist past silenced by the Soviet leadership.6 In fact, the constraints on de-Stalinization in the Khrushchev era had already provided samizdat and private discussion circles with much to discuss and read, but the complete abandonment of hopes for publication and public discussion in the late 1960s was tortuous, prolonged not only by stubborn intelligentsia resistance, but also by the hesitations of the Soviet leadership. The revelations of the Khrushchev era did not make possible as much discussion of the Stalinist past as many writers and citizens had hoped, but they did prevent the full re-Stalinization of Soviet public memory. The forms of commemoration of Stalin and Stalinism characteristic of late socialism attempted to defuse the persistent moral charge of the Stalin question but also evaded the moral and ideological liability of re-Stalinization. The bland new forms of commemoration made for easy reproduction and performance, subsuming the once controversial Stalin question into the predictable ideological discourse of late socialism, but this linguistic and commemorative shift only emerged after prolonged negotiation and controversy.7 As Simonov’s glasnost’ publications suggest, the de-Stalinization of the 1950s and 1960s also merits comparison with the de-Stalinization (and ultimately de-Leninization) of the 1980s and early 1990s. Indeed, Khrushchev’s “failed” de-Stalinization was an explicit reference point for Mikhail Gorbachev as he embarked upon glasnost’ in the mid-1980s.8

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Though he admired Khrushchev’s courage, Gorbachev also recognized the need to give more consistent support “from above” for exposing the “blank spots” in history; writers who responded to this appeal, with new (or resurrected) texts about Stalinism, defended these texts’ Sovietness by reference to the party’s discourse of memory and glasnost’, just as their 1950s and 1960s counterparts had done (indeed, some were the same people).9 This defense was necessary, moreover, because de-Stalinization in the late 1980s often faced very similar accusations as had been leveled at writers exploring the cult of personality in the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev eras. Attempts to revive memories of terror, including the links between 1937 and 1941—key themes in the “memory work” of parts of the post-Stalinist intelligentsia—were again accused in the 1980s of de-heroization, falsification, and (especially in the early years of glasnost’, when Soviet legitimacy was still a central, viable concern) ideological deviation.10 This debate proved rancorous, and ultimately destructive, in the increasingly pluralist political system of the late 1980s and early 1990s. 11 In fact, even after the Soviet collapse, Gorbachev’s successors have continued to experiment with new approaches to commemorating (or forgetting) Stalin, each an imperfect, even dysfunctional, solution to working through the moral and historical complexities of the Stalin era and to healing the divisions that the Stalin question continues to provoke.12 In some respects, the de-Stalinization of the 1950s and 1960s was a missed opportunity to resolve these problems immediately after Stalin’s death, although the period’s revelations, limited as they were, undoubtedly helped the Soviet population to come to terms with parts of the Stalinist past, as the passionate response to Soviet publications of the time illustrates.13 On the other hand, this first attempt at de-Stalinization presciently revealed some enduring, even insuperable, obstacles to consensual, calm commemoration of Stalin and Stalinism: notably the mutual “interference” of memories of terror and memories of war victory, first revealed in the reception of Simonov’s novels and other narratives of the cult of personality in the 1950s and 1960s, and the broader disputes over whether “glory” or “guilt” offers a firmer foundation for regime legitimacy.14 That post-Soviet leaders and citizens, as in other countries tackling traumatic pasts, continue to grapple with these questions suggests that it was not only the Soviet limits on discussion that left de-Stalinization

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unresolved in the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, the decade and a half after Stalin’s death witnessed an astonishing (and perhaps to this day unmatched) variety of approaches to remembering Stalinism. These lent the period its distinctive blend of hope and disillusionment about the post-Stalinist relaunch of the Soviet project itself.

NOTES

int ro d u ct i o n 1. Pravda, 2 November 1961, 10. Phrase from Tatu, Power in the Kremlin, 157. On the body’s removal, see RGASPI, 558/11/1487/129; Argumenty i Fakty, no. 50 (1988): 3; Semichastnyi, Bespokoinoe serdtse, 161. 2. Use of the term “non-person” in Thompson, “Reassessing Personality Cults”; Fine, Difficult Reputations, 34–35, 46. On erasure, see King, The Commissar Vanishes. On Beria, see Naumov, Lavrentii Beria; Knight, Beria; Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 33–37. 3. E. Evtushenko, “Nasledniki Stalina,” Pravda, 21 October 1962. 4. Connerton, How Societies Remember, 12. 5. Lambert and Mallett, “Introduction: The Heroisation-Demonisation Phenomenon in Mass Dictatorships.” 6. The term “degradation” is from Fine, Difficult Reputations, 33. On late socialist and post-communist comparisons, see Smith, Mythmaking in the New Russia; Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims; Langenlohl, “Memory in Post-Authoritarian Societies”; Langenlohl, “Political Culture in Contemporary Russia.” On international comparisons between approaches to coming to terms with the past, see above and also Lebow, Kansteiner, and Fogu, The Politics of Memory in Post-War Europe; Muller, “Introduction: The Power of Memory”; Elster, “Coming to Terms with the Past”; Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering; Olick, “What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?”; Herf, Divided Memory; Rev, Retroactive Justice. 7. Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome; Moeller, “War Stories”; Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. 8. Hodgkin and Radstone, Contested Pasts. 263

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9. RGASPI, 82/2/1470, 1434 (entire); RGASPI, 558/11/1487 (entire); RGANI, 5/16/593a, 593b (entire); GARF, 5446/54/154 (entire); GARF, 7523/52/15, 27, 82 (entire). On popular reactions to Stalin’s death more generally, see e.g. Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation, 4; Evtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography, 89–92; Leonhard, The Kremlin since Stalin, 50; Gorshkov, Volobuev, and Zhuravlev, Vlast’ i oppozitsiia, 182–84. 10. On the initial emergence of the cult, and the early delays and reverses (partly attributed to Stalin’s modesty, but also to the pragmatic need to dissociate from the difficulties of the early 1930s), see e.g. Tucker, “The Rise of Stalin’s Personality Cult”; Heizer, “The Cult of Stalin”; Bonnell, Iconography of Power; Davies, “Stalin and the Making of the Leader Cult.” On a similarly pragmatic retreat from the cult during the war, to dissociate Stalin from the early defeats, see e.g. Barber, “The Image of Stalin in Soviet Propaganda”; Kirshchenbaum, “ ‘Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families.’ ” 11. On journalism, see Barber, “The Image of Stalin in Soviet Propaganda”; Heizer, “The Cult of Stalin”; Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin!; Brooks, “Socialist Realism in Pravda.” On literature, see Hellebust, “Reflections on an Absence”; Marsh, Images of Dictatorship; Ziolkowski, Literary Exorcisms of Stalinism; Clark, The Soviet Novel; Miller, Folklore for Stalin. On art, see Plamper, The Stalin Cult; Gromov, Stalin; Corbesero, “History, Myth, and Memory”; Gunther, “Arkhetipy”; Bonnell, Iconography of Power. On historiography, see Barber, “Stalin’s Letter”; Maslov, “Kratkii kurs istorii VKP(b)”; Brandenberger, National Bolshevism; Afanas’ev, Sovetskaia istoriografiia. On film, see Dobrenko, Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History; Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade; Taylor and Spring, Stalinism and Soviet Cinema. On many of these topics, see Apor et al., The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships; Heller and Plamper, Personality Cults in Stalinism; Davies and Harris, Stalin; Annenskii et al., Osmyslit’ kul’t Stalina. 12. On the Stalin cult in comparative perspective, see Apor et al., The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships; and Heller and Plamper, Personality Cults in Stalinism. On non-Soviet leader cults, see Apter and Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic; Taylor, “The Production of the Chiang Kai-Shek Personality Cult”; Leese, “The Mao Cult as Communicative Space”; Gentile, “Mussolini’s Charisma”; Kershaw, The “Hitler Myth.” 13. On Stalin as the “continuer of Lenin,” see e.g. Tucker, “The Rise of Stalin’s Personality Cult”; Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! On the importance that Stalin attached to science, including economics and linguistics as well as the hard sciences, and his position as an authoritative figure in these realms and in party discourse more broadly, see Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars; Yurchak, Everything Was Forever until It Was No More. On the need to personify the historical process, see Brandenberger, National Bolshevism; Brandenberger, “Stalin as Symbol.” Compare the importance of theory (and “Mao thought”) in the Mao cult: Apter and Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic; Leese, Mao Cult.

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14. On the elision of personal and biographical detail in socialist “personality cults,” see e.g. Apor, “Leader Cult in the Making”; Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!; Clark, The Soviet Novel. On paternalism, see e.g. Gunther, “Arkhetipy.” Compare readings of Stalinist art and film, respectively, which emphasize tensions between Stalin’s paternalism and other aspects of his masculinity: Reid, “All Stalin’s Women”; Kaganovsky, How the Soviet Man Was Unmade. On the importance of prerevolutionary traditions of mentorship in shaping Soviet leader cults, see Heller and Plamper, Personality Cults in Stalinism; Plamper, The Stalin Cult. 15. The three key texts were Stalin’s Short Biography, the Short Course, and Stalin’s writings on World War II (On the Great Patriotic War). On the Short Biography, see Brandenberger, “Stalin as Symbol.” On the Short Course, see Brandenberger, National Bolshevism; Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis; Maslov, “Kratkii kurs istorii VKP(b).” On Stalin’s rise to power, see e.g. Tucker, Stalin in Power; Davies and Harris, Stalin. 16. On the discourse of gratitude, see Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin!. On anniversary tributes, see e.g. Heizer, “The Cult of Stalin”; Ssorin-Chaikov, “On Heterochrony.” 17. Dobrenko implies that this shift to a “timeless” (or “museumified”) vision of Stalinist history occurred early in Stalin’s role: Dobrenko, Stalinist Cinema and the Production of History. Cf. Corbersero, “History, Myth, and Memory”; Taylor, Stalinism and Soviet Cinema; Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting. On similar attempts to present the leader as timeless in Chiang’s cult in Taiwan, see Taylor, “The Production of the Chiang-Kai Shek Personality Cult.” 18. Some popular criticisms were voiced, though usually in private (and picked up by surveillance): Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia; Davies, “The ‘Cult’ of the Vozhd’ ”; Behrends, “Exporting the Leader”; Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism; Plamper, The Stalin Cult. 19. Brooks, “Socialist Realism in Pravda”; Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin!. For a fascinating analysis of the “insinuation” of the Assad cult’s ritual into Syrian everyday life, regardless of actual popular support and belief, see Wedeen, Ambiguities of Domination. 20. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism, 210–11 and throughout; Avrich, “The Short Course and Soviet Historiography.” On the cult for children, see Kelly, “Riding the Magic Carpet.” 21. For example, Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain; Rolf, “Working Towards the Centre.” 22. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind; Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book; Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience. 23. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 360. 24. Merridale, Night of Stone; Figes, The Whisperers; Thurston, “Fear and Belief.” 25. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind. 26. Figes, The Whisperers; Zubkova, Russia after the War. 27. The image of ghosts is common in studies of memories of Stalin; see e.g Hochschild, The Unquiet Ghost; Wolfe, Khrushchev and Stalin’s Ghost; Etkind, “Post-Soviet Hauntology.”

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28. On pre-1953 attempts at reform, see Gorlizki, “Party Revivalism and the Death of Stalin.” On early reforms, including to agriculture, see Service, “The Road to the Twentieth Congress”; Filtzer, The Khrushchev Era; Taubman, Khrushchev; Knight, Beria. On early awareness of the crisis in Soviet literature, see Zezina, “Crisis in the Union of Soviet Writers.” On reforms to the Gulag, see e.g. Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer. On the linkage between deconstructing Stalin’s authority or infallibility and policy change, see Service, “The Road to the Twentieth Congress”; Tucker, “The Politics of Soviet De-Stalinization”; Jones, The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization. 29. Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting”; Connerton, How Societies Remember; Evans, “Introduction: Redesigning the Past.” The closest comparison, examined further in the following chapters, is the attempt by the Chinese Communist Party to define and contain Mao’s influence on Chinese politics after his death: Baum, Burying Mao; Robinson, “Mao after Death”; Thompson, “Reassessing Personality Cults”; Wemhauer, “Regime Changes of Memory”; Barme, Shades of Mao; Leese, Mao Cult. 30. Connerton, How Societies Remember, 12. Evans also suggests that political transition may be better served by not excavating the truth about the past (“Introduction: Redesigning the Past”). On the limits to reconstructing the past (especially the reputations of charismatic leaders) to suit present political needs, see also Schwartz, “Social Change and Collective Memory”; Schwartz, “The Reconstruction of Abraham Lincoln”; Fine, Difficult Reputations; Jansen, “Resurrection and Appropriation.” 31. “Inverse legitimacy” is taken from Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims. On these competing aims, see Jones, The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization; Cohen, “The Friends and Foes of Change.” 32. Tatu, Power in the Kremlin; Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership; Conquest, Power and Policy in the USSR; Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz; Taubman, Khrushchev; Gleason, Khrushchev, and Taubman, Nikita Khrushchev (esp. Barsukov, “The Rise to Power”); Ilic and Smith, Khrushchev in the Kremlin. Although many of the Central Committee (CC) presidium and secretariat files remain classified, and many crucial files remain in the closed Presidential archive, there are several document collections with insight into CC decision making and leadership rivalry: Fursenko et al., Prezidiium TsK KPSS; Naumov, Lavrentii Beria; Kovalev, 1957. See also Cold War International History Project documents at: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/digital-archive. Khrushchev’s sometimes erratic shifts with regard to Stalin are visible in a recent collection of his less public speeches: Tomilina, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, 440–614. 33. Lazarev, Shestoi etazh, 50. 34. The importance of this official, public critique is also emphasized in memoirs, including Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, 24 (who knew many of the facts revealed, but were still shocked to hear them from the party leadership); and Orlov, Particules de vie, who claims that the speech “stupefied even

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36.

37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

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43. 44. 45.

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anti-Stalinists like myself” (121). Secondary accounts emphasizing this point include Reddaway, Uncensored Russia (“Many knew these facts already, but Khrushchev’s speech transformed them into legitimate subjects for reflection, discussion, written analysis,” 22); Shatz, Soviet Dissent (which argues that the Secret Speech enabled citizens to voice pre-existing doubts, 152). Quotations from Adler, “Life in the Big Zone,” 16; Hosking, “Memory in a Totalitarian Society,” 129; Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims, 17; Leonhard, The Kremlin since Stalin, 169. See Siegelbaum, Borders of Socialism, for nuanced analysis of the public-private divide, and for other perspectives on the balance between public and private in post-Stalinist culture, see Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia; Field, Private Life and Communist Morality; Jones, The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization; Roth-Ey, “Finding a Home for Television”; Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation; Bittner, “Local Soviets, Public Order, and Welfare after Stalin”; Lapierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia. Lazarev, Shestoi etazh, 50. Enteen, “The Stalinist Conception of Communist Party History”; Petrov, “The Freeze of Historicity”; Afanas’ev, Sovetskaia istoriografiia. On martyrdom and memory, see Corney, Telling October. On demonization of enemies, see Halfin, Terror in my Soul; Shcherbenok, “The Enemy, the Communist, and Ideological Closure.” First published as “O kul’te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh” at the height of glasnost’ in 1989. The term “vectors of memory” comes from Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome. Cf. Wood, Vectors of Memory. The limited “vectors” of de-Stalinization can be understood in terms of Etkind’s useful distinction between memory “hardware” (such as monuments and museums) and “software” (such as texts) (Etkind, “Post-Soviet Hauntology”). The limiting of Khrushchev-era de-Stalinization to “software” is a key contrast to the commemorative “hardware” created during glasnost’ (see e.g. Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims). Merridale, Night of Stone; Watson, Memory, History, and Opposition; Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance; Langenlohl, “Political Culture in Contemporary Russia.” Gerovitch, “ ‘Why Are We Telling Lies?’ ” also argues that private memories—in this case alternative memories to the official myths about space travel—were systematically suppressed by Soviet power. On counter-memory more generally, see Davis and Starn, “Memory and Counter-Memory.” Quotation from Passerini, Memory and Totalitarianism, 9. Ibid.; Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory”; Hosking, “Memory in a Totalitarian Society”; Skultans, The Testimony of Lives. Corney, Telling October; Kirshchenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad; Gerovitch, “Why Are We Telling Lies?”; Wemhauer, “Regime Changes of Memory”; Yekelchyk, Stalin’s Empire of Memory; David-Fox, “Cultural Memory in an Age of Upheaval.”

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46. Bodnar, Remaking America; Hodgkin and Radstone, Contested Pasts; IrwinZarecka, Frames of Remembrance; Gillis, Commemorations; Olick and Robbins, “Social Memory Studies”; Crane, “Writing the Individual Back into Collective Memory.” On the construction and organization of forgetting, see Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting”; Assmann, “Canon and Archive.” 47. Davis and Starn, “Memory and Counter-Memory”; Assmann and Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” 48. Assmann, “Canon and Archive”; Assmann and Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” 49. On the thaw, a durable metaphor in studies of the Khrushchev era, see e.g. Gibian, Interval of Freedom; Sidorova, Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke; Aksiutin, Khrushchevskaia “ottepel’.” For a recent critique of the term, see Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw. 50. On Novyi mir and/or the Moscow Writers’ Union, see e.g. Spechler, Permitted Dissent; Frankel, Novy mir; Kozlov, “The Readers of Novyi mir”; Loewenstein, Writers and the Public Sphere. On liberal historiography, see e.g. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia; Sidorova, Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke; Zelnick, The Perils of Pankratova; Hosler, Die sowjetische Geschichtswissenschaft. There were some contemporary analyses of more official, less revisionist, historiography, but at the time, their authors had no access to information on production and popular reception of these texts: Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union; Pundeff, History in the USSR. Some other contemporary accounts, though reliant on the Soviet press, provided valuable insight into the splits between liberal and conservative forces in the historical and literary professions e.g. Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts; Crowley and Hayward, Soviet Literature in the Sixties. Recent analyses of splits within post-Stalinist intelligentsia, expanding the picture beyond the traditional liberal focus and using new archival sources, include Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia; Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia; Brudny, Reinventing Russia. The latter provide important context for my account, but I focus more closely here on the texts and the arguments about memory produced by these intelligentsia factions. 51. Gibian, Interval of Freedom; Swayze, Political Control of Literature; Zubok, Zhivago’s Children. 52. On the lack of definition of the “field” of Soviet culture at this time, see Komaromi, “The Unofficial Field of Late Soviet Culture.” On published literature of the 1950s and 1960s and its representation of Stalin and Stalinism, see Marsh, Images of Dictatorship; Geller (Heller), Kontsentratsionnyi mir. Accounts that emphasize the limited number, and limited truthfulness, of Soviet narratives of Stalinism include Alekseyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation; Toker, Return from the Archipelago; Tolczyk, See No Evil; Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory”; Clark, The Soviet Novel; Ziolkowski, Literary Exorcisms of Stalinism. 53. On the durability of hopes for Soviet culture to accommodate truth about the past, and for reform more broadly, well into the Brezhnev era, see Zubok,

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55.

56. 57.

58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63.

64.

65.

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Zhivago’s Children; English, Russia and the Idea of the West; Shatz, Soviet Dissent; Kagarlitsky and Nickell, “1960s East and West.” A memoir emphasizing samizdat is Alexeyeva and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation. More recent analyses complicating the relationship between samizdat and published texts and reading practices include Oushakine, “The Terrifying Mimicry of Samizdat”; Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual. On post-Stalinist public opinion more generally, drawing on similar archival sources and also on oral history, see e.g. Aksiutin, Khrushchevskaia “ottepel’ ”; Aksiutin, “Popular Responses to Khrushchev”; Aksiutin and Pyzhikov, Poststalinskoe obshchestvo; Pyzhikov, “XX s”ezd i obshchestvennoe mnenie”; Zubkova, Russia after the War; Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer; Loewenstein, “Re-emergence of Public Opinion in the Soviet Union”; Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR; Kozlov, “The Readers of Novyi mir”; Reid, “In the Name of the People.” Indeed, discussions of the Stalinist past shaped this “public sphere” in important ways (see Loewenstein, Writers and the Public Sphere). The contrast to glasnost’, whose expansion was driven by radical changes to censorship and then to the institutions of Soviet politics, is particularly clear in this regard, and often (perhaps excessively) emphasized in scholarly accounts: Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims; Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution. For a fascinating comparison of Eastern and Western European approaches to confronting memories of World War II atrocities, see Judt, “The Past Is Another Country.” Richard Evans provides a succinct overview of broader international variations in the speed and extent of coming to terms with the past and the political benefits (or drawbacks) of each approach (“Introduction: Redesigning the Past”). Cf. Muller, “Introduction: The Power of Memory.” Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, 130. Moeller, “War Stories”; Herf, “The Emergence and Legacies of Divided Memory”; Olick, “What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?”; Giesen, “The Trauma of Perpetrators.” A point made in e.g. Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory.” Herf, Divided Memory; Herf, “The Emergence and Legacies of Divided Memory.” On returning prisoners lobbying for the truth about terror, see e.g. Cohen, The Victims Return; Adler, Keeping Faith with the Party. On the 1953–54 thaw, see e.g. Loewenstein, Writers and the Public Sphere; Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia. Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance, 7–8. On the limited, selective emergence of memories of terror into the media in Argentina, for example, see Jelin, “Layers of Memories.” Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance, 8; Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile; Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity; Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper, “The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration”; Herf, Divided Memory; Muller, “Introduction: The Power of Memory.”

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66. On the contestation between traumatic and other narratives of the past in various Western societies, see Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. 67. Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome; LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust; Maier, The Unmasterable Past. On “wounds” as a point of contestation elsewhere, see e.g. Wood, Vectors of Memory; Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance; Heimo and Peltonen, “Memories and Histories, Public and Private.” On the phenomenon of “scar literature” in China—officially permitted literature exploring traumatic experience in earlier periods of communist rule—see Barme, “History for the Masses.” 68. Maier, The Unmasterable Past; LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust. On different interpretations of the need to come to terms with the past, including the idea of “normalization,” see Olick, “What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?”; Olick, States of Memory. 69. Overviews of recent shifts in memory politics: Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering; Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi, and Levy, The Collective Memory Reader (the latter argues that there has been a recent rise in the politics of the “grudge” and “wound”). For a strong statement of the shift toward traumatic memories, see Antze and Lambek, Tense Past. Cf. Langenlohl, “Political Culture in Contemporary Russia”; Wood, Vectors of Memory. For a critique of this shift, see Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory?” For a range of perspectives on how to balance remembering and forgetting, avoiding either denial or obsessive, painful dwelling on the past, see LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust; Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting; Adorno, “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” 70. This negotiation over the limits of Soviet discourse has been well analyzed, before the opening of most Soviet archives, for Novyi mir (Spechler, Permitted Dissent). 71. The expression “right to remember” is from Schwartz, whose account of Chinese intellectuals lobbying for “moral memory” takes a predominantly bottom-up view of the pressure to confront traumatic pasts (Schwartz, “Strangers no More”). On moral arguments about memory, see also Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile. 72. Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat; Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak; Tomoff, Creative Union. 73. On etymology of the term “cult of personality,” see Maksimenkov, “Kul’t”; Heller and Plamper, Personality Cults in Stalinism; Shustov, “Kul’t lichnosti.” 74. Stephen Cohen was among the first to draw attention to the “conservative” camp in Soviet society, including conservative opinion on the Stalin question (“The Friends and Foes of Change” and “The Stalin Question after Stalin”). Recent archivally based studies of conservative post-Stalinist public opinion include Jones, “The Personal and the Political”; Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer; Reid, “In the Name of the People.” 75. Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory?”

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c hap t e r o n e : t he s ec r et s pe e c h 1. On pre-1956 criticism of the cult of personality, see Pyzhikov, Genezis ofitsial’noi pozitsii KPSS po voprosu o kul’te lichnosti; Service, “The Road to the Twentieth Congress”; Tucker, “The Metamorphosis of the Stalin Myth”; Zubkova, Russia after the War, 171. On the power struggle, see e.g. Barsukov, “The Rise to Power”; Taubman, Khrushchev. On ousting Beria, see Naumov, Lavrentii Beria. 2. On Khrushchev’s motivations, a still unresolved question, see e.g. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership (quotation from p. 34); Medvedev and Medvedev, Khrushchev; Taubman, Khrushchev; Kruglyi stol: 40 let zakrytogo doklada N. S. Khrushcheva. 3. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 167–68 (no mention of speech in April 1955 decisions to hold the 20th Congress the following year). 4. Speech described as a “breakthrough toward the historical truth”: Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR, 292. On the Pospelov commission: Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 171–72. 5. Mikoian, Tak bylo, 589–92; Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR, 237–44. 6. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 170–72, 175–76. The initial plan was to have victims give speeches themselves (177–85), but this plan was abandoned in favor of a secret leadership statement (Naumov, “K istorii sekretnogo doklada N. S. Khrushcheva na XX s”ezde KPSS”). 7. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 238–41. Detailed accounts of the revision process include: Naumov, “K istorii sekretnogo doklada N. S. Khrushcheva na XX s”ezde KPSS”; Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz. Eyewitness accounts of the ongoing revisions to the speech during the congress itself: Lur’e, 1956, 99–125. 8. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 120–33, 185–230, 234–37. 9. Ibid., 212, 221, 228. 10. Ibid., 229. 11. Ibid., 234. Bulganin also wanted references to Stalin’s greatness removed (235). 12. Ibid., 234–35. 13. Ibid., 176. 14. Ibid., 237, 235. 15. Ibid., 235–36. 16. Ibid., 236. 17. Ibid., 235. 18. Ibid., 235–36. 19. On “framing” memory, see e.g. Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance; Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile. 20. For accounts emphasizing the power struggle above all, see e.g. Barsukov, “The Rise to Power”; Conquest, Power and Policy in the USSR; Tucker, “The Politics of Soviet De-Stalinization.” 21. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 175. 22. Ibid., 176.

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23. Stephen Cohen was one of the first to argue that elite divisions over Stalin (and other reform-related issues) reflected broader splits in the population. See Cohen, “The Stalin Question after Stalin”; Cohen, “The Friends and Foes of Change.” 24. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 234. 25. Ibid., 176. 26. Ibid., 234 (similar claims from Kaganovich about danger of erasing thirty-year period, a week prior to this discussion, 176). 27. Ibid., 176. 28. “O kul’te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh,” 161. 29. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 134–50. Cf. Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz, 142–43; Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR, 239–44; Aksiutin and Pyzhikov, “O podgotovke zakrytogo doklada N. S. Khrushcheva,” esp. 110–11. Not all of Khrushchev’s suggestions were included, for example his brief reference to the “Moscow case” was eliminated from the final version. 30. The original text of the speech drafted by Pospelov is in Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 120–33. 31. On the final edits before performance, see e.g. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 41–49. One example of a Stalin criticism cut from Khrushchev’s version of the text is the allegation that Stalin “sat like a holy fool and destroyed cadres” (148). 32. Lur’e, 1956, 99–117. 33. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 250; Adzhubei, Te desiat’ let, 85. 34. For example, Zhuravleva, XX s”ezd i ego istoricheskie real’nosti; Aksiutin, “Popular Responses to Khrushchev.” 35. On these intertwined aspects of de-Stalinization, see e.g. Jones, The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization; Tucker, “The Politics of De-Stalinization.” 36. Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, 24. See also e.g. Loewenstein, “Re-emergence of Public Opinion in the Soviet Union”; Zubkova Russia after the War; Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz, 147–53; Aksiutin, “Popular Responses to Khrushchev”; Silina, Nastroeniia sovetskogo studenchestva. 37. This lack of clarity is noted in e.g. Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer; Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR; Zezina, “Shokovaia terapiia.” 38. Accounts that emphasize the contrast between the speech and popular opinion include Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz; Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR. 39. On constraints on discussion, see e.g. Lur’e, 1956, 17–82. 40. Hooper, “What Can and Cannot Be Said.” 41. “O kul’te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh,” 160. 42. The speech repeatedly termed the loss of life from terror and war “enormous,” and alluded to “thousands” and “hundreds of thousands” of unnecessary deaths from each, respectively. Questions about the death toll of terror include: RGANI, 5/32/45/69; 5/32/45/90. On the death toll of war, see e.g. RGANI, 5/31/53/52. 43. “O kul’te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh,” 152, 159–60, 145–51. On deportations, see e.g. RGANI, 5/31/54/47; RGANI, 5/30/139/5–27. On Civil War, see e.g.

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

65. 66.

67. 68.

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RGANI, 5/32/45/183. On World War II, see e.g. RGANI, 5/32/45/39, 94; RGANI, 5/32/46/28, 64, 121, 182. TsDNIVO, 113/52/103; TsDNIVO, 71/25/50/129. On this, see also Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 79–103. RGANI, 5/31/53/134. RGANI, 5/15/746/76. RGANI, 5/35/24/78–81. See chapter 2 on literary and historical professional discussions. On socialist legality, see Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer. RGANI, 5/32/45/60. RGANI, 5/31/53/101. See another claim, in Moscow, about the older generation’s memory of sadness that Lenin’s role was being diminished by ubiquitous praise for Stalin (RGANI, 5/32/44/17). RGANI, 5/31/53/17. RGANI, 5/32/44/169. RGANI, 5/32/45/40 (an Old Bolshevik in Orel who had worked with Eihke); RGANI, 5/31/53/133 (collective farm chairman in Lvov on Eikhe); memories of Kosior and Postyshev in the Ukrainian republic (RGANI, 5/31/54/43). RGASPI, 556/1/25; RGANI, 5/31/54/45. RGASPI, 556/1/1702. Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 68. For testimony of terror and torture, recounted in this heroic vein, but without attempts at lustration, see e.g. RGANI, 5/32/44/48. RGANI, 5/32/45/37. RGANI, 5/32/45/50. In Kalinin, a returnee called for state security organs to be investigated (RGANI, 5/32/44/36). RGANI, 5/32/45/60. The second half of the Pospelov report had implied a need for this kind of investigation of institutions and of the widespread complicity in terror (Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 212–30). These local performances can be compared to Stalin-era show trials of local bosses, used for their own aims by peasants: Fitzpatrick, “How the Mice Buried the Cat.” See next chapter for further analysis of limits on lustration. Davies, “The ‘Cult’ of the Vozhd’ ”; Davies, “ ‘Us against Them’ ”; Fitzpatrick, “Supplicants and Citizens.” The “Beria version” of the terror, promoted between Beria’s murder and the Secret Speech, is another example of scapegoating to shield Stalin from direct criticism (Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 343). Examples of questions about Stalin’s private life: RGANI, 5/32/43/100; 5/32/45/61, 69, 94, 131, 156, 198; 5/32/46/64, 121, 150. These adjectives were used of extreme criticisms of Stalin by CC observers of events in Moscow, Leningrad, and the RSFSR more broadly (RGANI, 5/32/43/1;

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70. 71. 72.

73.

74.

75.

76. 77. 78.

79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

n o t e s t o p ag es 2 8–31 5/31/54/35; 5/32/43/5; Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 433; Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 21). Party observers noted “outrage” frequently in reactions to the speech (RGANI, 5/32/43/12, 59; Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 45). Examples of demonstrative iconoclasm: Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 21–24; RGANI, 5/32/45/60; 5/32/46/64; RGASPI-m, 1/32/810/12; RGANI, 5/32/46/58. On covert iconoclasm, which worried party authorities much more, see e.g. RGANI, 5/32/54/2–12, 54, 126. RGANI, 5/31/53/133. RGANI, 5/31/54/86. RGANI, 5/32/46/173; RGANI, 5/31/53/134. On demonization of Stalin in later literature, see Ryan, Stalin in Russian Satire; Ziolkowski, Literary Exorcisms of Stalinism. RGANI, 5/32/43/8, 133; 5/32/43/7. Allegation of criminality, and question as to why his “personality was still in force” (lichnost’ v sile) (RGANI, 5/16/746/15). Report on reactions across the RSFSR observes many allegations that Stalin had committed “mistakes, bordering on crimes” (RGANI, 5/32/44/1). RGANI, 5/32/46/9; war betrayal also sarcastically contrasted to wartime cult language (RGANI, 5/32/44/188); war deportations deemed a breach of the party regulations (RGANI, 5/31/53/7), and also criticized in RGANI, 5/31/53/7. RGANI, 5/32/43/90; claim that Stalin has nothing in common with Lenin from 1937 onward (RGANI, 5/32/44/59–60); claim that Stalin was not a Marxist because he destroyed people (RGANI, 5/31/54/52); objection to Khrushchev terming Stalin “one of the strongest Marxists” (RGANI, 5/32/46/90). Gor’kii (RGANI, 5/32/44/147); Grodno (RGANI, 5/31/54/5); Simferopol’ (RGANI, 5/31/54/6); Stalingrad (TsDNIVO, 119/20/48/12). RGANI, 5/32/45/24–26. RGANI, 5/35/45/156; RGANI, 5/32/46/150; RGANI, 5/31/53/7; Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 52; RGANI, 5/32/45/178; RGANI, 5/31/54/84; TsDNIVO, 71/23/50/129; RGASPI-m, 1/32/810. RGANI, 5/32/43/143; RGANI, 5/32/46/207; RGANI, 5/31/52/41; RGANI, 5/32/46/63. Such speeches were generally deemed “mistaken.” RGANI, 5/32/43/8; RGANI, 5/31/54/57. RGANI, 5/32/46/9; RGANI, 5/31/54/57; RGANI, 5/31/52/41; RGANI, 5/32/43/22; RGANI, 5/31/54/35; Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 432. RGANI, 5/31/54/134. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 21. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 46. On the preservation of Stalinist mentalities, see Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer. On Stalin-era unmasking, see Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! “O kul’te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh,” 157–60. Most of this critique in the final pages was sketched in little detail and apparently rushed.

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88. Jones, “Strategies of De-Mythologisation in Post-Stalinism and PostCommunism,” 91, 94–95, 98–99. Reports of popular appeals to “fundamentally change attitude to Stalin’s memory,” e.g. RGANI, 5/32/45/1; RGANI, 5/31/54/2–12. 89. Jones, “Strategies of De-Mythologisation in Post-Stalinism and PostCommunism,” 85. See also e.g. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 45–52. 90. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 173–77. 91. Jones, “Strategies of De-Mythologisation in Post-Stalinism and PostCommunism,” 86–89. 92. For example, RGANI, 5/32/46/119. Many of the harshest judgments of Stalin also included calls for his removal, including the Mordovan attack cited above. 93. Blood references: RGANI, 5/32/46/9; dirt references: RGANI, 5/32/43/90. In Astrahkan’, a raikom instructor combined both tropes with a claim that Stalin must be removed because he was “dirtied with blood” (RGANI, 5/32/44/51). 94. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 173–77. 95. Multiple references to damage to party, especially to the purges and terror, in Ibid., and also in RGANI, 5/32/44/59–60, and RGANI, 5/32/44/152. On “damnation” of disgraced figures’ memory, see Connerton, “Seven Types of Forgetting.” 96. References to “holiness” in Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 173–77. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. One person in Tashkent suggested victims and Stalin could be placed, and commemorated, side by side, a suggestion deemed incorrect (RGANI, 5/31/54/113–19). 100. RGANI 5/32/46/10 (question suggesting removing portraits and the body from the mausoleum as punishment for killing “honest people”). 101. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 45–52. 102. See Fitzpatrick et al., Sedition, on dangers of “generalizing” criticisms. 103. See Jones, “Strategies of De-Mythologisation in Post-Stalinism and PostCommunism,” 104–5; and e.g. RGASPI, 556/1/235, 150, 52 (entire); TsDNIVO, 10102/1/5. 104. Pravda, 28 March 1956, 2–3; Ibid., 7 April 1956, 2–3. 105. Leese, Mao Cult, 30–38; Westad, Brothers in Arms, 261. 106. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 432–38. 107. For example, a list of questions from more conservative Moscow institutions (including the Higher Party School and Moscow State University): RGANI, 5/30/139/5–27. 108. “O kul’te lichnosti i ego posledstviiakh,” 128. 109. Ibid., 144, 160. 110. Leese, Mao Cult, 30–38, argues that the CCP leadership focused from a very early stage on trying to resolve the inadequacies of Khrushchev’s theorization of the “cult of personality,” as well as clarifying the balance of Stalin’s merits and failings (set at 70:30 by Mao in 1956).

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111. For accounts that emphasize the frequency of these systemic criticisms, see e.g. Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz, esp. 150; Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed, esp. 144; Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR, esp. 114; Silina, Nastroeniia sovetskogo studenchestva, 109. On the “liberal subject” as a source of enduring fascination in studies of the Soviet Union, see Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies.” 112. Gutnova, Perezhitoe, 285–88; Lazarev, Shestoi etazh, 109. 113. For example, Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz, 147–53. 114. Horvath, “The Dissident Roots of Glasnost’.” 115. Djilas, The New Class. 116. Pankratova questions include questions about a new class (Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 432–38). On class analysis in Polish responses to the speech, see Kemp-Welch, “Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ and Polish Politics.” 117. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 41–43. 118. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 508. 119. On stupefaction and shock, see e.g. Lazarev, Shestoi etazh, 50–51; Zezina, “Shokovaia terapiia.” 120. RGASPI, 556/1/362; RGANI, 5/32/46/28. On longer traditions of resentment about the elite-mass divide, see Davies, “ ‘Us against Them’ ”; Fitzpatrick et al., Sedition. 121. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time; Buchli, “Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against ‘Petit-Bourgeois’ Consciousness in the Soviet Home.” 122. Halfin, Terror in my Soul; Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia. 123. These domestic critiques pre-empted the later widespread scholarly view that Khrushchev gave the speech to excuse and cover up his own conduct during Stalinism, e.g. Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR, 246; Lebow, Kansteiner, and Fogu, The Politics of Memory in Post-War Europe, 14. 124. RGANI, 5/32/46/10, 75; RGANI, 5/31/53/7; RGANI, 5/3/53/52; RGANI, 5/32/45/131, 166. 125. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 469–70; RGANI, 5/31/53/26, 133; RGANI, 5/32/46/28; RGANI, 5/31/52/54. 126. RGANI, 5/32/45/113. Part of reason that this was termed “demagogic” was the contrast that the speaker drew to Stolypin’s handling of the Duma. 127. RGANI, 5/32/45/166, 124; RGANI, 5/31/54/94. 128. RGANI, 5/32/43/21. 129. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 493; Pravda, 5 April 1956, 2–3. 130. RGANI, 5/32/43/60. 131. RGANI, 5/32/45/61, 69; RGANI, 5/32/43/91. 132. RGANI, 5/32/46/18; RGANI, 5/31/54/113–19; Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 520, 549; RGANI, 5/32/46/18–19. 133. See for example criticism of the CC, made in Leningrad and Kalinin after the publication of the article in Pravda in early April (RGANI, 5/32/46/158, 161).

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134. On the use of sarcastic and scandalous accusations in popular criticisms of Soviet leaders, see e.g. Fitzpatrick et al., Sedition. 135. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 552. 136. There were several such allegations contained in the questions collated by Pankratova in Leningrad and at the leading Moscow academic institutions (Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 432–38; RGANI, 5/30/139/5–27). 137. RGANI, 5/32/45/3; in the Ukrainian city of Stanislav, one teacher at the pedagogical institute alleged that this “worldview” and these “principles” had become so widespread that they had deformed the party as a whole (Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 550). 138. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 45–52. 139. RGASPI, 556/1/124. 140. RGANI, 5/32/44/3; RGANI, 5/32/46/10. 141. Aimermakher, Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 505 (cited as an example of slanderous and anti-Soviet discourse). 142. RGANI, 5/32/43/49. 143. For example, RGANI, 5/31/53/7. 144. RGANI, 5/32/45/24–26. See also claims about dictatorship in Moscow and Leningrad intelligentsia questions (Aimermakher, Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 432–38; RGANI, 5/30/139/5–27). 145. RGANI, 5/16/746/72. Cf. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 471, 482. 146. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 512; see also criticism of the electoral system in Leningrad: RGANI, 5/32/45/171. 147. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 448–62. This observation was caricatured in the party report as a direct call for an armed uprising. 148. Ibid. Compare reference to slavery at Gor’kii World Literature Institute in Moscow (429). 149. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 52–57; Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 288, 448–62. See also testimony of those involved in the laboratory scandal in Lur’e, 1956, 182–96. 150. Orlov, Dangerous Thoughts, 110–36. 151. For example, a note submitted to a Murmansk reading of the Secret Speech asking: “Do CC members consider it correct to criticize Stalin’s leadership without criticizing themselves?” (RGANI, 5/32/46/40). 152. RGANI, 5/32/46/63–64. 153. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, 8. 154. RGANI, 5/32/45/136; Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 491. 155. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 508. 156. Ibid., 533. 157. TsDNIVO, 594/1/15; TsDNIVO, 113/52/20/284–85. 158. RGANI, 5/30/139/5–27. 159. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 510.

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160. RGANI, 5/32/45/4. 161. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 432–38; RGANI, 5/30/139/5–27. 162. This tendency was greatly increased in reactions in other parts of the Eastern bloc, especially Hungary and Poland. See e.g. Kemp-Welch, “Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ and Polish Politics”; Kramer, “New Evidence on Soviet Decision Making and the 1956 Polish and Hungarian Crises.” 163. Orlov, Dangerous Thoughts, 110–33; for other examples of radicalization of thinking, especially after punishment, see e.g. Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective. See also chapter 2. 164. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 496. 165. On the apocalyptic elements of popular protest, see Fitzpatrick et al., Sedition. 166. On local uncertainty, see Jones, “From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin.” 167. A wide range of such incidents in Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 492–95, 507–13. 168. Pravda, 5 April 1956, 2–3. At roughly the same time, the first of several confidential party circulars of 1956 warning against incorrect interpretations of the “cult of personality” was circulated (Kulavig, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev, 16). 169. Orlov recalls reading the article and feeling that he had nothing in common with Mensheviks or socialist revolutionaries, but now wanted to find out more about them (Orlov, Dangerous Thoughts, 124). 170. For example, Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 496. 171. See chapter 2 on the continuing intensification of punishment of dissenters. 172. Rettie, “How Khrushchev Leaked His Secret Speech to the World.” 173. Kemp-Welch, “Khrushchev’s Secret Speech”; Apor, “The Secret Speech.” 174. Kulavig, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev, 2, 16. 175. Blauvelt, “Status Shift and Ethnic Mobilisation”; Kozlov, Massovye besporiadki v SSSR, 155–83; Lur’e, 1956, 132–69. 176. Analyses that mention, though do not deeply analyze, pro-Stalinist sentiment include Pyzhikov, Genezis ofitsial’noi pozitsii KPSS po voprosu o kul’te lichnosti; Pyzhikov, Politicheskie preobrazovaniia v SSSR; Cohen, “The Friends and Foes of Change.” 177. RGASPI, 82/2/1470/56. 178. RGASPI, 82/2/1467/26–28; RGASPI, 82/2/1470/64, 59, 56, 63, 55, 57; RGASPI, 82/2/1467/15, 51–53. 179. RGANI, 5/32/46/176. 180. On “merits,” RGANI, 5/32/45/94; 5/35/45/198; 5/31/53/72. On revolutionary contribution, e.g. RGANI, 5/31/53/72. Criticism of the “blasphemy” of the “thirty years” of Stalinism: RGASPI, 82/2/1470/66. 181. RGASPI, 82/2/1470/58. See also military praise for Stalin’s transformation of the backward country and the victory over Germany (Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 542).

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182. RGASPI, 82/2/1467/22–25; RGASPI, 82/2/1487/58. On the redemptive myth of victory, see Weiner, Making Sense of War, and chapter 5 below. 183. RGASPI, 82/2/1487/58. Clark, The Soviet Novel; Priestland, Stalinism and the Politics of Mobilisation; Hansen, Timer and the Design of Soviet Institutions. 184. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 540–47. 185. RGASPI, 82/2/1470/58. 186. RGASPI, 82/2/1470/57. 187. RGANI, 5/32/46/119. 188. RGANI, 5/32/46/177. 189. RGASPI, 82/2/1467/26–28; RGANI, 5/32/46/64; criticism of “petty details” in RGASPI, 82/2/1467/22–25. 190. RGASPI, 82/2/1467/1–3. 191. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 35. 192. RGANI, 5/32/45/57. 193. RGANI, 5/31/54/11. 194. RGANI, 5/32/45/5. 195. RGASPI, 82/2/1467/1–3. 196. RGASPI, 83/1/35/130–38; cf. warning in RGASPI, 82/2/1467/22–25, that “we’re not puppets that you can turn in all directions.” 197. RGASPI, 82/2/1467/20. 198. Aksiutin, Khrushchevskaia “ottepel’ “; Fitzpatrick et al., Sedition. 199. RGASPI, 83/1/35/130–38. 200. RGASPI, 82/2/1470/58. 201. RGASPI, 82/2/1470/55; cf. RGASPI, 82/2/1470/62 (cynicism about the CC’s apparent need for a “fresh string”). 202. RGASPI, 82/2/1467/20; Ibid., ll. 29–41. 203. Ibid., ll. 29–41. 204. RGANI, 5/32/45/62; RGANI 5/32/46/193; RGANI, 5/32/46/176, 202; RGANI, 5/31/54/100, 8. Acknowledgment of trauma of renouncing faith in Stalin: Cohen, “The Stalin Question after Stalin”; Vail’ and Genis, 60-e, 516. 205. RGANI, 5/32/46/194. 206. RGANI, 5/32/54/53–55. 207. Fitzpatrick et al., Sedition. 208. Blauvelt, “Status Shift and Ethnic Mobilisation.” On the ongoing problem of mass disorder throughout the 1950s and 1960s, see Kozlov, Massovye besporiadki. 209. On foreign reactions to the Secret Speech, see Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 607–795; Leonhard, The Kremlin since Stalin, 193–241. 210. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 378–85; Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 157–62; cf. Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz, 152; Silina, Nastroeniia sovetskogo studenchestva, 107. 211. Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR, 220, 256–60; Chulanov, “Postanovlenie TsK KPSS ot 30 Iiunia 1956 g.”

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212. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khruschcheva, 287–88, 325–42, 347; Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz, 151. 213. See CC criticisms of the cult-ridden Short Biography and the cult-centered party history: Bol’shaia tsenzura, 657–60; and Fursenko et al., Prezidiium TsK KPSS, vol. 2: 264–72. For guidelines on how to remove or avoid the cult of personality in the school curriculum, see: GARF, 2306/72/5628. On removal of the cult from museums, see e.g. GARF 501/1/1151/47; RGALI, 2329/2/470/37; TsDNIVO 113/52/119/131–32; TsDNIVO, 71/25/37/80–82; TsDNIVO, 113/52/61/14. 214. For example, a Komsomol plenum soon after the speech warned against “simplifying this question . . . reducing the whole matter to removing busts and taking down portraits” and against viewing de-Stalinization as a “quickly completed campaign [kampaniia]” (RGASPI-m, 1/2/348/72; d. 350 passim). See also multiple RSFSR local party organizations’ warnings against excessive haste or thoroughness in removing Stalin cult symbols: RGASPI, 556/1/150, 124, 69, 526, 147. 215. For example, RGANI, 5/31/54/7. 216. On the Stalingrad giant statue of Stalin, see RGANI, 5/30/143/2; TsDNIVO, 113/52/19/4; 113/5/20/76. There were many requests to change “Stalinist” city names, but these were not granted (GARF, 7523/75/358/34–111, including, at l. 78, Stalingrad). 217. Though some analyses present the summer 1956 texts as unambiguous: Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennia intelligentsiia, 172–74; Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR, 257. 218. RGANI, 5/32/46/245–46. 219. This and subsequent citations are taken from Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 132–46. The first draft had claimed that Stalin had tried to change the system, but that colleagues saw his devotion to socialism, and so did not think it necessary to intervene. 220. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 559–84 (collection of letters sent to Pravda in response to the resolution). 221. Ibid.; RGANI, 5/31/54/26–29, noted three types of “incorrect reactions” in its survey of responses in the union republics, of which two concerned allegations about the guilt of current CC members. Of two incorrect reactions highlighted in a report of reactions in the RSFSR (RGANI, 5/32/46/241, 46), one, from a factory manager in Vladivostok, was a criticism of “careerism” and of the timing of the speech (the speaker was expelled). 222. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 583–84. 223. Ibid., 563. 224. Ibid. 225. Ibid., 567, 565. 226. Ibid. 227. Ibid. 228. Ibid.

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229. Ibid., 566; Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 173–77. 230. Aimermakher et al., Doklad N. S. Khrushcheva, 570. 231. Letters referring to Poland and/or Hungary: RGASPI, 82/2/1470/69, 73, 74, 81, 90. 232. RGASPI, 82/2/1470/73. Similar letter sent to Kommunist: RGANI, 5/30/140/197. Molotov expressed similar nostalgia for Stalinist methods in CC discussions of the Hungarian crisis: Fursenko et al., Prezidiium TsK KPSS, vol. 3: 204. 233. The term “utopian nostalgia” comes from Boym, “From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia.” 234. RGASPI, 82/2/1470/80. c hap t e r t w o : f r om tha w to fr eeze 1. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 208–14. On drafting of the letter, see Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz, 160; Loewenstein, “Re-Emergence of Public Opinion in the Soviet Union,” 1342. 2. Examples of party organizations’ discussion of, and monitoring of reactions to, the letter in Aimermakher, Ideologicheskie komissii, 597–606; cf. Papovian, “Primenenie stat’i v RSFSR”; Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR, 256–60, 285–86; Kulavig, Dissent in the Years of Khrushchev, 16–34. 3. Gati, Failed Illusions. 4. Mclean and Vickery, The Year of Protest, 155–59. 5. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 208–14. On Voprosy istorii after Stalin’s death, and especially its reformist agenda from early 1956 onward, see Sidorova, Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke; Hosler, Die sowjetische Geschichtswissenschaft; Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union; Zelnick, The Perils of Pankratova. 6. Loewenstein, Writers and the Public Sphere; Tolz, “Cultural Bosses as Patrons and Clients”; Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennia intelligentsiia; Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia; Brudny, Reinventing Russia, chapter 1. 7. Dudintsev, Mezhdu dvumia romanami, 9–14; Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, 37–38; Lazarev, Shestoi etazh, 37–38, 56; English, Russia and the Idea of the West, 68. 8. For example, Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union; Sidorova, Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke; Rogger, “Politics and History in the USSR”; Dallin, “The Soviet Social Sciences after Stalin”; Enteen, “The Stalinist Conception of Communist Party History”; Avrich, “The Short Course and Soviet Historiography”; Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia. 9. Sidorova, Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke, 146–51; Zelnick, The Perils of Pankratova, 50; Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union, 89. 10. Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer; Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw. 11. Stephen Bittner has argued persuasively that “thaw” was a retrospective, nostalgic metaphor (Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw).

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12. Firsov argues that the assault was “Stalinist” (Firsov, Raznomyslie v SSSR, 258). Zezina argues that it was not (Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, 259). 13. Orlova, Vospominaniia, 44. 14. Zezina, “Crisis in the Union of Soviet Writers.” 15. Kaverin, Epilog, 368. Cf. Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 81. 16. Clark, The Soviet Novel; Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book; Corney, Telling October; Petrov, “The Freeze of Historicity in Thaw Cinema.” 17. On “Stalinist” methods of dealing with literature, the fullest account is: Artizov, Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia. Cf. Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows; Bliss-Eaton, Enemies of the People; Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia. On Stalin-era history profession, see e.g. Barber, “Stalin’s Letter to the Editors of Proletarskaya revolyutsiya”; Shteppa, Russian Historians and the Soviet State; N. Simonia, Istoriografiia Stalinizma. 18. See Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, on these two competing objectives in post-Stalinist criminal justice. See also Kuzovkin, “Partiino-Komsomol’skie presledovaniia,” for nuanced analysis of treatment of dissenters. 19. On dogmatism, see Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership. 20. Ibid., 54. 21. On the struggle for intelligentsia autonomy, see e.g. Zubok, Zhivago’s Children; Loewenstein, Writers and the Public Sphere. 22. Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed, 143; Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 70–71; Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 84–86. 23. Orlova, Vospominaniia, 192. 24. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/6/28; Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, 169. 25. Afiani et al., Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1953–1957, 170–73; Zezina, “Crisis in the Union of Soviet Writers.” 26. Swayze, Political Control of Literature; Afiani et al., Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1953–1957, 173. Formation reported in e.g. Literaturnaia gazeta (LG), 21 March 1955; 30 March 1955. 27. Ibid., 5 May 1955; 17 May 1955. 28. Tolz, “Cultural Bosses as Patrons and Clients.” 29. Afiani et al., Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1953–1957, 324–30; Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin, 12–22; Zlobin, “Stepan Zlobin”; Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, 104–60; Loewenstein, Writers and the Public Sphere; Zubkova, Russia after the War. 30. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/5/132. 31. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/5/135. 32. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/7/109. On Makar’ev, who later committed suicide, see Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, 49–52, 66. 33. Cf. Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, 167–70. 34. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/7/109. 35. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/6/69–76. 36. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/6/95.

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37. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/7/157–68. 38. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/7/59. 39. See chapter 1. This was also similar to Hungarian and Polish writers’ discussions of de-Stalinization, though it is unclear whether the Moscow Union knew much about these discussions abroad. 40. Clark, The Soviet Novel, argues that late Stalinist literature was already grappling with such questions. 41. Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, 25; Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 70–71; Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 84–86. 42. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/7/109. 43. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/7/120. 44. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/6/69–76; TsAOPIM, 8132/1/5/188 (other “Leninist” suggestions). 45. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/9/2: criticism of Gribachev in June 1956. On the rehabilitation and growing power of returnees in the union, see Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, 52, 63. 46. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/7/177–215. 47. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/7/214. 48. TsAOPIM, 478/1/467/1–5; Il’chenko, Letopis’ Moskovskogo universiteta, vol. 2, 579. 49. Ibid., 410; Ibid., vol. 3: 61. On the syllabus and its reliance on the Short Course, see e.g. Moskovskii universitet, 21 October 1949; 19 March 1953; 27 March 1953. See also 7 April 1953 and 11 April 1953 for ongoing reliance on Stalin’s works after his death. 50. This was also true of party historians at the Academy of Social Sciences, whose panicked discussions of the Secret Speech and 20th Congress are in RGASPI, 606/1/684 (entire). 51. “Cult of personality,” criticized in general terms (with no reference to Stalin) in TsAOPIM, 478/1/467/94, 111, 116, 121, 128–29. In March 1954, MGU’s party historians held a conference, at which there was brief discussion of the “cult of personality,” but again no mention of Stalin (Vestnik MGU: Seriia obshchestvennye nauki, no. 4 (1954): 125–27). 52. Gutnova, Perezhitoe, 286. 53. Gutnova, Perezhitoe, 285–88; Dmitriev, “Iz dnevnikov Sergeia Sergeevicha Dmitrieva,” 166–70. 54. TsAOPIM, 478/1/643/19. 55. Ibid., l. 17. 56. Ibid., l. 18. 57. See e.g. Rogger, “Politics, Ideology, and History in the USSR”; Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union, 76. 58. Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, 211. On social sciences teaching, see Gutnova, Perezhitoe, 286–88; Tromly, “Re-Imagining the Soviet Intelligentsia.” 59. On the publication of new party history textbooks, see the next two chapters. 60. TsAOPIM, 478/1/644/27–33.

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61. TsAOPIM, 478/1/648/39–40, 63, 100–101. 62. TsAOPIM, 478/1/643, 644 (entire); Vestnik MGU: Seriia istoriia, no. 4 (1956): 143–50. Compare similar anxiety about the syllabus among party historians at the Academy of Social Sciences: RGASPI, 606/1/115, 684 (entire). 63. TsAOPIM, 478/1/643/121–22. 64. TsAOPIM, 478/1/643/25, 122; 478/1/644/33; Vestnik MGU: Seriia istoriia, no. 2 (1956): 169–73. 65. TsAOPIM, 478/1/643/14, 16, 38, 39; Vestnik MGU: Seriia obshchestvennye nauki, no. 4 (1956): 143–50. 66. TsAOPIM, 478/1/644/34–35. 67. TsAOPIM, 478/1/643/104; 478/1/644/34. 68. TsAOPIM, 478/1/643/45; 478/1/644/25, 34, 36, 37, 39; Vestnik MGU: Seriia obshchestvennye nauki, no. 4 (1956): 143–50. 69. TsAOPIM, 478/1/644/36. 70. Vestnik MGU: Seriia obshchestvennye nauki, no. 4 (1956): 3–7. 71. Vestnik MGU: Seriia obshchestvennye nauki, no. 4 (1956): 146–47. 72. Moskovskii universitet, 1 September 1956, 2. 73. TsAOPIM, 478/1/643/64, 66. 74. Ibid., ll. 100–104. 75. Gutnova, Perezhitoe. 76. Dudintsev, “Ne khlebom edinym”; Moskalev, “Bor’ba za sozidanie Marksistkoi rabochei partii.” 77. Spechler, Permitted Dissent; Frankel, Novy mir. 78. Loewenstein, Writers and the Public Sphere, 296–328; Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, 181; Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 74–80; Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, 38. 79. Clark, The Soviet Novel, 92; Kaverin argues however that it was written “with that relative freedom that proved that the ‘thaw’ had arrived all the same,” (Kaverin, Epilog, 345). 80. Orlova, Vospominaniia, 195. On the clear-cut morality of readers’ letters about the novel, see Kozlov, “Naming the Social Evil.” 81. Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed, 158–59. On how the novel’s inventor plot resonated with Soviet engineers, for example, see Schattenberg, “Democracy or Despotism?” 82. On renewal of “moral-humanist” protest, see e.g. Spechler, Permitted Dissent; Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed. 83. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/9/154. See also prose section party meeting five days earlier, with majority support for publication of Dudintsev (ll. 6–49). 84. Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks!; Kozlov, “Naming the Social Evil.” 85. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/9, passim. 86. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/9/219. 87. Moskovskii literator (ML), 3 November 1956, 4. 88. Loewenstein, “Obshchestvennost’ as Key to Understanding Soviet Writers of the 1950s.”

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89. Beginning of Lenin prize nominations announced by the union-level Writers’ Union, 24 October 1956 (RGALI, 631/30/580). First prize discussion in union, in prose section, 28 November 1956 (RGALI, 2464/1/336). 90. RGALI, 2464/1/336/66. 91. RGALI, 246/1/336/73. 92. On this trajectory, cf. Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer. 93. RGALI, 2464/1/336/48, 71, 35. Compare Clark, The Soviet Novel, on the “master plot” of overcoming obstacles in Stalin-era novels. 94. RGALI, 2464/1/84/55. 95. RGALI, 2464/1/336/35; Zlobin, “Stepan Zlobin.” 96. RGALI, 2464/1/336/42. 97. RGALI, 2464/1/84/51, 57. 98. RGALI, 2464/1/84/47–62; cf. ML, 13 December 1956. Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, 54, calls this attempt only brief, but it in fact persisted until late December, right up to the deadline. 99. RGALI, 2464/1/84/50, 55. 100. Afiani et al., Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1953–1957, 570–80. 101. Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, 195. 102. Sidorova points out the lack of “directive” instructions against Voprosy istorii at this time (Sidorova, Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke, 142). 103. RGASPI, 606/1/686 (entire); 606/1/114/2–4. On MGU’s prominent role, see Zelnick, The Perils of Pankratova; Sidorova, Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke, 149–52. 104. Shapkarin noted proudly at a 1957 meeting of the party history section of the Ministry of Higher Education that the MGU history faculty was renowned for “having occupied the correct position in the discussion of the mistaken statements of the journal Voprosy istorii” (GARF, 9396/16/896/23). 105. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/33, 58. 106. TsAOPIM, 478/1/729/15, 67. 107. Pravda, 20 November 1956, 2. The author was V. Smirnov, one of the party historians responsible for party history instruction for science students. Dmitriev calls this Pravda article a statement of “Stalinists” (Dmitriev, “Iz dnevnikov,” 149), while Heer sees it as a significant “escalation” of the campaign against the journal as a whole (Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union, 89). References to these delays later acknowledged in department: TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/1–3. 108. Shapkarin enthusiastically condemned Dudintsev, attracting criticism from colleagues and students alike for his Stalinist tone. Yet he refused to engage in the same kind of criticism of Moskalev. This is reconstructed from TsAOPIM, 478/1/726, as the transcripts were not available for consultation, but retrospective summaries still allow a sense of the 1956 (non-) discussion. 109. Barber, “Stalin’s Letter to the Editors of Proletarskaya revolyutsiya.” 110. Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw. 111. TsAOPIM, 478/1/729/1–2, 9, 10. 112. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/6–7, 66.

286 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135.

136.

137. 138.

139.

n o t e s t o p ag es 77–8 2 RGANI, 5/35/39/155–62; Sidorova, Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke, 157. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/41, 47, 62; 478/1/729/1, 15. TsAOPIM, 478/1/730/35–37. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/48. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/16, 56. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/14, 16, 29, 62 (l. 63, Smirnova accused of faking this faint). References to “vragi” at TsAOPIM, 478/1/729/91. “Conscious” misreading of the line of the 20th Congress in TsAOPIM, 478/1/729/15, 61. Resistance to calling Moskalev and Smirnova enemies: TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/48, 23, 33, 54. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/28, 61. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/37, 54. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/61. RGANI, 5/35/39, 77 (entire); Istorik i vremia. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/30. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/31. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/78, 102. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/26, 67, 75. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/23, 36,102. Concern about overall lecture content (TsAOPIM, 478/1/729/11); concerns about excessive criticism of Stalinist past (TsAOPIM, 478/1/729/13); claim that whole department has “elements of liberalism” (TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/26). For example, TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/24; see also 478/1/726, 729 (entire). TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/39. TsAOPIM, 478/1/726/106–7. For example, Moskovskii universitet, 1 April 1957, 3. Sidorova, Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke, 149. For example, Materialy vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia zaveduiushchikh kafedr obshchestvennykh nauk. The Academy of Sciences Institute of History’s agenda in 1958 was dominated by anti-revisionism too (Sidorova, Ottepel’ v istoricheskoi nauke, 92–93). For more on the consequences of this anti-revisionism for commemoration of Stalin and Stalinism, see chapter 3. On the campaign against Yugoslavian revisionism, see Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 55–57. On local anti-revisionism, see TsAOPIM, 478/1/762/58–65; 478/1/753, 693 (entire); TsMAM, 1609/2/407; series of long articles on revisionism by the historian Bushuev in Moskovskii universitet, 27 March 1958, 10 April 1958, 10 May 1958, 24 May 1958. Loewenstein emphasizes “control” and “coherence” of these attacks (Loewenstein, Writers and the Public Sphere, 327–419). RGALI, 2464/2/102/43. Surkov also tried to argue against “administrative interference” (l. 8). Shepilov was later criticized for leniency: Bittner, The Kremlin’s Scholar; Shepilov, Neprimknuvshii. RGALI, 2464/2/102/10, 14, 13, 17, 27, 31; Chukovsky, Diary, 411–12.

notes to pag e s 82–87

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140. RGALI, 2464/2/102/11 (Simonov), and l. 14 (Chakovskii). 141. RGALI, 631/30/593. The earlier draft of the meeting resolution had been more alarmist, claiming that the union’s faction had cast a shadow over the whole union. 142. Tomilina, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, vol. 2: 453, 472; full texts of speeches, 446–62 and 462–97, respectively. 143. RGALI, 2464/2/102/27, 35, 29. 144. Though Simonov tried to argue that “we need to speak in our literature about difficulties, defects, and shady sides” (Ibid., l. 11). 145. Ibid., ll. 40–43. 146. Ibid., l. 9. 147. Taubman, Khrushchev, 306–8; Kaverin, Epilog, 365–68. 148. Kaverin, Epilog, 368. 149. Tomilina, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, 450, 485. 150. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/9/206; LG, 26 January 1957, 4; ML, 31 January 1957, 4. 151. RGALI, 2464/1/108/52–55. 152. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/13/55–66. 153. Surkov at the union-level Writers’ Union earlier that month had engaged in a similar justification of the anti-cosmopolitanism campaign (LG, 5 January 1957, 2). 154. ML, 31 January 1957, 4. 155. Swayze, Political Control of Literature, 189–90; ML, 15 March 1957, 2. 156. Afiani et al., Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1953–1957, 626–34. 157. Ibid. 158. Ibid. 159. Ibid., 648–58. 160. On Aliger’s resistance at the May 19 meeting, see Tomilina, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, 491–97. On the first Moscow Union meetings after Khrushchev’s addresses, see TsAOPIM, 8132/1/14; ML, 30 May 1957, 2; Loewenstein, Writers and the Public Sphere, 413; Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, 292. 161. Afiani et al., Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1953–1957, 673–82; Swayze, Political Control of Literature, 189–90; Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, 201. 162. On continuing resistance: RGALI, 2464/1/103; ML, 16 June 1957, 3; Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, 44. 163. Orlova, Vospominaniia, 44. 164. RGALI, 2464/1/104; ML, 26 December 1957, 3. 165. RGALI, 2464/1/104 (speakers included Lesiuchevskii and Sobolev). 166. Afiani et al., Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1953–1957, 617–18. 167. RGALI, 2938/1/1 (September inaugural meeting); further meetings: RGALI, 2938/1/2, 3 (entire). On the intent behind the union, see e.g. Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, 44; Hosking, Rulers and Victims, 349–50. 168. RGALI, 2464/1/104, passim.

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n o t e s t o p ag e s 87–92

169. On the RSFSR Union’s promotion of celebratory memory in the 1950s and beyond, see Jones, “The Personal and the Political.” 170. See chapter 4. 171. RGALI, 2464/1/113/4. Sobolev was also first secretary of the RSFSR Union by this time. 172. ML, 1 July 1957, 2; ML, 30 September 1957, 2; ML, 2 November 1957, 4. 173. RGALI, 2464/1/104/184. 174. Orlova, Vospominaniia, 149; Komaromi, “The Unofficial Field of Late Soviet Culture,” 613. 175. RGALI, 2464/1/339/53–57; Gibian, Interval of Freedom, 23. 176. Afiani et al., Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1958–1964, 221–30. 177. RGALI, 2464/1/355 (entire). 178. Afiani et al, Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1958–1964, 173, 221–30, 239–40. 179. RGALI, 2464/3/363/33–36; 2464/3/339 (entire). 180. Afiani et al., Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1958–1964, 76–83, 207, 221–30. 181. Ibid. 182. “ ‘Delo’ molodykh istorikov”; Rozhdenstvenskii, “Materialy k istorii samodeiatel’nykh ob”edenenii v SSSR”; Gorshkov and Volobuev, Vlast’ i oppozitsiia, 215–19. 183. See also the previous chapter on Orlov. On MGU’s response to the 1956 student unrest and misbehavior, see e.g. TsAOPIM, 478/1/633, 693; TsMAM, 1609/2/432/3–4; 1609/2/415; RGASPI-m, 1/46/910. Secondary literature on these protests includes: Taranov, “ ‘Raskachaem Leninskie Gory!’ ”; Silina, Nastroeniia sovetskogo studenchestva; Pyzhikov, “Sources of Dissidence”; “Studencheskoe brozhenie v SSSR (konets 1956g.)”; Tromly, “Re-Imagining the Soviet Intelligentsia.” Moscow union members, if they knew anything about Krasnopevtsev, saw his form of protest as far more radical and antiSoviet than their own (e.g. Orlova, Vospominaniia, 204). 184. On the disillusionment of Krasnopevtsev and his circle with the post-20th Congress line, see “ ‘Delo’ molodykh istorikov”; Kozlov and Mironenko, Kramola, 327–32; Silina, Nastroeniia sovetskogo studenchestva, 150–54. 185. TsAOPIM, 478/1/761/54–55. 186. TsAOPIM, 478/1/761/32, 55. 187. “ ‘Delo’ molodykh istorikov.” 188. TsMAM, 1609/2/477/8. 189. TsAOPIM, 478/1/761/57. 190. TsAOPIM, 478/1/761/57. 191. TsAOPIM, 478/1/761/59; 478/1/693/87; 478/1/762/18. 192. For example, TsAOPIM, 478/1/693/78–80, 101; 478/1/753/1–3; TsMAM, 1609/2/477/4. 193. For example, TsAOPIM, 478/1/693/198ff. 194. TsAOPIM, 478/1/727/26. 195. TsAOPIM, 478/1/727/87. Smirnova again vociferously objected to being called a revisionist, and defended her views as party-minded (l. 89).

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196. TsAOPIM, 478/1/727/54, 59. 197. TsAOPIM, 478/1/727/87–88; 478/1/762/18–23; Moskovskii universitet, 3 May 1958, 3. 198. TsAOPIM, 478/1/818/86–93 (however, the victim of these allegations resisted strenuously, appealing to the partbiuro; his appeal was turned down because there was evidence of right oppositionism in his past); TsAOPIM, 478/1/762/20–25; 478/1/818/69. 199. TsAOPIM, 478/1/761/44–50. 200. TsAOPIM, 478/1/761/58–59. 201. TsAOPIM, 478/1/643/17–18, 90; 478/1/644/36, 122; CC discussion of teachers “avoiding sharp questions”: RGANI, 5/35/58/127. 202. RGASPI-m, 1/46/190/61–76. 203. “ ‘Delo’ molodykh istorikov.” 204. Orlov, Particules de vie, 118–25 and passim. 205. Silina, Nastroeniia sovetskogo studenchestva, 147, and 109–10, 120. 206. GARF, 9396/1/735/53–138; Hatcher, Administration of Teaching in Social Sciences in the USSR; Pundeff, History in the USSR. 207. TsAOPIM, 478/1/729/95; TsMAM, 478/1/727/62–68; TsAOPIM, 478/1/727/54–55; more attempts to make direct correlations of rises and falls in ideological vospitanie levels between rises and falls in party history teaching hours in TsAOPIM, 478/1/762/4; and correlation between talk of discipline reform and students’ unhealthy sentiments (478/1/729/53). 208. Early calls for reversal of move of party history out of first year, as part of discussion of serious ideological-political lapses in students’ views (TsMAM, 1609/2/727/34–37; on these decisions themselves, see e.g. TsMAM, 1609/2/415). More calls for hours to increase, in order to increase the political reliability of students: TsMAM, 1609/2/762/48; TsMAM, 1609/2/693/198, 225–27. More calls for reversals of syllabus reforms: TsMAM, 1609/2/477/22–23 and passim; 1609/2/449/69ff. 209. TsAOPIM, 478/1/762/18–19; Moskovskii universitet, 27 October 1956, 2, and 23 January 1957, 3. 210. Splits in Soviet press: “O prepodavanii obshchestvennykh nauk v vuzakh,” Partiinaia zhizn’, no. 9 (1957): 36–41; “Nekotorye voprosy prepodavaniia istorii KPSS v vysshei shkole,” Kommunist, no. 5 (1959): 63–72 (fascinating discussions of this article at the Kommunist editorial board: RGASPI, 599/1/124/23–32; 599/1/125/128–37). On splits in the CC (principally between Suslov and Khrushchev), see Harris, After the Kratkii kurs; Mitrokhin, “The Rise of Political Clans.” 211. For example, GARF, 9396/1/735/53–58. 212. RGASPI-m, 1/46/220/11–13; 1/46/199/84–102; RGASPI-m, 1/46/204/17ff. These perceptions of student attitudes toward social sciences were probably accurate (see Tromly, “Re-Imagining the Soviet Intelligentsia”; and Silina, Nastroeniia sovetskogo studenchestva).

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n o t e s t o p ag e s 95–101

213. RGASPI-m, 1/46/199/18–72. Discussion of these ideas in the CC department of science: RGANI, 5/35/58/124–37, 205. On Komsomol’s relative leniency toward youth misbehavior, see Kuzovkin, “Partiino-Komsomol’skie presledovaniia.” 214. GARF, 9606/1/152, 160, 454; GARF, 9396/16/876, 896 (entire). On party history textbooks, see next two chapters. 215. Cf. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 57. c h ap t e r t h r e e : for ge tting with in limits 1. Pravda, 19 January 1957, 2. Cf. Pikhoia, Sovetskii Soiuz, 147. Reactions from the public included an appeal to the CC to make rehabilitation explicit, RGANI, 5/30/189/1–2, and confusion and outrage at the contrast to the Secret Speech, ll. 29–31 2. For example, Stalin’s post-war toast to the Russian people. 3. For examples of the wide variety of different ways in which Khrushchev spoke about Stalin at party and other public gatherings, see Tomilina, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, esp. vol. 1, 440–614. 4. Willetts, “Death and Damnation of a Hero”; Conquest, “The Three Funerals of Joseph Stalin”; Schapiro, “The Soviet Press and the Problem of Stalin.” 5. Though this resolution was contested and tortuously edited, it was not publicly rescinded or revised once issued (see e.g. Baum, Burying Mao; Leese, Mao Cult, 226–52). 6. Robinson, “Mao after Death”; quote from Barme, Shades of Mao, 16. 7. Compare an analysis of the Chiang cult and its recent commodification in Taiwan, which has also generated multiple views of the leader, but again not the kinds of divisive splits analyzed below (Taylor, “QuJianghua”). 8. Interestingly, Mao himself at an early stage calculated Stalin’s legacy as 70 percent good and 30 percent bad, but this calculation was not widely publicized in the Soviet Union itself (Westad, Brothers in Arms, 260–61). 9. Taubman, Khrushchev; Mitrokhin, “The Rise of Political Clans.” 10. Jansen, “Resurrection and Appropriation.” 11. Ibid., 991. 12. Fine, Difficult Reputations, 55. 13. On the hierarchy of Chinese party historians and the lower ranks’ preference for commentary (rather than primary research), with similarities to the Soviet case, see Unger, Using the Past to Serve the Present. 14. The terms are from Fine, Difficult Reputations. 15. Barme, Shades of Mao. 16. See chapter 6. 17. RGASPI-m, 1/2/36/30, 251. 18. Public criticism of Yugoslavian criticism of “Stalinism,” coupled with praise for Stalin’s “on the whole correct” position in Kommunist, no. 5 (1957): 87–94 (another article in same issue, 101, again criticizes the idea of “Stalinism”). On domestic revisionism, see previous chapter.

notes to p ag e s 1 0 1–10 5

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19. Rol’ narodnykh mass i lichnosti v istorii, esp. 318, 340–43, 352; GARF, 9396/1/735/18–23 (dialectical and historical materialism university course calls for balance between eliminating cult of personality and rejecting leaders altogether). Other praise for Stalin and attacks on anti-revisionism, e.g. Kommunist, no. 10 (1959): 152–69; Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 5 (1958): 97–118; Materialy vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia zaveduiushchikh kafedr obshchestvennykh nauk, passim. 20. As also argued by Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union. 21. Kim, Istoriia SSSR. On the protracted editing of the encyclopedia entry, see RGANI 5/30/140/13–23. 22. RGASPI, 623/1/168 (entire); Arkhiv RAN, 1577/2/371; RGANI, 5/35/55, 77 (entire). 23. Press criticism of the book’s excessive criticisms of Stalin, e.g. Voprosy istorii, no. 1 (1959): 180. By contrast, historians at the Academy of Sciences defended it as “significant event in historiography”: Arkhiv RAN, 457/1/355/355. 24. The commemorative article appeared as “I. V. Stalin (k 80-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia,” Kommunist, no. 18 (1959): 47–56, the book as Ponomarev, Istoriia KPSS (1959). On delays to publication of this textbook, see RGASPI, 623/1/191/5, 24. Readers continued to send many questions about Stalin to Kommunist during this delay: RGASPI, 599/1/430/19–32. 25. Alexei Yurchak argues that the death of Stalin produced a crisis, in that it removed the “external editor” of ideological discourse, but he does not elucidate how long that crisis lasted before the discourse stabilized into lasting, easily “performable” forms (Yurchak, Everything Was Forever until It Was No More). This analysis suggests the uncertainty lingered throughout the Khrushchev era. On the uncertainty plaguing the ideological apparatus in the late 1950s, see e.g. Skakhnazarov, S vozhdiami i bez nikh, esp. 74. 26. Wertsch, Voices of Collective Remembering, 67–86. 27. The majority of the files of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism remain unavailable to researchers. 28. RGANI, 5/33/57 (entire). 29. Detailed textual analysis in Fedenko, Khrushchev’s New History of the Soviet Communist Party, 1–150. Compare the balanced picture of Stalin in press coverage: e.g. Kommunist, no. 10 (1959): 52–65; Pravda, 12 July 1959, 2–4. 30. RGASPI, 599/1/129/1–11. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. RGANI, 5/33/117. 34. Baum, Burying Mao. 35. Tucker, “The Metamorphosis of the Stalin Myth.” 36. Problems of Communism, no. 1 (1960): 58–61; Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union, 106. 37. Heer assumed that the delays to the History and inconsistencies in its image of Stalin were partly due to “sharp differences among historians over how

292

38. 39. 40.

41.

42.

43. 44.

45.

46. 47.

48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

n o t e s t o p ag es 10 5 –10 9 Stalin should appear in historiography” (Ibid., 106). This evidence of reception supports this view. RGASPI, 71/42/2/87–96. RGASPI, 71/42/1/70–73, 114–21; RGASPI, 71/42/2/95 (this last complaint also asserted that the wartime cry “For Stalin!” was true). Party historians and propagandists surveyed in Georgia and Central Asia (RGASPI, 71/42/3/55–58) also expressed widespread discontent with the sharp reduction in praise. Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 99, emphasizes the difficulty that Secret Speech listeners had had in seeing Stalin in “composite terms” in 1956. This evidence shows such difficulties enduring in subsequent years. RGASPI, 71/42/2/216–17. See another call, ll. 186–96, for Stalin’s “major errors” to be shown, though the author did not want the history book to be only about Stalin’s mistakes. RGASPI, 599/1/430/45. Fedenko observed at the time that the textbook “finds itself in a predicament when it attempts to evaluate Stalin’s actions” (Fedenko, Khrushchev’s New History, 107). Stalin’s works appeared over twenty times in syllabi for materialism and political economy classes in 1957–58: see Hatcher, Administration of Teaching of Social Sciences in the USSR; RGANI, 5/35/40 (diamat syllabus). See also leading social scientists’ complaints about excessive forgetting and removal of Stalin works from syllabi: Materialy vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia, passim. Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance, 128. See also next two chapters on similarly dichotomous popular responses to literary images of Stalin. Heer notes the more stable narratives of Stalin(ism) in this period (Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union, 110). However, she points out that “this attempt of the regime to transform the image of Stalin from villainy into tragedy was also to prove transitory” (111). On the Third Party Program and the desire for utopian relaunch, see Renkama, Ideology and Challenges of Political Liberalisation in the USSR, 1957–1961; Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, 189–214; Taubman, Khrushchev, 507–16. On foreign policy pressures, see e.g. Westad, Brothers in Arms, which dates the final breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance to the start of the 1960s. Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, 74. Orlova, Vospominaniia o neproshedshem vremeni, 8. Vail’ and Genis, 60-e, 752. These confidential discussions of pre- and post-war terror are in Kovalev, 1957. For more analysis of these narratives of terror, see next chapter. Linden, Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 117–20; Tatu, Power in the Kremlin, 141–76. Tatu, Power in the Kremlin, 151. XXII s”ezd KPSS, vol. 2: 593. See chapter 1.

notes to p ag e s 10 9 –1 1 2

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58. Jones, “From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin.” Examples of the discourse of sanctity, applied to the mausoleum at the 22nd Congress: XXII s”ezd KPSS, vol. 3: 114–17, 121, 131. 59. RGANI, 5/32/174/203. Percentage calculation of 1937 losses at meeting in Tula (RGANI, 5/32/174/135); memories of 1937 also recounted in Orenburg (RGANI, 5/32/175/103) and Chita (RGANI, 5/32/175/110). 60. RGANI, 5/32/175/78–79. 61. RGANI, 5/32/174/264. 62. RGANI, 5/31/16/119. 63. RGANI, 5/31/160/73; RGANI, 5/32/174/135; RGANI, 5/3/161/97. 64. RGANI, 5/32/175/84. 65. RGANI, 5/31/161/98; RGANI, 5/31/160/73; RGANI, 5/31/175/37. 66. RGANI, 5/31/60/10. 67. Several examples of victim testimony in this packet of letters of support for the mausoleum changes: RGANI, 5/30/345/97–116. 68. RGANI, 5/30/345/104. 69. RGANI, 5/30/345/110–11. 70. RGANI, 5/30/345/105–6. 71. RGANI, 5/32/174/118; RGANI, 5/32/174/169. For examples of the discourse of progress and relief from confronting a traumatic past and punishing perpetrators, see XXII s”ezd KPSS, vol. 1: 105, 291–92; vol. 2: 163, 583; vol. 2: 116. 72. RGANI, 5/30/173/116. Many other letters in this collection called in similar terms for Stalinist place names to be changed and also for the Stalinist anthem to be modified. 73. RGANI, 5/3/160/11; RGANI, 5/32/175/2; RGANI, 5/31/161/119; RGANI, 5/31/160/86. 74. RGANI, 5/31/160/72. 75. Pravda, 10 November 1961, 1 (Stalino); 11 October 1961, 2 (Stalingrad); 12 November 1961, 2 (Stalinabad). Examples of renaming decisions at various levels of the party hierarchy: GARF 385/17/3702 (Stalinogorsk); GARF, 375/17/3661 (Stalinsk); GARF, 259/42/6770/1–7 (renamings of various “Stalin” chemical factories). There was hardly any variation in the language of renaming requests at different levels—the lowliest bodies (e.g. in GARF, 385/16/3671: rabochie poselki in Moscow oblast’; GAVO, 2115/6/1713/160: railway station in Stalingrad) produced documents identical in tone, and often in content, to the decrees issued by the higher authorities. The reasons for wanting to get rid of the Stalinist association were kept brief, or often not mentioned at all, to suggest that the new attitude to Stalin and the cult was now self-evident. 76. RGANI, 5/32/174/232. 77. On the wholesale removal of monuments, see Medvedev, Khrushchev, 211. On removal of paintings, see e.g. RGALI 2329/2/818/88–91 and RGALI 2329/2/820/62 (Ministry of Culture orders to put numerous drawings and posters of Stalin into storage). On erasure, see New York Times, 12 November 1961, E3; 7 November 1961, 5 (erasure of Stalin from a painting in Moscow’s

294

n o t e s t o p ag es 112–116

Metropol’ hotel); Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, 308; King, The Commissar Vanishes, 188–89. 78. GARF 501/1/3402/68–74; GAVO 6527/1/157/56; New York Times, 9 November 1961, 5; 12 November 1961, 3. 79. For example, rumors that they had been thrown into the sea, or stored in Moscow basements (Borev, Fariseia, 52–55). 80. Jones, “From the Secret Speech to the Burial of Stalin”; Hooper, “What Can and Cannot Be Said.” 81. RGANI, 5/32/174/312, 341; RGANI, 5/32/175/82. Quotation from Taubman, Khrushchev, 515. 82. RGANI, 5/31/160/90; cf. expression of confusion at destruction of monuments in Moscow oblast’, RGANI, 5/32/174/296. 83. For example, conversations overheard by observers in Georgia objecting to the congress’ raising the Stalin question again, and alluding to youth protest against the mausoleum decision in light of Stalin’s “revolutionary merits”: RGANI, 5/31/160/57. 84. RGANI, 5/31/160/56. 85. RGANI, 5/31/160/59. 86. RGANI, 5/31/160/42. 87. Ibid. 88. RGANI, 5/32/175/307–8. 89. List of Supreme Soviet decisions on “Stalin” cities and other place names: GARF, 7523/78/1054. The local party leadership’s rubberstamping of the Stalingrad renaming decision: TsDNIVO, 71/37/16/158–60. 90. On museum, see: GAVO, 6527/1/153 (entire); GAVO, 6527/1/157/51, 49, 62–63; TsDNIVO, 71/37/18/171. 91. TsDNIVO, 71/37/16/155–60. 92. Suggestions of new names other than Volgograd included “Hero-Town” (Geroevgrad), “Victory” (Pobeda) and “Glorious” (Slavnyi): TsDNIVO, 71/37/32/98; TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/41–42. 93. Indeed, in the aftermath of the Secret Speech in April 1956, one of the city’s party leaders had drawn attention to the city’s close, perhaps inextricable, connection to Stalin and the Stalin cult: RGANI, 5/34/2/14–16. 94. TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/1. See also gorkom resolution, which highlights Stalin’s role in the repressions, and argues that only a new name would adequately reflect the city’s “feat” (podvig): TsDNIVO, 71/37/16/155–56. 95. TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/16. This meeting also deemed Stalin a criminal, with a shameful, “stained” reputation. 96. TsDNIVO, 71/37/32/93. 97. For example, TsDNIVO, 71/37/32/93; TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/1. 98. Problems of Communism, 2 (1963): 5; Mickiewicz, “The De-Stalinization of Stalingrad.” 99. TsDNIVO, 71/37/32/93–96, 100–104. 100. TsDNIVO, 71/37/32/94.

notes to p ag e s 1 1 6 –1 2 2 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131.

295

TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/6. TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/23. TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/3–3ob. TsDNIVO, 71/37/32/98; TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/2. TsDNIVO, 594/1/31/24–27. TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/6, 22–24. TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/22–24. See similar quashing of Vrublevskaia’s objections at the closed enterprise: TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/3–3ob. TsDNIVO, 71/37/32/96; TsDNIVO, 119/28/38/2. RGANI, 5/32/174/156. For example, censors’ punishment of retention of old city name of Stalingrad: GARF, 9425/1/1108/2. GAVO, 6527/1/157/19. GARF, 9425/1/1153/16–17; RGANI, 5/55/8/6. GARF, 9425/1/1153/20–23. RGANI 5/30/378/68–69. GARF 9425/1/1109/85; GARF, 9425/1/1112/102, 166, 204, 268; GARF, 9425/1/1109/82–87. See next section. GARF, 9425/1/1099/314; GARF, 9425/1/1097/107,125. GARF, 9425/1/1099/67; GARF, 9425/1/1097/40–42. GARF, 9425/1/1112/204; GARF, 9425/1/1099/54; GARF, 9425/1/1102/115. Other examples in 9425/1/1111, passim. RGASPI, 623/1/68/31–74; GARF, A-605/1/1/1418. Stuchebnikova and Zhibarev, Obzor istochnikov istorii KPSS. Tatu claims “they were criticized for it [pro-Stalinism] by everybody” (Tatu, Power in the Kremlin, 208). Departmental references to the text as “wrong” (porochnaia) (TsAOPIM, 478/1/915/101); university-level discussion of book as “harmful,” TsMAM, 1609/2/589; Vestnik MGU: Seriia istoriia, no. 3 (1962): 69–72, 73–75; no. 2 (1963): 3–19; RSFSR Ministry of Higher Education calls the MGU texts “cultish” and “harmful”: GARF, A-605/1/1418/24 and GARF, A-605/1/1068/97–101; press criticism of texts includes e.g. Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 6 (1961): (calling text a “political mistake”). Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie istorikov, 361–70, and passim; XXII s”ezd KPSS and XXII s’ezd i zadachi kafedr obshchestvennykh nauk. TsAOPIM, 478/1/997/5; TsAOPIM, 478/1/976/3. On private accusations, see TsAOPIM, 478/1/1051/4–5; Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union, 159, 162, 267. Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie istorikov, 297. Ibid., 499. TsAOPIM, 478/1/915/106. TsAOPIM, 478/1/915/101–19. TsAOPIM, 478/1/1029/10.

296

n o t e s t o p ag es 12 2 –12 5

132. TsAOPIM, 478/1/915/109; cf. ll. 101, 104. 133. On Nosov’s resistance, see: TsAOPIM, 478/1/1050/1–10, 60–64; TsAOPIM, 478/1/1051/4–6; TsAOPIM, 478/1/1029/73–74. 134. Vestnik MGU: Seriia istoriia, no. 4 (1963). 135. Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union, 162. 136. TsAOPIM, 478/1/1029; TsAOPIM, 478/1/1050/7; TsAOPIM, 478/1/1051/6; TsAOPIM, 478/1/915/112; Voprosy istorii, no. 10 (1966). 137. Stalin described as a “non-person” or “unpersoned” after the congress in: Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union; Pospielovsky, “Restalinization or Destalinization”; Thompson, “Reassessing Personality Cults.” 138. GARF, 9425/2/353/1–4. Order banning the Short Biography: GARF 501/1/3830/93–94. Guidelines in the press only mentioned the Biography among Stalin’s works, though did emphasize the urgency of removing cultic elements from all historical texts (e.g. Kommunist, no. 2 (1962): 15–46). 139. For example, GARF, 9425/1/1099/314; RGANI, 5/35/199/111–12. Criticism of the Short Course: GARF 9425/1/1104/15. Heavy criticism of Stalin’s works at XXII s”ezd i zadachi kafedr obshchestvennykh nauk, passim. 140. GARF, 9425/1/1118/85. 141. GARF, 9425/1/1114/133. 142. RGANI, 5/30/346–48 (entire). 143. For example, the meeting of the critics’ section of the Moscow Writers’ Union, whose first meeting of January 1962 featured wide-ranging analyses of Stalin’s errors (RGALI, 2464/3/763). Cf. XXII s”ezd i zadachi kafedr obshchestvennykh nauk, passim, and Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie istorikov, 21, 56, 201, 270–73, 357–71, and passim. 144. Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie istorikov, 268–69; draft of article, criticizing journals for not eliminating the cult, discussed RGASPI, 599/1/225/59–63; article published in Kommunist, no. 18 (1964): 110–14. 145. See e.g. Schapiro, “The Soviet Press and the Problem of Stalin”; Cohen, “The Stalin Question after Stalin.” On literary portraits of Stalin, see the next two chapters. 146. A few examples of this intensified criticism: Kommunist, no. 18 (1962): 30–39; Kommunist, no. 1 (1963): 49–59; Voprosy istorii, no. 9 (1963): 15–24; Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 1 (1964): 66–75. On historiography, see Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia; Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union; Afanas’ev, Sovetskaia istoriografiia. 147. RGANI, 5/33/196/200–207; Fedenko, Khrushchev’s New History, 154–67. 148. RGASPI, 71/42/9 (entire). This was also shown in press coverage of the new edition, which contained strong criticism of Stalin (e.g. Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 4 (1963): 120–29; Voprosy istorii, no. 4 (1963), 3–11; Pravda, 15 November 1962, 2; Kommunist, no. 7 (1963): 22–29). 149. Arkhiv RAN, 1577/2/390. 150. XXII s”ezd i zadachi kafedr obshchestvennykh nauk, 203. 151. RGANI, 5/55/62/27–49.

note s to p ag e s 1 25 –13 1

297

152. Accusations of Stalinism and fondness for the Stalin cult leveled at Pospelov after the 22nd Congress by lower-ranked historians: e.g. RGANI, 5/33/199/51–55. 153. Tomilina, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, vol. 2: 601–28. 154. T. Larson, “What Happened to Stalin?” Problems of Communism (March 1967): 82–90. 155. Suslov was obliged to criticize Stalin publicly and at length in February 1964 (Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, 137–39) as part of the worsening of relations with China. Earlier anti-China propaganda in 1963 intensified criticism of Stalin and terror and increasingly pathologized belief in the cult, e.g. Kommunist, no. 8 (1963): 11–26; no. 10 (1963): 3–14. 156. Taubman, Khrushchev; Tatu, Power in the Kremlin, 578–660; Medvedev and Medvedev, Khrushchev; Aksiutin, Khrushchevskaia “ottepel’.” 157. RGASPI, 599/1/251/23–25. 158. RGASPI, 599/1/220 (entire). 159. Ibid., ll. 16–19. 160. RGASPI, 599/1/220/1–15. 161. Ibid. 162. Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome, 188. 163. In the French case, as Rousso argues, coming to terms with the past was complicated not so much by this undisputed “evil,” but rather by contestation over the extent of French “collaboration” with it. 164. Respectively, from Robinson, “Mao after Death,” 354, and Jansen, “Resurrection and Appropriation,” 975. 165. This era thus also provides some precedent for the “moral limbo” of Stalin’s reputation in post-Soviet Russia: Merridale, “Amnesiac Nation,” 8. c hap t e r f o u r: tr a u ma a nd r ed emption 1. XXII s”ezd KPSS, 587. 2. Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims; McClarnand, “The Politics of History and Historical Revisionism”; Merridale, Night of Stone; Adler, Victims of Soviet Terror. 3. Roginsky, “The Embrace of Stalinism”; Etkind, “Post-Soviet Hauntology”; Adler, “The Future of the Stalinist Past Remains Unpredictable”; Paperno, “Exhuming the Bodies of Soviet Terror”; Langenlohl, “Political Culture in Contemporary Russia”; Sherlock, “Confronting the Stalinist Past”; Shlapentokh and Bondartsova, “Stalin in Russian Ideology and Public Opinion”; Levinson, “The Uses and Abuses of Stalin’s Image.” The Khrushchev-era interplay of war and terror memories is explored in the next chapter. 4. Etkind, “Post-Soviet Hauntology.” 5. Kozlov, “ ‘I Have Not Read, but I Will Say,’ ” 588. 6. See chapter 6. 7. Materialy vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia zaveduiushchikh kafedr obshchestvennykh nauk, 26, 80; Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 5 (1958): 97–118; no. 2 (1959): 86–103; no. 6 (1959): 25–47.

298

n o t e s t o p ag es 131–135

8. Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 6 (1959): 140–57. 9. RGASPI, 71/42/2/87, 94–96, 106; RGASPI, 71/42/3/202–3. On presentation of the terror, see Fedenko, Khrushchev’s New History, 98–106. 10. RGANI, 5/33/57/24–26; RGANI, 5/30/349 (entire). Questions about terror (submitted to Kommunist) prior to the publication of the new textbook: RGASPI, 599/1/430/22, 40, 42. 11. For example, Valtseva, “Kvartira 13”; Nikolaeva, “Bitva v puti.” 12. Valtseva’s novella was heavily criticized as part of attacks on the Moscow Union in 1957, and Nikolaeva’s portrayal of a relative of a terror victim was substantially rewritten for the novel’s book publication and subsequent film adaptation (RGALI, 2453/4/552, 558, 664). Cohen notes the muted anti-Stalinism of literature before 1961 (Cohen, “The Stalin Question after Stalin”). 13. Tvardovskii, “Za dal’iu dal’.” On Khrushchev’s role in publishing text, see Taubman, Khrushchev, 387–88. 14. Marsh, Images of Dictatorship, 59. For a contemporary claim by Ketlinskaia’s colleagues that this was the first post-Stalinist novel about 1937, see a Moscow Union discussion of 1960 prose (RGALI, 2464/3/377/56–59). 15. Ketlinskaia, “Inache zhit’ ne stoit.” On Simonov, see chapter 5. 16. Dudintsev was an extreme variation on this tradition (see chapter 2). A more conventional (though still controversial) production novel was Nikolaeva, “Bitva v puti.” For an analysis of some such novels, see e.g. Problems of Communism, March 1959, 44–50. 17. Denis Kozlov argues that responses to Dudintsev’s novel were the first phase in coming to terms with the terror through literature: Kozlov, “Naming the Social Evil.” 18. On the novel’s multiple versions and long writing process, see RGALI, 2816/1/5; RGALI, 2816/1/383/49. On Ketlinskaia’s Stalin-era texts, see e.g. Krylova, “Identity, Agency, and the ‘First Soviet Generation’ ”; Marsh, “Women Writers of the 1930s,” and RGALI, 618/17/258/52. On Ketlinskaia in the thaw, see Afiani et al., Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1953–1957, 218–20, 228–48, 264–65, 331–36. Cf. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/9/163 (support of Dudintsev in 1956). 19. Marsh, Images of Dictatorship, 59. 20. The review from the historian Timofeevskii was the longest, at twenty pages (RGALI, 618/17/258/192–209). 21. See Chapter 3. 22. RGALI, 618/17/258/84, 90. 23. Ibid., l. 140. 24. For somewhat positive views of Stalin, see e.g. LG, 29 December 1960, 1–3; Leningradskaia Pravda, 16 November 1960, 3. For a much less positive view of Stalin, see the review (significantly published after the 22nd Congress’ antiStalinist attacks): Pod”em, no. 4 (1962): 140–46. 25. RGALI, 618/17/258/83, 193. 26. Ibid., ll. 61, 168, 120, 133.

notes to p ag e s 13 5 –1 4 0 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

299

Ibid., ll. 161–62. Ibid., ll. 121, 129, 134, 136, 140. Ibid., ll. 118, 121, 124, 130, 136. On the non-literary dimensions of this issue, see Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer. RGALI, 618/17/258/117. Ibid., l. 171. Ibid., l. 108. Ibid. RGALI, 618/17/258/104, 109. Tolczyk, See No Evil. RGANI, 5/37/82/1182. In this sense, this early text supports Catherine Merridale’s argument about the irrelevance of “trauma” in Russian culture. By contrast, though, the period after the 22nd Congress (examined in the next section) witnessed unprecedented exploration of terror as trauma (Merridale, Night of Stone; Merridale, “Soviet Memories”). RGALI, 618/17/258/12, 17. Ibid., l. 17. Another claim that this is the first narrative of 1937 (l. 32). Ibid., ll. 31, 22. For example, a perpetrator letter in RGALI, 2816/1/383/18–24. Victim letter: RGALI, 2816/1/382/81. On lack of discussion of the terror at the time that it was occurring, see e.g. Thurston, “Fear and Belief in the USSR’s Great Terror.” RGALI, 618/17/258/32 (other references to understanding personal past: ll. 23, 31, 62). Tolczyk, See No Evil. RGALI, 2816/1/383/6, 5. Ibid., l. 14; RGALI, 2816/1/382/94–95; RGALI, 2816/1/383/5, 6, 9, 11; RGALI, 618/17/258/65, 68, 73–77. Ibid., l. 22. RGALI, 2816/1/383/15; cf. RGALI, 2816/1/382/89; RGALI, 618/17/258/31. For a fascinating study of changing ideas of the “soul” in post-war Soviet literature, see Krylova, “Healers of Wounded Souls.” RGALI, 618/17/258/68. Other complaints about the harsh review: ll. 64–69, 74–77. The review was in Literatura i zhizn’, 16 December 1960, 4. RGALI, 2816/1/383/1–2 (reference to radost’). One reader’s letter to the author claimed to have spoken to one of the editors at Znamia, and discovered that the novel’s ambiguous treatment of Stalin was intended to avoid political controversy (RGALI, 2618/1/382/89). RGALI, 2816/1/383/35–36. Ibid., ll. 16–17. Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Alexander, “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals.” Clark, The Soviet Novel.

3 00

n o t e s t o p ag es 140–143

57. Alexander, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. For an application of these ideas to a socialist context, including an analysis of why “cultural memory” may not reflect “communicative memory” of trauma (e.g. if individual memories do not “link up” into a collective, public narrative), see Wemhauer, “Regime Changes of Memory.” 58. XXII s”ezd KPSS, vol. 3: 119–21. 59. Ibid., 119–21, 114; vol. 2: 404. 60. XXII s”ezd KPSS, vol. 1: 291–92; vol. 2: 116, 163, 583; vol. 3: 54, 116. 61. For various perspectives on the role of leaders and other state actors in removing traumatic events from a state of latency, see e.g. Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome; Kansteiner, “Finding Meanings in Memory”; Herf, Divided Memory. For a fascinating study of the “semi-latent” state of Holocaust memory in post-war West Germany, see Moeller, “War Stories.” 62. XXII s”ezd KPSS, vol. 2: 528–29 (Tvardovskii), and vol. 3: 181–88 (Kochetov). On the contrast between these two approaches, defined broadly as “truth” and “lies,” see Vail’ and Genis, 60-e, 676–86. 63. Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 5 (1962): 134–44. 64. RGANI, 5/33/196/200–207 (quotations l. 200). 65. Ibid. 66. RGASPI, 71/42/9/22. 67. Cohen, “The Stalin Question after Stalin,” esp. 112. 68. For especially detailed coverage of the terror, see e.g. Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 11 (1963): 57–72; Novyi mir, no. 11 (1962): 229–41. Also see following two notes. 69. For example, Pravda, 5 April 1962, 2; Voprosy istorii, no. 6 (1962): 3–16; no. 9 (1963): 21–36; Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 11 (1963): 56–63. 70. On Soviet law during the terror, see e.g. Pravda, 27 May 1962, 2–3; Izvestiia, 8 February 1962, 3–4. On the NKVD, see e.g. Kommunist, no. 18 (1962): 3–29; no. 1 (1963): 49–59; Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 1 (1963): 66–75; no. 2 (1964): 17–29. For examples of the anxiety that the editing of such innovative texts about terror caused (within Kommunist), see RGASPI, 599/1/190/70–73, 104–8. 71. A good example of such a balance, in an article written by Semichastnyi himself, is Pravda, 20 November 1962, 3. See also his memories of negative literary portrayals: Semichastnyi, Bespokoinoe serdtse, 247. On images of the police in the post-Stalin period, see also Elkner, “The Changing Face of Repression under Khrushchev,” and Geller (Heller), Kontsentratsionnyi mir i sovetskaia literatura, which includes analysis of the trope of the “repentant Chekist” in Soviet literature. 72. For example, the KGB insisted on editing Lev Sheinin’s play Igra bez pravil to bring it into line with the KGB’s “operational interests,” though this happened just before the 22nd Congress, and the play was published after the congress (GARF, 9425/1/1090/18). See also a report of the Ukrainian KGB successfully objecting to a negative depiction of “Chekists” in a play in 1964: GARF, 9425/1/1209/112. See also a later example, in 1968, of KGB pressure leading

notes to p ag e s 1 4 3–1 4 9

73.

74.

75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

30 1

to a ban on a play with an unflattering depiction of the secret police (GARF, 9425/1/1289/14). For a contemporary account of such commemoration, see Problems of Communism, March 1963, 48–59. See also Van Goudoever, The Limits of De-Stalinization in the Soviet Union. On production of book biographies, see RGASPI, 623/1/518 (entire), 623/1/520/24, 38–39; RGANI, 5/55/8/116–22. RGANI, 5/55/66/34. For an example of a memoir about terror (by the wife of a victim) being consigned to this archive during the late Khrushchev era, because of concerns that its publication might be exploited by anti-Soviet forces, see RGANI, 5/55/8/26, 28. An example of the narratives held in the archive: RGASPI, 560/1/11. Petitions and official responses: e.g. RGANI, 5/33/197 (entire); RGANI, 5/55/3 (entire); RGANI, 5/55/68 (entire). RGASPI, 623/1/519/37–38, 43, 49; RGASPI, 623/1/549/11–14, 42. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/36/50, 72. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/36/128. See, for example, critics section meeting in early 1962 with much testimony of losses suffered within Soviet literary criticism, explicitly inspired by Shchipachev’s earlier announcement of the toll of terror (RGALI, 2464/3/676). See chapter 2. LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust. For an application of these ideas to postSoviet memories of terror, see Etkind, “Post-Soviet Hauntology.” RGALI, 2464/3/477/80; RGALI, 2464/3/677; ML, 22 November 1962, 2. See this chapter’s final section for a brief examination of Nekrasov’s text. Zlobin, “Stepan Zlobin.” RGALI, 2464/3/477/23. ML, 16 May 1962, 3; Aldan-Semenov, “Barel’ef na skale.” On this work, see Tolczyk, See No Evil, 210–52. In February 1962, the head of the union party organization had offered a slightly different perspective, urging writers to take great care with writing about “this wound [which is] still fresh” (TsAOPIM, 8132/1/40/19). RGALI, 2464/3/477/27–46. Kosterina was published, Chukovskaia was not (see next section). RGALI, 2464/3/477/46–48. ML, 30 December 1962, 3. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/41/10–20. Ibid. On the March attempt to expel Lesiuchevskii, see Chukovsky, Diary, 459; Benno, “The Political Aspect,” 190–93. On El’sburg, see RGALI, 2464/3/53/2 (only the protocol is available, indicating that many speakers participated in the discussion, including high-ranking figures such as Shchipachev, Mal’tsev, Borshchagovskii). Orlova, Vospominaniia o neproshedshem vremeni, 196, attributes a leading role to the critic Chicherov.

3 02

n o t e s t o p ag es 149–15 5

95. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/41/124–30, 139–44; cf. Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, 84. 96. TsAOPIM, 8132/1/41/170–71; Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts, 14. 97. Ermilov had been one of the few members to try to impose a more conservative line on the cult of personality within the union, interpreting the December CC meetings as a call for caution (TsAOPIM, 8132/1/41/109). On the Ermilov dispute, see Kozlov, “The Readers of Novyi mir,” chapter 5. 98. RGALI, 2464/3/492 (entire). 99. This was despite CC anxieties, raised as early as the end of 1961, about the radical agenda of de-Stalinization being pursued by Zlobin and others at the union (Afiani et al., Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1958–1964, 474–85). 100. Solzhenitsyn, “Ivan Denisovich.” Cf. Lakshin, Novyi mir vo vremena Khrushcheva; Tolczyk, See No Evil, 253–310. 101. Stenograms of these meetings in Aimermakher, Ideologicheskie komissii, 293–382, and Tomilina et al., Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, vol. 2: 533–601. 102. Aimermakher, Ideologicheskie komissii, 372–73. 103. Tomilina, Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, 546–47. 104. Serebriakova’s speech is in Ibid., 573–76. 105. On “scar literature” in China—that is, the official authorization of Chinese literature to explore some of the traumas of the past, especially the Mao period—see Barme, “History for the Masses.” 106. Tomilina et al., Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, vol. 2: 574. 107. Khrushchev’s speech was translated as The Great Strength of Soviet Literature and Art. Several drafts of the speech in Tomilina et al., Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, vol. 2: 601–28. 108. Tomilina et al., Nikita Sergeevich Khrushchev, vol. 2: 604. 109. Ibid., 628. 110. Ibid., 619. 111. The Great Strength of Soviet Literature and Art, 17. 112. Ibid., 33. 113. SSSR: Vnutrennye protivorechiia, vol. 6: 189–207. See also the subsequent union-level Writers Union meeting’s condemnations of the Moscow Union, and its agenda of “blackening the past,” with affirmations of a highly positive memory of the Stalinist past (RGALI, 631/30/958). 114. See Chapter 2. 115. Literaturnaia Rossiia (LR), no. 2 (1963): 6–7. 116. RGALI, 2938/2/3/36–106. 117. LR, no. 3 (1963): 6–7. 118. On the political uses of the terms “normal” and “normalization,” see Olick, “What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?” 119. RGALI, 2938/2/1/48. 120. Ibid., l. 51. 121. RGALI, 2938/2/1/62.

note s to p ag e s 1 5 5 –1 5 8

30 3

122. This was especially well captured in the RSFSR Union’s success in reversing the Moscow Union’s decision to expel El’sburg; he was reinstated in spring 1963 (RGALI, 2464/3/106/17). 123. RGALI, 2464/3/85. Cf. Kopelev and Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, 88; Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts, 30–51, 186–201; Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin, 81. 124. SSSR: Vnutrennye protivorechiia, no. 6: 205; Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, 306, 311. 125. RGALI, 2464/3/103; December 1963 calls for “affirmation” and optimism (RGALI, 2464/3/490/9–10). 126. See the more generic, less openly “Stalinist,” criticisms of writing about victims and “dark” literature in the RSFSR Union’s summer 1963 meetings: RGALI, 2938/2/7/304. 127. Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts, 30–51, 59, 86–89; Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin, 84, 100; Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia, 303, sees the June 1963 plenum as the “final chord” in series of party shifts on intelligentsia policy. 128. On the imposition and lifting of this ban, see Spechler, Permitted Dissent, 177, 184–87, 198–99. On the peak year of publication, 1964, see Tolczyk, See No Evil, 210–52. Discussions and disputes between the unions over the cult of personality: RGALI, 2464/3/118, 489, 500 (entire; Moscow Union discussions of Ivan Denisovich in run-up to 1964 Lenin prize); RGALI, 2938/2/45 (entire; end of year reviews of Soviet prose, in February 1964, by both unions). 129. Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile; Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance. Henri Rousso’s study of the memory of Vichy combines a psychoanalytical and constructionist perspective: The Vichy Syndrome. On the contestation between such framings of Holocaust memory in post-war Germany, see Adorno, “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?”; Olick, “What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?”; Herf, “The Emergence and Legacies of Divided Memory”; LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust; Maier, The Unmasterable Past. 130. Stern, Remembering Pinochet’s Chile, 119. 131. Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance, 8. Cf. Olick, “What Does It Mean to Normalize the Past?”; Olick, States of Memory. 132. Cohen, “The Stalin Question after Stalin,” 94. 133. Spechler makes a related argument about Novyi mir and its limited “permitted dissent” (Spechler, Permitted Dissent). 134. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting; Adorno, “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” 135. The term is from Etkind’s analysis of the failure to confront terror in postSoviet culture (Etkind, “Post-Soviet Hauntology”). 136. Cohen, “The Stalin Question after Stalin”; Spechler, Permitted Dissent. See also Hayward, Soviet Literature in the Sixties, in which several chapters note the prominence of anti-Stalinist fiction in this period, but see it as conforming to a clear party line, unlike my argument here. 137. Politicheskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 51–58; Chukovsky, Diary, 479–80.

3 04

n o t e s t o p ag es 15 8–160

138. Zorin, “Druz’ia i gody.” 139. Reviews of some of the many Soviet productions of Zorin’s play, noting and discussing the play’s engagement with the theme of terror include: Teatral’naia zhizn’, no. 8 (1963): 26–27; no. 10 (1963): 1–2; no. 13 (1963): 1; no. 15 (1963): 21; and no. 16 (1963): 7; Teatr, no. 9 (1962): 52–60; and no. 9 (1963): 20–22. 140. Pravda calls these three chapters “possibly the most powerful in the book” and described the “hydra-headed monster” created by denunciation (Pravda, 10 January 1962, 2). Oktiabr’, no. 2 (1962): 200–208, review of Stel’makh’s text calls the “drama of 1937” a “tragic, exceptional accident” that the Soviet people were able to overcome. 141. Balter, “Do svidaniia, mal’chiki!” Novel cited to admit Balter to Moscow Union (RGALI, 2464/3/477/46). Praise for novel from conservative critics included: LR, no. 10 (1963): 10; Oktiabr’, no. 4 (1963): 178–92. The most thoughtful review of the work’s consideration of “when and how what we call the cult of personality began” was in Novyi mir, no. 1 (1963): 249–53. On the film adaptation, see RGALI, 2453/4/2527 (entire). 142. Kosterina, “Dnevnik Niny Kosteriny.” Reviews of Kosterina, and of Kosterina and Balter together: Komsomol’skaia Pravda (KP), 27 November 1963, 2, and 6 March 1963, 4; 31 January 1964, 3. 143. For an early conservative criticism of a narrative of 1937 (Voronin’s 1962 novella Dve zhizni) for its excessive focus on that year, and its failure to show the “main trajectory of history,” see Oktiabr’, no. 9 (1962): 185–93. 144. Nikul’kov, “V buche.” Praise for the novel at the RSFSR Union: RGALI, 2938/2/45/150, 221. Nikul’kov himself used RSFSR Union discussions to criticize Soviet literature’s excessive and excessively negative attention to the cult of personality (e.g. RGALI, 2938/2/1/163–69). 145. RGALI, 2938/2/1/163–69, and “objectivity” praised in RSFSR Union review of text: RGALI, 2938/2/13. Nikul’kov contrasted to literary texts and critics “reducing everything only to facts of infraction of the law”: LR, no. 10 (1964): 20. 146. RGALI, 2938/2/13; LR, no. 33 (1964): 20–21, praises “broad and multi-faceted” view of history and broad chronological perspective across 1920s and 1930s. 147. Nikul’kov, “V buche,” no. 3: 55, 59; no. 4: 67. Author explains his “Marxist” view that Stalin alone cannot be held responsible for terror (RGALI, 2938/2/13/341). Call for more detail on Stalin’s role in this “greatest of tragedies” rejected in union discussion of the book edition (ll. 324, 327). 148. RGALI, 2938/2/45/150, 221. 149. Nikul’kov, “V buche,” no. 3: 83; no. 4: 101. 150. Ibid., no. 4: 97. 151. Ibid., 118. 152. Ibid., 119–21. Term from discussion of book edition, RGALI, 2938/2/13/315. 153. Stadniuk, “Liudi ne angely.” On the protracted editing and publication of this work, see Stadniuk, Ispoved’ Stalinista, 298. 154. Spechler, Permitted Dissent; Kozlov, “The Readers of Novyi mir.”

notes to p ag e s 16 0 –1 6 3

30 5

155. RGALI, 1702/89/141/4–5 (rejection of Ginzburg’s Into the Whirlwind). A different kind of rejection was meted out to Leonid Pervomaiskii’s Wild Honey, because of its excessively positive portrait of an NKVD employee, felt to be inappropriate when so little terror literature had yet been published (RGALI, 1702/9/67/3–4). The journal also rejected many other manuscripts for being too crude in their depiction of victims and perpetrators (e.g. RGALI, 1702/9/70). Examples of careful selection (and rejection) of narratives of the cult of personality by other journals at this time: RGALI, 2931/1/55/157–58; RGALI, 2931/1/70 (Moskva); RGALI, 618/17/403, 406 (entire; Znamia). 156. Kozlov, “The Readers of Novyi mir.” 157. On censorship of Novyi mir in the late Khrushchev era, see GARF, 9425/1/1114/33, 91; GARF 9425/1/1118/29–35; GARF, 9425/1/1147/2–4, 17, 21, 55; GARF, 9425/1/1153/25, 55–58, 135; GARF, 9425/1/1176/79, 122, 132. Cf. Spechler, Permitted Dissent, 166–238. On difficulties of getting through party and state censorship, see also: Lakshin, Novyi mir vo vremena Khrushcheva; Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik. The best overall account of Soviet fiction about 1937 is Geller (Heller), Kontsentratsionnyi mir i sovetskaia literature, 256–318. Gulag fiction has received far more coverage in Geller (Heller), and in Tolczyk, See No Evil; Toker, Return from the Archipelago. 158. Solzhenitsyn, “Sluchai na stantsii Krechetovka.” 159. Oktiabr’, no. 4 (1963): 198–207, which dislikes the work’s portrayal of 1937 as an “alternative reality,” one that is “threatening, all-powerful, the only one.” Compare criticism of “gloomy” work in KP, 27 November 1963, 2. A more positive reading of the story is in Voprosy literatury (VL), no. 11 (1963), which analyzes the “tragedy” of Zotov’s loss of trust in ordinary people and his excessive trust in Stalin. Compare praise for work’s depiction of suspiciousness and psychosis in Moscow Union discussion in early 1964 (RGALI, 2938/2/45/364). 160. Gorbatov, “Gody i voiny.” On cuts to Gorbatov’s work, see GARF, 9425/1/1176/132. 161. Spechler, Permitted Dissent, 203–5, mentions Dombrovskii several times in her account of the resurgence of fiction and non-fiction about terror after 1963, but does not analyze the work in depth. The most detailed study is Doyle, Iurii Dombrovskii. 162. Dombrovskii, “Khranitel’ drevnostei.” Another work set mostly in 1937 was Voronin, Dve zhizni. 163. Geller (Heller), Kontsentratsionnyi mir i sovetskaia literatura, 250–51. 164. Dombrovskii, Khranitel’ drevnostei, 8. 165. Sibirskie ogni, no. 10 (1965): 179–81. 166. Dombrovskii, Menia ubit’ khoteli eti suki, 151–60. 167. RGALI, 1702/9/116/3, 5. 168. A. Berzer, “Khranitel’ ognia,” 591–602. 169. RGALI, 1702/9/116/3–7. 170. Ibid., l. 5.

3 06

n o t e s t o p ag es 164–167

171. Ibid., ll. 7, 9. 172. Berzer, “Khranitel’ ognia.” 173. RGALI, 1702/9/116/9. Gorbatov’s memoirs were indeed discussed and compared with Dombrovskii’s work at this very meeting. 174. Ibid., ll. 13, 15, 17. Doyle, whose account of these changes to the manuscript is the most detailed available, sees the novel as improved by this omission, as it focuses the novel more tightly on 1937 (Iurii Dombrovskii). 175. Lakshin, Novyi mir vo vremena Khrushcheva, 234. 176. Ibid., 245; Berzer, “Khranitel’ ognia.” 177. GARF, 9425/1/1176/79. On the delays to publication and the cuts, see also Doyle, Iurii Dombrovskii, 34–37, 128–32; Lakshin, Novyi mir vo vremena Khrushcheva, 242–45; Dombrovskii, Khranitel’ drevnostei, 20–24. 178. Sibirskie ogni, no. 10 (1965): 179–81. 179. On the overwhelmingly positive popular reaction, see Berzer, “Khranitel’ ognia,” 602. 180. Dombrovskii, Menia ubit’ khoteli eti suki, 179–81. 181. Quoted in Shtokman, “Strela v polete,” 9. 182. Nina Kosterina’s diary said to show “moral supremacy of the Soviet person” (KP, 6 March 1963, 4). Another optimistic reading of Kosterina, Balter and Solzhenitsyn’s “Sluchai na stantsii Krechetovka,” which claimed that the “cult of personality” was capable of “bending” the Soviet people but not breaking their Leninist spirit: KP, 31 January 1964, 3–4. Simonov’s hero, Serpilin, who survives arrest and imprisonment in 1937 to return to the front in 1964, provided a particularly good example of the “unbreakable” Soviet man (e.g. KP, 5 January 1964, 4); see also next chapter. 183. Moskva, no. 9 (1964): 200–209. Another review claimed that the hero of Stadniuk’s novel illustrates how “no 1937 could reduce [Soviet man] to the bare man” (LR, no. 9 (1963): 14). 184. See e.g. the optimistic ending of a propaganda text exploring the many negative consequences of the cult of personality: O kul’te lichnosti i avtoritete (Moscow: Znanie, 1962), and also Jones, “Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories?” 185. On “overcoming” difficulties as the “master plot” of the Stalin-era novel, see Clark, The Soviet Novel. 186. “Kira Georgievna,” Novyi mir, no. 6 (1961): 70–127. 187. On Kira Georgievna, see also Jones, “Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories?” 188. RGALI, 1702/8/629 (entire). 189. Ibid., ll. 33–34. 190. Apart from the works focused on below, see e.g. Agranenko, Pod odnoi iz krysh . . . my vmeste, and the returnee hero of Konstantin Simonov’s two Khrushchev-era novels (see chapter 5). On Gulag returnees in life and literature, see also Adler, The Gulag Survivor; Toker, Return from the Archipelago; Etkind, “A Parable of Misrecognition.”

note s to p ag e s 16 7 –17 1

30 7

191. Adler, The Gulag Survivor; Toker, Return from the Archipelago; Sherbakova, “The Gulag in Memory.” 192. Aleshin, “Palata”; Alshits and Rakov, Opasnee vraga; Rozov, Pered uzhinom. 193. Pogodin, “Vernost’ ”; Ikramov and Tendriakov, “Belyi flag.” 194. Pogodin, “Vernost’ ”; Pogodin, Chernye ptitsy; Aleshin, Vstrechi na greshnoi zemle, 212; Teatral’naia zhizn’, no. 4 (1963): 9–10. 195. Aleshin, Vstrechi na greshnoi zemle, 210–12; Teatr, no. 2 (1963): 15–19. 196. Pogodin, “Vernost’,” 230. 197. Ibid., 287. On victims’ resentment, see also Wood, Vectors of Memory; Langer, Holocaust Testimonies. 198. Aleshin, Vstrechi na greshnoi zemle, 210. 199. Pogodin, Chernye ptitsy, 79–80. 200. Ibid. 201. Teatr, no. 2 (1963): 15–19; Teatral’naia zhizn’, no. 5 (1963): 13. Reviews continued to encourage harsh judgements of Krutoiarov: e.g. Sovetskaia kul’tura, 7 February 1963, 2. 202. Response to March 1963 meeting with intelligentsia praises play as one of the few non-problematic parts of the repertoire (Teatral’naia zhizn’, no. 10 (1963): 1–2). 203. Moskovskaia pravda, 16 November 1962, 4. 204. Continued praise from the conservative press, e.g. LR, no. 9 (1963): 18–19; no. 6 (1963): 14–15; Oktiabr’, no. 8 (1963), 180–88. 205. Teatral’naia zhizn’, no. 8 (1963): 26–27. 206. Teatral’naia zhizn’, no. 21 (1963): 24. 207. For example, a review circulating in samizdat, denouncing the unrealistically limited discussion of perpetrator guilt (Politicheskii dnevnik, vol. 2: 211–13), and a discussion at Mosfil’m, where the refusal to probe the conflict between returnees and their accusers led to rejection of a film adaptation (RGALI, 2453/4/276 (entire)). 208. Aikermakher, Ideologicheskie komissii TsK KPSS, 1958–1964, 394. Earlier praise for the play, contrasting it to others with wrong approach to the cult of personality: Sovetskaia kul’tura (SK), 19 March 1963, 2–3; 25 May 1963, 3; 24 August 1963, 1. 209. RGASPI-m, 1/32/1117/63; RGASPI-m, 1/4/2612/233–34; RGASPI-m, 1/5/887/259; RGASPI-m, 1/5/887/259. 210. The play was also criticized by Dolmatovskii at the March 1963 Writers Union plenum (RGALI, 631/30/958/1), and at a Komsomol meeting on youth literature in 1963 (RGASPI-m, 1/32/1118 (entire)). Cf. Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts, 51. 211. LG, 12 March 1963, 2. 212. Aimermakher, Ideologicheskie komissii TsK KPSS, 1958–1964, 393, 448. Mihajlov, Moscow Summer, 94–95, suggests that Soviet criticism of The White Flag subsided after a more positive reception for the play abroad. 213. Ikramov and Tendriakov, “Belyi flag,” 221.

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n o t e s t o p ag es 171–175

214. 215. 216. 217. 218.

Ibid., 232. Znamia, no. 5 (1963): 189–203; Zvezda, no. 10 (1963): 187–90. Moskva, no. 8 (1963): 214–216. Aimermakher, Ideologicheskie komissii TsK KPSS, 1958–1964, 447–48. SK, 5 March 1963, 3. Criticisms of notion of history as repetitious in e.g. Kommunist no. 4 (1964): 46–48 (citing Il’ichev’s criticisms); Teatr, no. 10 (1963): 60–67. 219. Moskva, no. 8 (1963): 214–16. 220. Maksimov, “Zhiv chelovek”; Trifonov, “Utolenie zhazhdy”; Bondarev, “Tishina.” For a fuller analysis of Trifonov’s novel, see Jones, “Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories?” On Bondarev’s text, see Jones, “Breaking the Silence.” Motifs of flight in: Semenov, “Pri ispolnenii sluzhebnykh obiazannostei,” a work adapted into a 1964 film; and in another, more conservative work also using flight to symbolize the overcoming of negative memories of Stalinism: Chakovskii, Svet dalekoi zvezdy. On flight as a motif of Stalinist literature and film, see e.g. Bergman, “Valerii Chkalov.” Space flight in the Khrushchev era had revitalized this motif. c h ap t e r f i ve : between my th a nd me mor y 1. RGALI, 618/17/184/13–14. 2. First published as K. Simonov, “Zhivye i mertvye,” Znamia (1959) 10: 10–55; 11: 56–124; 12: 3–107; and K. Simonov, “Soldatami ne rozhdaiutsia,” Znamia (1963) 8: 13–69; 9: 3–17; 10: 3–64; 11: 3–44; and (1964) 1: 3–52; 2: 3–57; 3: 13–67; 4: 20–59; 5: 79–122. 3. Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat, 6. 4. Several historians have alluded to Simonov’s especial importance to memories of war and Stalinism, without elaborating further (e.g. Merridale, “Soviet Memories”; Kudryashov, “Remembering and Researching the War”). 5. Foreign editions include Simonov, Victims and Heroes. Foreigners’ letters can be found in e.g. RGALI, 1814/8/8 (entire). 6. On previous confrontation of war trauma, see e.g. Krylova, “Healers of Wounded Souls”; Kukulin, “Regulirovanie boli.” 7. Figes, The Whisperers, 620; Frank Ellis claims that literature about the war, including Simonov’s writing, could never only concern the war, but had to engage also with the terror, collaboration, and even collectivization (Ellis, And Their Mothers Wept). 8. On the coexistence and contestation between popular and public memory, see e.g. Bodnar, Remaking America; Assmann and Czaplicka, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”; Jay Winter suggests “remembrance” better captures the activities of collectives in recalling war and other events, and claims memory is “unstable, plastic, synthetic and repeatedly reshaped,” and that “collective remembrance is rarely what the state tells us to remember” (Remembering War, 4, 277); Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper, “The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration”; Bucur, Heroes and Victims. On war memory and literature,

note s to p ag e s 17 6 –17 7

9.

10.

11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

30 9

especially popular literature, see e.g. Vance, Death so Noble; Zehfuss, Wounds of Memory. Lazarev, “Russian Literature on the War and Historical Truth”; Ellis, The Damned and the Dead; McMillin, “The Second World War in Official and Unofficial Russian Prose”; Kukulin, “Regulirovanie boli”; Lovell, The Shadow of War, 9. On historiography, see Gallagher, The Soviet History of World War II; Bialer, Stalin and His Generals. On film, see Youngblood, Russian War Films; Woll, Real Images, 71–99 and passim. Examples of groundbreaking film and literature about the war, especially its early period, include the 1956 film (in which Simonov was involved), Bessmertnyi garnizon, and the early prose works of Iurii Bondarev and Grigorii Baklanov. This was an agenda endorsed, at least initially, by the party authorities, e.g. LG, 7 May 1955, 1; 2 June 1955, 3. Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 111. Like many other analysts of war literature of the thaw, however, Tumarkin alludes to, but does not examine more closely, the effects of such groundbreaking texts; cf. Kudryashov, “Remembering and Researching the War,” who also mentions readers’ letters as a useful and rich source for popular memories, but does not elaborate. The Soviet press criticized Comrades in Arms in the years between Stalin’s death and the publication of The Living and the Dead, e.g. LG, 16 May 1955, 2–3. On the 1952 publication of Comrades in Arms in Novyi mir, see Simonov, Istorii tiazhelaia voda, 268–72; Karaganov, Konstantin Simonov, 117–18. On Simonov’s growing discontentment with Comrades, see Lazarev, Konstantin Simonov, 172–83. Figes, The Whisperers: 379–454; Ortenberg, Eto ostanetsia navsegda, 48–75. Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 246–47. Figes, The Whisperers, 593, 614–15; Lazarev, Shestoi etazh, 201; Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 74, 85, 113. Pankin, Chetyre ia Konstantina Simonova, 245–67; Figes, The Whisperers, 382, 615; Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 160, 175 (on use of diaries). See also next chapter, on Simonov’s later attempts to publish these diaries. Figes, The Whisperers, 383. K. Simonov, “Pered novoi rabotoi,” 266–80 (272). On other real-life inspirations for characters, see Karaganov, Konstantin Simonov, 151, 162–67. Simonov, “Pered novoi rabotoi,” 267, 271. Ibid., 267; Lazarev, Konstantin Simonov, 189. He also describes Simonov’s frustration at the state’s refusal to create an official archive of soldiers’ testimony, forcing Simonov to store the material in his own domestic archive (203). Cf. Figes, The Whisperers, 621; Karaganov, Konstantin Simonov, 174. Vance, Death so Noble, 6. For a claim that the use of these many testimonies creates “polyphony” in the novel, see Karaganov, Konstantin Simonov, 152. Simonov, “Pered novoi rabotoi,” 270. On the importance of Tolstoi for Simonov’s historical fiction, see Karaganov, Konstantin Simonov, 145, 190 (especially the Tolstoi quotation, frequently cited

3 10

24.

25.

26.

27. 28.

29.

30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

n o t e s t o p ag es 177–179 by Simonov: “character is expressed even more clearly in an era of failures and defeats”; Lazarev, Konstantin Simonov, 240 Simonov, “Pered novoi rabotoi,” 270; Lazarev, Konstantin Simonov, 207. Some critics did nevertheless point out a lack of psychological depth in Sintsov’s depiction (Novyi mir, no. 6 (1960): 209–23; no. 11 (1961): 217–33). RGALI, 618/17/184/118–22, 132–34; Molodaia gvardiia (MG), no. 3 (1960): 205–9; Krasnaia zvezda (KZ), 6 February 1960; LG, 26 January 1961. For a defense of the narrow focus on Sintsov, seeing him as a Pierre Bezukhov-style observer of war, see VL, no. 4 (1961): 25–33, and no. 7 (1961): 11. Major episodes of distrust of Sintsov punctuate the novel from start to finish (Simonov, Zhivye i mertvye, 195–203, 273–769, 284–88, 355–81, 466–75), and he finds them deeply traumatic (323–28, 401–4). Simonov, “Pered novoi rabotoi,” 276. The only reviews to mention the cult of personality directly were Literatura i zhizn’ (hereafter L i zh), 8 May 1960; and LG, 21 March 1961, 2–3. The review that most criticized the novel’s failure to move beyond embryonic reflections on Stalin and the terror was in Novyi mir, no. 6 (1960): 209–23 (cf. VL, no. 7 (1961): 11). Brief or oblique references to terror and to Sintsov’s and Serpilin’s victimhood in KZ, 6 February 1960; and LG, 21 March 1961, 2–3. See the pre-publication review by Gen. Major Fokin (RGALI, 618/17/184/ 123–27), who criticized the manuscript for “some kind of murky hint at the errors that took place, rather than an explanation of Stalin’s behavior,” and similar criticisms at the Frunze academy (RGALI, 618/17/214/75–82). Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 131. Simonov, Zhivye i mertvye: 17, 36, 42, 118, 305, 441–42, 178. Ibid., 116. Simonov publicly acclaimed returnees’ courage and lack of resentment at the time of the novel’s publication, e.g. Simonov, “Pered novoi rabotoi,” 271. Simonov, Zhivye i mertvye, 491–93. Ibid., 116, 118, 159–63, 491, 493. Ibid., 438, 443, 490. Meanwhile, Sintsov’s reaction to Stalin’s July 1941 speech is very positive (77). Serpilin at one point explicitly claims that now (i.e. wartime) is not the time to remember the terror and engage in retribution (Ibid., 163), although even in this novel, he cannot quite suppress his memories of terror (132). On censorship and self-censorship, see Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 110; Pankin, Chetyre ia Konstantina Simonova, 259; Lazarev, Shestoi etazh, 201; Simonov, Istorii tiazhelaia voda, 250–87. RGALI, 2453/4/723/28–30. This belief about the living and dead was frequently reiterated by the author (e.g. Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 130, 168–69). Pankin, Chetyre ia Konstantina Simonova, 267. Pravda, 5 July 1964; LR, no. 26 (1964): 15, 20; Izvestiia, 30 May 1964; LG, 23 May 1964. These reviews all mentioned the work’s portrait of Stalin, as did

note s to p ag e s 17 9 –184

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

31 1

the reviews in: Sovetskaia Rossiia (SR), 31 July 1964; KZ, 19 August 1964; LR, no. 1 (1965): 5; KP, 7 July 1964. Even just before the 22nd Congress, Simonov’s position had evolved from his refusal to touch upon 1937, articulated at the Frunze academy conference. In a letter of August 1961, he insists that it must be illuminated “with little candles in hand” (Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 131). Ibid., 144–45. Simonov, Soldatami ne rozhdaiutsia, 71–73, 85–87, 92. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 110. Ibid., 107–8. Ibid., 111, 458, 521–22. Ibid., 581–83. Serpilin had earlier remembered Grin’ko, during the argument with his son and subsequent reflection on the terror (Ibid., 113), but he had not then resolved to write a letter. This time, he suppresses his fearful desire not to send it (583). Marsh, Images of Dictatorship, 61. A roughly contemporaneous poetic portrait of Stalin, also in the Kremlin, is Tvardovskii, “Za dal’iu dal’.” LR, no. 1 (1965): 8 (Simonov concedes the portrait is probably not the “absolute truth”). Quotation from Soldatami ne rozhdaiutsia, 600. Serpilin’s honest narrative of terror starts to emerge prior to his summons (589), and continues in the encounter (596–601, especially 600, 608). Ibid., 595–96. Ibid., 598–601. Ibid., 609. Ibid., 615–23. Ibid., 620, 621, 623. Ibid., 598. Ibid., 602–3. Ibid., 607. More minor characters whose unquestioning belief in Stalin is gently criticized include Serpilin’s wife (Ibid., 113) and Serpilin’s colleague, Pikin (19). Ibid., 182, 153–60. Ibid., 263–64. Ibid.; cf. 431–32. “Pis’ma k K. Simonovu,” 86. RGALI 618/18/80/49. The idea of “hydraulic” release of emotion is critiqued in Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History.” Ortenberg, Eto ostanetsia navsegda, 57. Lazarev, Shestoi etazh, 192. Ortenberg, Eto ostanetsia navsegda, 48–75. “Pis’ma k K. Simonovu,” 86, 97–99.

3 12

n o t e s t o p ag e s 184–187

71. LG, 4 April 1961; 3 July 1960; KZ, 6 February 1960; LG, 23 May 1964. Cf. Lazarev, Shestoi etazh, 193. 72. RGALI, 618/17/184/2–12. Another letter remembering meeting Simonov in trenches, l. 64. Another reference to pravda in l. 97. 73. RGALI, 618/17/402/17–19; RGALI, 618/17/184/17–19. Comparisons with Days and Nights, ll. 4–5, 51–53; RGALI, 618/18/80/49. Other letters from readers following Simonov’s career since the early war: RGALI, 618/18/80/44, and RGALI, 618/17/402/2–3, 7, 35, 37. 74. Kirshchenbaum, “ ‘Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families.’ ” 75. Figes, The Whisperers, 397–400; Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead, 73. Wartime fan letters expressed gratitude to Simonov both for understanding soldiers’ feelings (“Pis’ma k K. Simonovu,” 86–88) and for teaching them how to manage their feelings during war (85, 94–95). 76. Figes, The Whisperers, 397–400; “Pis’ma k K. Simonovu,” 85–99. On the wartime confluence of private and public emotion, see Kirshchenbaum, “ ‘Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families.’ ” 77. The term is taken from Anna Krylova’s exploration of post-war literature about emotion and trauma (Krylova, “Healers of Wounded Souls”). For examples of the highly emotional wartime trauma narratives sent to Simonov, and published, at least in the immediate post-war period, see “Pis’ma k K. Simonovu.” 78. Allusions to fandom starting in the war, and continuing for the rest of the reader’s life: e.g. RGALI, 618/18/80/43, 44; RGALI, 618/17/336/28–30; RGALI, 618/17/184/4–5, 51–53. 79. Karaganov, Konstantin Simonov, 3. 80. Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 178–80; Pankin, Chetyre ia Konstantina Simonova, 265, 266. 81. Pankin, Chetyre ia Konstantina Simonova, 266. 82. Ibid., 265–68; Karaganov, Konstantin Simonov, 186. 83. For example, the refusal of the Moscow Writers Union prose section to nominate People Are Not Born Soldiers for the Lenin prize (RGALI, 2464/1/499/18–25). Such hostility may have been grounded in Simonov’s conduct during the anti-cosmopolitan campaign: see e.g. Figes, The Whisperers, 482–92. 84. RGALI, 1814/2/199/198. 85. See Kukulin, “Regulirovanie boli,” on the ways in which war “trauma” was both revealed and concealed in Soviet literature from wartime to the Brezhnev era. 86. Weiner, Making Sense of War; Hosking, “The Second World War and Russian National Consciousness.” 87. This problem has received far greater attention in post-Soviet culture (e.g. Roginsky, “The Embrace of Stalinism”; Levinson, “The Uses and Abuses of Stalin’s Image”), than in Soviet culture (still one of the best analyses of Stalin’s contradictory legacies as apprehended in the immediate post-Stalin period is Cohen, “The Stalin Question after Stalin.”)

note s to p ag e s 1 87 –1 89

31 3

88. Krylova, Soviet Women in Combat, 5. 89. LG, 23 July 1959; 30 January 1960, 2; 24 March 1960; 4 April 1961. For further examples of the broadly positive critical reception, see the widespread condemnation of an unusually hostile review (MG, no. 3 (1960): 202–14), in e.g. LG, 26 March 1960, 5; L i zh, 3 July 1960; VL, no. 10 (1960): 5–6. 90. Boris Pankin says that praise, for the lack of “embellishment” and authentic characters, “was pretty much the leitmotif of readers’ letters,” though points to a few conservative objections (Pankin, Chetyre ia Konstantin Simonova, 259). 91. RGALI, 1814/2/199/451, 484, 497, 509–13. 92. RGALI, 618/17/402/11–12, 55–56; RGALI, 618/17/336/26. The majority of letters sent to Znamia contained the word pravda. 93. RGALI, 1814/2/199/544. 94. RGALI, 618/17/184/2–12. 95. Ibid., ll. 598, 614; RGALI, 1814/8/11/41. 96. The term “vernacular memory” is from Bodnar, Remaking America. 97. RGALI, 618/17/184/29, 13–14; RGALI, 1814/2/10/311. 98. RGALI, 618/17/402/13–15. Cf. Another veteran letter acclaiming truth, ll. 17–19. 99. References to “tragedy” include RGALI, 1814/2/199/62, 216, 231, 317, 580. This was also a term used in some published reviews (LG, 30 January 1960, 2; KZ, 6 February 1960), as well as occasionally in The Living and the Dead itself (e.g. Simonov, Zhivye i mertvye, 32). 100. On retreat: RGALI, 1814/2/199/202, 272, 280–82, 312, 371–75, 423, 451, 521, 686; RGALI, 1814/8/10/58. One letter even claimed the enemy advance into Soviet territory was worse than anything in Tsarist times (RGALI, 1814/8/10/93–94). 101. RGALI, 1814/2/199/23, 49, 85, 89, 114, 198, 202. Again, these terms were not entirely absent from the novel, though they were concentrated in the very early chapters (Simonov, Zhivye i mertvye, 13, 15, 25). 102. References to suffering include: RGALI, 1814/2/199/101, 178, 213, 237. Torture reference in RGALI, 1814/8/10/298. 103. Use of uzhas as a term include: RGALI, 1814/2/199/23, 41, 59, 100, 132, 144, 186, 436, 530, 636; RGALI, 1814/8/10/163; 1814/2/7/478. Use of mrak/ mrachnyi in RGALI, 1814/2/199/41. Both terms had, much more rarely, been used in the novel itself (e.g. Simonov, Zhivye i mertvye, 22, 298, 313). An example of a wartime letter using the word uzhas: “Pis’ma k K. Simonovu,” 97–98. The term occasionally appeared in reviews, both positive (Novyi mir, no. 6 (1960): 209–23) and negative (MG, no. 3 (1960): 202–14). 104. RGALI, 1814/2/199/292–94. 105. Confident dismissal of hostile criticism, claiming it is because critics didn’t see the war: RGALI, 1814/2/199/114.

3 14

n o t e s t o p ag es 18 9–191

106. Ibid., l. 59. Cf. other “confirmations” of the veracity of the narrative (Ibid., l. 210; RGALI, 1814/8/11/43). 107. RGALI, 1814/8/9/280. In fact, even The Living and the Dead had contained some shocking “close-ups” of corpses (e.g. Simonov, Zhivye i mertvye, 225, 527). 108. RGALI, 1814/8/9/276; RGALI, 1814/2/200/16. Sintsov himself worries about his lack of direct contact with the fighting; it is only when he abandons journalism and enters combat that these anxieties subside (Simonov, Soldatami ne rozhdaiutsia, 625). 109. RGALI, 1814/2/199/186; RGALI, 1814/2/200/26. 110. Papernyi, Kul’tura dva. 111. Fussell, The Great War in Modern Memory. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Christine Varga-Harris have argued that this recognition of wartime service, expressed in concrete decisions to grant housing and other benefits to veterans, only really began in the Khrushchev era, signaling a delayed return to “normalcy” (Fitzpatrick, “Post-war Soviet Society”; Varga-Harris, “Forging Citizenship on the Home Front”), while Mark Edele has charted the complex treatment of veterans (Edele, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War). Simonov’s literary recognition of the courage of those fighting in the early war forms an important corollary to these political and judicial decisions. 112. References to “grief” include RGALI, 1814/2/199/44, 100, 132, 144, 686; RGALI, 1814/8/11/72. References to fear (strakh, strashnyi) include RGALI, 1814/2/199/99, 258, 420, 470, 640; RGALI, 1814/2/11/72; RGALI, 1814/8/10/293. The novel had alluded occasionally to both emotions, though almost entirely in the very early days of war (Simonov, Zhivye i mertvye, 57, 59). For a fascinating discussion of fear as an acceptable emotional response to war in pre-revolutionary culture, see Plamper, “Fear.” 113. RGALI, 1814/2/199/408–10; RGALI, 1814/2/200/26; RGALI, 1814/2/199/154. 114. RGALI, 618/17/184/18–19; cf. RGALI, 1814/2/199/16, 35, 178–79. 115. RGALI, 1814/2/200/17–18. 116. Yekelchyk, “The Civic Duty to Hate.” 117. On the etymology of the term “trauma,” see Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. 118. RGALI, 1814/2/199/433. 119. Ibid., ll. 586–87, 408–10. 120. Ibid., l. 416. 121. RGALI, 1814/2/193/52. See also Simonov’s claims at the time that “war wounds the soul” (Lazarev, Konstantin Simonov, 217). 122. RGALI, 1814/2/199/355. 123. Kirshchenbaum, “ ‘Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families.” ” 124. RGALI, 1814/2/199/154; RGALI, 1814/8/10/72. 125. On the presence and absence of “sites” of memory and mourning, see e.g. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning; Merridale, Night of Stone. 126. RGALI, 1814/2/199/267. 127. Ibid., l. 390.

notes to p ag e s 19 2–1 9 6

31 5

128. Ibid., ll. 523, 404. 129. Ibid., l. 259. Another example of factual corrections, countered by a reminder of the text’s fictional status: RGALI, 618/17/184/28–30. Simonov as early as 1955 conceived of the work as fictional, rather than historical (Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 74), and reiterated that position on fictionality after publication (168–69). 130. Review by General Boltin of manuscript of The Living and the Dead criticized the lack of a “general picture of the historic victory” (RGALI, 618/17/184/118– 22), while another by General Fokin also advocates showing the “dawning victory” more clearly (ll. 123–27). Pre-publication review of People Are Not Born Soldiers, again by Boltin, criticizes the poor evocation of overall context and progress (RGALI, 618/18/144/1–8). Criticisms of lack of context include: LG, 9 July 1959; Novyi mir, no. 6 (1960): 209–23. 131. RGALI, 1814/2/199/30. 132. Ibid., ll. 382, 355, 59; RGALI, 1814/8/10/172. 133. The English translation of the novel was Victims and Heroes. 134. RGALI, 1814/2/199/647. 135. Edele, Soviet Veterans, 102–28; Dobson, “POWs and Purge Victims.” 136. Edele uses the example of Sholokhov to argue that “under Khrushchev, the topic of captivity could finally be discussed in public” (Edele, Soviet Veterans, 125). On the film adaptation as trauma narrative: Baraban, “The Fate of a Man by Mikhail Sholokhov and the Soviet Cinema of Trauma.” 137. Examples of “verification” or confirmation of Simonov’s account: RGALI, 1814/2/199/619; RGALI, 1814/8/11/242. 138. RGALI, 1814/2/199/312, 637. 139. RGALI, 1814/2/199/646. Another optimistic narrative is RGALI, 1814/2/199/520. 140. Dobson, “POWs and Purge Victims.” References to vosstanovlenie in e.g. RGALI, 1814/2/199/186, 210–12. 141. Ibid., l. 158. 142. Ibid., l. 33. Cf. letter from wife recounting struggle to have late husband recognized, not least in pension rights (l. 184). 143. Ibid., l. 292. 144. Weiner, “The Making of a Dominant Myth.” 145. RGALI, 1814/2/199/210. 146. For example, Ibid., l. 565. 147. Ibid., l. 161. 148. A similar hope for a happy ending, marred by doubts about the massive “power of paperwork” to derail rehabilitation, is evident in Ibid., l. 186. 149. Ibid., ll. 263, 591; RGALI, 1814/2/200/12. 150. RGALI, 1814/2/199/485. 151. RGALI, 618/17/184/132–34. Mark Edele also confirms the “hidden . . . incomplete” rehabilitation of returnees (Soviet Veterans, 124). 152. RGALI, 1814/2/199/37–40.

3 16

n o t e s t o p ag es 196–2 0 3

153. Ibid., l. 127; RGALI, 1814/2/193/6. On chances of survival, see Edele, Soviet Veterans, 102–28. 154. RGALI, 1814/2/199/426–29. 155. RGALI, 1814/8/9/224. 156. RGALI, 1814/8/7/459. 157. RGALI, 1814/2/199/235, 317, 385; RGALI, 1814/8/10/273. 158. RGALI, 1814/2/199/116. 159. RGALI, 1814/8/11/36; RGALI, 1814/2/199/28. 160. Ibid., l. 582. 161. RGALI, 618/17/184/130–31; RGALI, 1814/2/199/71. 162. RGALI, 1814/2/199/148. 163. RGALI, 1814/2/200/93. Simonov’s reply: RGALI, 1814/2/200/91. 164. RGALI, 1814/2/199/77, 122, 640, 37–40, 582. 165. Ibid., l. 633. 166. RGALI, 1814/8/11/169–70. 167. RGALI, 618/17/402/13–15. 168. RGALI, 1814/8/7/484. 169. Similar emphasis on getting to know Stalin in one readers’ conference report: LR, no. 1 (1965): 8. 170. On Simonov’s encounters with Stalin, see Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia; on archival research, see LR, no. 1 (1965): 8. 171. Langenlohl, “Political Culture in Contemporary Russia,” 105. 172. RGALI, 1814/2/199/582. 173. Ibid., l. 382. 174. RGALI, 1814/2/200/93–95. 175. RGALI, 1814/2/199/37–40. 176. Ibid., l. 460. 177. Ibid., l. 540. 178. RGALI, 1814/2/193/48–51. 179. Pankin, Chetyre ia Konstantina Simonova, 264–66; Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 113, 119, 143–44. 180. RGALI, 1814/2/193/47. 181. RGALI, 1814/2/199/26. Compare another exchange with an anti-Stalinist reader, where he again refuses to debunk Stalin’s authority entirely: RGALI, 1814/2/198/49; RGALI, 1814/2/200/38–40; Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 146–47. 182. RGALI, 1814/2/199/218–20, 531. 183. Ibid., l. 376. 184. Ibid., l. 620 185. RGALI, 1814/2/199/420–21. 186. Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 113. Other such letters: RGALI, 1814/2/199/521, 168–73, 473. 187. RGALI, 1814/8/10/152; RGALI, 1814/8/11/249; RGALI, 1814/8/7/481. 188. RGALI, 1814/8/10/152; RGALI, 1814/8/9/224; RGALI, 1814/8/11/69; RGALI, 1814/8/7/481.

notes to p ag e s 20 3 –20 7 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201.

202.

203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210.

211.

212.

31 7

RGALI, 1814/8/11/249. Call to “dethrone [razvenchat’] Stalin’ ”(RGALI, 1814/8/7/485); cf. l. 432. RGALI, 1814/8/10/172–75. RGALI, 1814/2/200/38–40. Ryan, Stalin in Russian Satire. Ziolkowski, Literary Exorcisms of Stalinism. RGALI, 1814/8/11/151. A review with a similar (though less aggressively worded) combination of reversed cult epithets with historical facts is LR, no. 26 (1964): 15, 20. RGALI, 1814/8/10/157; RGALI, 618/17/336/16–17. RGALI, 1814/8/9/153–54. RGALI, 1814/8/9/51–59. RGALI, 1814/8/10/242–46. Simonov himself continued to advocate in public for a balanced view of Stalin (LR, no. 1 (1965)), as did some critics, e.g. LG, 23 May 1964; and Izvestiia, 29 May 1964. RGALI, 1814/8/11/185; RGALI, 1814/8/10/180–87 (contrast drawn to allegedly more extreme anti-Stalinism of Ivan Denisovich). Praise for “complexity” of Stalin portrait, and realistic picture of his “weaknesses” and “tragic” contradictions, in RGALI, 1814/8/7/610, 621. Realism, psychological accuracy praised in RGALI, 1814/8/11/23. RGALI, 1814/8/11/57. RGALI, 1814/8/7/630. Ibid., l. 433. Ibid., l. 412. Compare review in LR, no. 26 (1964): 15, 20, which sees Stalin as impossibly complex but does not resolve the enigma. RGALI, 1814/2/199/486; RGALI, 1814/8/7/448; RGALI, 1814/8/10/115. RGALI, 1814/8/10/116–18. Ibid.; cf. letter in Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 246–47, alluding to definitive “switch in values,” and containing very strong condemnation of Stalin (dated 18 May 1964). Even stronger condemnation of Stalin and total rejection of previous love for him in 1966 letter (323). At a readers’ conference in 1965, Simonov expressed a desire to carry on researching and writing about Stalin, but most of his subsequent research remained unpublished (see LR, no. 1 (1965): 8, and next chapter). George Mosse and Jay Winter both suggest that redemptive and heroic narratives of war died out in Western Europe after World War I (Paul Fussell suggests by contrast that it was during the war that this shift occurred): Mosse, Fallen Soldiers; Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning; Winter, Remembering War; Fussell, The Great War in Modern Memory. However, Ashplant shows the ongoing negotiations over public representations of war, and the complex interplay of truth and myth (Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper, “The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration”). On the balance between confronting

3 18

213. 214. 215. 216.

217. 218. 219. 220. 221. 222.

223. 224. 225. 226. 227.

228. 229. 230.

n o t e s t o p ag es 2 0 7–2 0 9 and healing or comforting trauma in Soviet war narratives, see Krylova, “Healers of Wounded Souls”; Kirshchenbaum, The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad. Vance, Death so Noble, 9. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 4, 6, and passim. RGALI, 618/17/184/29; RGALI, 1814/2/199/617; RGALI, 1814/2/200/20–23. Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 115. He also publicly defended his view that “the breaking off of human lives is one of the tragic peculiarities of war” (Simonov, “Pered novoi rabotoi,” 275, 279). For example, RGALI, 1814/2/199/272, 528. Ibid., l. 32; RGALI, 1814/2/198/6 (Simonov’s reassurance to a reader that the series would go up to the end of war). On the need for a “logical” ending, see RGALI, 1814/2/199/604. Description of war as “optimistic tragedy” and as both retreat and advance (Ibid., l. 580). Ibid. l. 469; cf. other references to the radost’ of the later period in ll. 268, 385, 565. Ibid., l. 200, 89, 222, 231, 241, 268, 446, 650, 690; RGALI, 1814/2/200/ 20–23. A longer duration of suffering before the turn to victory: RGALI, 1814/2/199/89–91, 317; RGALI, 1814/2/200/60. Other happy memories of the “turning tide” of the war in RGALI, 1814/2/199/200, 201, 475, 565; RGALI, 1814/2/200/87–88. Reviews had claimed that The Living and the Dead already shows the beginnings of victory (L i zh, 8 May 1960; LG, 23 July 1959; 3 January 1960). This did in fact reflect Simonov’s feeling at the time that he observed events (Figes, The Whisperers, 384), and later, when writing his postStalinist accounts (for pre-sentiments of victory within The Living and the Dead, albeit mostly articulated by the omniscient narrator rather than by the more pessimistic and anxious characters, see Simonov, Zhivye i mertvye, 33, 75, 175, 252, 313, 387). Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 117, 118, 115; Simonov, “Pered novoi rabotoi,” 279. RGALI, 618/17/184/34–74, passim. RGALI, 1814/2/199/100. Ibid., ll. 586–87. Compare the reader Demidov’s desire for fictional okruzhentsy to have a happier outcome than himself (ll. 210–12). Outraged responses in 1971 to the deaths in The Last Summer: RGALI, 1814/8/7/570–80, 590–91. Karaganov claims that many could not forgive the death of Serpilin, though Simonov tried to explain it as an attempt to evoke the intense grief of the death of someone particularly dear (Karaganov, Konstantin Simonov, 177). Reviews alluding to the national character include KZ, 6 February 1960; VL, no. 7 (1960); LG, 21 March 1961, 2–3. RGALI, 1814/2/199/258; cf. ll. 132–33 (sadness (gore) but also greatness of narod). Ibid., l. 235; cf. ll. 85–86, 62–65.

note s to pa g e s 20 9 –21 2

31 9

231. Russian character: Ibid., ll. 144–46. Soviet vospitanie as key to victory: ll. 65, 140–44, 212, 694. References to popular “patriotism” in general: ll. 46–47, 136, 343, 473, 544. Allegations of a lack of patriotism were extremely rare, but occurred in: ll. 506, 570; RGALI, 1814/8/9/173–74. Reviews of The Living and the Dead more frequently referred to the survival, and ultimate transcendence, of the early disaster as proof of the “Soviet soul” and a “manifestation of communist consciousness” (VL, no. 7 (1960); LG, 21 March 1961, 2–3). 232. RGALI, 618/17/214, passim; RGALI, 618/17/184/118–22, 123–27. 233. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, 9. Calls for more realism include: RGALI, 1814/2/200/12; RGALI, 1814/8/9/277. On Vlasov: RGALI, 1814/2/199/475. 234. On pessimism and pacifism, see RGALI, 1814/8/9/269; RGALI, 1814/2/199/28, 272 (a veteran on his tussle with suicide), 167, 260; RGALI, 1814/8/9/269–70; RGALI, 1814/8/11/257. On fears of pacifism in the late Stalinist period, see Johnston, “Peace or Pacifism?” 235. RGALI, 1814/2/10/128. Other descriptions of the novels as “life-affirming” in RGALI, 1814/2/199/62; RGALI, 1814/8/10/302. 236. RGALI, 618/17/336/9, 14–15; RGALI, 618/18/80/27–29. 237. Simonov, Pis’ma o voine, 228–30. 238. Clark, The Soviet Novel. 239. Many accounts describe the Khrushchev era predominantly in terms of demythologization (e.g. Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead; Lazarev, “Russian Literature on the War”). 240. Weiner, Making Sense of War. 241. Studio’s descriptions of film stressing optimism despite realistic portrayal of losses (RGALI, 2453/4/723/1–8). Cf. Pravda, 5 July 1964; SR, 31 July 1964; Izvestiia, 29 May 1964; KZ, 19 August 1964; Karaganov, Konstantin Simonov, 224–36; Youngblood, Russian War Films, 137. 242. Tumarkin argues that some parts of the “matrix” of the war cult were in place in the Khrushchev era, and others, such as Stalin’s wartime role, remained in flux until the early Brezhnev era (Tumarkin, “The Great Patriotic War as Myth and Memory”). 243. Langenlohl, “Political Culture in Contemporary Russia,” 107. 244. On the importance of war as a usable past in the Soviet Union, see, inter alia, Tumarkin, “The Great Patriotic War as Myth and Memory”; Hosking, “The Second World War and Russian National Consciousness.”

1. 2. 3. 4.

c hap t e r si x : t he “c u lt of pe r s ona lity” i n t he e arly b r e zh n e v e ra A. Rybakov, “Leto v sosniakakh,” Novyi mir, no. 11 (1964). Rybakov, Roman-vospominanie, 207. On Khrushchev’s ouster, see Artizov, Nikita Khrushchev. Bek, “Roman o romane,” 497–98; The novella is mentioned several times but not analyzed in depth, in Spechler, Permitted Dissent, 203–13, and in Woodhouse, “Stalin’s Soldier.”

3 20

n o t e s t o p ag es 2 13–2 18

5. Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 290–91. 6. See e.g. Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed; Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power; Bacon and Sandle, Brezhnev Reconsidered. 7. A. Rybakov, “Pamiat’ i vymysel,” VL, no. 5 (1980): 102–24. 8. Use of term “stigma” (kleimo), in Soviet Writers’ Union 1966 discussion of Soviet literature about the “cult” including this work: RGALI, 631/30/1167/236. 9. RGALI, 1702/10/251/1–6. 10. RGALI, 1702/10/251/201–2. 11. RGALI, 1702/10/251/90; see also the emphasis on victims’ maintaining their dignity in publicity for the book edition: Izvestiia, 23 December 1965, 3. 12. RGALI, 1702/10/251/90. 13. RGALI, 1702/10/251/89–90. 14. RGALI, 1702/10/251/1–6. 15. A. Tvardovskii, “Po sluchaiu iubileia,” Novyi mir, no. 1 (1965). On tortuous editing and publication, see Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 293, 296, 301–9; Lakshin, Novyi mir vo vremena Khrushcheva, 261. On popular responses, see Kozlov, “The Readers of Novyi mir,” chapter 8. Example of conservative criticism: RGANI, 5/55/139 (Suslov criticism of excessive focus on the cult of personality). Protests against conservative attacks on the article recorded in Politicheskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 83–88. 16. Baklanov, Vkhodite uzkimi vratami, 167; see also 168–69 for observations of others’ shock at Khrushchev’s fall. 17. Contract issued by Znamia: RGALI, 618/18/5/62; Published as “Iiul’ 1941g.,” Znamia, no. 1 (1965): 3–41; no. 2: 3–71. 18. Baklanov has described his desire to understand the roots of 1941 as stemming from the fact that his brother died in the very early period of the war (Baklanov, Dorogi prishedshikh s voiny, 297). Cf. Baklanov, Vremia sobirat’ kamni, 72, 150; Ellis, The Damned and the Dead, esp. 51–57. 19. See one typical statement of the need to balance “tragedy” with triumphs: Baklanov, Vremia sobirat’ kamni, 93, and on need to testify to “that great and fearsome time” (i.e. war), Baklanov, Vkhodite uzkimi vratami, 132. 20. Marsh, Images of Dictatorship, 64–66; Spechler, Permitted Dissent, 203–13. Nanci Adler argues by contrast that de-Stalinization came to an abrupt end with Khrushchev’s fall (Adler, “Life in the Big Zone”). 21. Trifonov, “Otblesk kostra”; Woll, Invented Truth, 22–24. 22. Rozen, Poslednie dve nedeli. On Rozen, see Marsh, Images of Dictatorship, 64–66. 23. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, 168. Note contrast with works in next section, pulped a year later with far less compunction. 24. Rosalind Marsh, for example, links publication to the “confused interval” after Khrushchev’s fall (Marsh, Images of Dictatorship, 64–66). 25. Baklanov, Dorogi prishedshikh s voiny, 209; Baklanov, Vremia sobirat’ kamni, 124. 26. This 1937 narrative drew on Baklanov’s wife’s memories of living in a similar apartment block decimated by the Great Terror (Baklanov, Vkhodite uzkimi vratami, 127–28).

notes to p ag e s 218–224

32 1

27. Baklanov described Shcherbatov’s inner torment about these lapses in Baklanov, Vremia sobirat’ kamni, 127. 28. RGALI, 1702/9/141/8–10; Baklanov, Dorogi prishedshikh s voiny, 433. 29. Baklanov claims that the presence of 1937 led to the journal’s rejection of the text: Baklanov, Vkhodite uzkimi vratami, 167. 30. On the damage to the journal’s relationship with the author, see Lakshin, Novyi mir vo vremena Khrushcheva, 243. 31. RGALI, 2931/1/70/14–17. On this controversy, see chapter 4. 32. RGALI, 618/17/406/77–79. 33. RGALI, 618/17/403/20–23. 34. RGALI, 618/17/406/77–79. 35. See also chapter 4. 36. Baklanov describes shaming his two editors—both of whom had repressed relatives—into recognizing the moral necessity of literature about terror (Baklanov, Vkhodite uzkimi vratami, 169–72). 37. Ibid. 38. LR, no. 18 (1965): 14. 39. RGALI, 618/18/81/5, 121, 13. 40. Ibid., ll. 1, 6–7. 41. LR, no. 18 (1965): 14. 42. RGALI, 618/18/81/101–3. 43. RGALI, 618/18/81/94–95. 44. RGALI, 618/18/81/35–36. 45. Gagen-Torn later published a memoir of her time in the Gulag: Gagen-Torn, Memoria. 46. RGALI, 618/18/81/20. 47. Baklanov mentions many readers with negative views of the work, and linked this to the letter writers’ having a “particular attitude to 1937,” but this incidence of negative feeling was not reflected in available archive documents (Baklanov, Vremia sobirat’ kamni, 98–99). 48. RGALI, 618/18/81/37–40. 49. Vtoroi s”ezd pisatalei RSFSR. One reader referred to this congress as a sign that works such as July 1941 were falling out of official favor (RGALI, 618/18/81/ 16–17). Another, however, saw the congress as granting ongoing permission to explore 1941: ll. 94–95. 50. Oktiabr’, no. 3 (1965): 185–97. 51. Pravda, 28 March 1965, 3. 52. Burlatsky, Khrushchev and the First Russian Spring, 216; Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, 38; Medvdev, Lichnost’ i epokha, 168–69; Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 260. 53. An article by Bagramian is widely seen as first step toward rehabilitating Stalin’s wartime role: LG, 17 April 1965, 3. Zhores Medvedev notes “eulogies” in press in April and May 1965 (Medvedev, Ten Years after Ivan Denisovich, 60). Tatu sees military as aiming for return to objectivity rather than praise for Stalin (Tatu,

3 22

54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

n o t e s t o p ag e s 2 2 4–2 2 8 Power in the Kremlin, 477–80; cf. Bialer, Stalin and His Generals; Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, 149, 157). On the new history book, see Pravda, 19 June 1965, 2. Nekrich, 1941. On tortuous publication and censorship of Nekrich’s text, see: GARF, 9425/1/1208/74; Goriaeva, Politicheskaiia tsenzura, 551–55; Nekrich, Forsake Fear. All quotations in these two paragraphs are from RGALI, 2464/3/166, 167 (entire). LR, no. 19 (1965): 22; Oktiabr’, no. 6 (1965): 173–77. On divisions in the Moscow Union, emerging forcefully during the disputed union elections of January 1965, see RGALI, 2464/3/164 (entire). On this ban, and its rescinding in the Gorbachev era, see conclusion to this book. “Creeping” re-Stalinization noted in e.g. Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 260; Arbatov, The System, 137. Orlova, Vospominaniia o neproshedshem vremeni, 150. Parts of his diaries were published in 1974 in Druzhba narodov with substantial cuts (Beliaev, “Na staroi ploshchadi”). Marsh, Images of Dictatorship, 113–15, sees this criticism as mild. One of the best and most detailed analyses of this underrated novel is Woodhouse, “Stalin’s Soldier.” On the original title, Sshibka, a Pavlovian psychological term indicating a personality split, see Woodhouse, “Stalin’s Soldier,” and Bek, “Roman o romane,” 493. Bek, “Novoe naznachenie.” Cohen, “The Stalin Question after Stalin,” 118–20. Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik; Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf. Among the best secondary accounts is Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, 220–38. The treatment of Solzhenitsyn, always a more marginal figure, was similar, but not as surprising as the treatment of these more powerful, mainstream Soviet writers (see Scammell, The Solzhenitsyn Files, and Labedz, Solzhenitsyn, for detailed documentary records of Solzhenitsyn’s move into samizdat and tamizdat). On the porous boundaries between official and unofficial culture at this juncture, see Komaromi, “The Unofficial Field of Late Soviet Culture.” Cohen, “The Stalin Question after Stalin,” 118. Arbatov, The System, 126–30; Pospielovsky, “Re-Stalinization or De-Stalinization?”; Bacon and Sandle, Brezhnev Reconsidered. Tatu, Power in the Kremlin, 486. Bek, “Roman o romane,” 494. Ibid., 494. For example, board member Gerasimov praises it as strongest work yet, about “the character of the times.” Ibid., 496. Ibid., 498. Tevosian had already controversially featured in Bek’s previous novel, therefore Tvardovskii was not surprised when this new scandal erupted: Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 360. Bek, “Roman o romane,” 501.

note s to pa g e s 229 –23 2 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83.

84.

85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94.

95.

96. 97.

32 3

Ibid., 503. Ibid., 501–3. Ibid., 503, 514–15. Ibid., 507–9. For example, Kommunist, no. 3 (1965): 15–28: probably the earliest warning, from Egorychev. Reactions to meetings held in summer 1965: Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 334, 359, 374; Politicheskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 51; vol. 2: 13–15. RGANI, 5/36/148/133–35, 63–70; Tomilina, Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1965–1972, 226. RGANI, 5/36/148/64–69. On reading this long letter, Bek was struck by the omission of any direct discussion of Stalin (Bek, “Roman o romane,” 523–27). RGANI, 5/36/148/62–72; Novyi mir abandonment of publication plans: ll. 133–37. Cf. Tvardovskii, Novormirskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 368; Bek, “Roman o romane,” 523. For example, Trapeznikov’s strong objections to literature about the cult of personality in Pravda, 8 August 1965, 2. Spechler sees this as an absolute ban (Spechler, Permitted Dissent, 218). Rothberg sees “flurry” of hostility to narratives of the cult of personality from August 1965 (Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin, 150). KGB campaign for ideological purity: RGANI, 5/33/235/52–78; Goriaeva, Politicheskaia tsenzura, 147–53. Compare State Press Committee concerns about bourgeois views in art, and excessive “negative phenomena” being depicted in art and literature (GARF, 9604/1/16: entire). The best recent account of reactions to the writers’ trial is in Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw, 174–210. Bek, “Roman o romane,” 545. RGALI, 2464/3/512; Bek, “Roman o romane,” 529. RGALI, 2464/3/512/6; Burtin, “Vlast’ protiv literatury,” 287. RGALI, 2464/3/512/7. RGALI, 2464/3/512/11, 9. RGALI, 2464/3/512/22, 26–27. Bek, “Roman o romane,” 531–33. Bittner argues that fear of a new 1937 made such debates especially emphatic and urgent (Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw, 178). Tvardovskii notes that the congress featured “not a note, not a word, not even those words ‘the cult of personality’ ” (Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 458). On contemporary perceptions of the congress’ stance, see Tatu, Power in the Kremlin, 488; Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 492; Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, 150; Arbatov, The System, 128. Spechler, Permitted Dissent, 218. These attacks foreshadowed a vicious campaign against the journal in 1967. Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 481–85; Cohen, An End to Silence, 158–61.

3 24 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106.

107. 108. 109. 110.

111. 112.

113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

n o t e s t o p ag es 2 32 –2 36 Bek, “Roman o romane,” 531. RGANI, 5/36/148/138; Bek, “Roman o romane,” 534. Tomilina, Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1965–1972, 217. Bek, “Roman o romane,” 535–37. RGANI, 5/58/46/2–3. GARF, 9425/1/1261/10–27. For example, Izvestiia, 21 October 1966, 3; Kommunist, no. 12 (1966): 175–78; Izvestiia, 30 April 1966, 2. On restrictions on research into collectivization, see e.g. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia, 111–54. Typical warning about excessive criticism of collectivization: Pravda, 24 August 1967, 2–3. Pravda, 3 October 1966; 5 November 1966; 8 November 1966; Kommunist, no. 17 (1966): 48–60. Izvestiia, 23 June 1966; Kommunist, no. 11 (1966): 63–74. Turn to criticism of previously published war narratives, including Baklanov’s July 1941, visible in Kommunist, no. 8 (1966): 17–23. On changing views of war, see e.g. Larson, “Dismantling the Cults of Stalin and Khrushchev.” On usable past, see e.g. Cohen, “The Stalin Question after Stalin”; Cohen, “The Friends and Foes of Stalinism.” For support for this heroic historical narrative among writers themselves, see e.g. Oktiabr’, no. 6 (1966) (coverage of RSFSR Union plenum). Tomilina, Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1965–1972, 381–90; Goriaeva, Politicheskaiia tsenzura, 556–59. Burtin, “Vlast’ protiv literatury,” 252–69; Beliaev, “Na staroi ploshchadi.” Both see the ideological meeting in the second half of October 1966 as signaling an abrupt change in attitudes to anti-Stalinist literature. Zhores Medvedev sees both bans as “sudden” (Medvedev, Ten Years after Ivan Denisovich, 82), though also characteristic of many works banned and pulped at this time. Beliaev, “Na staroi ploshchadi”; Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 480–90. On the limited nature of “revisionism”—the fact that it remained within Soviet categories—in most of the Soviet intelligentsia at this time, see e.g. Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 271; Markwick, “Catalyst of Historiography, Marxism and Dissidence.” RGANI, 5/58/29/38–40; Beliaev, “Na staroi ploshchadi.” Examples of Epishev’s earlier lobbying: XXIII s”ezd KPSS, vol. 1: 545–54; RGANI, 5/33/230 (entire). Beliaev, “Na staroi ploshchadi.” Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 505–15. Ibid.; Beliaev, “Na staroi ploshchadi.” Beliaev, “Na staroi ploshchadi”; Burtin, “Vlast’ protiv literatury,” 252–69; Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 487. In 1965, Simonov had had personal correspondence and meetings with Brezhnev about the diaries, and Brezhnev had promised in 1965 that they would be published (Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, 139).

notes to p ag e s 23 6 –23 8

32 5

119. Markovy, Chetvertyi s”ezd pisatelei, 158–61. Tvardovskii acclaim for this speech: Novormirskii dnevnik, vol. 2: 36. 120. Burtin, “Vlast’ protiv literatury”; Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 490–91; Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 487. 121. Beliaev, “Na staroi ploshchadi.” 122. RGANI, 5/58/46/15–17; Burtin, “Vlast’ protiv literatury”; Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 2: 64–72, 99. 123. Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 2: 66. 124. Ketlinskaia’s speech at Fourth Writers’ Congress cites them (Markovy, Chetvertyi s”ezd, 196–98); Tvardovskii groups works together, and with languishing unpublished works by Drabkina and Solzhenitsyn, frequently in 1967 and 1968: Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 2: 46–49, 64, 66, 72. Department of culture warning about strife in writers’ circles: RGANI, 5/58/46/15–17. This increasing tendency to liken the two authors and texts to each other contrasts to the initial distance that Bek felt from Simonov (Bek, “Roman o romane,” 512). On writers’ growing complaints about censorship in the late 1960s, see Blium, Kak eto delalos’ v Leningrade, 16 and passim. 125. Burtin, “Vlast’ protiv literatury,” 269; Bek, “Roman o romane,” 536–40. The same anxiety about foreign publication again revived Bek’s chances of publication, albeit again abortively, in 1971 (Bek, “Roman o romane,” 557; Burtin, “Vlast’ protiv literatury”). The prospect of a foreign translation of Simonov’s diaries likewise influenced his 1967 domestic publication chances (Afanas’ev and Afiani, Trudnye puti pravdy, 75). 126. RGANI, 5/58/46/15–17; cf. Burtin, “Vlast’ protiv literatury.” 127. Tomilina, Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1965–1972, 465–67; cf. Svirskii’s complaints about censorship at Moscow Writers’ Union (428–29). 128. In a speech intended to be given at Fourth Writers’ Congress, which quickly became a staple of samizdat (Ibid., 510–21). 129. On censorship of fiction and non-fiction about terror, see e.g. GARF, 9425/1/1257/30–33; GARF, 9425/1/1268/162–70. 130. Burtin, “Vlast’ protiv literatury.” See minimization of references to 1937 in Cheka anniversary celebrations: e.g. Kommunist, no. 18 (1967): 57–68. Cf. Elkner, “The Changing Face of Repression under Khrushchev.” On increasing limitations on terror victims’ press commemoration, see Politicheskii dnevnik, vol. 2: 158. 131. Beliaev, “Na staroi ploshchadi.” 132. For more on this, see next section. 133. On the campaign against Nekrich, see GARF, 9604/2/143/113–14 (expulsion protocol); Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 272; Voprosy istorii KPSS, no. 9 (1967): 277–302; Nekrich, Forsake Fear; Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia, 199–233; Petrov, June 22nd, 1941. Warnings against unheroic narratives of war include KZ, 30 May 1967, 4. On the heavy cuts made to a film about early war in which Simonov was involved (Esli dorog tebe tvoi dom), also in 1967, see GARF, 9425/1/1268/39.

3 26

n o t e s t o p ag es 2 38–2 41

134. Burtin, “Vlast’ protiv literatury,” 252–69; Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 2: 72; another attempt to publish in October, supported by Demichev, also failed: Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, 99. 135. Clark and Dobrenko, Soviet Culture and Politics; Fitzpatrick, “Culture and Politics under Stalin.” 136. On Solzhenitsyn, see e.g. Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf, 88–199; Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, passim. On Rybakov, see Rybakov, Romanvospominanie, 202–9. On Medevdev, see e.g. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 518–20; Zubok, Zhivago’s Children, 270; Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 508–10; vol. 2: 7, 22, 38. On Tvardovskii, see Tomilina, Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1965–1972, 689–90, 719–23; and Spechler, Permitted Dissent, 222–24. 137. On publication of the book of Fireglow, see Trifonov, Otblesk kostra; Shitov, Iurii Trifonov, 329–51. On Kaverin, see: GARF, 9425/1/1217/14 (rejection of initial publication in a 1965 collected works); the story first came out in a 1966 edition of his collected works, after its journal publication, and then in a separate edition, Dvoinoi portret; Kaverin, Epilog, 458; and “Ivan Shukhov—U istorii na vetru,” Izvestiia (Kazakhstan), 25 September 2004, http://www. izvestia.kz/node/14607. On Bulgakov, see Bulgakov, “Master i Margarita”; Lovell, “Bulgakov as Soviet Culture.” 138. Cohen, “The Stalin Question after Stalin,” 119; Cohen, “The Friends and Foes of Change,” 200; Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin, 167. 139. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, 167. 140. On Trapeznikov, see e.g. Arbatov, The System, 126–36; Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, 164; Plimak, Na voine i posle voiny, 132; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, 166. On the charges against Khrushchev, see Artizov, Nikita Khrushchev. 141. RGANI, 5/35/210/66, 178. 142. RGANI, 5/35/210/123. 143. RGANI, 5/35/215/41–158. Cf. another symposium the same month, about party history, which urged the “correct depiction of the role of the individual in history and showing objectively the whole process of historical development” (RGANI, 5/35/211). 144. A similar argument was reiterated several times at a November 1965 meeting of the ideological commission (RGANI, 5/35/210). 145. RGANI, 5/35/215/157; RGANI, 5/35/210/251. See chapter 3. See also MGU party history internal discussions in early Brezhnev era, with strong emphasis on anti-revisionism and excessive criticism of Stalinist past: TsAOPIM, 478/1/1127, 1184, 1199, 1250 (entire). KGB warnings about revisionism: RGANI, 5/33/235/52–78; Goriaeva, Politicheskaiia tsenzura, 147–53. 146. RGANI, 5/35/211/117 (Trapeznikov); similar argument by Pospelov: RGANI, 5/35/210/205. Criticism of “era of cult of personality” in Pravda, 30 January 1966; Plimak suggests that the “majority” of “pro-Stalinists” are delighted at publication of this article: Plimak, Na voine i posle voiny, 132. Letter of protest against this article, from Nekrich among others: RGANI, 5/35/223/53–57.

note s to p ag e s 24 1 –24 7

32 7

147. RGANI, 5/35/210/137. On ongoing opposition to the rehabilitation of Stalin’s works, and contested changes to the university syllabus, see Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’, 154. 148. Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 481, 485. 149. Cohen, An End to Silence, 158–61. 150. Ibid. On use of the terms “Stalinism” and “Stalinist” at earlier ideological meetings, see RGANI, 5/35/210/219. 151. Pospielovsky, “Re-Stalinization or De-Stalinization?” 317, and Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union, 117; Arbatov, The System; Bovin, XX vek kak zhizn’. 152. “Obsuzhednie maketa 3-ogo toma Istorii KPSS.” 153. For example, Kommunist, no. 11 (1966): 63–74; Pravda, 4 January 1967, 4; KZ, 30 May 1957, 4; Kommunist, no. 1 (1968): 57–68. 154. Tatu sees “most striking change” in narrative of war (Tatu, Power in the Kremlin, 477–78). 155. Ponomarev, Istoriia KPSS (1969). Archival materials on editing this volume are unavailable. 156. For example, two articles in early 1969, one arguing in the strongest terms yet for Stalin’s wartime role to be praised, and the other arguing emphatically for a single, celebratory approach to party history: Kommunist, no. 2 (1969): 119–28; no. 3: 67–72. 157. For multiple examples of these fears and warnings, see Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, passim; Politicheskii dnevnik, passim. 158. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 485–88, 491–92. 159. Tomlina, Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1965–72, 46–65. 160. Ibid., 428–38. On pro-Stalin literature, see e.g. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, 171. Examples include: Smirnov, “Svidetel’stvuiu sam”; Zakrutkin, “Sotvorenie mira.” 161. “Obsuzhdenie maketa 3-ogo toma Istorii KPSS.” 162. Ibid. 163. Tomlina, Apparat TsK KPSS i kult’ura, 1965–1972, 460–65. The work was initially published as Kochetov, “Chego zhe ty khochesh’?” 164. Tomlina, Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1965–1972, 733–37. 165. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 485–88. 166. Tomlina, Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1965–1972, 460–65. 167. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 485–88. 168. Tomlina, Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1965–1972, 428–39. 169. Cohen, An End to Silence, 56–61. 170. Though this family history was not mentioned in his petition. On “radical obedience” to party and legal discourse, see Nathans, “The Dictatorship of Reason.” 171. For example, Markwick, “Catalyst of Historiography, Marxism and Dissidence.” 172. Cohen, An End to Silence, 153–57. 173. Tomlina, Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura 1965–1972, 46–65; Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 491–92.

3 28

n o t e s t o p ag es 2 47–2 5 3

174. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 485–88. 175. Tomlina, Apparat TsK KPSS i kul’tura, 1965–1972, 428–38. Compare similar argument in intelligentsia petition against Kochetov novel (733–37). 176. Ibid., 438–39. 177. Rubenstein, Soviet Dissidents; Alekseeva, Soviet Dissent. 178. RGASPI, 558/11/1414a/2. Rothberg and Medvedev claim the plans were already in place earlier in the year, but this file on the ninetieth anniversary contains no indication (Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin, 268–79; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, 175–83). 179. On eightieth anniversary celebrations, see chapter 3. 180. RGASPI, 558/11/1414a/3–5. 181. Politicheskii dnevnik, 1965–1970, vol. 1: 589–94. 182. Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 2: 399. 183. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 525–29 (only two out of twenty-three votes cast against it). 184. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, 175–83. 185. Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 525–29. 186. Ibid. 187. Ibid. 188. Ibid. 189. Ibid. 190. RGASPI, 558/11/1414a/8–45. 191. Schapiro sees these ambiguities as a sign of continuing “struggle with Stalin’s spectre” (Schapiro, “The Soviet Press and the Problem of Stalin”). 192. Pravda, 21 December 1969, 2. 193. Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 2: 443. 194. Politicheskii dnevnik, vol. 1: 586–89. 195. RGASPI, 558/11/1414a/57, 62. 196. Ibid., l. 57. 197. Ibid., ll. 57, 62. 198. Ibid., ll. 59, 60 199. Ibid., l. 60. See also reports of anxiety about “stirring up the past” (l. 65). 200. See Tvardovskii’s friend’s observation that “this article divided people in two” (Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 2: 443). 201. RGASPI, 558/11/1414a/60, 64. 202. Ibid., l. 64. 203. Ibid., ll. 58–59. 204. Call for full rehabilitation: Ibid., l. 74. 205. Ibid., l. 69. Another reference to Stalin’s “imia”: l. 58. 206. Ibid., l. 59. 207. Ibid., l. 76, l. 64. 208. Ibid., l. 72. 209. See another, brief call for a bust on Stalin’s grave: Ibid., l. 68. 210. Ibid., l. 70.

note s to p ag e s 25 3 –25 8 211. 212. 213. 214. 215. 216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221. 222. 223. 224. 225. 226.

227.

228.

229. 230. 231. 232. 233. 234.

32 9

Ibid., ll. 72, 75. Neither was identified as an inhabitant of the city. Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin, 268–72; Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, 175. KGB suggests these views are in the minority: RGASPI, 558/11/1414a /64. RGASPI, 558/11/1414a/86. Ibid., l. 89. Ibid., l. 91. Ibid., l. 85. Ibid., l. 86. A letter focusing on 1937 listed victims including Tukhachevskii, Bliukher, Kosior, Postyshev, Chubar’: Ibid., l. 84. Ibid., l. 93. Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin, 271. RGASPI, 558/11/1414a/97. Ibid., l. 69 Ibid., l. 76. Ibid., l. 82. Ibid., l. 76. Quotation from Leese, “The Mao Cult as Communicative Space.” On reproducibility of late socialist discourse, see Yurchak, Everything Was Forever until It Was No More. Spechler, Permitted Dissent, 263, suggests that the mission of Novyi mir was continued in samizdat after its “dissent” was no longer “permitted” in Soviet publications. Markwick makes a similar claim for revisionist historiography (Markwick, “Catalyst of Historiography, Marxism and Dissidence”). On the dissident project of glasnost’: Horvath, “The Dissident Roots of Glasnost’.” On the dissident movement, see e.g. Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin; Alekseeva, Soviet Dissent; Shatz, Soviet Dissent in Historical Perspective. Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha, 236. Several accounts emphasize that it was a close-run thing (Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin; Bacon and Sandle, Brezhnev Reconsidered). Thompson, “Reassessing Personality Cults,” 126. Cohen suggests that the Stalin question lost some of its defining power for the post-1960s generation (Cohen, “The Friends and Foes of Change”). Artizov, Reabilitatsiia, vol. 2: 530–31. Marsh, Images of Dictatorship; Cohen, “The Stalin Question after Stalin”; Ellis, The Damned and the Dead, 110–42. Tvardovskii, Novomirskii dnevnik, vol. 2; Spechler, Permitted Dissent, 222–28, 258–64; Rybakov, Roman-vospominanie, 215–36. The best study of Trifonov’s Aesopian language is Woll, Invented Truth.

c on cl u si o n 1. “Uroki istorii.” On reader response, see Nauka i zhizn’, no. 12 (1987): 4, 5–16, 16–17. 2. “Uroki pravdy.” For reader response to this text, see Nauka i zhizn’, no. 12 (1988): 78–82; no. 5 (1989): 20.

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n o t e s t o p ag e s 2 5 8–2 61

3. In his analysis of the “vast distance” covered by revelations about the war in 1987–88, Davies emphasizes several Simonov texts, including these two texts and his writings on Zhukov, published for the first time in 1988 (Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution). 4. Benjamin Nathans argues that the decision to take official language, including legal language, seriously and literally was one of the defining practices of the burgeoning Soviet human rights movement at this time (Nathans, “The Dictatorship of Reason.”) 5. Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin, 78. 6. Boobbyer, Conscience, Dissent, and Reform. 7. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever until It Was No More. 8. For example, Tompson, “Khrushchev and Gorbachev as Reformers”; Nordlander, “Khrushchev’s Image in the Light of Glasnost and Perestroika.” 9. On the importance of Gorbachev’s discourse, or framing, of memory and the project of coming to terms with the past (notably the greater thoroughness implied in the “blank spots” metaphor), see Wolfe, “Past as Present, Myth or History?”; Hosking, “Memory in a Totalitarian Society.” 10. See examples of opposition to glasnost’, using these arguments, in a collection of popular responses to early glasnost’ de-Stalinization of the war: Samsonov, Znat’ i pomnit’. 11. For an excellent analysis of the structural differences between the two episodes of de-Stalinization, see Smith, Remembering Stalin’s Victims. 12. Mendelson and Gerber, “Failing the Stalin Test?”; Sherlock, “Confronting the Stalinist Past”; Shlapentokh and Bondartsova, “Stalin in Russian Ideology and Public Opinion”; Levinson, “The Uses and Abuses of Stalin’s Image”; Adler, “The Future of the Stalinist Past Remains Unpredictable”; Roginsky, “The Embrace of Stalinism.” 13. Gerber and Mendelson suggest that de-Stalinization never occurred in the Soviet era, and blame this for the ongoing failure to condemn Stalin and the terror in today’s Russia (Gerber and Mendelson, “Failing the Stalin Test”). 14. Langenlohl, “Political Culture in Contemporary Russia”; Roginsky, “The Embrace of Stalinism.” Merridale claims that these competing memories leave Stalin and Stalinism in “moral limbo” in post-Soviet culture (Merridale, “Redesigning History in Contemporary Russia,” 8).

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INDEX

Academy of Social Sciences (AON): 45, 74–75, 283–84 Albania: 125 Aleshin, Samuil: 169, 307 Anti-Party Group: 95, 99, 108, 123, 141, 143 Army, Soviet: attitudes to Soviet historiography, literature, 172–211, 216–25, 234–35, 238, 310n29, 315n130, 321n58; depiction in Soviet literature, 172–211, 216–38; purges and terror affecting, 159, 177–82, 207, 217–24, 226–38. See also Veterans; World War II Baklanov, Grigorii: 174, 216–29, 233, 320–21 Balter, Boris: 158 Bek, Aleksandr: 225–38, 247, 257 Beria, Lavrentii: denunciation of, 13, 30–31, 63, 127, 143; depiction in literature, 134–35 Berzer, Anna: 163–64, 228 Bondarev, Iurii: 147, 149–50, 159, 161, 174, 215 Borshchagovskii, Aleksandr: 149, 232, 301 Brezhnev, Leonid: 12, 82, 84, 224, 227, 236, 238, 242, 250, 324n118

Bulgakov, Mikhail: 239 Burdzhalov, Eduard: 70, 79–80, 121 Censorship: 12, 108, 118–23, 134–36, 161–64, 179, 212, 216, 219–20, 227–28, 233–35, 238, 258, 305n157 Central Committee (CC): departments, of agitprop, 248, of culture, 73, 86, 237, of ideology, 118, 123, of science, 86, 88–89; ideological commission, 150, 170, 326n144; resolution of June 1956 on the cult of personality, 50–55, 65, 69, 97, 102–3, 107, 109, 127, 131–32, 166, 200, 236, 241–44, 249–50, 252, 255; resolution of 22nd Party Congress, 97, 107, 109, 113, 119, 166, 243–44, 246; sector of party propaganda, 103, 124, 132, 142. See also Third Party Program Chakovskii, Aleksandr: 308n220 China: 14; attitudes to Stalin, 33; commemoration of Mao Zedong, 98, 104; Sino-Soviet split, 97, 100, 125, 145, 292n48, 297n155 Chukovskaia, Lidiia: 147, 157, 301n88 Civil war, Russian: 5, 25, 103, 114, 117, 181. See also Stalin, Iosif; Stalingrad Collectivization: 45, 92, 103, 122, 124, 159–60, 233, 242, 308n7

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358

index

Congresses of the CPSU: 17th Congress (1934), 19, 36, 124, 159; 19th Congress (1952), 36, 142; 20th Congress (1956; see also Secret Speech), 2, 8, 18–19, 71–78, 82, 236, 244–46; popular reactions to 20th Congress, 24–49, 61–69, 85–86, 109–10, 123, 150, 175–76; 21st Congress (1959), 107; 22nd Congress (1961), 1–3, 9, 14, 61, 65, 87–89, 97–100, 107–25, 129–30, 140–58, 166–67, 169–70, 175, 179, 203, 205, 231, 236, 243–46, 250, 259; 23rd Congress (1966), 230, 232, 241, 243–45, 247 Czechoslovakia: 213, 243, 246 Daniil, Iulii: 230–32, 241 Demichev, Petr: 242 Dissident movement: 94, 256, 260 Dombrovskii, Iurii: 161–65 Dudintsev, Vladimir: 84–86, 88, 298n16, 17; Not by Bread Alone, 58–59, 65, 69–75, 82, 88 Egorychev, Nikolai: 144–45, 148, 323n80 Ehrenburg, Il’ia: 62, 149, 152, 161, 184, 219 El’sburg, N.: 149, 303n122 Encyclopedia, Great Soviet: 101 Epishev, Aleksei: 225, 235 Ermilov, Vladimir: 149–50, 152 Evtushenko, Evgenii: 2–3, 15, 148, 181 Fadeev, Aleksandr: 61 Fedin, Konstantin: 158 Films about Stalinism: 5, 129, 158, 179 193, 210, 298n12, 304n141, 307n207, 309n9, 325n133 Five Year Plans: See Industrialization, Soviet Fomenko, Lidiia: 153–54 France: 12–13, 127 Furtseva, Elena: 170 Georgia: 44, 49–50, 113 Ginzburg, Lidiia: 305n155 Glasnost’: 9, 129, 140, 226, 257–61. See also Gorbachev, Mikhail Glavlit: see Censorship

Gorbachev, Mikhail: 9, 12, 129–30, 257, 260–61 Gorbatov, Aleksandr: 161, 164, 222 Gospolitizdat: 120. See also Historians and Historiography Gribachev, Nikolai: 64 Gulag: amnesties, 17, 27, 193, 196; depiction in literature, 70, 136, 146–47, 150, 153–54, 156, 159, 161, 163–64, 166–72, 178, 180, 223, 306n190; returnees, 63, 111, 132, 193–97, 221–22, 283n45 Historians and Historiography: 5–6, 9, 11, 14–15, 24–25, 56–96, 121, 123–24, 200, 213, 224, 232–35, 238–43, 258–61; depiction of Stalin: see Stalin, Iosif; history publications (see also Short Course; Voprosy istorii), 11, 68, 75, 100–106, 120–27, 129, 142–44, 242–44; History of the Communist Party, 1959 edition, 102–106, 131–32, 134, 1962 edition, 120, 124, 142–43, 1969 edition, 243; party history, 56–96, 105, 120–25, 131, 135–36, 142–43, 239–44, 258–61, 292n40; teaching (see also Moscow State University; Universities), 65–69, 80–81, 91–96, 123, 131–32, 142, 240; war history: see Civil War, Russian; World War I; World War II Holocaust, memory of: 14, 139, 146 Hungary, Soviet relations with: 43, 49, 55–57 Iakir, Petr: 246, 254 Ikramov, Kamil’: 167, 170–72 Il’ichev, Fedor: 104, 125–26, 150, 170, 172 Industrialization, Soviet: 20, 45, 55, 103, 132–35, 226, 228–33, 235, 238, 242, 249, 253 Institute of Marxism-Leninism: 105, 118, 125, 131, 134–36, 248, 291n27 Iunost’ (journal): 158 Kabo, Liubov’: 147 Kaganovich, Lazar’: 21–22, 36–37, 108 Kaverin, Veniamin: 60, 84, 89, 231, 237, 239, 284n79

index

Kazakevich, Emanuil: 89 Ketlinskaia, Vera: 131–40, 181, 196, 223, 323n85, 326n145 KGB (formerly NKVD): 90, 129, 149, 251–52; depiction in literature, historiography, 133–35, 143, 160–63, 218, 300nn71–72, 325n130 Khrushchev, Nikita: as party leader, 4, 7, 17, 20, 95, 99, 107, 125–26; attitude to Stalin and Stalinism (see also Secret Speech), 15, 83–84, 97, 100, 104, 107–9, 125–27, 140–41, 151–54; policy on literature, 82–86, 89, 125, 132, 141–42, 150–57, 170, 213; popular attitudes to, 36, 47–48, 55–56, 90, 126; removal from office (1964), 14, 210, 212–13, 216–19, 226, 228, 239–40, 248, 255–56; role in Secret Speech writing and performance (see also Secret Speech), 2, 8, 18–29, 34–42, 200 Kochetov, Vsevolod: 88, 142, 245 Kommunist (journal): 102–106, 126–27, 246, 281n232, 289n210 Komsomol (Communist Youth League): 90, 94–95, 101, 104, 116, 170 Kopelev, Lev: 107, 149, 244–45, 247 Kornilov, Boris: 149 Kosterin, Aleksei: 147–48, 301n88 Kosterina, Nina: 147, 158, 161, 301n88 Kozhevnikov, Vadim: 83, 154. See also Znamia Krasnopevtsev, Lev: 90–96, 121 Lakshin, Vladimir: 163 Lazarev, Lazar’: 8–9, 184, 216 Lazurkina, Dora: 1, 141, 148 Lenin, Vladmir: cult of, 1, 5, 21, 32–33, 41, 54, 60, 110; in historiography, 58–59, 75–77; Lenin prizes, 72–73, 158, 197, 312n83; mausoleum: see Mausoleum, Lenin/Stalin Lesiuchevskii, Nikolai: 147–49 Literaturnaia Moskva: 62 Makar’ev, Leonid: 63–64, 282n33 Maksimov, Vladimir: 308n220 Malenkov, Georgii: 37, 47, 108

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Mao Zedong: See China Mausoleum, Lenin/Stalin: placement of Stalin in, 1, 4, 36; removal of Stalin from, 1–2, 31–33, 51, 55, 107–11, 113 Medvedev, Roi: 217, 238, 246, 249, 251, 256 Mikoian, Anastas: 18, 37, 56 Ministry of Higher Education: 95, 120. See also Universities Molodaia gvardiia: 170 Molotov, Viacheslav: 21–22, 36–37, 44–47, 55–56, 108. See also Anti-Party Group Monuments: attacks on Stalin monuments, 28, 44; erection, preservation of Stalin monuments, 50–51, 254; monuments to terror victims, 129–30; removal of Stalin monuments, 9, 112–14, 253 Moscow State University (MGU): history faculty, 65–66, 68–69, 80, 90–91, 93, 120–23; party history department (see also Moskalev, Ivan), 58–59, 65–69, 74–81, 89–95, 120–24, 240; student reactions to Secret Speech (see also Universities), 58, 66 Moscow Thermo-Technical Laboratory: 35, 39–40, 42–43, 50, 90. See also Orlov, Iurii Mosfil’m (film studio): 179, 307n207 Moskalev, Ivan: 58, 60, 69, 75–80, 90–92, 94, 121 Moskovskii literator: 71 Museums: de-Stalinization of, 114, 118, 119; commemoration of terror in, 9, 129–30; in Stalingrad, 114, 118 Nazism, commemoration of: 13, 127–28. See also Holocaust, memory of Nekrasov, Viktor: 147, 166–67 Nekrich, Aleksandr: 224, 226, 235, 238 Nikolaeva, Galina: 298n12, 298n16 Nikul’kov, Anatolii: 158–61, 165, 181 NKVD: See KGB Novyi mir: 11, 69–70, 89, 150, 158–59, 160–64, 166–67, 212–16, 218, 226, 228–39, 257

3 60

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Oktiabr’: 224 Old Bolsheviks: 1, 18, 26, 35, 141, 143–44, 217, 242, 244 Orlov, Iurii: 39, 41, 43, 94 Orlova, Raisa: 61–63, 86, 107–8, 227 Pankratova, Anna: 26, 33–34, 70, 79. See also Voprosy istorii Partiinaia zhizn’: 68, 75 Party History: See Historians and Historiography Pasternak, Boris: 88 Paustovskii, Konstantin: 58–60, 65, 70–73, 83, 86 Pel’she, Arvid: 250 Pervomaiskii, Leonid: 305n155 Podgornyi, Nikolai: 249–50 Pogodin, Nikolai: 167–72 Poland: 43, 50 Pomerantsev, Vladimir: 62, 69, 147 Ponomarev, Boris: 124. See also Historians and Historiography Portraits: attacks on Stalin portraits, 28, 44; preservation and removal of Stalin portraits, 31, 51, 112–13. See also Stalin, Iosif Pospelov, Petr: 83–84, 143, 241; as historian (see also Short Course), 18, 124–25; role in Secret Speech (see also Secret Speech), 18–19, 22–24, 83 Pravda: publications about Stalin, 1–2, 33, 43, 48, 50, 54, 75, 140, 224, 239, 248–51, 326n146; readers’ letters to, 54–55, 110–11, 251–56 Putin, Vladimir: 12 Renamings: 4, 50–51, 112–17, 121, 254. See also Stalin, Iosif; Stalingrad Revolutions of 1917: 50th anniversary of, 242; depiction in Soviet historiography and literature, 74, 78, 103, 124; Stalin’s role in, 5, 45, 103, 124, 251 Rozen, Aleksandr: 217, 225 Rybakov, Anatolii: Children of the Arbat, 238; Summer in Sosniaki, 212–16, 228 Samizdat: 8, 12, 204, 226–28, 239, 243–48, 254, 256–57, 260

Schools, Soviet: 6, 50, 123, 129, 280n213 Secret Speech (1956): 2, 13–14, 17–56, 103, 105, 107–9, 125, 128, 130–31, 138, 141, 143, 150, 166, 243; drafting (see also Khrushchev, Nikita; Pospelov, Petr), 2, 8, 18–24, 83, 134, 153, 250; popular reactions to (see also Stalin, Iosef: popular attitudes toward; Universities), 8–9, 23–50, 58, 61–69, 85–86, 88, 93–94, 105–106, 109, 112–13, 126, 139–40, 145, 176, 201–2, 204, 255, 259 Semenov, Iul’ian: 308n220 Serebriakova, Galina: 85, 151–52, 168 Shchipachev, Stepan: 94, 144, 155, 301nn79 Sheinin, Lev: 300n72 Shelepin, Aleksandr: 101, 104, 141 Shelest, Petr: 249–50 Shepilov, Dmitrii: 82, 84, 104 Sholokhov, Mikhail: 193 Short Course: 18, 66–68, 75, 96, 103, 105, 131, 235, 242, 253. See also Historians and Historiography Simonov, Konstantin: 70, 86, 173–211, 218, 222, 224–25, 238–39, 257–61, 306n182; attitude to Stalin, 175–79, 181–83, 198–203, 206; Comrades in Arms, 176; Days and Nights, 176, 185; Hundred Days of War, 225–28, 230, 234–39, 309n16; The Last Summer, 185, 209; The Living and the Dead, 132, 134, 173, 176–80, 183–84, 187–97, 199–203, 209–10; People are not Born Soldiers, 158, 173–74, 176, 179–83, 185, 197–98, 203–6, 209–10, 216, 224, 234; readership, 173–211, 220–21, 329n103; wartime journalism and literature, 173–74, 176, 183–85, 188–96; veterans, relationship with, 177, 186–96, 207–10 Siniavskii, Andrei: 230–32, 241 Slutskii, Boris: 148, 181 Smirnov, Sergei: 246–47 Sobolev, Leonid: 88, 153–54, 287n165 Socialist Realism: 11, 70, 72, 83–84, 130, 133–34, 136, 139–40, 162, 165–66, 174, 184, 187, 189, 195, 209–10, 221, 298n16 Sofronov, Anatolii: 64, 154

index

Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr: 252, 325n124; An Incident at Krechetovka Station, 161, 306n182; Cancer Ward, 238, 257; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 70, 147–48, 150–51, 159, 161, 215 Stadniuk, Ivan: 160, 165, 181 Stalin, Iosif: anniversaries of birth and death, 5, 44–47, 102–7, 239, 248–56; attitudes toward Soviet history, 59–60, 75–76, 79, 92; attitudes toward Soviet literature, 59–60, 72–74; biography, 105, 123, 253, 280n213; death and funeral (1953), 1–4, 7, 17, 36, 48, 98–99, 103; depiction in Soviet art (see also Portraits), 5; depiction in Soviet historiography, of the Stalin era, 5–6, 18, 66–68, 91–92, 105, 107, 120, 187–89, 253, of the Khrushchev era, 11–12, 24, 77–80, 91–92, 100–107, 118–125, 131, 134, 142, 152–53, 176, 200, 203, 248, of the Brezhnev era, 128, 224–27, 232, 238–45, 248–56, 260, of the Gorbachev era, 258–61; depiction in Soviet journalism, 8–9, 17, 33, 50, 97, 102–107, 126–27, 242–43, 246, 248–56; depiction in Soviet literature, of the Stalin era, 5–6, 181, 204, of the Khrushchev era, 2, 11–12, 81–84, 133–40, 159, 173–211, 234, 249, 256, of the Brezhnev era, 216–29, 244–46, 256–57, of the Gorbachev era, 257–61; family, 5, 28; grave, 253–54, 328n209; mausoleum: see Mausoleum, Lenin/ Stalin; monuments to: see Monuments; popular attitudes toward (see also Secret Speech), in Stalin era, 6–7, 28, in Khrushchev era, 6, 21–56, 100–101, 105–6, 109–13, 115–16, 126–27, 138–39, 171–75, 178, 198–207, 210–11, in Brezhnev era, 221–23, 243–47, 251–56, 258, 261, in post-Soviet era, 199, 261; publications by, 66–67, 106, 123, 126–27, 241; role in Civil War, 25; role in terror, 1–2, 18–22, 25, 28–32, 45–46, 52, 63–64, 85, 98–99, 103, 106–12, 114–17, 124, 130–31, 133–40, 142–43, 237, 243, 249–51, 254–55, 261; role in World War II (see also World War II),

36 1

23, 25, 29, 45, 53, 98, 103, 124–25, 173–211, 216–25, 235–36, 242–43, 249, 251, 253, 255, 258–59, 261 Stalingrad: battle of (see also Simonov, Konstantin), 176, 179, 181, 185; Civil War, 114, 117, 181–82; museum: see Museums; population reaction to de-Stalinization, 25, 41, 46, 114–18; renaming: see Renamings; Stalin, monument, 51 Stel’makh, Mikhail: 158 Surkov, Aleksandr: 62–63, 286n138, 287n153 Suslov, Mikhail: 104, 249–50, 289n210, 297n155, 320n15 Svirskii, Grigorii: 244, 246–47, 325n127 Tendriakov, Vladimir: 167, 170–72 Terror: Anti-cosmopolitanism campaign, 15, 68, 74, 149, 287n153, 312n83; commemoration of (see also Monuments), in Brezhnev era, 212–58, in Gorbachev era, 129–30, 261, in post-Soviet period, 129–30, 261–62; discussion of, 1–2, 8–9, 19–22, 25–31, 34, 46, 62–65, 84–85, 99, 107–12, 114–17, 140–42, 144–57; historiography of the “Great Terror” (see also Historians and Historiography), 102–3, 124, 131–32, 142–44, 235, 238, 243; literature about the “Great Terror,” 130–40, 142, 144–72, 173–83, 196–207, 212–26, 229, 234–36, 238–39, 256, 259–60; memoirs by victims of, 143–44, 147, 158, 161, 249; perpetrators of, 2–3, 14, 19, 27–28, 32, 34, 63–65, 107–8, 110, 130, 133–34, 137, 141, 143, 148–49, 152, 160–61, 165–72, 178, 213–15, 226, 305n155. See also Stalin, Iosif Theater, Soviet: 158, 167–72, 183, 300n72 Third Party Program (1961): 107, 145 Trapeznikov, Sergei: 105, 240–41, 323n84 Trifonov, Iurii: 217, 239, 257, 308n220 Trotskyism: 34, 42, 78, 82, 122, 131, 240, 251 Tsaritsyn: See Stalingrad Tukhachevskii, Mikhail: 159, 329n341

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Tvardovskii, Aleksandr: attitude to Stalin, 142, 146, 236, 248, 251; By Right of Memory, 238; Distance beyond Distance, 132, 134, 311n54; editorship of Novyi mir (see also Novyi mir), 11, 69, 89, 150, 160–61, 164, 212–13, 215–16, 236; Terkin in the Other World, 156 Universities; students, 58, 75, 91–95, 116–17, 121, 240; syllabi, 6, 65–69, 81, 94–95, 105, 120, 123, 129, 131, 142, 291n19, 292n45, 327n147. See also Ministry of Higher Education; Moscow State University Veterans, war: 117, 153, 175–77, 186–96, 201–3, 207–11, 220–21, 314n111. See also Simonov, Konstantin; World War II Volgograd: See Stalingrad Voprosy istorii: 11, 58–59, 69–70, 74–81. See also Burdzhalov, Eduard; Pankratova, Anna Voronin, Sergei: 304n143, 305n162 Voroshilov, Kliment: 21–22, 36, 108, 111. See also Anti-Party Group World War I: 189 World War II: anniversaries of start of war, 233, of end of war, 216–225; battle of Stalingrad: see Stalingrad; death toll of, 192, 255; depiction in Soviet

literature, 133, 158, 161, 173–211, 216–27, 230, 234–38, 258–59; films about, 179, 193, 210; historiography in Khrushchev era, 118, 124–25, 176, in Brezhnev era, 210, 224–25, 232–38, 242–43, 251, in Gorbachev era, 258–61, in post-Soviet era, 129, 261; journalism (see also Ehrenburg, Il’ia; Simonov, Konstantin), 184–85; veterans of: see Veterans, war; victory in, 5–6, 45, 98, 129, 175, 188, 199, 203, 206–11, 216–24, 235, 239–40, 261; Vlasov army, 209, 223. See also Army, Soviet Writers’ Union, Soviet: congresses, 3rd (1959), 89, 4th (1967), 236–37; Moscow Writers’ Union, 58–65, 70–76, 81–89, 144–50, 155–58, 160–61, 186, 224–25, 231–32, 258, 296n143, 303n128, 312n83; RSFSR Writers’ Union, 138, 146, 153–56, 158–60, 223, 303n128, 324n108; Union-level Writers’ Union, 61–62, 82, 89, 320n8 Yugoslavia: 35, 66, 80, 101 Zabolotskii, Nikolai: 149 Zlobin, Stepan: 72, 85, 147–48 Znamia: 83, 132, 134–36, 154, 173, 183, 185, 195, 197, 216, 218–19, 226, 305n155. See also Kozhevnikov, Vadim Zorin, Leonid: 158