Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union 0674021789, 9780674021785

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Marxism and the Crisis of Russian Messianism
2. The Effects of Revolution and Civil War
3. Soviet Nationality Policy and the Russians
4. Two Russias Collide
5. Projecting A New Russia
6. The Great Fatherland War
7. The Sweet and Bitter Fruits of Victory
8. The Relaunch of Utopia
9. The Rediscovery of Russia
10. The Return of Politics
11. An Unanticipated Creation: The Russian Federation
Conclusion
Appendix
Notes
Index

Citation preview

RULERS AND VICTIMS

rulers and victim s TH E R U SSIA N S IN THE SOVIET U N IO N

GEOFFREY HOSKING

T H E BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD U N IV E R S I T Y PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England 2006

Copyright © 2006 by Geoffrey Hosking All rights reserved Printed in the United States o f America Library o f Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hosking, Geoffrey A. Rulers and victims : the Russians in the Soviet Union / Geoffrey Hosking. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-02178-9 (alk. paper) 1. National characteristics, Russian. 3. Nationalism—Russia (Federation).

2. Russians— Ethnic identity. 4. Soviet Union— History.

5. Soviet Union—Ethnic relations. I. Tide: Russians in the Soviet Union.

II. Tide.

DK510.34.H67 2006 305.800946— dc22

2005057215

C ontents

Preface Introduction 1

M arxism and the Crisis o f Russian M essianism

2 T he Effects o f R evolution and Civil W ar

vii 1

10 36

3

Soviet N ationality Policy and the Russians

70

4

Two Russias C ollide

90

5

Projecting a N ew Russia

6 T he G reat Fatherland W ar 7

T he Sweet and B itter Fruits o f V ictory

8 T he R elaunch o f U topia 9

T he Rediscovery o f Russia

142 189 224 268 304

10 T he R eturn o f Politics

338

11 A n U nanticipated C reation: T he Russian Federation

372

C onclusion

404

A ppendix: Tables

411

N otes

415

Index

463

PREFACE

O ne dram atic image has remained in m ost peoples minds from the final days o f the Soviet Union: Boris Yeltsin standing on top o f one o f the tanks sent by the Soviet “Emergency Com m ittee” in August 1991 to storm the W hite House, the Russian parliam ent building. As see in television foot­ age aired around the world, Yeltsin condem ned the coup as an attem pt to “remove from power the legally elected authorities o f the Russian Repub­ lic.” H e called on “the citizens o f Russia to give a fitting rebuff to the putschists” and on all officials to “unswervingly adhere to the constitu­ tional laws and decrees o f the President o f Russia.” His defiant and coura­ geous stand inspired Russians to come by the thousands to camp around the W hite House and defend it from possible assault. The junta decided not to open fire on them and the coup collapsed. T he final and decisive conflict, then, was not between Com m unism and anti-Com m unism , as the whole history o f the USSR m ight have led one to expect, but rather between Russia and the Soviet Union. How could that be? How could it confront itself? T hat is the question which underlies this book. My attem pt to answer it, though, dates from long before 1991. O ne evening in 1969, as I was about to travel on the overnight train from Mos­ cow to Leningrad, a friend gave me a book to read that she warmly rec­ ommended. At first I was not impressed: it was a novel by the Vologda w riter Vasilii Belov, o f whom I had never heard, and the title— Privychnoe deb, or “Business as Usual”— was not especially promising. But once I started reading, I found the text so gripping that I did not get much sleep

VIII

PREFACE

that night. It concerned a collective farm somewhere in the Russian north, and the travails o f a hum er devoted to his wife, his children, and the land, but so alienated by the local bureaucrats and their procedures that he decides to break w ith the village and seek a new life in the town. W hat the book revealed to me was that there was a way o f being Rus­ sian that was un-Soviet. Like m ost people, I had gotten used to thinking o f the Soviet U nion as essentially Russian. Russian was its m ain language, spoken w ith native fluency even by the non-Russians I m et as a graduate student. Russian writers dom inated all the bookshops. Russia’s history— including that o f the tsars— perm eated the university curriculum , even if to my eyes the “era o f feudalism” and the “era o f capitalism” seemed in­ congruous labels to fix on the country’s past. O n the other hand I knew from my undergraduate studies at Cam ­ bridge that there was another Russia, one not acknowledged in Moscow. Some o f its sons and daughters, long cut off from their hom eland yet still devoted to it, had been am ong our teachers. I had enjoyed Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, which was a best seller in the West but was not to be seen in any Soviet bookshop. I had read Anna Akhmatova’s poem cycle Requiem and poetry by O sip M andelstam, none o f which was to be found even in the otherwise comprehensive catalogues o f Moscow’s Lenin Library. So I knew that there was a suppressed Russia whose culture was found only in em igration. Moreover, in the Soviet U nion itself I had seen the O rthodox Church, bearer o f the Russian national faith, conduct­ ing its services discreedy and unannounced, attended mainly by old women and inquisitive foreigners like myself. Belov, however, was som ething new to me: the novel revealed a non-So­ viet Russian culture that em anated, not from the church or from sophisti­ cated non-M arxist intellectuals, but from ordinary Russian people, from the peasants whose voices had so long been silent, or at least unheard. O ne o f my abiding early impressions o f Soviet life had been the condition o f the Russian villages— mostly seen from trains and buses. The m uddy cart tracks that passed for roads and the ramshackle wooden huts w ith corrugated iron roofs did not correspond w ith my image o f a superpower’s agricultural economy. Could this be the same country that had launched Sputnik and that bristled w ith nuclear weapons and intercontinental bal­ listic missiles? Reading Belov opened my eyes to the reasons for the apparent incon­ gruity. Later I got to know other “village prose” writers, a unique genera-

PIEFACE

IX

don o f village lads who had undergone the dem anding training o f the Gorkii Literary Insdtute and had emerged able to do w hat no one else could: chronicle the transform ation o f the village that had taken place be­ fore their eyes. Though censorship inhibited them from complete frank­ ness, 1 learned from them w hat no historian could then recount, how the collectivization o f agriculture had disrupted the moral traditions o f the village and demoralized its population. It turned out that in the ostensibly modernizing Soviet U nion many people hankered after a form o f social solidarity that was now lost.1 Since that tim e the frite o f the Russians in the Soviet Union has haunted me. M ost non-Russians regarded them as the ruling nation; most Russians, for their part, consciously or not, looked on the Soviet U nion as their country. Yet in many ways, as I could see, Russians had suffered from the depredations o f the Soviet decades as m uch as, if not more than, other peoples. In the late 1980s, some Russians even began to declare that they had been the victims o f the Soviet Union, betrayed by the non-Russians they had striven to help. W hat was the truth? W riting about the Russians in the Soviet U nion is tricky. As I hope this book makes clear, Russian identity is diffuse and has a num ber o f aspects that do not harmonize easily: ethnic, imperial, civic, and cultural. U ntil 1932 Russian identity was not acknowledged in any official docum ent, and only non-Russians were represented in the People s Commissariat o f Nationalities. Even after that date, when it was officially recorded as “en­ try no 5Min the internal passport that every adult had to carry, most Rus­ sians still attributed no great im portance to their ethnic identity: in their eyes it still had fluid boundaries and merged readily w ith that o f other peoples, especially the Ukrainians, Belorussians, Jews, and the non-Rus­ sian peoples o f the Soviet Russian Republic, like the Chuvashi and the M ari. M any o f the experiences o f Russians described in this book were shared by non-Russians, for example in the Stalinist terror, in the collec­ tivization o f agriculture, or in the Second W orld War. T hat does not dis­ qualify them as part o f the Russian life story, but it is the Russians’ experi­ ence o f Soviet existence that I have tried to capture. In the field o f culture, I have treated literature much more than the other arts, partly because it is w hat I know best, and partly because it has been the art form in which Russians have felt their national identity is most fully expressed. My subject m atter is, then, somewhat blurred in outline. Its im por­ tance, however, is incontestable. At a tim e when the frite o f post-Soviet

X

PIEFACE

Russia is still in many ways open and undecided, it is imperative to try and understand w hat the Soviet U nion m eant to Russians, w hat effect it had on their national identity, and how it shaped the form ation o f the Russian Federation after 1991. This book is in some ways a sequel to my earlier w ork Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917, published in 1997. Yet the subject m atter is very different: to begin w ith, the new state was not even called after Russia anymore. As a result, I have structured this book differently, giving much more weight to Russians’ personal experiences and to the inform al fea­ tures o f Russian life. I w ant to thank warmly my colleagues Pete D uncan, Stephen Lovell, Robert Service, and my daughter Katya, who have read all or p an o f an earlier draft and offered helpful and insightful com ments that have im­ proved the text considerably. I am grateful to the British Library and the library o f the School o f Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London; the archive o f the Davis Russian Research Center, H ar­ vard University; T he State Archive o f the Russian Federation (GARF); T he Russian C enter for the Preservation and Study o f D ocum ents o f Contem porary H istory (RTsKhIDNI); and T he Russian State Archive o f the N ational Economy (RGANI). I owe a special thanks to the reading room attendants at the Archive o f the Library o f Russians Abroad (Biblioteka-fond Russkogo Zarubezhia), who actually served me glasses o f tea while I pored over their docum ents; their collection, despite its title, contains a large num ber o f personal papers deposited in response to an appeal by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn for materials reflecting the lives o f ordi­ nary people in the Soviet U nion. Sonia Bogatyreva lent me the Belov novel that launched my search for Russia in the Soviet U nion. Liudmila Chem ichenko offered constant sup­ port and invaluable assistance w ith archives. M y wife, Anne, and my daughters, Katya and Janet, com forted and sustained me through the seemingly endless process o f research and writing. 1 also owe m uch to Kathleen M cD erm ott and Christine Thorsteinsson o f Harvard University Press, who saw the book through the publication process w ith tact and understanding. I am gready indebted to the Leverhulme Foundation, whose award o f a Personal Research C hair made the research and w ridng o f this book possible. I am grateful for permission to use material from two o f my previously

PREFACE

XI

published articles: "The Second W orld W ar and Russian N ational C on­ sciousness,” Past and Present, no. 175 (May 2002), 162-187; and “Forms o f Social Solidarity in Russia and the Soviet U nion,” in Ivana M arkovi, ed., Trust and Democratic Transition in Post-Communist Europe (Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2004), 47-62.

In 1993, during the first parliam entary elections to take place in the postSoviet Russian Federation, the politician who seemed to capture m ost succincdy and forcefully Russians’ m ood— and the incongruity o f their re­ cent history—was the leader o f the Liberal Democratic Party, Vladimir Zhirinovskii: For m ost o f the tw entieth century, our nation has been in transit. We travelled in carts, ratding over country roads and potholes. We smashed the Germans and sent men into space, but in the process destroyed families and lost our sense o f history.. . . We m utilated our country. We turned it into a backward place, compelling the Russian nation, which at one tim e had occupied the vanguard, to retreat. We drove the population underground by economic, legal and psycho­ logical pressure. And today w ere being told we cannot manage w ith­ out the help o f foreigners.1 W hatever one may think o f Zhirinovskii as a politician, there is litde doubt that— as his electoral success witnessed— he was articulating the mixture o f resentment, bewilderment, and hum iliation that many Russians felt. They could not understand why, given their nations great and generally recognized achievements, Russia was impoverished and de­ graded by the final decade o f the tw entieth century. They had been the foremost people o f a great state, allegedly leading hum anity to a wonder-

im m iciiiN

2

fill future, and now suddenly they were the victims o f the collapse o f that state, apparendy backward and poverty-stricken, dependent on the hand­ outs o f other nations. There is indeed som ething paradoxical and as yet poorly understood about the Russians’ fate in the Soviet Union. By now we have histories o f all the m ajor nationalities o f the Soviet U nion, and a good many o f the m inor ones too— but not, so for, o f the Russians. They were the “un­ marked” Soviet people, the zero option o f the USSR. M ost Russians ac­ cepted this situation and identified themselves unthinkingly w ith the So­ viet U nion. They would sometimes refer to non-Slavs as natsmeny— “national people.” Rather like the American term “ethnic,” it im plied that Russians themselves had no ethnic identity. A similar message was im­ plicit in a ditty about the first cosm onaut that was popular in the 1960s: Kak khorosho, chto Iu. Gagarin, N e tungus i ne tatarin, O n ne khokhol i ne uzbek, A nash sovetskii chelovek. W hat a good thing that Iu. Gagarin Is not a Tungus or a Tatar, N ot a U krainian and not an Uzbek, But one o f us, a Soviet m an.2 M ost non-Russians and nearly all foreigners also assumed the Soviet U nion was Russia. T he non-Russians in the USSR generally regarded the Russians as their masters. Some accepted the fact, others resented it, but few questioned w hether it was really the case. Russians, for their part, could never understand this viewpoint. They felt they had rescued all the Soviet (and European) nations from Nazi rule, and then assisted them at considerable cost in rebuilding their economies and constructing social­ ism. They were helpful comrades, not occupiers, still less tyrants. W hy were they now treated w ith resentm ent and disdain? N ot everyone shared the consensus view, however, and some people even felt that the USSR was in a sense counterposed to Russia. Irina Kantor, a Jew who was an O rthodox believer, recalled as a child asking her father to show her Russia. H e took her across to a map on the wall and pointed to the Soviet Union. She replied, “T hat’s not Russia! Show me

INTRODUCTION

3

Russia!” T hen he pointed to the boundaries o f the Russian Federation, the RSFSR. “I thought for a m om ent. If one removed the incomprehensible word ‘Federation,’ then that should be Russia all right. . . . But no, that was not Russia. W here was it? I stared at the map long and hard, but in vain.” H er Russia was not a state nor a bounded territory on the map but a state o f m ind, an ideal for which she longed, though as a Jew she did not understand why.3 As a preface to her first published book o f poems, Irina Ratushinskaia wrote an essay, “M y H om eland,” which reflects an uncertainty about her national identity similar to K antors. In her passport her nationality was listed as “Russian.” But she had been brought up in Odessa, in the Ukrai­ nian Soviet Republic, and had never set eyes on geographical Russia until she was an adult. Perhaps then she was Ukrainian? But she spoke and wrote in Russian, and in her hom e town virtually no one used Ukrainian. Perhaps she should accept w hat she was told at school, that her hom eland was the Soviet U nion. But she did not feel that she could identify equally w ith the wild m ountains o f the Caucasus, the m ild Baltic coast, the frigid Siberian taiga, and the arid steppes o f Kazakhstan. N or did she feel much attachm ent to the Soviet culture propagated in the classroom. She came to the conclusion that her real hom eland was Russian literature, not the one taught at school, but the one she discovered quite suddenly at the age o f twenty-four: the unpublished poets M andelstam, Tsvetaeva, and Pasternak. O r alternatively her hom eland was God, W hom , she explains, “I did not seek. G od found me Himself, helped me to survive and rescued my soul.”4 This identification w ith a language, a culture, or a religion rather than w ith a territory, a state, or a country is com mon, especially am ong Russian intellectuals. We should pause, though, before assuming that such feelings o f un­ certainty and ambivalence about one’s national identity are peculiar to Russia. They are com m oner than one m ight think, especially among major ethnic groups that identify themselves w ith an overarching state. Such dom inant ethnicities assume both power over and responsibility for smaller ethnic groups, and so they tend to take nationality for granted and to merge their identity w ith some larger ideal.5 M ost large European na­ tions have gone through at least one period in their history when they as­ sumed that their religion, their civilization, their political system, or their way o f life was especially beneficial, and that it ought to be spread to the whole o f humanity. T he sixteenth-century Spaniards, having just expelled

4

INÏIIIICÎIIN

the Muslims from the Iberian peninsula, tried to take their mode o f Ca­ tholicism to m uch o f Europe (provoking revolution in the Netherlands) and across the ocean to South America. T he French forcefully transported their ideal o f the civic nation across m ost o f Europe in the first decade o f the nineteenth century. T he Germans attem pted som ething similar for ethnic nationhood and K ultur in the first half o f the tw entieth. As for Britain/England, for m ost o f the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries its leaders and m any o f its ordinary people took for granted that their coun­ try had a duty to disseminate Protestant Christianity, free trade, and par­ liam entary government throughout the world. Today, the U nited States is the world’s leading missionary nation, assuming both the right and the duty to spread its culture and its style o f m arket economy— the “Wash­ ington consensus”— to the whole planet.6 T hus Russians’ tw entieth-cen­ tury belief that they had an analogous right and duty to spread socialism throughout the world is not at all unusual: it is part o f the norm for large nations. A nthony Sm ith, perhaps currendy the foremost theorist o f ethnic iden­ tity, sees the idea o f sacred mission as a norm al constituent o f nationalism. H e argues that “nationalism . . . draws m uch o f its passion, conviction and intensity from the belief in a national mission and destiny; and this belief in turn owes m uch to a powerful religious m yth o f ethnic election.” This belief has its origin in the idea o f a “chosen people . . . a particular people as a vessel chosen by a deity for a special religious task or mission in the w orld’s moral economy. By perform ing that mission, the elect will be set apart and sanctified, and their redem ption, and that o f the world, will be assured.”7 Among the characteristics o f such missionary nationalism , Smith high­ lights the following: 1. a belief in the moral superiority o f the missionary community, con­ ditional upon fulfilling the covenant and carrying out the mission; 2. confidence in the “radical reversal” o f the com m unity’s “hitherto lowly or marginal status in the world” through fulfillment o f its mission; 3. reinforcem ent o f the strict boundary “against outsiders who . . . have no part in the sacred mission and its d u tie s.. . . Election myths may also be used against insiders who reject the mission”; 4. m obilization o f the people as a whole, not just the elites. “Everyone

INTRODUCTION

5

m ust be drawn into the com m unal task, so that the energies o f the whole people can be engaged; and this in turn requires a high de­ gree o f popular participation in the special destiny o f the people.”8 All four characteristics apply to the Soviet Union. T he Soviet leaden and many Soviet citizens believed in the superiority o f their com m unity and were confident that they were fulfilling their “covenant” w ith history by raising up the hum ble and oppressed (both themselves and other vic­ tims o f global imperialism). They took pride in elevating Russians, hith­ erto one o f the m ost backward o f European peoples, to a global position o f economic and scientific leadenhip. T heir ideology, and their practice in such fields as education and propaganda, laid great stress on the mobiliza­ tion o f whole peoples, not just elites. T he m ost doubtful category is the third: for part o f its history the Soviet U nion eagerly accepted outsiders as citizens. From the m id-1950s, however, the Soviet authorities erected and m aintained very strict border controls; for fear o f adm itting spies and other enemies, they discrim inated against Jews and deported entire ethnic groups (Chechens and Crim ean Tatars, am ong others) whom they sus­ pected o f being internal enemies. It m ight be argued, though, that the Soviet U nion was not the Russian nation, and that hill-blooded Russian nationalism was never the policy o f the Soviet state; indeed, at times, as we shall see, the state actively disad­ vantaged Russians. This, too, is less unusual than it m ight appear. A common characteris­ tic o f all forms o f national messianism, historically speaking, is that on the face o f it they were not very national, or at least that they subordinated nationhood to the supranational ideal: Catholicism in the case o f the Spaniards, liberty, equality, and fraternity in the case o f the French, Prot­ estantism and free trade in the case o f the British. In his recent study o f English national identity, Krishan Kumar takes up Sm iths category o f “missionary nationalism .” He describes it as “a nationalism that finds its principle not so m uch in equating state and nation as in extending the supposed benefits o f a particular nations rule and civilization to other people.” In Kum ars conception, “the key feature o f imperial or mission­ ary nationalism is the attachm ent o f a dom inant or core ethnic group to a state entity that conceives itself as dedicated to some large cause or pur­ pose, religious, cultural or political.” In such cases, “nationalism and cos­ m opolitanism were not opposed but complementary.” In practice, Kumar

6

INTIIIICTIIN

uses the terms "imperial** and “missionary” nationalism almost inter­ changeably. “Empires,” he states, “though in principle opposed to claims o f nationality, may be carriers o f a certain kind o f national identity which gives to the dom inant groups a special sense o f themselves and their destiny.”9 These form ulations certainly apply to Russians in the Soviet Union. They help to explain why many Russians deny that the category o f nationhood applies to them at all, and assert that the Soviet U nion was not an empire. T he w ider mission may well entail a degree o f self-abnegation. As Sm ith observes, “In the great polyethnic empires we frequently encounter conflicts between the universal pretensions o f faith and em pire [on the one hand, and on the other] the heritage and interests o f its culturally dom inant population.”10 As we shall see, those conflicts were acute in the case o f Soviet Russians, and sometimes left them feeling hum iliated and cheated even w ithin the Soviet U nion, let alone after it collapsed. T he term “missionary nationalism” used by Sm ith and Kumar assists us in looking for a way to describe adequately the apparent contradictions o f Russian national consciousness. It helps to explain why Russians on the whole do not regard their identity as being circumscribed by physical boundaries, why they associate it w ith an “idea,” and why they tend to re­ ject the notion that it is adequately em bodied in any particular territory or state form ation, seeing it instead as a spiritual or cultural entity. In this sense the Russian situation is like that o f dom inant ethnies in general. U ntil recently social scientists did not usually use the terms “eth­ nos” or “ethnie” for the English in the U nited Kingdom, the French in France, or the Jews in Israel. “Ethnicity” was confined to m inorities, who had no state or only a subordinate one, and whose “ethnic” characteristics therefore stood out by contrast to the dom inant “political” ethos o f the ruling people. Recently, however, as decolonization and dem ocratization have swept across the world, and as European states have fragmented w ith the end o f the Cold War, peoples who took their state-bearing status and their cultural dom inance for granted have had for the first tim e to justify or defend their situation, and in the process to rediscover their own hith­ erto unchallenged and therefore sometimes half-forgotten ethnic tradi­ tions.11 T he failure to recognize ethnicity in a dom inant group has been espe­ cially acute in the case o f Russia. In m ost W estern languages there is only one word for “Russian,” but the Russians themselves have two: russkii.

IITRIDICIION

7

which refers to the people, the language, the culture, and the ethnos; and rossitskii, which refers to the state, the empire, and the m ultinational terri­ tory. T he difference is as im portant as that between “English” and “Brit­ ish,” or— in some ways an even closer parallel— between “Turkish” and “O ttom an.” If we neglect to draw these distinctions, we make elementary mistakes in w riting about these peoples. A corollary o f this indiscrim inate approach to Russia is that Westerners often w rite as if Russians, unlike other peoples, were not entided to their own national consciousness, because by definition it is bound to be over­ bearing and chauvinistic. Now, admittedly, Russian national conscious­ ness does tend to take on imperial or supraethnic forms: that is one o f the m ain themes o f the book that follows. But historically such an attitude has been associated w ith m any other peoples as well; in any case, it hardly becomes an English or American scholar to chide the Russians for it. We should not autom atically denigrate Russian national feeling as pernicious. This book has been w ritten in the overlap between two distinguished in­ terpreters o f Russian national identity, both o f whom have deeply influ­ enced my thinking, though they appear to hold almost diametrically op­ posed views: the émigré philosopher Nikolai Berdiaev and the Soviet dissident and novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In a celebrated study o f the “Russian idea,” Berdiaev asserted that, apart from the Jews, the Russians were the m ost messianic o f peoples, and that Com m unism was merely the latest manifestation o f this mentality. The Russian Empire, he argued, was sustained by the m yth o f the “T hird Rome,” the idea that Moscow was the successor o f Rome and Byzantium as the beater o f the universal Christian idea: “Russia was the only O rtho­ dox empire (tsarstvo), and in that sense an ecumenical empire, like the first and second Romes.”12 The Soviet Union, in a paradoxical continuation o f this tradition, was the T hird International: “The messianic idea o f Marx­ ism, preaching the mission o f the proletariat, com bined w ith and became identical w ith the Russian messianic idea. In the Russian Com m unist rev­ olution w hat became dom inant was not the empirical proletariat but the idea, the m yth o f the proletariat. . . . Leninism-Stalinism is not classical Marxism. Russian Com m unism is a distorted variant o f the Russian mes­ sianic idea. It proclaims light from the East to illum inate the bourgeois darkness o f the W est.”13 Scholars have been divided in their approach to Berdiaev. M any see

8

INT8IDICTIIN

him as a source o f snappy and serviceable quotes to highlight aspects o f Russian thought or behavior. Few, however, have taken his equation o f T hird Rome and T hird International wholly seriously. 1 believe his insight is very valuable, especially his contention that messianic consciousness generates an “im perialist tem ptation,” so that a doctrine which starts out as universal becomes associated w ith a particular state, a particular form o f rule, a particular national culture, and thus loses its universality.14 I do not, though, accept his assertion that messianism is peculiar to the Rus­ sians; on the contrary, as I have argued, m ost large European nations have gone through at least one messianic period. In this respect Russia is a typi­ cal European nation. W hat distinguishes Russia is not its messianic mis­ sion as such, but rather the complex and contested nature o f that sense o f mission, and the attitude to it o f both the state and the people. Solzhenitsyn appears to say the opposite from Berdiaev, that the Soviet messianic ideology was n o t intrinsic but alien to Russian culture, that it came from outside, from the West, and underm ined Russia’s identity. Actually, both are right. There are two forms o f Russian messianism, Christian and socialist, and the attitude o f the ordinary people to both has been at times enthusiastic, at times restrained and suspicious. Solzhenit­ syns great insight was that in Russia people and em pire were distinct, that the Russian people were separable from the Soviet U nion and that their interests were not best served by spreading socialism throughout the world. H e believed that Russians had been burdened w ith a universal ide­ ology that was im peding their development as a nation. T hus far I agree. But I do not accept that M arxism was alien to Russia. It coalesced w ith Russian traditions o f collectivism, and it retained specifically Russian mes­ sianic features that it shed in m ost o f Europe. In any case, the split be­ tween people and empire in Russia had taken place before 1917; it was widened, but not created, by M arxist ideology.15 Russians’ identity, as often happens, was form ed in reaction to an “O ther,” in this case W estern Europe, whose great power interactions from the late seventeenth century formed the context in which Russia de­ veloped. Unlike other world civilizations reacting against the West, how­ ever, Russia had no long-established religious or civilizational tradition as a distinct foundation on which to construct and validate its resistance, no equivalent o f Islam, Confucianism , or the variety o f Indian traditions that we normally call “H induism .”16 Its national creed. O rthodox Christianity, was one variant o f the dom inant W estern religion. It had to borrow many

INTRODUCTION

9

o f its foundation concepts from the West, though these were then reinter­ preted and reconfigured through the practices o f both the Russian state and the Russian people. As part o f its self-demarcation against the West, Russia actually gen­ erated two messianic ideas, one associated w ith Orthodoxy, the other w ith socialism. The two proved incom patible, indeed bitterly opposed to each other. Furtherm ore, each o f them overlapped only partially w ith the com m unity spirit o f the Russian people. In the tw entieth century the conflict between these three powerful forces burst into the open and reached its climax. T hat is why Russia’s tw entieth-century history has been so turbulent.

1 MARXISM AND THE CRISIS of R ussian messianism

How did the idea take root that the Russians were a “chosen people” w ith a universal mission? T he concept o f Moscow as the T hird Rome, w ith a special mission to bring true C hristianity to the whole o f humanity, was born in the six­ teenth century, after the fall o f Byzantium. A lthough it sounds like an im ­ perial project, the idea actually took shape in the church. In fact it was never really adopted by Muscovite tsars or by later Russian emperors, who feared that it w ould accord too m uch political influence to clergymen. They increasingly saw Russia as a European great power and a north Eur­ asian empire, not as a theocratic state. T he m yth was, however, em bodied in daily readings from the pulpit o f Russian churches, and it seems to have resonated w ith ordinary people. It was cherished especially am ong the O ld Believers. But it was widespread too, am ong peasants, merchants, clergymen o f the official church, and even at times statesmen. The latent sentim ent persisted that Russia was in some way a holy empire, chosen by G od for a great mission.1 The subordination o f the church to the state was deepened during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Peter the Great abolished the patriarchate, symbol o f the church’s independent standing, and instead brought the church under the Holy Synod, which was in effect a depart­ m ent o f state often headed by a layman. H e and his successors also expro­ priated the church lands, the source o f its self-sufficient wealth. They wanted the church to concentrate on the secular functions o f providing

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education and tending to social welfare. In effect they carried out an at>ortive Protestant revolution w ithin the church, but w ithout the essential Protestant conditions o f a literate, Bible-reading population and parish autonomy. T he Bible was not even available in m odern Russian (only in archaic C hurch Slavonic) until the 1870s. Adrian Hastings has em pha­ sized the influence o f Bible translation in generating a national language and in strengthening national identity am ong Christian peoples. In Rus­ sia it played such a role in the m iddle ages, but a declining one by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, since the scriptures were not avail­ able in the vernacular.2 In this way m odernization and the imperatives o f empire actually delayed and obstructed the form ation o f Russian national consciousness.

Popular Traditions of Social Solidarity It is one thing to talk about state and church, quite another to consider the life o f local com m unities far from the centers o f power. Right up to the late nineteenth century Russia was overwhelmingly a country o f small towns and villages, scattered over a huge territory, many o f them at the margins o f viable agriculture. For that reason the members o f Russian com munities were highly interdependent. From an early stage they had to generate collective arrangements that w ould provide for m utual support and help in their isolated and vulnerable situation. They developed a sys­ tem known as krugovaia poruka— literally “circular surety,” but perhaps best translated as “joint responsibility.” All members o f the com m unity had to accept shared liability for setding conflicts, preventing crime, ap­ prehending criminals, and m aintaining com mon facilities. Analogous systems can be found in the villages and small towns o f most o f medieval Europe— for example in England as tithings or frankpledge, and in France as the basis o f the monarchy’s tax-collecting system.3 M ost, however, were displaced or absorbed in the sixteenth to eighteenth centu­ ries as monarchies became more powerful.4 In Russia the opposite hap­ pened: w ith the com ing o f absolute monarchy “joint responsibility” was actually strengthened. T he state took over krugovaia poruka as an adm in­ istrative device, which helped it to restrain crime, collect taxes, and raise recruits for the army. If one household failed to pay its dues, the others had to make up the shortfall; if one recruit absconded or was found to be unsuitable for m ilitary service, then the com m unity had to provide an-

12

RILERS AND VICTIMS

other in his place. This system greatly simplified the job o f tax-collectors and recruiting sergeants.5 It also made social life in both towns and vil­ lages more secure and predictable, since it m eant that no individual or household faced m isfortune on its own: the rest o f the com m unity was usually there as back-up. Everyone was a mem ber o f an interdependent collective bound by personal ties to someone in authority. To achieve the level o f consensus required to make such a system work, the com m unity needed an open and accessible decision-making process. This was the function o f the selskii or posadskii skhod, the village or town assembly, which norm ally consisted o f all heads o f households. It elected from am ong its own members a starosta (elder), who presided over its meetings, saw that decisions were im plem ented, and represented the com­ m unity in dealings w ith the outside world and the authorities. Decisions in the assembly were taken by consensus, not by voting. M utual agree­ m ent was im portant because decisions were supposed to reflect the crucial concept o f pravda: this m eant “tru th ,” but also everything that was m or­ ally right, just, fair, and in accordance w ith G od’s law. Small-scale crimi­ nal charges and civil disputes w ithin the com m unity were setded by a court o f older and respected villagers or townsfolk, the “best people,” as w ritten docum ents call them , chaired by the elder. Its findings also re­ flected pravda, though interpreted in such a way as to cause m inim um damage to the economic life o f the com m unity as a whole.6 Both as social custom and adm inistrative device, krugovaia poruka had profound im plications for the Russians’ view o f life, especially for their at­ titude to law, property, and authority. For Russians law reflected consen­ sus and pravda, and rights belonged to households and com munities rather than to individuals. T he tsar as an authority figure was also sup­ posed to guarantee pravda: as the saying went, “G od is found not in strength, but in pravda.” O rdinary people recognized, though, that his servitors were fallible and sinful, and they regarded them w ith reserve: “G od is in his heaven, and the tsar is far away.”7 Krugovaia poruka especially affected the life o f the village. Peasants re­ garded the land as G od’s. It was given to hum an beings to use for their subsistence but did not belong to anyone in particular. It was a resource available to all who worked on it, along w ith their dependants, according to need. In keeping w ith that concept, many village com munities periodi­ cally redistributed land am ong households to reflect changing family size and needs. Larger families would receive more land but would have to pay

MARXISM AND TIE CRISIS IF IISSIAI MESSIAIISM

13

correspondingly higher taxes; smaller ones w ould lose land but also pay lower taxes. T he key was to ensure that each household had enough to feed itself and discharge its obligations. T he economic ideal was suf­ ficiency. Both the indigent and the wealthy were regarded w ith distrust: the indigent because they were suspected o f sloth and were a burden on the rest o f the community, the wealthy because they were suspected o f un­ derhand practices that contravened pravda and m ight be a threat to their colleagues. As a popular saying had it, “W ealth is a sin before God; pov­ erty is a sin before ones fellow villagers.”8 Even after the money economy became generally accepted, in the sec­ ond half o f the nineteenth century, and peasants became accustomed to buying and selling land, they continued to assume, incongruously, that a basic m inim um w ould always be available to them , should they need it, especially in emergencies like war, revolution, or famine.9 Because villagers were so interdependent, it was generally accepted that households should help each other out in difficulties, whether caused by shortage o f food, sickness, theft, fire, or other contingency. Bread would be put aside for a starving family, herbs would be provided for the sick, neighbors would rally round and help w ith the harvest. There was no di­ rect, equivalent exchange o f services, but a general expectation that help given now w ould entide one to receive help, o f any kind needed, in the future. This m utual aid, known as pomochi, was not altruism but shared self-interest born o f the fact that any household s misfortunes could affect the whole com m unity.10 Interdependence had its dark sides, too: villagers kept a close watch on one another’s lives and constandy exchanged infor­ m ation. Gossip, often malicious, sustained the fabric o f rural life, since heavy drinking, stealing, or m arital discord could wreck the economic life o f a household and therefore weaken the whole community. In this way com munities o f joint responsibility policed their own members. Krugovaia poruka profoundly affected the oudook o f Russians in all spheres o f life. It was egalitarian and democratic, in that all households made their contribution to decision-making, yet also hierarchical and au­ thoritarian, in that they were represented by their older, male members. W omen and younger men were disadvantaged, and their interests were frequendy poorly defended." Joint responsibility generated com m unity spirit and ensured that everyone could survive, yet it also squeezed out the gifted, deviant, or eccentric and generated its own internal splits and con­ flicts. It created dense networks o f m utual obligations that were com fort-

14

IIIE IS AND VICTIMS

ing yet required constant vigilance. In emergencies and difficulties— and there were to be plenty o f those in the tw entieth century— Russians tended to reproduce com m unities o f joint responsibility adapted to the context in w hich they found themselves. W orkers, for example, would en­ roll in an artel, a kind o f labor cooperative, to live and w ork together and sign contracts w ith employers joindy. In the absence o f effective institu­ tions and laws, such com m unal associations were badly needed.

Ukraine and Belorussia A nother aspect o f ethnic Russia m attered greatly to the rulers. D uring the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Russian state absorbed a large num ber o f East Slav com m unities— Ukrainians and Belorussians— who for centuries had lived under Polish or Lithuanian rule. Some o f them were O rthodox, b u t m any belonged to the U niate (Greek Catholic) or even Roman Catholic faith. T heir spoken dialects were related to the speech o f Russian peasants, though w ith some alien vocabulary and syn­ tax. T heir culture was also similar, though they were for less likely than their Russian counterparts to practice m utual redistribution o f land: indi­ vidual plots would survive in the same family for generations, which m eant that U krainian and Belorussian peasant households tended to feel a more intense attachm ent to a particular sm allholding than did the Rus­ sians.12 T he status o f the Ukrainians and Belorussians was crucial to both the tsarist and later the Soviet state. They were numerous: at 22.4 m illion in 1897 the Ukrainians were “the largest non-dom inant ethnic group in Eu­ rope,” while the Belorussians added another 5.9 m illion people.13 If both could be counted as Russians, then Russians constituted a considerable m ajority o f the population in the state called after them , and offered a sound basis for the building o f a Russian nation-state. If, however, they were acknowledged to be separate peoples, then Russians were in a m inor­ ity in tsarist Russia and barely in a m ajority in the early Soviet U nion. This was a serious m atter, since, as Alexei M iller has pointed out, the Russian-Ukrainian encounter was “not the interaction o f two shaped nations, but a rivalry between different projects o f nation-building.”14 Moreover, behind the calculations o f all Russian rulers hovered the threat o f Poland, whose culture remained resilient, even when there was no independent Polish state. Russian rulers never altogether lost the fear that Poles were on

MARXISM UNI TIE CRISIS IF IISSIAI MESSIAMISM

15

the alert to claim Ukrainians and Belorussians for an alternative national project. For that reason the tsarist regime abolished distinct U krainian institu­ tions and referred to the geographical area as “Little Russia.” It did its best to prevent the emergence o f a printed U krainian literary culture. In 1863 an imperial decree prohibited the publication o f books in Ukrainian, w ith the gloss that “there never has been a distinct Little Russian language, and there never will be one. T he dialect which the com mon people use is Rus­ sian contam inated by Polish influence.” P. A. Valuev, the m inister respon­ sible for the decree, advised the tsar that “perm itting the creation o f a spe­ cial literature for the com m on people in the U krainian dialect would signify collaborating in the alienation o f Ukraine from the rest o f Rus­ sia.”15A similar veto was laid on Belorussian, for the same reasons.16 A t the beginning o f the tw entieth century the prospects for the forma­ tion o f a distinct Ukrainian or Belorussian nation did not appear bright. T he great m ajority o f Ukrainians were illiterate peasants, while the Ukrai­ nian nobles had more or less completely assimilated to the Russian impe­ rial culture. In the larger towns o f Little Russia few elites were Ukrainian: they were mostly Russian, Polish, Germ an, even Greek or Armenian, while the urban masses were often Jewish. The clergy owed their loyalty to a Russian church that had no separate U krainian jurisdiction. All the same, in the small towns and villages, and at the lower end o f the professions, especially in the zemstvos (local government assemblies), there were a fair num ber o f educated professional people, lawyers, doc­ tors, feldshers (auxiliary medics), schoolteachers, and civil servants, who regarded themselves as Ukrainian; many of them were the sons and daugh­ ters o f peasants or clergymen. T heir focus on the local economy, health, and education gave a social welfare coloring to U krainian nationalism at this stage. In 1905—1907, when censorship relaxed, they launched Ukrainian-language newspapers and journals, founded scholarly societies, agri­ cultural cooperatives, and political parties, and even for a tim e gained rep­ resentation in the State Duma. At this tim e Ukrainian national sentim ent focused on a num ber o f themes: on the sixteenth-to-eighteenth century D nieper Cossack institutions, w ith their own dem ocratic self-govern­ m ent; on U krainian literature, especially the figure o f Taras Shevchenko, the serf-poet who became a kind o f Ukrainian Robert Burns; on the right to use U krainian in public life; and on the need for radical land reform so that Ukrainian peasants could make a good living from their holdings.17

16

IIIE IS ANI VICTIMS

T he period 1914-1921 transform ed the U krainian situation. T he First W orld War sharpened perception o f ethnic distinctions throughout Eu­ rope, not least in Russia, where, for example, the empress’s Germ an ori­ gin— scarcely noticed before the war— made her an object o f suspicion. Litde Russia was close to the front line throughout, and many Ukrainians became refugees; the aid organizations which offered help were mostly ethnically marked, that is, they emphasized attachm ent to the regional culture and language.18 In the army, too, officers and men became more conscious o f their ethnic origins, even while rem aining on the whole steadfastly loyal to the tsar. Large num bers o f junior officers were pro­ m oted, and the Litde Russians am ong them came from precisely the so­ cial strata where U krainian feeling was strongest.19 As a result o f these developments, after the fall o f the tsar there was a sudden proliferation o f U krainian associations o f various kinds, which took m ost contem poraries by surprise. A t the head was the Ukrainian Rada, the national equivalent o f the All-Russian Congress o f Soviets. W hen an A ll-Ukrainian Rada convened in Kiev in April 1917 it had dele­ gates from zemstvos, army units, cultural-educational societies, profes­ sional associations, and peasant cooperatives. In May the Rada dem anded hom e rule for Ukraine, separate representation in peace negotiations, and the form ation o f separate U krainian arm y units. A U krainian M ilitary Congress m et and set about creating a national army. After the fall o f the Provisional Governm ent in November, the Rada in its T hird Universal (a term denoting a Cossack decree) proclaimed the independence o f the U krainian People s Republic. This was real nation-building, however sud­ den and unexpected.20 T he edifice could not be com pleted, though, because o f the civil war. The first independent regime lasted only three m onths before it was over­ throw n by Russian-backed Reds, and soon afterward the whole coun­ try was occupied by the Germans. O ver the next three years at least eight different kinds o f regime ruled tem porarily over substantial regions o f Ukraine, but none was able to consolidate itself or even claim the adher­ ence o f m ost o f the population. As G eoff Eley has com m ented, the “frag­ m entation o f the polity and civil society” was “akin to the warlordism that dom inated provincial C hina in the 1920s and 1930s.”21 The greatest weakness o f Ukrainian nationalists was that they did not have the full backing o f U krainian peasants, m ost o f whom wanted land reform more than anything else and were prepared to accept land from whichever rul­ ers offered it. In any case, the new Ukraine was torn between the great

MARXISM AND TIE CRISIS I f IISSIAN MESSIANISM

17

power am bitions o f Germany, Soviet Russia, and Poland, as well as be­ tween its own irreconcilable political factions.22 All the same the memory o f an independent state, however fragmented and em battled, thereafter remained a powerful factor in the Ukrainian self-image, especially since its m emory was spectrally revived in 1922 in the shape o f the U krainian Soviet Socialist Republic— not an independent state and not all o f Ukraine, but still a real institution and a haunting re­ m inder o f w hat m ight be achieved. No longer could anyone simply take it for granted that Ukrainians w ould peacefully acquiesce in dom ination by Russians, o f whichever political hue. For Belorussians the situation was less clear. In 1897 a mere 2 per­ cent o f them lived in towns o f more than 2,000 inhabitants, and among them there were almost no professional people; the urban population was mostly Jewish, Polish (in the west), and Russian (in the east). N inety per­ cent o f Belorussians were engaged in agriculture, and m odern Belorussian was largely a peasant dialect. In the second half o f the nineteenth century Catholic intellectuals o f peasant origin began to use it as a literary lan­ guage, and this development, as we have seen, worried tsarist officials enough to ban Belorussian along w ith Ukrainian. It was revived after the 1905 revolution in the weekly journal NaJfa N iva (O ur Cornfield, 19061915), whose content focused on the hard life o f the peasants: this was w hat Belorussian intellectuals saw as their ethnic identity.23 In the turm oil o f revolution and civil war, Belorussians attem pted to es­ tablish a separate republic, at one stage in tandem w ith the Lithuanians, but there was no history o f continuous independence, however em battled, between 1917 and 1921, as there was in Ukraine. In 1919, however, the Bolsheviks in Moscow sanctioned the creation o f a Belorussian Soviet Re­ public, w ith its capital in M insk, to parallel the one they were trying to es­ tablish in Ukraine. The idea seems to have been to create “buffer repub­ lics” between Soviet Russia and its neighbors to the west, a move that was also in line w ith Lenin’s policy o f setting up counterweights to “Great Russian chauvinism .” W hatever the motive, the plan was opposed by some local Bolsheviks, who objected that Belorussia was not a nation and that there was no point in artificially engendering local nationalism .24

Socialist Messianism D uring the nineteenth century writers and thinkers revived the latent Russian messianic tradition and reformulated it in contem porary terms,

18

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as an assertion o f Russia’s special mission, distinct from that o f the West. T he Slavophiles m aintained that Russians alone had w ithstood a dam­ aging tide o f individualism, atheism, and rationalism that had swept through W estern Europe and was weakening the moral fiber o f its peo­ ples. Russians had retained a primeval sense o f community, which the Slavophile theologian and historian Aleksei Khomiakov defined as sobomost, and w ith it a simple but deep C hristian faith. According to the Slavophiles these characteristics equipped Russia potentially to heal the spiritual sickness o f the West. They disapproved o f the tsarist state, which they felt had absorbed m uch o f the spiritual malady o f the West, and they believed th at Russia would have to be purified before it could shoulder such a mission. In the long run, however, they were confident that, cleansed o f its im purities, Russia w ould be able to restore true C hristianity to the more advanced and sophisticated but corrupted W est.29 T he Slavophiles attributed particular im portance to the survival o f the village com m une. As we have seen, the Russian state had preserved the com m une, w ith its krugovaia poruka, as a convenient device for the ad­ m inistration o f the com m on people. K onstantin Aksakov, however, took a m uch more idealistic view: he called the com m une “a moral choir . . . a union o f the people, w ho have renounced their egoism, their individual­ ity, and who express their com m on accord; this is an act o f love and a no­ ble C hristian deed.”26 For the Slavophiles sobomost became the foundation ideology w hich gave Russia its distinctive faith and strength. Shorn o f its link w ith Orthodoxy, this outlook could easily be trans­ m uted into a form o f socialism. Between the 1860s and the 1890s, a whole pleiad o f thinkers staked out a new concept o f socialism, which took M arxism as its point o f departure but rejected the idea that the revo­ lution could only be led by the proletariat o f the leading industrialist na­ tions. O n the contrary, they asserted, the peasants o f Russia had distinct advantages: they still had their own prim itive institutions, in which fun­ dam ental principles o f socialism, like dem ocratic self-government and property-sharing, were taken for granted. They had the potential to con­ vert this rudimentary, unw itting socialism into m odern, conscious social­ ism and avoid the evils o f capitalism altogether. O n the basis o f a con­ tem ptuous reference by Lenin, these thinkers have gone down to posterity as “Populists” (narodniki). They differed from one another on w hether the transition from prim itive to m odem socialism would come about through violent popular revolution (M ikhail Bakunin), through peaceful propa-

MARXISM AND TIE CRISIS IF IISSIAN MESSIANISM

19

ganda by educated and "conscious” people (Petr Lavrov), or w ith the help o f a small elite that w ould seize power on behalf o f the people (Petr Tkachev). But they all agreed that the peasant com mune and its workingclass equivalent, the artel, would form the basic building block o f the new society.27 M ost populists were atheists, but some explicidy professed C hrisdanity o f an nonecdesiastical kind. Andrei Zheliabov, organizer o f the assassina­ tion o f Alexander II in 1881, stated at his trial: "I deny Orthodoxy, al­ though I affirm the essence o f the teachings o f Jesus C h r i s t . . . All true Christians m ust fight for the truth, for the rights o f the hum iliated and the weak, and, if necessary, even suffer for them . This is my faith.”28 It m ight be thought that Marxism, as a doctrine that, unlike Populism, was proletarian and internationalist, would repudiate any form o f messianism associated w ith peasants or w ith a special Russian mission. Marx himself, however, was not always dogmatic about the course revolution m ight take. In 1881 he wrote to the Populist Vera Zasulich about the peasant commune: "special research has convinced me that this com m u­ nity is the m ainspring o f Russia’s social regeneration.”29 H e and Engels were in any case not im m une horn nationalism: they had a tendency to favor the larger European nations, and especially the Germans, as "pro­ gressive,” while they considered “reactionary” and even “counter-revolu­ tionary” the attem pt o f smaller ethnic groups to assert their national sta­ tus in 1848-1849.30 T he notion o f particular nations as bearers o f social progress was not, then, wholly alien to the M arxist tradition. Marxism was, moreover, partly Jewish in origin. Indeed, its founder was Jewish, and it proved especially appealing to Jews in Russia. They par­ ticipated in the Russian revolutionary movement in strikingly large num ­ bers from the 1870s onward. M ost Jewish revolutionaries had reacted strongly in their adolescent years against the apparent rigidity and provin­ cialism o f their ethnic and religious heritage. Deprived o f their family background and hating the autocracy, they found a spiritual hom e among the Russian socialists, who accepted them w ithout prejudice and enabled them to participate in a struggle for an international brotherhood freed o f all ethnic and racial stigmas. They entered this new and congenial envi­ ronm ent while retaining certain core elements o f their Jewish identity, no­ tably the hope o f bringing salvation to humanity. Lev Kogan-Bernshtein, before he was executed for his part in the Irkutsk rising o f 1888, stated in his final speech: "By working all my life in the Russian revolutionary

20

IILEIS A ll VICTIMS

party, I worked for the destitute Jewish masses fully convinced that their fate is closely connected w ith the fate o f all peoples living on the territory o f Russia, and that the liberation o f the Jewish people from political op­ pression can be realised only w ith the liberation o f all Russia.”31 At any rate, Jewish Marxists played a m ajor role in prom oting interna­ tional revolution in Russia. It was the Jew Aleksandr Parvus-Helfand who first m ooted the idea that the Russian proletariat m ight prove to be in the vanguard o f European social revolution. Trotskii followed him , prophesy­ ing in June 1905 that the Russian working class w ould be M the initiator o f the liquidation o f world capitalism .” The Russian bourgeoisie, he as­ serted, was so weak that the proletariat would have to take over the task o f carrying out even the bourgeois revolution, which it would accomplish w ith the help o f the peasants, who would be m ounting their own revolu­ tion against feudalism. Thereafter, though, the Russian workers would lose the support o f all peasants but the poorest, and, to take the revolution further, to the socialist stage, they would need support from abroad. They would get it from the proletariat o f the more advanced European coun­ tries, who, inspired by the Russians’ example, would by then have seized power in their own countries. Together w ith their Russian brethren they w ould declare a "republican U nited States o f Europe,” which in its turn w ould be the foundation for the “U nited States o f the W orld.”32 This intoxicating scenario o f Russia as the flashpoint for world revolu­ tion inspired Lenin and helped his ideas to crystallize at a crucial stage. It inspired his vision o f a Russian revolution o f the proletariat and poor peasants sparking off a world revolution against imperialism. Here was the kernel o f the Soviet U nions universal mission.

Russian Popular Religion T he relationship o f the ordinary Russian people to both forms o f messianism. O rthodox and socialist, is hard to gauge. Students and young radi­ cals, inspired by Lavrov, w ent out to the villages in the 1870s, both to learn from the peasants’ prim ordial wisdom and to preach to them about how they could create true socialism in their villages. They got a mixed re­ ception: many peasants welcomed their help, especially in the areas o f medicine and education, and they were readily persuaded that the present landowning arrangements were inequitable. But they were prepared to ac­ cept a redistribution o f land only if it was bestowed by the tsar, that is, in

MARXISM AND TIE CRISIS DF RUSSIAN MESSIANISM

21

a moral and political framework that was already familiar to them . Social­ ist ideas seemed outlandish to them , or at least acceptable only if refrained in the language o f the New Testament.33 Russian peasants were O rthodox believers and they attended O rthodox church services; indeed, if asked which nation they belonged to, most would probably have answered pravoslavnyi—O rthodox. All the same, their attitudes and practices were only loosely contained w ithin the con­ fines o f the state church, a situation that worried the clergy. Some peas­ ants were attracted to doctrines that prophesied the achievement o f a truly Christian life on earth, to be achieved in the land o f the “white waters” or in the sunken city o f Kitezh. Some o f these visions seemed to derive distandy from the ideal o f the T hird Rome. T he Believers in C hrist (Khristovovery), whose existence is first attested in the early eighteenth century, held that C hrist was occasionally reincarnated in members o f their own com m unity who led an exemplary life. They would gather in their own congregations, in a private home or sometimes out o f doors, wearing w hite garments. Divine worship would begin w ith their own “C hrist” reading from the scriptures. O n special occasions they would conclude the service w ith a radenie, a frenzied dance during which they would prophesy in tongues, like M uslim Dervishes or American Shakers. The Castrates (skoptsy), first attested in the late eighteenth century, tried to attain spiritual purity by more drastic means, m utiladng themselves in order to achieve freedom from earthly and fleshly desires.34 Besides, many peasants remained O ld Believers. By the early tw entieth century, two hundred and fifty years or so after the schism that gave birth to their movement, the O ld Belief claimed perhaps as many as one-sixth o f all O rthodox believers.35 It was influential even among those peasants who did not acknowledge membership in an O ld Believer community. Frederick Conybeare, an American anthropologist who investigated pop­ ular religion in the 1910s, concluded that the strength o f the O ld Belief “lies less in its overt adepts than in the masses who mutely sympathize w ith i t . . . . In many regions, among the p etit peuple we meet w ith the sin­ gular opinion that official orthodoxy is only good for the lukewarm, that it is a worldly religion through which it is barely possible to attain salva­ tion, and that the true and holy religion is that o f the O ld Believers.”36 Russian socialists o f the m id-nineteenth century hoped they m ight be able to forge some kind o f link w ith the O ld Believers— who, like them , were alienated from the official state and church. They soon found, how-

22

IMLERS AND VICTIMS

ever, that there was no basis for an alliance, so rem ote from socialism was the O ld Believers’ oudook. V. I. Kelsiev, a young socialist who visited their com m unities in the 1860s to inquire into their convictions, reported that not only they but the people as a whole "continue to believe today that Moscow is the T hird Rome and that there will be no fourth. So Russia is the new Israel, a chosen people, a prophetic land, in which shall be fulfilled all the prophecies o f the O ld and New Testaments, and in which even the A ntichrist will appear, as C hrist appeared in the previous Holy Land. T he representative o f Orthodoxy, the Russian tsar, is the m ost legit­ imate em peror on earth, for he occupies the throne o f C onstantine.”37 These expectations m ight be messianic, but they were a long way from nineteenth-century socialism, o f whatever variety. Unlike the O ld Believers, m ost peasants remained loyal to the official church, but their relationship w ith it was tense and, by the early tw entieth century, evolving quite rapidly as peasants were becoming better educated and gaining experience o f both urban and m ilitary life. T heir religious culture was more homely and pragm atic than that o f the sectarians. It com bined narratives and symbols derived from O rthodoxy w ith rituals that celebrated local holy sites, marked the passage o f the seasons and the agricultural cycle, and bestowed a deeper m eaning on the events o f family life.38 Peasants were building new churches and chapels to house their own “wonder-working” icons, to com mem orate a particular event, or to m ark a holy place. They were organizing local festivals to supplem ent the coun­ trywide ones in order to celebrate deliverance from an epidemic or a fire, or to m ark the day o f a saint they particularly cherished. As in W estern countries, women were taking a greater part in religious life, generating narratives derived from their own spiritual experience and evoking the Virgin M ary— or, as Russians nearly always call her, the M other o f G od— as guide, protector, and intercessor for women, the poor, and the weak. These dem otic initiatives were regarded w ith misgivings by m any clergy­ men, especially the bishops, who had come up through monasteries and had little experience o f parish life. In generating their own versions o f the Christian narrative, peasants became more insistent on the right to run their own parish affairs, a stance that was warmly welcomed by some cler­ gymen but was regarded w ith distaste and suspicion by others.39 Overall, then, we may say that peasants’ perceptions o f religion were changing fast before 1917, as they became more literate and their links w ith urban culture became closer. M any o f them were moving away from

MARXISM AND IDE »ISIS IF RUSSIAN MESSIANISM

23

the official church, but that did not necessarily mean they were ready to embrace the socialism o f intellectuals. They were partly engaged w ith both kinds o f messianism, O rthodox and socialist, but not fully w ith either.

The Orthodox Church In m ost societies one o f the principal mediators o f national memory is the national church. For Russians this was especially true, for the O rthodox C hurch was a cardinal feature o f their national identity. T heir faith was, in their own eyes, w hat distinguished them from Germans, Poles, Jews, and Turks. As we have seen, however, in the early tw entieth century the O rthodox C hurch was under pressure both horn rival faiths and from its own pa­ rishioners. W ithin the church, too, few clergymen, w hether from the w hite (parish) or the black (monastic) clergy, were content w ith their situ­ ation. In answer to a questionnaire circulated by the Holy Synod in 1903, nearly all the bishops expressed dissatisfaction and recommended reform. They felt that the church did not have sufficient independence from the state, that it was poverty-stricken and unable to operate properly under w hat some called a “Protestant Caesaropapist” regime.40 Nearly everyone agreed, then, that reform was essential. But the clergy was split on w hat kind o f reform was needed. There were two m ain ap­ proaches. O ne, which we may call that o f the “episcopal conservatives,” called for renewal o f the church from above: they recommended the resto­ ration o f the patriarchate as the symbolic head o f the church, and o f the pomestnyi sobor (local council) as its sovereign assembly. Supporters o f this viewpoint believed the bishops should play the leading role in the sobor. The other approach focused on the parish: it m aintained that the w hite (parish) clergy and parish councils should be given more power to take their own decisions, appoint their own priests, and manage their own finances. T he proponents o f this line may be called “parish liberals” or “congregationalists,” as they believed that revival would come from below. They mostly wanted the church to lift the ban on white clergymen be­ coming bishops, so that parish concerns would be better reflected at the higher levels o f the church. Some o f them also wanted to conduct parts o f the liturgy in m odern Russian (rather than Church Slavonic), to make them easier for ordinary people to understand.41

24

IVLERS AND VICTIMS

T he division between these two reformist camps was sharp, and feel­ ings between them sometimes bitter. They reflected indirectly the division in Russian society between the elites and the ordinary people. "Parish lib­ erals” tended to sympathize w ith the peasants and workers o f their par­ ishes, and some o f them inclined toward socialism, which they regarded as the contem porary em bodim ent o f Christianity. Father G apon, the orga­ nizer o f the January 1905 St. Petersburg workers’ dem onstration, was one o f them . In 1905 a group o f thirty-tw o St. Petersburg clergymen pub­ lished a petition calling for reform on "congregational” lines, and joined w ith a group o f lay C hristian socialists to form a U nion for C hurch Re­ generation w ith a wider social reform agenda.42 In 1905-1906 the church set about reforming itself, and the opposing camps had the opportunity to debate these issues at length in a so-called pre-conciliar consultative commission. T he commission was intended to prepare the way for a full-scale pom estnyi sobor, whose convening w ould it­ self m ark the first step to overhauling the church’s structure. A t a late stage, however, the tsar counterm anded his order for the m eeting o f the sobor,: All the reform plans fell by the wayside, but their supporters none­ theless continued to believe passionately in them .43 In the eyes o f m any believers the church, for all its defects, remained the bearer o f the national messianic idea. A t the celebration o f the festival o f the Kazan icon o f the M other o f G od in 1907, Archpriest Ioann Vostorgov declared that "Divine Providence, calling us Russian Slavs . . . into the bosom o f the Church o f C hrist, in the very geographic placem ent o f our country on the border between Europe and Asia, East and West, laid upon us a great mission: to carry the treasure o f C hrist and the true faith we have received to rem ote eastern and northern Europe, and further into Asia, to struggle w ith the darkness o f paganism . . . to enlighten the wild tribes o f aliens \inorodtsy\ and to have them join in the Kingdom o f G od and in the life o f enlightened hum anity.”44

Dostoevskii and Russian Messianism O ne figure stood at the crossroads o f both Christian and socialist forms o f messianism: the novelist Fedor Dostoevskii. His view o f European civili­ zation was similar to that o f the Slavophiles: it was rationalist, individual­ ist, mercenary, and atheist. H e came to believe that Russia could provide healing for the W est’s spiritual ailments "in the form o f G od’s pravda, in

MARXISM AHI THE CRISIS I f RISSIAH MESSIANISM

25

the form o f the Truth o f C hrist which will surely some day be realized on earth and which is preserved in its entirety in Orthodoxy.”45 In his regular newspaper colum n, “D iary o f a W riter,” Dostoevskii of­ fered w hat may be called the classic definition o f messianic nationalism: “Every great people believes— and m ust believe if it wishes to be alive for long— that the salvation o f the world is to be found in it and in it alone, that it lives in order to stand at the head o f the peoples, attach them all to itself in unity, and lead them in a harm onious choir to the ultim ate goal, predestined for them all.”46 W ith the Serbian rebellion o f 1876-1877 against O ttom an rule, Dos­ toevskii hoped that the opportunity had come to turn his vision into real­ ity. H e attacked the government s failure to take the side o f the insurgents against their oppressors. Russia’s mission, he urged, was to act as the leader o f the Slav peoples, to conquer Constantinople, and to inaugurate a reign o f “eternal peace” in the Slav spirit: “O ur war . . . is the first step to the attainm ent o f that eternal peace in w hich we are fortunate enough to believe, and to the achievement o f a genuinely caring prosperity for hu­ manity.”47 T he intensity o f Dostoevskii s convictions led him to conceive an abid­ ing hatred o f the rival messianic people, the Jews. H e was not the first Russian to feel this way, but his anti-Sem itism was unusually vehement. In his D iary o f a W riter he stigmatized the Jews as marked by “material­ ism, a blind, carnivorous hunger for individual material security, a thirst for personal accum ulation o f money by any means.”48 H e m isquoted the O ld Testament to imply that they were aiming at the physical conquest o f the world and the enslavement o f other peoples.49 The Dostoevskian tem ptation has remained latent w ithin Russian nationalism. W henever the Russian universalist messianic dream falters, some Russians are always tem pted to blame the Jews. Dostoevskii came closer than any other Russian thinker to com bining the two forms o f messianism, the Christian and the socialist, to reconcil­ ing empire and people in one syncretic vision. He believed that the em­ pire had a special mission thanks to its size and m ight, and that the people had too thanks to their humility, their readiness to accept suffering, and their tolerance o f other cultures and faiths. In his vision, empire and peo­ ple together could save Europe, restore true Christianity, and defeat so­ cialism at its own game. Dostoevskii’s reconciliation o f apparent incompatibles, his breathtak-

26

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ingly am bitious vision o f Russia's future as the harbinger o f universal hu­ manity, have made him an eternally attractive thinker for Russians. No one has so well articulated for them w hat they felt their national identity ought to be. In an indirect sense, this vision was the unacknowledged foundation for the messianic premise o f the Soviet state. It is no accident that from the 1960s onward Dostoevskii became the favorite author o f many Russian intellectuals.

The Desacralization of the Monarchy W hat defeated O rthodox messianism and gave the socialist version its chance was the foil o f the Romanov dynasty. Up to the early tw entieth century the linchpin o f the Russian political system had been the tsar. T he original concept o f authority that sustained him was Byzantine: the m on­ arch was G od’s anointed and was considered sufficiently holy to have priesdy powers. But he was not held to be an actual G od, and therefore he had a partner, the church. It was the function o f the church to rem ind the m onarch o f G od’s law in any given circumstance; it was the function o f the m onarch to exercise physical authority and to protect church and peo­ ple. This was the symphony, the enm eshing o f two distinct but m utually reinforcing forms o f authority. From the eighteenth century, however, the em peror (as the tsar now significantly retitled him self) claimed absolute authority, including in ar­ eas that had previously belonged to the church. H e no longer acknowl­ edged the church as form ing a restraint on his power. Symbolically, this assertion o f absolute power was accomplished when Peter the Great abol­ ished the patriarchate in 1700 and in effect became head o f the church himself. A t the festive entry into St. Petersburg following his victory over the Swedes at Poltava in 1709, Peter was greeted w ith words formerly re­ served for the patriarch: “Blessed be H e who com eth in the name o f the Lord!”50 T he great m ajority o f Russian people, however, including the clergy, continued to regard the em peror as a Byzantine vasileus, a figure o f great power, but still answerable to G od’s law. There was thus a latent contra­ diction in the image o f the tsar (as he was still usually known) held by the people and church on the one hand and by the bureaucracy and educated strata on the other. This contradiction was not fatal as long as the tsar could project him self as a powerful m ilitary leader, holding his own

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27

among the European powers, extending and defending his huge realm. H e was able to accomplish that for the eighteenth and the first half o f the nineteenth century. But then came defeat in the Crimean War in 1856: the first sign that his authoritative aura was beginning to fade. The disjuncture between the holy God-fearing Byzantine m onarch and the amoral but all-powerful em peror began to become obvious and troubling. Significandy, this was the m om ent when the radical political opposition turned against the monarchy on principle and the first attem pts were made to assassinate the tsar.51 In the early tw entieth century the discrepancy between the two images o f the tsar became m uch more serious, and ultim ately fatal. U ntil then m ost workers and peasants— whatever they m ight think o f bureaucrats, police, and landowners— had remained faithful to the image o f their ruler as a holy figure abiding by G od’s law. As discontent am ong workers m ounted, the first attem pt to organize them for political action was made by a priest, Father G apon o f St. Petersburg. G apon believed that if the tsar were alerted to the deprivation and oppression in which workers lived, he would come to their defense and issue decrees lim iting the capitalists’ ex­ ploitation o f them . His movement was a kind o f revivalist crusade. W hen the workers dem onstrated in the capital city in January 1905, they carried not only a petition calling for more legal rights but also icons and por­ traits o f the tsar. However, they were not received in audience by the tsar, as they had hoped. Instead, nervous soldiers opened fire on them , and a massacre resulted in which some two hundred workers were killed. This was even more o f a disaster than it appeared at first sight, for it destroyed the hope o f a revived urban O rthodoxy in partnership w ith a renewed and popular monarchy. Moreover, w ith the easing o f censorship, the newspa­ pers began to carry reports o f the massacre that spread throughout the empire, including the villages, and provoked widespread unrest.52 A sacral link between m onarch and people had been severed. W hen tested, the monarch had behaved, not like the vasileus who observed G od’s law, but like a tyrant who did not. This was the decisive m om ent when most politically active workers turned away from Christianity to one or another form o f socialism. O ne scholar who has studied the writings o f workers in the post-1905 period notes that they remained religious, but in an eclectic spirit, using themes derived from Christianity, but in a metaphorical or symbolic manner, and com bining them w ith motifs from other religions and from revolutionary

28

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socialism: "They typically viewed hum an existence . . . as a m ythic jour­ ney through suffering toward deliverance from affliction, evil, even death. Images o f m artyrdom , crucifixion, transfiguration and resurrection re­ mained part o f their creative vocabulary, as did narrative attention to suf­ fering, evil and salvation.” A poet o f the Petrograd Proletkult (a workers cultural organization o f 1917) wrote: "As G od we proclaim M an, as the M other o f G od— the M achine, and as Jesus the Messiah— the Conscious Socialist H ero.”53 In February 1917 the m onarchy was not merely overthrown; it was dis­ credited and shorn o f its sacred aura. This was quite unlike the situation in France after the 1789 revolution, when many people were prepared to fight for the monarchy, which as a result was actually restored in 1815. In Russia a vacuum remained where the tsar had been. In the civil war none o f the W hite leaders, whatever their private views, called for the restora­ tion o f the m onarchy because they knew that to do so would be to jeopar­ dize public support for their cause. It is difficult to exaggerate the disori­ entation this absence generated. T he source o f power, hierarchy, law and order, tradition, and stability had been elim inated. T he social memory not only o f Russians but o f m ost non-Russians too had been loosed from its moorings. Everyone had to operate in a political, legal, and moral framework no longer guaranteed by the state.

Russian Socialism and Revolution The vacuum was filled by Russian messianic socialism. Why, am ong the European nations, was it Russia that generated a specifically socialist form o f messianism? Here the long survival o f krugovaia poruka was decisive. Russians were accustomed to a m odest standard o f living, and they were accustomed to helping each other out in difficulties. They had never fully accepted private property, individualism, and legalism. Egalitarianism, joint responsibility, and m utual aid were ideals and habitual practices that came naturally to m ost o f them . T he revolutionary movement o f peasants and workers in 1905—1907 and in 1917 was impelled partly by material self-interest, but also by their own vision o f pravda, that is, equality, jus­ tice, and self-rule. W hen in 1905 the tsar invited village assemblies to put forward their own proposals for reform, the m ost popular dem and was for private ownership o f land to be abolished, and for all land to be transferred to those who worked it. As the resolution o f an assembly in

MARXISM AND IDE CRISIS OF RHSSIAN MESSIANISM

29

Volokolamsk district, Moscow province, put it, “Land should be used only by those who cultivate it, in their families or in m utual associa­ tions, but w ithout hiring labor, and in such quantity as they are able to cultivate.”54 Urban workers had a more developed view than peasants o f civil rights and dem ocratic processes, but they too supported the peasant dem and for the land, and supplem ented it w ith their own dem and for electing work­ ers to factory supervisory committees. In the autum n o f 190$ they im­ provised for themselves the urban equivalent o f the village assembly, the soviet o f workers’ deputies. Soviets were elected by the employees o f all the m ajor industrial enterprises o f any given city; they would assemble in a large building— or sometimes even on a river bank. N ot only deputies but also their constituents could attend and speak, and deputies could be recalled at any tim e by their electors and replaced.55 This was the clos­ est thing to direct democracy that could be devised in the urban envi­ ronm ent. These were the features o f Russian society which the Populists had al­ ways emphasized, and their view was cogent, given the nature o f Russia’s economy and its relationship to society and government. Capitalism and its related social institutions were less developed in Russia than in any other part o f Europe save the Balkans. O ne indication o f this m indset can be seen in the official and public reaction to the food-supply crisis during the First W orld War. W hereas the other com batant states used the com­ mercial m arket to ensure that cities and armies were fed, both the Russian government and the voluntary associations sought grain through non­ profit cooperative organizations that kept prices low. O ne result was that grain deliveries declined seriously by early 1917, precipitating the crisis that brought down the tsarist regime.56 W hen the tsar was overthrown in February 1917 and succeeded by the Provisional Government, strange transform ations took place among Rus­ sia’s political parties. The Kadets, who had long stood for liberal democ­ racy and self-rule for the nationalities, now clung to the forms o f an au­ thoritarian empire and insisted on continuing the war; in the Provisional Governm ent they refused to grant Ukraine autonom y and delayed the convening o f a C onstituent Assembly, because they feared underm ining the Russian state. Even more surprisingly, the Mensheviks (Marxist social­ ists) and the Socialist Revolutionaries (Populist socialists) did the same— though the process caused a fatal split in the latter party.57 W hatever polit-

30

INIEIS AM VICTIMS

ical party found itself responsible for the fate o f Russia was in thrall to the inherited form o f the Russian state and was loath to tam per w ith it for fear o f triggering a total breakdown o f law and order. In 1917 only the Bolsheviks did not feel the same responsibility for Russia, and so they were free to launch their own slogans calling for an end to the war, for peasants to seize the land, for soldiers to take control o f the army, and for nationalities to determ ine their own future, even though they knew these aims entailed the destruction o f the state. O nce they were themselves in power, though, the Bolsheviks also became subject to the same imperial imperatives, as we shall see. In O ctober 1917 the final collapse o f government, army, police, and ju­ diciary gave the peasants the opportunity to put their vision o f land, law, and local government into practice. T he new Bolshevik government ex­ plicitly gave them their head: borrowing the very words o f a peasant con­ gress o f June 1917, it abolished private landownership and transferred all rural land to village and volost land com mittees for redistribution among peasant households. This decree at last satisfied the peasants’ centuries-old longing to own all the land and run village affairs themselves. Sometimes peacefully, sometimes by violence, the village assemblies took over the land and the m anor houses, dividing them up am ong themselves accord­ ing to criteria worked out separately in each village.38 M eanwhile in the cities, workers voted deputies to factory committees that undertook the supervision o f industrial enterprises and usually ended up by expropriat­ ing the owners; and they elected delegates to city soviets whose armed de­ tachm ents carried out the seizure o f power. T hat is why the post-revolu­ tionary government was called the “worker-peasant authority” (rabochekrestianskaia vlast) and the state was referred to as Soviet Russia, later the Soviet U nion. Actual power, though, passed into the hands o f the Bolsheviks, mainly because they were the only political party which was prepared at that juncture to sacrifice the existing Russian state to popular aspirations.59 T he process o f revolution dem onstrated the degree o f em bitterm ent and alienation that existed between the people and the privileged, edu­ cated classes o f old Russia. W hatever the niceties o f M arxist class analysis, the term burzhui was applied indiscrim inately to old-regime landowners, merchants, priests, lawyers, professors, and army officers— anyone who looked well-dressed or well-fed. As O rlando Figes has remarked, burzhui denoted “not so m uch a class as a set o f popular scapegoats, or internal en-

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31

emies, who could be redefined almost at will to account for the break­ down o f the market, the hardships o f the war and the general inequalities o f society.” “We should exterm inate all the b u rzh u i” declared one factory worker in January 1918, “so that the honest Russian people will be able to live more easily.” Trotskii recommended they be rounded up and made to shovel snow from the streets or clean out barrack-room latrines. U nder the slogan “Loot the looters!” {grab nagrablennoe!) workers, peasants, and soldiers took over factories, marched on m anor houses, and requisitioned bourgeois apartm ents w ith the explicit approval o f the new regime. “I’ve spent all my life in the stables,” a former servant declared at a political rally, “while they live in their beautiful flats and lie on soft couches playing w ith their poodles. N o more o f that, I say! It’s my turn to play w ith poo­ dles now; and as for them , it’s their turn to go and work in the stables.”60 Peasants also interpreted the land redistribution as a blow against the privileged. W hen the future w riter K onstantin Paustovskii visited his aunt’s estate in the Polese district o f Belorussia, the driver o f his horse and cart asked him when the “general perm it” would “come through . . . for us peasants to take the land and be masters and to stick all the big and litde masters in the backside w ith our pitchforks and send them all to the devil’s mother?”61 Actually, peasants did sometimes adm it the former landowner to their com m unity and award him a fair peasant-size plot o f land, provided he turned him self into a peasant by cultivating it him self w ithout hired labor. By contrast, landowners who resisted expropriation o f their estate m ight be m urdered along w ith their families, or at best driven to the nearest railway station and dum ped there w ith a warning never to return. In Usman district o f Tambov province, for example, Prince Boris Viazemskii was seized in his m anor house by a crowd o f peas­ ants and subjected to a kangaroo court which initially resolved he should be sent to the front, “so that he can learn to fight as the peasants have done.” But from the public bench at the court there were shouts o f “Let’s kill the Prince, w ere sick o f him!”; and before he got as far as the railway station, a drunken mob fell upon him and m urdered him .62 W hatever happened to the landowners, peasants would then set about looting the m anor house— usually starting w ith the wine cellars, con­ fiscating tools and utensils that m ight be useful, and then smashing pic­ tures, furniture, books, musical instrum ents, and anything else that re­ called a more cultured way o f life than they led themselves. Finally they would burn down the m anor to ensure that the bariris departure was final.

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In September and O ctober 1917 alone, one-fifth o f the manors in Penza province were destroyed.69 This was an orgiastic dearout o f the cultivated, Europeanized milieu which had made peasants feel both alienated and ex­ ploited. T he O ctober revolution was, then, both a conspiratorial seizure o f power conducted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks and also a mass movement inspired by the egalitarian self-governing practices o f peasants and work­ ers— joined now by soldiers. T he two aspects o f the revolution intersected and overlapped. T he socialist oudook did have quite a lot in com m on w ith the aspirations o f workers and peasants: they shared, for example, the view o f profit as im m oral and o f property as illegitimate except where it was justified by m anual labor. But the people’s outlook actually stemmed mainly from C hristianity and from custom ary peasant practices rather than from any kind o f theoretical socialism, even though by now quite a few workers and peasants had learned to frame their aims in socialist language. By the same token, the underlying worldview o f M arxist intellectuals was at a considerable remove from that o f the ordinary Russian people. O ne can appreciate the difference if one considers the oudook o f the young U krainian Jewish C om m unist Lev Kopelev in the early 1920s: W orld revolution was absolutely essential, so that justice should at last trium ph, so that prisoners should be freed from bourgeois jails, so that the hungry should be fed in India and China, so that lands taken from the Germans and the Danzig “corridor” should be re­ stored and our Bessarabia taken away from Rom ania . . . So that af­ terward there should be no more frontiers at all, no capitalists or fas­ cists anywhere. So that Moscow, Kharkov, and Kiev should be as large and well-equipped as Berlin, H am burg, or New York So that we should have skyscrapers and streets full o f cars and bicycles, so that all workers and peasants should go around in good-quality clothes, w ith hats and watches . . . And so that there should be air­ planes and airships everywhere.64 There was a small area o f overlap between this outlook and that o f the Russian peasant, b u t its whole m ental context, w ith its orientation to the m odem , urban, international world, was completely different. Both sides— peasants and socialist intellectuals—were determ ined to

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33

get their way, and ultim ately they were bound to clash. W hen that hap­ pened, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, their conflict destroyed the tra­ ditional Russian way o f life, but also transform ed Marxism beyond recog­ nition.65 Shordy after the revolution, all the same, the two forms o f messianism were unexpectedly com bined in one single poem by Aleksandr Blok. Called The Twelve—indicating a detachm ent o f Red Guard soldiers, but also suggesting the apostles— it ends w ith the figure o f Jesus C hrist lead­ ing the soldiers through the streets o f Petrograd: T hus they advance w ith state-bearing step, Behind them a hungry cur, W hilst at their head w ith blood-red flag, Invisible in the snowstorm, Impervious to the bullets, A t a gende pace above the blizzard, In the pearly scattering o f snow, W ith a wreath o f w hite roses, Before them all walks Jesus C hrist.66 This ending surprised Blok himself. In a letter answering criticism o f it, he replied: “I don’t like the end o f The Twelve either. . . . W hen I’d fin­ ished, I was surprised myself. W hy Christ? Could it really be Christ? But the more I looked, the more clearly I saw Christ. A nd that’s when I made a note o f it for myself: unfortunately Christ. C hrist and no one else.” In his creative im agination, Blok was drawing on both the Bible— especially the Book o f Revelation— and the recent culture o f his own country. In so doing, he was com ing up w ith dualistic apocalyptic imagery that well re­ flected the dual and contradictory nature o f the Russian revolution.67 Among the Bolshevik leaders themselves, Anatolii Lunacharskii was the m ost effusive in his celebration o f a specifically Russian revolution. He contrasted Russia w ith the U nited States, where mechanization enabled people to live a more leisured life, but where hum an beings had been taken over by machines and by the petty selfishness o f capitalism. Russian workers, by contrast, he claimed, m ight appear backward and clumsy, but they had already shown that they could humanize industrial labor: “O ur ‘New America’ will aim to use the labor o f machines to make hum an life elegant and enjoyable.”68 Conceding that American workers were more ef-

34

IIIE IS AND VICTIMS

ficicnt and pragm atic than their Russian counterparts, he nevertheless concluded, looking at the O ctober revolution, that “the Russian working class was able, bleeding and offering enorm ous sacrifices, to rise from the depths o f autocracy and barbarism to the position o f avant-garde o f hu­ manity.”69 T he them e o f “America m inus capitalism plus a hum ane cul­ ture” was to remain a dom inant m otif in the Soviet self-image.

The W hites O ne m ight have expected the W hite armies, or at any rate their leaders during the civil war o f 1917-1921, to have acted as bearers o f the Russian national idea against international socialism. T hat turned out not to be the case, for a num ber o f reasons. T he m ain problem was the heritage o f the empire. Russia was not a na­ tion b u t an empire, and its identity was firmly linked to the person o f the tsar. As we have seen, however, both the person and the m yth o f the tsar had been thoroughly discredited by 1917. W hat, then, were the W hites fighting for? Senior W hite officers had re­ ceived their training in the old Im perial Army, in a m ilieu that deliber­ ately eschewed politics as som ething illegitimate. They were therefore both ignorant and contem ptuous o f it. T heir propaganda was vague, con­ fusing, and to m any people threatening. They readily confused liberalism, socialism, and non-Russian nationalism as part o f a single conspiracy, probably m aster-m inded by the Jews, to destroy Russia.70 T he only for­ m ula on w hich they could all agree was “Russia, one and indivisible.” But that simplified slogan suggested different things to different people: there was no agreed form ulation o f w hat “Russia” m eant. Some, especially in the early stages o f the civil war, were fighting for the prem aturely dissolved C onstituent Assembly as the only body that could claim to have been le­ gitimately elected by the Russian people. But for m ost W hites the assem­ bly was itself far too left-wing in its com position to be acceptable as a po­ litical icon. Paradoxically, then, the Reds were fighting for (relatively) established institutions, the soviets, which at least in some sense represented the aspi­ rations o f the great mass o f Russians. By contrast the W hites, the ostensi­ ble conservatives, created raw, unstable institutions and were proposing a vague and quixotic ideal w ith litde popular support. M ost peasants, work­ ers, and soldiers feared that the W hites w ould deprive the peasants o f

MARXISM AND TIE CRISIS IF RUSSIAN MESSIANISM

35

their recently won land and self-government, bring back the capitalists, and let foreigners rule Russia. In another paradox, by seeking support from Russia’s form er W orld War I allies, the W hites, for all their devotion to "Russia,” actually appeared unpatriotic, while the Reds, who had no foreign allies, could warn that imperialists were trying to crush the young Russian socialist state. Incongruously, the Reds were thus able, when it suited them , to pose as the party o f patriotism . Russian messianism came, then, in two configurations, O rthodox and socialist, both o f which partially intersected w ith the oudook o f the peo­ ple, but neither o f which fully m et their needs. T he revolution m eant the apparent victory o f the socialist variety. The Soviet U nion then became the forum for a double struggle: between Com m unism and Orthodoxy, and between Com m unism and the Russian people. The first ended in ini­ tial victory but ultim ate defeat for the Com munists; the second was in­ conclusive, but each side was profoundly changed by the other.

2 Ti e

effects of revolution

AND CIVIL WAR Communists in Power Among the great empires that fell after the First W orld War, the Russian and O ttom an were in some ways remarkably alike. They both straddled the borders o f C hristianity and Islam, both had a m ultiethnic ruling class, both professed a potentially universal religious faith, and both had a ma­ jority peasant population that bore the main burdens o f empire. After 1922, however, their fates were completely different. The heartland o f the O ttom an Empire became a Turkish nation-state, and w ith the abolition o f the Caliphate it abandoned its sponsorship o f a universal religion. The Russians, on the contrary, restored their empire almost completely; they abandoned one universal religion but took up another that was even more am bitious in its earthly claims. The victorious Bolsheviks com bined the m ultiethnic oudook o f the imperial state w ith the messianism o f the former Russian religious and po­ litical opposition. This was the first tim e, at least since the seventeenth century, that the Russian state had been messianic in its official outlook. In its new character as the Soviet U nion, it was the bearer o f the one true faith, M arxist socialism, which it aimed to carry to the entire world under the slogan “Workers o f the world, unite!” T hat they had to achieve their task in the crucible o f civil war only confirmed the Bolshevik leaders in their conviction that the transform ation o f society was both necessary and possible. N o sooner had they seized power than they began im plem enting that transform ation in the name o f the people.

TIE EFFECTS IF IEVILITIII A l l CIVIL WAR

37

In appearance, then, this was a truly popular government, devoted to giving the people w hat they wanted. Yet it did so by destroying civil so­ ciety and interm ediate institutions, so that nothing remained between the regime and the people. For that reason extreme democratism was accompanied by extreme authoritarianism . Alongside the new peoples courts the government set up an Extraordinary Commission for Struggle w ith Counter-Revolution and Sabotage— the Cheka, as it is commonly known— in essence the new regime’s secret police, answerable to no popu­ larly elected institution. To run all branches o f the economy, a Supreme Council o f the N ational Economy (Vesenkha) was created, which ab­ sorbed the new factory workers’ committees and took charge o f all com­ mercial operations. Peasants now had their own land, but the grain grown on it was soon subject to com pulsory requisition. In the armed forces, the soldiers’ committees were absorbed into the regime’s new “political de­ partm ents” under “political commissars”; officers from the old army re­ turned to take com m and and restored full m ilitary discipline, includ­ ing the death penalty. T he imperatives o f the new-style universal empire took precedence over the creation from below o f a national com­ munity. Lenin saw no contradiction between democracy and dictatorship. The term “dictatorship o f the proletariat” com fortably embraced both, and they were amalgamated in his thinking by the absolute desirability and popularity o f the aims the Bolsheviks were pursuing. He believed that it would be sufficient to transfer the com m anding heights o f the capitalist economy to workers and peasants for exploitation to end and for the fruits o f production to be available to the great m ajority o f the people— provided they acted efficiendy and ruthlessly.1 “Com rade workers,” he ex­ horted on November 5, 1917, remember that you yourselves are adm inistering the state. N obody is going to help you if you do not yourselves unite and take over a ll affairs o f state. Rally round your soviets: make them strong. . . . Institute strict revolutionary order, suppress w ithout mercy the anar­ chic excesses o f drunken hooligans, counter-revolutionary cadets, Kornilovites, etc. Institute rigorous supervision over production and accounting over products. Arrest and deliver to the tribunal o f the revolutionary people anyone who dares to raise his hand against the people’s cause.2

38

HIERS ARD VICTIMS

These were the tones o f the millennial revolutionary, confident that, after a final decisive trial o f strength, deliverance and the reign o f peace and plenty were at hand. The first draft program o f the Com m unist Party envisaged a similar com bination o f spontaneous self-organization from below w ith ruthless dictatorship from above to elim inate the privileged social classes and es­ tablish com plete social equality along w ith full com m unal self-govern­ m ent. It foresaw the end o f the individual domestic economy, to be re­ placed by “joint catering for large groups o f families.” It recommended replacing the labor m arket w ith “universal com pulsory labor service,” and trade w ith “planned, organized distribution,” which w ould eventually make money unnecessary, though in the m eantim e all banks would be controlled by the state.3 In his book The A B C o f Communism, w ritten to put the party’s program in plain words for the masses, Nikolai Bukharin explained that there would no longer be com modities but only products, and they w ould be “neither bought nor sold; they will simply be stored in com m unal warehouses, and subsequendy be delivered to those who need them . In such conditions money will no longer be required.”4 In appear­ ance the egalitarian principles o f the Russian village com mune were now to be applied universally by the state. But at the level o f a whole country this could be accomplished only by a centralized, highly authoritarian, and well-informed government— one, moreover, working on principles that had only lim ited points o f contact w ith the popular worldview and peasant custom. T he domestic, social, and economic institutions o f Rus­ sia were to be uprooted and replaced by a paternalist police state. To ensure that this m ethod o f rule not be confused w ith parliam entary democracy, the new regime in January 1918 closed down the institutional child o f the February revolution, the C onstituent Assembly, which had been newly elected on the m ost generous franchise Russia had seen up to that tim e. T he Bolsheviks received a respectable num ber o f votes, but the largest single party in the Assembly was the Socialist Revolutionaries, the party o f peasant self-government. Lenin claimed that the Assembly repre­ sented only “bourgeois democracy” and m ust yield to “dem ocratic institu­ tions o f a higher order,” the soviets. This was the first sign that the two revolutions o f 1917 were set to clash w ith each other. The early utopian C om m unist declarations also asserted categorically that the advance toward socialism m eant the end o f the nation and the nation-state:

TIE EFFECTS IF REVOLITIII AID CIVIL WAR

39

N ational enm ity and ill-feeling are am ong the means by which the proletariat is stupefied and by which its class consciousness is dulled. . . . T he worker who, under capitalism, proclaims him self a patriot, is selling for a copper or two his real fatherland, which is socialism; and thereby he becomes one o f the oppressors o f the backward and weak n atio n s.. . . N o m atter w hat tongue the workers o f other lands may speak, the essential feature o f their condition lies in this, that they are all exploited by capital, that they are all comrades, that they all suffer alike from poverty, oppression and in­ justice.5 O nly the international proletariat could create a truly hum ane world: “T he proletariat today is the true savior o f m ankind from the horrors o f capitalism, from the barbarities o f exploitation, from colonial policy, incessant wars, famine, a lapse into savagery and brutalization, from all the abom inations that are entailed by financial capital and imperialism. H erein lies the splendid historical significance o f the proletariat.”6 T he ultim ate vision was intoxicating: a superior hum an species, capable o f assimilating and surpassing the greatest cultural and scientific achieve­ ments o f the past. Trotskii evoked his dream at the end o f his book Litera­ ture and Revolution: M an will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights o f consciousness, to make them transparent, to « te n d the wires o f his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise him self to a new plane, to create a higher social-biological type or, if you please, a superman. . . . M an will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythm ic, his voice more musical. The forms o f life will become dynamically dram atic. The average hum an type will rise to the heights o f an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.7 To begin the work o f creating an international proletarian state, in 1919 Soviet Russia founded the Com m unist International, or Com in­ tern. From the outset the Com intern drew a clear distinction between the old socialism o f W estern Europe, which merely strove to improve workers’ conditions w ithin existing bourgeois societies, and the new revolution-

40

IILEIS AM VICTIMS

ary socialism, which aimed to transform the world. T he C om intern de­ nounced “reformist” and “opportunist” socialist leaders who had let their parties become “subsidiary organs o f the bourgeois state,” and it called for the overthrow o f fraudulent parliam entary regimes in favor o f “a new and higher workers’ democracy.” In 1920 it placed twenty-one conditions be­ fore European socialist parties who wished to join it, am ong w hich were issuing propaganda laying bare the bogus nature o f existing democracies and preparing for an arm ed seizure o f power.8 In m ost countries only a small m inority o f socialists were prepared to satisfy these conditions and to join C om m unist parties, that is, parties affiliated w ith the C om intern. T heir small num ber underlined the contrast between the messianic uni­ versalist socialism o f Soviet Russia and the pragmatic, parliamentary, na­ tion-bound socialism prevalent in m ost o f Europe.

Civil War and Chaos In messianic thinking, deliverance is preceded by the apocalypse. T he events o f 1917—1921 bore out this expectation. As the historian Lynne Viola has com m ented, “Three o f the four horsemen o f the apocalypse— war, famine and disease— stalked the Russian land in an all too literal orgy o f death and destruction.”9 Social capital and national memory were de­ stroyed on an unprecedented scale. T he development o f civilized society was halted and reversed. T he m onarchy was abolished and discredited, the O rthodox C hurch disestablished, weakened, and divided. For a messi­ anic political party, such devastation was not a disaster but an opportu­ nity. Bolsheviks had always accepted that they could not create a new soci­ ety w ithout a destructive upheaval. But for m ost o f the Russian people this transform ation entailed a drastic decom position o f their society, a de­ scent into a formlessness and chaos that were to leave their m ark on them for decades— in a sense throughout the Soviet period. W hereas international war tends to unite a society, civil war fragments it brutally. In Russia in 1917—1921 centralized power disintegrated, for all the Bolsheviks’ authoritarianism . T he empire dissolved into separate re­ gions and discrete ethnic territories, sometimes even just individual vil­ lages, left to fend for themselves in a w orld where neighbors were at best untrustworthy, at worst intent on pillage and murder. Economic life lost its variety and its m ultiple interconnections and became crude and pov­ erty-stricken; money, the bearer o f com m unity trust par excellence, lost

TIE EFFECTS IF IEVILITIII AID CIVIL WAI

41

m ost o f its value and its power to inspire confidence. O rdinary services and facilities, which people had come to take for granted, simply col­ lapsed. In the cities the end o f the German war entailed the abrupt cessa­ tion o f m ilitary m anufacture and precipitated the unraveling o f the indus­ trial economy, soon followed by that o f the auxiliary economic branches which had serviced and supplied it. H undreds o f thousands o f workers were laid off and left w ithout alternative sources o f income. Over the next couple o f years rail and w ater transport deteriorated drastically, and sup­ plies o f food and fuel became more and more haphazard. In January 1920 the anarchist Emma Goldm an returned to St. Petersburg, whose “gaiety . . . vivacity and brilliancy” had impressed her in her youth. T he city she found not only had a new name, Petrograd, but also looked quite differ­ ent, and it appalled her: “It was almost in ruins, as if a hurricane had swept over it. T he houses looked like broken old tombs upon neglected and forgotten cemeteries. T he streets were dirty and deserted; all life had gone from them . . . . T he people walked about like living corpses. . . . Emaciated, frost-bitten men, women and children were being whipped by the com mon lash, the search for a piece o f bread or a stick o f wood.”10 H eating and lighting were reduced to a m inim um , so that by 1921 an observer in Kharkov reported that people were “living four, five, six, even seven to a room w ithout lights, w ithout running water and w ithout ade­ quate fuel.”11 M uch o f Russia lies well north o f Kharkov, and w hat the de­ privation m eant in the dark, cold winters at those latitudes can scarcely be imagined. W hen they could, people warmed themselves at improvised stoves known ironically as burzhuiki (implying a comfortable bourgeois hostess), which they fed w ith rubbish, w orn-out clothes, books, and paper as fuel. Medical services and public hygiene virtually ceased, so that mal­ nourished, exhausted, and stressed townsfolk were left to face disease unaided. Epidemics o f typhus and cholera swept in destructive waves through the cities. M any people left, especially those in the more northern cities, which were remote from the grain-growing regions and hence most acutely threatened by hunger and disease. At times their precipitate exo­ dus overwhelmed the already overstretched transport services: one train left Petrograd so crowded that it overbalanced while crossing a bridge, toppled over, and plunged into the River Neva w ith the loss o f hundreds o f lives.12 Petrograds population fell from 2.5 million in 1917 to 700,000 in 1920. Apart from disease, people daily faced unfamiliar and pressing hazards,

42

IDLERS AND VICTIMS

notably hunger and physical attack. They became fearful and suspicious; in order to survive they often had to react by emergency action or im pro­ vised and violent self-defense. A volatile tem peram ent, swift reflexes, and readiness to fight at a m om ent’s notice became positive attributes. In Sep­ tem ber 1918 the w riter M ikhail Prishvin noted in his diary: “I can feel even the best and cleverest people, scholars included, beginning to behave as if there were a mad dog in the courtyard outside.”13 People were pre­ pared to take greater risks than before, to act in a less rational, more im­ pulsive manner, simply because situations were unfam iliar and perplexing, and because completely safe courses o f action did not exist. Naturally, courtesy hided too, and coarse, aggressive behavior became the norm . Peo­ ple thought in cruder ways. W hen reverses happened, they did not seek a sophisticated explanation, but took the one w hich lay closest to hand and which their political superiors usually encouraged: namely, that misfor­ tunes were caused by "enemies” who should be resisted at all costs and if possible destroyed, while good fortune was due to "comrades” who should be supported wholeheartedly. Such interpretations perform ed the vital function o f inspiring hope, for they suggested that a favorable outcome could be reached by an uncom plicated line o f conduct. They shaped the Russian m entality for m uch o f the tw entieth century. T he brutalization and im poverishm ent o f everyday life were extremely distressing for members o f the upper classes, who had been brought up to expect high standards o f courtesy, forbearance, and tolerance from fellow hum an beings. M any o f the elites concluded that norm al life had become impossible and emigrated. M ost ordinary people, however, were unable to do so, or chose to stay behind in the country they loved or had become accustomed to. T heir lot was hard. In January 1919 the historian Iurii G ote walked all the way across Moscow to buy thirty eggs and three pounds o f rice: "The journey around Moscow during business hours in the m orning . . . produced a frightening impression on me— it is likely that the invasion o f Genghis Khan affected the towns subjected to him in approximately the same way: all the windows have been boarded, every­ thing has been killed, everything has stopped.”14 The artefacts and practices o f bourgeois life were losing their value and meaning. University meetings were chaired by party activists, people whose faces “exuded lack o f culture.” Parlor curtains were taken down to exchange for potato flour; when G ote was interrogated by the Cheka in an expropriated house, it was “in the old bedroom . . . w ith Corinthian

TIE EFFECTS IF IEVILITIII A l l CIVIL WAI

43

columns and a marvellous m irror.” G ote’s own apartm ent was requisi­ tioned by the local authorities, and an alien family was moved into his dining room, so that, he recalls, “I retained the impression that someone was going to the toilet all day behind m e.” Princess Sofia Volkonskaia suf­ fered the same fate: A notice came from the “house com m ittee” telling us to be ready to receive two new lodgers in our flat. We were, it appeared, occupying more space than was allotted to us according to Soviet law. Recrimi­ nations were o f no avail. T he couple thus forced on us— a young man and his wife— seemed quite nice, b u t . . . they were Com m u­ nists. . . . N othing could be more disagreeable than this living in close contact (having to cook our dinners on the same stove, to use the same bathroom devoid o f hot water, etc.), w ith people who con­ sidered themselves a priori and in principle as our foes. N othing could be more irritating than the feeling o f being, even at home, un­ der the constant eye o f the enemy. “Take care,” “Shut the door,” “Do not talk so loud; the Com m unists may hear you.” Pin-pricks? Yes, o f course. But in that nightm are life o f ours every pin-prick took on the dimensions o f a serious w ound.15 People became exiles in their own homes. Gote, at least, decided he could stand it no longer and moved into his workroom in the Rumiantsev Museum. A stable, calculable life had been transform ed into a jum ble o f unforeseeable events: “I had thought that we w ould move from our apart­ m ent on Bolshoi Znam enskii only into the other world, but that shows w hat hum an expectations are w orth; the Bolsheviks came and wrecked them all.” So devastating was this bonfire o f all cultural and social capital that Gote, a professional historian and an O rthodox believer, confessed one day to his diary that “there is neither religious nor historical feeling in me; the one and the other have been destroyed in me by w hat is go­ ing on.”16 Gote, though thoroughly shaken up, managed somehow to survive in the new life o f unpredictability and privation. N ot so Igor Nilaev, an engi­ neer in Petrograd who saw his factory closed down, his bank account se­ questered, and rooms in his apartm ent handed over to worker families. Everything that had rendered his life meaningful had vanished, and he wandered around the one room left to him , m uttering, “W hatever has

44

RHIEIS AND VICTIMS

happened to us?” Eventually he was taken to a psychiatric hospital, where he died.17 For peasants and workers the changes did not perhaps dem and as radi­ cal a transform ation o f cultural attitudes as they did for the bourgeois and professional strata, but they did engender behavioral patterns that were archaic and simplified. They too divided the world into "right” and “w rong,” “white” and “black.” At the big M otovilikha armaments works outside Perm in December 1918 the workers proclaimed to the world: “O ur revolutionary conscience and duty com m and us to take revenge on all persecutors o f the Russian and International revolution, w hether they are conscious persecutors— the bourgeoisie and capitalists— or uncon­ scious ones— ignorant workers and peasants.”18 T heir rhetoric is notewor­ thy for the assum ption that whole classes o f people were enemies, w hether or not they intended to be. Civil war com bined w ith ideology to impose a crude sim plification o f the categories by which everyone understood so­ cial life and politics. T he new regime abolished private trade in agriculture as part o f its pro­ gram o f leaping straight to a socialist society. Soon, though, it had to rec­ ognize that w ithout such trade there would be mass starvation. T he para­ doxical result was that almost everyone became a trader in a small way, either as seller or as buyer, often as both. But the “trade” that resulted was quite different from the orderly m arket o f pre-1917 times. It was the m ost prim itive form o f commerce, barter, in w hich elaborate and fast-changing calibrations o f comparative value become everyone’s preoccupation and a perpetual subject o f conversation. Bourgeois townsfolk who had litde to offer, and whose m ost precious heirlooms had been abrupdy devalued, were reduced to desperate expedients. Baroness M eyendorff sold a dia­ m ond brooch in order to buy a sack o f flour, while Princess Golitsyna hawked home-made pies and the wife o f General Brusilov boxes o f m atches.19 Emma G oldm an witnessed the ultim ate degradation, city girls “selling themselves for a pound o f bread, a piece o f soap or chocolate. The soldiers were the only ones who could afford to buy them because o f their extra rations.”20 Workers were in a relatively favorable position, as long as their factories remained open: to obtain wares w ith which to trade, they would pilfer equipm ent or products from the workplace. Alternatively, to forestall such theft, employers would pay them , not in worthless currency, but in goods they could exchange on the market. Some o f them would set up rudi-

ÏIE EFFECTS IF IEVILUTIIN AND CIVIL WAt

45

m entary workshops where they could hastily fashion or repair vitally needed objects: boots, overcoats, stoves, ovens, and so on. In special de­ m and were axes, ploughshares, prim us stoves, pen-knives, and cigarette lighters: townsfolk carrying such items would flood outward, cluttering up all available trains, especially those going south-eastward toward the main arable regions. Peasants w ith sackfuls o f produce would take the re­ verse route and set up their stalls in the cities, where they could com mand a good price or exchange rate. The authorities could do litde to control these “bagmen”— and anyway, to do so would mean condem ning the en­ tire urban population to starvation.21 T hat towns survived at all testifies to Russians’ remarkable capacity to improvise viable ways o f living in extreme adversity. They were able to re­ vive rudim entary technologies and to restore more archaic forms o f hu­ man association, even though the adaptation was neither easy nor conge­ nial. The means they deployed to do so marked their social institutions for decades to come.22 Daily life was scarcely less harsh in the small towns and villages, whether under Red or W hite rule. In April 1919 Ataman D utov o f the O renburg Cossack Army wrote from Troitsk, in the Urals, to his com m ander-inchief, Admiral Kolchak: In the front-line zone and especially in the regions liberated from the Bolsheviks, local government does not exist. Local taxes do not get paid, and the officials have dispersed. Almost all hospitals in the vil­ lages are closed, since there are no medicines, the staff are not paid, and there are no resources to keep hospitals going. The schools are not working: there are no teachers, since they haven’t been paid for half a year or more. . . . There is no agricultural production, the roads and bridges are unrepaired, everything is falling apart. In the villages there is no calico, no sugar, no paraffin. People drink herbs and samogon [home-brewed vodka], and they light tapers to see by.23 By that tim e a similar picture could have been painted for much o f small­ town and rural Russia. It is true that the villages were in some ways better off than the towns: at least it was possible to grow food there. Besides, long-established kustam yi (cottage industry) skills, though superseded by m odern industry, had not been lost altogether, so that the basic amenities o f life— clothes,

46

IHLERS AID VICTIMS

furniture, and implements— could still be improvised locally, using axes and chisels instead o f lathes and circular saws. O n the other hand, the vil­ lage was remote and undefended; in the absence o f a firm central govern­ m ent it was vulnerable to any arm ed men who m ight turn up. For exam­ ple, on the night o f November 2 -3 ,1 9 1 8 , the setdem ent o f Kishki in Ufa guberniia was alarmed by the appearance o f a detachm ent o f sixty horse­ men o f unknow n status. They dem anded thirty puds (nearly 500 kilos) o f oats, three cartloads o f hay, and a slaughtered ram. They took vodka from an old m an, beating him up when he resisted. Finally they called for “wenches” (devki). T he leader o f the band exclaimed, “If I die, so be it, but I’m going to have a good tim e first!” (Umru tak umru, no poguliaiu. / 4 T hat kind o f attitude was com mon: life seemed short and cheap, and all moral restraints had been w ithdrawn. Besides, the greatest attraction o f the village— that it produced food— inevitably drew it into the circle o f violence. Both W hites and Reds treated peasant households as passive sources o f food supplies for the army and the cities. T he authorities’ pillaging o f the village is reflected in a peas­ ant woman’s letter o f August 1920 from Cherdyn district to her son: “They’re taking butter away by force, we’ve given them four pounds, and now they w ant to take the cow. They’re confiscating grain two sheaves out o f three, and potatoes two buckets for them , one for us, and turnips the same. They took all our butter, didn’t leave us any, and said if we didn’t have any butter we should borrow some and give it to them. They told me to go and get some, or I would be arrested. Fedia, it’s all just like last year, and I don’t know who to com plain to.”25 N o one cared w hether the peasants themselves had enough to live on and to guarantee the next season’s sow­ ing, even though the simplest reasoning would have suggested that they were the source of next year’s food too. People’s calculations had become so primi­ tive and short-sighted that such considerations were now off the radar. Some villages declared themselves “independent republics” and set about defending their “sovereign territory,” w ith “Green” militias; one in Orel guberniia actually surrounded itself w ith barbed wire and trenches.26 In Tambov guberniia in 1920, local authorities succeeded one another w ith bewildering rapidity, as the following story illustrates: “O n September 25 there was always a fair in O kri, the next village. T hat day, reckoning that all policemen would be there keeping order, an armed detachm ent sud­ denly appeared out o f the forest in our village. They quickly carried all the tables and cupboards out o f the Volrevkom [district revolutionary com­ m ittee premises] and set the building alight. Then the horsemen began to

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prance around the m ain square, shooting in the air to intim idate us. . . . T he villagers made themselves scarce. N o one came out to greet their new rulers. A nd the rulers, having circled the square a few times, galloped off into the forest.” Two days later the Reds returned, took two village lads, made them dig their own graves, and then shot them . “Now we no longer knew whom to acknowledge and whom to obey. Each m orning we would come out o f our huts, look around, and ask one another in whispers, ‘W ho’s in charge today, the Greens or the Reds?’”27 Even when governments established themselves, things were not neces­ sarily better. Each successive regime viewed its predecessor as wholly “black” and would arrest all its employees and supporters on the strength o f no more than a single denunciation. Under the Reds mere social origin m ight suffice to be im prisoned or even executed. In a further escalation o f lexical malignity, the language o f prophylactic hygiene was deployed to designate whole social classes. In December 1917 Lenin called for a “war to the death against the rich, the idlers, and the parasites” in order to “cleanse the Russian land o f all vermin, o f fleas— the crooks, o f bed­ bugs— the rich— and so on. In one place they will put in prison a dozen rich men . . . in another they will be put to cleaning latrines. In a third they will be given yellow rickets [the m ark o f the prostitute] after a term in prison, so that while they are harm ful everyone can keep an eye on them . In a fourth one out o f every ten idlers will be shot.”28 In September 1918 in Kungur, Perm guberniia, the Cheka shot sixteen people simply because they had once been tsarist policemen, members o f the Kadet Party or o f the U nion o f Russian People— and two nuns were included for good measure. In Perm itself forty-two hostages were shot on September 15, and thirty-seven more at the start o f October. The atm o­ sphere was such that “if one heard next door a thud, scuffles, or a despair­ ing cry, one froze and stared into the darkness, waiting in terror for a knock on one’s own door.”29 This kind o f casual and unreflecting violence, directed against whole categories o f people, continued throughout the civil war and left its m ark long afterward. It inculcated the habit o f assum­ ing that all problems could be solved by labeling entire collectives as ene­ mies and annihilating them .

Demographic Effects W orld war, revolution, and civil war had a devastating effect on Russia’s demographic health, and therefore on the family. M illions o f young men

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were killed between 1914 and 1921. A lthough no one could foresee it at the tim e, the outbreak o f the First W orld W ar plunged Russia’s peoples into a period o f turbulence exceeding anything they or their ancestors had experienced in their earlier history. T he First W orld W ar was merely the initial stage. D uring the course o f the war, 17.6 m illion men passed through the barracks, trenches, naval bases, and hospitals o f the armed services. O f those, 11.4 m illion (60.6 percent) never returned, that is to say, they died or were lost w ithout a trace. This percentage o f losses is higher than for the G erm an and A ustro-H ungarian armed services, both o f which suffered heavily in the course o f a war in which they were de­ feated. T he losses were particularly heavy am ong the officers and men o f the standing arm y o f 1914, in other words, am ong the bearers o f the old imperial service ethos. Civilian casualties o f the war are impossible to as­ sess accurately, but deaths were probably in the range o f 2 to 3.5 m illion.90 Between 1918 and 1922 the catastrophic population decline contin­ ued, as a result o f fighting in the civil war, Red and W hite terror, epidem­ ics, people fleeing their homes (including some 2 m illion who left the country altogether and w ent into em igration), the collapse o f economic life, the requisition o f food supplies, and the devastation o f cities. Finally a drought in the m ain arable regions in 1920 drastically reduced harvest yields in 1921 and 1922. Famine resulted in the m iddle and lower Volga basin, as well as in parts o f the Urals, Kazakhstan, and western Siberia. It has been estim ated that the population o f the area covered by the new So­ viet republics in 1922 had declined by 11 to 15 m illion since autum n 1917. If one also takes into account the lost births com pared w ith pre1914 projections, then the total demographic loss m ust have been in the order o f 20 m illion.31 T he losses were especially heavy in the cities and non-black earth re­ gions o f the Russian republic; they were less so in Ukraine and the blackearth regions, while the population rose slighdy in the Urals and lower Volga, and considerably in Siberia and Kazakhstan— areas to which refu­ gees were fleeing. Russians had suffered huge losses, yet paradoxically they had became a m ajority w ithin their own state territory for the first tim e in at least 200 years.32 The deaths, as we have seen, elim inated young men disproportionately. T heir wives, m others, and daughters were left alone, many o f them w ith­ out male support, to run smallholdings, allotm ents, and workshops. Since gender roles in villages and small towns were traditionally very sharply de­ lineated, men often belittled the economic efforts o f women taking over

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these roles. O n the other hand, partly because o f the shortage o f able-bod­ ied men and partly because o f the social programs o f the new regime, women gained a real influence in the village assemblies, horn which previ­ ous custom had debarred them . They became shakers and movers in rural and small-town life to an unprecedented degree. W henever marriage could be sustained right through all the emergen­ cies, it was immensely valuable as a pooling o f economic and em otional resources, and people, especially women, clung to it. They regarded Bol­ shevik attem pts to underm ine the family and the church, which offered sacral backing for the family, w ith extreme misgivings. Inevitably, though, many nuclear families came to grief, either because one spouse died, or because the vicissitudes o f war and revolution drove the partners apart. In those circumstances, there was a reversion toward an older pattern o f kin­ ship, w ith extended families grouping together for m utual support. This development was short-lived and was reversed by the m id-1920s, but it showed that Russian family arrangements could, if necessary, be quite flexible.33

Destraction of Memory An indispensable com ponent o f any com m unity’s identity and solidarity is memory. A lthough memory is an individual attribute, it is stocked w ith material m uch o f which is shared w ith other members o f the community, especially those in ones imm ediate social milieu. It offers the daily grid against which all experiences and impressions are checked and validated. Overlapping and shared memories enable people to com m unicate readily w ith others o f similar background. M emory “reduces the complexity and restricts the uncertainty o f our social environm ent,” enabling people to trust one another w ithout elaborate and irksome precautions.34 M emory is not necessarily shared by the nation as a whole. It is deter­ m ined partly by one’s hom e town or village, region, social class, religion, or ethnic affiliation. Prerevolutionary Russia had an especially fragmented and contested cultural memory; there was no ideal image o f the country shared by all social classes and all nationalities. The most widely accepted elements o f a com mon culture were the tsar and the O rthodox Church. By 1917, however, the monarchy had not only fidlen but had also become largely discredited, while the church was about to face a devastating as­ sault. Perhaps the m ost powerfid m ediator o f memory is the family. From the

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outset the Com m unists set out to underm ine it, both in order to weaken the sense o f property and to free women to play a more active role in soci­ ety. Under their legislation, church marriages lost their civil significance, and any stable cohabitation, registered or not, was considered a family. T he distinction between legitim ate and illegitimate children was abol­ ished, so that the few rem aining inheritance rights could be claimed by any offspring. A bortion was available on dem and, and divorce could be obtained simply by inform ing the other partner. Probably this legislation did less than revolution and war to underm ine families, but it exacerbated the instability o f dom estic life in the 1920s and thereby further weakened the culture-preserving role o f the family. Abstract ideas, such as religion or nationhood, can become p an o f the cultural memory, but they need to be symbolized in specific images or practices and related to particular times and places. T he content o f mem­ ory, w hether actualized in images, stories, songs, dances, shrines, cere­ monials, or customs, bestows a certain em otional coloring and symbolic content to a com m unity’s sense o f itself. T he past is not simply repro­ duced; it also reconstitutes itself selectively in each succeeding generation, a process that entails forgetting as well as remembering— especially those past happenings that no longer speak to the needs o f the contem porary com m unity.35 As a leading theorist o f cultural m emory has com m ented, "O nly a significant past is remembered; only a remembered past becomes significant.”36 W hat is remembered is determ ined partly (though certainly not wholly) by the authoritative discourses passed down from above, by the rulers. T he Com m unists actually intended to destroy social m emory in order to have, as it were, vacant cultural building sites on which to erect their own temples. As Barbara M isztal has com m ented, they “dism antled the traditional value-generating institutions, disintegrated families and under­ m ined many previous values, such as responsibility, freedom and auton­ omy.”37 Russians’ cultural memory, already divided and vulnerable, was drastically further degraded. Society became a shapeless structure: the social "rule book” consisted o f more or less blank pages on which new ide­ als, norm s, and practices could be inscribed at will. T he Bolsheviks as­ sumed this task w ith enthusiasm, self-confidence, and a considerable the­ oretical baggage, assembled in the underground and refashioned during the civil war. T he question was how for they could succeed in “fixing” the new reality on the various strata o f the population. O lder people found the unfam iliar context difficult to adjust to; many younger people, by

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contrast, whatever their social origin, attem pted to align themselves w ith it in order to secure a place where they could find a fulfilling role as indi­ viduals. For the tim e being, though, in the absence o f an agreed cultural mem­ ory or a reliable com m unications system, inform ation and a sense o f com­ m unity were m ediated by other means, primarily rum or and gossip. Ru­ mors offer a substitute both for reliable inform ation and for a stable community. As a cultural historian has com m ented, “Rumours are inter­ pretations; in situations o f great uncertainty, they seem to offer coher­ ence.”38 They even create an artificial togetherness when individuals are terrified o f being isolated and overwhelmed: “In a rum our one is not alone; that is its ambivalent promise. It is always connected w ith the fears, hopes and expectations o f people------W hoever hears a rum our and passes it on joins the linear sequence o f people’ who constitute the ‘they,’ the agents o f collective speech.” Gossip then processes rum or and gives it a context; it is the mechanism by which a society maintains its norms, or tries to restore them if they have been underm ined.39 The natural milieu for rum or is wartime, when fear and distortion o f inform ation are at their height. A civil war, being especially disruptive o f inherited norms and regular com m unications, makes rum or and gossip even more imperative than a national war. Soldiers exchange their own narratives in rest areas, field kitchens, and hospitals just behind the lines; these are then em broidered, magnified, com m ented on, and conveyed in letters to the rear, where they undergo the same processes yet again.40 In the words o f James Scott, “Life-threatening events such as wars, epidemic, famine and riot [all present in Russia then] are among the m ost fertile so­ cial sites for the generation o f rumors. Before the development o f modern news media and wherever, today, the media are disbelieved, rum or m ight be virtually the only source o f news about the extra-local w orld.”41 These wartime conditions became more or less perm anent features o f life in the Soviet Union, and they created a continuing tendency to exaggeration, distortion, and sometimes outright fantasy masquerading as inform ation. As the poet Anna Akhmatova observed tartly a decade and a half later, “We live in the pre-Gutenberg era.”42

Militarization of Life Strange though it may sound, the best way for young men to cope with life’s chronic instability was to enroll in the Red Army. It was by no means

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a haven o f security, o f course, but at least in its ranks one had a weapon to defend oneself w ith, and a better chance o f being regularly fed. By 1920 the Red Army was no less than five m illion strong. In its early stages, though, it had proved difficult to muster. T he Bolsheviks had begun by trying to extend the recruitm ent practices o f the Red Guards, that is, to create a volunteer citizen m ilitia, but few men came forward, and they had to replace the projected volunteer force w ith a conscript army. Con­ scripting did not prove easy either: in its early days the Red Army was plagued by desertions caused by war-weariness and by enlisted m ens un­ derstandable worries about their families. By 1919, though, the Soviet au­ thorities had devised a means o f easing such concerns and accomplishing m obilization successfully: they offered new recruits tangible benefits. In a w orld that had become desperately insecure they guaranteed weapons, m ilitary training, a regular food supply, and rudim entary social security for their families in the form o f the pack, or basic rations, as well as access for their children to education and a first claim on any spare land, for ex­ ample, that confiscated from deserters. This was the best arrangem ent available at the time: the Red Army man fought for the state, and in re­ turn the state eased his m aterial worries and took over some o f his family obligations. In a way this was a kind o f social contract, and it played a large part in constituting the new Soviet political com munity.43 As a result o f this arrangem ent, a very high proportion o f the young men who survived the civil war had been militarized at a decisive stage in their lives— in fact we may say that they experienced m odernization as m ilitarization. T he Red Army had widened their horizons, taught many o f them to read, and given them an insight into forms o f social and politi­ cal organization and a fam iliarity w ith m odern technology. It had also cut them off from their childhood backgrounds, so that not infrequently sol­ diers were prepared to suppress peasant risings even in their own home provinces. T heir training and wartim e experience left a perm anent mark on their concept o f the political community. W hether they were initially recruited in the First W orld W ar or the civil war their commanders aimed in training to eradicate peacetime “weaknesses,” to subordinate them to strict discipline and inure them to controlled violence, to encourage the comradely bonding o f small fighting units, and to foster physical fitness and masculine qualities like courage, strength, stamina, and dexterity. In the Red Army, or in the prelim inary training corps, Vsevobuch, they also received political education aimed at inspiring them w ith the image o f their political com m unity as the “toilers,” regardless o f ethnic origin.

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T heir “enemies” were the “former” social classes— merchants, landowners, priests, “kulaks” [wealthy peasants], and so on— and also the foreign im ­ perialists, the “interventionists” who had invaded their country. For de­ cades thereafter, these master images, positive and negative, dom inated the imaginations o f m ost young Soviet m en.44 Some o f these m en, thus formed by wartime experience, moved on to become influential political figures in the succeeding years; indeed, former Red Army soldiers form ed the backbone o f the party and the soviets for a decade or two thereafter— the “cadres,” as they were symptomatically called. T heir outlook did m uch to shape the public rhetoric and the au­ thoritative mentalities o f Soviet society. They simply assumed that m ili­ tary organization and discipline were the natural way to deal w ith social problems. T he language and oudook o f m ilitary campaigns dom inated their discourse: every social and economic program became a “front” to be taken by “assault,” while those who did not pull their weight were “desert­ ers” or even “enemies,” against whom a life-or-death “struggle” was natu­ ral and legitimate. O ne killed because otherwise one would be killed.45 This m ilitarization o f socialism helps to explain why, despite the osten­ sible Bolshevik prom otion o f female equality, women soon sank into a kind o f second-class citizenship. This was not just inherited prejudice: the dom inant ethos o f the m ilitant, muscular, energetic proletarian was decid­ edly masculine. Bolsheviks came to m istrust women as confined by tradi­ tion, the body, and byt (everyday routine), everything that was to be over­ come in the creation o f socialism.46 The solidarity o f m ilitary campaigns also colored the personnel pat­ terns o f the new regime. The comrades w ith whom one had shared broth around a bivouac fire became the closest associates in civilian life. W hen one o f them was appointed to a people’s commissariat or regional party secretaryship, he would invite his buddies o f yesteryear to join his staff, as the people he knew best and trusted.47 T heir shared memories, both em­ bellished and disinfected, became the sacred texts o f the new regime, and were im bibed by the young and ambitious o f the succeeding generation. Veterans’ networks became the working model o f party-state adm inistra­ tion. There were no veterans’ associations as such, but Sheila Fitzpatrick has apdy suggested that “the Bolshevik Party itself took the place and per­ formed the functions o f a veterans’ organization.”48 This was the origin o f the nom enklatura system o f public appointm ents which soon created a new and unusually rigid ruling class. There was no straightforward ethnic content to this image o f the politi-

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cal com m unity: that is why I do not call it a "nation,” and the Soviet au­ thorities did not either.49 C ertain national stereotypes did hover in the background, though. T he great m ajority o f Red Army soldiers were Rus­ sian, as the arm y drew m ost o f its m anpower from Russian villages and the big Russian industrial cities. There were many Ukrainians and Belo­ russians too, though o f course some Ukrainians fought against the Reds for the independence o f Ukraine. T he Red Army was also a partial rein­ carnation o f the old Im perial Army: m any imperial officers served in it, and they welcomed the opportunity to recreate a properly disciplined Russian army, which in their opinion the Provisional G overnm ent had fa­ tally underm ined. T he territory the Red Army was fighting to reclaim was, w ith a few m odifications, the form er Russian Empire, so that oldfashioned Russian patriotism was an acceptable motive for service w ithin it. This was especially true from the spring o f 1920, when the newly inde­ pendent Poles, centuries-old rivals for dom inance in the western regions, invaded Soviet territory. General Brusilov, who had hitherto stayed aloof from the civil war, issued an appeal in Pravda, urging his fellow imperial officers to drop their grudges against the Bolsheviks, to "forget egoistic feelings o f class struggle” and join the Red Army: "It is now your duty to defend our beloved Russia w ith all your strength, and to give your lives to save her from irretrievable subjugation”; otherwise "our descendants . . . will say we have forgotten our own Russian people and destroyed M other Russia.”50 Non-Russians were drafted into the Red Army too, and many o f them served w ith conviction to defend their hom eland against the openly Russifying W hites. They did not join separate ethnic units, however. A t least initially they were assigned to all-Soviet units in which they served together w ith people o f other nationalities, w ith Russian as the language o f com m and. O nly in peacetime after the civil war did the 12th Party Congress o f 1923 try to draw on specific ethnic loyalties by creating eth­ nic units, w ith a native language o f com m and.51 T he structure o f the new society was in large part determ ined by prac­ tices which had evolved as a result o f war. From 1914 onward the state— w hether in its incarnation as tsarist regime, Provisional Government, W hite m ilitary rule, or Soviet republic—had systematically collected far more detailed inform ation about its subjects than ever before. To deter­ mine liability for m ilitary or civilian service, eligibility for rations or other aid, to spot potential spies or internal opposition, everyone had to be

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identified and classified. These practices were com m on to all governments fighting the First W orld War. They used this inform ation to learn about the moods and intentions o f different categories o f the population, and wherever possible to affect those moods. O ne m ight see this as a manifes­ tation o f the general tendency during the war to shift from a territorial concept o f rule to a managerial one, to forms o f government seeking uto manage populations, not just to rule territories.”52 D uring the civil war in Russia it became extremely difficult for any re­ gime to accomplish such inform ation work systematically. All the same, by 1919 the Soviet authorities had some ten thousand officials opening and analyzing citizens’ mail and com piling “summaries on the popula­ tion’s m ood.”53 They extended this effort when peace returned, and they used the results to determ ine the status o f their citizens. T he positive, di­ dactic aspect o f their intelligence w ork was especially prom inent, starting w ith regular “political enlightenm ent” sessions in the Red Army. Such in­ struction was necessary partly because the regime’s aim was to transform society, and partly because society had in any case lost its bearings and its memory.54 The result was the erection o f w hat one scholar has called “the propaganda state,” whose output replaced social memory and blocked the articulation o f alternative viewpoints. In a real sense it supplanted civil so­ ciety and the public realm, so that “the Soviet people ultim ately came not so m uch to believe the Bolsheviks’ world view as to take it for granted.”55 Statements about society, w hether true or untrue, were henceforth active forces shaping everyone’s activity and view o f themselves. These instrum ents o f social policy were then taken up and used by the new supreme authority, the Com m unist Party, which was not a political party in the traditional sense, but, in the words o f one historian, “a messi­ anic order, burdened w ith the task o f purifying society in the name o f the future com m unity.” T he party deployed adm inistrative classification as a tool o f social engineering. As civil war ended and society setded down, the shape o f the new social hierarchy became determ ined by differential access to various levels and types o f education. Prospective students would fill out special questionnaires designed to elicit vital inform ation such as so­ cial origin, party affiliation, work experience, and role during the civil war. Special commissions would then examine the questionnaires in order to assign priorities. They would look for inconsistencies and question ap­ plicants on them . Preference would be given to party and Komsomol (Com m unist Youth) members, to workers and their children, to poor

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m VICTIMS

peasants and their offspring, and to active participants on the Red side o f the civil war. From tim e to tim e purge commissions w ould re-examine a students credentials along w ith progress in his or her studies, and m ight decide on expulsion. T he “correct” com position o f one’s biography and avoidance thereafter o f “incorrect” behavior became key skills.56 This social framework encouraged a habit o f denunciations. As the di­ rector o f the Leningrad Institute o f Com m unications Engineers said, “Ev­ erybody was asked to forward w ritten denunciations o f those who they believed had no place in the workers’ faculty. Interrogation took place in group meetings where denunciations were read aloud and cross-examina­ tions took p lace.. . . D enunciations were seen neither as ignoble betrayals o f colleagues nor as personal affairs but as the duty o f every conscientious citizen.”57 H ere the needs o f the new order coincided w ith habits left over from “joint responsibility.” Politics no longer concerned the conflict o f ideas or the dash o f articulated social, ethnic, or economic interests; rather it was about advancement or nonadvancem ent in the environ­ m ent o f m onopoly patronage and in the context o f a socialist messianic worldview.

Popular Rejection of Communism By 1920 the popular rebellion that had brought the Com m unists to power had more than run its course. Peasants, workers, and soldiers had achieved their dream o f acquiring the land and productive resources, o f governing their own lives— but had then seen their dream snatched away again by the new rulers. T he contrast was so marked that some confused activists, recalling the short-lived liberties o f 1917, actually coined the slo­ gan “Long live the Bolsheviks! D eath to the Com munists!”— evidently not having registered that the party had changed its nam e.58 There was good reason for their confusion. T he grain they produced had been taken away by their form er benefactors at gunpoint, their horses had been requi­ sitioned and their sons conscripted for the Red Army, while their commu­ nal assemblies had become village soviets presided over by Com m unists. In the factories “workers’ control” no longer m eant anything: they had either been closed down or turned into fortresses o f “commissarocracy,” disciplined assembly lines o f m ilitary production. In the army soldiers’ as­ semblies had been brusquely abolished and replaced by “political depart­ ments” headed by political commissars w ith revolvers at their hips. “All

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power to the soviets,” the slogan for which the masses had fought, had be­ come a distant memory. Peasants reacted by obstructing grain collections. If requisition squads arrived, they would turn them away or even m urder them . Gradually peasants began using the weapons they had acquired during the years o f fighting: they w ould form "green” bands in the forests and marshes, from where they w ould venture out to attack grain stores or Soviet offices. W hole regions o f the m iddle and lower Volga, the Urals, and Siberia slipped out o f C om m unist control. In Tambov, perhaps the worst-affected province, peasants dem anded the restoration o f the C onstituent Assem­ bly, the restoration o f civil liberties and genuine soviet elections, an end to grain requisitioning, and a return to free trade.59 In late w inter 1920—1921 the unrest spread to the towns. The imm edi­ ate reason was a cut in the bread ration, but the striking workers o f Petrograd and Moscow soon issued a set o f demands remarkably similar to those o f the peasants. If Com m unists tried to attend strike meetings, they would be expelled as traitors to the socialist cause. In February 1921 a so­ cialist but anti-C om m unist Assembly o f Plenipotentiaries launched a gen­ eral strike in Petrograd, proclaiming: "We, the representatives o f factories and socialist parties in Petrograd, despite m uch that we disagree on, have united on the basis o f the following goals: overthrow o f the Bolshevik dic­ tatorship, free elections to the soviets, freedom o f speech, press and assem­ bly for all, and the release o f political prisoners.”60 T he strikers’ demands were taken up by the sailors o f the Baltic Fleet in their garrison at Kronstadt, the island naval base just outside Petrograd. A t a public m eeting one sailor reported visiting his family s farm and find­ ing that the cow had just been requisitioned: “W hen I and my brother re­ turn hom e from serving the Soviet Republic people will sneer at our wrecked farm and say ‘W hat did you serve for? W hat has the Soviet Re­ public given you?’”61 T he sailors issued their own manifesto, repeating the workers’ demands and adding their own for the abolition o f political de­ partm ents in the army and navy.62 From the Com m unists’ point o f view this was a shattering blow. T he Baltic sailors had been pioneers o f soviet democracy, prom inent am ong the storm troopers o f the O ctober revolu­ tion, so their rejection o f the Com m unist leaders now marked the deser­ tion o f the “truest o f the true.” Besides, the heavy artillery o f their batdeships was capable o f causing destruction in Russia’s largest industrial city. W hat the peasants, workers, and sailors were dem anding was a return

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to the original ideal for which they had fought in 1917, and w hich they had then called “soviet power”: ownership o f the land, the right to trade, to govern themselves, and freely to elect their own representatives to higher political authorities. C om m unist leadership had been rejected by its own grass roots, had lost the popular support on which it had de­ pended. Lenin was right to call this crisis the m ost critical the regime had yet faced, “undoubtedly more dangerous than D enikin, ludenich, and Kolchak com bined.”63 H e used the regimes new special security troops to crush the K ronstadt rebellion, but he also, for the first tim e, com promised w ith his enemies, by restoring certain elements o f private enterprise and free trade in w hat became known as the New Economic Policy. H e com­ bined concessions, however, w ith an actual tightening o f the political re­ gime: non-C om m unist parties were finally banned, and even factions w ithin the C om m unist Party were declared illegitimate. T hus the two rev­ olutions o f 1917 finally parted company, and the Com m unists prepared to continue their drive to save the world by means o f naked coercion.

The Orthodox Church T he ideas o f the ecclesiastical reformers, frustrated in 1905, resurfaced in 1917 w ith all the bitterness o f long delay. T he end o f the Romanov dy­ nasty decapitated the church and so made reform at last unavoidable. T he long-awaited local council (pomestnyi sobor), the first for more than two hundred years, convened in Moscow in August. It soon became apparent that the episcopal party had the upper hand over the parish-based reform­ ers. T he sessions were held in an increasingly tense political situation, w ith news com ing in o f the Bolsheviks’ seizure o f power in Petrograd. W ithin earshot o f the cannons boom ing around the Kremlin in Novem­ ber, the delegates voted to restore the patriarchate and the pomestnyi sobor as the church’s governing bodies. By a strange coincidence, then, Russia’s two forms o f messianism both reached their flowering at exactly the same tim e. T he m an the council elected as patriarch (the final stage was decided by lot) was Tikhon, who a few m onths earlier had become the first popu­ larly elected M etropolitan o f Moscow. H e was a conciliatory figure, one who supported the parish liberals as well the episcopal conservatives, and he had m uch experience o f leading the church in a hostile environm ent, having earlier served in Alaska, Poland, and Lithuania. H e had, however, no sympathy whatsoever for socialism.64

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T he Com m unists, as the rival messianic movement, had no intention o f allowing the church to rebuild its popular support. The government closed down the sobor and then broke the church’s link w ith the state in a drastic m anner quite unlike that recommended by either set o f ecclesiasti­ cal reformers. A decree o f January 1918 deprived the church o f its status as a legal person, which m eant that henceforth it could not own property and its central organization lost all adm inistrative powers. These handi­ caps m eant that parishes were throw n on to their own devices and re­ sources. Ironically, they had gained their independence, as reformers had long aspired, but as legally helpless, isolated, and under-resourced bodies, pale shadows o f w hat the "parish liberals” had envisaged. Even worse followed. D uring the civil war many churches were simply closed or destroyed, while their parish priests were arrested or killed as members o f a hostile social class. A nything like a foil congregational life became extremely difficult to conduct. Patriarch Tikhon reacted by anath­ ematizing "the confessed and secret enemies o f C hrist” who sow "anger, hatred and destructive accusations instead o f brotherly love.” H e called on believers to defend the church against attack and expressed confidence that "the enemies o f the C hurch o f C hrist will be shamed and scattered by the force o f the cross o f C hrist.”65 H e did not, however, specifically name the Soviet regime or call for armed resistance to it. Clergy who had escaped abroad were less cautious. They convened their own sobor, at Karlovci, in Yugoslavia, which called for the overthrow o f the atheist Com m unist regime and the restoration o f the monarchy. They thereby gave the Bolsheviks a good pretext for regarding the church inside Russia as “counter-revolutionary.” After the civil war, the Bolsheviks held back from a frontal assault on the church, fearing that it was likely to prove counterproductive in the face o f the strongly held beliefe o f m ost peasants and a good many work­ ers. T he famine o f 1921-1922 in the Volga basin did, however, give them the opportunity to proceed in a more subde manner, by splitting the church from w ithin. T he regime dem anded that the church surrender its numerous valuables, chalices, plates, vestments, and the like, held in churches up and down the country, to raise fonds for the famine relief ef­ fort. In reply Tikhon took the line that the church was prepared to sacri­ fice valuable objects for the cause o f famine relief, but not those conse­ crated for liturgical use; and he insisted that parish councils should decide for themselves how their fonds should be used.66 M any reformers w ithin

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the church denounced this attitude as narrow-m inded and unw orthy o f an organization professing C hristian ideals. A group o f Petrograd clergy recom mended a com plete surrender o f valuables to the government under the supervision o f parish representatives.67 Even the “renovationists,” those clergy who wished to cooperate w ith the regime, were themselves divided about w hat they wished to achieve and w hat kind o f church they envisaged for Soviet Russia. Some o f them took a broadly traditional view that the church should do its best to work w ith the government, as it had under the tsars, while introducing reforms to bring it more into line w ith m odern society and closer to socialist ide­ als. T he leader o f this tendency was Bishop A ntonin Granovskii, a one­ tim e oriental scholar who joined the priesthood relatively late in life. Some renovationists, however, actually w anted to reshape the church as an active advocate o f socialism and a positive ally o f the Com m unist re­ gime. Aleksandr Vvedenskii, the m ost prom inent am ong them , came from an intelligentsia family and trained at the St. Petersburg Spiritual Academy only after com pleting a degree in philology. H e was ordained in 1914, having resolved to devote his life to renewing the apostolic mission o f the priesthood by bringing about the reconciliation o f science and faith and by preaching “the Gospel in atheist language.” H e was a flamboyant figure who believed that priests needed to attract congregations by enact­ ing divine service as a dram atic spectacle. In his first service in 1914 he re­ cited the Cherubim ’s Prayer (normally not heard by the congregation) as if it were a declam atory verse by a currendy fashionable decadent poet; eventually the presiding bishop stepped in and asked him to desist.68 T he clergy, then, was internally split in facing the regimes pressure. As for the great m ajority o f believers, they resisted change o f any kind. Because the society around them was undergoing such upheavals, they wished to preserve the church as a rock o f stability and a custodian o f fixed cultural memory. W hen activists o f the G PU (as the Cheka was now called) turned up at churches to confiscate sacred vessels, they were often m et by large crowds o f parishioners determ ined to obstruct them . In one case, in Shuia, an industrial tow n not far from Moscow, a mêlée resulted in which four or five people were killed, including a Red Army soldier. Le­ nin regarded this clash as an ideal pretext to m ount an assault on the church, w ith the famine as political cover. H e w rote to the Politburo recom mending that “the greater the num ber o f representatives o f the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we manage to shoot on this

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basis, the better. It is precisely now that we should deliver a lesson to [believers] so that they dare not even think about resistance for several decades.”69 His comrades nevertheless decided that a proper trial should be held, but the result was w hat Lenin wanted: five o f the Shuia resisters were shot; even more seriously, so too was M etropolitan Veniamin o f Petrograd for resisting confiscation o f valuables in Petrograd parish churches. Tikhon was confined to house arrest and a court case was pre­ pared to charge him w ith counter-revolutionary activity. D uring the next few m onths the renovationists acted fast to profit by the sidelining o f Tikhon. W ith the authorities’ support, they set up a new Supreme C hurch A dm inistration and issued an appeal (whose wording was approved by the Politburo) calling on all clergy to join them . They were awarded a cathedral in Petrograd for Bishop A ntonin. Initially the renovationists were able to attract a good many parishes, mosdy on the initiative o f priests who either accepted their aims or sought the regimes favor. Some priests who resisted transfer to the renovationists were ar­ rested. T he plight o f Tikhon’s supporters at this tim e is illustrated by the situation that awaited a new bishop, Valerian, when he arrived to take over in Smolensk: “In our cathedral, as in other Tikhonite churches, there were no episcopal vestments, nor the sacred vessels needed for a bishop’s ordination.” T he renovationists in the Trinity M onastery had some o f these objects, though and the congregation managed to borrow them from well-disposed monks there. Such had been the turnover o f clerical personnel, however, that there was no deacon available who knew how to conduct the service o f greeting and solemnly installing a new bishop. So the service was improvised, but it was attended by a large and appreciative congregation.70 T he reaction o f m ost congregations to the renovationists was at best skeptical. In many parishes there was mass resistance to them from the outset. People suspected that changing the words o f services would de­ prive them o f their sacred character. T he reform that aroused the greatest opposition was the introduction o f the new calendar. It entailed the omis­ sion o f thirteen days, and ordinary believers objected that they would have to slight certain saints by skipping their festivals. Parish priests warned that persisting w ith the reformed calendar would drive a good many parishioners into the arms o f the O ld Believers.71 T he main reason for resistance to reform, however, was the wellfounded impression that the renovationists were operating in league w ith

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die secret police. T he spectacle o f clergymen who resisted the reformers being arrested, tried, and sometimes shot naturally created the worst pos­ sible impression. In Moscow, the G PU reported, believers thought the re­ formers were working w ith the Com m unists to destroy the church in or­ der to help the Jews. In Lipetsk believers refused to enter renovationist churches “for fear o f receiving the m ark o f the A nti-C hrist.” In Leningrad oblast “members o f the parish council in the village o f Begunitsa vigor­ ously agitated against the renovationist movement, saying ‘Renovationist priests are commissars in cassocks. They support Soviet power because it pays them . They betray the people. They don’t believe in God; they bum icons and rob churches. G od has sent Soviet power to punish us for our sins. If people will pray as they did in the past, then the Lord G od will de­ liver us from all this evil.’”72 T he reformers, then, had minimal support w ithin congregations. Worse still, they were split am ong themselves, along the old fault line between congregational and episcopal reformers. This rift reached a dram atic cli­ max at a church service in September 1922, when Bishop A ntonin sud­ denly turned away as Father V ladim ir Krasnitskii approached him for a blessing, exclaiming for all to hear: “C hrist is not am ong us!”79 T he regime did not wish the renovationists to achieve their aims, either. W hat C om m unists w anted was not a new church o f sincere believers who com bined C hristianity w ith socialism; rather they w anted to weaken and eventually destroy the existing church. Even Lunacharskii, a former “G od-builder” and o f all leading Bolsheviks the m ost inclined to a neoreligious worldview, w rote to Lenin in April 1921 remarking that the church was falling apart and that “we m ust help this process but by no means allow the church to regenerate and take some renewed form. . . . T he party’s stake is in com m unism and not in religion.”74 H e recom­ m ended that the party avoid all contact w ith the church and leave it to the Cheka to handle priests and believers. Renovationists, however sympa­ thetic to socialism, were to be kept at arm’s length, since the best way to destroy the church was by splitting it from w ithin. T hat was the purpose the renovationists fulfilled, especially in their early years; once they had perform ed that task, the regime no longer had any use for them . O nce the church was split, Tikhon no longer represented such a threat, and the authorities decided in June 1923 to free him and to allow him to operate under sufferance. As the price for his release he was required to is­ sue a statem ent renouncing his implacable hostility to the regime. He

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asked believers to join w ith him in “praying for help to the Workers’ and Peasants’ G overnm ent in its labors for the good o f the whole people,” and not to undertake “antigovernm ent activity” or to hope for the return o f the monarchy. H e condem ned the “harmful counter-revolutionary activ­ ity” o f the Karlovci émigré church and finally broke all ties w ith them . Be­ cause o f the church’s fraught situation, he had secretly appointed three deputies who could replace him in an emergency. W hen he died in April 1923, however, the authorities would not perm it a proper pomestnyi sobor to be held, and so there was no fully legitimate successor to him . All his three designated deputies were arrested, but one o f them had further ap­ pointed Sergii, M etropolitan o f Moscow, as his deputy beforehand. O n this basis Sergii took over as acting patriarch, and in 1927 he made a declaration o f loyalty that satisfied the regime, although some o f its wording was ambiguous. O n the one hand, he said: “We wish to be O r­ thodox believers, and at the same tim e to claim the Soviet Union as our civil m otherland, whose joys and successes are our joys and successes, and whose misfortunes are our misfortunes.” Here Sergii was specifically pledg­ ing loyalty not to the regime but rather to the “m otherland.” However, the name o f that m otherland now contained a political term , “Soviet,” rather than an ethnic or geographical one, “Russia.” In any case, in an­ other place Sergii added: “We need to show not only in words but also in deeds t h a t . . . the m ost loyal adherents o f O rthodoxy can be true citizens o f the Soviet U nion, loyal to the Soviet authorities (sovetskoi vla sti)” H e also instructed clergy to pray for the regime.75 O n the grounds that he had sworn allegiance to an atheist regime, a substantial num ber o f O rthodox believers refused thereafter to acknowl­ edge Sergii’s authority. They accused him o f declining to pray for bishops who had been deposed and arrested, o f setting up an un canonical tem po­ rary Holy Synod (supreme church adm inistration) w ith the support o f the G PU , and o f using it to transfer bishops from one diocese to another. M etropolitan Iosif, whom he had dismissed from the Leningrad diocese, refused to lay down his charge, even though he was confined to a monas­ tery in Rostov, and wrote to his followers: “The church’s authority is in a state o f slavery.” W hen a delegation o f IosiFs supporters came to Sergii, urging that the Soviet regime should not be obeyed because it was the cre­ ation o f the A nti-Christ, Sergii replied that the rule o f the A nti-Christ was prophesied to last for three years, whereas Soviet power had already lasted for ten: “Yes, we are persecuted, and we are retreating! But in return we

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have preserved the unity o f the church.” This, o f course, was not true: in Leningrad, sixty-one out o f one hundred parishes declared for Iosif.76 Sergii made his compromise in order to ensure that the church, how­ ever besieged, would survive as an organization. H e believed that “if an individual part o f the church body hüls into schism, that will be less de­ structive for the Russian O rthodox C hurch than its wholesale fragmenta­ tion as a result o f its illegal situation in the Soviet state.”77 H e hoped that the church w ould preserve its moral and liturgical autonom y and be able to continue its custom ary wide range o f social and educational activities. T he regime soon disillusioned him . A law on “religious associations” o f April 1929 forbade all ecclesiastical activities other than divine service. There were to be no religious processions, Sunday schools, prayer meet­ ings, Bible study groups, no hospitals, almshouses, or old peoples homes. Clergymen were forbidden to officiate outside their registered parish, so there could be no missionary activity. T he church was to be allowed no central organization, and even parishes were not recognized as juridical persons— w hich m eant, for example, that they could not so m uch as con­ clude a contract w ith a builder for repair w ork to their church building. Contradictorily, parishes were nevertheless treated like enterprises in the private economy, w hich paid very high taxes. To make it more difficult for ordinary people to attend church, the w orking week was calibrated in dekady, ten days, which m eant that only one week in seven w ould ones day off fall on a Sunday.78 T he long-term result o f the failed reformist challenge was fateful for the church. M ost O rthodox believers have to the present day retained the impression that serious reform or m odernization inside the church is synonymous “w ith ‘renovationism ,’ that is, w ith schism, treachery, and betrayal.”79 T he church was robbed o f its m iddle ground. As parishes were closed down and whole cities left w ith m inim al religious provision or none at all, m ost people retreated into religious inactivity, though they m ight retain some kind o f deistic belief: the unpublished 1937 census ac­ tually found that 57 percent o f the population was still prepared to ad­ m it to belief in G od, despite the dangers o f making such a declaration.80 T he m inority who remained staunch practicing believers retreated into a highly conservative and literalist version o f their faith, impervious to all innovations. Since they were not allowed to do more than conduct weekly divine service, that become the entire public content o f religion, uncon­ nected w ith social, charitable, or educational activity. N or was the church

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able to absorb young people, in the newly literate generations coming out o f schools all over the Soviet Union. Congregations consisted increasingly o f the old and uneducated. The link between the church and normal so­ cial activity had been completely broken, and thereby a cardinal element o f Russian national consciousness fatally weakened.

Creating a New Memory From the outset the Bolsheviks were conscious o f the im portance not only o f destroying tradition but also o f creating their own social memory and fixing it by means o f symbolic representations and celebrations that would appeal to ordinary people, such as public holidays, rituals, parades, and drama. This was not easy for them to accomplish in practice, though. For one thing, the Bolsheviks’ advent to power was so recent that there had been no tim e for popular memory to accumulate. The actual process o f revolution and civil war had been chaotic, and it was difficult to sum it up in presentations that w ould be understandable and appealing. N or had the supposedly sovereign workers and peasants yet been able to evolve their own stable forms o f culture. A very serious attem pt had been made, though, through the so-called Proletkults, working-class cul­ tural associations that had been launched even before the O ctober revolu­ tion. T heir theorist was Aleksandr Bogdanov, who aimed to create a wholly new international proletarian culture, different in nature from the aristocratic and bourgeois cultures o f the past, and reflecting the collec­ tive, machine-inspired spirit o f the workers.81 In its early stages Proletkult proved tremendously popular am ong the workers, probably because it took their hum an dignity more seriously than any movement in tsarist Russia had done. They Hocked to join dram a groups, creative w riting classes, choral societies, dance troupes, and painting workshops. They put on plays, designed posters, staged folk dance and folk song evenings; they sent perform ing groups to entertain Red Army soldiers at the front. There was litde consistency about their styles: some groups were happy to learn from the folk culture or high cul­ ture o f the past, while others considered such borrowing a betrayal o f the revolutionary spirit, and dem anded new forms o f art. “In the name o f our tom orrow we will burn the Raphaels, destroy the museums and trample on the Rowers o f art,” wrote the Proletkult poet Vladimir Kirillov.82 W hat the more innovative Proletkult members had in m ind was an art

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inform ed by a specifically proletarian view o f the world, tough, muscular, assertively unrefined, collectivist, machinized, confident o f creating a new world, international but also proudly Russian. Here is an example from a Proletkult poet in Saratov: Here they are, those calloused hands! These huge rakes, T hat pierce the depths o f the earth ' W ith fingers o f red steel! Here they are, those calloused hands! They will build a hom e For freedom, art and science W ith no room for pain or suffering.83 In his poem “Russia” V ladim ir Kirillov com bined these themes w ith a proud statem ent o f universal mission: You, the renovated Russia, Take up the universal struggle As the sun-faced God-M essiah W ith proudly raised head . . . And the oppressed w orld looks At the refulgent East And w ith bright faith weaves A garland for you, Russia.84 In early 1918 the Bolsheviks announced a com petition to design m on­ um ents that would replace the tsars and generals in the public squares and parks. T he com pleted artefacts reflected an international, not a national, history— that o f popular revolution: they included Brutus, Robert Owen, Robespierre, Marx, and Engels. In practice they were hurriedly erected and found little response am ong the public; some o f them were vandal­ ized or had graffiti scrawled on them , and m ost were subsequendy dism anded. M ore success was enjoyed by the new public holidays, decreed, in the same spirit, to replace those o f the church: January 1, January 22 (Bloody Sunday), M arch 12 (the overthrow o f the autocracy), M arch 18 (the Paris Com m une), M ay 1 (International Workers’ Day), and Novem-

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ber 7 (Bolshevik revolution). By contrast, some Saturdays— normally a rest day—were designated subbotniki, days o f voluntary, unpaid labor, m eant to symbolize the fact that under a workers’ state manual labor was a form o f creative freedom. T he subbotnik held on May Day 1920, for ex­ ample, was intended to clean up Petrograd from the rubble o f civil war and to remove the last traces o f the old regime.85 T he Bolsheviks also staged a few mass spectacles to dramatize the provi­ dential role they were claiming for themselves in world history. O n May Day 1920 the Red Army m ounted the Mystery o f Liberated Labor on the square before the stock exchange building in Petrograd. This was a mas­ sive, six-hour long presentation o f the history o f the international labor movement, from the Spartacus slave revolt in ancient Rome to the O cto­ ber Revolution. Similarly, the opening o f the 1920 Com intern congress used w hat was becoming the symbolic center o f the regime, Moscow’s Kremlin, as a stage to depict the progress from the Paris Com m une o f 1871 to the future “world com m une.” T he culm ination had the following scenario: “A cannon volley heralds the breaking o f the blockage o f Soviet Russia and the victory o f the world proletariat. The Red Army returns and is reviewed by the leaders o f the Revolution in a ceremonial march. Kings’ crowns are strewn at their feet. . . . In the sky flare greetings to the Congress in various languages: ‘Long live the T hird International!’, ‘W orkers o f the W orld, Unite!’ A general trium phal celebration to the an­ them o f the w orld Com m une, the Internationale. ”86 There were thirty thousand spectators present, who joined in the sing­ ing at this point, but all the same, it cannot be said that such spectacles em bodied popular creativity. They were carefully choreographed by lead­ ing theater directors, and they required the discipline o f the Red Army to help the Proletkultists w ith their performances.87 After 1921 public shows became more modest, then gradually evolved into the for more disci­ plined, m inutely organized parades o f the Stalin period. By this tim e the party itself was becoming wary both o f mass workingclass spontaneity and o f “proletarian culture.” Lenin was decidedly not am ong those who wished to burn Raphaels; on the contrary, he believed that proletarian painters should study Raphael and other great painters o f the past before trying out their own efforts. “For a start, we should be sat­ isfied w ith real bourgeois culture,” he wrote. He was as good as his word: the very day after the revolution he appointed commissars to oversee the protection o f museums, art galleries, and fine public buildings from loot-

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ing and destruction. Lsvestiia inform ed the people that they had inherited “enorm ous cultural riches, buildings o f rare beauty, museums hill o f rare and marvellous objects, libraries containing great intellectual treasures, things that enlighten and inspire.”88 H e also regularly assisted Maksim G orkii in his self-appointed task o f finding rations to keep good writers alive, no m atter w hat their ideological orientation.89 Lenin regarded the task o f Proletkult as being largely educational rather than creative. For that reason, and in order to gain more control over it, he w anted to see it subordinated to Narkom pros (the Peoples Com m issariat o f Education). By 1922 he had his way, not least because the large-scale rundow n o f in­ dustry during the civil war had drastically cut Proletkults membership and finances.90 Therew ith the crude but vibrant creativity o f working-class culture faded. T he new regime s symbols looked back as well as forward: from the past they borrowed traditional elements to w hich people already felt some em otional attachm ent. T he Soviet flag took the red banner that had for decades been the rallying point o f European socialists and workers and placed on it the star o f the Red Army and a ham m er and sickle to denote the revolutionary alliance o f workers and peasants. T he socialist song, the “Internationale,” became the new state anthem . An emblem was devised that com bined the ham m er and sickle w ith the slogan “Proletarians o f All Countries, Unite!,” a rising sun to point to the future, a wheatsheaf to de­ note abundance, and a classical scroll for less obvious purposes, probably to give elegance and unity to the com position.91 T he ritual and em otional life o f the C om m unist regime reached an early apogee in the ceremony devised to bury its founder. The regime had sponsored experiments in crem ation, but Lenin’s body was not inciner­ ated. O n the contrary, it was em balm ed and exposed to public view in a m anner that horrified O rthodox believers no less than crem ation would have done. Anatolii Lunacharskii and Leonid Krasin, who played a major role in setting up the arrangem ents, had been so-called God-Builders be­ fore 1917. They believed socialism could not survive on a diet o f scientific prediction and intellectual reasoning, but required its own ritual and sa­ cral elements to bind ordinary people to the socialist vision and the social­ ist community. Lunacharskii and Krasin had both been attracted to the prerevolutionary thinker Nikolai Fedorov, who had preached that science would one day make possible the resurrection o f all the dead. They may have been hoping to preserve Lenin for posterity, for possible resurrection.

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At another funeral in 1921, Krasin said: “I am certain the tim e will come when science will become all-powerful, that it will be able to recreate a diseased organism. . . . T he liberation o f m ankind, using all the m ight o f science and technology, the strength and capacity o f which we cannot imagine, will be able to resurrect great historical figures.”92 Lenin’s lying in state and his funeral procession were more or less tradi­ tional, w ith unspecific religious overtones, like those accorded to socialist heroes before 1917. T he body was then laid to rest in a tem porary sar­ cophagus, soon replaced by a dignified assemblage o f cubes in red por­ phyry as a perm anent mausoleum. This building became the focus o f a popular cult, encouraged by the Com m unist leaders and taken up w ith enthusiasm by the population. In fact, Lenin’s mausoleum established it­ self as the num ber one sacred space in the Soviet Union, perm anently watched over by a guard o f honor, an object o f pilgrimage for the masses and a venue for the leaders to watch mass parades on festive occasions. O nce dead, Lenin the founder could be safely identified w ith the socialist dream, unbesmirched by the imperfections o f its subsequent realization. W hen later Com m unist leaders were in difficulties, they could always evoke the Lenin heritage.93 Right from the beginning, then, the Com m unist regime, though still bent on uprooting Russia’s past, had begun to construct its own forms o f memory and to celebrate them in rituals designed to have as much public appeal as possible. For the m om ent, however, their success was lim ited and uncertain. D uring 1917—1921 Russia’s social structures and social memory had been destroyed on an unprecedented scale; an already am­ biguous and fragmented national consciousness had been further attenu­ ated. The attem pt to create a new social order based on the Com m unist hierarchy and a new social m yth based on the Com m unist worldview had barely had tim e to take shape.

3 SOVIET NATIONALITY POLICY and the Russians

In the early 1920s a Chechen teenager, A bdurakhm an Avtorkhanov, be­ gan to collect "infidel” books: Tolstoi, G orkii, and the like. For this he was w hipped by his pious M uslim father and expelled from the mekhteb (reli­ gious elementary school) in his village. H e decided to leave hom e to find a secular school at which to study. Together w ith his cousin M umad, who was carrying a revolver for protection, he set out over the m ountains to the big city, Groznyï. O n arrival they were both arrested, the revolver was confiscated, and they were interrogated as suspected members o f a terror­ ist gang. W hen they denied the charge, the inspector retorted to M umad, “Com e on! W hat kind o f Chechen are you, if you’re not a thief, a bandit, and a murderer?” M um ad leaped at the inspector and punched his nose before being dragged away by guards. T he next m orning, to their great surprise, both were released. A check in their village had revealed their identity, and it was explained to them , “You are honest people, and the of­ ficial who insulted the Chechen people has been punished.”1 T he two cousins had unknowingly become pawns in the complex in­ teraction between ethnic groups and the new Soviet state. There were ac­ tually two governments in Groznyï at the time: a Russian municipal ad­ m inistration and a Chechen Soviet Executive Com m ittee. The first had arrested them , the second released them .2 T he contretemps was just a tiny wrinkle in the patchwork ethnic mêlée o f the N orth Caucasus region. The Bolshevik leaders proclaimed that they were establishing an inter­ national republic. The A B C o f Communism declared: “It is essential that

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the working-class should overcome all national prejudices and national enmities” in order to create a "unified world socialist republic.”3 But this goal was extraordinarily difficult to accomplish in a territory containing so m any interm ingled nationalities whose m utual relations had been em bit­ tered by the horrors o f revolution and civil war. Com m unists regarded nationalism as a kind o f pubertal disorder o f the hum an race, a necessary phase, but som ething to be got through as swiftly as possible. Lenin advocated national em ancipation for oppressed peoples but always insisted that the international solidarity o f the proletariat had absolute priority. Com m unist leaders themselves disavowed any national identity. Lenin wrote on his passport application "no nationality,” and Trotskii, when asked if he was Jewish or Russian, replied: "Neither: I am a Social D em ocrat and an internationalist.”4 A t the tim e the Bolsheviks came to power they were confident that an international workers’ state w ould soon be created. Fired by the Russian example, they believed, workers in other European countries would has­ ten to overthrow their imperialist governments and join their Russian comrades. In that way the national problem would quickly fade from the agenda. As tim e passed, the Soviet leaders came to realize that matters were not so simple, that the national "disease” could be protracted, messy, and dangerous. They also perceived, however, that it offered opportunities if exploited properly. T he Bolshevik leaders believed the tsarist regime had mishandled the nationality problem by trying to Russify the non-Rus­ sians— a mistake symptomatic o f the “prison-house o f the peoples,” and one they w ould not repeat. W riting to Sergo Ordzhonikidze, chairman o f the party’s Caucasian bureau, in April 1920, Lenin urged him to display “caution and maximum goodwill towards the Muslims, especially on ad­ vancing into Dagestan. D o everything to dem onstrate, and in the most em phatic manner, our sympathy for the Muslims, their autonomy, inde­ pendence, etc.”5 In his anxiety not to replicate the high-handedness o f the tsars, Lenin repeatedly railed against the "great power chauvinism” o f the Russians and reiterated his determ ination to cut Russians down to size as one national­ ity among others. In the process, however, he perpetuated the error com­ m on among Russian intellectuals o f assuming that the Russian people could automatically be identified w ith the Russian imperial state, that there was no difference between the Russian nation and the Russian Em­ pire. Lunacharskii, cultural commissar for most o f the 1920s, took the

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same approach: uWe m ust educate people . . . so that they regard every­ one, no m atter w hat nationality they belong to, as their brothers, so that they love equally every inch o f our com m on planet, and so that, if they have a prejudice in favor o f Russian people, the Russian language, or the Russian countryside, they should recognize that that feeling is an irratio­ nal prejudice.”6 Lunacharskiis task was to use educational and cultural policy to create a de-ethnicized international republic, first o f all in the Soviet U nion, later throughout the world. If one considers the ethnic realities the Com m unists inherited, then it is obvious that to create even the makings o f an international republic re­ quired a complex and well-form ulated policy. If m atters were left to them ­ selves, the prospect was that in the course o f m odernization some o f the non-Russians would gradually assimilate to the Russian language and culture, while others would reject Russia altogether and assert their own separate national identity. In neither case w ould internationalism be ad­ vanced. So a clear-cut policy o f “affirmative action” was required to pro­ m ote the national identity o f non-Russians— a policy that in practice was bound to entail some discrim ination against Russians. Bukharin accepted the logic o f this situation, asserting that Russians w ould thus be given the opportunity “to purchase for themselves the genuine trust o f the previ­ ously oppressed peoples.”7 Stalin, the Commissar for N ationalities, agreed w ith this policy in prin­ ciple. H e was uneasy, however, about making Russia just one national re­ public alongside others. H e had good reason. “Russia” had never existed as a discrete territory inside the Russian Empire. How should it be con­ structed now? O n this issue Stalin had serious differences w ith Lenin. As new Soviet republics took shape during the civil war, Stalin envisaged the Soviet state simply absorbing all o f them to form a Russian Soviet Repub­ lic, the direct territorial successor to the old Russian Empire. Lenin, how­ ever, felt that such a “Soviet Russia” would merely revive the old imperial arrogance: at one point in discussions on the issue he burst out impatiendy: “I declare war to the death on Great Russian chauvinism .”8 H e recommended that, formally at least, Russia should not be an overarching state, but should enter a federal Soviet state on equal terms w ith the nonRussian republics. T hat overarching federal state would have no ethnic or geographic designation: it would simply be called the Union o f Soviet So­ cialist Republics.9 As we know, that is w hat actually happened. This soludon did not address the fact that, whatever borders one as-

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signed to the Russian republic w ithin the USSR, it was bound to leave out a lot o f Russians, and also to contain a large num ber o f non-Russians, in­ cluding many Muslims. O ne o f the principal Muslim Com m unists, M irSaid Sultan Galiev, proposed forestalling this problem by going even fur­ ther than Lenin. H e suggested that not only the larger non-Russian na­ tionalities but also the smaller ethnic form ations should no longer be sub­ ject to Russia, but should become full members o f the USSR, on a par w ith Russia, Ukraine, and so on. Stalins reply to Sultan Galiev high­ lighted sharply the dilemmas o f situating Russia inside the new Soviet state structure. “Such a proposal,” he argued, “means dissolving our feder­ ation into pieces and creating a Russian TsIK [Soviet Central Executive Com m ittee]— not a rossiiskii, but a russkii TsIK.. . . Comrades, do we re­ ally need this?”10 Stalin was indicating the danger o f giving institutional em bodim ent to Russian ethnic sentim ent inside the U SSR “Russia” was acceptable as a supranational entity, as a purified ghost o f the old empire, and as a disembodied precursor o f the coming proletarian international state— but not as an actual ethnos or nation-state. A real Russian ethnicterritorial state in the m iddle o f the Soviet U nion would be so large and powerful that it w ould either dom inate the Union or render it unwork­ able. In the end the constitution adopted in December 1922 was Leninist in form: that is to say, it was formally federal, and the new state, the U nion o f Soviet Socialist Republics, was not nam ed after Russia. All the same, the content o f the constitution was unmistakably Stalinist. The Rus­ sian republic, the RSFSR (the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic), contained 90 percent o f the land area and 72 percent o f the population. Some tw o-thirds o f Com m unist Party members were Russian.11 M ore­ over, despite the federal costume in which the constitution was dressed, the party, the armed forces, and the economic adm inistration were all tighdy centralized. Given such a structure, very determ ined counteraction was needed to prevent the RSFSR and the Russians dom inating the U nion. Initially such counteraction was forthcoming: to weaken the potential dom ination o f Russians the Soviet leaders adopted a conscious policy o f “indigenization,” korenizatsiia— essentially affirmative action in favor o f non-Russians. The 10th Party Congress in M arch 1921 proclaimed that “the party’s task is to help the labouring masses o f the non—G reat Russian peoples to catch up w ith central Russia, which has forged ahead,” by

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building their own state institutions, including courts and adm inistrative and economic offices, staffed by their own people in the native languages, and uto develop their press, schools, theatres, recreation clubs and educa­ tional institutions generally, functioning in the native languages.” Likbez, or the liquidation o f illiteracy, was also to be carried out in the native lan­ guages.12 Now, in many regions o f the Soviet U nion the simplest policy would have been to send Russians in to develop the adm inistration and prom ote economic development: they were usually better trained and more famil­ iar w ith the workings o f a m odern economy than were non-Russians. In­ stead, under korenizatsiia the party deliberately decided to train local peo­ ple to take over these jobs, providing them w ith education and experience that w ould equip them to run their own republics, which as a result effec­ tively became tem porary local nation-states, though under tight supervi­ sion from Moscow. Ethnographers were sent out into the regions to study local languages, customs, religions, economic life, tribal allegiances, and other factors affecting people s ethnic identity. T he results were used in a program o f w hat m ight be called “ethnic engineering,” assembling new nations out o f raw ethnic m aterial and giving them their own republican institutions w ith boundaries that as far as possible reflected the ethnic com position o f the population.13 T he Peoples Com missariat o f N ationalities (Narkomnats) was set up as a means o f directing these nation-building programs from the center, and also as a forum in w hich the representatives o f the various nationalities could articulate their difficulties and try to have them acknowledged, dis­ cussed, and overcome. Significantly, the only people not represented on Narkom nats were the Russians.14 In practice it was not possible to delineate ethnic territories tidily. For one thing, it was not clear w hat indicators o f national identity one should adopt. Language, religion, dress, diet, everyday customs, economic activ­ ity, and self-identification were all possible markers. Moreover, peoples national identity was evolving. T he more backward groups were tending to assimilate to the more advanced, and in particular to adopt the Rus­ sian language. At this stage, however, ethnographers tended to interpret “Russification” as unnatural or forced, a hangover from the old regime, and to choose for their respondents an alternative nationality.15 T he main obstacle, though, was the complex interm ingling o f ethnic groups over m uch o f Russia’s old imperial territory. N ot only in large cities but also in

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small towns and sometimes even in villages people o f different ethnic ori­ gins lived side by side. W ithout massive population movements they could not just be assigned to a nation w ith unam biguous borders. T he Com m unist leaders had studied the history o f the national question in the old Habsburg Monarchy, where both Lenin and Stalin had lived for a tim e before 1914, and which had suffered from the same problem. They wanted to avoid the mistakes that had led to the M onarchy’s disintegra­ tion. All the same, they did not take the advice o f the Austrian M arxist thinkers who proposed w hat was probably the only workable solution for dealing w ith ethnic interm ingling: personal cultural autonom y.16 Such a solution would have im plied a concept o f individual hum an rights that Bolsheviks always dismissed as a bourgeois sham. Since they rejected personal cultural autonomy, the Bolsheviks had a choice o f two ways to tackle ethnic problems, both collective. Either they had to encourage m inority ethnic groups to assimilate to the m ajority in their republic, or they had to be prepared to create very tiny ethnic-ad­ ministrative territories. They chose the latter course. The result was a complex calibrated hierarchy o f union republics, autonom ous republics, autonom ous regions, and so on, many o f which survived to the end o f the Soviet U nion.17 W ithin the Russian republic, the Bolsheviks favored a non-Russian nationality wherever possible. As a result, to take one exam­ ple, the M ordovian A utonom ous Soviet Socialist Republic, on the terri­ tory o f the RSFSR, was called after the M ordovians, even though in 1926 Russians constituted 60 percent o f the population there; similarly, Rus­ sians formed more than half the population in the Karelian and Buriat Autonomous Republics.18 Initially “national soviets” were created down to the very lowest levels, including individual villages, each w ith its own schools, law courts, and adm inistrative offices, as a way o f ensuring that minorities were not assim­ ilated or forcibly incorporated into larger ethnic communities. Narkomnats was to adjudicate whenever conflicts arose. These national adminis­ trative units were probably the smallest ever created anywhere in the world. However small they were, though, there always remained a m inor­ ity w ithin a minority, feeling aggrieved that its national rights were not properly protected. So the system never elim inated ethnic friction alto­ gether.19 The first republic to establish a hilly calibrated system o f national sovi­ ets was Ukraine, since it contained an unusual num ber o f advanced and

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active ethnic groups who were not content simply to be ruled by Russians or Ukrainians: Poles, Germans, Jews, Armenians, Greeks, and Bulgarians. W herever they had local m inorities, even at the village level, these groups were awarded their own soviets, com m itted to full im plem entation o f korenizatsiia, including prom otion o f the national language and culture and form ation o f national cadres. In this way, as one example, Jewish shteds became full-fledged national soviets.20 O nly one nationality was left w ithout any nadonal soviets: the Russians. H ad they been allowed them , whole cides like Kharkov and D onetsk w ould have become Russian adm inistrative enclaves. T he Russians were too powerful and numerous for their own good, and korenizatsiia therefore intentionally discrim inated against them . Inside the RSFSR, national soviets for non-Russians were numerous. In addition to the autonom ous republics such as those m endoned above, by 1932 290 nadonal districts (raiony) had been formed, along w ith some 7,000 national village soviets and some 10,000 national collecdve farms. A bout half o f these were U krainian. H igher educadonal institutions in the RSFSR held places specially reserved for candidates from the m inorities.21 In this way an imbalance was created, as a result o f which Russians w ith good reason felt themselves disadvantaged. In Ukraine, for example, they were required to subscribe to Ukrainian-language newspapers and to send their children to Ukrainian-language schools, to be taught in w hat many o f them considered a farmyard dialect. At an April 1926 session o f the Central Executive Com m ittee o f the Soviets, Iurii Larin spoke o f these grievances, raising “that part o f the nationalities question which one m ust name the Russian question in Ukraine, for regrettably such a question does exist.” According to the stenogram, his remarks provoked prolonged applause; evidently, he had tabled an issue about which delegates had strong unspoken feelings. His opponents reiterated the accepted view that “it is impossible to behave towards the Russians in Ukraine as a national m inority.”22 T he following year Avel Enukidze repeated and expanded this criticism o f the Ukrainians, charging that their practices led to the creation o f “iso­ lated little islands.” Instead, he suggested, “our task is, in an ascending line, to lead national m inorities towards the basic culture o f their republic. T hat is for union republics. In relation to the USSR as a whole our task is different. Russian culture and Russian language is the main axis around which we should raise up all nationalities living in the USSR.”23 His re-

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marks were greeted w ith indignation, even though his opponents ac­ knowledged that he was voicing the sentim ents o f many Com munists. He was asked to retract them but declined to do so. In effect, he had formu­ lated an alternative nationality policy, that o f proceeding by gradual as­ sim ilation to turn the Soviet Union into a Russian nation-state. T hat had been the policy o f M ikhail Katkov and Konstantin Pobedonostsev under the tsars, but for Com m unists it was anathema. O ne o f the first examples o f a policy that could be construed as antiRussian was the campaign o f terror conducted in 1919 against the D on Cossacks, who were thoroughly Russian both in descent and in oudook. Admittedly, the campaign was originally conceived as pan o f the class struggle. Among the staunchest supponers o f the old regime, many— but certainly not all— D on Cossacks fought for the W hites during the civil war. As the Red Army occupied their territory in the early m onths o f 1919, the Com m unist Party ordered a “merciless struggle w ith the entire Cossack elite by means o f their total exterm ination,” com bined w ith confiscation o f their grain and the reallocation o f their lands to “outlanders,” non-Cossack peasants and workers living in the region. “No compromises, no half-measures are permissible,” the Orgburo circular o f January 24, 1919, insisted. O n the strength o f these instructions, revolu­ tionary tribunals tried and passed death sentences against arrested Cos­ sacks: altogether, perhaps ten to twelve thousand were victims o f this pol­ icy. Local Com m unists also wanted to abolish the D on Cossack Region as an adm inistrative unit. Soon, however, a Cossack anti-Red rebellion gave them pause: w ith the front line still not far away, they could not afford to alienate all Cossacks by treating them indiscriminately as a single ethnic unit. As one local Com m unist proposed, the terror was reoriented and “conducted w ithin the parameters o f class struggle,” and not as “an amor­ phous zoological struggle.” “De-Cossackization” became more discrimi­ nating, using socioeconomic criteria to distinguish among Cossack house­ holds, welcoming some o f them as allies rather than rejecting them all as enemies. “Be attentive, comrades, to the D on middle Cossack,” as one in­ struction put it.24 It was not only in Ukraine and on the Don that Russians felt resent­ m ent at their treatm ent. Official policy came out against the many Rus­ sian and U krainian peasants, as well as Cossacks, who had settled in the N orth Caucasus region and in Turkestan in the decades before 1917. In the N orth Caucasus the newly formed M ountain Peoples’ Autonomous

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Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR) launched its career in 1921 w ith the fol­ lowing command: “For the satisfaction o f the desperate needs o f landless M ountain Peoples, begin imm ediately the planned expulsion o f Cossack settlem ents.” Some fifteen thousand Cossacks were evicted and deported in the course o f this action.25 Similarly in Turkestan between 1920 and 1922, the new Soviet author­ ities carried out a land reform in favor o f the indigenous peoples, in the course o f w hich m any recent Slavic setders were expropriated and driven out, apparendy on ethnic grounds, w hether or not they were classified as “kulaks.” In places the policy was enforced w ith extreme harshness: peas­ ant households w ould be given forty-eight hours to collect their movable belongings and evacuate their homes and fields w ithout any arrangem ent for them to resetde elsewhere. In the village o f Vysokoe near Chim kent, for example, a C entral C om m ittee emissary later reported, “O n April 16, 1921, policemen appeared and w ith the help o f the arm y loaded the fami­ lies onto trucks and transported them to the stadon o f Abail on the Semireche railway, where they sat in the open for three whole days in the pouring rain. M ost o f the deportees were old m en, women, and children, including some small babies.” Eventually they were offered new land in the G olodnaia Step, but they declined it on the grounds that they were too old to found a new setdem ent there. T he victims o f this operadon protested: “W hen 25 m illion people are starving in Russia, one should en­ sure that everyone sows as m uch grain as possible, but we are being de­ prived o f a harvest w hich we have already sown. . . . O ur 24 families are being condem ned to starvadon. A nd not only us, but the families o f our children, who are serving in the Red Army. Why? W hat have we done, simple peasants who eternally till the soil?”26 A. A. Ioffe, emissary o f the RSFSR government, later reported visidng the region and seeing “aban­ doned Russian huts and abandoned vegetable plots, while alongside them Kirgiz artels lived in their tents and neglected all this because they did not know how to manage a Russian stove or culdvate a Russian m arket gar­ den.” In 1921 the Russian population o f Turkestan fell firom 2.7 to 2.2 million, and Russian arable landholdings from 3.3 m illion to 1.6 million desiatinas.27 In Uzbekistan the authorities im plem ented korenizatsiia by favoring Uzbeks in the labor market, in some cases laying off Slavs in order to em­ ploy them . A t the Tashkent labor exchange in April 1927 unemployed Russians complained: “W hat are the Russians supposed to do, or do they

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not w ant to eat? Russians fought and won freedom for you devils, and now you say Uzbeks are the masters in Uzbekistan. There will come a tim e and we’ll show you. We’ll beat the hell out o f you!” The Uzbeks re­ sponded in kind: “Just wait, it won’t be long before we ask all you Europe­ ans to go back to your hom eland [rodina] and find work there.” O n a num ber o f occasions serious brawls broke out as a result o f such ex­ changes.28 T he construction o f the Turksib railway from Novosibirsk to Tashkent offered a stern test o f korenizatsiia, for it was deliberately used by the Kazakh authorities, across whose territory it ran, to launch the creation o f a Kazakh proletariat. In pursuit o f this policy, Kazakh candidates for la­ boring jobs w ould often be given preference, even though N arkom put, the managers o f the railway, preferred Russians, who were usually more skilled and easier to integrate into the workforce. The results were mixed. Q uite a few Kazakhs did make it into long-term employment, break­ ing w ith their traditional nom adic background and overcoming manage­ m ent’s prejudice against them . Sometimes their Russian colleagues would help them to adjust, though in the process they had to learn Russian as the language o f their new life. O ther times, however, the less skilled and unemployed Russians gave vent to bitter resentm ent by attacking Kazakh laborers. At Sergiupol in December 1928 a crowd o f unemployed Europe­ ans w ent on a rampage at the labor exchange and beat up every Kazakh job-seeker they could lay their hands on, then marched through the town and sacked the O G PU and party buildings. Some fifty Kazakhs were wounded in the brawls.29 Russians were slighted not only ethnically but also institutionally. T heir republic, the RSFSR, had an insecure and hum ble status; it was the puny giant am ong the Soviet republics. It was certainly not “Russia” in the sense o f being a potential nation-state. As we have seen, it was a patchwork o f autonom ous republics, regions, and so on. Besides, the leaders kept lop­ ping chunks o f territory off it. In 1924 the Uzbek and Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republics were created from inside the RSFSR (the Uzbek re­ public later divided to become the Uzbek and Tadjik republics). Vitebsk, Gomel, and (temporarily) Smolensk oblasti were transferred to the Belo­ russian republic. In 1936 a huge stretch o f Central Asian steppe and desert— southern Siberia or northern Central Asia, according to taste— was reconstituted as the Kazakh SSR. A Karelo-Finnish SSR was carved out during the W inter W ar in 1940 but was returned to the RSFSR as an

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autonom ous republic in 1956. After the war the RSFSR gained the ex­ clave o f Kaliningrad, beyond Belorussia on the Baltic coast, but lost the Crim ea to the U krainian SSR in 1954 as a good-will gesture during the celebration o f the 300th anniversary o f the “reunion” o f Ukraine and Rus­ sia. W hat these far-reaching but arbitrary transfers indicate is that the RSFSR was never seen as a hom eland for the Russian people, but rather as a residual holding territory, to be adjusted and rearranged for adm inistra­ tive convenience.30 RSFSR ministries, though they had jurisdiction over the lions share o f natural resources, were mostly subordinate to USSR ministries and dom i­ nated by them . Even more im portant, the RSFSR had no Com m unist Party o f its own w ith a Central Com m ittee. Regional leaders in the RSFSR felt they had no one to defend their interests in the highest eche­ lons o f the party when it came to com petition w ith other union repub­ lics, especially over econom ic policy. In 1926 M ikhail Kalinin was put in charge o f a special commission to examine “the construction o f the RSFSR, national republics and oblast organs w ithin the RSFSR.” T he commission worked for nine m onths and produced a report th at was sent to the Politburo, but no action was taken on it. W ith the first five-year plan approaching, the authorities planned to augm ent the power o f the all-U nion industrial ministries, not reduce it.31 In a sense, then, the Russians were the orphans o f the Soviet U nion. They had no C om m unist Party, no capital city, no Academy o f Sciences, no national encyclopedia, no radio or television networks separate from those o f the Soviet U nion as a whole. They had no means to defend their own interests when they clashed w ith those o f the other nationalities. Yet at the same tim e those deprivations marked out Russians’ supranational status as the custodians o f the USSR as a whole, their perm anent role as responsible “elder brother,” whatever they m ight think o f the other “prod­ igal sons.” Yuri Slezkine has likened the Soviet U nion to a com munal apartm ent in which each nationality had its own room except the Rus­ sians, who lived in the hallway, the corridor, the bathroom , and the kitchen; they ran the place and got in everyone’s way, but they had no se­ cure space o f their own.32

Residual Russian National Feeling Despite these formidable handicaps and for all the Bolsheviks’ interna­ tionalism, from the outset countervailing factors made it inevitable that

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some day the Soviet Union would take on a Russian coloring. The fact was, after all, that the international revolution had broken out in Russia, not in any other country. As Lenin him self explained to the T hird AllRussian Congress o f Soviets in January 1918, “Things have turned out differently from w hat M arx and Engels expected and we, the Russian work­ ing and exploited classes, have been given the honor o f being the van­ guard o f the international socialist revolution. We can now see clearly that the revolution will develop much further. T he Russian began it— the Ger­ man, the Frenchman, and the Englishman will complete it, and socialism will trium ph.”33 Lenin, then, still viewed the Russian contribution to revolution as only preliminary. However, m ilitary defeat at the hands o f the Germans forced the Central Com m ittee by February-M arch 1918 to take a fateful deci­ sion which cem ented the relationship between socialist revolution and Russia. The young Soviet state had two alternatives: it could let the Ger­ mans invade and occupy the country, after which it would continue the war as an underground guerrilla campaign against the occupiers, while is­ suing clarion calls for the German workers to rise and overthrow their ex­ ploiters. Such a strategy would am ount to a declaration o f all-European class war: it would have been consistent w ith Lenin’s policy through O cto­ ber 1917, and it was the strategy favored by the so-called Left Com m u­ nists led by Nikolai Bukharin.34 (It would certainly have embarrassed the Germans, who would have found it tricky to occupy effectively a country the size o f Russia while still conducting a war in the West.) Alternatively Soviet Russia could surrender to the Germans and conclude a formal peace treaty, abandoning the prospect o f imm ediate international revolu­ tion, and concentrate instead on saving w hat could be saved o f sovereign Russian territory as a tem porary bastion o f socialism. Lenin chose the latter course. By doing so, he turned Russia into the hom eland o f socialism, at least provisionally. He reformulated the imme­ diate aims o f the party, speaking o f “our unbending determ ination to en­ sure that at any rate Russia [he used the archaic term Rus] ceases to be wretched and im potent and becomes mighty and abundant in the hill meaning o f those w o rd s.. . . O ur natural wealth, our manpower, and the splendid impetus that the great revolution has given to the creative powers o f the people are ample material to build a truly mighty and abundant Russia [again /fay].”35 Here was the embryo o f what later under Stalin would become Socialism in O ne Country. These early, somewhat hesitant paeans to Russia focused on its working

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people. N o Russian socialists had yet professed adm iration for the Russian imperial state. Yet once the Reds won the civil war, they became the de facto inheritors o f Im perial Russia and o f m ost o f its territories and peo­ ples. Paradoxically, during 1917-1920 the Reds had proved themselves better able to ensure Russia’s survival and integrity than had the tsarist re­ gime, the Provisional Governm ent, or the W hites. They had repelled for­ eign incursions w hich in some cases the W hites had actually supported, for all their imperial patriotism and their proclamations o f "Russia O ne and Indivisible.” W hen the Poles invaded Ukraine in the spring o f 1920 the Reds set the seal on the tem porary and im probable alliance between socialism and the ghost o f Imperial Russia. Historically the Poles were na­ tional enemies who had for centuries disputed the western regions o f w hat Russians considered their own territory. Resisting them was the duty o f every patriotic Russian: or so the Reds now argued, for the first tim e com­ bining revolutionary élan w ith Russian nationalism . O n May 8, 1920, Karl Radek—secretary o f the C om intern, no less— appealed to W hite officers to join the Red Army for patriotic reasons. “T he Soviet government, w hich defends the territorial integrity and inde­ pendence o f the country that is populated by Russians . . . is for honest W hite officers the governm ent that defends Russian independence. . . . O ur civil war was always national. It was a regathering o f Russian lands in the hands o f the dictator— the w orking class. It was always the struggle for independence from the yoke o f foreign and native capitalism .”36 As we have seen, Brusilov and other old regime generals, m ost o f whom had hitherto rem ained aloof from the Com m unists, responded positively to this appeal. All the same, the two oudooks were far from identical. Brusilov still re­ garded Lenin as the A nti-C hrist and considered Bolshevism a “tem porary sickness,” since “its philosophy o f internationalism is fundam entally alien to the Russian people___ Com m unism is completely unintelligible to the millions o f barely literate peasants, and it is doubtful that they will fight for it. If C hristianity failed to unify the people in two thousand years, how can Com m unism hope to do so when m ost o f the people had not even heard o f it three years ago? O nly the idea o f Russia can do that.”37 In essence Brusilovs oudook was the old-fashioned rossiiskii imperial attitude revamped for a particular occasion and purpose. It would never­ theless prove itself a powerful weapon. Thousands o f officers d id respond to the appeal and enlist in the Red Army, to an extent that surprised and

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even embarrassed the Soviet leaders. A nd the m ood proved durable, out­ lasting the war against Poland. For at least the first two decades o f Soviet rule, Brusilovs kind o f hybrid patriotism — inherited great-power im peri­ alism plus instrum ental accomm odation w ith Com m unism — was com­ m on am ong Soviet Russia’s professional strata, including its army officers, even though they now had no epaulettes.38 As censorship tightened inside the USSR, it became impossible to ar­ ticulate Brusilov’s oudook fully w ithin the country. As so often in the next few decades, it fell to centers o f Russian em igration to provide a fuller ac­ count o f w hat was happening inside Russia itself and to formulate politi­ cal conclusions in a trenchant and even provocative manner. The m ost in­ novative tendency was Eurasianism. First articulated in a collection o f essays that appeared in Sofia in 1921, the movement posed a radical chal­ lenge to the whole orientation o f Russian cultural life. Eurasianists pro­ posed that Russia and the West were incom patible and that the policy o f em ulating the West, which had been pursued for the past two centuries by the bureaucracy and the intelligentsia, was misguided. O rdinary Russians were actually closer in their material and spiritual culture to Asiatic peo­ ples, w ith whom they shared a com mon origin in the steppes o f Eurasia. According to this view, the Bolsheviks had brought disaster to Russia be­ cause they had imposed yet another destructive ideology from Europe; but their very success w ould unleash the latent strength o f the Russian people, who would finally sweep away the W estern veneer overlaying their true instincts. A former colonized country itself, Russia would lead the em ancipation o f the other colonies from the dom ination o f W estern Eu­ rope and usher in an era o f authoritarian rule, strong religious faith, and ethnic tolerance.39 Eurasianism was an abrupt and radical challenge to m ost o f Russian thought, even to that o f the socialists, who also rejected liberalism and capitalism. It offered an alternative way o f being anti-W estern. For the tim e being it remained an isolated émigré movement w ithout echoes in the Soviet Union. N ot till the 1980s, as we shall see, did it come to play an im portant part in Russians’ self-identification. O f more immediate sig­ nificance were those thinkers who saw in the Soviet U nion a renewed Rus­ sian Empire. The initial leader o f this group was Nikolai Ustrialov, who had been chairman o f the Kadet Party in the Russian Far East. He had fled to M an­ churia after the W hites’ final defeat, and from there to Prague, where he

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edited a collection o f articles entided Smena Vekh (Change o f Land­ marks), published in 1921.40 It summ ed up the new mood, conciliatory toward the Com m unists, that was gaining ground am ong Imperial Rus­ sian patriots. Its central thesis, expounded in Ustrialov’s own article, “Patriotica,” was that the Bolshevik revolution, despite appearances, was thoroughly Rus­ sian in spirit; the Soviet Union w ould now take over the traditional role o f the Russian Empire as a great power, w hether its leaders intended that outcom e or not. Emigrés should therefore cooperate w ith the new govern­ m ent: “T he and-Bolshevik movement has become too closely associated w ith foreign elements and has thereby conferred on Bolshevism a certain nadonalist h a lo .. . . T he Soviet regime will strive in every possible way to reannex the peripheries— in the name o f world revolution. Russian patri­ ots will fight for the same goal— in the name o f Russia, one and indivisi­ ble. For all the infinite difference in ideology, the practical way forward is the same.” Ustrialov urged émigrés to accept that Russian culture needed to be renewed from w ithin; at the m om ent, he asserted, only the Soviet leadership was capable o f achieving such a renewal and at the same tim e o f restoring Russia’s great-power status: “As the power o f the revolution— and at the m om ent only that power— is capable o f restoring Russia’s great-power status and her international standing, our duty in the name o f Russian culture is to acknowledge its political authority.”41 Ustrialov had completely turned his back on the liberal politics o f the pre-1917 years. H e believed that the authoritarian nature o f the Russian state was a positive advantage in the new era: “Formal democracy is ev­ erywhere entering its tw ilig h t. . . H istory is striving to reproduce certain features o f the enlightened absolutist state, though o f course in a new form for a new era.” It followed that Russia was well equipped to take the lead: “the new era will more than any previous one be marked by the in­ fluence o f Russia and o f Russian culture.” Russia should be “powerful, great, and frightful to her enemies,” for only a strong state could generate a great culture. It would be led by a “new aristocracy, in its own way both popular and progressive, an aristocracy o f black bones and calloused hands.” Ustrialov remained strongly Christian in oudook but held that Christianity was irrelevant to the conduct o f politics.42 In 1925 he dem­ onstrated the sincerity o f his beliefs by becoming an employee o f the So­ viet regime, as an official on the M anchurian railway.43 A nother contributor to Smena vekh, the former O ctobrist politician

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Aleksandr Bobrishchev-Pushkin, was even more forthright in his praise o f the Soviet state, both for its authoritarianism and for its messianism. He asserted that the greatest achievement o f the Bolsheviks was that they re­ distributed property to the people, and thus created a stable social basis for their authority that the old regime had lacked.44 Smena vekh acknowledged, then, that the anti-Bolshevik movements had been defeated. In the words o f one contributor, "We are going to Canossa. We recognize that we have lost, that we took the wrong road, that our activities and our assessments were m istaken.” All the same, the im plication o f their way o f adm itting defeat was that the Bolsheviks had also miscalculated, since their revolution had generated not an interna­ tional proletarian revolution but a renewed and strengthened Russian state. Bolshevism was "a disease, but at the same tim e a necessary, though unpleasant, stage o f our country’s evolution,” from which it would emerge fortified and reinvigorated.45 The oudook o f Ustrialov and his colleagues seemed to be confirmed by the developments o f the early 1920s. T he Soviet U nion was finally consol­ idated on almost the same territory as the old Russian Empire, and it be­ gan to be tentatively accepted by other powers as the successor to it. By 1923 all other attem pted European socialist revolutions had failed, while inside the USSR the New Economic Policy had been introduced, which meant, even in Russia, the tem porary abandonm ent o f the aim o f imme­ diately building socialism and the réintroduction o f some forms o f private economic activity. By 1925 Nikolai Bukharin was even exhorting peasants "Enrich yourselves!” as a contribution to the construction o f socialism. In 1924, moreover, Stalin, now general secretary o f the Com m unist Party, began to retreat from Lenin’s vision o f international revolution and to talk o f the possibility o f “socialism in one country.”46 D uring these years the Soviet frontier had not yet become imperme­ able, and there was still a good deal o f movement back and forth across it. M any émigrés had initially intended to return after the expected fell o f the Soviet regime; now that it had not fallen, they began instead to hope that it m ight after all prove tolerable, so that they could go back to their home­ land. The Smena vekh oudook was naturally congenial to them. Similarly, inside the Soviet Union many army officers, civil servants, and profes­ sional people were eager to continue serving their country and people, un­ der whatever label, and they too hoped that the Soviet regime m ight prove to be simply Russia in a new guise.

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Some writers clung to the same hope. In 1922, for example, Aleksei Tolstoi wrote: “If history has reason, and I believe that it has, everything that is happening in Russia is done for the sake o f world salvation. . . . [O ne must] do everything to help the revolution develop in the direction o f enrichm ent o f Russian life, in the direction o f the extraction o f all good and all justice from the revolution . . . in the direction o f strengthening Russia as a great power.”47 Tolstoi believed that Com m unism was Russia’s national fate. In his novel Peter the Great he portrayed an earlier state-di­ rected transform ation, “com batting barbarism by barbaric means,” as Le­ nin liked to say, while in The Road to Calvary (Khozhdenie po m ukam), he portrayed the transform ation o f an early-tw entieth-century decadent in­ tellectual into a true C om m unist believer.48 In the 1920s books and journals were sometimes published both in the Soviet U nion and in em igration. O ne o f the contributors to Smena vekh, lu. V. Kliuchnikov (a form er professor o f law at Moscow University, a m em ber o f the Kadet Party, and a m inister in Kolchaks government), founded a daily newspaper that was published in both Berlin and Mos­ cow from 1922 to 1924. Called Nakanune (O n the Eve), it was subsidized for a tim e by the Soviet government; it unreservedly endorsed the So­ viet U nion as a Russian state, entided thanks to its internadonalism to play a m ajor role as a great power in the com ing decades. Kliuchnikov called upon W hite émigrés to return and strengthen their hom eland.49 T he m onthly journal Novaia Rossiia (later simply Rossiia), edited by Isai Lezhnev, took a similar line and continued to publish Ustrialov after he was barred from the rest o f the press— alongside the highly controversial prose w riter and dram adst M ikhail Bulgakov. Some émigrés did respond positively. V ladim ir Vernadskii, one o f the w orlds leading geologists, had struggled already before 1917 to persuade the tsarist regime to fund a Commission for the Study o f Russia’s N atural Resources, being convinced that a large-scale invesdgation o f this kind was necessary to enable Russia to exploit its resources to the full, as was re­ quired to m aintain great-power status. H e failed then and emigrated after the civil war. In the West, however, he was no more successful in obtain­ ing the large sums he considered necessary, and in 1926 he decided to re­ turn to the Soviet Union. He loathed the Com m unists but hoped never­ theless that, as Russian rulers eager to bolster their international status and w ith the resources o f an unprecedendy centralized state at their dis­ posal, they would be able to assist him in a way nobody else could. He thought that Com m unism would prove ephemeral, while the state’s devo-

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tion to science and economic development would endure. H e was wrong on the first count but right on the second: the regime did in fact provide funding for his research.50 As for the Soviet leaders themselves, some gave conditional support to the Smena vekh line. W hatever the long-term future, in the short run the Soviet state had to be soundly run, both internally and externally, or the revolution would perish. It needed "bourgeois specialists” to take up the expert professional jobs, for which few Com m unists or workers were trained. If "bourgeois” thinkers were prepared for their own reasons to support the Soviet U nion, they were w orth accepting as tem porary allies. T hat was the line taken by Lunacharskii, who claimed that the Smena vekh writers were "national liberals” who had realized that the Com intern "serves the interests o f Russia as a great power, w inning her friends both in the West and in the East am ong millions o f oppressed people.” Trotskii com m ented that they "approached not com m unism but at least the Soviet state through patriotic gates,” having "come to the conclusion t h a t . . . no­ body can defend the unity o f the Russian people and its independence from the external threat in contem porary historical conditions other than the Soviet state.” H e recom mended that Smena vekh be circulated among the military.51 O ther Soviet leaders were less well disposed toward Smena vekh, fearing that its supporters, should they become too numerous and powerful, m ight divert the revolutionary regime from its true purpose. Lenin gave Smena vekh a backhanded com plim ent when he adm itted that its support­ ers were warning o f dangers that m ight possibly materialize unless Com ­ m unists acted to counter them .52 Prom inent am ong the opponents was Grigorii Zinovev, who as head o f the C om intern spoke ex officio for the international dim ension o f the revolution. T he w riter Maksim Gorkii also warned against them: he loathed Russian peasants and worried that a re­ surgence o f Russian nationalism m ight imply a willingness to give peas­ ants a stranglehold on economic life. T he leaders o f the non-Russian re­ publics likewise opposed the influence o f Smena vekh, fearing that it would prom ote the interests o f Russians to the detrim ent o f their own peoples.53 Stalin, as so often, took up an interm ediate position. At the 14th Party Congress in 1925 he was both accepting and wary: Smenovekhism is the ideology o f the new bourgeoisie, which is growing and gradually linking up w ith the kulaks and the working

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IHLEIS AM VICTIMS intelligentsia. . . . [It takes] the view that the Com m unist Party is bound to degenerate and the new bourgeoisie to consolidate itself, while it appears that, w ithout ourselves noticing it, we Bolsheviks are certain to approach the threshold o f the dem ocratic republic, then to cross that threshold and finally, w ith the help o f some "Caesar” who will come forward, perhaps a m ilitary m an or perhaps a civilian, to find that we have become an ordinary bourgeois republic. . . . Ustrialov is the author o f this ideology. H e is in the transport ser­ vice. It is said that he is working well. I think that, if he is working well, let him go on dream ing about the degeneration o f our party. Dream ing is not prohibited in our country. . . . But let him know that, while dream ing about our degeneration, he m ust at the same tim e bring grist to our Bolshevik mill. Otherwise it will go badly for him .54

Stalin, then, was prepared to accept cooperation under sufferance and for lim ited tactical purposes— w hich is w hat Ustrialov had in m ind too. A t the same tim e, Stalin was actually introducing a m ajor modification o f Leninism— though he was careful to present it as irreproachably ortho­ dox. Lenin, and even more so Trotskii, had always insisted that the Rus­ sian revolution was the start o f w orld revolution, and he had never seri­ ously considered the question o f w hat would become o f the form er if no C om m unist Party outside Russia managed to seize power. By 1924-1925, a full seven years after the O ctober revolution, there was still no other Eu­ ropean socialist state, and the question urgendy needed tackling. Accord­ ing to Trotskii, Stalin acidly remarked, "Since there was no success yet in the West, the Russian revolution was left w ith the ‘choice’ either to w ither on the vine or to degenerate into a bourgeois state.” This was, he quipped, the theory o f “perm anent hopelessness.” O n the contrary, Stalin main­ tained — and this was a m ajor turning point in the evoludon o f Russian socialism— that “socialism in one country” was wholly possible, given the will to succeed and the support o f workers and socialists in other coun­ tries, which was certainly forthcom ing.55 Already in the 1920s a fateful paradox was taking shape. The Soviet state was com m itted to an internadonalist vision that im plied acdve dis­ crim ination against the alleged "chauvinism” o f the Russian people. It had created a Russian Republic that was the largest but also the weakest o f all the union republics. Yet at the same dm e it was assuming a reluctant and

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instm m ental— but nevertheless real— Russian imperial identity. This was a contradiction that could not last indefinitely. The “Russian question” was the concealed but m ortally dangerous defect in the structure o f the USSR. T he Soviet leaders did not manage to elim inate it before it elimi­ nated them .

4 T w o R u s s i n C ollide

In the late 1950s, after the death o f his wife, to whom he had been mar­ ried since 1895, the O ld Believer Sergei Aleksandrovich Voronov dictated a brief autobiography to his son. T he final page describes all the clothes his wife had sewn in the last m onths o f her life for him and for their grandchildren, and it ends: “Altogether G ods servant Evdokiia lived in this world eighty-one years and eight m onths. She lived together w ith me sixty-two years and five m onths. I, G od’s servant Sergii, have remained in this world alive in my body w ith my many sins and I ask forgiveness from the Lord G od for my trespasses. G od’s servant Sergii.” The rock-steady piety o f Voronov had become extremely rare by the tim e he told his story. It had borne him through a long life full o f trials and m isfortunes, the worst o f which he recounted to his son: In the w inter o f 1930 they dekulakized us. O ur household was de­ clared official property [sdali v kaznu], our lands were handed over to the kommuna. They ordered us to vacate our house. I was then fiftyfive years old, my wife was fifty-three, my m other eighty, our sons seventeen, seven, and five, our daughters fifteen and thirteen. There were eight o f us in all. In accordance w ith the order we left our house. We gathered w hat remained to us and moved to the house o f our son Evsevii. In February 1930 my son and I were sent logging. We worked at that till April 15. Then we returned home. A village soviet official told us: “You have been given a horse and cow, and

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your son a horse. Here is your sowing plan.” They assigned us land far from the village and in poor condition. The horse was one o f ours, an elderly mare. We fulfilled the sowing plan and started to prepare the fallow. T hen my old mare fell ill and died. They exam­ ined her and ordered me to take off the hide and deliver it as official property [sdat v kaznu]. T he flesh was buried. T hat ended our task. O ur household no longer existed, I had no job and no one to work for. I decided to move to acquaintances at Birokan station near Khabarovsk to seek w ork and somewhere to live.1 T he dry, spare language o f Voronov s account masks the enorm ity o f w hat was happening to him: the destruction o f his home, his family, his household economy, and his whole way o f life. T he devastation o f rural Russia in the early 1930s was the climax o f the collision between two Russias, that o f the peasants and that o f the new Com m unist ruling class. After the upheavals o f revolution and civil war a brief norm ality had re­ turned to the village for a few years under the New Economic Policy. But even that was overshadowed by foreboding. Com m unists and peasants had cooperated in the com m on aim o f expropriating the landowners, but there was litde else they could agree about. They lived in two utterly dif­ ferent m ental worlds. Com m unists were optim istic, energetic, forwardlooking, and confident o f the future. Peasants were cautious, inclined to pessimism, and wary o f “dark forces.” They regarded tim e as a cyclical succession o f good fortune and disaster. Village tim e was measured in the recurring rhythms o f night and day, the agricultural seasons, and the alternation o f workdays and festivals. A part from Christmas, Easter, Trinity (or W hit) Sunday, and Shrove Tues­ day (Mardi Gras), they celebrated the holy days o f their favorite saints, among whom w ould often be St. George, St. M ikhail, and the prophet Elijah. Just before festivals villagers would cook special meals and brew beer or samogon, so that on the day itself, after going to church, they could gather, drink together, and discuss the affairs o f the village and the world. This was also an occasion for relatives and visitors from neighbor­ ing villages to take meals w ith families. O ften at the end o f the day there would be dancing and singing, and young people would meet and stroll together on the village street. Com m unists tried to ban festivals that fell on workdays and to discourage heavy drinking, which not inffequendy led to hooliganism and violence or brought to a head feuds between vil-

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läge clans. T heir exhortations had litde effect, though: peasants regarded festival behavior as governed by special laws.2 T he rural police force was gready overstretched and simply could not cope w ith the illicit home-brew stills, the brawls, and the allegations o f sexual m isconduct w hich they were supposed to investigate. As for Com ­ m unists, there were very few o f them in the village: in Tver province, on average, there was only one party member for every five to seven settlem ents, and they were not usually peasants but rather schoolteachers or veterinary surgeons. Even if they were active and determ ined, they were cut off from the “real” Soviet U nion by miles o f m ud-churned rural tracks and the uncertainties o f the horse and cart. At this stage very few people had m otor vehicles or telephones w ith which to conquer the remote deso­ lation o f the village.3 T he new village soviet, which had briefly been a power in the country­ side in 1917-1919, had yielded to the old village assembly, the skhod, which was now in its element. It could decide all village questions w ithout interference from the landowner. As the village lapsed into the old roudne, the older men elbowed out the women and younger men, who had played a serious role in the soviet during 1917—1919, and resumed their traditional authority. From the party’s viewpoint, the skhod was an irritat­ ing rem nant o f the past, w ith its endless leisurely discussions on parishpum p issues, its blinkered focus on household and village, and its reluc­ tance to innovate. Moreover, it symbolized the village as a unified struc­ ture led by its "best” families, rather than as a potential forum for class struggle w ith “poor peasants” against “kulaks.”4 Exultant visions and dark forebodings remained as a hangover from the exhilarating but also horrifying period o f revolution and civil war. In V innitsa district in Ukraine village folk talked about the last judgm ent and the resurrection o f corpses. In Tyshtypskii raion in 1926 G od was ru­ m ored to have spoken to a peasant, who prom ised that on June 19 he would com m unicate the divine message to the assembled people. Some three thousand gathered, and the peasant told them the world would end in forty-seven years if they believed in G od, but in twenty-seven years if their hearts remained hard. A cross was erected on the spot, which for a few years was a pilgrimage site.5 Still, there was at least a brief period o f normality. V iktor Petrovich Beliaev, who was bom in 1923 in the village o f Shileksha, in Kostroma guberniia, summed up the rural work patterns o f his childhood in his

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memoirs. H e saw the village as a complex organism linked to a wider world through m uch more than agriculture: “Returning from the spring­ tim e tim ber floating, m ost peasants would begin sowing, while some would do carpentry till the haymaking; toward w inter some would fell timber, while others would go carting, transporting loads. Some villagers would go to work in Kologriv [the nearest district town], Kostroma, Mos­ cow, St. Petersburg, N izhnii Novgorod. The men worked at the post of­ fice, in savings banks, in hospitals, private shops, or bakeries, while the girls usually found em ployment as chambermaids or servants.”6 Handicraft (kustam yi) industry was still widespread. Blacksmiths, stovesetters, and cobblers w ould both make and repair their goods for a few vil­ lages in the imm ediate neighborhood, while larger entrepreneurs would manufacture, say, spinning-wheels in their workshops and then distribute them over wide areas by railway and river. As a compromise between home-made artefacts and large-scale industrial products, these artisans were able to adapt the techniques o f the industrial revolution to make ru­ ral life somewhat more comfortable and convenient. Kustam yi manufac­ ture reached its zenith in the first thirty years o f the twentieth century.7 O ne C om m unist innovation did meet the approval o f many villag­ ers. In 1920 an Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle against Illit­ eracy launched a nationwide campaign under the snappy title likbez. Learning to read and w rite was declared the duty o f everyone under fifty. Part o f the task was handled by the growing network o f primary schools, obligatory four-year study having been introduced for every child in 1923. For adults, literate people in the villages would be exhorted to open a likpunkt, often a “reading-hut” expropriated from a “kulak,” where those who wished to learn to read could go in the evenings or during the winters. As one young peasant woman from Tambov province, Tamara Kuderina-Nasonova, described it, “O n the tables were always laid out a great quantity o f pamphlets, posters, little books w ith political content, which we devoured till they fell apart, and which gready helped to open our eyes.. . . O ften evenings o f ‘Q uestions and Answers’ were arranged— a common way o f organizing mass political work at the time. And lots o f questions cropped up then. O ne had the impression that people had sud­ denly woken up, were rubbing their eyes and trying to understand where they were and how they got there.”8 After everything they had been through since 1914, peasants, especially younger ones, naturally wanted to understand better the world in which

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they now lived. Revolution and civil war had taught them m uch, but they had not been a favorable environm ent for schooling, and many young people had lost tim e to make up. M ost o f them seized enthusiastically the new opportunity to make their way in the world, and the party used the occasion to spice elementary reading books w ith political propa­ ganda. W hile learning the alphabet students also learned how the tsar had been overthrown, the landowners expropriated, and universal equality in­ stalled. They learned a great deal more, too, about how to lead a civilized life. W hen Theodore Dreiser visited Russia in the late 1920s, he reported that everywhere there were posters “urging (never really commanding) the people to do this and that, from com bing their hair to swatting flies, washing out the stables and m ilk pails, cleaning the babies’ m ilk botdes, opening the windows o f sick rooms, ploughing w ith tractors, fertilizing w ith the right fertilizer, building w ith the right lumber, eating the right food.”9 T he census o f 1939 showed that 87.4 percent o f the population aged 9 to 49 could read (93.5 o f m en, 81.6 percent o f women). T hat was a con­ siderable achievement, given that in 1897 the comparable figures had been 28.4 percent (40.3 and 16.6), in 1920, 44.1 percent (57.6 and 32.3), and in 1926, 56.6 percent (71.5 and 42.7). T he greatest advance, especially for women, came in the late 1920s and 1930s. Inevitably, though, m any people, especially young m en, used their new skills to es­ cape from the village in that upheaval, so that in some ways even this ad­ vance made m atters worse. Perhaps that is why the liquidators o f illiteracy were am ong those attacked by peasants during collectivization: their in­ struction was seen as part o f the general assault on village life.10

Collectivization of Agriculture T he collectivization o f agriculture m eant the wholesale and deliberate de­ struction o f the peasants’ way o f life. But it was for their own good, the Com m unists believed. Lev Kopelev recalled from his days as party activist in the countryside, “I was convinced that we were soldiers on an invisible front, waging war on kulak sabotage for the sake o f bread the country needed for the five-year plan. For bread above all, but also for the souls o f peasants whose attitudes had hardened through ignorance and low politi­ cal consciousness, and who had succumbed to enemy propaganda, not grasping the great tru th o f com m unism .”11

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T he centuries-old “village society,” or com mune, focus o f the peasants’ com m unity life and decision-making, was abolished by a decree o f July 30, 1930. M any o f its authoritative householders— elders, judges, the “best people”— were labeled “kulaks” and deported. M arkets and fairs that had served as forums for trade and sociability were likewise closed down, on the grounds that they served private capital. Perhaps most de­ moralizing o f all, village churches were closed and either destroyed or turned over for secular use as warehouses, clubs, or cinemas. Clergymen were arrested— though many managed to flee, some to become clandes­ tine “wandering” priests serving secret congregations in cellars, private apartm ents, or deep in the woods. Church closure was often accompanied by symbolic desecration. Icons were removed and, in one case, lined up against walls for “execution” by shooting, each w ith a superscription re­ cording which saint had been sentenced to death for “resisting kolkhoz construction.” T he bells, whose peals were the villages celebrant voice and its protection against evil spirits, pestilence, and storms, were taken down— sometimes literally cast down from the belfry w ith a final harsh cacophony as they h it the ground— before being carted off to be melted down for the five-year plan.12 N ot all the pressure for collectivization came from outside the village. T he prospect offered new opportunities to poorer peasants, to younger sons, and to those who had political connections from the Red Army. Collective farming, Beliaev m aintains, was at first not taken seriously by the villagers: “But quite a few young people from the village fell under the influence o f Bolshevik propaganda. All the same, the decisive factor while the kolkhozy [collective farms] were being created was the authorities’ di­ rect pressure, the com bination o f persuasion and promises w ith down­ right sanctions against the opponents o f kolkhozy.”13 Sometimes peasants resisted passively, by sitting silendy at meetings called to take the decision on collectivization or to identify “kulaks” for deportation. O r they would take the opposite stratagem and endlessly ask questions, or all shout at once to disrupt the orderly conduct o f the meet­ ing. If the church bell was still in place they would sound it as a tocsin so that villagers could shout “Fire!” and thus break up the meeting. O ften it was women who seized the initiative: in the village o f Taneevka in Tatariia, for example, they attacked and beat up members o f the village soviet who were trying to close the church and take down the bell for re­ casting. Under the slogans “We won’t give up the bell!” and “We don’t

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need tractors or collective farms!” they even managed to farm their own village government far a tim e.14 In M arch 1930 in the village o f Bolshie Ialchiki, in the Central Black Earth region, someone broke into the church after it had been closed and rang the bells, sum m oning the villagers. They dem anded the closure o f the recendy established kolkhoz, the reopening o f the church, the return o f the dekulakized, the restoration o f property, and the reopening o f com­ m unal woodlands. Part o f the crowd broke away and forcibly evicted peo­ ple occupying the homes o f the dekulakized. O thers arm ed w ith sticks threatened to beat up the chairm an o f the Young C om m unist League. They were held off by the threat o f weapons until help arrived.15 For many households the greatest psychological blow came w ith the transfer o f their animals to the collective. Especially painful was the loss o f a horse: UI remember that parting w ith our horse was a dram atic event in the life o f the family. We were losing not only the m ain producer in the household, but also a living being w ithout whom we all felt orphaned. A t first the horses assigned to the kolkhoz paddock would by force o f habit return from the pastures back to their old owners. O ur Peganko would canter up to our house during the day, since the pasture was nearby, and stick his head in at the open window; my m other w ould give him a slice o f black bread sprinkled w ith salt.”16 Anna N ikitichna Chernichenko, at that tim e a thirteen-year-old girl in a Siberian village, also recalled how their favorite horse, Zvezdochka, bolted back to the family from the collective paddock: "O ne o f our neigh­ bors called out, ‘Hey, here comes your horse, just look at his eye!’ I looked up, and saw Zvezdochkas eye dislocated and bloody, hanging by a thread. My m other fainted. She had always had a weak heart, but this was her first attack, and it was a serious o n e . . . . She was an invalid after that.”17 M ost damaging to the future o f the village was the so-called deku­ lakization,” the process by which the Bolsheviks rid the countryside o f “wealthy” peasants. It began w ith the im position o f heavy taxes. O ne vil­ lager from Penza oblast recalls, “I remember how my father w ith tears in his eyes scraped together the last grains, intended for food and seed corn, from the barn. O nce a peasant had paid off one tax dem and, a little later another would arrive. A nd that could happen several tim es.”18 W hen the taxes could no longer be paid, a “plenipotentiary” w ould ar­ rive to conduct searches. O ne woman describes such a visit: “I remem­ ber three men came. O ne in a leather tunic tied w ith a leather belt—

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the plenipotentiary from the town, the second a poor peasant from the Komsomol, the third from the village soviet. T he plenipotentiary had a revolver at his hip. They had come to search for grain or bread. They looked under the stove and under the bed, where they found a small trunk improvised out o f planks. T hat was my trunk w ith my ‘finery.’ They started to tu rf out my linen and dresses straight on to the floor. I was appalled— I thought they were going to take my clothes, so I rushed up to them , seized m y trunk, and screamed at them to return every­ thing.”19 Sergei Voronov, whose narrative opened this chapter, was one o f the “fortunate” kulaks who was not deported. Those who were suffered the further traum a o f being transported in extremely harsh conditions and then resettled in a completely unfam iliar environm ent. According to one account, “We were loaded like catde, forty to a truck. There were iron stoves inside. Inside everything was together, dining room, bedroom, and toilet: one did one’s business through the open door while the train was moving. They curtained it off a bit w ith mats. The young girls were very embarrassed at having to use such a ‘toilet.’. . . We ate w hat we had brought w ith us, but w ithout liquid, and the small children suffered espe­ cially. At hom e they would be given m ilk from the cow, but now we were completely cut off from all that.”20 From February to May 1930 alone more than 100,000 kulak families were deported, the largest numbers from the N orth Caucasus, Ukraine, Belorussia, the Central Black Earth region, and the Lower Volga— in gen­ eral, the m ost fertile grain-producing zones. M any died in the course o f transportation, o f cold, hunger, dehydration, or untreated disease. T heir corpses would simply be rolled out o f the trucks during a halt. So great were the losses that one post-Soviet Russian historian has accused the So­ viet authorities o f “genocide.”21 Such experiences were com mon. In 1933 the director o f Siblag (Sibe­ rian Cam p Complex) wrote to his superiors com plaining that 3 to 4 per­ cent o f those transported died on the way. The reasons for the high m or­ tality rate, he asserted, were that, contrary to instructions, many sick and elderly people were included, and insufficient food and water was sup­ plied for the journey.22 W hen he arrived in Vologda region, the so-called kulak Anton Lisechko was separated from his wife and children, who were housed in a former monastery: “The place where my Kseniia and the children lived I can only

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call a death camp. How m any children, old folk, and able-bodied people died there no one counted.” Two o f the children were later sent to live w ith relatives. A nton was transported further and detrained near a river: wBeside the river there were huts, or at least skeletons o f huts. O n the snow, w ithout walls, stood beams and rafters about six meters high and eight meters wide. T he roof was covered w ith a thin layer o f straw ham ­ mered down. There we were left to get on w ith it. It was terribly cold. T he h u t was 18 meters long, and no m atter how m uch you fed the two iron stoves w ith their iron flues, it didn’t get warm. Everywhere it was draughty.”23 T he exiles’ destinations were usually the far north, the Urals, Siberia, and Kazakhstan. They were not im prisoned there, but they had to report regularly to the local NKVD com m andant. T he intention was to put them to w ork in industries where labor was scarce: tim ber, fishing, m in­ ing, agriculture, and construction. O thers were left to their own devices, to find chance em ploym ent in small-scale m anufacture, the retail trade, domestic service, agriculture, or looking after animals. O ne woman exiled to Kustanai oblast in northern Kazakhstan in early 1940 was dropped from a truck one evening in the snowy steppes. She thought she and her com panions were being left to die in the void, until suddenly the director o f the local sovkhoz (Soviet farm, a variant o f the kolkhoz) showed up. H e com plained that there were too m any old and sick people am ong them and not enough able-bodied workers. T hen he dispatched them for the night to peasant huts that they had not noticed buried in the snowdrifts. They were ordered to report next m orning to the sovkhoz office. “T here,” the woman recalls, “they told us they were not going to provide food or shelter for us— we would each have to take care o f ourselves. We were detailed off to chop down trees (the saksaul, a hard­ wood that grows on the banks o f large lakes and rivers) and to clean out the cattle stalls. For a piece o f bread and some broth we worked like serfs from early m orning to late evening. We had no suitable clothing and got tired easily. All February we suffered from cold and hunger. The older people fell sick and died.”24

Peasant Reactions to Collectivization As early as December 1929, some peasants were already protesting against life in the new kolkhozy. From M insk okrug a group o f forty or so peas-

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ants wrote to Rykov, the chairm an o f Sovnarkom (in effect the prime minister), declaring: We never thought that the Soviet authorities would oppress us in this way. . . . They force us to enter collectives, and if some house­ holder does not w ant to, then he is deprived o f land____If the Soviet authorities do not change course, things will get very bad, for peas­ ants are starting to m urder each other, and if we have to live together in collectives, it will be m uch worse. There will be m utual slaughter, because w ere not used to barrack life. Everyone tries to work for himself, and now we have to hand everything over to the State, al­ m ost like returning to barshchina [labor dues, abolished in 1861]. We were very pleased when we were released from barshchina, and now the Soviet authorities are reimposing it. Is that just?25 Nearly everything about the kolkhozy was unfamiliar and repugnant to the peasants. They were used to having their own animals, their own household plots, and their own strips on the common fields, where they would work using their own tools and in their own time. Now their ani­ mals had been taken away, the status o f their household plots was uncer­ tain, and the fields were state property, where they were required to work under orders at specified times. Peasants interpreted the outright assault on their way o f life— indeed their lives— according to the cosmology they had inherited from their an­ cestors. O nly a generation earlier they had been drawing up political pro­ grams and voting in parliam entary elections. Now they were plunged back into a world o f medieval eschatology.26 The imagery o f the apoc­ alypse seemed em inendy realistic. “Soviet power is not o f God, but o f the A nti-C hrist,” w ent an oft-repeated slogan. Peasants who joined the kolkhozy voluntarily would, it was rumored, be stamped w ith the mark o f the beast and picked out for dam nation on judgm ent day. A chastushka warned: O h brothers! oh sisters! D on’t go into the kolkhoz . . . Antichrist will lay his mark upon you three times. O nce on the hand, The second on the forehead for all to see, And the third on the breast.

lUiERS MO VICTIMS

100 If you believe in G od, don’t join the kolkhoz. . . And if you’re in the kolkhoz, oh sisters, leave . . F

Official statem ents and the public media were utterly mendacious, so rum or resumed its sway, giving peasants a surrogate sense o f com m unity and identifying an enemy they should resist. A “St. Bartholomew’s massa­ cre” was prophesied in Ivanovo oblast, the Urals, and Chuvashia. Else­ where people foretold a great peasant jacquerie, or a war in which the So­ viet regime w ould be overthrown by— depending on the version— the British, the Poles, the Chinese, or the Japanese. “The Pope o f Rome will come, the government will hill, and all Com m unists and collective farm­ ers will be crushed,” ran another prophecy. Yet other comments reflected the literal truth: “They take the last cow horn a poor villager; this is not Soviet power, but the power o f thieves and pillagers.” “The kolkhoz is barshchirut, a second serfdom .” “We will be eternal slaves.” O ne prediction in the N orth Caucasus wove together several peasant nightmares: In the kolkhoz there will be a special branding iron, [they] will close all the churches, not allow prayer, dead people will be cremated, the christening o f children will be forbidden, invalids and the elderly will be killed, there won’t be any husbands or wives, [all] will sleep under a one-hundred-m etre blanket. Beautiful men and women will be taken and brought to one place to produce beautiful people. Children will be taken from their parents, there will be wholesale in­ cest: brothers will live w ith sisters, sons w ith m others, fathers w ith daughters, etc. T he kolkhoz— this means beasts in a single shed, people in a single barrack.28 A variety o f motifs are blended here: the antireligious campaign, family reform, eugenics, sexual immorality, abolition o f property, and loss o f in­ dividuality. These were all direct or indirect reflections o f policies the re­ gime actually was pursuing. Com m unists dismissed such imaginings as the work o f priests, kulaks, or “unenlightened womenfolk” (nesoznatelnye baby). But in their context the rumors were utterly realistic. M any o f their prem onitions were fully justified: famine, deportations, massacres, re­ newed serfdom. Moreover, they reflected the unquestionable fact that the upheaval was caused by a struggle perceived as one between absolute good

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and absolute evil. T he wanderers, beggars, and iurodivye (fools in Christ) who retailed these rum ors were people whose lives had been irreparably disrupted by the turm oil. W omen were the prim e bearers o f village memory and the protagonists o f the “moral economy.” They were also more likely than men to be regu­ lar churchgoers. M any o f their menfolk had spent years away, fighting at the front or earning money in factories, whereas women were more likely to have spent their entire lives in or near the village, im bibing the lore o f their own m others and passing it on. They found the destruction o f tradi­ tion even more intolerable than did their husbands and sons. Besides, they were less likely than men to be punished for their indiscipline, since the authorities (whatever they said about em ancipating women) regarded women as inherently less “conscious,” even apolitical. They found it expe­ dient to write off opposition as coming from women, since to do so m ini­ mized the scale and significance o f peasant resistance.29 O ne element o f traditional peasant eschatology was, however, missing. N o pretender made an appearance. Stalin may have been perceived as the agent o f A nti-Christ, but there was no “genuine tsar” to oppose him and lead a popular rebellion. W hy this was so one can only speculate. Perhaps the crucial element was the desacralization o f the monarchy, which had been com pleted just over a decade earlier. No longer were peasants look­ ing for a holy prince to restore the deposed dynasty: the Romanovs had been comprehensively discredited and were no longer regarded as bearers o f G ods grace. D id the peasants really believe their own myths? We do not know, but at any rate the narratives o f apocalypse were effective at mobilizing them to resist collectivization. Defiance often began when the local church was closed or the priest arrested. In the M im ry district, Moscow province, a priest gave a sermon warning that “the end o f the world is approaching, A nti-C hrist is come to earth. Com e to the church. Tomorrow I will give my last serm on.” The next day a large crowd duly showed up to obstruct his arrest.30 Sometimes peasant resistance was violent. Fighting usually started w ith the defense o f “kulaks” earmarked for deportation, or o f grain stores or animals. Since peasants were usually armed only w ith the most primitive weapons, they endeavored to avoid armed clashes. But they had one ad­ vantage: locally, they gready outnum bered their opponents, who were not usually in a position to call up reinforcements. O ften a warning or a

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threat was enough to induce officials to hide or even to w ithdraw tem po­ rarily. But if they persisted in their attem pts to search for grain or to de­ tain so-called kulaks, villagers m ight assemble in large numbers, equipped at least w ith pitchforks and stones, and perhaps the odd shotgun or hunt­ ing rifle. At the village o f Cherepakha in the M iddle Volga a crowd assem­ bled in M arch 1930, dem anded the return o f all household property, ran­ sacked the School o f Kolkhoz Youth, and expelled poor peasants from requisitioned houses to return them to their owners. At Nachalovo in As­ trakhan oblast in February 1930, a crowd armed w ith a few guns attacked the village soviet building, where local officials had barricaded themselves, broke in, and m urdered at least half a dozen o f them . A t Salsk in the N orth Caucasus a crowd variously estim ated at several hundred or several thousand storm ed the soviet building and seized confiscated property; neighboring villages followed their example, and in the end Red Army units had to be dispatched to restore order. At Biisk in the Altai region in­ surgents actually managed to seize an arsenal and a police station, and to free all the local prisoners from jail. Here too troops had to be sent in to quell the disturbances.31 In general, peasant resistance, though widespread and deeply felt, was ineffective, since it was unled, unarm ed, and disorga­ nized. Confrontations were at an especially high level in Ukraine: in 1930 roughly 30 percent o f “kulak” rebellions reported by the O G PU for the whole USSR took place in the U krainian SSR, and 45 percent in the worst m onth, M arch 1930. T he other hardest h it areas included the N orth Caucasus (7.7 percent), the Central Black Earth region (10 per­ cent), and the Lower Volga (7.3 percent). All three were in the RSFSR, but all three also bordered on Ukraine and contained substantial Ukrai­ nian m inorities.32 Worse still, from the regimes point o f view, some o f the rebels linked resistance to collectivization w ith nationalist demands. A leaflet from Shtrim bakh village, Krutianskii raion, for example, proclaimed: “C iti­ zens, down w ith the bandit gangs, down w ith the villainous commu­ nards. Long live free Ukraine! Villagers, be prepared for the struggle against Bolshevism. Ukraine is defecting from Russia.” A proclamation from Rogachi in Berdichev okrug added another target o f ethnic hatred: “Brother peasants, we are all suffering under the oppression o f the panykommunisty [Com m unist landlords]. They rob us. We are naked. . . .

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Fight the Com m unist zhidy [Yids]. Throw him [sic] from power, d o n t be­ lieve him , he sits on your back, he drives you, he eats your bread!”99 Among the bitterest opponents o f collectivization were the Kuban Cos­ sacks. In the 1920s they had been granted national m inority status be­ cause, though they lived on the territory o f the RSFSR, they spoke a dia­ lect closer to U krainian than to Russian. They were awarded U krainianlanguage schools and institutions o f their own, which were then used by non-Cossack Ukrainians living in and near the N orth Caucasus. M any Com m unists had doubts about allowing them these concessions, not least because Kuban Cossacks had been prom inent in the W hite movement during the civil war. The doubts had not been resolved when collectiviza­ tion h it the region and generated bitter resistance. In February 1930, for example, the staff o f the N orth Caucasian m ilitary district reported that as a result o f “kulak agitation” in several districts “crowds o f peasants o f 2 300, sometimes up to 500 people, mainly women, wreck collectivization meetings, during the inventories o f kulak property they beat up local au­ thority representatives and activists, they break open stores o f confiscated kulak property and hand it back to the kulaks, they set free detained ku­ laks, and so on.”94 Ukraine and the N orth Caucasus were both regions where the civil war had been conducted w ith particular ferocity, and where many Cossacks had fought for the W hites or for U krainian separatists. It is not altogether surprising, then, that the Soviet leaders tended to interpret rural resistance there as a reversion to civil war, or as preparation for a Polish invasion. D uring the late summ er and autum n o f 1932, as grain requisitioning got under way, it transpired that there was a considerable shortfall from these regions. The Politburo reacted w ith fury, insisting there should be no con­ cessions: requisition plans should be m et in full, if necessary by the use o f terror. As early as August Stalin wrote to Lazar Kaganovich, who had re­ cently returned from leading the party in Kiev: The most im portant thing right now is Ukraine. Things in Ukraine have h it rock bottom . . . Redens [head o f the Ukrainian GPU] is not up to leading the fight w ith counter-revolution in such a large and distinctive republic. . . . Unless we begin to straighten out the situation in Ukraine, we may lose Ukraine. Keep in m ind that Pilsudski is not day-dreaming, and his agents in Ukraine are many

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times stronger than Redens or Kosior [Ukrainian party first secre­ tary] think. Keep in m ind, too, that the U krainian Com m unist Party (500 thousand members, ha, ha!) includes quite a lot (yes, quite a lot!) o f rotten elements, conscious and unconscious Petliura adher­ ents, and finally direct agents o f Pilsudski.35 Here we see an example o f the m indset that a few years later was to generate the headlong terror o f 1937-1938. A grain collection short­ fall was interpreted as evidence, not o f peasant self-preservation or reluc­ tance to w ork on the collective firm s, but rather o f an intention to fo­ m ent counter-revolution and assist a Polish invasion o f Ukraine. In the following m onths the Politburo sent special commissions to chosen re­ gions o f Ukraine and the N orth Caucasus. Kaganovich oversaw a spe­ cial m eeting o f the N orth Caucasus kraikom, where he warned against re­ cent imm igrants from Ukraine: “W ithout a doubt, among those arriving from Ukraine were organised groups, carrying out [counter-revolution­ ary] work, especially in the Kuban, where the U krainian language is spo­ ken.” T he m eeting decreed special economic and penal sanctions for fail­ ure to deliver the expected grain quota. As a warning, three large Cossack settlements (stanitsy) were placed on a black list, which entailed a total economic blockade and the arrest and deportation to the far north o f m uch o f the population. T hen followed a purge o f the Com m unist of­ ficials o f the region, who were held to have been either weak or actively cooperating w ith the nationalist enemy.36 A num ber o f problems had coalesced and come to a head in the Kuban grain-procurem ent crisis. Ukraine was the m ost sensitive republic for the operation o f the Soviet U nion as a m ultiethnic state. It was also im portant for the Soviet U nions international relations, since it bordered on Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. The region contained many o f the Soviet U nions key industrial projects, and it was the U nions bread­ basket, the arena for the struggle to feed the cities and the armed forces in the face o f peasant defiance. There has been m uch controversy over the famine o f 1933-1934, which killed some five m illion peasants, m ost o f them Ukrainian. Some historians have suggested that the famine was de­ liberately induced as an act o f genocide directed against the Ukrainian people.37 Stephan M erl has contested this interpretation on the grounds that the famine did not embrace all o f Ukraine but actually did affect some non-U krainian regions; and that the device o f setting up road-

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blocks to prevent peasants getting into towns to find food, or even some­ times crossing republican frontiers, was practiced in other areas besides Ukraine.38 In actual fret, the m ost likely explanation seems to be that an ethnically directed policy was not originally intended but emerged in the course o f the crisis. A Politburo decree o f December 14, 1932, lambasted the U krainian and N orth Caucasian leaders for having stood by and allowed "kulaks, former officers, Pediurites and supporters o f the Kuban rada to penetrate the collective farm leadership” and for having provided "the most evil enemies o f the party, working class and kolkhoz peasantry, the saboteurs o f grain requisition, w ith party cards to put in their pockets.” The very next day another decree ended all Ukrainizing measures inside the RSFSR, resulting in the loss o f special U krainian status for several thousand village soviets and collective farms. O n January 24, 1933, a Central Com m ittee resolution stated that "the Party organs in Ukraine have not succeeded in carrying out the Party tasks entrusted to them in the areas o f organization o f grain storage and com pletion o f the plan for grain collection.” T he Ukrainian C om m unist Party leadership was thor­ oughly purged not once, but twice, first in 1933 and then in 1937, w ith reliable outsiders being sent in both times to regain control.39 There is no question that Stalin regarded Ukraine as the key to gaining a grip on the various problems that freed him in the 1930s. The result was that Ukraine became the m ost oppressed and exploited o f the republics (with the possible exception o f Kazakhstan) during those years, and consider­ able efforts were made to Russify it and subject it more tightly to Moscow.

Life in the Kolkhozy The face o f the countryside was radically transform ed by the upheavals o f 1929-1933. G oing back a few years later to take care o f her sick sister, Kuderina found her Tambov village almost unrecognizable: There were no threshing floors or courtyards anymore. The huts were neglected externally— they had not been painted or w hite­ washed. But in almost all huts curtains had appeared at the win­ dows, usually gauze, occasionally tulle. O nly thatched roofs had re­ mained, as I recall. W here there had been robust huts roofed w ith corrugated iron, only em pty gaps remained w ith piles o f old clay

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wall plaster. These were the homes o f the dekulakized, which had been dism antled and transported elsewhere. T he church was closed and was falling apart. There was no fence around it. T he roof had not been painted for a long tim e, and in places rust showed om i­ nously through. T he walls were dirty and stained w ith damp. The bell tower was densely occupied by the nests o f jackdaws, which were flying around it.40 T he disorganization and the dem oralization o f the peasants m eant gross underproduction and eventually famine, especially in the m ost fer­ tile grain-growing regions, such as Ukraine, the Kuban, west Siberia, and the Volga basin. In their new status as kolkhozniki, peasants sowed less grain than before, took for longer to do it, and tended the fields afterward less thoroughly, so that they became choked w ith weeds. W hen Viktor Kravchenko visited a village in D nepropetrovsk oblast in 1932, he was shocked by the neglected condition o f "im plements and machinery which had once been cared for like so m any jewels by their private owners.” Horses were knee-deep in m ud in their stalls, "reading newspapers,” as a rural m etaphor had it when they were idle and not being fed.41 Stalin sent instructions that grain collections were nevertheless to be rigidly enforced. Peasants reacted w ith sit-down strikes or deliberately negligent work. W hen they could, they would steal grain from the fields or at least leave it unharvested, to be gleaned later. They did not conceal w hat they were doing. A t Petrovka, in Azov raion, they delivered an ulti­ matum: “W hen you give us bread then we will show up at work. If you don’t, then bring in the harvest yourselves.”42 Stalin reacted w ith cold fury; for him this was a renewal o f the civil war, fought w ith different weapons. W hen the w riter M ikhail Sholokhov warned him w hat was happening, he replied that “the grain-growers were waging w hat was virtually a quiet’ war against Soviet power. A war o f star­ vation, dear Com rade Sholokhov.” Stalin reacted in kind, ordering that villages foiling to deliver were to be cut off from all retail trade, while households hiding grain were to be punished by exile or up to ten years’ im prisonm ent. A decree o f August 7, 1932, actually prescribed the death penalty for thefts o f “collective or cooperative property,” that is, anything produced on the kolkhoz, which m ight be no more than a sheaf o f corn. Blockades were not lifted until the first deaths from starvation had taken place. In M arch 1933 an official emissary in the N orth Caucasus noted

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that "cases are reported o f edema and death from em aciation, o f the con­ sum ption o f dogs, rats and frogs, and even o f cannibalism .” In west Sibe­ ria a health inspector reported visiting a kolkhoz family at dinner tim e and seeing "on the table. . . gnawed bones from a dead horse,” while else­ where villagers were "grinding sunflower stems, flax and hem p seeds, chaff and dried potato peelings . . . People walk around like shadows, silent, va­ cant . . . O ne rarely sees an anim al on the street (apparendy the last ones have been eaten).”43 Unlike the famine o f 1921-1922, this one remained stricdy secret, in order to preserve the public image o f a successful first five-year plan. M any starving peasants who tried to make for town to find food were turned back by roadblocks. All the same, quite a few got through. As Kuderina recalled, in Kharkov "one fine m orning all the central streets o f the towns were filled w ith crowds o f incom ing starving, swollen peasants. W hole families o f them sat all along the sidewalks, including old people and children. M any were weeping, while others w ith a doom ed look in their eyes stretched out their hands for ‘alms.’ Some were lying down, sick or dying. All o f them had lice crawling over them . T he sight o f these des­ perately suffering people was intolerable, but there was no way one could help. Everyone walked silently past them , hanging their heads in unspo­ ken sympathy.” N ot everyone was sympathetic, though. Some pushed the more persistent beggars away, frightened o f their lice.44 In all, it has been estimated that some four to five million people died as a direct result o f the famine.45 In a century o f Russian tragedies, the w anton destruction o f the peas­ ant village was perhaps the m ost terrible. T he poet Boris Pasternak made a “creative trip” to the Urals countryside in order to write a book on the new kolkhozy. W hen he returned, however, he never wrote it, so horrified was he by w hat he had witnessed: “W ords do not have the power to ex­ press w hat I saw. It was such an inhum an, unimaginable catastrophe, such a terrible disaster that it became— if one can say such a thing— abstract and beyond rational apprehension. I fell ill. For an entire year I was un­ able to w rite.”46 T he tragedy was the product o f two Russian traditions at war w ith each other, that o f the socialist millenarians and that o f the peasants. T he so­ cialists believed they were modernizing the village, bringing it into line w ith current industrial modes o f production, technology, and social orga­ nization. They developed a whole barrage o f new terminology to describe

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the labor processes o f the new forms: brigadir (brigade leader), trudoden (labor-day: the unit o f pay), udam ik (shock-worker), and m ost ominously trudguzhpovinnost (labor and cartage obligations).47 T he peasants, by con­ trast, saw themselves as being dragged back into a “second serfdom,” a de­ pendency from which their grandparents had been freed seventy years earlier. T he outcom e o f the confrontation was clear. T he Soviet state and C om m unist Party were now the decisive forces in the life o f the village: the power structure had been perm anently altered. Ownership o f the land, together w ith machinery and the larger animals, had been taken from individual households and vested in the kolkhoz as a whole; from that land the form was obliged to deliver to the state a specific am ount o f assorted produce each year. This may look like a return to the land tenure system o f the mir, but at the same tim e the strips were consolidated into large fields. In any case, the vital question was: W ho decided how the land w ould be used? W hereas before 1930 such decisions had been in the hands o f an assembly consisting o f all heads o f households, that assem­ bly now became m uch larger and included all kolkhoz members: men, women, heads o f households, and ordinary household members. In a purely formal sense, that assembly m ight be more democratic, but in practice authority rested w ith the kolkhoz chairm an and the few profes­ sional people dose to him . H e was the representative o f the party and the authority o f the state, and his proposals regarding sowing, harvesting, the care o f animals, or the upkeep o f buildings were normally accepted. W ork organization also became collective. This was a complete innova­ tion for the Russian village, where previously households had devised and im plem ented their own work patterns— adm ittedly in consultation w ith others when land was held in strips. Now they were organized in brigades o f thirty or so, each headed by a brigade leader appointed by the chair­ man. He, in consultation w ith the chairm an, w ould decide on their daily assignments, sum m on them at the beginning o f the working day—some­ times using the bell confiscated from the church— supervise their labor, and keep a record o f them for the purposes o f later payment. Being sub­ ject to the equivalent o f the factory whisde did not suit m ost peasants, and brigade leaders often had to go around to their homes in m id-m orn­ ing knocking on doors to sum m on them to work. O r the opposite m ight happen, as V iktor Beliaev recalled from his village: “T he sun stood high in

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the sky. Formerly the peasants would already long have been in the fields, but now the kolkhozniki were sitting on logs that someone had brought and w aiting for the brigade leader to talk things over w ith the chairm an and bring their various w ork assignments. They smoked and laughed themselves. All decisions were now being taken by the chairm an, a towns­ m an.”48 T heir reluctance to w ork was explained partly by the system o f pay. T heir efforts were recorded in the form o f “labor-days,” notional units o f work that were p u t down on their records and added up at the end o f the year to determ ine their earnings. From the peasants’ point o f view there were two snags about this system. First, they were paid only after the kol­ khoz’s other financial obligations had been fully discharged, including de­ liveries to the state, deductions for the kolkhoz capital fund, and repay­ m ent o f loans to the State Bank. In bad years litde or nothing remained, so that in effect they had reverted to the serflike practice o f barshchina (corvée). Second, all pay was determ ined by the brigade’s total work, not by that o f each individual, which was too com plicated to calculate, so that individual effort was not rewarded unless it was replicated by one’s col­ leagues. This was krugovaia poruka in a new guise. T he result was that un­ productive households m ight be expelled from the kolkhoz under pressure from their colleagues.49 The Com m unist victory was not quite complete. After the famine o f 1932-1933 the Soviet authorities and peasant Russia dropped their con­ frontation and reached a compromise. Peasants decided that continuing the struggle w ould destroy their villages and their children’s future. T he Com m unists could also see that full application o f their plans would en­ tail mass starvation, not only in the villages but in the towns too. They came to the conclusion that regular food supplies could be ensured only by leaving peasants some autonom y and some incentives to work hard. For that reason, it was decreed that each household could hold a small pri­ vate plot, typically a third to half a hectare, on which it could keep chick­ ens, graze a cow, and grow fruit and vegetables. Peasants were allowed to sell the produce from their plots for whatever prices they could fetch at designated markets in town (incongruously known as kolkhoz markets). In other words, a m inim al private m arket in agricultural products was perm itted. This private market became a crucial source o f agricultural products for the towns. By 1950, for example, 47 percent o f meat, 50 per-

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cent o f milk, 61 percent o f potatoes, and 74 percent o f eggs sold on the m arket were being produced on these private plots. For everything except bread, in fact, townsfolk relied on private trade.50 Private sales constituted a tenuous link w ith the towns, but in other re­ spects villages became both more isolated and less self-sustaining in their economic life. They lost the auxiliary economic activities that had pro­ vided essential services for villagers and kept them in touch w ith the towns: T he authorities outlawed the small-scale village handicraft workers and craftsmen who made sheepskins and felt boots, sewed coats, m anufactured carting equipment.. . . T he owners and shareholders o f litde water mills, butter chum eries, and beehives were declared kulaks, even though these tiny enterprises were essential to the vil­ lage economy. . . . Tinkers stopped com ing to the village to m end samovars, saucepans, and teapots, there was no longer anyone to sol­ der buckets. The rag-and-bone m erchants, the buyers o f coarse cloth disappeared. There were no more carpenters’ artels, as almost no one was building houses. Even stove-setters, the m ost crucial village construction workers, would take on jobs only if they could prove that their earnings did not foil under the category o f “nonlabor incom e.”51 Taken together, these gross disruptions o f the pattern o f rural existence generated great bitterness and dem oralization. O ne feature o f prerevolu­ tionary days that was not reproduced in the Soviet village o f the 1930s was the m yth o f the “good tsar.” Peasants hated everyone who was responsible for foisting the “second serfdom” on them— especially Stalin. A Finnish C om m unist who visited some villages in 1934 reported that “there were none o f the paeans to the great Stalin that one heard in the cities”; “my first impression, which remained lasting, was that everyone was a counter­ revolutionary, and that the whole countryside was in full revolt against Moscow and Stalin.” O nce the collective forms had settled down, there was little question o f actual revolt, but in other respects materials that have recendy come to light— as well as the general tendency to flee the countryside if possible— has confirmed his observation. Sheila Fitzpatrick, who has studied the evidence closely, sums it up: “The prevailing opinion, as expressed in rumors, was that Stalin, as the organizer o f collectivization,

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was the peasants’ inveterate enemy: they wished him dead, his regime overthrown, and collectivization undone, even at the cost o f war and for­ eign occupation.”52 Those who could leave the village did so, legally or illegally. Thousands o f beggars and wanderers took to the roads, and many o f them tried to setde down unnoticed in the towns. To stem the outflow the state intro­ duced internal passports in December 1932, w ithholding them from kolkhozniki. W ithout a passport it was illegal to stay more than three nights anywhere but one’s registered place o f residence. T hat is not to say that no peasants did so, but the lack o f a passport constituted a severe im ­ pedim ent to mobility. O ne needed the permission o f the kolkhoz chair­ man to travel at all, let alone to resetde elsewhere.53 The devastation and dem oralization o f the villages was such that many families took the wrenching decision to abandon homes that had been in the family for generations. Some, the more far-sighted or those who al­ ready had urban connections or experience o f life in the towns, left before collectivization gained m om entum and while they could still sell their ru­ ral possessions. O thers were caught up in the process itself, am ong them "kulaks” not deemed heinous enough to be deported, but deprived o f house and hom e and left to their own devices. Later chaos, poverty, and famine drove out many who had initially decided to give the collectives a chance. O ne peasant from the Central Industrial Region wrote in May 1933: “Here on the collective farm I am living the life o f a badly fed ani­ mal. I have been robbed o f my grain and all my reserves. My catde have also been taken . . . Therefore life here is impossible. I am going into the town to get a job as a workm an, and there I will be fed.”54 M uch about the new life, including the restrictions on mobility, was reminiscent o f serfdom. T he overall social and ideological context was, however, quite different. All young men were now obliged to perform m ilitary service, while those w ith skills m ight be drafted under orgnabor (the state labor recruitm ent scheme) for one o f many flagship industrial projects. They were caught up in a stream o f social m obility that was part o f the new life; but m ost women and older men were excluded from it. The 1930s saw the beginning o f an exodus o f young men that in time would reduce m ost villages to melancholy asylums for old people and un­ married women. Even those who stayed behind were beginning to acquire urban expectations. The state had assumed a m uch higher profile in their lives, and they came to expect that it— rather than their families— would

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provide for them in sickness and old age. If before 1861 they had looked to the barin to provide for life’s shocks, they now transferred that expecta­ tion to the state. Having forcibly asserted its authority over the peasant way o f life, the Soviet state had also created a new culture o f dependency.55

Ruralization of the Towns D uring the first five-year plans millions o f people left the countryside and streamed into the towns. Some o f them were drawn by the attraction o f training or a job in the city; some left w hat they felt to be intolerable con­ ditions in the village— and a good many were m otivated by both reasons. T he results were starding. Between 1926 and 1939 the urban population o f the Soviet U nion more than doubled, from 26.3 m illion to 60.4 mil­ lion, as did that o f the RSFSR, from 16.7 to 33.7 m illion. Moscow grew to more than twice its size, to 4.54 m illion, Leningrad almost to 3.4 mil­ lion. In some towns growth was even more remarkable: in Gorkii the pop­ ulation w ent from 222,000 to 644,000, in Sverdlovsk from 140,000 to 423,000.56 M ost o f this growth was caused by im m igration rather than the birth o f children to exisdng townspeople; in f r a the urban birth rate was declining by 1930, thanks to poor living conditions and the increased em ployment rate o f women. In the early years o f industrialization, in the country as a whole the death rate increased as well as the birth rate, thanks to urban overcrowd­ ing, poor hygiene, and the uncertain food supply. M any people were liv­ ing in cold, dam p cellars or wooden barracks and hostels, poorly supplied w ith cooking, cleaning, and heating facilities.57 Conditions were especially bad in 1932-1934, when the food supply was interm ittent, and ration cards had to be introduced. Beginning in 1935 they improved somewhat, as the work o f providing piped water, sewage works, and proper medical facilities advanced. Party-state officials and specially chosen workers began to escape from the com m unal apartm ents into newly constructed family units. W hat peasants found when they reached the town was both exciting and bewildering— the tall buildings, the noise, the constant traffic, the huge num ber o f unknown frees in the streets. The w ork o f the fra o ry was disorienting too: instead o f working as long as necessary to complete a job, one had to clock in and out at certain times and do disconneaed fragments o f jobs, often using unfam iliar tools and equipm ent.

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But for new imm igrants there were some familiar features too. M any o f them found lodging and work in a place where their fellow villagers had preceded them . They setded in a house as part o f a zemliachestvo, an asso­ ciation o f tenants from the same rural origin. M igration had been part o f the pattern o f peasant life well before 1917, and it redoubled now. Ruraldwellers would sometimes make use o f connections or inform ation net­ works that had been forged decades earlier. (In 1917—1921, after all, many city-dwellers had moved the other way, to escape poverty in the towns, sometimes after a decade or more o f living there.) O n the whole villagers made for a town not too far from their homeland, using invita­ tions from relatives or at least people from their own rural area to help them find shelter, food, and a job in the early stages o f relocation. O ne survey o f Moscow construction workers showed that in the 1930s more than 80 percent o f them had found their job through previous seasonal work or through inform ation gained from village acquaintances. M igrants naturally trusted such contacts far more than the blandishm ents offered by officials from orgnabor,:58 In a sense the new imm igrants became urbanized, but it w ould be equally true to say that they ruralized the cities. O ften the first dwelling place would be a com munal barracks. V iktor Zam ochin later described to oral historians the settlem ent he had lived in as a child at Medvedkovo, on the edge o f Moscow: It consisted o f several single-storey long wooden baraki, w ith vegeta­ ble gardens all around. At one end o f the barak, there was a com m u­ nal kitchen and toilets. It had a central corridor w ith doors. Each family had its own door and window, but inside you could separate out the space as you wished. People put up partitions, but they were in a way—symbolic. Everyone knew everyone, everyone knew every­ thing about everyone. You never locked the doors, o f course, and no one would have taken a carrot or even a radish from your allotm ent, even if you hadn’t put a fence round it. We children ran all over the place. O ur mothers were at work all day, but they weren’t worried: they knew there was no danger. It was like in the village; there was always someone left to look after us. Some o f the tenants kept a pig or chickens in a nearby shed, and in the spring and summer evenings everyone tended vegetables on the allot-

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m ents, chatting to one another as they worked: “D uring the holidays, we cooked giant crocks full o f stew and shared the food am ong us. Everyone brought a plate, someone played the accordion, and we sang and danced.” Clearly the tenants were taking every opportunity to reproduce features o f rural life, even though the living space was m uch more crowded and the arrangements far more com m unal than in the village. After the barracks, the next stage for m ost imm igrants was the commu­ nal apartm ent (kom m unalnaia kvartira). T he original intention o f the So­ viet regime was that people should live in doma-kommuny, where many family functions, such as cooking, laundry, and child-care, w ould be orga­ nized collectively, in order to relieve women o f household chores and leave family members maximum freedom to lead their own lives together or apart, as they wished.S9 T he regime, however, never invested enough in the building and re­ building required to establish such collectives as genuine models o f social living. O n the contrary, they became notorious for their squalor and lack o f hygiene. They were just the kind o f homes the new elite did wish to have. In any case by the 1930s the official ideology had shifted back to re­ garding the family as the core unit o f society, and such dwelling construc­ tion as did take place in those years was o f family apartm ents. They were awarded to senior officials o f party and state, to Stakhanovite workers, and to other specially favored groups. O rdinary people had to crowd into the existing, largely prerevolutionary, stock o f dwelling space. Given the scale o f im m igration into the towns during the 1930s, providing adequate housing w ould have created problems in any circumstances, but the dif­ ficulties were exacerbated by the fact that construction o f homes was not a priority o f the first five-year plans. In m ost countries the result would have been shantytowns on the urban peripheries. O w ing to the Soviet regimes egalitarian principles, however, together w ith its desire to adm inister and control social processes, shantytowns were unacceptable (though in extre­ mis they sprang up too). Instead, as we have seen, as early as 1918 local soviets were decreeing upbtnenie, or “crowding together.”60 To demarcate the unfamiliar, shrunken private spaces, tenants would erect plywood partitions: “O ld rooms and hallways were partitioned and subdivided, creating weird angular spaces, w ith a window opening into a sunless back yard, or w ithout any windows. Every tenant exercised her imagination in inventing curtains and screens to delineate their m inim um privacy.”61

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The com munal apartm ent fitted some o f the outlook and practices o f the village com m une into the new structures o f Soviet life. Since the for­ m er bourgeois members had been deprived o f their wealth, everyone shared a kind o f egalitarian poverty, and marked departures from the aver­ age were regarded w ith suspicion: the very poor because they were a bur­ den to their neighbors, the affluent because their wealth suggested crim i­ nal behavior that could be disruptive. O n the other hand, as in the village, a hierarchy o f apartment-dwellers existed alongside the egalitarian fea­ tures. At the top were the kvartupolnomochennyi, the appointed apartm ent supervisor, and also those who had good connections w ith the domovoi kom itet, the house com m ittee that managed the whole apartm ent block. A t this level, too, were members o f the “comrades’ court,” which adjudi­ cated disputes w ith the local soviet or party com m ittee, and w ith the po­ lice. Also near the top were those who had lived there longest, and there­ fore had the greatest com m itm ent to the collective, as well as the m ost detailed knowledge o f the apartm ent’s “com m on law,” the inform al ar­ rangements that had become legitim ated by time. M ost tenants had their billets in the apartm ent awarded by the institution for which they worked, so that their tenancy intensified their dependence on their employer. Members o f the apartm ent had to coexist somehow, and so they de­ vised rules about how this could be done, in ways as far as possible accept­ able to everyone. It is true that a statute law existed in the form o f a 1935 circular entided “O n the Struggle w ith Hooliganism in A partm ents.” Among other things it prohibited “loudsh behavior such as: arranging regular drinking sessions, accompanied by noise, brawling, and vulgar language; beadng people up (especially women and children); making in­ sults or threats o f revenge; exploidng one’s official or party rank; debauch­ ery; ethnic victimization; personal abuse; the playing o f malicious practi­ cal jokes (throwing other people’s property out o f kitchens or other public areas, spoiling food being cooked by other tenants, damaging property, groceries, etc).”62 The circular presents a revealing checklist o f pracdces that experience m ust have shown were com m on, but it offered no advice on how to deal w ith them , other than recourse to informal comrades’ courts, which were structured rather like village courts. Living in communal dwellings necessitated inform al m utual consensus and decision-making, which required regular consultation, even if there was no mechanism resembling the skhod. Some rules, for example about the use o f bathroom or telephone, or about paying for gas and electricity.

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were w ritten and displayed in a prom inent position. M ost rules, though, were informal; they were m ediated through kitchen gossip and perhaps tested through the occasional skandal—a row, scene, or shouting match conducted in public— in which the w inner s version would be accepted as authoritative for the future.63 As in the village, the fortunes o f families and individuals would fluctu­ ate. Since they were all near the subsistence frontier, it was helpful if they could tide each other over during bad times. To some extent it was normal practice to keep an eye on one another’s children, or use a neighbors saucepan, sieve, matches, or salt, but all these instances o f aid needed to be regulated by m utual agreement or convention. Lending money was more problem atic but also generally expected where there were good rela­ tions. Besides, refusal to lend money m ight lead to theft, which always disturbed good relations and generated tension. O nce a loan was made, the debtor would usually do his utm ost to return the money on tim e, to keep up the relationship, even if he had shamefacedly to request another loan the next m orning.64 In other respects the com m unal apartm ent was very different from the village, or even the baraki, where people shared a com mon background and oudook. Tenants did not usually engage in com mon activities, even on festival days. As one respondent put it, personal life was “bleached out,” w ithout a real sense o f com m unity being created to compensate. T he boundaries o f the private were fur more porous, since private func­ tions like washing were conducted in public rooms, and there was no buffer zone other than a flimsy door between family rooms and public spaces. Because several generations o f one family usually lived in one room , the lack o f privacy also m eant that, as one respondent put it, “I had to take my trousers off in front o f my mother-in-law.”65 T he kind o f embarrassment that could result is exemplified in an inci­ dent Svedana Boym recalls from her Leningrad childhood. H er m other was offering tea to foreign guests— unusual and exoric visitors in such sur­ roundings— and discoursing on the cultural riches o f the Hermitage and the Russian M useum, when an alcoholic neighbor slum ped to the floor right outside their door: “A litde yellow stream slowly made its way under the door into the room. Smelly, embarrassing, intrusive, it formed a litde puddle right in front o f the dinner table.”66 N othing comparable could happen in the peasant hut, which by comparison was like a casde w ith a drawbridge.

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Even going to the kitchen to make a cup o f tea entailed being ready for a public encounter, possibly a skandaL This situation caused great distress to urbanized professional people and intellectuals, who needed long peri­ ods o f privacy, peace o f m ind, and unbroken concentration for their work. It may be that the lack o f privacy contributed to the relative frequency o f paranoid m ental disorders in the USSR; nearly every apartm ent had its mad person, like the “woman who was convinced that others were putting bits o f glass in her soap, and that they w anted to poison her.”67 T he reduced privacy o f the com m unal apartm ent was well suited to the needs o f the surveillance state, especially given that the state owned all dwelling spaces and could reassign them at will. The sociologist Ekaterina Gerasimova has called the outcom e “public privacy.” Neighbors could su­ pervise each other’s behavior w ithout any difficulty: the dose proxim ity in which people lived ensured that m ajor family events were known by everyone. Even ordinary conversations m ight well be overheard if they took place in the kitchen— the venue for general sociability— or in a fam­ ily room w ith thin walls. Usually one or more members, perhaps the upolnomochcnnyi and one other, w ould be reporting regularly to the secu­ rity police; so too w ould the dvom ik, the janitor, cleaner, and handym an. Anyone could easily do so if they chose, merely by w riting an anonymous denunciation. They m ight well do this in order to elim inate conflict, or in the hope o f gaining extra living space or other forms o f privilege.68 Keeping up a sense o f equality and fairness was even more crucial to col­ lective harm ony than in the village, and some tenants were always pre­ pared to enforce that sense by turning to the authorities if they deemed it necessary. They did this w ith every feeling o f justification, o f sustaining a moral code, not violating it. T hat is one reason that denunciations be­ came so common. T he greatest difference from the village com mune, however, was the varied social background o f the members. Usually a core o f long-tim e ur­ ban-dwellers, some o f them bourgeois in origin and relatively well edu­ cated, would find themselves sharing space w ith recent imm igrants from the countryside. T heir domestic habits, as well as their underlying views o f life, were so different that collective norms were far harder to establish and m aintain than in the village. (In this respect com m unal apartm ents also differed from shantytowns.) Long-time urbanites had expectations o f privacy, hygiene, and courtesy that were not shared by the country cousins w ith whom they now had to live in close proximity. These discrepancies

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generated constant tension and conflict over dirt in the bathroom and toi­ let, over permissible behavior for visitors, over noise in the early m orning or late evening, and over the disappearance o f food and items o f personal property. These conflicts, too, m ight provoke denunciations.69 From the late 1950s onward, as the regime undertook a huge program o f domestic housing construction, many people left com munal apart­ m ents to setde in private units. Usually they did so w ith great relief; some, however, reported that they felt uneasy in their new surroundings because o f the lack o f com pany and the feeling that there was no one to fall back on in difficulties.70 T he com m unal apartm ent and (as we shall see) the Soviet enterprise ensured the continuation o f w hat Daniel Bertaux has called the “com m u­ nal” model o f Russian life: equality, joint responsibility, discipline, and subjection to authorities, w ith enforced interdependence generating a cer­ tain reluctant solidarity. O n the whole this was the social model fostered by the O rthodox C hurch too, though in the 1930s it was powerless to play any part in social life. T he presiding patriarch was now Stalin. O ne way or another, everyone was perm anently affected by the com m unal ex­ perience. As Svedana Boym has com m ented, “Every com m unal apart­ m ent dweller is probably scarred for life b y . . . symbolic ‘joint responsibil­ ity,’ a double bind o f love and hatred, o f envy and attachm ent, o f secrecy and exhibitionism , o f em barrassment and com prom ise.”71 Daily life usually remained semirural too. To continue the full religious life o f the village was impossible, but all the same, recent immigrants w ould continue to celebrate saints’ days and other religious festivals, de­ spite managem ent’s efforts to compel them to observe only the new secu­ lar holidays. T he regime introduced a ten-day work week, but it never really caught on in many industrial enterprises, since the m ajority o f workers would take Sunday off anyway. For several decades village cus­ toms coexisted alongside urban practices in a strange amalgam. Some re­ cent imm igrants, for example, hung both icons o f saints and portraits o f Lenin in their barracks or hostel rooms. Lenin was the deified figure in the society they now inhabited, and they wanted to invoke his intercessory powers to com plem ent those o f the more familiar saints. They would gather w ith friends in parks on church or Soviet holidays, gossip, and sometimes sing songs and dance— only now often w ith tunes they had heard over the radio or in the streets around them rather than those they had brought from the countryside. Former peasants who could afford to

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do so w ould dress in the latest urban fashions, to deflect the sneering con­ descension o f more established townsfolk. A particular problem for recent urbanites was that their children alm ost invariably became more literate and far better educated than they themselves were; children learned the compulsory rhetoric o f Soviet urban life and w ith it the skills required to m anipulate the system, in a way that could leave their parents floundering in resentful incom prehension.72 Peasant culture gradually adapted itself to the urban scene, sometimes in the process bringing sharp rural skepticism to the inadequacies o f city life, as in the following chastushki (ditties): N a verkakh oni zasedali I prozasedalisia. Magaziny opusteli, Bez shtanov ostalisia. They’ve held meetings at high levels; they’ve held meetings endlessly. Meanwhile the shops em ptied, and we were left w ithout pants. Priezzhali k nam uchenye, Chtoby zuby nam vstavliat,” A zachem nam ikh vstavliat,” Esli nechego zhevat.” Scientists came to us To give us false teeth. But why give us false teeth, if there’s nothing to chew on?73 Facilities for everyday life were usually inadequate, especially in the newly built industrial centers. O ne early recruit to the steel works at M agnitogorsk recalled getting out o f the train at the (barely existent) rail­ way station, staring out hopefolly over the em pty steppe and asking: “Is it for to the city?” “Two years,” someone quipped in reply. Workers were liv­ ing in tents, dugouts, or hastily thrown up barracks because finances as­ signed to building apartm ents was diverted to industrial needs. Even

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where an industrial town was raw and unwelcoming, though, many peas­ ants flocked to it to escape the new-style rural destitution. In 1933 57 percent o f new recruits in M agnitogorsk were peasants, m ost o f whom had not come through orgnabor. Probably a third o f them were illiterate and lacked elementary industrial skills. Labor turnover was enormous: in 1933, 53,000 workers were recruited in M agnitogorsk, but the same num ber quit.74 M any established townsfolk resented this flood o f coarse and some­ times disorderly im m igrants. In 1932 a Donbass worker— a keen up­ holder o f law and order—wrote to the Central Executive Com m ittee com plaining that “at this tim e o f intense struggle and selfless work, at a tim e o f serious shortage o f working hands, here— in the USSR—espe­ cially recendy, the quantity o f wandering, nonworking elements has in­ creased, m ost o f them from the countryside, people who have taken fright at the first difficulties o f work on the kolkhoz. Crowds o f them meander around the stations and city streets, com m itting robberies and m urders.” Moreover, he added, “in connection w ith occasional difficulties o f a tem ­ porary nature w ith food supplies in some towns and w ith clothes and footwear in others many citizens have taken up speculation, exploiting the tem porary difficulties o f the toiling people. They should be apprehended as irreconcilable enemies o f the proletarian toiling people, and the su­ preme measure o f social defense should be applied to them: shooting w ithout any abatem ent or amnesty.”75 In the drive to create new industry at a super-fast tem po, technical norms were violated and nonindustrial needs slighted or ignored. A dam m ed lake intended for the water supply was built quickly but turned out too shallow and froze over in winter, so that it was utterly inadequate for its purpose. T he official line, though, was that “w hat m attered was that the dam had been built— not only built but ahead o f schedule— and in the process hundreds o f youths had come o f age as loyal partisans o f the cause.”76 The spirit o f propaganda, gigantism, and record-breaking vitiated much o f the planning and construction. There was no such thing as a small store or repair workshop that one could “pop around the corner” to. To buy food, clothing, or consumer goods, to get ones shoes repaired, even to make a bus journey to work, entailed long waits in line, where natural sociability generated a good deal o f grum bling about the “system.” To the present day Russian urban life is still partly rural in texture. In-

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tellectuals, at least o f the older generation, cultivate a tradition o f informal hospitability and sociability, usually in the kitchen. M anners are simple, and some m ight regard them as boorish, reflecting decades o f living alongside imperfecdy urbanized villagers. M ost ordinary Russians now live in separate family apartm ents, but they still gather whenever they can, which is to say from early spring to late autum n, in courtyards and squares to sit on benches or improvised seats, where conditions allow them to do so. T he men play dominoes or cards, the women gossip, and the children play nearby in sandpits and on swings.

The Soviet Enterprise T he nature o f the Soviet enterprise was severely distorted by the context in which it had been set up. In theory Gosplan (the state planning com­ mission) assigned enterprises a set o f annual production targets as part o f the five-year plan. T heir task was to fulfill those targets. In practice, how­ ever, managers could not just give orders; they found they had to concede to workers a good deal o f control over the labor process. It was as if the ar­ tel had returned by the back door to determ ine m atters such as the speed and organization o f work and the quality o f the finished product. Workers were scarce, and to retain them and secure at least their minim al coopera­ tion, managers had to allow them a certain day-to-day autonomy, and also to turn a blind eye to lateness, drinking, periods o f slack work, and insub­ ordination. At the same tim e, given the ubiquitous shortages, workers de­ pended on enterprise managers for many m aterial benefits otherwise dif­ ficult to obtain, so they too had an interest in putting in enough serious work to fulfill the plan. This m utual “codependency” reproduced roughly the “joint responsibility” o f the village com mune, except that the link to the state was now m uch more direct and the element o f state-supported patronage much greater.77 M utual supervision o f the workforce was also m uch tighter, backed up by the party cell, the Cadres D epartm ent, and the NKVD/KGB. Since there was no market economy to make demands on the pro­ ductive system, the outcom e o f the encounter between these conflicting forces was a compromise between the demands o f Gosplan, the enterprise managers, and the workers. The Soviet enterprise became an institution dedicated to fulfilling the needs o f these three major participants. Gosplan required fulfillment o f plan quotas. The managers and workers required a

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plan that was not too dem anding; the job o f the managers was to secure such a plan by negotiating w ith Gosplan, and then to create the frame­ work w ithin which the workers could formally fulfill it. In the absence o f m arket disciplines, how they did this and the quality o f the product turned out at the end was nobody’s concern. T he Soviet enterprise be­ came ever poorer at generating the output that was its ostensible function and became instead an institution whose m ain aim was to satisfy the life needs o f those who worked in it. T hrough the enterprise the workers re­ ceived pay, housing, medical care, recreation, social security, and often sta­ ple food supplies— in fact the elementary requirements o f life in a society o f scarcity. T he managers received those things too, and also status, secu­ rity, and the habit o f com m and. Managers and workers were dependent on each other for the continuation o f this benign situation. An over-de­ m anding manager was a threat to the workers’ com fortable arrangements and would be m et by strategies o f resistance that in the end threatened to jeopardize his benefits. O n the other hand, hopelessly lazy, drunken, or in­ com petent workers w ould not fulfill the plan and so w ould get him into serious trouble.78 T he whole situation is rem iniscent o f the com m unal vil­ lage arrangem ents, which ensured subsistence by cooperation, ostensible deference to authority, and agreed traditional work practices, sustainable for those o f average ability. Innovative technology, bringing w ith it new w ork practices, was a threat to these arrangements. T he result was an economy that produced a basic m inim um to ensure a tolerable existence for those w ithin the system, but that was hard on out­ siders and insensitive to the needs o f consumers or the demands o f new technology. Soviet society was intended to be an egalitarian society based on abundance; it actually became a hierarchical society based on scarcity. The texture o f the society can be found in the vertical and horizontal per­ sonal relationships necessary to get around the scarcity. Enterprise manag­ ers employed tolkachi, “pushers,” to secure urgendy needed materials, spare parts, and so on, in short supply: their job was to cultivate good per­ sonal reladonships w ith potential suppliers. In everyday life ordinary peo­ ple constandy came up against shortages or low-quality goods generated by this system o f producdon. They would overcome the problems thus created by seeking alternative sources o f supply, either through influence w ith superiors, or through personal reladonships based on the m utual ex­ change o f favors.79 In either case, Soviet institutions had a certain trompe lo eil quality: patron-client reladonships or m utual personal networks of-

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fered the high road to survival. Those who were outside them were seri­ ously disadvantaged; they did not, however, altogether form an underclass since the state provided m inim al social security benefits to everyone. This was the beginning o f a new kind o f tacit agreement between the state and the mass o f the people: the welfare compact. In this way Soviet Russia reached a compromise w ith traditional Russia. This kind o f inform al economic system had the great advantage o f sim­ plifying the continued integration o f non-Russians, especially those from the Caucasus and Central Asia. There the population, accustomed to the exchange o f inform al economic benefits through hierarchical extended families, was able to adjust fairly easily to the planned economy and to the nom enklatura appointm ents system, which generated its own “dans” in the form o f personal dependency networks.80 So far we have been dealing w ith “norm al” life. But as the son o f a priest later recalled, “In this period reality evolved in two distinct dim en­ sions. In one, stars were raised on the Kremlin, expeditions to the N orth Pole were achieved, young people took exams and danced to jazz. In the other, there were denunciations, arrests, prisons, illegalities.”81 It is to this other dim ension, and its concentrated essence in the Gulag, that we m ust now turn.

Gulag T he Gulag came into being at the intersection o f the Bolsheviks’ m illen­ nial dreams and their apocalyptic nightmares. T heir hopes spawned con­ sequences no less terrible than their fears. Russians had long dream ed o f mobilizing the great mineral wealth that their geologists had prospected: gold, platinum , and nickel, not to speak o f coal and oil, m uch o f it buried in the frozen soil o f the far north and Siberia. Before the revolution the great chemist D m itrii Mendeleev had published a best-selling guide to Russia’s riches, G etting to Know Russia, in which he had extolled his coun­ try’s natural resources: “O ur subsoil is rich in minerals, not to m ention such m onetary metals as gold and brass, o f which we unquestionably have a m uch greater reserve than any other country. . . . We could flood the whole world w ith oil, we could not only supply ourselves w ith coal for all branches o f industry, but also saturate many parts o f Europe . . . O ur ores could be turned into a quantity o f iron and steel that would surpass not only England and Germany but the U nited States as well.” (Among the

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resources he specifically m entions were iron ore in the Urals, at w hat later became M agnitogorsk, and coal at Ekibastuz in Kazakhstan, later ex­ tracted by (breed labor.)82 H itherto, however, the financial and hum an costs had simply seemed too burdensome for serious investm ent to be directed to the remote re­ gions where m ost o f these minerals were to be found. To lay down roads and railways, to build mines, factories, and homes, to fell timber, excavate minerals, and transport them to where they were in dem and had seemed beyond the realms o f economic practicality. Mendeleev had envisaged raising investm ent for the huge development costs by placing a high tariff wall around Russia and then prom oting the growth o f a network o f both state and private banks.83 T he Soviet state took a different path, replacing investm ent w ith coer­ cion. In the late 1920s, as Gosplan reviewed its plans for industrial devel­ opm ent, new possibilities opened up. It was difficult to attract wage labor­ ers to move to these rem ote and inhospitable regions, but zeki—the inmates o f prisons and concentration camps— could simply be sent there. A decree o f M arch 26, 1928, envisioned ua series o f economic projects w ith great savings in expenditure . . . by means o f the widespread use o f the labor o f individuals sentenced to measures o f social protection.” To all intents and purposes they were to be turned into slaves. In 1930 Gosplan received instructions “to incorporate the w ork perform ed by those de­ prived o f liberty into the planned economy o f the country”; all prisoners sentenced to terms o f three years or longer were to be transferred to labor camps, and a special departm ent o f the NKVD, Gulag (the M ain Cam p A dm inistration), was set up to run these convict enterprises.84 In the early 1930s, accordingly, expeditions o f prisoners and guards, to­ gether w ith geologists and mineralogists who somehow happened to have been recently arrested, penetrated these isolated landscapes by boat or even by horse and cart, hastily erected prim itive huts, and began to dig, sometimes w ith just pick and shovel. Some o f the early pioneers found nothing valuable they could prise from the frozen soil; they were then of­ ten abandoned to their fate. O thers became the founders o f huge prison empires bearing names like Sevlag (the N orthern Camp Complex) and Ukhtpechlag (the U khta Cam p Complex in the Pechora D istrict), near Vorkuta in the Komi Republic o f northern European Russia. C ut off as they were from civilization, they built their own brick works, electricity generators, warehouses, and hospitals. To train and civilize their unedu-

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cated, uprooted, and bewildered workers, the authorities provided ap­ prentice workshops, cinemas, theaters, libraries, and, in one case at least, a so-called university.85 Even in the depths o f the Soviet inferno, its custodi­ ans did not entirely give up the hope o f bringing a kind o f culture and civ­ ilization to the victims. W hat was at stake in these penal setdem ents can be seen from the his­ tory o f the m ost formidable o f all the penal empires, Dalstroi, the Far Eastern C onstruction A dm inistration, in the Kolyma river basin o f the Si­ berian far east, w ith its attached labor camp dependency, Sevosdag (the N ortheastern Camp Complex), centered on the port city o f M agadan, on the Sea o f O khotsk. In the 1920s M agadan had become a base for the provision o f educational and medical services to the nom adic Evenki and Chukchi peoples o f the region. W ith collectivization and sedentarization, however, the Soviet authorities established a more direct presence and used it to begin seeking out and exploiting the rich gold and platinum re­ serves o f the region. In 1928-1930 the First Kolyma Geological Expedi­ tion under I. Iu. Bilibin confirmed and extended the findings o f earlier prospectors. This was the signal for the Politburo to pour the resources o f Gulag into the region.86 Since the Kolyma basin is geologically related to the Yukon Territory and Klondike, on the other side o f the Bering Straits, one m ight regard w hat followed as a grimmer, Soviet version o f the “gold rush.” For its crash industrialization program the Soviet U nion needed ta buy advanced technology from W estern countries, and Kolyma gold was to be its means o f doing so. Hence m ining in the region was supremely im ­ portant, and Stalin gave it close attention. Reingold Berzin, an O ld Bol­ shevik and Red Army com m ander during the civil war, was sent to head Dalstroi; he became the G rand Panjandrum o f the whole region. Between August 1931 and M arch 1932 the Politburo discussed Kolyma no fewer than eleven times; Stalin dem anded daily reports on the development o f the gold industry and periodically sum m oned D alstrois managers to Moscow to brief him . In the setdem ents early years, Berzin treated the in­ mates w ith w hat w ould later seem like relative hum anity: they were given adequate food, warm clothing, and regular rest days. By 1936 they had built a whole port city, Magadan, o f 15,000 people, together w ith the docks, roads, quarries, mines, warehouses, and apartm ent blocks needed to service it.87 The situation rapidly deteriorated, however, as first the dekulakization

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o f 1929-1933, then the terror o f 1936-1939 filled the labor camps w ith new, disoriented zeks branded as “enemies o f the people.” They had been stigmatized as, in A nthony Sm iths words, “outsiders . . . who have no part in the sacred mission and its duties.” They were therefore expendable, available to be worked to death if required for the success o f the project. T heir sentences were long— five years at the least, usually ten or even more— and to the victims they seemed interm inable. There was no pros­ pect o f parole, so the only way to m otivate them was through the goad o f hunger. Those who fulfilled the daily planned output were rewarded w ith full rations, just about enough to keep a laborer going in the harsh cli­ mate. But those who failed to do so received a reduced ration, and through undernourishm ent became weaker and even less able to fulfill the plan. As Iurii M argolin, a form er zek, later recalled, “We were never in a condition to do w hat was dem anded o f us to have enough to eat. The hungrier we were the worse we worked. T he worse we worked the hun­ grier we became. From that vicious circle there was no escape.”88 Solzhenitsyn m aintains that even a full ration was not enough to nour­ ish adequately a zek who carried out the planned work in full. Zeks there­ fore had to master the art o f appearing to work zealously while not ac­ tually doing so, and then o f disguising underproduction. This was what Solzhenitsyn called “the great principle o f tukhta,” or “padding the books,” which enabled m any to survive the Soviet penitentiary system. This tactic was easier than m ight appear. Let us suppose that the lum ber­ jacks have deliberately exaggerated the am ount o f tim ber felled in a day, so as to ensure themselves an adequate ration. Those responsible for trans­ porting the tim ber would have no interest in disclosing the shortfall, for the nonexistent surplus w ould help to feed them , too; the same was true at the sawmill downstream and on the freight trains taking the planks on­ ward. O nly at its ultim ate destination, say a furniture works, would any­ one be m otivated to reveal the discrepancy—and by that tim e it would be too late to make up the deficiency and very difficult to find out who had been responsible for it.89 W hatever the potential for skiving, work had to be performed, and the incentive to do so was usually m ediated through the work brigade. It was m uch easier for camp bosses to measure the output o f a brigade o f twenty or thirty people than that o f each individual. If the brigade as a whole m et its output target, then each member was properly fed, but not otherwise. This device made the guards’ job o f supervision m uch simpler: it was in

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the interest o f each brigade mem ber to make sure that all the others worked hard. Zeks policed themselves. As Ivan Denisovich, the hero o f Solzhenitsyns short labor camp novel, remarks, “The zek is kept up to the m ark not by his bosses but by the others in his gang. Either everybody gets a bonus or else they all die together.” T he former Polish zek Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski confirms this account: “T he m ost conscientious and fervent foremen were the prisoners themselves, for the norm was reckoned collectively by dividing the total output by the num ber o f workers. Any feeling o f m utual friendliness was completely abolished in favour o f a race for percentages.. . . There was in all this som ething inhum an, mercilessly breaking the only natural bond between prisoners— their solidarity in face o f their persecutors.”90 This was the reaction o f a Pole. Russians found the experience more fa­ miliar: it was a perverse variant o f krugovaia poruka, the joint responsibil­ ity o f the peasant com m une, the artel, and the com m unal apartm ent. In this respect, as in others, the labor camp was a microcosm o f Soviet soci­ ety, which was taking shape through the osmotic absorption o f Russian social memory. Solzhenitsyn, only half ironically, m aintains that the zeks form ed a dis­ tinct nation in the shape o f—to use Stalin’s definition o f a nation— “a his­ torically form ed com m unity o f people, w ith their own shared territory, language, com mon economic life, and a com m on psychological disposi­ tion manifested in their culture.” T heir territory was the archipelago, w ith its scattered but uniquely rigid boundaries marked by barbed wire and watchtowers. T heir economic life was the slavelike fulfillm ent o f the NKVD output plan. T heir psychological disposition was determ ined by their enforced way o f life: fatalistic, m istrustful, cunning, parsimonious in word and gesture, energetic only in struggling for the essentials o f life. T heir language was terse but pithy, often obscene, and scarcely employed the future tense o f verbs, so uncertain and cheerless was their outlook. T heir culture was o f necessity oral but was rich in memories o f a “golden age,” a past way o f life before arrest, now irrecoverably lost. T heir folklore consisted o f accounts o f their masters’ arbitrariness and their own wily in­ genuity. They had no common religion but did have their own supersti­ tions and irrational hopes, for example, the prospect o f an Anglo-Ameri­ can invasion o f the USSR or the expectation o f an amnesty at each major Soviet festival, in May and November (never realized till after Stalin’s death). In all these respects the zeks were a supranation. W hether they

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were Russian or non-Russian made no difference. They form ed a gro­ tesque subterranean parody o f the ideal o f the "Soviet people.”91 After the Second W orld War, however, ethnic feeling did revive w ithin the camps, as a result o f wartim e fighting and the deportation o f national­ ities. According to Solzhenitsyn, it began to manifest itself w ith the arrival o f former soldiers o f the O U N , the U krainian partisans who had fought against both the Germans and the Soviets. Unlike the cowed prewar pris­ oners, they w ould m urder "trusties” in their m idst and then cover up for one another.92 Zeks began to form their own ethnic clans and m utual aid associations. O nly the Russians had none: their ethnic solidarity was weak, and they were still divided either by ideology— Com m unists versus non-Com m unists— or by rodina, place o f origin: Moscow, Leningrad, the Urals, Siberia. T he "zek nation” was a product o f the downside o f Russian messianism. T hrough the zeks’ shared way o f life their collective attitude, together w ith the Russian custom o f krugovaia poruka, was disseminated to all the other Soviet peoples. Some o f the zeks’ characteristics became those o f an entire Soviet generation, having been taken up and developed in analo­ gous conditions o f privation and austerity outside the camps. Anyone who visited the Soviet U nion right up to the 1980s will recall how fero­ ciously people would fight w ith their elbows to climb on to an already overcrowded bus or underground train, how they w ould jealously defend their hard-earned position in a line for defitsitnye tovary (goods in short supply). Even the grim, unsm iling expression o f Soviet citizens going about their business on city streets bespoke experience gained, perhaps not in the penitentiary system itself, but in conditions not so very differ­ ent, a determ ination to fight for rare opportunities or benefits as soon as they were available, but otherwise to have as litde as possible to do w ith the public world and to reserve one’s em otions for private life. T he terrible ordeal and the modes o f survival could not help affecting the spiritual and cultural life o f Soviet society right up to the end— not least because the memory o f them was suppressed, so that when it sur­ faced, tim idly in Solzhenitsyn’s novel Ivan Denisovich in 1962 (fully in his Gulag Archipelago only in 1990), it burst forth w ith all the force o f what Freud called the “return o f the repressed.” The questions the explosive revelations raised, the conflicts they engendered, formed yet another rea­ son that even the Russians in the USSR could have no unified culture. In the 1950s, as zeks were released, Anna Akhmatova spoke o f two Russias

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“eyeball to eyeball”: those who had been in the camps, and those who had sent them there.93 The shadow o f the Gulag hangs over even post-Soviet Russia. Here Russia’s messianic crisis still casts its baleful shadow. For Germans to re­ pent as a nation makes a certain sense, for under the Nazis m ost oppres­ sors were Germ an and m ost victims were non-Germ an. For Russians, however, the issue is much more com plicated and is fraught w ith m utual resentment. Russians were the oppressors, but they were also the victims. Non-Russians likewise. This reality does not excuse the failure o f post-So­ viet Russians to face up to the past, but it does help to explain their reluc­ tance.

Mass Terror In the terror o f the late 1930s Russian messianism reached its supreme cri­ sis. Having fatally weakened the peasant com m unity and nearly destroyed the Russian O rthodox Church, the men who had made the revolution went on to destroy one another. T he Com m unist leaders were a tighdy knit coterie o f strong men who had come through the underground, revo­ lution, and civil war together. T heir shared experience had inculcated in them an extremely macho worldview, which valued determ ination, ruth­ lessness, and aggression. T he m utual interdependence o f life-and-death struggle im parted to their personal relationships a frenzied intensity: they valued small-group comradeship just as m uch as soldiers at the front line. T he word “comrade” was not just a political affectation: it came abso­ lutely naturally to them . They were carrying out the transform ation o f the country over which they ruled in a highly contested m anner which over­ rode many o f the traditions o f the population. T hat is why they used the rhetoric o f warfare to describe their achievements in normally unwarlike branches o f the economy: “the breakthrough on the grain front,” and sim­ ilar expressions. Like crusaders in hostile occupied territory, they knew they had to stick by one another through thick and thin. The slightest wa­ vering, the slightest breach o f discipline, could be fatal to their whole en­ terprise. The core o f Stalins leadership team consisted o f w hat Gerald Easter calls the kom itetchiki, the former local leaders who had kept the Bolshevik underground going between 1905 and 1917, then had become regional political commissars during the revolution and civil war. As he defeated

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the various "oppositions” in the late 1920s, Stalin prom oted some o f these men right to the top: Valerian Kuibyshev from the Volga region, Kagano­ vich from the U krainian underground, O rdzhonikidze from the Transcaucasus.94 Naturally, they in turn brought w ith them the local subordi­ nates whom they had learned to trust, thus form ing a new layer o f clients. T he industrial ministries set up under the overlordship o f O rdzhonikidze to run the five-year plans opened up a new and abundant source o f pa­ tronage. In the absence o f stable institutions and laws, personal pyramids o f power were once again decisive, as they had been in tsarist Russia. T he kom itetchiki were mosdy o f lower m iddle class, worker, or peasant origin. They had received a truncated education and had had to make their own way in life. M any o f them were autodidacte, com pensating for an inadequate education by voracious reading. They inherited the Russian intelligentsias love for books, and so Soviet culture remained highly verbal and print-based right up to the end. A bout half the kom itetchiki were Rus­ sian; the rest were Jewish, Latvian, Georgian, Arm enian, or Polish. N one o f them considered ethnicity im portant, though: they had mosdy broken w ith their family backgrounds and forged their m ost intense personal re­ lations through the Red Army and the party. Party and army, in fact, had given them everything: their faith, their career, their friendships, and their marriages.95 T heir com radeship revealed itself in their m ode o f life. They all had da­ chas just outside Moscow, in picturesque settings like Serebrianyi Bor, Kratovo, or Zubalovo, where a prerevolutionary oil magnate had built two walled estates, each w ith a m ansion and several smaller cottages. Sta­ lin and several other leaders shared the Zubalovo m ansion and the cot­ tages: their wives and children would spend the warmer m onths there, while they themselves came for weekends and summ er evenings to escape the pressure o f routine work. Stalin would d ip roses and take his children for strolls in the woods. His daughter Svetlana milked cows, fed poultry, and felt in her elem ent. In this relaxed atmosphere the leaders constantly visited each other, bringing presents for wives and children, and held long eating and drinking sessions, sometimes accompanied by music and danc­ ing. Outw ardly not m uch distinguished their gatherings from those that grace the plays o f Turgenev and Chekhov.96 Yet at these cozy get-togethers grave m atters o f state were being dis­ cussed, the fates o f millions decided. W hen plugged into the electric cir­ cuits o f high politics, the comradely networks acquired an altogether

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weightier and more sinister character. For if ftiendship faltered, it turned immediately into the bitterest hostility. T he comrades were borne aloft by a shared faith, and if any one o f them showed the slightest sign o f doubt, he was forthw ith deemed untrustw orthy, no longer a true comrade, and therefore objectively an enemy. These were the old traditions o f Russian kruzhkovshchina (cliquishness) intensified by revolution and civil war. Any group o f people that has to work together over a long period to achieve its aim generates its own view o f the world and its own style o f discourse, which becomes more or less obligatory for all those involved. Anyone who adopts a different approach or a different language is either not really understood or, where issues are contentious, may be treated as a dangerous outsider. Moreover, groups in positions o f power have a strong interest in preserving a facade o f absolute and unshakeable unanimity, es­ pecially at times o f crisis. T he heavily monologic discourse is part o f their repertoire o f authority.97 These tendencies were hypertrophied in the case o f the Com m unist leaders. They believed they possessed the key to world history, both to un­ derstanding it and to determ ining its future. They were fighting for abso­ lute good against absolute evil, and anyone who claimed to perceive inter­ mediate shades o f grey had to be spurned as an apostate. D uring the civil war they had learned to treat all opponents and even waverers as deadly enemies who m ust be defeated and destroyed. Now, after 1933, they were faced w ith the threat o f a Germ an leader who proclaimed as his prim ary aim the invasion o f the Soviet U nion and the destruction o f Com m u­ nism. They knew they had to prepare the whole country for a serious and large-scale war. M entality and contingency thus com bined to create a particularly em­ battled unanim ity on all m atters o f doctrine and politics. The “general line,” as enunciated by the Central Com m ittee, and increasingly by Stalin himself, became compulsory in all its details. Fully elaborated in the Insti­ tute o f M arxism-Leninism, it was disseminated by a huge and growing army o f consultants, lecturers, agitators, and propagandists. Anyone who doubted or strayed from its formulaic prescriptions was considered no longer fully dependable. As the rhetoric escalated, the doubters became “oppositionists,” then “deviationists,” then people “w ith terrorist inten­ tions,” and finally “terrorists” or “spies” o f capitalist powers, full-scale ene­ mies to be exterm inated.98 Stalin exemplified these traits to the extreme. He had a talent for

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friendship and could be extremely generous. W hen Anastas M ikoian first moved to Moscow to join the party Central Com m ittee, Stalin lent him his own apartm ent; then, when M ikoian took a liking to it, he simply gave it to him and found another one for him self (adm ittedly not all that difficult for a top official). As general secretary o f the party, he took care o f the physical arrangem ents for his comrades, seeing that they all received the cars they w anted, and making up litde pakety o f extra money and holi­ day coupons when they needed it. O f course he was also building up his clientele, but the fact remains that he was good at it, and his comrades valued him for it. Yet, as Simon Sebag M ontefiore has remarked, whis friendships, like teenage infatuations, meandered between love, adm ira­ tion and venomous jealousy.” If he was slighted or upstaged, or suspected that a “comrade” was trying to capture a close friend for himself, he be­ came relentless and ruthless in his rancor, though he always remained pa­ tient, w aiting for the best m om ent to strike. Stalin was also a good actor, continuing to sim ulate friendship up to the last m om ent. Some o f his comrades did not cease loving him right up to their own violent deaths at his hands.99 T he m ost poignant example o f this dogged and incongruous devotion is the letter that Nikolai Bukharin wrote to Stalin from prison in Decem­ ber 1937. It lays bare the conflicting drives o f comradeship, paranoia, and dedication to a great cause. Bukharin had not yet been tried as a member o f a “Trotskyite-Rightist Bloc” accused o f conspiring w ith foreign intelli­ gence services to prepare the invasion o f the USSR, but he already knew o f the charges against him . His letter is frill o f conflicting emotions: terror at his probable frite, dedication to the party, devotion to Stalin: “If only there were some device w hich would have made it possible for you to see my soul flayed and ripped open! If only you could see how I am attached to you, body and soul, quite unlike certain people.” H e is torm ented above all by the fear that Stalin m ight actually believe the grotesque accu­ sations leveled against him . But he acknowledges that “great plans, great ideas and great interests take precedence over everything, and I know that it would be petty for me to place the question o f my own person on a par w ith the universal-historical tasks, first and foremost, on your shoulders.” Almost incredibly Bukharin ends by asking “one final tim e for your for­ giveness (only in your heart, not otherwise).”100 There could scarcely be more agonizing testim ony to the m ental world in which the Com m unist leaders lived.

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T he assumptions engendered by em batded unanim ity seeped their poi­ son into the m ost intim ate family relationships, too. W hen O sip Piatnitskii, a leading C om intern official, was arrested in July 1937, the accu­ sations against him aroused terrible doubts in the m ind o f his wife, Iuliia. She recalled that at times he had been gloomy and uncom m unicative, that sometimes strange individuals had visited him . Could it be true th at he had served in the tsarist secret police and still had connections w ith its agents, plotting to overthrow the Soviet regime? In her diary she ap­ plauded Nikolai Ezhov’s drive to unm ask spies and terrorists. T he arrest o f her elder son shook her faith in Ezhov, but even so, she continued to use the Stalinist rhetoric to reproach her younger son, Vovka, when he re­ ceived a poor school report: UI rem inded him that he was the son o f an enemy o f the people,’ that he showed by his behavior he was the brother o f an ‘enemy,’ and so on. Tears came to his eyes, and he said: ‘A m I guilty that I am the son and brother o f enemies? I don’t w ant you to be my mother, I w ant to go into an orphanage.’”101 T he drive to rhetorical unanim ity clashed fatefully w ith the tendency to form personal patron-client networks. In one sense, the party-state mechanism was a single huge patron-dient network, organized and di­ rected through the nom enklatura appointm ents system. In fact, though, it did not function in a hilly coordinated manner: interm ediate and lower cells were not always easy to control from above. Local party secretaries knew their own people in a way no one at the center could. They would appoint their own enterprise directors, collective hum chairmen, school heads, and police chiefs, all o f whom then had an interest in covering up for one another, throwing up joint smokescreens to obscure the view from above. T heir secretiveness im plied not political opposition but merely that they wete unobtrusively enjoying the good things in life just like their superiors and wished to go on doing so. They were diverting funds to build themselves dachas, providing themselves w ith high-quality cars and chauffeurs, treating themselves to good wine and gourm et meals, pleasant summer holidays, or “rest-cures” on the Crimean coast, all at the expense o f local populations who had to get by on cramped com m unal apartm ents and standing in line for inadequate food. The Soviet Union had become a society o f scarcity, and finding a rung on the patronage ladder, however low down, becoming the client o f some patron, was by now the key to coping w ith its everyday problems. T he trouble was, scarcity, hierarchy, and favoritism were not at all w hat the

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ideology envisaged, and the clash w ith reality, though not openly ac­ knowledged, was obvious and painful. T he headlong industrialization, collectivization, and dekulakization had brought on one disaster after another. T he top leadership knew about but steadfastly ignored the millions o f deaths from starvation. The kom itetchiki supported the programs in general term s, but they knew from their regional contacts how m uch suffering and destruction they entailed. They w ould probably have preferred slower tempos, less use o f coercion, and a more discrim inating approach to the "kulaks.” O n the other hand, they had no alternative policies to propose, and in any case they and their protégés were drawn ineluctably into com petition w ith one another to achieve ever higher tem pos.102 A t the 17th Party Congress in 1934 some o f these leaders, worried about where Stalin was taking them , approached Kirov—who as the Le­ ningrad first secretary was a senior figure— and asked him to stand against Stalin for the general secretaryship o f the party. Kirov declined, but Stalin heard o f the potential challenge and resented it, especially since in the subsequent ballot he received more than one hundred negative votes, while Kirov received only two. T he published voting figures were falsified, and Stalin continued as general secretary.103 W ith Stalins “general line” thus confirmed, how was one to explain the disasters? This is where the nature o f Com m unism as a religion comes into question. M ature and well-developed religions all have a theodicy, that is, a way o f explaining setbacks, failure, and suffering, learning from them , and renewing the faith in order to move on. M arxism-Leninism had no theodicy. If there were setbacks and failures, they could only be ex­ plained, as one would in a war, by assuming that the enemy was at work. If people died in a train crash or a coal mine explosion, or because poison gas had escaped at a chemical works, a commission would go down to in­ vestigate, but would invariably come up w ith the conclusion that “sabo­ teurs,” “diversionists,” or “wreckers” were to blame. In the attem pt to root out “enemies” from w ithin the party, Stalin ordered an “exchange o f party cards”— that is, a screening process or “purge”— in 1933. Every party member had to appear before a commis­ sion, hand in his party membership card, and then be interrogated on his activities and beliefe before receiving a new one— or not, if the commis­ sion was not satisfied. Since the process had to be carried out at the grass roots, m ost local party secretaries, naturally enough, took the opportunity to get rid o f rivals and opponents, and to confirm the membership o f

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those they trusted. Stalin strongly suspected that, as a result, many “ene­ mies” had remained ensconced in their positions. H e decided he would have to bring in an independent force from outside the party to repeat the operation. T hat independent force was the N K V D .104 Thus from 1935 or so the secret police gained an independent purchase on inner-party intrigue. Since their professional obligation was to unm ask and destroy “enemies,” the process was to prove unprecedentedly destruc­ tive. T he ratcheting up o f operations began after the m urder o f Kirov— w hether or not that was ordered by Stalin. Thereafter Kuibyshev died and Ordzhonikidze, the m ost powerful o f the patrons, com m itted suicide after a confrontation w ith Stalin. Rival patron-client networks fought each other, using the blunt weapons o f the secret police. Stalin determ ined who the individual victims were, but he never succeeded in eradicating the net­ works. Those who survived in the top leadership, and those who, slighdy below, moved into senior and responsible positions over the dead bodies o f their predecessors, were consequently all skilled and ruthless operators in the art o f m onopoly patronage politics, w hich thus, despite Stalins best and bloody efforts, became the backbone o f the new Russian-Soviet polit­ ical system.

Orthodox Church M etropolitan Sergii had made his 1927 declaration o f loyalty to the Soviet U nion in order to ensure that the church, however m uch under siege, would survive as an organization able to run its own affairs. As we have seen, however, the regime did not fulfill its side o f the bargain. It did not confine itself to legal restrictions on ecclesiastical activity. It was also pur­ suing a more positive strategy, trying to create a secular and scientific counterculture and to refute religious doctrine by means o f antireligious propaganda. The regime set up a League o f M ilitant Godless, which trained agitators to com bat the claims o f believers, to extol the virtues o f science and atheism, and to denounce the church as an organization that extorted money from ordinary unenlightened people by means o f false promises and bogus consolations. These efforts produced disappointing results. T he atheists themselves were often too ignorant and rigid in their thinking to convince their opponents, and believers were suspicious o f them as hirelings o f the state.105 Creating a positive atheist culture and way o f life was beyond them . In spite o f its failure to offer an alternative to organized religion, the re-

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gime soon ceased to tolerate even weekly divine service. As we have seen, in the late 1920s and 1930s, during or soon after collectivization, the ma­ jority o f parishes were closed and their church buildings turned into cine­ mas, clubs, or stores. T he bells would be cast down from the tower, then carted off to be m elted down for the five-year plan. In this way the two strongholds o f traditional ethnic Russia, the church and the village com­ m une, were destroyed simultaneously. In the process priests and servers, as well as active believers, were identified as especially dangerous "kulaks”— "the anti-Soviet active kulak groups o f churchpeople and sectarians,” to quote the O G PU directive o f February 2, 1930.106 T hat m eant they were slated for deportation. These operations did not always proceed smoothly. In the village o f O lshanitsa in Briansk oblast, the village soviet sent a delegation to close the church and hand it over to the local seven-year school. T he NKVD reported on w hat followed: It was envisaged that the churchwarden would give them the keys o f the church. T he warden refused to hand over the keys, and the priest o f the church, who had by then been alerted, appeared in a drunken state accompanied by hysterical women. As a result a heated dispute arose over the handover o f the church, during which two o f the crowd who arrived w ith the priest, the woman KOLGANOVA and the old man D R O ZD O V in his seventies, climbed up the bell-tower and sounded the alarm. At the alarm call people ran in from the fields w ith sickles and stakes, up to 300-330 women, who drove away the representatives who had come to close the church.107 By 1939 all monasteries had been closed. O f 37,000 parish churches still active in 1930, only 8,302 were still officially registered as open. M any o f them , however, were not functioning because there was no priest to officiate in them: it has been estimated that in Ukraine, only 1,116 o f 4,487 churches were active. In Moscow a mere 15 churches out o f 600 were still open; in Leningrad, 5 out o f 300; and in the whole o f Tambov diocese, 2 out o f 110. In Odessa 1 church had been kept open at the per­ sonal request o f Academician Filatov, Stalins oculist. There was no of­ ficiating priest there, but each Sunday, so it was said, the congregation would gather, a priest w ould appear from among them , perform divine service, and at the end be arrested by the N K V D .108 In April 1939 Liubov Shaporina, wife o f the composer, did not attend

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church in Leningrad at Easter for the first tim e in her life. She noted in her diary, “There are just three churches left in the city, and all are com­ pletely packed, so that there is no Easter procession, and you won’t even hear the words ‘C hrist is risen spoken on the streets.”109 O f 163 bishops, only 4 were still at liberty in 1939 and able to perform some o f their functions. O ne o f them , M etropolitan Aleksji o f Leningrad, was living in a cubbyhole in the belltower o f the cathedral, in accommo­ dation intended for the caretaker. O f the rest a few were retired, but the great m ajority were in prison, labor camp, or exile, and many o f them had been killed. It is estim ated that more than 40,000 ordained priests m et a prem ature death between 1918 and the late 1930s. In 1941 there were of­ ficially reckoned to be 5,665 still active, which, including the renovationists, was only 5 percent o f the 1930 figure. Fully 80 to 85 percent o f priests had been im prisoned or executed.110 T he m ost dram atic single incident in this wholesale persecution o f the church was the blowing up o f the huge Cathedral o f C hrist the Savior in central Moscow. The largest place o f worship in Russia, the cathedral was built in the late nineteenth century to commemorate the Russians’ victory over Napoleon. It had dom inated the cityscape for decades, visible from a variety o f vantage points. Preliminary removal o f bells and structural fea­ tures took nearly five m onths. T he process was com pleted w ith high ex­ plosives on December 5, 1931. After two explosions the dom e was still standing, and “believers in the crowd shouted that the Lord had heard their prayers and would not let the church be destroyed.” However, a third explosion finally dashed their hopes.111 The regime intended the vacated site to be occupied by a Palace o f So­ viets, which was to be 415 meters high— taller than the recendy com­ pleted Empire State Building in New York and far more massive in its lower floors— and topped w ith a 90-m eter-high statue o f Lenin, three times the size o f New York’s Statue o f Liberty. The palace was to be ap­ proached by an avenue 250 meters wide, running right through the center o f Moscow, along which columns o f workers and soldiers would march. Inside, under a 100-meter dome would be a conference hall that seated 21,000 people, plus 17,000 square meters o f oil paintings, 20,000 o f bas reliefs, and 17,000 o f frescoes and panels. W hen dem olition was com­ plete, however, an examinadon o f the subsoil revealed that the high sub­ terranean water table was likely to flood the foundadons. T he builders tried to harden the foundadons by ramming into them hundreds o f grave­ stones taken from local cemeteries. But even this expedient did not pre-

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vent water seepage, and eventually the plans had to be abandoned alto­ gether. A swimming pool was built instead. An em pty space replaced what should have been the symbolic heart o f the entire new order.112 M any believers and some priests simply w ent underground. Priests w ould work by day as hospital porters or cloakroom attendants, then in the evening put on a cassock and conduct a secret service or visit the sick and dying. There were even clandestine monasteries, some in the Siberian forests, others w ithin regular working institutions in the cities. Secret ser­ vices and prayer meetings were held in the woods or in nonconsecrated buildings. O ne woman described a catacomb Easter service: T he litde house where Father Serafim lived looked abandoned and uninhabited. But inside it was foil o f people who had come to cele­ brate the joyous festival w ith their priest as they formerly did in church. T he priest was busy fixing up the altar and iconostasis. . . . Before beginning divine service, the priest sent someone to check that the singing could not be heard in the street. Then Easter m atins started, and the litde house turned into a glowing temple, in which everyone was united by one incomparable feeling, the joy o f Resur­ rection. T he procession o f the cross took place inside the house, in the hall and the corridor.113 We cannot tell just how widespread such clandestine celebrations were. W hat we do know is that in 1937 a census o f the population revealed that 57 percent o f Soviet adults still claimed to be believers. This cannot be an overstatem ent, since both the census-takers and those questioned had an interest in m inim izing the true extent o f religiosity. The figure was so shocking that the census results were suppressed. W hatever the num ber o f believers, though, on the eve o f the war the O rthodox Church was almost destroyed as an institution. In May 1941, Sergii confessed to a visiting priest: “Formerly they used to strangle us, but at least they fulfilled their promises. Now they continue to strangle us, but they no longer fulfil the promises they give while strangling us.”114

The Fate of a Priest The story o f one priest may help to clarify w hat servants o f the church, their families, and their congregations w ent through in these years. It is recounted by the priests younger son, Vasilii Ivanovich Sokolov, whose

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papers are in the archive o f the Russkaia Biblioteka Zarubezhia. Father Ioann was born in 1879 in Novospasskoe, Smolensk guberniia. After studying at a seminary, he worked for seven years as parish priest in a remote village, during which tim e he read widely in Russian theology and became convinced that M arxist socialism was an attem pt to declare hum anity divine, to create a M an-G od, and that therefore it was a m or­ tally dangerous doctrine. Any compromise w ith it, such as that proposed by the “renovationists” in the early 1920s, he rejected. Instead he believed it was necessary to rethink C hristian doctrine by linking it more effec­ tively w ith the church’s care for its parishioners. H e entered the Moscow Spiritual Academy, where Father Pavel Florenskii supervised his disserta­ tion.115 H aving com pleted his studies, Father Ioann was appointed as priest in charge o f Nizhne-Nikolskaia church, the second m ost im portant church in Smolensk after the cathedral. H e was arrested in 1923 as the author o f a declaration in support o f the recendy arrested Patriarch Tikhon, but he was released when no copy o f the paper was found am ong his possessions; his son, warned o f the im m inent search, had hastily removed them .116 There followed several years o f relatively peaceful parish work. But life was becoming steadily more difficult for clergymen and their families. They belonged to the category o f lishentsy, or “deprived people.” These were members o f “former” social classes— landowners, merchants, clergy­ men— stripped o f civil rights. As Vasilii explained, “They could be .con­ scripted at any tim e to fulfill menial tasks like cleaning toilets or m ending roads, they could be arrested w ithout a procurators w arrant, or taken as hostages, who were sometimes shot if the political situation got tense or even if it did no t.”117 M any o f them could not stand the pressure and left the clergy. The plight o f their families was agonizing. Father Ioann was once sum­ m oned to the G PU and warned to give up the priesthood because he was “ruining his childrens future.” If one’s father was a priest, one needed to practice deception to join the party, to get a good job, or to enter special­ ized and higher education— unless, that is, one was prepared to forswear him publicly. Father Ioann’s elder son did abandon the family. His daugh­ ter also disavowed him but kept up secret contacts, and she persuaded Vasilii to join her in Moscow, where he registered in the Institute o f Chemical Engineering. He never forgot the sight o f his father seeing him off at the railway station: “I was astonished and embarrassed to see my fa­ ther w ith tears in his eyes as the train began to move. Ignoring everyone

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around him , he took off his hat and made the sign o f the cross over m e.”" 8 Vasilii received no scholarship at the Institute because o f the “dark places” in his biography. T he director, who learned o f his background, allowed him to stay on as long as he continued to gain good marks but advised him “to lose your birth certificate and not tell anyone about your father.”119 In August 1936 w hat the whole family had been dreading finally hap­ pened. Father Ioann was arrested and sent into exile in Kazakhstan, where o f course he was forbidden to exercise his priesdy functions and had to perform m anual labor. H e did survive, however, till an incident took place in his form er parish that allowed the authorities to apply to him the “highest penalty.” Some children playing in the ruins o f a fort on the edge o f Smolensk “discovered early one m orning that from tim e to tim e an elderly or m id­ dle-aged woman would make her way to a nearby tower. They lay low and eventually saw a horse and cart driving up to the tower, out o f which a very old m an clambered, helped by the driver.” Creeping right up to the tower, the children saw an incredible spectacle: the old m an, who had some kind o f m ande over his shoulders and a black cap w ith a white cross on his head, was intoning som ething, while those present, m osdy women, chanted quite engagingly and sometimes got down on their knees.. . . O ne wom an hastily hung up a curtain and arranged a few icons on it, like an iconostasis, and then pulled an ordinary school desk out o f a bush growing inside the tower and draped a towel w ith an em broidered cross over it, as a kind o f lectern. Someone else took a pile o f liturgical books out o f a suitcase, and a third person heated up some coals and placed them in a homemade censer. An ordinary divine service began, w ith the censer swinging at the appropriate points, only w ith tar instead o f incense. The children related w hat they had seen to their parents, who reported it further. O ne day the service was raided in the middle, the priest and the old women were hauled away, and the books burned. As a result o f this discovery in his form er parish, Father Ioann, even though he was far away in adle, was re-arrested and this tim e was sentenced to “ten years’ impris-

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onm ent w ithout right o f correspondence.” O nly when Vasilii investigated his hie in the 1990s did he discover that in fact his hither had then been shot.120 In the late 1930s, then, the Soviet U nion was in the grip o f a terrible and destructive sociopolitical psychosis, engendered by revolution, civil war, and the leaders’ messianic struggle against the national church and against the traditions o f the Russian people. In the face o f the war against Germ any which threatened, the leaders needed to do som ething to restore greater stability and social cohesion. But the task was daunting: Russians’ social memory, already gravely damaged by revolution and civil war, was further fractured by their experience during the 1930s. There was litde they could share because the social stratification was so extreme and the violence so damaging. Yet, as we shall see in the next chapter, a new ruling class was emerging, drawing its recruits from all strata o f Soviet society, but especially from the workers and peasants. It was creating not only its own m onopoly pa­ tronage system, but also its own m emory and its own myths. By exploit­ ing the range o f its own education and propaganda system, it was able to propagate them for down the social scale to the newly literate. At the grass roots, too, a reconfigured but not unrecognizable model o f Russian social life was emerging, in the com m unal apartm ents and the workplaces, where the modified but familiar bonds o f “joint responsibility” revived impecunious egalitarianism, m utual surveillance, and subjection to au­ thority. In spite o f all the conflicts, the outlines o f a new kind o f Russian society were forming, though they were not to be fully consolidated till af­ ter the Second W orld War. An incongruous but nevertheless workable symbiosis o f Russian traditions and Com m unist practices was beginning to take shape.

5 PROJECTING » NEW RUSSIE

From the late 1920s to the m id-1930s Soviet society was in turm oil. The institutions and myths o f tsarist Russia were dead, and nothing stable had replaced them . H ider had come to power in Germany, proclaiming his intendon to invade the Soviet U nion and destroy Bolshevism. Sud­ denly the country that Russian Marxists had always revered as their great­ est hope had become their bitterest enemy. Unifying counterinfluences were sorely needed. Above all the Russians as the m ost numerous Soviet people needed a social memory, tales o f achievement, and popular cele­ brations to heal the rifts and underpin the new society. T he official history was still raw and unfamiliar: its heroes were not great men, but rather ab­ stract social forces; its battles were the plodding and protracted engage­ ments o f the class struggle; its tim eline was marked out not by kings and queens but by stages o f socioeconomic development. Perhaps m ost im­ portant o f all, its hom eland was not Russia but the international working class and the ethnically anonym ous U nion o f Soviet Socialist Republics. O ne would have thought that tales o f the revolution had a heroic po­ tential and m ight have stirred the blood or stuck in the memory. Surveys conducted in Odessa schools in 1924 and 1927 suggested, however, that few children understood w hat Com m unism was, who led the Soviet gov­ ernm ent, or even w hat was the name o f the country in which they lived. They knew about the revolution and civil war, but as memorized histori­ cal facts rather than as subjects on which they could answer questions or about which they felt deeply. As many as 20 percent o f the respondents in

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1927 did not even know who Lenin was. A wider survey conducted by the Pedagogical Section o f Narkompros also revealed some starding ig­ norance about the Soviet U nion and its insdtutions. O ne respondent thought the Komsomol was “an international organization o f the hom e­ less,” another that Persia and C hina were about to enter the USSR, and a third that “imperialism is the best path to socialism.”1 W hen Britain broke off diplom atic relations w ith the Soviet U nion in 1927, the regime launched a series o f stories in the press designed to arouse patriotic feeling. O G PU reports suggested that the popular re­ sponse was indifferent or negative. A Russian from Krivoi Rog was re­ ported as saying: “England is preparing to declare war on the USSR, but the Russians are tired o f war and no one will go off to fight. Soviet Power for us is like a [bad] dream and a tem porary phenom enon: sooner or later it will cease to exist and then there will be a C onstituent Assembly.” And a peasant from Moscow oblast: “Soon there will be a war and they will give weapons to us peasants and we’ll turn them against Soviet Power; we do not need a workers’ regime and we should overthrow it and sm other the Com m unists.” A question was asked at a public meeting: “W hy can’t we have Soviet power w ithout the party?”2 In case o f an international crisis, the regime had good reason to question how m uch support it would re­ ceive from the public. Creating positive myths and memories had become an urgent priority.

Ukraine and the Crisis of Korenizatsiia The launch o f the five-year plans and the collectivization o f agriculture brought the problems o f korenizatsiia to a head. By its very nature the planning and opening o f technically up-to-date factories under tightly centralized control carried im plicit Russifying overtones. The new enter­ prises were producing for an all-Union market whose predom inant lan­ guage was Russian. The commands, instructions, and specifications came from Gosplan and the U nion industrial ministries in Russian. M ost o f the qualified staff, w hether adm inistrators, technical specialists, or workers, had received their training in Russian and, whatever their origin, spoke Russian on the job in preference to other languages; for many o f them it was their only language. Kalinin, who sometimes blurted out w hat other Soviet leaders thought but kept quiet about, com m ented at (of all places) an Uzbek party congress in 1925 that “the national question is a purely

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peasant question. . . . T he best way to elim inate nationality is a massive factory w ith thousands o f workers . . . which like a millstone grinds up all nationalities and forges a new nationality. This nationality is the universal proletariat.”3 Inside the Soviet Union, that “universal proletariat” could only be Russian. We have already seen that Ukraine was at the epicenter o f the crisis over the collectivization o f agriculture. T he same was true o f korenizatsiia, which was pursued as a flagship policy in Ukraine. By 1933, 89 percent o f prim ary school children in the republic were studying in Ukrainianlanguage schools— impressive figures considering that U krainianlanguage instruction had been banned till 1905. The dram atic rise in lit­ eracy was accompanied by w hat m ight be called, following Benedict Anderson, a U krainian “print revolution”: by the late 1920s the great ma­ jority o f books, journals, and newspapers were in U krainian. Russians and Jews, compelled to scramble for places in the few rem aining Russian-lan­ guage schools, greatly resented these developments. N ot even all U kraini­ ans were pleased. V iktor Kravchenko later recalled: “In theory we Ukrai­ nians in the student body should have been pleased. In practice we were as distressed by the innovation as the non-U krainian minority. Even those who like myself had spoken U krainian from childhood were not accus­ tom ed to its use as a m edium o f study. Several o f our best professors were utterly demoralized by the linguistic switch-over. W orst o f all, our local tongue simply had not caught up w ith m odern knowledge; its vocabulary was unsuited to the purposes o f electrotechnics, chemistry, aerodynamics and m ost other sciences. . . . [We] suffered the new burden, referred to Russian textbooks on the sly and in private made fun o f the opera bouffe nationalism .”4 T he U krainian “print revolution” m eant that large-scale urbanization, when it came in the 1930s, took place in U krainian rather than Russian, as would have been the case a mere ten years earlier. For the first tim e ever, many cities on U krainian territory became mainly U krainian in language and culture. Even in the Donbass, traditional bastion o f Russian workers, Ukrainians constituted 70 percent o f coalminers by 1930, while 44 per­ cent o f the labor force in the region spoke U krainian as their native lan­ guage. Mykola Skrypnyk, Commissar o f Education, proclaimed proudly that “Ukrainian culture is now not only the culture o f song, music, thea­ tre, cooperatives and schoolteachers. It is now a culture o f factories and enterprises, the culture o f D neprostroi and the Donbass.”5 This statem ent was somewhat premature: some cities in the east and south, like Kharkov,

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Donetsk, and Odessa, remained m ainly Russian in culture. It is also true that korenizatsiia was not U krainization in the full sense, but rather the adaptation o f Ukraine to Soviet structures. All the same the changes were an unpleasant shock for Russians and those who were used to cultural and linguistic dom ination. It was logical, then, that the crisis o f korenizatsiia should come in Ukraine. It was the acid test case for a m ultiethnic state where Russians were the m ost num erous people. T he Ukrainians’ choice o f national iden­ tity, along w ith that o f the Belorussians, determ ined w hether a united East Slav nationality w ould become overwhelmingly dom inant in the USSR, or w hether Great Russians would merely constitute a relative ma­ jority. T he Ukrainians also straddled a very sensitive international border: nearly five m illion o f them lived in Poland. In the early 1920s, it had been confidendy anticipated that Polish Ukrainians would wish to resetde in the USSR; in fact a C om m unist Party o f W estern Ukraine (KPZU) had been created specifically to make the U krainian SSR “a centre o f attrac­ tion for the mass o f discontented U krainians,” by which was m eant those living abroad. By the early 1930s, however, the Soviet U nion began to look like a country one m ight wish to escape from rather than migrate to. Soviet leaders began to fear that Soviet Ukrainians m ight form a cen­ ter o f discontent, or even opt for Polish citizenship and emigrate. Josef Pilsudski’s seizure o f power in Poland in 1926, and his declared intention o f working w ith Polish Ukrainians and Belorussians, had awakened fears o f a new anti-C om m unist campaign exploiting ethnic conflicts against the USSR. These fears were com pounded by the effects o f korenizatsiia. Some party members suspected that U krainization was proceeding too force­ fully and taking on a dangerous life o f its own. A great symbolic trium ph for Ukrainian intellectuals was the return o f Mykhailo Hrushevskyi from abroad in M arch 1924. Hrushevskyi had been chairm an o f the U krainian Central Rada during its fight for independence from Russia in 19171918, and therefore a key figure in the anti-Bolshevik movement. O n his return he was elected chairm an o f the historical section o f the U krainian Academy o f Sciences. In spite o f his past, though, he was now pre­ pared to work w ith the Com m unists, like the Russian Change o f Land­ marks thinkers, and m ost Com m unists felt it advisable to return the com plim ent, in order to keep U krainian intellectuals aboard the Soviet ship.6

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Hrushevskyi was the doyen o f U krainian nationalist historians and au­ thor o f a history o f his country that minim ized the role o f Muscovite and Imperial Russia in its form ation. H e m aintained that the prevalent Rus­ sian historiography, which saw Great Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorus­ sians as a single nation, was defective because it concentrated too m uch on the state and ignored the peoples. In claiming Kievan Rus as the origin o f the portm anteau "Russian” people, Hrushevskyi asserted, Russian his­ torians were ignoring im portant ethnic distinctions: "We know that the Kievan state, its laws and culture, were the creation o f one nationality, the Ukrainian-Rus, while the Volodimir-Moscow state was the creation o f another nationality, the G reat Russian.” Moscow was, if you like, Gaul to Kiev’s Rome. Kiev, in Hrushevskyis view, had given birth to a quite different tradition, that o f Galicia-Volynia in the thirteenth century, o f Lithuania-Poland in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, and o f the U krainian nation in the present day. T he present Belorussian nation, on this interpretation, had also emerged from a parallel development, center­ ing on the G rand D uchy o f Lithuania. "There can be no all-Russian’ [obshcherusskaid\ history,” Hrushevskyi asserted, "just as there is no ‘allRussian’ nationality. There may be a history o f all the ‘Russian nationali­ ties,’ if anyone wishes to call it so, or a history o f the East Slavs. It is this term that should take the place o f w hat is currendy known as ‘Russian history.’”7 It may seem surprising that the reinterpretation o f a distant past should prove so contentious, but in the fractured Soviet memory, it had explosive force. It challenged radically w hat had been an unspoken assumption o f all the Soviet rulers, even in their anti-Russian moods: that for historical reasons the Russian people form ed the underlying substance o f the So­ viet U nion. This “cem ent” functioned for more effectively if Ukrainians and Belorussians were included as Russians, and this is precisely w hat Hrushevskyi denied. Hrushevskyis trium phal return was only the m ost striking example o f a U krainian nationalist trend that worried the Soviet leaders, as well as many Russians, Jews, and other non-Ukrainians. Kaganovich, the party first secretary in Ukraine, feared in particular that the onward march o f U krainization was threatening to engulf the large numbers o f Russian ur­ ban workers living in Ukraine. As early as April 1926, acting on one o f Kaganovich’s reports, Stalin rebuked the U krainian Commissar o f Educa­ tion, O leksandr Shumskyi, for his overbearing attitude: "We can and should, while observing the proper tem po, Ukrainize our party, state and

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other apparatus. But we m ust not Ukrainize the proletariat from above. We m ust not force Russian workers en masse to give up the Russian lan­ guage and culture and declare their language and culture to be U krainian. This contradicts the principle o f the free development o f nationalities. This would not be national freedom, but a novel form o f national op­ pression.”8 Stalins criticism provoked a furious controversy inside the U krainian Com m unist party (KPU) leadership. Unexpectedly it intersected w ith the Polish border question: in January 1928 the KPZU issued a statem ent in defense o f Shumskyi, criticizing “the bureaucratic deform ation o f the pro­ cess o f Ukrainization” and “the denial o f the need to Ukrainize the urban proletariat.” This touched a raw nerve. T he C om intern reacted w ith un­ precedented ferocity by dissolving the KPZU and reconstituting it w ith an entirely new leadership, while the KPU denounced Shumskyi s line as “the theoretical form ulation o f Ukrainian fascism.”9 This was exception­ ally strong language for comrades to be using about one another, and it re­ flected the increasing paranoia that by now marked the party’s approach to all U krainian issues. T he same paranoia occasioned one o f the m ost widely publicized show trials o f the period, that o f the Union for the Liberation o f Ukraine, which was held in the Kharkov O pera Theater in M arch-April 1930. T he defendants came from the U krainian Academy o f Sciences, the Ukrainian Autocephalous Church, non-C om m unist U krainian political parties, and other public associations. They were accused o f fom enting nationalist dis­ content w ithin Ukraine in order to provoke a popular rising and facilitate foreign intervention.10The indictm ent was one o f the first examples o f the gross rhetorical overstatem ent that was soon to become characteristic o f Soviet jurisprudence, conjuring “enemies,” “spies,” and “foreign agents” out o f peaceful if discontented citizens, and forging “terrorist conspira­ cies” out o f inconclusive gatherings or discussions. Similar fears beset party leaders in relation to Belorussia, even though national consciousness was far weaker there. D uring the revolution and civil war, Belorussia had experienced only the briefest period o f indepen­ dence before being established as a Soviet republic in 1919. Even some lo­ cal Bolsheviks had been opposed to its creation as an independent entity, on the grounds that Belorussia was not a nation, but Lenin was apparendy very anxious to set up counterweights to “Great Russian chauvinism” by splitting the East Slavs." D uring the 1920s Belorussia had benefited, as had all non-G reat Rus-

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sian republics, from korenizatsiia: schools began to teach children in Belo­ russian for the first tim e. T he peasants who made up the great m ajority o f the population benefited first from the revolutionary land expropriation and then from the New Economic Policy. D uring the 1920s and 1930s a real social base for Belorussian national identity was being created, as newly educated peasant offspring moved into the towns, obtained urban jobs, and trained in the professions. A Belorussian-language press was tak­ ing root, and by the late 1930s nearly 90 percent o f the population o f Belorussia could read, though many o f them did so in Russian.12 T he specter o f Belorussian nationalism so haunted the Soviet leaders that they m ounted in M insk a show trial very similar to the Ukrainian one. There was one m ajor difference, however: am ong the defendants in the trial o f the U nion for the Liberation o f Belorussia were four prom i­ nent leaders o f the Belorussian C om m unist Party. Here, it was alleged, the nationalist danger had worm ed its way into the party’s very highest ranks. Vigilance obviously needed to be redoubled. Articles appeared in the party press declaring Belorussian nationalism the greatest political danger in the republic. “Belorussization”— the local variant o f korenizatsiia—was never officially repudiated, but in the face o f such official declarations it became a policy to be pursued only cautiously, if at all.19 Plunged back into the m indset o f the civil war, Stalin and his colleagues had become convinced that m ost o f the resistance to the "Great Socialist Offensive” was com ing from non-Russians and especially from U kraini­ ans, who had shown themselves to be not only economically unreliable but also a prospective fifth colum n for the intrigues o f a potential enemy, Poland. T he Russians, by contrast, were proving themselves in the eyes o f the party leaders to be not only the state-bearing people but also more re­ liable implementers o f the party’s economic plans.

The Upgrading of Russia T he logic o f the conflicts generated by the “Great Socialist Offensive,” then, drove the Soviet leaders toward a pro-Russian posture. They were beginning to give due weight to the fact that the Russians were the bearers o f the Soviet m ultiethnic idea. Russian was the official language o f the So­ viet state and the m ost widely used for interethnic com m unication. The Russians were the m ost num erous people and— along w ith the Ukraini­ ans— the most geographically mobile, the m ost inclined to migrate be-

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yond the borders o f their own “hom eland” republic. From the 1920s right through to the 1950s, despite korenizatsiia, they were desperately needed throughout the USSR as adm inistrators, skilled workers, and technical specialists, especially where new branches o f the economy were being de­ veloped. O utside the RSFSR they were concentrated mainly in the towns: by 1939, for example, Russians constituted 35.7 percent o f the urban population o f Azerbaijan, 35 percent in Uzbekistan, and in Kazakhstan a huge 58.4 percent. In dealing w ith the indigenous peoples, they normally expected Russian to be used, n o t the local language, which few o f them bothered to learn.14 By now, the whole program o f “grinding up all nationalities,” as Kalinin had put it, was being taken off the agenda. O n the contrary, nationalities were digging in for survival, and class war was being replaced by ethnic tension. D uring the 1930s class origin ceased to be the m ost im portant factor in determ ining one’s fate, and was gradually replaced by ethnic identity. Formally the turning point was marked by the 1936 constitu­ tion, which proclaimed that socialism had now been constructed, and that as a result the class struggle had in the m ain been won. But as early as 1934 Stalin had warned that the national question presented the greatest threat to the m oral-political unity o f Soviet society.15 As a result o f this change o f approach, some o f the “kulaks” only re­ cently »tiled found it possible to regain a certain acceptance in society. Since factories were short o f labor, they could often find employment w ithout questions asked. In 1936 their right to vote was restored. T heir children were able to attend local schools and, at the age o f sixteen, to re­ ceive a passport. Some kulaks “wrote off” their former status by volun­ teering for m ilitary service, and from 1941 this became a general practice. In that way exile status gradually became eroded, though the NKVD did its best to ensure that regulations were observed, residence perm its regu­ larly checked, passports w ithheld, and so on. Local officials became con­ cerned that some trudposelentsy (labor exiles) were turning themselves back into kulaks. From Khabarovsk oblast it was reported that some o f them had three to five cows, a horse, and a shotgun w ith which they went hunting. O thers were said to be conducting “speculative” trade and mak­ ing money out o f local kolkhozniks.16 They were acting as enterprising peasants have always done, trying to ensure survival and if possible pros­ perity by adapting to a harsh environm ent, to local economic conditions, and to prevailing social hierarchies.

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Gradually the Soviet state was beginning to adopt the attitude that, though the Soviet U nion was hom eland for all social classes and for all peoples, it was especially so for workers and for Russians. Marx had stated that uthe workers have no hom eland.” At a conference o f industrial m an­ agers, however, Stalin adjusted this doctrine to bring it up to date. MIn the past we did not have and could not have a fatherland,” he proclaimed, but “now, since we have overthrown capitalism and power belongs to the working class, we have a fatherland and will defend its independence.” By that tim e H itler s accession to power in Germ any had given a new dim en­ sion to the desire to defend w hat could now unself-consciously be called the “socialist fatherland.” In M arch 1935 Pravda expatiated on this new doctrine: “Soviet patriotism is a burning feeling o f boundless love, a selfless devotion to ones m otherland and a profound responsibility for her fate and defence, which issue forth like m ighty spring waters from the depth o f our people.” O nly a year later Pravda was attributing to that So­ viet patriodsm an explicidy Russian core: “In the constellation o f union republics, the RSFSR is the largest. A nd the Russian people are the first am ong equals.”17 A t a lunch w ith top officials o f the Com intern, to celebrate the tw enti­ eth anniversary o f the O ctober revolution, Stalin rum inated publicly on his understanding o f the Russian inheritance: “T he Russian tsars did a great deal that was bad. . . . But they did one thing that was good— they amassed an enorm ous state, all the way to Kamchatka. We have inherited that state. A nd for the first tim e we, as Bolsheviks, have consolidated and strengthened it as a united and indivisible state, not in the interests o f landowners and capitalists, but for the benefit o f the workers, o f all the peoples who make up that state.” If any part o f that state should be lost, he warned, it w ould “inevitably fall under foreign subjugation” and inflict damage on the cause o f socialism: “Therefore, whoever attem pts to de­ stroy that unity o f the socialist state, whoever seeks the separation o f any o f its parts or nationalities— that man is an enemy, a sworn enemy o f the state and o f the peoples o f the USSR. And we will destroy each and every such enemy, even if he is an old Bolshevik.”18 In this way, the protection and defense o f the neo-Russian Empire had become the Com m unists’ top priority. The rehabilitation o f Russia soon found its reflection in policy. D uring the 1920s the Soviet leaders had begun Latinizing the various alphabets in use in the country. They had even considered Latinizing the Cyrillic

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script, in order, as Lunacharskii said, “to give us maximum international­ ism, link us both w ith the West and w ith the reformed East.” A special com m ittee o f Narkompros had been set up to prepare the changeover. It declared Cyrillic “an alphabet o f autocratic oppression, missionary propa­ ganda and Great Russian national chauvinism . . . ideologically alien to socialist construction.” In July 1937, however, the com m ittee was dis­ banded. The Latin alphabet was now dismissed as a product o f “the bour­ geois W est.” By the same token, the U nion o f Esperantists, which had been attached to Narkompros, was closed in June 1938, on the grounds that Esperanto was being used for espionage and counter-revolutionary activity. M any o f its activists, including its head, E. Drezen, were ar­ rested.19 In 1938 the teaching o f Russian was made com pulsory in the non-Russian republics; in practice, though, its introduction was slow and unsystematic: local soviets dragged their feet, head teachers resisted mak­ ing room for it in crowded tim etables, and the training o f qualified teach­ ers was haphazard.20 T he Soviet Army was also turning into som ething more like the old Russian Imperial army. Exemptions from service for certain non-Russians were abolished, and territorial reserve units were phased out from 1935. Members o f these locally based units had done a few days’ training every m onth and had attended a summ er camp each year. In regions o f mixed nationality the smaller formations o f the regular army as well had gener­ ally been ethnically homogeneous, w ith training and com m and in the ap­ propriate language. These ethnic form ations were abolished from 1938. T heir abolition elim inated a locally based system o f recruitm ent and made mobilization m uch more cumbersome, as was catastrophically dem­ onstrated in 1941. Russian was made the universal language o f com mand, and beginning in July 1940 instruction in Russian was provided for those recruits who did not speak it.21 After the civil war, as we have seen, Cossack m ilitary form ations had been disbanded, and so also had Cossack adm inistrative districts w ith the attached privileges. Cossacks had lost their self-governing assemblies headed by atamans and were reclassified, like other rural-dwellers, as wealthy, middle, or poor peasants. From 1936, however, Cossack names were given to five cavalry divisions and Cossack uniforms were restored; Kuban and D on Cossack choirs reappeared and performed at the Bolshoi Theater. These formations were not stricdy Cossack in the old sense, though, since recruits o f all social and ethnic backgrounds were accepted,

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including workers and Jews, long-tim e antagonists o f the Cossacks. This was a synthetic, not a genuine, réanim ation o f tradition.22 T he ethnic status o f passport holders was also tightened up at this stage. W hen passports had originally been introduced in 1932, entry no. 5— nationality—was filled in on the basis o f a citizen’s simple declara­ tion. Now, however, an N KVD circular o f April 2, 1938, insisted that the nationality entry be substantiated by docum ents, such as a birth cer­ tificate, indicating the parents’ nationality.23 T he designation o f national­ ity was now essentially racial: one’s nationality could only be “chosen” if one had parents o f different ethnic origins, and then only at the age o f six­ teen on first receiving a passport. Thereafter it was unchangeable. This was not quite racism in the Nazi sense. A lthough Soviet anthro­ pologists took race seriously, they did not regard physiological characteris­ tics as unalterable; nor did they reject particular races as inferior. O n the contrary, they believed that interm arriage and racial mixing w ould con­ tribute to progress and the evolution o f higher hum an biological types. In any case, w hat interested the NKVD was not racial status but rather kin­ ship and ethnic identity, and their im plications for state security. If an eth­ nic group had a hom eland abroad, then it was automatically suspect as potentially disloyal to the USSR. Similarly, having relatives abroad was becoming a reason for official doubt about one’s total loyalty.24 T he practice o f surveying whole populations and collecting inform a­ tion about them , classifying subgroups on social, economic, ethnic, or ra­ cial criteria, and keeping track o f every individual in huge filing systems had become a routine part o f European politics since the outbreak o f the First W orld War. Emerging social welfare systems depended on such data, as did industrial em ployment and m ilitary recruitm ent.23 Inform ation o f this kind was especially useful to security forces. In the Soviet Union it be­ came doubly potent as a political weapon, since classification was har­ nessed to a messianic ideology that aimed to create a perfect society and which divided hum an beings into comrades and enemies. In the words o f Amir Weiner, “the Soviet purification drive . . . com bined the m odem Eu­ ropean ethos o f social engineering w ith Bolshevik M arxist eschatology.. . . T he unprecedented increase in the capacities and aspirations o f the state w ent hand in hand w ith the view o f society as raw material to be molded into an ideal image.”26 The new techniques o f population control had initially been used for the purposes o f class struggle, to aid in the adle o f kulaks. But already in

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the early 1930s ethnic criteria were sometimes used to discrim inate on the basis o f social class. T hus in Ukraine dekulakization was applied w ith es­ pecial stringency to certain ethnic m inorities, like Germans, Jews, and Poles. There was even a popular saying: “Raz poliak, znachit kulak. ” (“If he’s a Pole, he m ust be a kulak.)27 Fears over the darkening international situation prom pted the creation o f frontier security zones in the west in 1934—1935. As the zones were de­ lineated, the authorities undertook further deportations that had a more definite ethnic character than earlier. W hen some 8,300 families were moved eastward from the regions o f Kiev and V innitsa oblasti bordering on Poland to other parts o f Ukraine, more than half o f those deported were Germans and Poles, though they form ed only a tiny percentage o f the population there. In January 1936 a further 15,000 G erm an and Polish households were deported from the same region, this tim e to Kazakhstan, where they became “special settlers” like the kulaks who had preceded them .28 Thus deportations progressively became ethnicized. T he first tim e the new techniques were applied to an entire nationality was the deporta­ tion o f Koreans. In 1935 some 200,000 Koreans were living in various parts o f Siberia, w ith a particular concentration in the Far East. Some o f them had been resettled from the border regions when the Japanese occupied M anchuria in 1931. T hen in 1937, because the Japanese had invaded China and posed a serious threat, Koreans— suspect because to local officials they looked like Japanese and m ight be suspected o f spy­ ing for them — were deported from all Far Eastern oblasts plus C hita and the Buriat M ongol krai. They were packed into overcrowded and underheated freight cars and transported to various parts o f Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmeniia, and Kirgiziia, where they were “dum ped in the m iddle o f nowhere, w ith a few blankets and whatever they were able to bring along.” Some found work on collective farms, in handicraft artels, or in the mines o f Karaganda; others succumbed to cold, hunger, dysen­ tery, malaria, or typhus. In those respects their fate was exactly like that o f the kulaks. But an additional penalty was attached to ethnic deportation: those who eventually setded into Soviet institutions in their new home­ land were not perm itted to read Korean newspapers or send their children to Korean-language schools. D eportation was aimed at erasing their eth­ nic identity. The homes they had been forced to leave were occupied by incoming Red Army and NKVD personnel, to secure the frontier.29

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M any non-Russians understandably saw deportation as Russification. They were wrong, though, for one o f the deported ethnic groups was Rus­ sian. U ntil 1935 the Soviet U nion owned and operated the Chinese East­ ern Railway in M anchuria, on which m ost o f the workers were Russian. After the line was sold to the Japanese, many o f those railwaymen re­ turned to the Soviet U nion, where they imm ediately became the target o f NKVD suspicion, since they had lived abroad and still had relatives there. T heir fate prefigured that o f the m uch larger num ber o f returnees after the Second W orld War. Ethnic cleansing was a tool o f imperial security, not o f national, still less racial, prejudice.30 Reflecting on these developments after the end o f the Soviet U nion, M ikoian claimed: “Stalins decision to deport entire nations had a depress­ ing im pact on me. I did not understand how one could accuse virtually entire nations o f treason. After all, they had party organizations, Com m u­ nists, lots o f peasants, and a Soviet intelligentsia! M any had been m obi­ lized into the arm y and had fought at the front. Q uite a few representa­ tives o f these peoples were decorated as Heroes o f the Soviet U n io n !. . . This was a deviation from the class approach to the solution o f the nationality problem .”31 It certainly was. In fact henceforth ethnic pol­ icy largely replaced the class approach as the dom inant m ode o f Soviet politics.

Finding a “Usable Past” O n the face o f it, the struggles and heroic deeds o f the revolution should have offered the Soviet leaders ample material for a gripping foundation narrative. But a serious snag arose at precisely the wrong m om ent, in the mid-1930s: m any o f the heroes o f that era were in the process o f being unmasked as “wreckers,” “terrorists,” or “im perialist spies.” A 1935 edi­ tion o f The History o f the C ivil War in the USSR had to be w ithdraw n and reissued in a completely new edition in 1938, shorn o f m ost o f its photo­ graphs and w ith much o f its text excised, because nearly half o f the “heroes” m entioned in it had since become “unpersons.” Schoolchildren found these tergiversations totally bewildering: “O ne day their pictures are on the walls in school and in the text-books. The next day, all o f a sud­ den we were told they’re enemies o f the people.” Liubov Shaporina, the com posers wife, reflected in her diary in June 1938: “People used to keep things and pass them down from generation to generation, archives were

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preserved and history was created. Now the present day denies the day that has passed, yesterdays leaders are shot today, everything that remains from the day before is destroyed in the m inds o f the young.”32 Since much o f the revolutionary narrative was unacceptable, the only alternative was to find a Russian past that could be safely evoked. If the workers now had a "socialist fatherland,” w hat were its memories and symbols, the essential com ponents o f any vision o f a fatherland? In the schools the Central Com m ittee and Narkompros decreed a re­ treat from the project-based vocational and labor-based teaching o f the 1920s. Pupils were to return to their desks, study officially approved textbooks, and take exams. T he class-struggle approach to history was also downgraded in favor o f a sim pler and more memorable narrative. A t a special meeting o f historians called in M arch 1934 Stalin complained: “M y son asked me to explain w hat was w ritten in this book. I took a look and I didn’t get it eith er.. . . These textbooks are useless . . . W hat the hell is ‘the feudal epoch,’ ‘the epoch o f industrial capitalism ,’ ‘the epoch o f for­ m ations’? It’s all epochs and no facts, no events, no people, no concrete in­ form ation.”33 Young people needed a more patriotic and rousing narrative focusing on the Russian and Soviet state, which could guarantee the peo­ ple’s security in a dangerous world as no putative "international proletar­ ian republic” could. H istory teachers were instructed in a decree o f May 1934: “O n the teaching o f civic history in the schools o f the USSR,” to avoid “abstract sociological schemes” and instead to employ “a chronological historical se­ quence . . . firmly fixing in the minds o f pupils im portant events, person­ ages and dates.” M ikhail Pokrovskii, the doyen o f socioeconomic histori­ ans, fell out o f fashion; instead monarchs, dates, and battles were back in vogue, especially battles won by Russians. T he expansion o f the tsarist Russian state, oppressive and exploitative though it m ight have been, was projected as objectively beneficial and progressive, since it created the ter­ ritory that was now the Soviet U nion. In M arch 1936 Pravda com­ m ented: “To love one’s great, free native land means also to know it, to take an interest in its past, to take pride in its bright, heroic pages and to hate its oppressors and torm entors.”34 The task o f making sense out o f Russian and Soviet history was en­ trusted to a team at the Lenin Pedagogical Institute working under Pro­ fessor A. V. Shestakov. Among the recommendations made by Andrei Zhdanov, the cultural commissar, were “explain better the cultural role o f

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Christianity”; "provide som ething on the progressive meaning o f the cen­ tralization o f state power”; and "strengthen the history o f the individual peoples.” In other words, he w anted religion, ethnicity, and the state to figure more prom inendy in the interpretation o f history.3S T he new textbook was published in September 1937 in an edition o f no less than ten m illion copies. In m any ways it re-established the historical orthodoxy o f the late tsarist period. In im plicit refutation o f Hrushevskyi, it reasserted the unity o f the Russian state, evoking an un­ breakable tradition stretching from Kievan Rus through Muscovy to the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. It presented the absorption o f Ukraine in the seventeenth century as a liberation and "reunification.” Russian imperial expansion and m ilitary victories were celebrated, and Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Alexander I extolled as great lead­ ers. T he non-Russian peoples were at the m argin, brought in when Rus­ sian imperial expansion or Russian peasant revolts involved them . By putting the Russian state at the center o f the picture, and presenting Ukrainians and Belorussians as part o f the Russian people, the textbook projected a triune Russian nation as the focus o f the Soviet U nion.36 This was not simply a revival o f pre-1917 Russian patriotism , though. Twenty years o f Likbez and mass prim ary education had transform ed the situation: the narratives o f nationhood were now able to reach a far wider audience than had previously been the case. M illions o f Russians— all but the very elderly—had been taught to read and write their own language. They had come into the towns, had begun to read newspapers regularly, to listen to the radio, and to go to the cinema. They were thus drawn w ithin the radius o f conscious Soviet citizenship. This was the first Rus­ sian mass patriotism , and it took a Soviet statist form. Since school resources were inadequate, however, m any teachers were poorly qualified and children often distracted by other matters; students and the general public tended to oversimplify the historical doctrines be­ ing p u t before them . T he new historiography was after all quite complex and difficult to understand. If tsarist Russia really had been a "prison o f the peoples,” then how could its expansion have been “progressive?” And how could the struggle o f the revolutionary movement against it have been justified? A question at a Leningrad lecture summed up the di­ lemma. A student had just read about the late-eighteenth-century general Suvorov as a “peoples hero”; “w ithout doubt,” he com mented, “Suvorov was a brilliant m ilitary leader who never experienced defeat, but at the

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same tim e he was him self an instrum ent o f tsarist policy, the Gendarm e o f Europe policy. So is it really right to call him a people’s hero?”37 M ost chil­ dren, and indeed m ost teachers, did not trouble w ith these quandaries: w hat they retained in their imaginations was a sim ple-m inded Russian m ilitary and statist patriotism carried over from the tsarist to the Soviet state, w ithout any o f the sharp breaks or dialectical subtleties the new doc­ trine required. O ne new element in Russian-Soviet patriotism was that it now delin­ eated itself by contrast w ith the U nited States. Already in the 1920s Maiakovskii had w ritten an ode to the Brooklyn Bridge, extolling its “steel-wrought mile” as a trium ph o f technology that Russia should em u­ late. H e insisted, though, that Americans were brash, hypocritical, and obsessively mercenary. H e evoked the imagined surprise o f Americans at seeing Russians working enthusiastically to fulfill five-year plans w ith­ out the driving force o f money: “Gendemen! You have long been used / To buying constructive energy w ith money. / You will never understand, plum p gendemen, / T he roots o f the zeal o f our Com m unards. . . . I Your famous swift America / We shall catch up and overtake.”38 “Catch up and overtake” became a universally understood cliché, even w ithout its referent: it indicated one o f the priorities o f the regime. T he form ulation implied a respect for the U nited States that Stalin direcdy en­ couraged, recom mending that Russian “revolutionary élan” be tem pered by “American efficiency” if it was not to deteriorate into either daydream­ ing or an obsession w ith issuing decrees. “T he com bination o f Russian revolutionary élan w ith American efficiency,” he stated, “is the essence o f Leninism in party work.”39 T he new Russian-Soviet patriotism contained cells o f Americanism encoded in its genetic structure, w ith both positive and negative signs. T he U nited States was both opponent and model, w ith fateful implications for the future. We should note that the rehabilitation o f Russia was entirely imperial and statist, not ethnic. It was, if you like, neo-rossiiskii, not russkii. Stalin despised ethnic Russia, and during the 1930s he never ceased to pursue policies aimed at the destruction o f its two m ost im portant citadels: the O rthodox Church and the village commune. In addition Russian litera­ ture, art, and music that did not conform to the new state-imposed canon was suppressed or at best subject to unpredictable persecution. N or was korenizatsiia term inated altogether, even though its operation was m odi­ fied to the benefit o f Russians in the 1930s.

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T he new patriotism may have been statist, but that did not stop Rus­ sian people from responding warmly to it. They identified w ith the state because it defended them and because it symbolized the broad bound­ aries and the m ultiethnic solidarity they liked to think o f as characteristic o f their nation. T heir reaction can be seen in the enthusiastic reception given to Sergei Eizenshteins film Aleksandr Nevskii, released in 1938. The film evoked the thirteenth-century struggle o f the people o f Novgorod— presented straightforwardly as Russians— against the Teutonic Knights. Aleksandr Nevskii, their prince, was projected as cunning, hum orous, res­ olute, heroic, able to inspire the mass o f ordinary people against scheming and disloyal opponents. T he O rthodox C hurch was m uch in evidence, but merely as a symbol o f national identity, w ithout any religious sig­ nificance. A t the very end, for instance, Aleksandr chooses the cathedral porch as the setting for his final peroration w arning that “anyone who comes to Russia w ith the sword shall perish by the sword.” This film provided a reassuring linkage o f historical symbols w ith a con­ tem porary message. A Red Army officer com m ented, “T he film touched me to the depths o f m y soul. It is a genuine masterpiece o f Soviet cinema­ tography. T he unforgettable ‘battle on the ice’ characterizes the patriotism o f the Russian people, their unwavering bravery and their deep love for their m otherland.” O r, as a m etal worker put it: “T he words o f Aleksandr Nevskii, pronounced seven hundred years ago, are relevant even now. We will answer every blow o f the enemy w ith a triple blow. T he Russian peo­ ple have [always] beaten their enemies, are beating them [now], and will continue to beat them .”40 O ne can imagine how com forting such declara­ tions were to Russians facing w hat they already knew m ight be the most destructive invasion in their history. In this way even legends and histori­ cal episodes from seven hundred years earlier could be drawn on to inspire mass patriotism in the 1930s. Were these changes both in national policy and in their popular reso­ nance a tacit admission that the Change o f Landmarks school had been right all along? Was this the “great retreat” they had anticipated?41 N ot really, because the messianic vision o f the em ancipation o f hum anity through an international proletarian movement had not been abandoned. But the process by which it was to be realized had been substantially re­ shaped. Now, rather than through international revolution, the goal was to be reached through the operations o f the Soviet U nion as a great power. This was certainly a change o f direction, but it was not really a “great re-

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treat.” O n the contrary, it coincided w ith and helped to generate the m ost frenzied crisis o f Russian-Com m unist messianism, the “great terror” o f the late 1930s.

Russians and Jews This new-style Russian mass patriotism was especially worrying for the Jews. In its early stages the Soviet project had been as m uch Jewish as Rus­ sian. T he Jews, like the Russians, and perhaps even more so, had inherited from their past a messianic tradition that had found litde sustenance in the everyday life o f prerevolutionary Russia. T he Jews were then the m ost oppressed nationality: the m ajority o f them lived in the Pale o f Setdement, in the towns and shtetls o f Poland, Belorussia, Ukraine, and Novorossiia. A skilled, educated, or affluent m inority lived (sometimes illegally) in the main cities o f the empire, where they were first guild mer­ chants, lawyers, doctors, bankers, professors, actors, musicians, and art­ ists. Even before 1917, m ost o f these urban Jews were becoming thor­ oughly Russified: they usually brought their children up in the Russian language and culture and drifted away from the synagogue. We have seen that Jews had been prom inent in the various wings o f the Russian revolutionary movement, and that Trotskii was the m ost consis­ tent internationalist am ong them . In April 1917 three o f the nine mem­ bers o f the Bolshevik Central Com m ittee were Jews, and in August six out o f twenty-one were.42 D uring the early years o f the new regime Jews occu­ pied several key positions: Trotskii was Peoples Commissar for M ilitary Affairs; Sverdlov was chairman o f the Central Executive Com m ittee o f the Congress o f Soviets and also secretary o f the Com m unist Party; Zinovev was chairm an o f the Com intern; and Kamenev and Zinovev headed the party committees o f Moscow and Petrograd-Leningrad. Jews were less well represented in the party as a whole: according to the 1922 membership census, there were 19,600 o f them , just over 5 percent o f members, and their share declined gradually thereafter, though it re­ mained high in Ukraine, at around 12 percent, and especially in Belorus­ sia, at 24 percent. In the government they remained prom inent well into the 1930s: in 1936 six out o f twenty peoples commissars were Jews. Overall they held about 6 percent o f senior adm inistrative posts. In a sense they took over the position held by the Germans in the tsarist ad­ m inistration, that o f an ethnic group influential well beyond their propor-

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tion in the population owing to their superior education and their strong attachm ent to the ruling system.43 T he Soviet U nion offered new and exciting opportunities to all Jews, not just those who aspired to high political positions. The Pale o f Settle­ m ent was abolished, along w ith all other forms o f anti-Jewish discrimina­ tion. As the m ost literate Soviet nationality, Jews seized their opportuni­ ties and flocked into educational institutions, especially at the higher and specialized levels. Between the m id-1920s and m id-1950s they form ed 13 to 15 percent o f the student body, while in 1934-1935, 18 percent o f aspiranty (research students) were Jews. In Ukraine in 1923 they formed 47.4 percent o f all students, nearly twice as m any as the Ukrainians them ­ selves. They w ent on from there to become prom inent in the arts and in m any o f the professions, as managers, accountants, engineers, architects, agronomists, journalists, professors, and resarchers.44 T he new opportunities attracted Jews in large num bers from the shtetls to the cities. These were mostly young Jews eager to escape from a rela­ tively restrictive hom e environm ent and participate in the Soviet social construction project. Already by 1926 21 percent o f Jewish marriages were to non-Jewish partners, a m uch higher level than before 1917. In 1926 nearly 25 percent o f Soviet Jews declared their m other tongue to be Russian, and in 1939 the proportion had grown to 54.6 percent. Large num bers o f Jews were, consciously or by inertia, breaking their ties w ith a synagogue-Yiddish background. W hile rem aining aware o f being Jewish, they were not only learning Russian (if it was not already their native lan­ guage) but also assimilating to Russian culture.45 As Vitalii Rubin, later a prom inent Sinologist, put it, “All the Jews knew that they were Jewish but considered everything related to Jewishness as a thing o f the past. . . . There was no active intention o f renouncing ones Jewishness. T he ques­ tion simply did not exist.” H e was exaggerating slighdy, but am ong big-city Jews in the 1920s and 1930s such an oudook was com m on. It is summarized by one scientist, describing the situadon in an Odessa school in the 1930s: “In my class, at least thirty out o f thirty-five pupils were Jewish. M ost knew some Yiddish. A lthough we spoke Russian am ong ourselves, our speech was sprinkled w ith many Yiddish words and expressions. I never experienced any antiSemitism during all my school years. We did not feel separate from the rest o f the ‘Soviet people.’ In school we did not study any Jewish history, but devoted a lot o f tim e to Russian history and literature. We Jewish pu-

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pils perceived it as our history and literature, not realizing that we were strangers in the country. This was the paradox: we considered ourselves part o f an indivisible Russian nation although we knew that we were Jews.”46 This com pound sense o f national identity— feeling Jewish, Russian, and Soviet, and seeing no contradiction between them — was com mon among urbanized Jews in the 1930s. They were among the m ost con­ vinced and goal-directed o f Soviet citizens; they believed passionately in building an international socialist com m unity in which ethnic distinc­ tions would persist merely as colorful relics. Even then, however, popular anti-Sem itism sometimes broke into their consciousness. T he journalist V iktor Perelman recalled that when he was a child in Moscow in the 1930s Russian teenagers w ould shout at him on the street, “Eh, Abramchik, evrei!” (Hey, Abramchick, you Jew!) O nce he was attacked and had to defend him self w ith his fists. Significandy, how­ ever, he never told his m other w hat had happened: “Possibly I intuitively sensed that, however m uch she m ight love me, she would be as helpless as me in the face o f these adolescent street bullies.” Moreover, such incidents did not fit into his family’s view o f the world. Once, when he spoke in a way which implied that Jews were somehow distinct, his m other retorted: “You should be ashamed o f yourself! W hat do you mean by W and ‘them’? I am Jewish by nadonality, but I am proud to have grown up among the great Russian people. . . . As long as the party and the Soviet authorities exist, the Jewish people will not need anyone’s protection.”47 The fact that Jews were prom inent in the Soviet adm inistration m eant that they were conspicuous in the O G PU , the m ilida, and the procuracy, which from the late 1920s onward played a leading role in collectivizadon and dekulakization, as well as in the closing o f churches and arrest o f priests. O f course many other nationalities worked in those organizadons too, notably Russians, but the prejudiced and ill-inclined could always portray these destructive operadons as part o f a Jewish conspiracy. Popular resentm ent o f the Com m unists could easily take anti-Sem idc forms. In the late 1930s some Jews were worried that the new Russophile party line would encourage such attitudes. D uring the terror many Jews were arrested, but not proportionately more than other nationalities. How­ ever, the fact that many high-profile defendants were accused o f “Trotsky­ ism” did provide an anti-Sem itic “hidden transcript” to the show trials. In January 1939 V. I. Blium, a prom inent theater critic, wrote to Stalin com-

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plaining that “the character o f Soviet patriotism is being d isto rted . . . and starting to take on all the features o f racist nationalism .” T he younger generation, he warned, had never seen bourgeois nationalism at work, still less the Jewish pogroms unleashed by the tsarist regime, and so they did not realize M that we cannot defeat the fascist enemy w ith his own weapon (racism) but only w ith a m uch better weapon, internationalist so­ cialism.”48

Soviet Celebrations W ith an acceptable history now in place, the present needed to be taken care of. How were the Soviet peoples, and especially the Russians, to re­ gain a sense o f their own community? We have seen that in the early years the Soviet leaders had difficulty devising celebrations which satisfied both popular feeling and the requirements o f ideology. The effort to find such an effective com bination continued for m ost o f the 1920s and 1930s. O n the whole during the 1920s emphasis was placed on relatively smallscale events, involving the workforce o f a single enterprise or institution. Thus in 1922 the famous Putilov works in Petrograd were renamed “Red Putilov.” Mass choral singing rang out as the old title was pulled down and the new erected; the workers then w ent in procession around the fac­ tory bearing torches, in a patent reference to the krestnyi khod, the proces­ sion o f the cross around the O rthodox parish church. Life-cycle events were m arked w ith new ceremonies, such as “O ctobering” in place o f bap­ tism. Trotskii was a leading supporter o f these experiments, and they were largely abandoned after his exile in 1927.49 Gradually celebrations took on more centralized and hierarchical forms. May Day and the anniversary o f the revolution on November 7 would culm inate in a parade through Red Square watched by the leaders from atop the Lenin M ausoleum, which had become the Soviet U nions most sacred space. They would line up, their order determ ined by an ever more rigid protocol, to take the salute. T he sequence o f the march defined the new social hierarchy: first came the armed forces, then industrial workers, then students, and finally collective farmers. The order in which the workers marched reflected the success o f their enterprises in fulfilling and over-fiilfilling the plan, w ith shock workers and Stakhanovites at the head.50 D uring the late 1920s and 1930s “Soviet tim e” gradually assumed a

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more settled form and challenged the ecclesiastical calendar. Harvest Day in O ctober supplanted Pokrov (the festival o f the Intercession), and May Day replaced Easter. Preparations for each began weeks in advance, high­ lighted in the local press. Instructions w ent out that production targets should be fulfilled in tim e for the festival, so that a new workshop or block o f apartm ents could be solemnly handed over to the new owners during the celebration itself. As late as the early 1930s, tw o-thirds o f families in towns were celebrat­ ing religious festivals to the exclusion o f Soviet ones. But this changed fairly rapidly thereafter, as churches were closed and industrial production schedules became tighter. Moreover, pleasurable public events, like soccer matches, film shows, music, and dancing were scheduled on Soviet festi­ vals, to attract ordinary people to them . Special allocations o f scarce goods and groceries would be sent to retail stores in the days preceding a festival, so that the public could rejoice on a full stomach, celebrate the new abun­ dance, and feel gratitude to their leaders.51 Soviet festivals became occasions for rewarding success publicly by dis­ tributing certificates and medals. Beginning in 1936 festivals were decreed for certain favored professions: the railwaymen, naval and air force per­ sonnel, and athletes (fizkultum iki); after the war miners, radio personnel, artillery and tank soldiers were added. Soviet elections, since they con­ tained no political com petition, became public celebrations, accompanied by music, dancing, and merry-making in public places.52 The All-Union Physical Culture parades held periodically in Moscow were im portant in delineating the Soviet U nion as a new kind o f m ulti­ national collective. N ot only did delegations from the Union republics pledge their loyalty to Stalin and dem onstrate their physical fitness to un­ dertake tasks o f production or defense, according to the needs o f the fa­ therland; but they also displayed aspects o f their hom e culture or econ­ omy: the Uzbeks the construction o f a canal to irrigate cotton production, the Georgians the harvesting o f grapes and tea. They wore national cos­ tumes and performed folk dances, but only in a stylized and pre-approved form: the spontaneous merry-making, let alone the drunkenness, o f folk festivals was not perm itted. In July 1939 the delegation from the Russian Federation led the way, carrying a banner that read, “First among equals,” confirming the current Pravda line on Russia’s status w ithin the USSR.53 For many participants the processions were most likely tedious and even embarrassing. Nonetheless, such feelings could give way to sudden

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elation at being identified w ith a huge collective. O ne Soviet student who later em igrated described his feelings: “M ost o f the participants— includ­ ing Komsomol members— felt some inner resistance, som ething akin to em barrassment and hum iliation, at the necessity o f carrying ‘Bolshevik icons.’ . . . Sometimes ones sense o f hum iliation would suddenly give way to an opposite feeling— a sense o f extreme pride and feverish enthusiasm .” This was part o f the Soviet drive to reforge the individual so that he would find his fulfillm ent in the collective.54 T he new era also required its own heroes. O ne such figure widely pro­ m oted was the Donbass coalm iner Aleksei Stakhanov, who achieved in­ credible output rates during ordinary work shifts. This acclaim was en­ tirely in the consciousness-raising spirit o f the regime, but its focus on the individual ran counter to established Russian labor patterns, which were collectivist. Stakhanovites’ feats required the cooperation o f colleagues to deliver materials and spare parts, keep the conveyer belt moving, lighting and heating w orking normally, and so on. T heir m onopoly o f publicity and reward was resented by their colleagues, and some o f them were phys­ ically assaulted.55 M ore widely applauded were the exploits o f the aviationists and polar explorers, perhaps because they were not wholly planned, and certainly airm en and explorers were not exploiting ordinary workers. In 1932 O tto Shm idt led a crew o f polar explorers in the ship Cheliuskin, w hich tra­ versed the Arctic Sea route in one navigational season. But on a second voyage in 1933-1934 it was trapped by pack ice and then sank, leaving 104 people stranded on a remote ice floe. T he hastily organized air rescue aroused genuine public concern, then rejoicing when it was successfully accomplished, and the whole narrative soon became a sacred text celebrat­ ing the heroism, resourcefulness, and technological sophistication o f So­ viet society. Izvestiia proclaimed, “Technology has conquered nature; man has conquered death.” W hen the explorer Ivan Papanin landed at the N orth Pole and established a base camp there, he and his fellow explorers claimed that they did not feel alone in the icy wastes: “no distance can separate us, citizens o f the USSR, from our country, the first socialist country in the world, from the Bolshevik Party, or from the w arm th o f our people.”56 A couple o f years later the record-breaking flights o f Valerii Chkalov, first from Moscow to the Soviet far east, then across the N orth Pole to the U nited States, called forth comparable rejoicing. They provided a new op-

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portunity to envisage not only the sheer size and diversity o f the USSR but also the prospect that it would be made manageable by m odern com­ m unications and transport systems. A t the same tim e the hierarchy o f place was preserved by the fact that Stalin welcomed the pioneers back and celebrated their feats in Red Square and the Kremlin. T he Soviet Union was now being represented as a concentric space centered on Mos­ cow, but w ith its brightest perspectives in the east: the immense frozen land o f Siberia, which could be conquered only by the m ost up-to-date technology com bined w ith heroism and high collective m orale.57 A new song o f 1936 summed up the motifs o f size, diversity, freedom, and perpetual readiness for defense o f the borders, while also suggesting that the Soviet U nion was a huge family: Broad is my native land. It has many forests, fields and rivers. I don’t know o f any other country W here a man breathes so freely. From Moscow to the very borders, From the southern m ountains to the northern seas, A man walks as the master o f his immense m otherland. But we will knit our brows severely, If the enemy wants to break us. We love the m otherland as we would our bride. We protect her as we w ould our affectionate m other.58 The cities were Incom ing showcases o f the new socialist way o f life, and they also tacitly served to delineate its hierarchy— since collective hum workers, still the majority o f the Russian population, were deprived o f the passports needed to enter them. The cozy but ramshackle and semirural appearance o f m ost Russian towns was giving way, not to rectilinear, func­ tional glass buildings, as one m ight have expected in the 1920s, but to neo-Baroque palaces in stone and stucco. Moscow, as the pinnacle o f the hierarchy, had its own General Plan for Reconstruction, approved only in 1935 but actually started some years earlier. The traders’ stalls in O khotnyi Riad gave way to the m onum ental edifices o f Gosplan and the

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Moskva H otel, while the old Tverskaia Street was substantially widened and became Gorkii Street, a succession o f voluptuous facades w ith arches, columns, and capitals, embellished w ith banners and statues o f workers and soldiers. These were cities designed for massive celebratory parades converging on Red Square and the Kremlin at the center." T he new architecture epitomized w hat V ladim ir Paperny has called “C ulture Two.” W hereas early Soviet “Culture O ne” had been m odernist, austere, antihierarchical, internationalist, and unspecific as to place, “Cul­ ture Two” was traditional, sensual, hierarchical, ethnically marked, and geographically specific. It answered the Soviet peoples’ need for stability and a definite identity, a sense o f place, tim e, and tradition.60 Perhaps the m ost extraordinary aspect o f the new capital was its under­ ground peoples palaces. O n the Moscow M etro, everyday mass travel was elevated into progress through an empyrean realm, a préfiguration o f C om m unist abundance. Vast, dem ocratic cavern-palaces were con­ structed, w ith baroque, classical, and avant-garde architectural motifs re­ assembled in new configurations and fulfilling new functions. Murals cel­ ebrated the history o f the revolution, economic development, and the friendship o f the Soviet peoples, like the series o f friezes in the Kievskaia Station depicting scenes from the history o f Russia’s relationship w ith Ukraine. T he ensembles were lit, not by the sun, but by evenly glowing arc-lights whose provenance was unclear, but which seemed to fulfill the promise both o f the 1912 futurist opera by Burliuk and Kruchenykh, “Victory over the Sun,” and o f Lenin’s declaration that “Com m unism = Soviet power plus electrification o f the whole country.”61

Sport and “Physical Culture” Public activities that had an elem ent o f genuine com petition and unpre­ dictability were the m ost popular. Hence the im portance o f sport. The C om m unist leaders had seen the potential value o f sport from the outset, but its m eaning subtly changed during the 1930s. The T hird Komsomol Congress o f 1920 had proclaimed that sport should help to create “har­ moniously developed hum an beings, creative citizens o f Com m unist soci­ ety,” specifically by preparing them for work and for defending their country. A Union-wide fitness program known as fizkultura was launched in 1931 under the slogan “Be Ready for W ork and Defense.”62 At this stage party sentim ent still favored general physical develop-

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m ent for everyone and opposed specialization, com petition, or wide­ spread spectator sports. By the m id-1930s, however, a different view be­ came dom inant: that watching, say, skilled soccer players was an excellent means to provide new townsfolk w ith a way o f filling their leisure tim e, generating a kind o f local patriotism — and perhaps also o f getting out o f cramped com m unal apartm ents. Like many other social facilities and wel­ fare benefits, sports teams were form ed at the workplace by the trade unions: in Moscow the Lokomotiv team represented railway workers; Spartak the producers’ cooperatives; and Krasnoe Znam ia the cotton tex­ tile workers. In Stalingrad, Traktor was drawn from the tow ns bestknown factory; in Kharkov the team was drawn from Selmash (the agri­ cultural m achinery works). The armed forces also prom oted sports: the Central House o f the Red Army (TsDKA) sponsored one o f the best Moscow teams, and another, D inam o, was set up by the security police (though this identity was not widely publicized). Top players remained employees o f their firms, while actually devoting m ost o f their tim e to practice and exercise for the game: they became de facto professionals while rem aining nom inal am ateurs.63 T he organization o f sport as mass spectacle had already begun in the 1920s and 1930s. As early as 1927 it was reported from the Donbass that "big games draw so m any spectators that the mines are completely empty.” By the late 1930s m ost m ajor cities had reasonably capacious sta­ diums. In 1936 a national soccer league was set up to give structure to the com petitions and to stim ulate public interest, in line w ith the general ten­ dency o f the tim e to create regulated hierarchical structures geared toward publicly rewarding achievement. T he teams were all from large towns: am ong the twenty-six in the first division, six were from Moscow, five from Leningrad, and two each from Kiev, Kharkov, and Tbilisi. Sports as­ sociations also took a leading part in organizing festival parades, to show off their progress and advertise their activities.64 By the early 1940s sport, w hether played or watched, m et the need for a mass urban occupation that gave people health, excitement, involve­ m ent, identification w ith a place, com m itm ent to com petitive excellence, and a hierarchy o f achievement. Even at this stage, however, it did not en­ courage ethnic identification. T he mass sports com petitions, Spartakiads, were organized by towns and regions, not by republic, and the national sports team, when it began to enter international com petitions after the war, represented the Soviet Union, not Russia or any other nationality.

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The Family Social memory and social values are transm itted above all in the family. But, like all other Russian institutions, the family underw ent such up­ heavals between 1914 and 1945 that it was seldom able to play that role effectively. It is not only that parents and grandparents died or were scat­ tered and lost by the turm oil o f those three decades; in addition, family fortunes were dispersed, and homes were expropriated or occupied by im­ portunate outsiders. Books, tools and equipm ent, gardens and orchards— all the paraphernalia that enable children to learn skills from their par­ ents— w ent missing, had to be sold, or were confiscated. Cultural and so­ cial capital was degraded on a huge scale. O n top o f all that, the family as such came under legislative attack. D uring the 1920s the regime abolished nearly all inheritance and prop­ erty rights associated w ith the family, erased the distinction between legit­ im ate and illegitim ate children, and simplified divorce to the point where one partner could achieve it simply by inform ing the other. W omen were given greater freedom, for example, to obtain an abortion on dem and, and their (scant remaining) property rights were equalized w ith those o f m en. T he loosening o f family relationships generated a sharp rise in the divorce rate, an even sharper escalation in the num ber o f abortions, and a fall in the birth rate. Large num bers o f orphans appeared on city streets: they w ould form bands and hang around markets and railways stations, begging or even attacking passers-by to obtain food, clothing, drink, or money. State orphanages could not cope and often became nurseries o f crime and disease.65 T he orphans were the victims o f social dislocation generally, but the state s family legislation certainly did not assist their re­ integration into society. W omen were supposed to be the beneficiaries o f the new laws, but in practice m any found that they were left shouldering family responsibilities by men who exploited the new freedom to ab­ scond. By the m id-1950s the regime had decided that unstable families and a low birth rate were endangering economic growth and weakening the country’s defenses. Divorce was tightened and granted only after a court hearing. M en who fell short on their alimony payments were pursued. A bortion was prohibited except where childbirth would pose a serious health risk. W eddings, which had been conducted casually in dingy of­ fices, were made more solemn and ceremonial; registration officials would

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pronounce short homilies to rem ind couples o f their responsibilities. The right to inherit property was restored. In Soviet conditions property was modest, but significant because o f the general scarcity: inheritance m ight, for example, include an urban apartm ent, in the circumstances a priceless acquisition. Since the offspring o f unregistered unions had no such rights, the notion o f “legitimacy” was tacidy reinstated.66 T he regimes attitude to women was transformed. T he state did not wholly abandon the ideal o f giving them equal status w ith men but nev­ ertheless began to regard them as having different functions. In 1936 Kaganovich addressed the wives o f senior officials in the transport com­ missariat. H e told them that “concern for [their] husbands” should be their priority. “Cook good food for them , don’t cause them any stress, cre­ ate a com fortable hom e and a good, relaxing family atm osphere.” Galina Shtange, wife o f a professor o f railway engineering, com m ented in her di­ ary, “If we have any strength left over, we can join in production work as well. H e will not stand in our way if we do, but that is not w hat’s im ­ portant.”67 A family’s ability to transm it tradidons, skills, and values to the youn­ ger generadon hinged on w hether one o f its members had a professional specialism that could be adapted to the new society. Some qualificadons, like those o f lawyers or clergymen, were useless— or even dangerous— in the new circumstances. O thers, like those o f doctor, linguist, army officer, engineer, or scientist, could be adapted w ith litde difficulty. Yet others, such as musician or journalist, m ight be turned to account w ith ingenuity, adaptability, and a capacity for compromise.68 A nother way o f preserving social capital was to obtain protection from someone influential in the new regime. D m itrii Zhurnalistov had been a zemstvo statistician from a m inor noble family in Chernigov oblast. H e had known the revolutionaries Shchors and Podvoiskii, and in the early 1920s he used this acquaintance to keep the family hom e in Starodub from being communalized— though the cherry orchard in which it stood was expropriated and cut down, exactly as in Chekhov’s famous play. Liv­ ing in the old hom e ensured that there was private space for books, music, and games, and made it easier for the children to find marriage partners from similar backgrounds. D m itrii’s son Ivan, who trained in law and eco­ nomics just before the revolution, was able to work as an adm inistrator in construction trusts, and he eventually became a senior ministerial official, w ith a central Moscow apartm ent, a telephone, and a well-appointed da-

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cha. From there Ivan was able to ensure that his own daughter received a good education, and he was able to place her in a prom ising first job.69 In this way one family repositioned itself w ithout losing all inherited cultural and social wealth. T he Arbat, the quarter where the Zhurnalistovs lived, lies just to the west o f central Moscow. In the nineteenth century it was the hom e o f several prom inent writers and thinkers, and became a bastion o f the Slavophile aristocracy and intelligentsia. M any o f its tree-lined streets and pleasant, spacious buildings survived Moscow’s redevelopment: one o f them was Alexander H erzens house, which became the headquarters o f the Soviet W riters’ U nion. Its significance for the transm ission o f cul­ ture was celebrated in the 1960s in a m uch-perform ed guitar song by Bulat Okudzhava, him self the son o f a prom inent Soviet official. He calls A rbat his “calling,” his “joy and sorrow,” his “religion.” “From love o f you there is no cure, / Though one may love forty thousand other streets. / Ah, Arbat, my Arbat, / You are my fatherland, / Never shall I be able to get to know you to the end!”70 Such was the im portance o f a stable and cultured environm ent for Russians: those who had it were able to recap­ ture prerevolutionary traditions and re-create an enduring sense o f na­ tional identity.

The New Social Hierarchy O ne result o f the “great terror” was that prerevolutionary specialists and adm inistrators were finally replaced by “Red specialists.” A new society was forming. Officially the leading class was the working class, but ac­ tually the contours o f the emerging hierarchy were determ ined by the nom enklatura system and its associated patron-client relations, by the passport system, and by the “hierarchy o f consum ption.” O ne way to rise was through the Stakhanovite and “shock-worker” movements. Individ­ uals who achieved record-breaking results on their shift were rewarded w ith higher pay, priority in the allocation o f separate apartm ents, and the distinction o f being marked out for prom otion— eventually out o f the working class into the Soviet “new class.” An im portant marker o f social status was the award o f certificates and medals. Just as Napoleon created his own hierarchy in postrevolutionary France through the Légion d ’H onneur, so the Soviet leaders decreed the es­ tablishm ent o f honors based on distinction in labor or on the battlefield.

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T he O rder o f the Red Banner was instituted in September 1918 for mili­ tary feats, and it was followed in 1920 by the O rder o f the Red Banner o f Labor. T he highest civilian and m ilitary awards, the O rder o f Lenin and the O rder o f the Red Star, were decreed in 1930. Holders o f medals were entided to priority in receiving apartm ents, and somedmes to extra space and lower rent payments, as well as to higher pensions, some free travel, and free places in sanatoria and rest homes.71 In this way the asperities and shortages o f Soviet society were eased for them . They were also more likely than average workers to be elected to the Supreme Soviet or to local soviets, or prom oted out o f the working class into the nom enklatura hier­ archy. Crucial to social advancement was the art o f filling in questionnaires, that is, o f reconfiguring ones life story to conform w ith official expecta­ tions. In order to obtain any benefit— a job, an apartm ent, a place at a training establishment— one had to answer questions laid out on a form about ones social origin, education and training, political record, work re­ cord, and so on, and also obtain a reference (kharakteristika) from ones workplace. It was im portant at this stage to keep quiet about certain m at­ ters and to lay out others in the language o f Soviet political correctness, in other words, to “speak Bolshevik,” as Stephen Kotkin has put it. This was not just a m atter o f technique: one had to learn to think o f one’s life in certain ways and even to reshape it in order to do the kind o f things that would look good on a questionnaire. T hen one needed the protection o f a powerful individual to secure the necessary kharakteristika.71 In the 1920s the ruling class still retained some o f the characteristics o f an idealistic underground movement o f students or recently demobilized soldiers, accustomed to deprivation, hardship, and m utual aid. T he life­ style o f many o f them remained modest, even austere, and their behavior direct, unvarnished, as they liked to say, “proletarian,” w ithout the frills and euphemisms o f an established high society. They remained inspired by the scientific certainty o f ultim ate victory, despite all setbacks on the way, and they were sustained by the brotherhood o f those who have been through great ordeals together. For the first fifteen or so years after the rev­ olution, the leather-jacketed commissar w ith a Mauser at his hip, rough, plain-spoken, vigilant, ready to coerce and be violent when necessary— that had been the ideal on which the party’s first upwardly mobile young people had modeled themselves.73 D uring the mid- and late 1930s this model was gradually replaced by

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one that was altogether softer and less abrasive. T he reshaped ruling class had acquired aspirations to com fort and a stylishly affluent lifestyle that the first generation had denounced as meshchanstvo (petty bourgeois men­ tality). T he ideal taking shape was that o f the kultum yi chelovek—a term closer to “gentleman” in m eaning than the “cultured person” which is its direct translation. But o f course the aristocratic-bourgeois connotations o f “gendeman” (as well as the exclusive gender) are misplaced. Lenin had al­ ways insisted that one o f the main aims o f the revolution was to create a new culture both o f w ork and o f leisure, in which people would behave toward each other w ith courtesy and tact, train themselves properly for their work, perform their duties conscientiously and punctually, and ob­ serve high standards o f personal hygiene. All this m eant raising ordinary people to new levels o f consciousness, and this he felt was one o f the most im portant tasks o f the party, especially once it had accomplished the sei­ zure o f power.74 M any w ritten genres were enlisted in the drive to improve standards o f behavior. T he simplest was the notice hung up in the com m unal apart­ m ent giving instructions on who was responsible for cleaning public places and when, forbidding spitting, walking the corridor w ith m uddy boots, or making a noise during quiet hours. For factory walls the Central Institute o f Labor, under Aleksei Gastev, produced posters on “How to W ork” and a series o f guides to the “scientific organization o f labor.” Pavel Kerzhentsev, a senior propaganda official, published three high-circula­ tion brochures entitled Organize Yourself.; The Fightfa r Time; and How to Read a Book. As the titles implied, he gave advice on how to take a me­ thodical and precise approach to w ork routines, how to avoid wasting tim e by smoking, gossiping, long tea breaks, or dawdling in the toilet, and how to engage in self-education by systematically perusing books, jour­ nals, and newspapers, taking notes, asking oneself questions, and discuss­ ing the contents w ith colleagues.75 Among Kerzhentsevs practical recom mendations for reading we find the following: “If you aren’t able to read in a library, find the best-lit and quietest corner that you can. Check w hether the room needs airin g .. . . It is best to read at a table, having selected a comfortable chair or bench. If you need to make extracts while reading, lay the paper or note book to the right o f your book, and place the inkwell alongside. Have your dictionary o f foreign words, your encyclopedia or other such reference books (which you may find helpful) on the left-hand side.”76 He seems to have in m ind

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som ething not far short o f a professor s private study; the tenant o f an av­ erage com m unal apartm ent was more likely to have to snatch a few pre­ cious moments on a rickety table used mainly for eating meals and doing the ironing, w ithout encyclopedias and probably w ith a radio blaring in one corner. This kind o f discrepancy between the kultum yi ideal and squalid everyday reality was to become one o f the m ain sources o f frustra­ tion in the life o f the average urban Russian. Expectations o f a m odicum o f privacy and domestic com fort were sus­ tained by a num ber o f journals, especially those aimed at women, such as Rabotnitsa, Krestianka, Obshchestvennitsa, and Sovetskaia zhenshchina. Though containing m uch more overt political content, they had some­ thing in com mon w ith contem porary British journals like Vogue or Homes and Gardens: they offered tips on how to dress, how to cook tasty and nourishing meals, and how to keep an apartm ent clean, tidy, and attrac­ tive. T heir precepts were less exotic and more functional but still provided inform ation about cars, furniture, cosmetics, radio sets, and suitable toys for children. T he advice was projected as advancing “the Soviet way o f life,” so it was accompanied by propaganda for the next elections and por­ traits o f prize-winning milkmaids. But The Book o f Tasty and N utritious Food, published in 1939, was unrelenting in its concern for m aterial well­ being. It featured recipes for game, roast veal, hollandaise sauce, and carp stuffed w ith kasha, the ingredients for which— to put it mildly—would not normally be found in the average Soviet Gastronom (grocery)..For m ost readers this book would fulfill the same function as an account o f a $3,000 ocean-liner cruise: it was unashamedly aimed at those w ith access to privileged special stores.77 The discrepancy between these material aspirations and w hat was nor­ mally available intensified the drive toward blat, or patron-client net­ works, as a way o f getting around the economy o f shortage. It also gen­ erated a tension between adm iration o f W estern standards o f living, especially those o f the U nited States, and rejection o f the W estern way o f life. The fractious and unw anted intimacy o f the communal apartm ent did not resemble these idyllic scenes at all. Those townsfolk who could do so escaped to the nearby countryside in the summer, for weekends, or in the evenings. This relief was made possible by the dacha, the country shack, cottage, or mansion (according to status). The easiest way to rent or buy a dacha was through one’s employer. Russians could build dachas them -

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selves, but they still needed land, building materials, and skilled labor, re­ sources that could only be obtained through their employers— or at great expense and some risk on the black market. So the dacha, symbol o f free­ dom , civilized values, and personal choice, was yet another channel o f subjection to a personalized hierarchy, another marker o f the individual’s standing or influence w ithin it.78

Creating a New Literary Canon D uring and after the civil war the party did not attem pt to impose an au­ thoritative line in literature. Such had never been its aim, and anyway, it lacked a mechanism for doing so. T hroughout the 1920s, for their part, writers divided into warring factions, each seeking the party’s patronage by presenting themselves as the standard-bearers o f the future and o f true socialist culture. By the early 1930s, though, the party had decided that it ought to have a role in creating a unifying culture and in inducing w rit­ ers to accept it. Creative artists, however, are not easy to organize or di­ rect. T he party tackled the problem by establishing a U nion o f Soviet W riters, membership in which w ould guarantee writers modest privi­ leges— a pleasant apartm ent, good medical care, an agreeable vacation home— that shielded them from the grosser forms o f the Soviet struggle for a m inim al standard o f living. T he union was run by officials— often mediocre writers themselves— appointed under the nom enklatura system. T heir m anipulation o f access to goods and services proved to be just as ef­ fective a means o f adm inistration in culture as in other walks o f life.79 T he new union aimed to present Soviet literature, not as the denial o f the aristocratic and bourgeois heritage, but, on the contrary, as its culmi­ nation in a new, all-class mass culture. It was to be nationally inclusive, too. Several distinguished European writers were invited to the first con­ gress— André M alraux, Louis Aragon, Theodor Plievier, Ernst Toller— to substantiate the claim that contem porary Russian literature was building on the best o f European culture.80 As in the field o f architecture, m odern­ ism was spurned. The new literature was to be largely traditional and real­ ist in form, but its realism was to be specifically “socialist,” depicting So­ viet society in the light o f its great future, its “revolutionary development” (“socialist” rather than “proletarian” because class origin was already be­ coming less im portant than in the early years o f the revolution). M any Russian writers who were skeptical about Com m unist rule sup-

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ported the initiative. Pasternak and Gorkii, for example, w ith support from Bukharin, now editor o f Izvestiia, hoped to use the occasion to reor­ ganize the Soviet literary world on a broad, nonsectarian basis, and to work w ith European anti-Fascist writers in resisting totalitarian regimes both at hom e and abroad.81 To symbolize its links w ith Russia’s tradition o f dem ocratic w riting, the new union was given “Herzens House” on the Tverskoi Boulevard in Moscow, which also became the hom e o f a kind o f literary university, the Gorkii Institute o f W orld Literature. Here aspiring young writers, whatever their social background— and there were workers and peas­ ants am ong them — studied the classics o f world literature, from H om er through D ante, Shakespeare, Voltaire, and G oethe, to Tolstoy and finally Gorkii himself. They composed their own first literary efforts, under the guidance o f established writers, and had them discussed at seminars o f their colleagues. At the pinnacle o f the organization, initiating a kind o f apostolic succession, was Maksim Gorkii himself. T he graduates o f the in­ stitute constituted a kind o f roll-call o f the mainstream o f Soviet litera­ ture. They com bined a high and consistent level o f (usually rather tradi­ tional) literary technique w ith a desire to establish themselves in the society in which they were growing up and reaching maturity. T heir ef­ forts to fulfill the demands o f party doctrine constituted “socialist realism” in practice.82 At the first Soviet W riters’ U nion congress, in August 1934, Andrei Zhdanov, the party’s chief ideologist, laid down a set o f theoretical re­ quirements that writers were to fulfill, which included realism, narodnost (writing about the people in a m anner accessible to them ), and partiinost (writing in a “party-m inded” spirit).83 In practice, the ideological prescrip­ tions were perhaps less im portant than the list o f existing works that Zhdanov and others presented as models for the aspiring Soviet writer. This was the “canon,” which differed from the biblical one only in that it was to be continually supplem ented by the writings o f Soviet authors. The archetypical socialist realist novel featured a hero who comes from among the people and draws strength from their simple though untutored wisdom. He encounters society’s evils and at first reacts w ith primitive rage, which is impressive but fruitless. T hen, however, w ith the help o f an older, more experienced m entor from the party, he learns to understand and master himself, channel his anger more productively, and overcome weakness and doubt. Drawing on the party’s ideology, he locates his place

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in the decisive historical struggle, keeping constantly in his m ind the im­ age o f the Great Society o f the future. T he conflict w ithin him self be­ tween "spontaneity” and "consciousness” provides the novels w ith their spiritual orientation, while the development o f the action has many o f the attractions o f the adventure story.84 T he socialist realist genre was similar in some ways to the zhitie, the tra­ ditional Russian saints life. A far closer parallel, however, is the Puritan spiritual biography o f the Pilgrim's Progress type. Its hero strives to reach the "magnificent city” by avoiding tem ptation, mastering his passions, and w orking w ithin the com m unity to confirm the good, extirpate the evil, and vindicate G ods providence. T he socialist realist hero is, though, always more closely bound up w ith his com munity, w ith ordinary workers and peasants, than is the Puritan prototype, who is more concerned w ith individual salvation. W hat the two heroes have in com m on is that they are following "a neo-religious doctrine o f salvation and re b irth .. . . going beyond the this-worldly and m undane.” In keeping w ith the new inclu­ siveness o f Soviet society, this kind o f novel was intended to reflea the consciousness o f all social strata. In practice it appealed especially to the young, upwardly mobile members o f the new elite o f the 1930s to 1950s. T his was the kind o f self-image and social memory w hich they, as readers, liked to cultivate, while the authors, for their part, were also creating an ideal image o f themselves.85 T he party was endeavoring to m old not only a new kind o f w riter but also a new kind o f reader. As a result o f the loss o f social memory, the au­ diences general culture or even sense o f its own past could not be taken for granted. T he poet O sip M andelstam once remarked that the new era had "cast [people] out o f their own biographies like balls out o f billiard pockets”; the "person w ithout a biography” had become the hero o f the age. A t any rate, the form ation o f the reader became one o f the principal goals o f cultural policy. As a C entral Com m ittee resolution o f August 1931 stated, "a book should be a powerful means o f educating, mobiliz­ ing, and organizing the masses toward the goal o f economic and cultural construction.”86 T he process began in the schools and continued in the public libraries, which acted both as disseminators o f the new culture and as a feedback mechanism to enable the cultural authorities to assess w hat they were achieving. These institutions now had a near monopoly on the distribu­ tion o f literary culture: the last commercial publishers were closed during the first five-year plan, while all journals and newspapers were owned by

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official institutions o f one kind or another. M any private libraries had been ransacked or dispersed during the revolution, while others had con­ tracted in the process o f uplotnenie, so that prerevolutionary books sur­ vived only in libraries and in a few reduced and endangered personal col­ lections. By the m id-1950s schools had stopped using literature as illustrations o f sociological theories and had returned to teaching an accepted list o f classics, Russian and foreign, intended to m old the aesthetic tastes o f young readers. To these the new socialist realist classics were now added. Librarians were exhorted to do more than just hand books out to readers. They were recom mended to keep records o f each reader on index cards— yet another set o f files— noting their interests and encouraging them to develop their tastes. They would hold periodic public discussions o f pop­ ular works or form readers’ circles, where excerpts would be read and eval­ uated. Reading was no longer a purely private activity: it was socially supported and interpreted, as was appropriate for a public still taking shape.87 O ne m ight have expected that a literature intended to be popular and accessible to ordinary readers w ould draw heavily on folklore. Gorkii had supported the idea in his speech to the first W riters’ U nion congress, claiming that the fundam ental mission o f folklore was M the striving o f primitive working men to ease their own labour and increase its produc­ tivity.” “T he better we come to know the past,” he urged, “the more easily, the more deeply and joyfully we shall understand the great significance o f the present we are creating.”88 Following his call, anthologies o f folklore were published and prerevolutionary collections reissued; performers were encouraged to refresh their memories by using them. However, folk culture could not simply be carried over into socialist culture w ithout considerable changes. M any Com m unists felt that folk­ tales reflected a “kulak” mentality, a passive fatalism or superstition. Ac­ cordingly, folklorists were encouraged not so m uch to transm it old mate­ rial as to reshape it and create their own. Folklore became w ritten and textual rather than oral and improvised—which o f course made it easier to censor. Epics were composed about Lenin, Stalin, the revolution, the civil war, and the five-year plans. Iurii Sokolov, the leading folklorist, told singers they should depict “the grandeur o f their epoch, tell everyone o f the huge gulf between the old and the new life, and show everyone what happiness it is to live in the Soviet U nion.” T he remodeled epics were called noviny, “tales o f the new,” in contrast to the traditional byliny, or

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“tales o f the past.”89 So the Soviet state even created its own synthetic folklore. T he prospect o f a new mass culture helped to attract the émigré com­ poser Sergei Prokofiev back to the Soviet U nion. In 1935» after attending a concert o f his own music in the Urals, he w rote in a newspaper article: I m ust say that the workers o f Cheliabinsk have shown m uch more interest in the program than some sophisticated audiences in Euro­ pean and American cities___ W hat is needed above all is great music that would correspond both in form and content to the grandeur o f the e p o c h .. . . At the same tim e, in turning his attention to serious, significant music, the composer m ust bear in m ind that in the Soviet U nion music is addressed to millions o f people who formerly had litde or no contact w ith music. It is this new mass audience that the m odern Soviet composer m ust attem pt to reach. . . . I believe the type o f music needed is w hat one m ight call “light-serious” or “seri­ ous-light” music.. . . It is not the old sim plicity that is needed, but a new kind o f simplicity.90 O n his return he composed perhaps the best-known example o f the newstyle folklore, Peter and the Wolf. Russian was projected as the senior literary culture am ong the Soviet peoples, patron and protector o f the others, which were to develop follow­ ing the Russian model. T he Pushkin celebrations o f 1937 (the 100th an­ niversary o f the poet s death) exemplified these themes. T he imperial and m ultinational aspect o f Pushkins w ork was emphasized. His poem “Exegi m onum entum ” was m uch quoted, for it contained the lines, “Stories o f me will spread all over Great Rus, and m y name will be uttered in every one o f its tongues, by the proud descendant o f the Slavs and by the Finn, by the now still savage Tunguz, and by the Kalmyk, son o f the steppes.” T he im plication was both that Pushkin w ould be translated into all the Soviet languages, and also that non-Russians would learn Russian, and thus become full Soviet citizens, by reading him .91 In co-opting Pushkin in this fashion, however, the regime was taking a risk: Pushkin— and other approved past writers, like Gogol, Tolstoi, and Chekhov—were fig­ ures too considerable to be forced into the Soviet mold. They remained awkward and irreducible heroes, subtly questioning the culture they were enlisted to endorse, and pointing back to a non-Soviet Russian past. Pushkin was not the only poet celebrated in this way during the 1930s.

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Rustaveli the Georgian and Shevchenko the U krainian had their own ju­ bilees, w ith public readings, discussions, and posters exhibited in schools. These celebrations were conducted in the native language in Georgia and Ukraine, in Russian in the RSFSR. M ultinationalism and the “friendship o f peoples” were central to Soviet literature. T he first W riters’ U nion con­ gress was postponed for a year while leading Russian writers traveled to non-Russian republics to acquaint themselves w ith “native” writers and their texts. It was im portant to invite these non-Russians to the congress. Vladim ir Pozner, a French delegate to the congress, evoked their diversity in his speech: “The representatives o f 52 literatures, from Georgians, who have fifteen centuries o f cultural history behind them , to Yakuts, who be­ fore 1917 possessed only one book in their language, the O rthodox cate­ chism; from the Russians, who have given the world Pushkin and Tolstoi, to the Lezgins o f Dagestan represented in the congress by an illiterate bard who sings poems he cannot write down— all these are united w ithin a sin­ gle Soviet literature by ties stronger than those o f blood or language.” The Armenian w riter Charents w ent even further, greeting the congress as an arena “where we can see emerging before our eyes the image o f a single culture com mon to hum anity.”92 Russian literature, then, was reframed as both Russian and interna­ tional, the culm ination o f world literature, but now couched in a form ac­ cessible to ordinary people, thanks to their schooling, and helping to pre­ pare them for the great tasks o f building socialism. T he result was a didactic and homogeneous, even monochrome, culture, which its critics dismissed as m onotonous. It was not prim itive or undeveloped; nor did it rely on vulgar, unform ed taste. At one end there were no cheap romances or thrillers, at the other no experimental, refined, or obscure aestheticism. Soviet literature was what we might call “middlebrow.” As Evgenii Dobrenko comments, “the egalitarianism o f Soviet culture lay not so much in prim i­ tive reliance on the ‘undeveloped taste o f the masses’ as in a comprehensive strategy o f averaging out and devouring the enclaves o f autonom y.”93 Even artistic literature was w ritten in a semi-bureaucratic style, de­ void o f semantic ambiguity or richness and bearing only one identifiable meaning, which could be readily linked w ith the party’s ideology. In the long run this tendency proved self-defeating: people began reading texts not for w hat they stated but for what they implied or even for what they om itted. Readers became insensitive to the deadeningly om nipresent norm and reacted only to fleeing aberrations. Cultural com m unication became a treacherous quicksand o f veiled hints or Aesopian allegories, in

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which all but the well-informed reader were completely at sea. This un­ derm ining o f the connection between printed text and reality m eant a re­ turn to w hat Anna Akhmatova called the “pre-Gutenberg era,” in which rum or and anecdote took the place o f public culture. For that reason the eventual rediscovery, decades later, o f a Russian lit­ erature that connected w ith reality was to contribute significandy to the creadon o f a non-Soviet Russian idendty. In the hidden niches o f the So­ viet cultural world, that creadon was already beginning.

A Hidden Countercanon O ne o f the m ost im portant functions o f a national culture is to m onitor memory, to ensure that representations o f national life are not too distant from reality. A mendacious account o f society cannot serve for very long as the basis o f a national culture, for it causes resentm ent and grief to fes­ ter, deprived o f outw ard expression, so that the nation becomes em bit­ tered and divided.94 Yet in the USSR the new heroic, optim istic, forwardlooking image projected by the various cultural unions and backed by the censorship suppressed all knowledge o f the vicdms o f the catastrophic so­ cial processes unfolding during the first five-year plans. It also ignored vi­ tal aspects o f the mainstream o f the Russian cultural tradition, notably O rthodox Christianity. For those reasons a kind o f hidden countercanon began to take shape— totally unknow n to the general public— am ong writers who had been squeezed out o f the official journals, who published only trivia there, or who had chosen not even to attem pt publication in the stifling cultural atmosphere o f the 1930s. I shall examine only three writers here: the novelists Andrei Platonov and M ikhail Bulgakov and the poet Anna Akhmatova. All o f them shared w ith the official culture the messianic im­ pulse and the apocalyptic fear, but they gave expression to these feelings in totally different forms and exposed different elements o f Soviet reality. T he rediscovery and publication o f their most im portant work from the 1960s onward was a m ajor formative influence on the renewed sense o f Russian national identity which emerged at that time.

A n d rei P latonov The hope and the despair o f the ordinary Russian peasant and worker were expressed m ost adequately and poignantly in the work o f Andrei

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Platonov. Born in 1899, the son o f a railway electrician, he was brought up in a working-class suburb o f Voronezh, where he became accustomed to the half-urban, half-rural way o f life lived by so many Russians in the late nineteenth and early tw entieth century. Voronezh is dose to the land­ scape border where the trees finally give out: south and east the steppes stretch away, apparendy endlessly. Platonov s evocations o f its imm ensity have sometimes a visionary and sometimes a despairing quality. H e had to give up school at fourteen and take a job as a mechanic in the same locomodve depot as his father, but he continued to study part-dm e and later entered Voronezh Polytechnic. H e became an electrical engineer, working on irrigadon projects in the semi-arid steppes o f his province, and help­ ing to bring electricity to small towns and villages. Like Lenin, he was convinced that electrification would transform society and enable hu­ man beings to take charge o f their own destiny, a belief he held tinged w ith Fedorov s mystic hope in the resurrection o f the dead through tech­ nology.95 D uring the civil war Platonov was a m ilitary reporter for a Red newspa­ per and became a member o f Proletkult, whose upbeat cosmic mysticism he shared. In 1921 he wrote in his newspaper, “The Russian people, in the person o f its proletariat, will step forth like an armed machine and conquer the universe . . . T he Russian m uzhik feels constrained by his fields and has ridden out to plough up the stars.”96 His early stories con­ cerned scientists, technicians, and artisans working on inventions in­ tended to transform the future o f humanity. In the course o f tim e, how­ ever, the bright, open tones o f the early works began to yield to darker perspectives, partly because the com ing o f N EP postponed indefinitely any hopes for a swift social transform ation. His best-known work, and the one that m ost effectively conveys his darker vision, was The Foundation P it (Kotlovan). It was w ritten in 1929— 1930, during the first w inter o f collectivization, but remained completely unpublished until it appeared in an émigré Russian journal in 1969. It was not published in Russia till 1987.97 The novels focus is an uncannily accurate anticipation o f the real-life fiasco o f the planned Palace o f Sovi­ ets in Moscow— still in the future when he was writing. At its core is the project for an All-Proletarian Hom e, which is to rise in the center o f the town and replace all the previous puny, fenced-off private dwellings: “In a years tim e the entire proletariat would leave the old town and its petty properties and take possession o f the m onum ental new hom e.” N or would it end there, for “in another decade or two, some other engineer

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would construct a tower, in the very center o f the world, where the toiling masses o f the whole earth would happily take up their eternal residence.”98 In the event, the workmen discover in the soil a large num ber o f coffins stored by nearby villagers who expect mass starvation as a result o f collec­ tivization. The workers become exhausted and demoralized at the exces­ sive labor and the hum an cost their idealism demands: “They possessed the meaning o f life, which is equivalent to eternal happiness,” but “their faces were dour and thin, and instead o f life’s serenity they had emacia­ tion.”99 T he great edifice never rises beyond the foundations, and in the end the unfilled pit becomes a mass grave. This novel is a reductio ad absurdum o f the Soviet project o f construct­ ing a perfect w orld in the shape o f an international proletarian repub­ lic. It builds on the biblical story o f the tower o f Babel, and also on Chernyshevskii’s vision o f the Crystal Palace (in his novel W hat Is to Be Done?) y which had already been mocked by Dostoevskii and satirized by Evgenii Zam iatin. W hat is remarkable about Platonov is the way he al­ lows the utopian im agination to take over his characters and saturate their being. T hought becomes action, and action is another form o f thought. T he abstract and the concrete are mingled incongruously. Voshchev, dis­ missed and evicted from the com pany hostel for “ongoing personal weak­ ness and thoughtfulness am id the general tem po o f labour,” sleeps rough and is found by two workmen who ask him , “W hat are you doing coming and existing here?” H e tells them , “I’m not existing here. . . . I’m only thinking h e re .. . . My body gets weak w ithout truth, I can’t just live on la­ bour. I used to keep thinking at w ork and I got sacked.”100 This strange, disjointed language is not just that o f the characters but that o f the narrator, too. Like his heroes, he feels abstract ideas in his body and translates them into the form o f physical movement and effort. He reflects a society where the language o f im agination has replaced reality and condem ned everyone to the pursuit o f mirages. As Joseph Brodsky com m ented, “Platonov speaks o f a nation which in a sense has become the victim o f its own language; or, to put it more accurately, he tells a story about this very language which turns out to be capable o f generating a fictitious world, and then falls into grammatical dependence on it.”101 H e is a w riter who senses that utopia has become a prison, that his own greatest hopes have turned into meaningless abstractions, which have then acquired a frightening power over people’s minds and actions. The result is not a satire, whose author stands com fortably outside his

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subject m atter and judges it confidently. Platonov is com ing from inside, sharing the hopes o f his characters, sharing too their bewilderm ent and discouragement that things have not turned out as anticipated. Now that we have from the archives so m any letters w ritten by ordinary Russians to Pravda and to Stalin, we can see that they often expressed themselves in a m anner rem iniscent o f Platonov. H e articulated the m ood o f workers and peasants, their frustrated and fearful utopianism , better than any other writer. A t any rate, in Platonov’s vision peasants who simply wish to con­ tinue their own way o f life become the victims o f a giant implacable of­ ficial machine, which herds them into bewildered and passive collectives. Enthusiasm and optim ism cease to be genuine hum an feelings and be­ come mere tools o f power. T he foundation p it never bears a great edifice, but it becomes the grave o f an orphan girl, Nastia, who should have repre­ sented hope for the future, but who actually dies o f neglect and disease. Voshchev stands over her and wonders “how Com m unism could ever come to exist if it didn’t appear first o f all in a child’s feelings and sense o f conviction. W hat use to him now was the meaning o f life if there no longer existed a small, trusty being in whom tru th would have become joy and movement?”102 We now know that Platonov originally intended the following ending: “W ill the USSR die like Nastia, or will it grow into a whole person, a new historical society? This anxiety is w hat provided the them e o f the book when the author w rote it. T he author may have been mistaken in repre­ senting the death o f Soviet society through the death o f the little girl, but this mistake was occasioned only by excessive anxiety on behalf o f some­ thing loved, som ething whose loss is equivalent to the destruction not only o f the entire past, but o f the future as well.”103

M ik h a il Bulgakov M ikhail Bulgakov’s upbringing unfitted him for life in the USSR about as comprehensively as can be imagined. H e was the son o f a professor o f the­ ology at Kiev University who was a participant in the early-twentieth-century attem pts to bring science, philosophy, and theology closer together. In his youth M ikhail read w ith enthusiasm the works o f the neo-Kantian and idealist thinkers Nikolai Berdiaev, Semen Frank, Lev Shestov, and his own distant relative Sergei Bulgakov. H e remained a Christian believer

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misplaced in an atheist state and an old-fashioned Russian imperial na­ tionalist stranded in first independent, then Soviet Ukraine. H e was, moreover, a maverick and rebel, a lover o f dram a in a land where bureau­ cratic conform ity and a grey artistic m ediocrity were increasingly de ri­ gueur.104 Bulgakovs intersection o f utopia and reality takes place in a very dif­ ferent way from Platonovs. T he action o f his m ajor novel M aster and M argarita is set in two cities where the history o f hum anity reaches a turning point: Jerusalem at the tim e o f C hrist, and Moscow in the 1930s. In this way the whole scheme o f the novel reminds one that in the six­ teenth century Moscow was known as the “second Jerusalem .” Ironically, however, the authorial technique transposes science and miracle: the holy city, Jerusalem, is described w ith sober realism, and everything that hap­ pens there has its clearly identified secular cause, whereas Moscow, the city o f materialism, technology, and atheism, is evoked as a fantastic appa­ rition and becomes the stage for supernatural intervention. There people suddenly disappear or die; fires break out w ithout cause; material things change their nature or vanish. In Moscow the action focuses on literary life. W riters deal in spiritual values, but w ithout believing in them and for material reasons: for the apartm ents they are awarded and the good food served up at the restau­ rant o f the “Griboedov H ouse,” the W riters’ U nion headquarters. In one o f the fantasmagorie scenes, W oland awards dollars and fashionable for­ eign clothes to the audience o f the Variety Theater; but after the show these prizes vanish as magically as they had earlier appeared and audience members have to travel hom e in their underwear. T he Master, the w riter at the center o f the novel, is a creative figure but not a fighter. H e is helpless in dealing w ith the dim ension o f power. He is denounced by a neighbor who covets his apartm ent. W hen numerous ar­ ticles appear criticizing a published extract from his novel, he becomes anxious and depressed and burns the m anuscript. H e and his novel are saved only by the intervention o f M argarita, who combines the role o f Faust and M ephistopheles and concludes a pact w ith the Devil to save the man she loves. T he M aster s literary text on the crucifixion becomes the means for the com pletion o f the historical dram a left incom plete (at least in Bulgakovs interpretation) at C hrists death. In the Jerusalem chapters o f Bulgakovs novel, Pontius Pilate knows that his dialogues w ith C hrist tell him im por-

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tant truths, that they answer a need in himself. H e is the cultured and cos­ m opolitan urban skeptic who accepts power because it seems to be the dom inant reality in this world, but he dimly perceives its emptiness. H e delivers Jesus to the executioners because the High Priest and the people, whose support Rome needs, dem and it. But he feels the need to complete his interrupted conversation w ith Jesus. T he dialogue o f power and love takes place only at the end o f the novel in a dim ension beyond both Mos­ cow and Jerusalem, and thanks only to the m ediation o f M argarita, at the end o f a cosmic ride that lifts Pilate beyond the empirical, power-ridden world o f his imperial consulate. M aster and M argarita is perm eated w ith apocalyptic imagery, especially that associated w ith horses. T he last three chapters are an elaborate pas­ tiche on the Book o f Revelation. Moscow and its corrupt, materialistic, power-crazed temples are left behind to burn to the ground, while the M aster and M argarita ride w ith the Four Horsem en o f the Apocalypse through unlim ited space and tim e, free Pilate, reunite him w ith Jesus, and simultaneously complete the M asters text.105 Bulgakov s imaginary world is both like Stalins and the opposite o f Sta­ lin’s. They both believe in absolute truths, in the salvation o f humanity, and in the universal struggle between good and evil. Yet Bulgakovs hero will have nothing to do w ith power and is utterly incom petent in practical matters. His writings reveal truths that politicians cannot grasp and make possible the ultim ate reconciliation o f truth and power, but only beyond the bounds o f this earth.

A n n a A khm atova T he daughter o f an aristocratic family living in Tsarskoe Selo, the imperial residence just outside St. Petersburg, Anna Akhmatova first made her name just before the revolution as the author o f delicately crafted love po­ etry, a convincing presenter o f womens feelings in a literary world dom i­ nated by men. After the revolution her kind o f verse rapidly w ent out o f fashion, and publishers soon turned away from her, even though she was still popular w ith the reading public— and even w ith one Bolshevik leader, the femi­ nist Alexandra Kollontai, who called her verse “the poetic expression o f the batde o f a woman enslaved by bourgeois society.” O n the other hand, the critic Kornei Chukovskii, who also liked her work, called her “the last

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poet o f O rthodoxy,” which was not calculated to win her favor in ruling circles. In 1925 an unpublished circular banned further publication o f her works.106 Akhmatova hated the Bolshevik revolution, w ith its atheism and w hat she saw as its disdain for culture, but she decided nevertheless to stay in Russia, to do w hat she could to defend and m aintain its culture. She did not join the large num ber o f her friends and literary colleagues who went into em igration at this time: I am not w ith those who abandoned their land For enemies to tear apart. I do not heed their coarse flattery, A nd I shall not give them my songs. To me the exile is ever pitiful, Like a prisoner or someone ill. D ark is your path, oh wanderer, A nd alien bread reeks o f wormwood. But here, in the m urky fumes o f the conflagration, Destroying the remains o f our youth, We have not repelled a single blow, A nd we know that in the final reckoning, Every hour will be justified . . . But there is no people on earth less tearful, M ore arrogant and simple than us.”107 It so happened that Akhmatova was living in an eighteenth-century house on the banks o f the Fontanka which had once been the hom e o f the aristocratic Sheremetev family. H er second husband, Vladim ir Shileiko, was an archeologist who had been tutor to the imperial family’s last chil­ dren, and the new regime allowed him to live there to watch over the valuables. So symbolically Akhmatova played a part in preserving the memory o f the past. After she broke w ith Shileiko, she continued to live in the Fontanka house w ith her next partner, the art critic Nikolai Punin; but his ex-wife shared the same flat, so that her life was always disordered, and she was often in great poverty, thanks to the banning o f her work. She

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was justified in saying, “We have not repelled a single blow,” and her posi­ tion as a woman made her life doubly difficult.108 The greatest test, though, came after 1935, when Punin and Akhma­ tovas son, Lev Gumilev, were both arrested. Over the next few years she spent countless hours standing in the lines outside the prisons, trying to find out the fate o f her loved ones, or to hand over a parcel o f food or clothes for them . The w riter o f exquisite love lyrics now became the bard o f Russia’s despair— and specifically the despair o f women: “O h cheerful sinner o f Tsarskoe Selo, / W hat will happen to your life?” She found her calling in rescuing from oblivion the reality o f their suffering (which oth­ erwise left no m ark whatsoever on the Soviet public media) and the mem­ ory o f the tim e when “Leningrad dangled, a useless appendage, / Along­ side its prisons.” Akhmatova became the voice o f these women, m andated by one o f them , who “identified” her, even though she had long been un­ published, and asked her in a whisper, “‘Can you describe this? And I re­ plied, ‘I can.’ T hen som ething like a smile flitted across w hat had once been her face.” H er nonexile now became a profound and bitter fact: “N o, not beneath a foreign sky, / N ot sheltered by a foreign wing. / I was where my people were, / W here, alas, they had to be.” She records her own suffering in counterpoint w ith the torm ents o f the grey lines o f women in the w inter cold and the stifling heat o f summer. H er voice is one “through which a hundred m illion people cry.” Akhmatova compares herself w ith Mary, the m other o f Christ, but combines her personal fate w ith that o f all her col­ leagues in distress: “I pray not only for myself / But for all those who stood w ith me / In savage cold and July heat / There, beneath that blind red wall.” This was her answer to the optim istic, mendacious, and atheist culture o f the W riters’ Union. To sustain her in her lonely self-appointed mission o f people’s tri­ bune, Akhmatova tied her fate to that o f Russia’s past literature, and spe­ cifically to Pushkin’s Exegi M onumentum , in the— otherwise arrogant— suggestion: If ever in this country They should think to erect a m onum ent to me, I give my consent to that solemn deed. But only on condition it stands N ot by the sea where I was born;

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T he last link w ith the sea is broken, And not in the palace garden at the secret tree, W here a disconsolate ghost awaits me still, But here, where I stood for three hundred hours And where no one unbolted the door.109 In this way Anna Akhmatova refashioned w hat had become a laborious and confused life in a m anner precisely opposite to that required in a So­ viet questionnaire. Defying the imperative to “speak Bolshevik,” she be­ came a witness to the suffering o f her fellow women, a chronicler o f the suppressed truth, and a custodian o f the deeper Russian culture hidden under the official one. T he m ost im portant works o f Platonov, Bulgakov, and Akhmatova were known only to a tiny circle o f im plicitly trusted friends. It was not till the late 1950s and early 1960s that they circulated am ong a somewhat wider audience, though even then still only in small coteries o f scientific and cultural intellectuals prepared to entrust one another w ith w hat later be­ came known as sam izdat. T heir acquaintance w ith these texts, and the long struggle for their publication, began the process o f formalizing a countercanon that seemed to place the whole o f Soviet “official” literature in doubt. By 1941 an entire society was just beginning to recover from physical destruction and cultural amnesia, to construct a new social hierarchy and a new repertoire o f myths, memories, celebrations, and practices. A new ruling class, m osdy o f very young people, was moving into the top posi­ tions in the party-state apparatus, the armed forces, and the professions. These leaders sponsored a new culture w hich bolstered their faith in their mission, but also suppressed m uch o f reality as well as crucial elements o f the Russian tradition. In spite o f that, a Russian supra-ethnic patriotism was taking shape for the first tim e, colored— though not yet permeated— by the leaders’ faith in the building o f socialism and in the international mission o f the Soviet Union. A t the same tim e, everyone was shaken, even traum atized, by the upheavals from which they had scarcely begun to emerge; they were anxious to protect themselves and their families by seeking security in vertical and horizontal personal networks where they worked and where they lived. In this paradoxical and uncertain mood Russians suddenly faced the greatest peril in their history.110

E TOE GREAT FATHERLAND WAR

O ne day in 1950 the Russian-Jewish w riter Emmanuil Kazakevich sat down to write a denunciation under the name o f Citizen Unknown. U n­ like m ost denunciations, it was to be addressed not to the secret police but “to the future.” He intended to set down the tru th about the decades through which he had lived as a kind o f tim e capsule to float unseen over the ocean o f Soviet censorship and wash up on some future shore o f free speech. There, he hoped, it w ould be salvaged by readers eager to learn about a past they had been fortunate enough to miss. O nce he settled down to work, though, he realized he had taken on a challenge beyond his powers: “To give an impression o f the events o f past decades, one would need to write a hundred volumes, w ith the many-sided realistic precision o f War and Peace or The D ivine Comedy, the outspokenness o f Zola or Proust.” H e later burned the fragment o f typescript.1 Kazakevich was right to feel overwhelmed by the demands made on his narrative abilities. The war which broke out w ith brutal suddenness on June 22, 1941, was the culm ination o f a quarter-century that had already included a world war, a revolution, a civil war, repeated famine, the collec­ tivization o f agriculture, the first five-year plans, tum ultuous urbaniza­ tion, and the great terror. If Kazakevich found it impossible to w rite about it all, then it is even more difficult for an outsider from a more sheltered country to com prehend w hat the Russians and the other Soviet peoples had been through in this time. Any war faces a country’s inhabitants w ith ordeals they never encounter

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in peacetime— and that is especially true o f the war the Germans un­ leashed, a race war, a frankly declared war o f annihilation. W ar confronts everyone w ith the question o f where their prim ary loyalties lie— in the tw entieth century, above all which nation they belong to. The categories o f citizenship and nationhood come together: ones rights and obligations depend as never before on the com m unity to which one belongs. How people perceive their com m unity depends, however, on a num ber o f fac­ tors: official propaganda, but also the cultural context and the recent life experience o f the various social strata.2 T he Soviet context was not promising. In the previous quarter-century national institutions and national memory had been destroyed, and the whole o f society had been through upheavals that had pitched one class in bitter conflict against another, one nationality against another, ordinary people against the rulers and the privileged. T he emerging neo-Russian imperial narrative had not yet had tim e to establish itself and take deep roots. T he war, though anticipated in general terms, was nevertheless a great shock for nearly everyone when it actually began. In the early m onths o f the conflict, m ost Soviet people were mainly aware o f disasters and privations and felt deep uncertainty and foreboding about the future. T he fears, grievances, and doubts o f the 1930s still hung over them . They were bewildered and resentful that the Soviet leaders had not prepared better. M any people concluded that they had been deceived yet again, that their arm y was inferior to the Germans’, and that the So­ viet U nion would soon lose the war. Moreover, the collectivization o f agri­ culture and dekulakization, the terror and the devastation o f the prewar officer corps had all left profound scars on Soviet society, while the NaziSoviet Pact had added a further residue o f confusion and cynicism. In Moscow many young m en refused to volunteer and conscripts failed to report for duty. In Arkhangelsk oblast the NKVD reported workers and peasants as saying, “Everyone said we w ould defeat the enemy on his own territory. It turns out the other way around . . . For two years our govern­ m ent has been feeding the Germans; they would have done better to stock supplies for their own army and people. Now we all face starvation.” In Kaluga oblast a m iner com m ented in July 1941 that he would go to the front and defend the Soviet land, but not those sitting in the Kremlin.9 In August 1941 the official in charge o f evacuating M achine Tractor Stations (state-owned institutions that rented heavy agricultural machin­ ery to the collective farms) from Kalinin oblast wrote to Stalin complain-

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ing that retreating soldiers were sowing panic in the rear. They were seiz­ ing cars and gasoline from Soviet offices in order to get further from the front. Some party and Soviet officials were beginning to do the same. Ru­ mors spread that M arshal Tim oshenko had been dismissed and had fled abroad. O ne source reported: “There is no discipline in the rear. Everyone does w hat he wants. Is this as it should be? Everyone is indignant, but says nothing.” From Beliaevka and O vidiopol in the south it was also reported that local officials “are sitting on their suitcases,” i.e. ready for departure at a m om ents notice.4 By November 1941, as the siege closed around Leningrad, many o f its inhabitants felt it would make sense to rebel against C om m unist leader­ ship and surrender the city to the Germans in order to be fed.5 The NKVD reported a factory worker as declaring, “If the Germans come, we shall have enough to eat, but if Soviet power remains, we shall all starve to death.” An econom ist from the local branch o f Gosplan com m ented, “O ur army is doom ed to constant defeats because the Russian people have lost any ideal w orth fighting for. T he peasant does not w ant to fight for the kolkhozy, as the ideal o f collective farming has failed.” In Moscow also, as the W ehrm acht approached, the NKVD reported a female factory worker as com plaining, “We d o n t have a firm and united hom e front. People are em bittered, and inside the country there will be conflicts that will complicate m atters. T he war will be bloody and debilitating.”6 Pessimism was not the only reaction, however. Some, especially in the armed forces and in the nom enklatura elite, where the official ideology was more pervasive, were much more confident. From the mid-1920s m ilitary propaganda teams had been offering their recruits political edu­ cation programs that encouraged individual soldiers to locate their own rodina (home town or village and surrounding district) on a map and to see it as part o f a broader territory, a U nion Republic, the USSR, and finally the international proletarian com m unity that the USSR would one day emancipate. Soviet citizens were taught to think o f themselves as sur­ rounded by enemies, the imperialists o f all countries, who would crush them if they could. For that reason the Soviet m ilitary doctrine antici­ pated a major war, but expected it to be a relatively brief class war fought mainly on enemy territory, w ith few casualties (maloi kroviu), since the proletariat o f the enemy nations would rise, overthrow their rulers, and welcome the Soviet Army. True, in the late 1930s, as the Japanese and German threats m ounted, m ilitary strategists were starting to take a more

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somber view and to prepare for a protracted war fought by huge forces, possibly pardy on Soviet territory.7 Litde o f this debate reached even most o f the nom enklatura elite, however, let alone a broader public. M ost "ideologically conscious” people remained confident o f a swift victory. Moscow factory workers reportedly expressed incredulity at the Ger­ mans’ rashness: “W ho do they think they’re attacking? Have they gone out o f their minds? . . . O f course, the Germ an workers will support us, and all other peoples will rise up . . . It will all be over in a week.” Even a sophisticated intellectual like Lev Kopelev was prone to such illusions. As he remarked in 1979 in a conversation w ith the G erm an w riter H einrich Boll, “W hen the first reports o f the war came in on June 22, 1 9 4 1 ,1 m ust adm it honestly, I was so stupid that I was delighted. I thought, ‘This is the holy war, now the Germ an proletariat will support us, and H itler will be overthrown immediately.’”8 T he actual war was very different. It took a while for the unforeseen to sink in. Initially m any people held to the illusion that the Soviet U nion was fighting an international class war. Frontline soldiers also took some tim e to realize w hat had h it them . O ne noted in his diary on July 20, 1941, after destroying a G erm an tank and capturing the crew: “W hat na­ ive philanthropists we were! In our interrogation we tried to get them to express class solidarity. We thought talking to us w ould make them see the light, and they would shout ‘Rot Front!’ . . . But they guzzled our kasha from our mess-tins, had a smoke from our freely offered tobacco pouches, then looked at us insolently and belched in our faces ‘Heil H ider!”’9 In the western part o f the Soviet U nion, and especially in the recendy annexed regions, m any people initially greeted the Germans as deliverers from Stalin. W hen they saw how the Germans behaved, however, they quickly changed their mood. A Russian watchmaker in Kiev, him self a de­ vout O rthodox believer, recalled later how he and others had initially wel­ comed the Germans w ith bread and salt, but soon turned against them: “If we had to be under masters, then we preferred to have our own mas­ ters, not foreign ones.” A west Belorussian peasant who actually fought for a tim e in the G erm an Army felt the same: “better Russian slavery than G erm an slavery.”10 This m inim al nationalism gradually became the dom inant sentim ent. T hen, as the war unfolded, it blossomed into convinced patriotism . The overbearing ruthlessness and cruelty o f the Germans and the doctrine they preached and practiced, o f m urdering Jews and enslaving Slavs as

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Untermenschen, ensured that m ost Soviet citizens, whatever their previ­ ous views, also came to see the war as a national one, to be fought to the bitter end. A letter from a Red Army soldier to Komsomolskata Pravda il­ lustrates the way in which this Germ an pressure soldered Russian and So­ viet patriotism together. It was w ritten in O ctober 1942, at a very low point in the war, but when the reconquest o f some occupied territory had dem onstrated t>eyond doubt the atrocities the Germans were com m itting: “T he Aryan-blooded Fascist Ober-verm in wants to enslave our freedomloving hearts. T hat will never be! Never will those m onstrous vampires gain a hold on our hearts, w hich are filled w ith freedom, pride, and infinite devotion to our beloved and long-suffering H om eland. Russian hearts, forged in the Bolshevik smithy, will never yield to the Germ an scum .”" T he overheated rhetoric well represented the com m on ground the regime shared by this tim e w ith m ost ordinary Russians. Even though the Soviet state remained com m itted in principle to inter­ nationalism, then, m ost o f its citizens came to see the struggle as one, not between imperialists and toilers, but between Russians and Germans. In ordinary parlance the terms “Fascist” and “H iderite” were used less than simply “G erm an.” In contrast w ith the First W orld War, when Russian soldiers had regarded their enemy as hum an, they now used metaphors that suggested the Germans were w ild beasts or vermin. T he reaction o f the Russian-Jewish novelist and war correspondent Ilia Erenburg is indic­ ative o f this new attitude. In 1936-1939 he had reported from the Inter­ national Brigade in the Spanish Civil War, which he had portrayed as an internationalist crusade o f the toilers against the imperialists. But he real­ ized in the first days o f the new war that this was going to be a wholly dif­ ferent kind o f struggle, and that Jews like him self had to identify w ith Russia: “I suddenly felt that there was som ething very im portant and te­ nacious— the soil. I was sitting on a Moscow boulevard. Beside me sat a sad, unattractive woman w ith a child. H er features seemed infinitely fa­ m iliar to me, as she said, ‘Petenka, don’t be naughty, take pity on me!’ I re­ alized that she was a member o f my family \chto ona rodnaia], that one could die for Petenka.”12 This feeling o f being a large family, not divided by class origins, was ar­ ticulated by Stalin in his first wartime broadcast to the Soviet peoples, on July 3, 1941, when he supplem ented the accustomed Com m unist mode o f address, “Com rades,” and the neutral civic term “Citizens” w ith the words “Brothers and sisters!” There was even perhaps here an echo o f the

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greeting given by the O rthodox priest to his parishioners. This was no or­ dinary war, Stalin emphasized: MThis is a great war o f the entire Soviet people against the German-fascist armies.” But, he added, they would have powerful allies, Britain and the U nited States (who were, o f course, “im perialists,” though he did not say so). H e called on all “the peoples o f the Soviet Union” to rise en masse to defend their “soil” and their “hom e­ land” against a “vicious and perfidious enemy.” H e rem inded everyone o f the eventual Russian success in driving out the Mongols, the Swedes un­ der Charles XII, and the French under N apoleon.13 Erenburg became the m ost vehem ent exponent o f the new view o f the war as a national struggle to the death between Russians and brutish Ger­ mans. H e w rote in Pravda, “If you haven’t killed a G erm an in the course o f a day, then your day has been wasted. . . . If you have killed one Ger­ m an, kill another. N othing gives us so m uch joy as the sight o f German corpses.” As a Jew, Erenburg had double reasons for hating the Germans, but the Russian poet K onstantin Simonov expressed very similar senti­ m ents in his poem “Kill him!” published in Pravda in 1942: “If your hom e is dear to you where you were nursed as a Russian, . . . / If your m other is dear to you, and you cannot bear the thought o f a Germ an slap­ ping her w rinkled face .. . . / If you do not w ant to give away all that you call your H om eland, / T hen kill a Germ an, so that he, / N ot you, should lie in the e a rth .. . . Kill a G erm an every tim e you see one!”14 In this atm osphere the idea o f the rodina— the hom eland, the small town or village where the family feels at home— became all-im portant. It had been downgraded in the 1920s and 1930s as a concept that belonged to the past, used by sentim ental, old-fashioned poets like Sergei Esenin. Now the Leningrad poet O lga Berggolts, who was already thoroughly dis­ illusioned w ith Com m unism by 1941, welcomed its rehabilitation: “It is w onderful that the concept o f the H om eland (Rodina) has come so much closer to the ordinary person, has become so immediate: to save the life o f one’s friend in com bat— that means to fight for one’s H om eland.”15 Similarly byt, everyday routine, had been despised as som ething soon to be transform ed in the new way o f life that science and technology were constructing under the inspiration o f party ideology. T hat all changed. Thoughts o f hom e and family life became especially treasured, precisely because they were now under such a terrible threat. A lthough by the mid1930s the leaders had abandoned the intention o f underm ining the fam­ ily, it remained true that before the war official propaganda had sub-

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ordinated hom e and hearth to public meeting places and public duties. Courtship and conjugal love had been valued, not for their own sake, but rather as part o f the process o f building socialism. Now, by contrast, Simonov’s lyric poem Z hdi menia i ia vemus (W aitfo r M e and I W ill Re­ turn) extolled the act o f simply w aiting for one’s beloved as the supreme hum an duty. Published in Pravda and frontline newspapers in January 1942, it was an instant success. Soldiers would cut it out and send it to their sweethearts at home, and some o f the improvised replies were also published.16O ne woman, a com m unications worker at the h o n t, wrote to Simonov, “You who do not know me are helping me to live. . . . There have been no letters from my husband for a long tim e. I was already start­ ing to lose hope. T hen suddenly ‘W ait for M e.’ It reached me on our wed­ ding anniversary. It was as if Iura had w ritten those lines himself, for that is just w hat he would have said if he could have got in touch. I had been w anting to cry, but after that I felt really good. And I sent a radio-letter to him , a long one in verse.”17 Individual love was now officially approved both for its own sake and as part o f the life o f the traditional community. M ost soldiers carried in in­ side pockets or around their necks a photograph o f home, o f family mem­ bers, or o f a sweetheart, both as a rem inder and as a form o f protection. The long-established life cycle, the village community, and the influence o f ancestors were evoked in literature in a m anner gendy provocative to Soviet atheism, as in another very popular poem o f Simonov, “Do You Remember, Alesha, the Lanes o f Smolensk?”: “As if, around every Russian village, / Protecting the living by crossing their arms / And gathering in assembly, our ancestors prayed / For their grandchildren who no longer believed in G od.”18 Since it was the Soviet Army that was defending these values, Russian national feeling and Soviet m ilitary pride coalesced. As Lisa Kirschen­ baum has put it, “Rodina, home and family emerged as key constituents o f Soviet patriotism .”19 The demands o f war added a new dimension to the integradon o f women into the community. O f course in Marxist-Leninist theory women were considered the equal o f men. In pracdce, too, they already had the vote, enjoyed the same civil and political rights as Soviet men, and were able to enter any profession. Now their contribution became even more crucial, and their status was correspondingly raised. In factories women took over work of all kinds, including the most physically dem anding, to

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replace men who had left for the front. By August 1941 they already con­ stituted 90 percent o f the labor force in the Kirov Works in Leningrad. H alf o f all doctors and virtually all nurses in the armed forces were women. The army now had wom ens units, and they were am ong the de­ fenders o f Kiev and Odessa in the autum n o f 1941. Male prejudice did not altogether evaporate, though: unkind quips about “powder-puff regi­ ments” continued, and some commanders apparently considered preg­ nancy a breach o f m ilitary discipline.20 In wartim e public discourse, however, women figured largely as de­ fenders o f hearth, hom e, and family. Take, for instance, a letter sent from Cheliabinsk to the front and published in Komsomolskata pravda in No­ vember 1941: “My beloved! Now during the long nights and evenings I sit for a long while near the cradle w ith our litde one and think o f you___ W here are you now? O ne thousand kilometres away is the city about w hich the whole w orld is thinking [presumably Moscow]. A nd you m ust be there now w ith your artillery men. Probably you’re sleeping very litde. A nd sharing makhorka [shag, coarse tobacco] w ith your friends and re­ mem bering us— me, your litde boy, your C hT Z [Cheliabinsk Tractor W orks].” It is impossible to know w hether this letter was genuine or w hether it was composed in the editorial offices o f Komsomolskaia pravda. But the very appearance o f such letters confirmed a new official m ood, and it is quite certain they were popular w ith the public. Hom e and hearth now validated the war, and vice versa. O ne o f the m ost popular war posters showed a m iddle-aged woman holding out a m ilitary draft form and sum m oning the hesitant to enlist.21 T he heightened sense o f com munity, m ilitary and civilian, male and fe­ male, was accompanied by a new acceptance o f w hat had already before the war been a highly authoritarian and m ilitarist style o f leadership. Even at M IFLI (the Moscow Insdtute o f Philology, Literature, and History), bastion o f cosm opolitan, free-thinking intellectuals, collectivism and dis­ cipline were now welcomed. As a former student later recalled, “We all w anted to be together, not to struggle alone w ith our bewilderment, and we w anted someone firm, intelligent, aware to tell us w hat to do, to orga­ nize and direct us . . . T hat is how, incidentally, the party acquired such authority in Russia, because it could direct the mass o f people in the de­ sired direction.” Similarly, V iktor Nekrasov, author o f popular war nov­ els and an inveterate nonconform ist, later confessed, “We forgave Stalin everything, collectivization, 1937 [the terror], his revenge on his com-

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rades. . . . And we, lads from intelligentsia families, became soldiers and believed the whole m yth w ith a dear conscience. W ith open hearts we joined the party o f Lenin and Stalin.”22 O ne finds the opposite reaction, too. T he historian M . Ia. Gefter, who was a young Jewish intellectual in 1941, asserts that a kind o f "spontane­ ous de-Stalinization” took place as a result o f the defeats o f the war’s first m onths. And looking back decades later, the former frontline soldier Viacheslav Kondratev declared, "There was one strange thing about the war: we felt ourselves feeer than in peacetime . . . If you were lucky and you got to the enemy’s trenches, then you had to show that you could think for yourself. There no one com m anded you and m uch was in your own h an d s. . . In a sense you even felt you had Russia’s fate in your hands: it was a real, genuine feeling o f being a citizen, responsible for the Fatherland.”23 These apparendy contradictory sentim ents can perhaps be reconciled. Feeling oneself free and a citizen was com patible during a terrible war w ith a strong sense o f com m unity and a desire to be firmly led. O ne woman, interviewed in the 1990s by Catherine M erridale, expressed it by contrast w ith later times: “We knew our m otherland, we knew Stalin, we knew where we were going.” At the front line such em otions were felt w ith even greater intensity, along w ith the binding power o f soldierly comradeship, which remained the strongest memory o f m ost Soviet Army men who survived the experience. As one o f them wrote in December 1945 to the fiancée o f his fallen comrade: “Life at the front brings people together very quickly. It’s enough to spend one or two days w ith someone, and you know all his characteristics and all his feelings in a way you would never know them in peacetime, even after a whole year. There is nothing stronger than front-line friendship, and nothing can break it, not even death.”24 N ot everyone welcomed the new comradeship or accepted the need for authoritarian leadership. Aleksandr Stolpovskii, who had graduated w ith distinction from an agricultural institute in Omsk, wrote to his parents in September 1941: “In army conditions only people o f a certain type can flourish: those who are rude and overbearing . . . I have no wish to learn how to kill people, and I cannot forget my special knowledge, which I ac­ quired w ith such labor and enthusiasm .”25 In the 1930s the official rehabilitation o f Russia had been entirely stat­ ist. Now the regime found that it needed to revive certain civic and ethnic

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aspects o f the Russian heritage as well. O ne example was the tacit authori­ zation o f private trading. O n a rail journey from M urm ansk to Moscow, Alexander W erth reported seeing peasant women trading on platforms and “soldiers bartering little pieces o f soap or tiny packets o f tobacco or boxes o f matches for m ilk and eggs.. . . T he m ilitia appear to be burly tol­ erant o f these ‘barter m arkets,’ as they enable the peasants to obtain a bare m inim um o f essential goods w ith which the state is no longer able to sup­ ply them .”26 T hrough such small-scale commerce peasants acquired nonagricultural goods and nonpeasants food they could longer buy elsewhere. T he loss o f m ost able-bodied young m en to the arm ed forces m eant that the agricul­ tural workforce consisted mainly o f middle-aged and old m en, women, and children. Furtherm ore, a great deal o f fertile land was lost to the in­ vaders for m uch o f the war. So the demands on agriculture were much greater than before 1941, but its resources m uch smaller. To face this problem , on the one hand, the regime raised the com pulsory m inim um o f labor-days th at each collective farmer had to work, including adolescents. Those who failed to achieve the m inim um w ithout good reason were tried and sentenced to up to six m onths’ com pulsory corrective labor.27 O n the other hand, contrary to Bolshevik policy during the civil war, the Soviet leaders also turned a blind eye to the “misuse” o f kolkhoz land for private cultivation and to the sale o f the resultant produce on the open market. Farm workers were excluded from the rationing system, so they used their discreetly enlarged plots for subsistence, but also sold a good deal to hungry townsfolk. T he private plots were known as “subsidiary plots,” but actually their production was the principal life support o f vil­ lagers, enabling them , as well as some townspeople, to survive. D uring 1942—1945 private production o f m ilk increased 2.5 times, o f potatoes 3.5 times, o f vegetables 4.8 times. Prices rose very steeply, fueled by infla­ tion: a liter o f m ilk that before the war w ould have cost 2 rubles, 28 ko­ peks, now cost 38 rubles, while a kilogram o f rye rose from 1 ruble, 88 kopeks, to 53 rubles, 80 kopeks.28 In some regions the zveno, or “link” sys­ tem , was widely adopted, under which a dozen or so collective formers, usually w ith a family as nucleus, would take com plete responsibility for a plot o f land throughout the year, decide w hat to grow, deliver a propor­ tion o f the yield to the state, and consume the rest or sell it for profit on the private m arket.29 By 1945 quite a few peasants seriously hoped that the continued toléra-

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tion o f private trade would lead to the abolition o f the kolkhozy. T he party’s inform ation departm ent reported that in Pskov, Penza, Voronezh, Rostov, and Dnepropetrovsk oblasti “provocative rumors about the al­ leged abolition o f the kolkhozy have intensified’’; while in San Fran­ cisco, M olotov was said to have offered to reopen churches, abolish the kolkhozy, and perm it free trade in order to avoid war w ith the U nited States. O n a num ber o f Pskov oblast farms kolkhozniki declined to put their signatures to a traditional greetings letter to Stalin. They explained their refusal in traditional patriarchal style: “This letter has a hidden meaning, as comrade Stalin asked the people to put up w ith the kolkhozy for another seven years, while the local bosses are determ ined not to dis­ solve the kolkhozy and are now collecting the signatures o f kolkhozniki. If we do sign the letter, the kolkhozy will not be abolished.”30 These were dear examples o f rumors as wish-fulfillment, since there was no evidence for any o f the assertions. M edia policy became more enlightened during the war. Censorship for m ilitary security was o f course tightened, but in other respects a lighter touch was adopted. This did not happen immediately. In the opening days o f the war rum or replaced inform ation. T he Soviet media agency Sovinformbiuro reported evasively on th e defeats, but this aroused only m istrust, since the slightest geographical knowledge indicated that the com bat locations were moving ever further east. O ne Moscow letterw riter commented: “Fear o f facts . . . is one o f the factors that aid the spread o f unofficial inform ation and rum ors.” Stalin’s acknowledgment on July 3 that the Soviet U nion had lost Lithuania, western Belorussia, and m ost o f western Ukraine actually caused relief, since many o f the ru­ mors had been even more luridly catastrophic.31 Sovinformbiuro gradually learned, then, that it was im portant in allout war to gain the trust o f the population. O n the radio unscripted live talk shows and live reporting, which had been banned in 1937, were re­ sumed in autum n 1941. U nit commanders were instructed to provide fa­ cilities for war correspondents. Sometimes they reported directly from the front, w ith noises o f batde in the background. A series o f daily broadcasts, Lettersfrom the Front and Lettersfrom the Rear, helped to keep soldiers and civilians in touch; many people listened regularly to such programs in the hope o f hearing news o f a relative or friend w ith whom they had lost con­ tact.32 This kind o f concern for relationships o f family and friendship helped to cem ent feelings o f com m unity under stress.

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In Pravda also the emphasis shifted from preaching ideology, leader­ ship, and party discipline to reporting direcdy on the lives and feelings o f ordinary citizens, evoking their personal m otivation to fight for their fam­ ilies, friends, and native land. T he skill, initiative, and conviction o f ordi­ nary soldiers and workers were praised as m uch as the quality o f m ilitary and political leadership. In the army newspaper Krasnaia zvezda Erenburg claimed as early as O ctober 1941 that “all distinctions between Bolsheviks and non-party people, between believers and Marxists, has been obliter­ ated . . . They pray for the Red Army in old churches, the domes o f which have been darkened so that they should not attract G erm an pilots. M uftis and rabbis pray for the Red Army.”33 Such political and religious eclecti­ cism w ould have been unthinkable before the war.

The Russian Orthodox Church In the spring o f 1941 the plight o f the church seemed desperate. M etro­ politan Sergii, who had seen all his attem pted compromises bring no re­ wards, remarked bitterly, “We are living through the last days o f the Rus­ sian O rthodox C hurch.” The war, however, transform ed the situation. From the outset the church com m itted itself to the Soviet cause as the em­ bodim ent o f Russia. M etropolitan Sergii issued appeals to the faithful to fight for the fatherland, and prayers were regularly said in all churches for the victory o f the Red Army. Parishioners collected money and ob­ jects such as warm clothing for the war effort, and the State Bank opened a special account to receive them , in a tacit acknowledgment that the church was once more a single structure and a juridical person. O ne Le­ ningrad parish offered to set up, run, and finance a field hospital; others collected money to create a special tank colum n called after D m itrii Donskoi. In November 1941 M etropolitan Nikolai o f Kiev was appointed to a State Com m ittee o f Enquiry into Nazi crimes in occupied territory. N othing m uch came o f the com m ittee, but it was a significant appoint­ m ent, for it was the first tim e a clergyman had been invited to join any Soviet institution.34 Official persecution o f religion was unobtrusively dropped, and the Soviet leaders gradually sanctioned the reopening o f parish churches. In a national war, in w hich the Germans were reopening churches on the territory they occupied, there was perhaps no choice. In September 1943, however, Stalin w ent m uch further. He suddenly invited the three

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highest-ranking prelates o f the O rthodox Church, Sergii, M etropolitan Nikolai o f Krutitsy (Moscow), and M etropolitan Aleksii o f Leningrad, to an interview in the Kremlin, at which he announced his intention to re­ store the patriarchate and perm it a more generous approach to the re­ opening o f parishes. How long would it take, he asked them , to convene a bishops’ conference to formalize the re-establishm ent o f the patriarchate? They thought about a m onth. “C ould one not apply Bolshevik tempos?” Stalin asked. W ith the help o f government air transport, it turned out, one could indeed. A mere four days later, the bishops had been flown in. M ost o f them looked unkem pt and bewildered, straight from labor camps, but the conference duly took place and elected Sergii as patriarch. Stalins m ain motive was not the encouragem ent o f Russian patriotism , as is often assumed. T he tim ing is indicative o f the purpose. T he Red Army had just won the Battle o f Kursk, and w ith that success it became realistic to begin planning for ultim ate victory and for postwar Europe. If Stalin wanted to ensure the security o f the USSR by establishing a cordon sanitaire o f allied states in Eastern Europe, then the help o f the O rtho­ dox C hurch would be very useful to him . His m ajor concessions to the church, then, were m otivated not by the desire for popular support, which he already enjoyed, but to secure the USSR’s great-power position after the war. Accordingly, for the first tim e since 1918, the church was allowed to set up a central adm inistration (installed in the former residence o f the Ger­ man ambassador). T he patriarchal cathedral in Moscow was restored to the church, together w ith the M onastery o f the Trinity and St. Sergii in Zagorsk, complete w ith sacred vessels returned from the local museum. It was supplied w ith foreign currency to open and m aintain missions abroad (Stalin’s special priority). It was perm itted to publish its own journal (sub­ ject to Soviet censorship) and to open a theological academy and three seminaries for the training o f priests. The three highest prelates received chauffeured cars and the right to supplies at state (not market) prices. A few weeks after being virtual outcasts the senior clergy had become part o f the privileged nom enklatura elite.35 The church accepted those benefits at the price o f strict subordination to the state. The patriarchate was placed under the supervision o f a Coun­ cil for Affairs o f the Russian O rthodox Church, whose first head, G. G. Karpov, was simultaneously head o f a special NKVD departm ent respon­ sible for “struggle w ith ecclesiastical and sectarian counter-revolution.”

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T he council was to advise on the appointm ent o f all bishops, and for that purpose kept up-to-date files on the careers o f all potential appointees, in authentic nom enklatura style. For religious zeal they received black marks; for services to the peace movement they were praised. The council had its delegates in each diocese to liaise w ith local authorities and to ensure that the laws on religion were observed; they also had a team o f inspectors to keep an eye on them .* Permission to revive parishes and reopen churches was given grudg­ ingly, even after Stalin m et w ith Sergii and his colleagues. M any local of­ ficials, aghast at w hat they were being asked to countenance, obstructed the process as long as they could. Reports from all over the country show that members o f the League o f M ilitant Godless were bewildered and re­ sentful, even outraged. Some people linked the new policy w ith the resto­ ration o f m ilitary ranks and insignia. O ne soldier commented: “Epaul­ ettes have reappeared, and now the churches are open. It only remains for chains and whips to return and we really will have the old regime back!”37 T he new policy was not simply a concession to traditional Russian pa­ triotism . Mosques were also reopened and Islamic organizations were given new powers. Three new M uftiyats (Muslim adm inistrative boards) were created in addition to the existing one in Ufa: they were in Dagestan, in Baku, and in Tashkent. In May 1942 Muslims were perm itted to hold a conference in Ufa, which sent greetings to Stalin and called on all Mus­ lims to support the war effort. T he Central Asian republics received many evacuees, mostly Slav, from the European part o f the Soviet Union, along w ith num erous new industrial enterprises transferred from there. Recruits from the M uslim regions were called up on the same basis as elsewhere and made their contribution at the front— in fact, perhaps for political reasons, they received more battle honors per capita than did the Slavs.38 Unlike in the First W orld War, the Muslims shouldered their frill share o f the war burden. These concessions to traditional religion did m uch to sustain social sol­ idarity am ong a population undergoing terrible ordeals. T he constant fear and uncertainty, the grieving for Edlen comrades and family members, generated a lively and unashamed revival o f religious feeling, especially am ong women and older people, but also am ong soldiers at the front. For the latter, any kind o f open worship was impossible, but many Red Army men carried a secret cross or talisman o f some kind and would pray dis­ creetly before going into batde.39 All the same, compromise w ith religion entailed a radical change in So-

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viet spirituality, which had hitherto com bined socialist messianism w ith atheism. These concessions were extremely unsettling for Com m unist true believers, who had been confident that the old faiths had been or soon would be thoroughly discredited and supplanted. W hen Christian believers petitioned for the reopening o f their churches they evoked by contrast a solidarity that was archaic, traditionally Russian, and inclusive o f all social classes: MT he open churches in Moscow and other towns are conducting services in unison and offering prayers for victory over the enemy. Therefore why shouldn’t our church and we the labouring kolkhozniki be part o f that unison?” O r, even more succincdy: “The in­ ternal batde is over. O ur people o f All Rus are united.”40 The Com m unist Party needed the support o f such sentim ent now. U nder the pressure o f war the regime was moving decisively away from messianic universalist atheism toward a traditional, pragm atic great-power oudook based on nco-rossiiskii imperialism.

Russian Culture W ar could not be conducted on the basis o f lies and enforced silence. In his novel Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak recalled: “W hen war flared up, its real horrors and real dangers, the threat o f a real death, were a blessing compared to the inhum an reign o f fantasy, and they brought relief by lim ­ iting the magic power o f the dead letter.” It cannot be said that the “dead letter” disappeared entirely. Still, the com m on struggle for survival did conjure up a sense o f com m unity where previously there had been fear, suspicion, and discord. Pasternak him self worked for a tim e in the fire watch service: his task was to dislodge incendiary bombs from the roof o f the twelve-story apartm ent building where he lived and throw them into an em pty lot. Some o f his w ork was published again, and he celebrated the reunion w ith his public through a series o f poems entitled On Early Trains: “Through the m utations o f the past / A nd the years o f war and poverty, / Silendy I came to recognize / Russia’s inim itable features.”41 Nowhere was the revived sense o f com m unity felt more keenly than in Leningrad, which for m uch o f the 1930s had been, in Akhmatova’s words, “a useless appendage to its prisons.” As we have seen, before the war Akhmatova had been almost an outcast. She had made her choice to stay in Russia, however, and accepted the consequences. T he outbreak o f war, for all its horrors, gave her a new reason for living. At the beginning o f the fighting she resisted being evacuated from Leningrad, even as the Ger-

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mans were approaching, and she joined the Civil Defense. Olga Berggolts recalled her sewing sandbags for the trenches and taking fire watch duty, “her face at once severe and angry, a gas mask throw n over her shoulder, she took on the fire watch like a regular soldier.”42 Despite her long exclusion from public culture, the authorities knew that Akhmatova was a pop­ ular figure. Now for the first tim e she was treated w ith honor, as a full citi­ zen o f the country in which she had decided to remain. At last she was allowed to publish, and she brought out a collection called From Six Books: the title perhaps reflected her tacit protest against the fact that the six books had been so long unpublished, and even now were appearing only in fragments. Akhmatova was invited to speak on the radio to boost the spirits o f Leningraders, and this she did w ith conviction: “T he city o f Peter, the city o f Lenin, the city o f Pushkin, Dostoevskii and Blok, this great city o f cul­ ture and labour, is threatened by the enemy w ith shame and death. M y heart, like those o f all the women o f Leningrad, sinks at the mere thought that our city, my city, could be destroyed.. . . I, like all o f you at this mo­ m ent, live only in the unshakeable belief that Leningrad will never fall to the fascists . . . We know that the whole o f our country, all its people, are behind us. We feel their alarm for our sakes, their love and help.”43 Akhmatova had her own war aim, which was also her reason for staying in Russia when so m any friends had left. She summ ed it up in her poem “Courage”: We know w hat lies in the balance right now, And w hat fate is being decided. T he hour o f courage has struck on our clocks, A nd courage will not desert us. We re not frightened to die under bullets, N or daunted at losing our home. For we will defend you, Russian language, T he great Russian word! We will carry you forth free and pure, To pass on to our heirs, saved from servitude For ever!44 Akhmatova, then, had sacrificed everything for the preservation both o f genuine m emory and o f cultural tradition at a tim e when both were un-

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der m ortal threat. H er version o f Russian national identity as consisting above all in language and culture had powerful resonance am ong her edu­ cated fellow citizens. The composer D m itrii Shostakovich, previously prolific, had also fidlen silent in the late 1930s. He had been publicly attacked in 1936 for his op­ era Lady M acbeth o f M tsensk, and he never dared to perform his Fourth Symphony, which faithfully reflected the terror and despair o f the tim e. It climaxes w ith one o f the m ost ferocious unresolved dissonances in the en­ tire orchestral repertoire, and then collapses, to fade out on an uneasy, re­ petitive rhythm , like a patient on a life-support machine. This was not music to inspire the workers as they toiled to fulfill the five-year plan. Now Shostakovich, too, was not only rehabilitated but celebrated. Initially he applied to be sent to the front but instead was detailed off to dig trenches; then, like Pasternak, he was assigned to fire watch duty on the Conservatory roof. H e took part in the same broadcast as Akhmatova, announcing that he had com pleted the first two movements o f his Sev­ enth Symphony. This was Shostakovich’s great contribution to the war ef­ fort, but, like m uch o f his work, its im plications were ambiguous. T he obsessive and brutal march them e o f its first movement could be inter­ preted as either anti-Nazi or anti-Soviet. Less than any other art form can music be tied down to a specific interpretation, though in the context o f the tim e only one reading was possible. T he symphony was first per­ formed in Kuibyshev, but the great event was the Leningrad premiere on August 9, 1942, for which musicians had to be brought out o f retirem ent or even from the trenches and given special rations. T he score was flown to the city, and a team o f copyists worked day and night to transcribe the orchestral parts. The performance was, not surprisingly, far from perfect, but it was relayed on loudspeakers to hushed, expectant crowds in the streets, and it did much to boost morale.45 As war correspondent for the army newspaper Krasnaia zvezda, Vasilii Grossman witnessed the catastrophic defeats and the headlong retreats o f 1941—1942. H e covered the batde o f Stalingrad, where his colleague Se­ men Lipkin recalls him “in a greatcoat drenched in petrol and spattered w ith d irt.” His frontline reportage, vivid and honest, was very popular w ith readers. Stalingrad also gave him the them e for his greatest literary work, the first part o f which, For a Just Cause, was w ritten in 1945—1949 and published in Novyi m ir in 1952. It was a remarkable achievement for a Jew to publish a closely observed account o f the war at a tim e o f maxi-

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m um official anti-Sem itism , and he only achieved it after several rewrit­ ings, undertaken to satisfy editorial dem ands.46 This was nothing, however, com pared to the tribulations o f the novel’s second part, entitled Life and Fate. By the 1950s, when Grossman spent nearly a decade w riting it, he had come to believe that the line between good and evil runs, not between Com m unism and Nazism, or between Russia and Germany, but, as Dostoevskii once p u t it, through every hu­ m an heart. H e portrays the Soviet and Nazi systems as oppressive and in­ hum an twins and presents parallel scenes from the Gulag and from Ger­ m an concentration camps. T he armies o f both sides are authoritarian autom ata, from which, paradoxically, the soldiers escape into the intense camaraderie o f the small frontline unit. This feature o f war is seen at its m ost intense in "House 6 /1 ,” an isolated observation point and fortified outpost behind the G erm an lines, which can only be accessed by night in a covered trench. Its commander, Grekov, is fiercely independent; he cares only for creating a warm, friendly atm osphere am ong his men. They dis­ cuss political m atters quite openly, including collectivization and the ter­ ror, knowing that no political commissar can overhear their conversation. Grekov refuses to send in reports to his superiors, com m enting tartly, "I’ll settle m y paperwork w ith the Germans alone.” His m en are devoted to him , and their fighting spirit holds off the Germans. House 6/1 symbol­ izes for Grossman the reason for the eventual victory at Stalingrad.47 It took Grossman m any years after the war to come to his own personal understanding o f the struggle between good and evil. W hen he did, it contradicted 100 percent the official mythology. W ithout perhaps fully realizing it, he was m onitoring the nations memory in grand confronta­ tional style. In the early 1960s he was alm ost alone am ong Soviet intel­ lectuals in taking such a negative view o f the regime. By the late 1980s this attitude was com monplace and prepared the way for the delight w ith which m any o f them greeted the dism antling o f Com m unist rule. M ikhail Suslov, the regime’s ideological guardian, saw the text and is said to have acclaimed, "This cannot see the light o f day for at least two hun­ dred years!” If indeed Suslov did make this statem ent, it was a recognition both o f the novel’s significance and o f its explosive nature. Perhaps on Suslov’s instructions, the book suffered the m ost devastating fate to which any literary text has ever been subm itted. It was “arrested” by the KGB: all copies o f the text were confiscated from the editorial offices o f Znam ia and from Grossman’s home, together w ith rough drafts, and even car-

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bon paper and typewriter ribbons used for its com position.48 Such was the fate o f a remarkable Jewish-Russian w riter who was inspired by his war­ tim e experience to attem pt a fundam ental reinterpretation o f the Soviet U nions messianic mission.

The All-Slav Committee T he war compelled the Soviet leaders to mobilize public opinion and mass sentim ent in completely new, untried ways. O ne strategy was to stim ulate Russian and Slav solidarity not just inside but also outside the Soviet Union. M any o f the countries occupied by the Germans were Slav: the Belorussians and Ukrainians inside the USSR, the Poles, Czechs, Slo­ vaks, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, and Bulgarians abroad. Moreover, sizeable Slav com m unities lived in em igration in the U nited States, Britain, and elsewhere in the world; since the late 1920s the USSR had spurned them as politically suspect, and Soviet citizens had suffered for any contact w ith them . In wartime, though, every source o f potential aid had to be investi­ gated and encouraged. The All-Slav Com m ittee was form ed in August 1941 from among Slavic cultural and political leaders who happened to find themselves in the USSR. It was placed under the um brella o f Sovinformbiuro, in whose elegant Moscow m ansion it was housed. This arrangem ent was logical, since the bureau coordinated Soviet news and propaganda broadcasting, including to the countries o f occupied Europe. Its head was General A. S. Gundorov, director o f the M ilitary-Engineering Academy, who was also in charge o f Moscow’s anti-aircraft defenses in the autum n o f 1941. The AllSlav Com m ittee was one o f a num ber o f public anti-Fascist committees form ed at around that tim e to mobilize patriotic sentim ent. O thers in­ cluded the W om ens Com m ittee, thé Youth Com m ittee, the Scholars’ Com m ittee, and the best-known, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Com m ittee. These groups were set up at the initiative o f A. S. Shcherbakov, who was head o f both Sovinformbiuro and Agitprop, and were associated w ith the party’s drive to enroll new members and also to gain more popularity among the general public by bringing the concerns o f civilians to the at­ tention o f the rulers.49 According to the Yugoslav Com m unist and partisan leader Milovan Djilas, however, the com m ittee was merely “an anti-G erm an facade for Soviet patronage over the Slavic peoples outside the USSR,” and it ap-

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pealed especially to the Com m unists among them , to whom it offered the prospect o f com ing to power after the war.50 N ot all Slavs present at its founding congress accepted its mandate: the Polish General Anders, for example, attended but did not take part. H e refused to join the com m it­ tee because he did not recognize the legitimacy o f the Soviet annexation o f western Ukraine and western Belorussia, and because he (correctly) sus­ pected the Soviet authorities o f having organized the mass m urder o f Pol­ ish officers in Katyn Forest. T he com m ittee’s m ain job was to propagandize the anti-G erm an cause am ong Slav audiences all over the world, and to try to raise material or financial support from those living outside G erm an rule. T hrough its journal, Slaviane, and its radio broadcasts it reported the course o f the war, stressing the heroic efforts o f Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians in fighting at the front and in keeping the hom e fires burning. It also painted a heartening picture o f partisan resistance from Slavs under occu­ pation. T he com m ittees overriding message was that the Slav peoples had been conquered and enslaved in the past as a result o f their disunity, and that they now urgendy needed to unite to free the gravest threat in their history. In m any W estern countries these efforts m et w ith considerable success. In the U nited States, for example, Com m ittees for Aid to the USSR were set up which sent food, clothing, and other items, w orth $16 m illion in 1943 and $22.7 m illion in 1944. Some Slavs abroad remained irreconcil­ able, either because o f hostility to Com m unism or because o f specific grievances. By contrast, some former W hites felt that the Nazi threat to their hom eland jusdfied a reconciliation w ith their former Red enemies.51 T he com m ittee’s nam e and m uch o f its propaganda inevitably evoked the memory o f the nineteenth-century Panslavists, who had tried to per­ suade the government to intervene more actively in support o f Slav peo­ ples in the H absburg and O ttom an Empires. T he opening congress, however, explicidy disavowed this heritage as a “thoroughly reactionary tendency, exploited by Russian tsarism for its own political purposes, and deeply hostile to the exalted goal o f equality o f peoples and the national development o f all states.”52 All the same, the All-Slav propaganda was sometimes consciously ar­ chaic, redolent o f the 1870s. Take, for example, the proclamation to the Bulgarian people o f January 1944: “Dear brother Bulgarians! The Russian [N.B.: not Soviet] people is inflicting incurable wounds on H iderism , is

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cleansing the holy Russian lands from the foe, is preparing the ulti­ mate defeat o f H itler’s Germ any and bringing liberation to the enslaved Slav peoples.. . . Bulgarian quislings [are] taking from the peasant every­ thing he has obtained by his toil, they help the Germans to destroy the centuries-old Bulgarian culture. W ith their approval the Teutons be­ smirch your national shrines and mock your national honor.” T hen fol­ lowed an appeal to priests: “Servitors o f the Bulgarian O rthodox Church. Let the call resound in your churches for the struggle against H itler, and let the prayer be heard for the speedy liberation o f your people from the power o f the German foe.”53 Almost every word o f this appeal could have l>een w ritten by the Panslavs seventy years earlier. Especially striking is the word used for “foe” at the end: supostaty. This is an archaic and rhetor­ ical term confined almost entirely to religious usage; it carries the idea, not only o f enemy, but also o f “evil spirits,” the enemy in the sense o f the devil. This kind o f focused rhetoric worked, or so at least G undorov reported at the end o f the war, m aintaining that “the nongovernmental [obshchestvennyt\ nature o f the com m ittee and the popularity o f its slogans enabled our propaganda to gain acceptance am ong foreign circles that would not have been possible for official Soviet propaganda organs, and attracted to our work people o f diverse political convictions.”54

Russian National Identity If one had asked a Red Army soldier at the tim e w hat he m eant by Russia, he m ight well have pointed to the extraordinarily popular narrative poem by Aleksandr Tvardovskii, Vasilii Terkin, which had been appearing in in­ stallments in frontline newspapers. The image o f Russian patriotism proj­ ected in the poem differed markedly from w hat would have been expected before the war. Terkin is a very ordinary soldier, a simple peasant lad, w ith minimal education and no interest in science, technology, or industry. H e is completely apolitical: the text contains no m ention o f the Com m unist Party nor even o f Stalin. Terkins attachm ent to his country centers on his rodina, his home province o f Smolensk: at one points he has a friendly spat w ith a soldier from Tambov, who boasts that the feats o f Smolensk people cannot m atch those o f the Tambovtsy. Yet Terkin is also proud o f the fact that he is fighting to save Russia, which, like all his countrym en, he straightforwardly equates w ith the Soviet Union: “The hour has come,

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/ O ur (ate has caught us. / Today we answer for Russia, / For the people, / For everything in the world. From Ivan to Foma, / Dead and alive, / We together are we, / T he people, Russia . . .”99 H e has no family o f his own but feels his unit to be a family, and he connects to Russian villagers as to a larger family, epitomized by the elderly couple for whom he mends a clock as his unit passes their home. After he has done so, he drinks w ith the husband, who is a veteran o f the First W orld War, and thus renews the symbolic link w ith Russia’s previous wars. Viewed in the light o f prewar proletarian internationalism , even in its neo-rossiiskii phase, Terkin is a strange and archaic figure, closer to the fantasies o f the nineteenth-century narodniki than to anything Lenin or Stalin m ight have conceived. Yet this was the hero Soviet soldiers liked to read about in their spare tim e, and Tvardovskii s book was a familiar ob­ ject in their knapsacks. T he censorship occasionally dem urred to some m inor aspect o f the text, but in general it was given the green light be­ cause o f its obvious popularity.96 Besides, the w ork was in no sense antiSoviet; it simply re-emphasized aspects o f Russian national identity that had been obscured or downplayed in the public discourse o f the interw ar years. Terkin represented, in fact, for the first tim e since 1917, the honor­ able re-emergence o f the russkii. Cumulatively, the w artim e changes o f policy consolidated the feeling, held by m ost Russians and non-Russians o f whatever social class, that they belonged to a society whose nature was determ ined by its Russianness. Rogers Brubaker has suggested that national identity can take shape quite suddenly. Indeed, he speaks o f “nationness” rather than o f national iden­ tity, and characterizes it as “som ething that suddenly crystallises rather than gradually develops, as a contingent, conjuncturally fluctuating and precarious frame o f vision and basis for individual and collective action.”97 We may say that during 1941-1945 “Russianness” crystallized in that way, as an ethnic and imperial amalgam, a blend o f russkii, rossiiskii, and Soviet elements. In 1945 the USSR was closer to being a com pound neorossiiskii nation-state than ever before— or, as it turned out, ever after. As if to give symbolic form to this neo -rossiiskii identity, in 1943 the Soviet state reintroduced the full panoply o f m ilitary ranks as they had been in the tsarist army, w ith gold braid and shoulder straps to match, and a series o f new decorations for officers, including the Orders o f Aleksandr Nevskii and M ikhail Kutuzov. It also dissolved the Com intern, institutional em bodim ent o f the old proletarian internationalism . This

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step worried and distressed m any Com m unists, as the party’s inform ation departm ent reported. In one Moscow factory, very understandably, an en­ gineer wanted to know: “W hat will happen to the slogan ‘Workers o f the world, unite’? W hat is going to replace it?”58 W hat indeed? In place o f the “International,” a new national anthem was adopted whose opening words celebrated in archaic language the concept o f Russia as the heart o f the USSR: “An unshakeable union o f free republics / Has been united by Great Rus. / Long live the country founded by the peo­ ple’s will, / T he united, m ighty Soviet U nion.”59 T he same concept was confirmed by Stalin when he spoke at a Kremlin banquet o f Red Army commanders on May 24, 1945: “I drink above all to the health o f the Russian people, because it is the outstanding nation am ong all the nations which make up the Soviet U nion. I drink to the health o f the Russian people because in this war it has deserved general recognition as the driv­ ing force am ong the peoples o f the Soviet U nion.”60

POWs a n d Returnees W ithin half a century the Soviet U nion had fallen apart and the non-Rus­ sian republics had declared their independence o f both Russia and Com ­ m unism. O ne is bound, therefore, to ask: W hat happened to this spirit o f Russian-led solidarity? O ne answer is that, even during the war, but especially afterward? the regime continued to underm ine the ethnic and civic aspects o f nation­ hood, both Russian and non-Russian. Its leaders still saw themselves pri­ marily as the rulers o f a great power, not o f a nation. Although, being more intelligent than H ider, they were prepared to compromise wherever necessary w ith the Russians and other peoples, they never really identified w ith them , and always safeguarded their right to rule over them regardless o f cost. This m indset is well illustrated in the state’s attitude toward Soviet pris­ oners o f war in enemy captivity: they were simply abandoned to their fate. The Soviet regime refused to give the International Red Cross any help or inform ation to make possible the delivery o f food parcels or correspon­ dence to them . As a result m ost Soviet prisoners suffered extreme neglect, especially during the early m onths o f the war. A commissioner o f the Ger­ man O stm inisterium described the conditions in a PO W camp in Poland in the autum n o f 1941: “T he camp was completely surrounded by barbed

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wire and guarded by sentinels w ith m achine guns. There were several huts for the camp adm inistration, but the prisoners lived in dugouts and slept on the bare earth. T he weather was cold and wet, and all the dugouts were leaking, but 40 percent o f the prisoners were w ithout greatcoats, tunics, or sometimes even footwear. . . . M orning and evening each prisoner re­ ceived a m ug o f hot water, for (so-called) dinner a liter o f thin soup, and a slice o f bread a day. . . . H alf-clothed, grimy, exhausted, w ith unshaven faces, they were in com plete despair. N o one was concerned about their fate; they had been declared oudaws by their own governm ent.”61 As a result o f these appalling conditions, only 2.4 m illion o f the 5.7 m illion POW s captured by the Germans in the course o f the war survived to the end. T he remainder, roughly 57 percent, died in captivity. Espe­ cially dreadful were the first six m onths o f the war, when large Soviet ar­ mies were defeated and encircled, and the Germans had still not decided w hat to do w ith prisoners. A t that stage PO W camps were almost literally exterm ination centers. Thereafter it occurred to the Germans that Soviet prisoners could be exploited as manual labor rather than being left to rot. This entailed feeding them well enough to have the strength for work, so the survival rate after the spring o f 1942 was higher than earlier. D uring the war as a whole, some 9 to 10 m illion Soviet citizens were captured or deported to occupied territory at one tim e or another, and barely half o f them survived till the end o f the war.62 T he original intention o f the Soviet government had not necessarily been to abandon its own citizens in this manner. From the outset, how­ ever, it declared that it would observe international conventions on the conduct o f war only insofar as the Germans did the same. Faced w ith evi­ dence o f the racism and extreme brutality o f the Germans in the areas they occupied, the Soviets refused in August 1941 to supply the Red Cross w ith inform ation about the identity o f Germ an prisoners in their hands. Foreign M inister M olotov stated that “in view o f the systematic vi­ olation by H itlerite Germ any o f international agreements and conven­ tions, the Soviet government shall observe w ith respect to Germany the [Hague and Geneva] treaties and conventions only insofar as they are ob­ served by Germany.”63 A t first sight there m ight seem a certain logic to that position. In prac­ tice, though, it m eant that the Soviet leaders adopted Nazi moral stan­ dards, even Nazi racist policies, as their own, and disowned citizens who had suffered no more than a norm al m isfortune o f war. A deeper motive

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was at work as well. As we have seen, during the 1930s the Soviet regime had come to view its frontier w ith the hostile outside world not as offering opportunities but rather as posing a threat. Anyone who had lived beyond it knew things that no Soviet citizen ought to know and m ight be a spy for a hostile power. Now, suddenly, as the result o f war, millions o f Soviet citizens were in that situation, mostly through no fault o f their own. To the regime, all the same, they were a menace. For that reason being taken prisoner was construed as an act o f cowardice or even deliberate betrayal. Encircled units were instructed to fight to the last man. A Stavka decree o f August 16,1941, proclaimed that “cowards and deserters m ust be annihi­ lated” and ordered that “commanders and political workers who during batde tear up their insignia and desert to the rear or give themselves up as prisoners should be considered malicious deserters, and their families are subject to arrest as families o f deserters, who violated their oath and be­ trayed their hom eland. H igher-ranking commanders m ust shoot out o f hand such deserters am ong the com m anding officers.”64 This decree was read out in units but not published. A lthough strictly it applied only to officers and political commissars, in practice the Soviet regime construed it as applying to all servicemen. In 1943, in reply to a papal inquiry about Soviet prisoners o f war, the Soviet ambassador in Turkey told the nuncio that the Soviet government ignored all inform ation about them , since it regarded them as traitors. T he government also withdrew from the fami­ lies o f POW s the supplem entary rations normally given to the families o f serving soldiers.65 O ne way the Soviet POW s could be fed and clothed was by volunteer­ ing to serve in the German armed forces. M ost such volunteers were as­ signed as auxiliaries to units under Germ an commanders, since H ider was determ ined not to allow the creadon o f Russian national form ations, even anti-C om m unist ones. Some o f his officers, though, reckoned that the Germans’ chances o f w inning the war w ould be gready enhanced if they had Russians fighting on their side for patriotic reasons and from antiCom m unist convicdon. In the summ er o f 1942 they recruited to their cause General Andrei Vlasov, who had been captured during the encircle­ m ent o f his unit on the northern front. They encouraged Vlasov to be­ lieve that he m ight become the leader o f a Russian national liberation army, enjoying the backing o f Germany in overthrowing Stalin and the Com m unist system. Vlasov is a kind o f touchstone for the dilemmas o f Russian patriotism

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during the Second W orld War. In December 1942 he issued the Smolensk D eclaration, which set out a political program for a free Russia indepen­ dent o f Com m unism , or, as Vlasov him self put it, “a new Russia w ithout Bolsheviks and Capitalists”— since he believed that the British and the Americans were ganging up w ith Stalin to exploit the Russians. It is re­ vealing, then, that Vlasov accepted m any o f the aims o f Com munism : the ideal o f social justice, protection from exploitation, the right to work, ed­ ucation, leisure, and a secure old age. His declaration also promised the unrealized civil rights guaranteed in the 1936 Soviet constitution, such as freedom o f speech, conscience, assembly, and so on. O n the other hand it also called for an end to terror and forced labor, the abolition o f the col­ lective farms, and the re-legalization o f private m anufacture and trade. Re­ markably for a political program published under Nazi sponsorship, it contained no trace o f anti-Sem itism. We cannot tell for certain, but it seems likely that such a program resembled more closely the aspirations o f Russians at the tim e than the policies o f the C om m unist Party. A t any rate, the Second W orld W ar Russian émigrés interviewed at H arvard in the late 1940s, certainly not pro-Soviet in their general oudook, expressed similar appreciation o f Soviet welfare programs while criticizing precisely the aspects o f Soviet rule that Vlasov proposed to abolish. His political vi­ sion also seems to have provoked a positive response in the few occupied towns he visited in the spring o f 1943, Smolensk, Mogilev, Bobruisk, and Pskov, though some o f his listeners are reported to have accused him o f collaborating w ith an occupation regime that was enslaving Russians.66 They were right. Politically Vlasov was in an impossible situation. There was never any real hope that H itler would allow him to form a Rus­ sian army— not, at least, until the final m onths o f the war, when its mis­ sion was already hopeless. His Smolensk D eclaration contained patendy untrue statem ents, such as: “Germ any is waging war not against the Rus­ sian people and their Rodina, but only against Bolshevism,” or “Germany does not wish to encroach on the living space o f the Russian people or on their national and political liberties.” Those joining Vlasovs movement were required to take an oath o f loyalty not only “to the Russian peo­ ple” but also “to H ider as the supreme com m ander o f all anti-Bolshevik forces.”67 Few Soviet officers from the PO W camps were prepared to join him, partly because they had no desire to take such an oath, and partly because they could see that his cause was doomed. Some 250,000 Soviet citizens,

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including 165-170,000 POW s, served at one tim e or another in the G er­ man armed forces, and perhaps 800,000 if one adds in Vlasovite units and the police. This represents about 8 percent o f the total num ber o f Soviet citizens who fell under enemy control during the war— a remarkably low proportion, considering the appalling alternatives.68 T he project o f a nonCom m unist Russian patriotic movement was a hopeless dream, crushed between the millstones o f Stalinism and Nazism. All the same, the regime reacted w ith extreme distrust toward all Soviet citizens returning from captivity or from occupied territory. O ne Brit­ ish sailor described their reception from his own viewpoint: “W hen we brought the Russians to Odessa, we unloaded the steamer from six in the m orning till four in the afternoon, but no one was there to greet them ___ After the unloading, NKVD officials lined up the men and marched them off somewhere for interrogation. T he women and children stayed behind and, if they had heavy luggage, had to sit all night in the open w aiting for trucks to com e.”69 We now know where the men were being marched off to. As early as the Finnish war, special NKVD filtration camps had been set up to re­ ceive and investigate returnees before deciding on their further status. In December 1941, as soon as the Soviet Army began to reconquer occu­ pied territory, those camps were reactivated, and their num ber greatly in­ creased during 1943—1945, when large swathes o f territory were being recovered. C onditions in them resembled those o f strict regime labor camps. M any o f them were located in industrial and m ining areas, and detainees were often required to perform heavy m anual labor.70 O ne inm ate, Sergei Terpilovskii, recalled the Stalinogorsk camp in Tula oblast, where he worked in a coalmine: “Barracks, poor food, work. They would sum m on you to the investigators in the evening, or in the daytime if you were working the evening shift. There were lots o f questions: how were you captured or did you surrender? W hy didn’t you shoot yourself? W hy did you work in a m ilitary factory?— as if I w ent there voluntarily rather than w ith a machine-gun at my back. It all came down to one thing: a guilty verdict as soon as possible.” In the west o f Russia Evgenii Murshel lived in tents and had to transport stones and surface asphalt roads. There everyone was registered according to their specialty: mechanic, m et­ alworker, lathe operator, and so on. The specialists were distributed

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am ong the m ilitary units. But m ost, like me, had no specialty. D ur­ ing our stay in the camp we were detailed off to surface roads, lug­ ging stones around (just like in occupied Simferopol). T he junior of­ ficers supervising us sometimes behaved no better than Germans: they chivied us, shouted at us. There was one incident when some­ one from our brigade climbed onto a trailer conveying stones for an­ other platoon and began to throw some o f them out. T heir com­ m anding officer galloped up on his horse and struck him a fearful blow w ith his riding crop, as a result o f which he had a heart attack.71 Later M urshel was transferred to a camp near Perm, where he was re­ quired to fell tim ber in -30 to -40 degree tem peratures in ragged clothing, w ith w orn footwear and w ithout proper m ittens. His pay depended on his output. Eventually the investigations began: A raw young man in uniform came and started to fill in question­ naires. We were taken one by one to see this official. Everyone re­ turned from seeing him either very downcast or barely contain­ ing their anger. At last it was my turn. A nd w hat do you think? It was some kind o f m adm an filling in those questionnaires. H e kept on twitching. W hat was the use o f talking to him? I said I had been captured when m y regim ent ceased its existence. T he Germans had pulled me out o f a swamp in the Udai basin somewhere near Piriatino. “We know all about that,” he shouted. I should think you do, I thought, it’s your lot that destroyed the army. “I can see through you,” he shouted. “You’re a spy!” H e seized me by the hair, pulled my head back, and gazed into my eyes.72 Eventually, when he received news that his father had died in Kazakhstan, M urshel was allowed to go and settle w ith his m other there, but only as a spetsposelenets, a political exile. By December 1946, 5.4 m illion returnees had been through filtration camps, 1.8 m illion m ilitary personnel and 3.6 m illion civilians. Investiga­ tions were conducted by the NKVD, the NKGB, the m ilitary procuracy, and a new counterintelligence organization called SMERSH (short for smert shpionam, “death to spies”), set up to detect agents infiltrated into the USSR by foreign intelligence services. T heir w ork sometimes took several years, and for some o f the investigated the end result was execution

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or long prison sentences. In other cases, already before the return home, former POW s were gathered at meetings where, as one soldier recalled, a political officer “told us that we had com m itted a grave offense before the m otherland and our people, and proposed that we sign on voluntarily for five years’ construction work in the Urals as the only way to atone for our guilt.”73 An especially remarkable case was that o f Lieutenant General I. A. Laskin, who had received the capitulation o f Field M arshal Paulus in Sta­ lingrad in 1943, and had been decorated by both the Soviets and the Americans. In August 1941, when still a colonel, he had been surrounded near Uman, captured, and interrogated by a G erm an noncom m issioned officer. After a few hours he had succeeded in escaping and rejoining his unit. Knowing about the NKVD investigations, he had decided to con­ ceal his brief period in captivity. The fact came out, however, in 1943, and he was arrested. The investigation o f his case took nine years, and in 1952 he was sentenced to fifteen years’ corrective labor.74 O f those interrogated, some 340,000— those who had served in the German army, the Vlasov army, or the police— were handed over to the NKVD. Some were shot as traitors, some were sent to strict regime labor camps, and some were treated like deported peoples, sent to “special set­ tlements” where they lived in exile. Roughly 600,000 were assigned to hard labor battalions working in places like the Donbass coalmines or fell­ ing tim ber in the for north. Just over a m illion were sent for further service in the Red Army. Even those not mobilized or subjected to crim inal pen­ alties suffered discrim ination thereafter, in many cases to the end o f their lives. Any docum ents they had at the tim e o f repatriation were confis­ cated, and they received a “tem porary certificate,” which recorded their sojourn under occupation, assigned them to a particular region (not nec­ essarily where they had previously lived), and enabled them to apply there for a residence perm it, but did not guarantee them one. In other words, it left them w ith a perm anent black m ark on their identity docum ents, and at the mercy o f the local police and party officials.75 Aleksandra Fedorovna Lychagina, for example, had been deported to Germany to work as a firm laborer. In summ er 1945 it took her two m onths to return, via various displaced person camps, to her home in M ichurinsk, near Moscow. There she discovered that her husband, M ik­ hail, a major in the army, whom she had married only just before the out­ break o f war, was now stationed in the Far East, and that her parents had

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sold their joint hom e and moved elsewhere. She crowded in w ith her pov­ erty-stricken elder sister, the sister s husband (who had returned from the war m inus one leg), and their children, and she reported to the local M VD (as the N KVD had now been renamed). There, as she reports in her diary, the station chief w arned that “until I undergo an investigation and receive identity papers I have no right to leave the town. If I ignore his warning, I will be arrested and im prisoned for five years.” Unable to visit either her parents or her husband, she appealed to the town council, where she was even more harshly received. T he secretary o f the party cell, she recalled, said “I ought to be exiled to Kazakhstan for having been in captivity in Germany. There is no place for me here.” Six m onths later, af­ ter m any fruitless visits to the M V D , and an equally fruitless letter to President Kalinin, she noted in her diary: “I don’t live a norm al hum an life. 1 have no passport, no right to life, w hich a person should have in his own country. I really regret I didn’t die during the warV Aleksandras marriage fell apart, since she could not get to see M ikhail, and she took up w ith another m an, Kostia, whom she had known at school. But Kostias brother advised him not to m arry her “because there was a shadow over me. Kostia told me that, and we separated.” Later she discovered that M ikhail had m arried again, but that the marriage had not worked out: he had com m itted suicide by throwing him self under a train, having sent his wife a telegram saying, “Your husband has been killed.”76 O ne cannot say for certain that the stigmatizing o f those who returned from captivity ruined her marriage, but it clearly deprived her o f any seri­ ous opportunity to save it. As a lingering token o f m istrust, right up to the end o f the Soviet U nion all citizens applying for a job, education, or a living perm it had to fill in a questionnaire that asked, am ong other things, “Were you or any o f your relatives in captivity or on occupied territory?” This question was finally deleted only in 1992.77 T he regimes distrust extended to the partisans, that is, to the Soviet U nions m ost staunch defenders, those who fought for its cause behind the Germ an lines. T he Soviet leaders had not anticipated fighting a parti­ san war and had made no preparations for one, partly because they antici­ pated an offensive war, and partly because they distrusted their own popu­ lation. A lthough Stalins radio address o f July 3, 1941, called for the development o f partisan com bat in occupied territory, in practice the So­ viet leaders were cautious about encouraging such activities during the

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early phase o f the war, for they were worried about sanctioning the forma­ tion o f armed bands beyond their control. The first partisans were young men in occupied territory who wished to avoid Germ an labor conscrip­ tion. In response, to exert some control over them , the Soviet authorities created a network o f underground party and N KVD cells, and em pha­ sized that partisan units should be form ed under the personal supervision o f responsible leaders from those cells. Soviet officials found, however, that local people and scattered Red Army units deep in the Germ an rear were improvising their own fighting detachm ents w ith or w ithout supervision, and so they hastened to equip those units as far as was practical, in order to gain some influence over them . A C entral Staff o f the Partisan M ovement was set up, attached to the Red Army. It had its own representatives in each army front, who were supposed to keep in radio contact w ith partisan detachm ents behind the lines in their area. T he Central Staff was led by the Belorussian Com m u­ nist Party first secretary, P. K. Ponomarenko: com m and was thus vested in the m ost prom inent nom enklatura figure from the republic w ith the greatest num ber o f partisans. T he N KVD had its own osobyi otdel (spe­ cial departm ent) in each partisan detachm ent, partly to provide security against enemy infiltration, but also undoubtedly to keep an eye on the partisans themselves and on local people. For the same reason political commissars were appointed to each detachm ent; they were kept on w ith hill powers even after their equivalents had been downgraded in the So­ viet Army in O ctober 1942.78 In the summ er o f 1942 there were probably some 150,000 partisans ac­ tive in the Germ an rear, especially concentrated in Belorussia and north­ ern Ukraine, where the swampy, wooded terrain favored their activity. T heir numbers grew progressively thereafter, and the effectiveness o f their operations is undeniable: parts o f Belorussia were more or less under their control, and even elsewhere the movement o f German troops and supplies was under constant threat. The W ehrm acht had to divert some 10 percent o f its men from frondine duty to guard supply depots and com munica­ tions deep in the rear. All the same at the end o f the war m ost partisans had to undergo filtration by the Soviet authorities, and unless they could dem onstrate their unbroken loyalty— obviously difficult to do in the con­ fused circumstances— they could suffer discrim ination or even criminal penalties. This was a strange reward for w hat m ight have been considered a sterling dem onstration o f courage and patriotism .

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O n the other hand, there was good reason for the authorities’ suspi­ cions: although many Ukrainians were willing to become citizens o f the Soviet U nion, some were irreconcilably hostile to it. Remembering the state-im posed famine and terror o f the 1930s and the brutal annexation o f western U kraine in 1939-1941, they were determ ined to prevent the reim position o f Soviet authority after the war. T he UPA (Ukrainian In­ surgent Army), established in 1943, fought against the Soviets as well as the Germans, and kept up the struggle even after the end o f the war. They were only finally rooted out in the early to m id-1950s.79 T he upshot, though, was that many o f those who had fought against the Germans m ost resolutely and in the m ost adverse circumstances were denied hill integration into the patriotic com m unity after the war. If there was any prospect o f a cohesive Russian-led Soviet U nion, then it was destroyed by the deportations carried out in 1939-1941 and 19441947. These took place in the Baltic republics, western Belorussia, west­ ern Ukraine, Moldavia, and the north Caucasus. T he story is by now well known and does not need to be expounded here.80 But certain aspects o f it should be emphasized. T he deportations aimed not just to rid sensitive territory o f potentially unreliable people but often actually to annihilate the ethnic groups involved. In the Baltic republics "only” some 1.5 to 4 percent o f the population was deported in 1940-1941, but they were in­ tellectuals and professional people, all those who m ight lead anti-Soviet political parties or independence movements; a further 3 percent or so were deported after 1945, mostly “kulaks” victimized during collectiviza­ tion. After the occupation o f western Ukraine and Belorussia in 1939, some 900,000 people were deported, about half as prisoners and half as “special setders” (spetsposelentsy), technically not in confinem ent but re­ quired to live in certain locations and to report regularly to the police. O f these, some 52 percent were Poles, 30 percent Jews, and 18 percent Ukrai­ nians and Belorussians. In M oldavia there were some 90,000 victims in the wave o f arrests and deportations that immediately followed the annex­ ation o f 1940, and even more in the dekulakization and famine o f 19461947: probably some 115,000 peasants starved and some 16,000 families were transported to Siberia and Kazakhstan. In all these regions, more­ over, agriculture was collectivized, industry was nationalized, and culture and education were brought under C om m unist control and censorship in the established Soviet pattern, w ithout any consideration for the specific features o f the peoples involved.81

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In other cases entire peoples were deported: the Germans, Crim ean Tatars, M eskhetians, Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingushes, Balkars, and Karachais. They were moved w ithout any concern for their health during the journey, so that many died o f cold, hunger, and untreated disease. Those who survived were resettled in regions wholly unfam iliar to them — for ex­ ample, the Caucasian m ountain people in the semi-arid plains o f Kazakh­ stan— so that it was difficult for them to re-establish their economic life. Moreover, they were deprived o f education or any public media in their own language. In essence the policy was attem pted genocide through physical m ortality and cultural deprivation.82 These peoples, understandably, reacted w ith extreme anti-Russian and anti-C om m unist em bitterm ent and also a sense o f collective victim ization that rendered them irreconcilable to continued Soviet rule. They brought a new m ood to the postwar labor camps. W hereas prewar inmates had cringed before the guards and crim inal “trusties,” these new contingents im ported a feeling o f ethnic solidarity and moral outrage that made them impossible to infiltrate or m anipulate. In fact, they began to organize the m urder o f informers in their m idst. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn records that in the camp where he was confined everyone feared inform ers until for­ mer soldiers o f the U krainian Insurgent Army arrived and made short work o f them : “O ther forms o f hum an association now bound people more closely than the w ork teams artificially put together by the adm inis­ tration. M ost im portant were national ties. N ational groups— Ukrainians, United Muslims, Estonians, Lithuanians—which informers could not pen­ etrate, were born and flourished. No one elected the leadership, but its com position so justly satisfied the claims o f seniority, wisdom and suffer­ ing that no one disputed its authority over its own nation.”83 In that way new, specifically anti-Soviet forms o f social solidarity were generated during and after the war. Later, after Stalins death, the policies o f national victim ization were revoked, and many o f the deported were al­ lowed to return to their homelands. Nonetheless, the memory o f at­ tem pted genocide left an enduring legacy o f bitter resentment. These peo­ ples became and remained profoundly unreconciled to both Soviet and Russian dom ination. In the end they made a major contribution to the eventual collapse o f the Soviet Union: as we shall see, the Baltic republics were the first to declare their secession from it, and the outcom e o f the Ukrainian referendum o f December 1991, heavily influenced by west Ukrainian attitudes, was its final death knell. Last but not least, the

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Chechens have given post-Soviet Russia its m ost protracted and insoluble internal conflict. All these developments are legacies o f mistakes— indeed terrible crimes— com m itted by the Soviet leaders before, during, and im­ mediately after the war. As for the Russians themselves, the war had for a tim e given them a sense o f shared purpose w ith their leaders. It had offered the opportunity to bridge the gap between elites and masses, to consolidate and confirm the patriotic narrative that the party had deployed during the 1930s, and to give it a broad popular resonance. Rodina, home, family life, and con­ jugal love had been revalidated, acknowledged as valuable for their own sake. It is o f such materials that nations are constructed. But the m indset engendered by enduring nom enklatura dom ination fatally im peded the process. T he incipient civil institutions granted to Russians during the war— a free agricultural market, the reopening o f churches, relaxed cul­ tural censorship, the somewhat freer and more spontaneous media—were withdraw n or emasculated after it. Especially damaging to the forging o f civic solidarity am ong form er soldiers was the policy o f either banning regimental and veterans’ associations or subjecting them to s tria party control.84 Furtherm ore, Stalin indicated in 1946 that it would be inadvis­ able to publish memoirs on the war, because it was too early to take an objeaive view o f it. T hat statem ent was in effea a prohibition o f them , w hich lasted some ten years. Even after the ban was lifted, memoirs were heavily edited and censored.85 Memories o f the war were to be stricdy ra­ tioned and shaped to the purposes o f the regime, not articulated as part o f authentic social memory. W here m em ory is not validated in the public media, where it cannot be periodically reinforced by the spontaneous exchange o f personal recollec­ tions in the com munity, then it becomes fragmented, insubstantial, and cannot function as an underpinning o f national identity. T hat was an es­ pecially serious m atter in a country where there were so m any deaths to be m ourned and so m uch suffering to be assimilated. In the Soviet Union, memory became instead part o f the official narrative, deployed to cele­ brate and bolster the regime, and otherwise to be treated w ith extreme suspicion. As a result, Soviet patriotism remained in large part that o f a ruling elite, m anipulated for purposes o f political rule, and therefore reso­ nating uncertainly and in distorted fashion am ong ordinary people. In one sense, the outcom e o f the war did confirm the millennial out­ look o f the C om m unist Party’s convinced believers. True, the perfect soci-

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ety had not been built, and there was no prospect o f its being built any tim e soon. But on the other hand, the Soviet U nion had averted the apoc­ alypse, in the form o f Nazi victory, and had saved Europe from it, too. T hat was not a bad second best, a genuine international mission accom­ plished against enorm ous odds. But that very success had a strange effect on Com m unist millenarianism. T he center o f gravity o f the symbolic life o f the Soviet state, and therefore o f Soviet society too, shifted from the fu­ ture to the past, from anticipation o f the distant trium ph o f socialism to remembrance o f the very real and undeniable victory o f Soviet arms in w hat everyone could agree in calling “the Great Patriotic War.” This fixation on the past com bined w ith the fracturing o f national identity, russkii, rossiiskii, and sovetskii, to hollow out the spiritual life o f the So­ viet peoples and to underm ine their sense o f community. In that way the Soviet regime gradually negated its own greatest trium ph, weakened its bond w ith the Russian people, and prepared the way for its own eventual downfall.

/ TBE S weet und B itte « F i n n s OF VICTORY

May 9, 1945, was the greatest day in Russian history. Alexander W erth, the British journalist, was in Moscow for the victory celebrations and re­ ported: “T he spontaneous joy o f the two or three m illion people who thronged Red Square that evening— and the Moscow River em bankm ent, and Gorkii Street all the way up to the Belorussian Station— was o f a quality and a depth I had never yet seen in Moscow before. They danced and sang in the streets; every soldier and officer was hugged and kissed; outside the US Embassy the crowds shouted ‘Hooray for Roosevelt!’ (even though he had died a m onth before); they were so happy they did not even have to get drunk, and under the tolerant gaze o f the m ilitia, young men even urinated against the walls o f the Moskva H otel, flooding the wide pavement. N othing like this had ever happened in Moscow before.”1 There was ample reason for their rapturous informality, their patrio­ tism, and their spontaneous internationalism . As we have seen, at a Krem­ lin reception for Red Army commanders on M ay 24, Stalin had raised a special toast to the Soviet people and, above all, to the Russian people, “the m ost outstanding o f all the nations that make up the Soviet U nion . . . the directing force am ong all the peoples o f our co u n try . . . [for their] clear m ind, staunch character, and patience.” H e adm itted that the gov­ ernm ent had made mistakes. “Another people m ight have said to its Gov­ ernm ent: ‘You have let us down. G et out and we will put in place another Government, which will conclude peace w ith Germany and ensure us a quiet life.’ But the Russian people did not do that, for they had faith in the correctness o f their government’s policies, and they accepted sacrifices

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to make certain o f Germany’s defeat. T hat faith o f the Russian people in the Soviet G overnm ent was the decisive force which guaranteed victory over the enemy o f hum anity—fascism.”2 We may presume that Stalin was being sincere on this occasion. W hat he said was a pretty clear statem ent o f the reasons that after 1945 the re­ gime made Russian patriotism a central plank o f its policy. H e had never before so wholeheartedly praised the Russian people—as distinct from the Russian state tradition. H e abandoned the rather contem ptuous attitudes o f Lenin and Bukharin toward the Russian people and explicidy recast Russians as the central pillar o f the Soviet m ultiethnic polity. But the terms in which he praised them are revealing: he im plied that he valued them because they were patient and accepting, unlikely to cause trouble, raw material at the regimes disposal for its policies, however mistaken. This was a sublim inal warning not to expect a genuine constitution or dem ocratic elections. T he w arning was needed, for the victory aroused the greatest expec­ tations. A people who had achieved such a signal trium ph expected to be treated at least w ith respect. Such treatm ent was incom patible w ith, among other things, the current condition o f the kolkhozy, as an anony­ mous correspondent com plained to Stalin: “Have the people o f Siberia re­ ally deserved to be condem ned to slow starvation? After all this is a heroic people, a people o f great warriors (narod-bogatyr) . . . D on’t send your an­ swer to me. Reply to the Russian people. They w ant to know if they are valued by the state or just an unnecessary burden.”3 Stalin’s exaltation o f the Russian people was, then, conditional on their docility; it was still subordinated to the needs o f the state. There were two distinctive features about the public m ood on which this official patrio­ tism rested. First, conscious national pride was m uch more widely felt and supported than ever before. D uring the 1920s and 1930s nearly all Rus­ sians, male and female, accept the very elderly, had learned to read and write in their own language and had absorbed m uch o f the history and culture o f their own country. M any o f them had been urbanized, inte­ grated into social security systems, and undergone other changes o f the kind envisaged by Karl Deutsch, Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, and others as fortifying national consciousness. D uring the war they had read newspapers and listened to radio bulletins w ith greater attention than ever before. In addition, the young men had gone through the binding experi­ ence o f com bat in the great national war between Russians and Germans. Russian patriotism was thus now for the first tim e ever a mass phenom e-

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non, and it had become so pardy as a result o f Soviet policies— even if that had not originally been the intention o f the Soviet leaders themselves. Second, the russkii and the rossiiskii had largely coalesced, and that co­ alescence took the form o f the sovetskii. Russians accepted as never before the right o f the state to interfere in their lives, indeed to determ ine com­ pletely m any aspects o f it. M any non-Russians (though, as we shall see, not all) also accepted the legitimacy o f a Soviet state that was led mainly by Russians and transm itted its values through Russian language, his­ tory, and culture. People from all nationalities, especially the young and upwardly mobile— and there were plenty o f those after the wartime de­ struction— saw that legitimacy as grounded in the recent victory, in the USSR’s resulting superpower status, and in the m om entous project o f building Com m unism , not just for the Soviet peoples, but ultim ately for the exploited and oppressed o f the whole world.4 This patriotism was articulated in both positive and negative ways in the postwar years. M any people drew the lesson that no imperialist power could be trusted, and so they were ready to make sacrifices for the sake o f im proving defense against the U nited States. A woman from Leningrad w rote in O ctober 1950 to Klim ent Voroshilov, D eputy Chair­ m an o f the Council o f M inisters: “O ur government and Com rade Stalin should know th at we w ant our army and our Soviet U nion to be very strong. If it s necessary for the army, let food become dearer, raise a new loan, do whatever is needed___ Forgive me for interfering, but the Soviet U nion belongs to all o f us, and the army too. M y husband was in the war, and my son will go to fight.”5 Russians assumed that they were entided to the leadership role in the Soviet U nion, not just because they were numerically the largest nationality, but also because, as a Russian engineer put it, “Russians are not na­ tionality-m inded, but state-m inded.” H e expressed the view that, if an Ar­ m enian or U krainian on Russian territory were asked who he was he w ould reply, “a Russian.” Russians, he felt, also had the highest culture, and so other nationalities readily looked up to them w ithout belittling their own culture. A U krainian engineer com m ented that Russians were not nadonalisdc but felt “patriotism for the socialistic state o f Russia, which has to destroy the capitalistic system the world over.” He added, “I am U krainian, but my fatherland is the Soviet U nion.”6 Moreover, the consciousness o f an international mission, extending be­ yond the borders o f the USSR, reached a new height. Looking back on that tim e decades later, the Russian-Jewish historian M ikhail Gefter com-

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m ented, “W hat we had then was our own, russkoe, rossiiskoe, sovetskoe, but we also belonged to the W orld.”7 It is significant that a Jew expressed this sentim ent: many non-Russians, but especially the Jews, were more than ready to acknowledge Russian primacy at this juncture, precisely because o f the international and messianic mission o f the USSR. O f course, the Russians’ missionary nationalism could be looked at from the other end o f the telescope. O ne U krainian, interviewed in emi­ gration after the war, poured out a flood o f invective against the Russians: they regarded themselves as a “chosen people,” they rode roughshod over local traditions and spoke their own language everywhere, refusing to learn the native language. O ther Soviet peoples, by contrast, he felt, were more open and more likely to help each other out, regardless o f ethnic dis­ tinctions. A young Russian army officer indirecdy confirmed this view o f his own people when he com m ented that Ukrainians were “always dream­ ing o f their independence. . . . They consider themselves insulted, but that will gain them nothing, especially in the struggle w ith Bolshevism.”8 Wise leadership m ight have conserved both Russian patriotism and the Russian leadership and cem ented a more harm onious and united Soviet Union. But wise leadership was not forthcom ing. Instead the nom en­ klatura elite, fortified by the war, moved to consolidate its grip on an up­ rooted and insecure postwar population, o f which it had always been sus­ picious. T he suspicion was m utual. M any people o f all ranks, Russians and non-Russians, continued to distrust the Soviet regime and to hope that it would be forced by the wartime allies to make concessions to its own peo­ ples. T he distrust found an outlet in rum ors. According to a mathematics teacher from Voronezh, “Intellectuals.. . thought that after the war Stalin would have to make concessions to Roosevelt and C hurchill. . . that there would be a new NEP, that the m onopoly o f foreign trade would be changed, and that ties— both cultural and material— w ith the West and especially w ith America would be improved and increased. I heard a lot being said about it from different sorts o f people.”9 This was the kind o f wishful thinking generated by the absence o f open public media.

Origin of the Cold War It was both paradoxical and frustrating that, at the very m om ent o f its greatest victory, the USSR should be confronted w ith a danger potentially more threatening than any it had yet faced: the atomic bomb. The Ameri-

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cans’ “successful” bom bing o f H iroshim a and Nagasaki in August 1945 gave notice that a new era in warfare had opened, in which the m ultim il­ lion-strong Red Army and its recent sweeping territorial gains suddenly looked almost irrelevant. As the British ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, put it, “Russia was balked by the west when everything seemed to be w ithin her grasp. T he three hundred divisions were shorn o f much o f their value.”10 If the Soviet U nion was to remain true to its self-appointed task o f spreading socialism around the world, then it could do so only as a great power capable o f tackling the U nited States as the ringleader o f imperial­ ism. So at least Stalin saw it, and the logic was that the Soviet U nion m ust, like the U nited States, have the atom ic bomb. T he country’s politi­ cal structure and its war m entality made it possible to prioritize resources in such a way as to gather the necessary scientific and technical expertise, and build laboratories, factories, and testing grounds at maximum speed. Slave labor was even available from the NKVD for the dirty and danger­ ous work, such as digging uranium ore in Central Asian mines or erecting a nuclear reactor near Cheliabinsk. T he prisoners were inadequately pro­ tected against radiation, and m ost o f them died fairly quickly. Even the ordinary population was not m uch better protected. N ear the Cheliabinsk reactor radiation sickness was reported in 1949, and in 1951 it was dis­ covered— though o f course not reported in the media— that the Tobol River system was contam inated by nuclear waste. Thousands o f people were evacuated and the affected watercourses were sealed off.11 T he rivalry w ith the U nited States was o f a kind Russia had never expe­ rienced before. Russians were used to enemies who threatened their bor­ ders direedy. T he U nited States was an ocean away and had no territorial claims on the USSR whatsoever. T he confrontation was ideological. In some respects the two countries resembled each other: both were partly European, partly non-European, both had grown out o f visions o f the perfect society generated by the eighteenth-century Enlightenm ent, and both aimed to spread their particular version o f it around the world. T he new Soviet-Russian national identity stressed science, technology, ur­ ban growth, and a high-quality mass culture— and in all these areas the U nited States led the world. For that reason even convinced Soviet Com ­ m unists in many ways adm ired the U nited States. T he upshpt was that the U nited States became the Soviet Union’s defining “other.” Through­ out the period o f their confrontation, Soviet citizens retained the ten-

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dency to judge their own society through a prism o f w hat they knew about the U nited States. T he unceasing rhetoric o f confrontation sowed in them the latent assum ption that, if things w ent seriously wrong at home, then at least the U nited States m ight know how to put it right. This tendency was to prove fateful when the USSR finally collapsed. For the m om ent, however, the U nited States was international enemy num ber one, abhorred for its gross social inequalities, its ethnic conflicts, its uninhibited flaunting o f power. If it succeeded in spreading its gospel around the world, then the USSR was doomed. T he opposite was also true, so that, in spite o f the absence o f territorial disputes, the two became deadly adversaries. T he form ation o f the N orth A dantic Treaty Organiza­ tion (NATO) in 1949, headed by the U nited States, confirmed this en­ mity. For each the other became the focal and defining influence in for­ eign and m ilitary policy. In postwar Europe the USSR had the advantage o f being a powerful neighbor. To consolidate that advantage, in 1944-1948 it built an “outer em pire,” a cordon sanitaire o f Central and East European states whose so­ cial and political structure was similar to that o f the Soviet U nion itself. Single ruling Com m unist parties were installed, economic enterprises were nadonalized and subjected to planning, farmers were expropriated and herded into collective farms, and education, culture, and the mass media were brought under strict political control.12 As in the USSR itself, these changes brought benefits to true socialist believers, and also to the officials who ran the new institutions. M ost peo­ ple, however, regarded w ith distrust and w ith lasting resentm ent the im ­ position o f an alien and repugnant way o f life. Furtherm ore, though the Second W orld War had been destructive, it had not obliterated social memory in the way revolution and civil war had done in Russia. N ational identity in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria re­ mained strong and now became generally, though to varying degrees, anti-Russian and anti-C om m unist. This was som ething Russians them ­ selves could never understand. H ad they not made huge sacrifices to lib­ erate those peoples from Nazism? H ad they not provided them w ith economic aid and advice at a tim e when Russians themselves were in des­ perate straits? From the outset, then, the benefits o f the outer empire were reduced or even nullified by the sullen hostility of m ost o f its population. Over the decades that m ood evolved into resigned acquiescence, but it never disap-

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peared. T he Soviet bloc provided territorial depth, but that was increas­ ingly irrelevant in the age o f ballistic missiles. It was also a perpetual source o f security worries and heretical ideas. T hat was part o f the cost o f converting messianic Russia into a superpower.

The Official Ideology Russian-Soviet patriotism was articulated in the years after 1945 more fully and discursively than any previous form o f Russian nationalism . It remained, w ith periodic slight modifications, the hegemonic ideology till the end o f the Soviet U nion, and it has strongly colored the outlook o f post-Soviet Russian nationalists. T he new patriotism established its dom ­ inance not only because it was officially proclaimed throughout the me­ dia, but also because it was congenial to the Russian-led m ultiethnic rul­ ing class, and also to upwardly mobile war survivors moving into their first responsible jobs— the “new bourgeoisie” w ith which, as Vera D un­ ham first perceived, the regime concluded a “Big D eal.”19 It also provided a clear and unam biguous role for the USSR in the “cold war” w ith its for­ m er allies. T he ideology amalgamated the revolution and the Second W orld War as the “sacred past” o f a new form o f messianic, Russian-led international­ ism. According to its tenets, Russia had played the key role in providing the inspiration and leadership for world socialism. The Soviet Union, w ith the Russian people at its heart, so the message ran, was leading the workers, peasants, and colonized peoples o f the world toward victory in the great struggle w ith imperialism. As an official com m entary put it, “Le­ ninism , w hich was born in Russia and was closely associated w ith the rev­ olutionary movement o f the Russian (rossiiskogo) working dass, was able to draw upon the achievements o f progressive Russian (russkoi) culture and to use them in the interests o f the workers’ revolutionary movement. For that reason Leninism was rightly considered the highest achievement o f Russian culture.” A t the same tim e Leninism “drew on the achieve­ m ents o f the culture o f all peoples, saved them from falsification by bour­ geois reactionaries and opportunists, critically refashioned the m ost valu­ able achievements o f hum anity in science and culture, and placed them at the service o f the proletarian revolution.”14 This was “missionary national­ ism” in its purest form. T he standard textbook on historical materialism issued by the Institute

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o f Philosophy o f the Soviet Academy o f Sciences claimed that "the Rus­ sian people, led by the Russian working class, have offered and continue to offer generous and wide-ranging help in economics, politics, and cul­ ture to all the peoples o f the USSR, so that they can build and develop so­ cialist industry, a national and socialist state system, and a culture national in form and socialist in content. Thanks to the Soviet socialist system many o f the peoples o f the USSR—the Uzbeks, the Tadjiks, the Kirgiz, the Turkmens, the Kazakhs, and others— have com pleted a m ajor histori­ cal leap from the ancient ox-plough to the tractor, from sickle and scythe to com bine harvester, from the traveling sm ithy to the huge machinebuilding works.” As Stalin put it, "Soviet patriotism combines harm oni­ ously the national traditions o f the peoples w ith the vital interests o f all the toilers o f the Soviet U nion. Soviet patriotism does not divide but on the contrary unites all the nations and nationalities [natsii i narodnostt[ o f our country into a single brotherly family.”15 To the possible objection that m ost socialists— including Lenin and his comrades— had hitherto considered patriotism a bourgeois ideology, a booklet published in half a m illion copies by the State Publishing House retorted: "It is not the bourgeoisie but the working class that today is the authentic spokesman and defender o f the national interests o f the peoples. It is the leading patriotic force o f Soviet society, the m ost staunch and consistent cham pion o f the cause o f the m otherland (rodina).” True patri­ otism was impossible in bourgeois society: "Private property lim its patrio­ tism by dividing people and acting as a source o f enm ity between them , but social property, as consolidated in the USSR, on the contrary unites people, blends their vital interests, aspirations, and actions----- T he Soviet U nion is the fatherland o f the toilers o f the whole w orld.”16 Patriotism was now a thoroughly respectable sentim ent, then. "Over­ coming national prejudices,” which The A B C o f Communism had rec­ om m ended as a prime duty o f Com m unists, was now stigmatized as "cosmopolitanism.” This m eant "indifference to ones own hom eland (rodina), to ones fatherland (otechestvo), to national culture and national traditions.” Cosmopolitanism "endeavors to eradicate peoples’ concepts o f national honor, to blunt their patriotic feelings, and thus to underm ine their will to struggle for independence and national liberation.. . . It runs counter to the national and international interests o f the toilers.”17 As we shall see, cosmopolitanism was identified prim arily w ith the Jews. In 1947 Stalin summ oned the writers Aleksandr Fadeev and Konstan-

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tin Simonov and w arned them : “There is a very im portant them e . . . which writers should take up. T hat is the them e o f our Soviet patriotism . If you take our average intelligentsia. . . professors, doctors, say, they have an inadequately developed sense o f Soviet patriotism . They display unjus­ tified reverence for foreign culture. . . . They still feel im m ature, . . . they’ve got used to being eternal pupils.” Stalin put his reflections in his­ torical perspective: “This is an outdated tradition and it can be traced back to Peter the Great. Peter had some good ideas, but too many Ger­ mans soon established themselves; this was a period o f groveling to the G erm ans.”18 V ictory in the Second W orld W ar was held to dem onstrate “the superi­ ority o f the Soviet system” and “its unconquerable strength___ By defeat­ ing the G erm an and Japanese aggressors, the Soviet people saved the peo­ ples o f Europe and Asia from fascist tyranny, and that great service to hum anity inspires in the hearts o f Soviet people a legitim ate feeling o f na­ tional pride.”19 T he threat was far from over, however: the international w orking class faced a new and dangerous enemy in the shape o f world im­ perialism, led by the U nited States and em bodied in NATO. A t the height o f the “anti-groveling” propaganda, Russians were cred­ ited w ith having invented the steam engine, the electric light bulb, the ra­ dio, and the aircraft, while the eighteenth-century polym ath M ikhail Lomonosov was lauded as the founder o f m odern science. A textbook on the history o f science claimed: “In the history o f discovery and explora­ tion the Russian people justifiably occupy the num ber-one s p o t.. . . The Russian nation has always been a nation o f discoverers. Courage and per­ severance in pursuing their goals, endurance and an indestructible desire for discovery have been characteristic o f its sons through the centurieslong history o f Russia.”20 A vestigial inferiority complex remained, all the same, and w ith it the tendency to evaluate all Soviet achievements in the light o f the experience o f “bourgeois” societies. U ntil the final years o f the Soviet Union, this Soviet-Russian patriotism served as the basis for the civic education o f the population, especially its young people. It rem inded Isaiah Berlin, who in the late 1940s worked in the British Embassy in Moscow, o f “public school religion, actively be­ lieved by a small minority, passively held by the rest.”21 In its full form it was meticulously worked out and articulated. Like the H anlin Academy in Im perial China, the Institute o f M arxism-Leninism preserved the sa­ cred texts, periodically reviewing them , interpreting them , offering com-

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mentaries on them , and imposing authoritative interpretations in con­ tentious cases. W hole institutions, headed by the Soviet Academy o f Sciences, the H igher Party Schools, and the Central C om m ittees Acad­ emy o f Social Sciences elaborated, explained, and construed the doctrine. Beneath them departm ents o f ideology, propaganda, and culture, profes­ sional and creative unions, and whole armies o f ideological workers— lec­ turers, consultants, agitators, and propagandists— disseminated SovietRussian patriotism through the mass media and at all levels o f the educa­ tional system. Even more than before 1941 ideas possessed a unique im ­ portance in Soviet society. T he life o f the com pliant intellectual was, though not affluent, more secure and stable than anywhere else in the world. N o student could gain a university degree w ithout passing courses in M arxism-Leninism, the H istory o f the CPSU, Political Economy, Scien­ tific Atheism, and the like. In the Komsomol, DOSAAF (the Voluntary Society o f the Army and Navy), and schools at all levels efforts were made to inculcate patriotism through making listeners aware o f their home town, their district, their republic, the Soviet U nion, and finally the inter­ national proletariat. In this way a com pound identity was created: one was an inhabitant o f Riga, a Latvian, a Soviet citizen, hence an honorary Russian (rossiiskii), and also a member o f the w orlds toiling classes.22 Even for non-Slav peoples, the history and culture o f Russia form ed a com pul­ sory paradigm. In the case o f Ukraine and Belorussia another level was im plied or openly stated: in addition to being Ukrainian-Belorussian and Soviet, one could also be Russian (russkii), a member o f the triune Russian nation. For the first tim e in many centuries all the peoples o f U krainian and Belorussian identity were united in their own states and bound by the closest ties w ith Russia (a brief prelude in 1939—1941 had been rudely in­ terrupted by the German invasion). T he relationship was not an easy one. As a direct result o f Soviet policies Ukrainians and Belorussians had expe­ rienced dekulakization, the destruction o f many productive farms, in Ukraine’s case a disastrous famine, then terror, and the repeated purge o f their political leaders, followed by the loss o f their entire territory to the Germans. After the war Sovietization m eant the ruthless im position o f collectivized agriculture, the planned economy, and Russian-Soviet cul­ ture in the newly integrated regions. Guerrilla fighters were crushed; po­ litical opponents were arrested and deported.23

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A nationally conscious Ukrainian or Belorussian m ight well conclude that the Soviet leaders should not be entrusted w ith the fate o f their coun­ try; that indeed was the conviction o f those who joined the O rganization o f U krainian N ationalists (O N U ) and fought in its guerrilla armies, first against the Germans, then against the returning Red Army. Similar parti­ san groups operated in the Belorussian marshes and forests. T heir outlook was a natural though extreme result o f the ethnicization o f Soviet policies, intensified by the firsthand experience o f Nazi ideology. T he O N U de­ m anded outright independence, and considered anyone who did not fa­ vor an ethnically pure sovereign Ukraine as an enemy, to be expelled or destroyed. They fought wars o f national exclusion by turns against the Germans, the Poles, and the returning Russians. T heir views reflected the general tw entieth-century obsession w ith labeling and classifying, and, like the Nazis, they aim ed at an ethnically cleansed population.24 T he evidence suggests, though, that m ost Ukrainians and Belorussians were prepared to forget the crimes com m itted against them , to abandon the struggle for ethnic purity, and to settle down to rebuild their country as part o f the m ultiethnic Soviet U nion. This attitude was partly accep­ tance o f the inevitable: once it was clear that the Germans were defeated and th at the U nited States and Britain were not going to fight the USSR, there was no alternative. M ore was involved than fatalism, though. Stalin had not only united the territories o f Ukraine and Belorussia but also per­ suaded the founders o f the U nited N ations that both countries should have seats in its General Assembly, alongside the USSR. This move was a neat way o f ensuring three votes for the USSR and at the same tim e cele­ brating the revived triune East Slav nation. M ore im portant was the fact that Ukraine and Belorussia were united for the first tim e, and that the U krainian and Belorussian languages were the m edium o f instruction in m ost prim ary schools. T he war had ob­ scured memories o f previous evils w ith a layer o f fresh and horrifying im ­ pressions. Above all, Soviet citizens had little choice but to pick up the pieces and try to make their way in the new world. T hat process entailed filling out forms and presenting one’s life story in the m ost favorable light possible, om itting m ention o f a kulak or Jewish background, eliding or distorting dubious behavior under Germ an occupation, and emphasizing periods o f Red Army service or partisan affiliation. The only way to sur­ vive was by “forgetting” unusable elements o f one’s past while playing up those that fitted into the now compulsory worldview. The war provided

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people w ith a m yth that allowed them to re-evaluate their past and pres­ ent themselves as patriotic U krainian, Belorussian, and Russian (the two were not m utually exclusive) Soviet citizens.25 O ne o f the great strengths o f the Soviet-Russian patriotic ideology was that it could be absorbed and understood on different levels. Rare indeed were the Soviet citizens who, once they had finished their exams, contin­ ued to take an interest in the whole complex and highly academic doc­ trine. M ost Soviet citizens utilized the ideology in a m uch more workaday fashion, as justification for their routine actions and attitudes. At this level, shorn o f its sophisticated superstructure, it resembled m uch more closely a crude and unreflective neo-Russian imperialism: the assum ption that the Soviet U nion was one o f the w orlds two superpowers, leader in the struggle o f good against evil, and that the Russians were the princi­ pal protagonists in this struggle, encouraging, inspiring, and helping the other Soviet peoples and the other nations o f the socialist bloc to play their part in it. Victory in the Second W orld W ar confirmed the rightness o f this view and inspired a renewal o f the revolutionary faith o f the early 1920s, short-lived though it proved in practice.26 This working ideology offered an assured position in society to the nom enklatura elite in party and state, in the m ilitary and the security ser­ vices, in the economy, and in the m ajor professions. They could all claim that they were making their contribution, in one way or another, to the power, the prestige, and the ideals o f the Soviet state. A backhanded com plim ent to this complex o f ideas and sentim ents was paid by the few underground opposition groups that existed in the post­ war years. They consisted o f young people who had been through the So­ viet higher-education system and had thoroughly internalized its practices and its ideological messages. They form ed secret circles w ith the parapher­ nalia familiar to them from the Komsomol: statutes, programs, party cards, or badges. They articulated their opposition to the system in M arx­ ist terms, calling it “state capitalist” or “im perialist.” They drew their in­ spiration from the wartim e patriotic upsurge, whose ideals they believed their parents’ generation was now betraying.27 In Voronezh, for example, seventeen- and eighteen-year-old schoolboys created a “Com m unist Youth Party” (CYP) which at one stage num bered more than fifty members. T heir main aim, laid out in their party pro­ gram, was “the construction o f a Com m unist society throughout the w orld.” T heir intended technique was to infiltrate Soviet institutions and

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reorient them toward “genuine socialism.” Like the CPSU, the CYP had its own Central Com m ittee and its own Voronezh obkom. It was struc­ tured in cells o f five, in each o f which only one mem ber knew any mem­ ber outside the cell: this was a conspiratorial principle they w ould have read about in their history textbooks. New members took an oath in a blacked-out room: “I swear to keep the sacred secret o f the CYP. I swear to fight to my last breath and to bear the banner o f Leninism aloft until the final victory!”28 A t this stage even the opposition was inspired by the So­ viet messianic mission.

The Postwar Soviet Union T he end o f the war confronted the Soviet peoples w ith a terrible para­ dox. They had just won the greatest war in history, yet at the same tim e their country was devastated and they m ourned untold millions o f dead. Soldiers being demobilized did not expect to find a flourishing country when they returned home. Even so, it was unsettling and dispiriting to see whole cities and villages reduced to jagged ruins, people living in dugouts and cellars or crowded together in the few surviving habitable buildings. T he population o f Voronezh had been reduced to 20 percent o f its prewar size, that o f Stalingrad to little over 10 percent. T he British journalist Al­ exander W erth reported a Red Army soldier saying to him : “There’s noth­ ing left o f Stalingrad, not a thing. If I had any say in the matter, I’d re­ build Stalingrad somewhere else: it would save a lot o f trouble. A nd I’d leave this place as a m useum .”29 Factories, schools, farms, agricultural equipm ent, railway stations and rolling stock, gas, electricity, and w ater systems had been seriously dam­ aged or destroyed, so that norm al life was virtually impossible in m uch o f European Russia. From the occupied regions some two and a half million people had been deported to forced labor in Germ any or its satellites, leaving old men, women, and young people as the only surviving local workforce.30 Electoral meetings in January 1946 reflected the difficulties the popula­ tion faced, their weariness, their worry about the future, and also a certain injured pride, an expectant patriotism com bined w ith a gnawing distrust o f the regime. Like the serfs who had not been freed after the Napoleonic war, they felt themselves cheated o f a just reward for their sacrifices. In Sverdlovsk and Vologda they asked: “T he war ended six m onths ago. W hy

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are there constant shortages o f matches, salt, and paraffin?” In Rostov-onDon: “W hy don’t they release workers who were mobilized for emergency factory duty till the end o f the war?” Elsewhere: “W hen will the citizens o f Novgorod be moved from dugouts and cellars into houses?” “In Troitsk the water supply has not worked for two m onths. N or has the electricity in schools and hospitals, not to m ention private apartm ents. There is no­ where to buy firewood or coal.”91 Such questions reflected weariness, dis­ appointm ent, unrealistic hopes, and the general expectation that the state should provide for its citizens. Some people complained about the electoral process itself. According to a party report from Penza oblast, a lathe operator (and party candidate) blurted out: “T he elections are a fraud, a mere formality. The deputies are not the peoples choice but the puppets o f our rulers.” A land surveyor complained: “Too m uch money and energy is being spent on preparations for the election to the Supreme Soviet. It’s all just a formality, the confir­ m ation o f a candidate already chosen.” A stable-hand alleged: “These up­ coming elections w ont give us anything. Now, if they were held as in other countries, that would be another matter. In Russia there were free elections only under Kerenskii; the Com m unists will do their electing w ithout consulting us.”32 Russians were aware o f their own past and o f w hat was going on in other countries, and the war had inspired many o f them w ith the feeling that they deserved better from their own rulers. They were also sensitive to inequality and unfairness. As Sonya Rose pointed out in her study o f wartim e Britain, patriotism makes people acutely conscious o f the way burdens are shared out and doubly indignant at injustice. “Equality o f sacrifice” becomes a crucial concept. In M arch 1947 a Moscow party agitator wrote to Stalin asking how he should an­ swer embarrassing questions posed by ordinary people during the election campaign. W hy were food prices higher than before the war, and why did the better-paid have access to special stores where goods were cheap, while m ost people had to make do w ith poorly stocked state shops or markets where prices were very high? From M olotov [Perm] a worker wrote to the Council o f M inisters inquiring sarcastically if society was divided into the “super-com petent” and the “worthless.” “The super-com petent live in luxury, they have their personal automobiles, their dachas, their holiday resorts, their huge salaries. But the worthless’ (the great majority) mosdy can’t even feed themselves, no m atter how hard they work. . . . Earlier we had ’depersonalization (obezlichka) o f people and labor. Now we have

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’super-personalization* (slishkom perelichka). O ne person receives 4,000 rubles pay, another 250. How can you live on 250? Yet the ’cheap’ person is a person too. H e works and wants to eat. H e also has children. And they w ant to eat too.”33 M oney was not the only decisive factor in determ ining how individuals fared. People lived largely on entitlem ents, to w hich they had to prove their right w ith docum ents handed out by officials o f one sort and an­ other. So everyone was dependent either on employers or on bureaucrats who could grant the appropriate vouchers. Those unable to establish any rights w ould crowd around markets and railway stations, hawking pa­ thetic personal possessions or looking for opportunities to steal. Petty crime became universal, and form er soldiers who had retained their weap­ ons had more opportunities than most. W hen one returned soldier re­ quested replacem ent o f his lost party card, the investigation revealed that he had lost it while participating in an arm ed raid on a train! By contrast, a report horn Saratov in O ctober 1945 revealed that an officer had arrived back from Berlin, having served right through the war, only to be stabbed in the back on the m ain street. People wrote to newspapers com plaining that "bandit gangs roam the cities w ith im punity, terrorizing the popula­ tion. W hen darkness falls, citizens are afraid to go out on the streets. W orkers do n o t show up for evening and night shifts. Party propagandists cannot do their job o f visiting people in their homes. In some towns (Saratov, Arkhangelsk, etc.) the cinemas and theaters are empty, m ajor po­ litical and cultural events are cancelled.”34 M any frontline soldiers returned, inevitably, to find their homes de­ stroyed or their families dispersed or fractured. Some wives had not w ith­ stood the long separation and had paired up w ith other men. Lives had been casually ravaged beyond repair. All this was unavoidable: returning soldiers were confronted w ith sim ilar grim realities in all com batant na­ tions. W hat was worse was the moral shock o f finding that qualities val­ ued at the front— courage, boldness, determ ination, devotion to com­ rades—were not required at hom e, indeed were positively dysfunctional in trying to get help from civilian officials. Aleksei Tarasov, a form er frontline soldier, discovered when he returned hom e to Moscow that all his furniture had been sold and that his wife and three children had been evicted from their flat and were living in someone’s bathroom . W hen he wrote to his factory com m ittee asking for an overcoat for his wife and clothes for his eldest daughter, they assigned him one pair o f lady’s over-

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shoes. W hen his daughter was invited to a celebration o f the twentyeighth anniversary o f the Red Army, she burst into tears because she had no suitable clothes for the event. In February 1946, despairing o f local of­ ficials, Tarasov w ent to the very top. H e wrote to M olotov appealing for help. It worked: M olotov instructed V. Liubimov, People s Commissar for Trade, to look into his case and help him out.95 Local bosses were helpless or obstructive, and only recourse to the very top would work—two char­ acteristics that were to persist long after the war. T he party-state elite had tightened its grip over society during the war and was not about to relax that grip at its m om ent o f trium ph. Perhaps m ost shocking was the official treatm ent o f soldiers who were perm anendy disabled in the war. These men were given the status o f “in­ valids first class,” but the benefits they received in the general economic stringency were meager. In Moscow disabled students lived in unheated, overcrowded hostels along w ith everyone else, and they were expected to get to their classes on trams and buses. In April 1946 two such students gave up the struggle and com m itted suicide. In O ctober 1948 the Procu­ rator-General reported that enterprises were not fulfilling their quotas for employing handicapped people or making adjustm ents to equipm ent and facilities to enable them to w ork usefully. As for the m ost seriously maimed, they would crouch at street corners and in outdoor markets beg­ ging or hawking their possessions. Someone in Kiev reported seeing a young lad w ithout legs in m ilitary uniform hunched against the wall beg­ ging for bread or money. T hen in 1947 the persistent beggars suddenly disappeared; they had been rounded up and dispatched to “special colo­ nies” in the far north.96 W hen at last a Soviet Com m ittee o f War Veterans was perm itted in 1956, one o f the issues it raised immediately was the m istreatm ent o f those who had been perm anently disabled in the war. O ne speaker at the first meeting o f the section o f frondine soldiers reported seeing a disabled old soldier come into an office o f a Leningrad raikom asking for help, whereupon he was sent packing w ith the words “Mnogo vas takikh zdes khodiat” (“There’s no shortage o f people like you around here.”) The speaker complained that he had w ritten several times to Zhukov about this m atter but had received no reply. W hen he w ent to the reception room o f the M inistry o f Defense he had been given the brush-off.97 People who com plained at being ignored by bureaucrats m ight easily find themselves accused o f “slanderous assertions about Soviet and party

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organs” and o f taking an “antiparty line.” As one official in the coal indus­ try lam ented in a letter to the Central Com m ittee, m ost party, trade union, and economic organizations considered domestic problems “o f secondary im portance.. . . D uring the war the authorities had gotten used to working w ith POW s, w ith people repatriated, interned, im prisoned, encircled, mobilized . . . and they continue to behave toward workers as they did toward people under armed escort.”38 H aving won a great war, the nom enklatura ruling class was digging in and constructing new pyra­ mids o f patron-client dependency. T he habit o f classifying, labeling, com­ m anding, threatening, punishing, and granting or w ithholding benefits helped them to consolidate their dominance.

The Countryside after 1945 Nowhere were the costs o f war and o f the subsequent armed peace so pro­ tracted and so distressingly apparent as in the villages. W hen the war ended hopes were high that the collective farms m ight be abolished. In Pskov oblast one party worker was asked, “W ill they dissolve the kolkhozy soon? If they didn’t exist, we w ould live better and bring the state more benefit.” In Penza oblast peasants were reported as saying: “The real vic­ tory will come when the kolkhozy are dissolved. Otherwise the situa­ tion there is hopeless: people receive no more than a hundred grams o f bread per labor-day. T he Allies will force [our leaders] to break up the kolkhozy.”39 C ontrary to their hopes, not only were the collective farms retained, but the relative freedom o f agricultural trade allowed during the war was ended. Collective farmers were required to make high com pulsory deliver­ ies to the state, not only from the collective sector (as during the war), but also from their private plots; the prices paid were low, sometimes not suf­ ficient to cover the cost o f production. From Penza oblast in May 1946 came the following com plaint: “We w ent to war so our life should im­ prove, but on the contrary it gets worse. Now they dem and taxes [i.e., com pulsory deliveries] twice as high as we paid in the war.” From Riazan oblast: “In Korostovo life is impossible, because they levy very high taxes: 300 liters o f milk, 40 kilograms o f meat, 75 eggs, and 1,500 rubles in cash. W here can I raise all that, when I’m half dead myself and eat only starch. W ere all starved, walking around barefoot and half-naked.” From Stavropol region in June 1946: “Soldiers return from the army, but they

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soon leave again, so there are only children to do the work, and they’re hungry. There are no meals for those w orking in the steppe, and the women refuse to go out there. O nly the second brigade is working, on the others’ fields everything is choked by weeds.”40 The poet Olga Berggolts visited a village in Novgorod oblast in M ay 1949 and noted in her diary: "The spring sowing has been turned into drudgery, almost forced labor. T he authorities w ant a large area plowed urgently, but there is nothing to plow w ith— there are no horses (14 o f them for a farm w ith 240 households) and just two tractors. So women w ith mattocks and spades are turning the soil over by hand ready for w heat.”41 Villagers were also compelled from tim e to tim e to perform heavy m anual w ork felling trees, lifting peat, or repairing roads. As before the war, paym ent to collective farmers for their work on the collective fields, their "labor days,” was made only when all the firm ’s other financial ob­ ligations— taxes, com pulsory deliveries, paying back loans to the State Bank—had been m et. Q uite a few kolkhozy paid their members litde or nothing; yet at the same tim e prices increased for the produce villagers purchased from outside. U nder a draconian law o f June 1948, any farmers "maliciously avoiding work and leading an antisocial, parasitic way o f life” were to be exiled to "distant regions.” By 1953 some 33,000 people had suffered this fate, including old people, invalids, and adolescents.42 In 1946-1947 wartime devastation com pounded by agricultural un­ derproduction triggered a famine, which struck w ith particular force in the grain-growing regions. T he Kaluga party obkom , for example, re­ ported that "the kolkhoznitsa Tsareva Evdokiia, whose husband died at the front and who has three children, earned 300 labor-days but received no grain [for them ]. She has no catde, and the bread and potatoes in her household have all been consumed. She and her children are all ill from undernourishm ent.” Similar scenes were played out over large areas o f Russia and Ukraine. T he leading historian o f the famine estimates that in the USSR as a whole some 100 m illion people were undernourished and some two million died prem aturely as a result, at least half a m illion o f them in Russia, while perhaps two million more became long-term dis­ abled as a result o f m alnourishm ent and eating noxious surrogates.43 Those who could do so reacted by em igrating from the village. M en who were fortunate enough to return from the war often departed al­ most before arriving. Far from founding new peacetime households, they

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were closing down existing ones: between 1945 and 1958 the num ber o f households in collective hums fell by 20 percent, and by 25 to 30 percent in the north and non-black earth zones. Between 1950 and 1958 in those regions the num ber o f active men fell from 1.9 to 1.7 m illion and the num ber o f women from 3.9 to 2.7 m illion, so that the excess o f women was reduced only slighdy as the effects o f war faded. T he num ber o f old people remained stable at 1.9 to 2 m illion, but, om inously for the future, the num ber o f adolescents aged 12 to 15 fell sharply, from 1.2 m illion to 500,000: this was the stage when young people were departing for sec­ ondary education and vocational training, from which few returned per­ manently. T he shortage o f young people m eant a decline in the num ber o f children, from 3.5 m illion to 2.5 m illion.44

Commemoration of the War T he question o f how m any Soviet citizens lost their lives as a result o f the war rem ained taboo for a long tim e. T he figure was difficult to calculate and terrible to contem plate. T he Soviet leaders, whose mistakes had been partly responsible for the extent o f the casualties, preferred not to make the effort. Khrushchev once surmised publicly a figure o f tw enty m illion, but he also remarked that “no one was keeping count.” N ot until the end o f the USSR was it possible to make better grounded calculations. Now the num ber o f those killed by enemy action or by war-generated hunger and disease is generally accepted to be about 27 m illion (though this fig­ ure m ust include some who died at Soviet hands, for example in the la­ bor camps). O f these, roughly 8.7 m illion were com bat deaths. T he full demographic loss to the Soviet peoples was even greater: since a high pro­ portion o f those killed were young men o f child-begetting age, the post­ war Soviet population was 45 to 50 m illion smaller than post-1939 proj­ ections w ould have led one to « p e c t (178.5 m illion in 1950 as opposed to 225 to 230 m illion). O f this “shadow” dem ographic loss the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians bore a disproportionate share.49 It was not only a m atter o f absolute losses. Family structures were dis­ torted by the disproportion o f m en and women. In 1959 (the first post­ war census) there were 825 men for every 1,000 women (in the RSFSR the num ber was 814). For some age groups the discrepancy was even more marked. For every 1,000 people aged 35 to 39 (hence 17 to 21 in 1941), 385 were men and 615 were women. At aged 40 to 44 (22 to 26),

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the numbers were 401 and 599, respectively, at 45 to 49 (27 to 31), 399 and 601; at 50 to 54 (32 to 36), 381 and 619. Altogether there were only 600 to 700 m en aged 30 to 50 for every 1,000 women o f the same age. For m any women the discrepancy m eant either having no children or bringing them up w ithout a perm anent male partner. For children it m eant having no hither. Instead, “the New Socialist M an . . . was being raised by a legion o f grandm others,” w ith the result that many children received a more archaic moral upbringing than would have been the case in a “norm al” family.46 This pattern may help to account for the generally traditional, unrevolutionary moral outlook o f Soviet citizens who were children in the 1940s and 1950s. T he dislocations o f war were com­ pounded by the disruption o f continuity w ithin the family and the ab­ sence o f a male role model for many children. This factor helps explain the unprecedentedly unstable family life o f Russians during the later So­ viet decades, and therefore their demographic decline. Few Soviet families were left unaffected by slaughter on this scale. Nearly all survivors had someone to m ourn, someone either dead or left perm anendy disabled by the war. Yet the regime deliberately obstructed the culdvadon o f memory. An appropriate way o f m aintaining both Rus­ sian and Soviet national consciousness m ight have been to encourage com m unity celebration and com m em oradon o f the war, and to institute rituals o f m ourning for the huge losses. In practice, the opposite policy was followed. In 1947 May 9, Victory Day, was made into an ordinary working day, which it remained till 1964. Moreover, in a 1946 m emoran­ dum Stalin advised against the publication o f war memoirs, indicating that it was too early to be objective about the war. (As if the function o f memoirs was to be objective!) Probably he feared that memoirs would deflect attention from his role as personal leader o f an impersonal ma­ chine— the retrospective wartime narrative he was then constructing. Sta­ lins “advice” was o f course a binding com m and, so that war memoirs were in effect prohibited, at least till after his death.47 M ilitary com m em oration in the form o f regimental parades was per­ m itted and indeed encouraged. But the form ation o f veterans’ associations was barred till 1956, even at the highest level. In May 1945 Semen Lozovskii, head o f the Sovinformbiuro, proposed that two elite veterans’ associations be set up— one a Council o f Marshals chaired by Stalin, the other a Society o f Heroes o f the Soviet Union. His proposal was rejected. Even (perhaps especially) at such an august level Stalin was not willing

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to sanction gatherings o f people who m ight in their cups get around to criticizing him . At the lower levels o f society such associations were un­ thinkable. Instead, veterans w ould m eet unofficially to drown their sor­ rows in cafes and bars, popularly known as “Blue D anubes.” T he w riter Em m anuil Kazakevich noted in his diary on May 9, 1950: “Victory Day . . . I dropped into the bar (pivnuiu). Two handicapped veterans and a plum ber . . . were drinking beer and remembering the war. O ne o f them was weeping, and then he said T f there’s another war, I’ll volunteer again.’”48

The All-Slav Committee W ith the end o f the war the whole purpose and nature o f the Slav move­ m ent changed radically. T he various Slav leaders returned to their coun­ tries and became influential figures there; the Slav Com m ittee branches in those countries became more self-reliant, and it was m uch harder for So­ viet leaders to m onitor them , still less control w hat they were doing. This decentralization placed the Ccm m ittee’s leaders in an awkward position. They had always been uneasily aware that it was counterproduc­ tive to address Slovak partisans or Canadian D ukhobors in the wooden language o f Soviet bureaucracy, and that each audience required its own specific approach. But there was litde they could do about it, since every dispatch had to be approved at the very top. Now after the war, far from easing, censorship tightened. Lozovskii, reproaching a correspondent on behalf o f Sovinformbiuro for willfulness in interpreting Soviet foreign policy, had to explain: “We cannot organize the same kind o f contribution as those made in the English press by journalists, scholars, and public fig­ ures, who put forward their own personal views on international politics. T hat is not our way o f doing things.” By “way o f doing things” he m eant, o f course, political guidance and censorship. The Slav Com m ittee secre­ tary V. V. Mochalov protested w ith a picturesque mixed m etaphor: “If you’ve given us the job, let us get on w ith it. If we overstep the mark, then rein us in, but to hold our coat-tails and stop us going anywhere— that is intolerable.”49 T he intention o f the com m ittee’s leaders had been to convene an AllSlav Congress in Belgrade in May 1946 to coordinate the work and dis­ cuss the differences and disagreements that were increasingly impeding their activities. The congress was postponed, however, because the Soviet

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delegation felt they had not been given a sufficiently strong position in the organizing com m ittee. T he congress finally m et in December 1946. Tensions were immediately apparent between the Soviet delegation and the others. M ost participants w anted to revive and celebrate their national cultures and to assert their political autonomy, whereas the Soviet partici­ pants envisaged a more unified and disciplined com m on approach de­ signed to secure peace and strengthen the socialist bloc. W ith the hardening o f the Cold W ar in the following year or so, those differences came hilly out into the open. It had been agreed that a second congress should be held in Prague in June 1948. T he Soviet Slav Com m it­ tee had initially accepted this decision, but began to rethink it as it be­ came evident that the Czechs were planning to use the opportunity to cel­ ebrate the centenary o f the Erst Slav Congress, also held in Prague, in June 1848. T he Soviets had no wish to recall nationalist trium phs o f the past; on the contrary, they w anted to bolster socialist international solidarity for the future. A t a preparatory m eeting in summ er 1947 the Soviet dele­ gation insisted that the next congress “m ust not look back to the past, but should be dedicated to the present and future, and should arm the Slav peoples for the struggle for urgent contem porary issues, against the dan­ ger o f a revival o f fascism, and against those who would unleash a new war.”50 T he Soviets brought strong pressure to bear on the Czechs to post­ pone the congress till later in 1948, so that it would no longer be seen mainly as a centenary celebration. In the event, the congress was not destined to meet at all. Before it could do so, a fatal rift took place w ithin the movement. Yugoslavia was expelled from the Com inform , the successor to the Com intern. This was the Erst unambiguous sign that the overbearing nature o f Russian-Soviet imperialism was underm ining solidarity in the outer empire. T he split oc­ curred because the Yugoslav leader, M arshal T ito, wanted to pursue a more ambitious plan o f industrial development and collectivization o f ag­ riculture than Stalin considered expedient. T he Yugoslav Com m unists, having liberated their country themselves, were not prepared to follow the Soviet line as abjectly as m ost o f their East European colleagues. This rup­ ture proved to be a m ortal blow to the idea o f Slav solidarity. T he Cold War Eonts had hardened, and Yugoslavia was now on the wrong side o f them; one o f the m ajor Slav nations was in the enemy camp. By the same token, several non-Slav nations were on the correct side: Albania, Roma­ nia, and Hungary. T he lineup in the Cold War was socioeconomic and

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political, not ethnic. Panslavism had become inexpedient. T he interna­ tional Slav Com m ittee atrophied and was replaced in some o f its (unc­ tions by the foundation o f the Council for M utual Economic Aid in 1949. T he Soviet Slav Com m ittee was reduced in size and budget, and became in effect merely a departm ent o f the Soviet peace movement.51 T he (ate o f the Slav Com m ittee dem onstrates yet again that the social and public initiatives supported by the Soviet government during and af­ ter the war were intended exclusively to protect and advance the USSR’s great-power position. As soon as the com m ittees activities clashed w ith that imperative, it was downgraded. T he rupture between Soviet citizens and émigrés became even more rigid than before the war. There was to be no m utual contact between émigré Russians or Ukrainians and their fel­ low countrym en in the Soviet U nion, such as existed between Israelis and Jews o f the diaspora, or even under C om m unist rule between Chinese émigrés and their counterparts in the Peoples Republic. There was no sense whatsoever o f a world-wide com m unity o f Russians, independent o f political regime.

The Russian Orthodox Church A t the end o f the war Stalin had am bitious plans for the Russian O rtho­ dox Church. As always, these plans reflected great-power imperatives. Evi­ dence suggests that his intention was for the church to establish itself as the leader am ong O rthodox churches and as the focus o f faith for O rthodox believers all over the world. H aving abolished the Com m unist International, he was now aim ing to establish a kind o f O rthodox Inter­ national, headed by the Moscow Patriarch, as a rival to the Vatican. In his conception, such an ecclesiastical International would strengthen the standing o f the Soviet U nion, especially in Eastern Europe and the M id­ dle East. T he process began w ith the abolition o f the U niate Church on the ter­ ritories o f Ukraine and Belorussia that had been annexed in 1939. The Journal o f the Moscow Patriarchate celebrated the occasion as the final de­ feat o f the “Polonizing and Latinizing tendencies” that had been dom i­ nant there since the sixteenth century. The Russian church had “dem on­ strated its universal mission by reuniting the whole O rthodox world and all the Slav peoples under a com mon ecclesiastical and national rallying call, as originally conceived by the im m ortal Saints Cyril and M ethodius.

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‘Moscow the T hird Rome’ remains the symbol o f this universal all-inclu­ sive concept, a counterweight to the papacy, w ith its drive to spiritual tyr­ anny, episcopal aristocracy, and its manic dreams o f earthly power.”52 In January-February 1945, for only the second tim e since 1700, a Na­ tional Council (pomestnyi sobor) o f the Russian church was convened in Moscow, w ith a num ber o f foreign O rthodox dignitaries present. As Patri­ arch Sergii had died by that tim e, the council’s m ain business was to elect a successor, M etropolitan Aleksii o f Leningrad. Stalin ensured that the oc­ casion was lavishly financed, w ith 65 meters o f silk for the hangings and 35 meters o f carpeting for dignitaries arriving at the assembly. Ecclesiasti­ cal valuables were returned from the State H istorical M useum, and gener­ ous gifts were presented to foreign guests— everything possible to impress delegates w ith the standing o f the Russian church and the support o f its own government.53 Russia’s prelates followed up the council by visiting their counterparts in the Balkans and M iddle East, while Patriarch Aleksii sent out invita­ tions to a Pre-Conciliar Consultation to be held in 1947. M etropolitan Nikolai visited church leaders in the Balkans and M iddle East to solicit their support, sometimes w ith financial inducem ents. Initially he was ex­ tremely successful. T he Karlovci C hurch had lost ground am ong émigrés for supporting H ider. In addition to Nikolai’s outgoing personality, his persuasive rhetoric and his evident erudition won over many doubters.54 T he Pre-Conciliar Consultation was intended to clear up controversial issues such as the church calendar, the date o f Easter, and relations w ith other Christian churches. It w ould thus prepare the ground for the O r­ thodox Church’s highest international gathering, an Ecumenical Council. By 1947, however, the Cold W ar was beginning to take hold, and the Vat­ ican and the American Protestant churches were activating their own di­ plomacy. O nly the churches in the new people’s democracies accepted Aleksii’s invitation. T he Patriarchs o f Jerusalem and Alexandria declined, on the grounds that the consultation would better be held in Jerusalem or on M ount Athos, “where we should be free from the great com m otion o f this earthly life, and from any political interference or pressure.” Arch­ bishop Leontii o f Cyprus, probably deliberately, m isunderstood the invi­ tation and answered as if he were being summ oned already to an Ecu­ menical Council, which, he objected, could be convened only by the Ecumenical Patriarch o f Constantinople.55 In the end, then, there was no proper consultative assembly, let alone

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an Ecumenical Council. T he church had in effect let Stalin down, and he treated it henceforth w ith less consideration, keeping it in reserve mainly as a tool o f international diplomacy. After autum n 1947 very few parishes were opened, and none after M arch 1948. In fact, some churches that had been reopened under Germ an occupation were closed again. T he local so­ viet would claim the buildings were urgently needed for grain storage or some other purpose; in a few cases the closure was carried out during a service, w ith insulting language and behavior.56 Even where parishes had been opened, s tria lim its were placed on what they could do. T heir principal business was the weekly co n d u a o f divine service in an approved building. They were allowed to ring bells to sum­ m on the faithful to prayer, but in practice very few churches still possessed bells after the depredations o f recent years, and casting new ones from scrap metal was forbidden. In all other respects the prohibitions o f the 1929 Law on Religious Associations rem ained in force. After 1948 reli­ gious processions in public were restricted to the imm ediate vicinity o f the church.57 T he authorities had good reason to be concerned. Religious feeling was at a high level am ong Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians, especially in the western regions that had been under Polish rule till 1939, then under Germ an occupation. There was plenty o f evidence o f religious activity elsewhere too. In 1946 the Council for O rthodox C hurch Affairs reported that in Stalingrad at Easter eight thousand people tried to attend the ser­ vice in one church, and six thousand each in two others. In Ulianovsk some ten thousand worshippers came to celebrate the festival o f Nicholas the W onder-W orker, and there were mass prayers in front o f his icon. In Kalinin oblast the rural population was celebrating religious festivals w hether or not there was an active church; in the village o f Okovtsy, where there was none, believers gathered by a holy spring to say their prayers. In Kirov oblast priests were going out to the fields to pray for rain, while in Pskov oblast priests were reported to be making money by "going on tour,” visiting churchless parishes and perform ing sacraments requested by the local people. T he secular authorities were not above ex­ ploiting these sentim ents: in Dnepropetrovsk they actually asked priests to preach to the farmers on the value o f hard work and care o f collective property, and in several regions it was com mon to ask the church to help w ith the sick and handicapped.58 T he motive for religious aaivity was often worry or grief over those lost

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in the war. In the town o f Kimry, Kalinin oblast, a blind man w ould sing in the streets and people would give him money to go into the churches and pray for their dead and missing loved ones. In Novosibirsk oblast a twenty-one-year-old sailor from the navy had him self baptized because his ship had been m ined, he had lost m ost o f his colleagues, and he himself, while struggling in the water, had taken an oath to be baptized.59 The Council for O rthodox Church Affairs received a large num ber o f petitions to reopen churches. There would often ensue a long delay, during which initiative groups o f believers w ould occupy em pty church buildings and began to use them for services w ithout permission. In Cen­ tral Russia by 1948 there were perhaps two to three times as m any unof­ ficial prayer houses as legally active churches. In the village o f Riazantsy in Moscow oblast villagers declared that, if their church was not reopened for services, they would stop w orking in the kolkhoz, while at a village near Volokolamsk they threatened to w rite to a foreign embassy and reveal the tru th about “freedom o f religion” in the USSR.60 Karpov warned the government that refusing parishes only stim ulated religious fanaticism, and thus played into the hands o f enemies o f Soviet power. H e suggested that his council, rather than the local soviet, should have power to decide about reopening churches, but his request was turned down.61 Even the church hierarchy itself became nervous at the unrestrained re­ vival o f religious life and the reaction to it o f excitable and minimally trained priests. W hen in 1947 Archbishop Luka tried to organize Sunday schools in Tambov diocese, Patriarch Aleksii wrote to him warning: “Sup­ pose the impossible happened and Sunday schools were perm itted. How many pretexts w ould they offer for accusations o f counter-revolutionary deviations, o f anti-Soviet activities and so on! How many new victims would there be! So it is just as well that servants o f the cult are spared that danger.”62 T he hazards that popular religiosity posed for church-state relations were dem onstrated in Saratov at Epiphany 1949. Some 10,000 people took part in a cross-bearing procession around the cathedral; they then w ent down to the Volga River bank to commemorate C hrist s baptism in the River Jordan by receiving a blessing from a crucifix steeped in the wa­ ter. Several hundred participants were not content w ith this perfunctory sacrament, and after the service they broke through a police cordon and insisted on taking their blessing in the archaic form o f full immersion in

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the river. This massive unauthorized religious spectacle was precisely the kind o f thing the regime was allergic to. Karpov tried to defend the church authorities. “Such bathings,” he com m ented, "are not an ecclesias­ tical ritual. O n the contrary, according to the D eputy Patriarch M etropol­ itan Nikolai, it is an ancient, probably pagan tendency, and in any case in­ corrigibly fanatical. T he clergy did not encourage the b ath in g .. . . It was the duty o f the local adm inistrative organs to prevent such violations o f public order.” A satirical article on the “Saratov bathings” was published in Pravdoy and the Patriarch reprim anded the local clergy for failing to foresee and prevent the disorders. H e forbade any further “pilgrimages to the River Jordan” and ordered that future Epiphany blessings m ust take place w ithin the precincts o f the church.69 C hurch and state thus cooperated in the curtailm ent o f unauthorized religious activity. T he “satisfaction o f religious needs” was henceforth to remain separated from the rest o f social life, as if the church were a her­ metically sealed premises where addicts o f a forbidden drug could satisfy their cravings. N o kind o f civic engagement was perm itted; nor was the kind o f charitable or educational w ork that underpins the fellowship o f a congregation. T he church was to rem ain w ithout any kind o f social di­ m ension, and worship was only to be perform ed by consenting and regis­ tered adults in private. It is difficult to exaggerate the im portance o f this stunting o f the congregational life o f O rthodox believers. A religion that has no social dim ension cannot nourish the spiritual life o f the commu­ nity, nor can it sustain and develop a national identity—not even a church so closely identified w ith nationhood as the O rthodox.

The Leningrad Affair In 1949-1951 a purge was carried out in Leningrad which affected some two thousand senior officials, effectively breaking up the Leningrad partystate leadership and far outstripping any other high-level purge o f the post-1945 period. Altogether some 220 senior officials were tried and sen­ tenced to death or various terms o f im prisonm ent. T he reasons for the purge have remained obscure, though m ost com m entators have linked it w ith the attem pt by Beria and M alenkov to reclaim the power positions they had tem porarily lost to Zhdanov and A. A. Kuznetsov, the Leningrad party secretaries respectively during and after the war.64 Stalin had reason to react w ith deep suspicion to any hint o f trouble in

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Leningrad. T he city had its own revolutionary traditions, it had already been the center o f a party opposition movement in the 1920s, and for m uch o f the war it had been cut off from the rest o f the USSR, as a result o f which it now had its own heroic m yth. But the situation was more complex than that. M any years later, M olotov recalled that in the Leningrad affair there was "a h in t o f Russian nationalism ,” though he linked it mainly to the idea, approved by N . A. Voznesenksii (head o f Gosplan and deputy chairm an o f the Council o f M inisters), o f convening a Russian trade fü r in Leningrad on the model o f the pre-1914 fürs in N izhnii Novgorod. Since Zhdanov had been first secretary in N izhnii/G orkii before moving to Leningrad, he probably sponsored the plan. According to Molotov, the G orkii and Leningrad party people got together and drew up the idea w ithout consulting Stalin. Beria then reported them to Stalin, who was furious.65 M ost likely, however, the explanation for the ferocity o f the Leningrad affair lies deeper than a trade für. In the indictm ent that the chief m ilitary procurator presented at the trial in September 1950, one o f the accused, P. G . Lazutin (former first secretary o f the Leningrad obkom ), is reported to have said, "Revealing a chauvinist oudook, Kuznetsov, Popkov [former chair o f the Leningrad C ity Executive Com m ittee], Kapustin [second sec­ retary o f the Leningrad obkom ], and I slanderously declared that the Central Com m ittee did not show the necessary concern for the RSFSR, and gave more attention to the other national republics o f the USSR.” Kuznetsov was said to have been even more specific: “We several times w ith hostile intent [j vrazheskikh pozitsit\ discussed the necessity o f creat­ ing a Russian Com m unist Party (Bolshevik) [RCP (B)] and the desirabil­ ity o f transferring the capital o f the RSFSR to Leningrad. In private con­ versations am ong ourselves Popkov and Kapustin talked o f me as the future secretary o f the RCP (B), and 1 was already rejoicing in my heart and imagining myself as the leader o f the Com m unists o f the Russian Federation.”66 This notion seems to be the heart o f the m atter. If the Leningraders had any serious plan to create a Russian Com m unist Party or to transfer the capital o f Russia to Leningrad (leaving the capital o f the USSR in Mos­ cow), then they were proposing a structural revolution inside the partystate apparatus against which both Lenin and Stalin had expressly warned. If Russia was to have a serious institutional presence in the Soviet state or (especially) in the Com m unist Party, then it could not help challenging

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the power o f the top Soviet leadership. (And indeed, when both events took place in 1990, they signaled that the Soviet U nion was nearing its end.) Admittedly, the accusation concerning the potential Russian Com m u­ nist Party and the transfer o f the Russian capital occupies only one and a half o f the thirty-seven pages in the indictm ent, and very litde further docum entary evidence has ever come to light to dem onstrate that such plans were being seriously considered.67 M ost o f the evidence in the in­ dictm ent concerns other matters: creating an "antiparty group,” display­ ing "lack o f respect for the central party and soviet organs,” criticizing their decisions, and plotting to have Voznesenskii prom oted to Soviet Prime M inister. T he accused were also said to have placed their own protégés in key positions in Leningrad and elsewhere in the RSFSR, and to have kept them in line by means o f bribery, deception, and coercion. M uch o f the evidence concerned corruption and nepotism am ong mem­ bers o f the Leningrad party and soviet apparatus— holding "banquets” and "collective booze-ups” [kollektivnye p ’iankt\ while Leningrad starved, receiving expensive stolen goods (in one case, a silver chalice), embezzling m unicipal funds, and building themselves luxury dachas. Voznesenskii was said to have protected these shenanigans, diverting funds to Lenin­ grad, "practicing nepotism and krugovaia poruka in USSR Gosplan, and encouraging a dishonest approach to the cardinal state function o f plan­ ning the national economy.”68 Bureaucratic rivalry was, then, clearly a m ajor com ponent o f the Lenin­ grad affair. All the same, one cannot dismiss the purge as nothing more. T he behavior o f w hich the Leningraders were accused was absolutely nor­ mal in the nom enklatura elite by this tim e, and it was conducted more openly and confidendy after victory in the war. Usually by now Stalin simply tolerated it as som ething he could m anipulate to his advantage. But in Leningrad such behavior was potentially m uch more serious. If Le­ ningrad became the core o f a patron-client network that could possibly infiltrate the entire RSFSR, then it would represent a very formidable challenge to the leaders o f the USSR and to the Central Com m ittee o f the Soviet C om m unist Party. Stalin, who w anted absolute control over all high-ranking personnel questions, would be bound to regard the very possibility as a serious threat, even if it never moved beyond being the subject o f casual conversations.69

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Moreover, some credible evidence exists that party officials in Lenin­ grad were concerned w ith the idea o f raising Russia’s status. T he discrep­ ancy between the ostensible standing o f the Russian people as “elder brother” and the continuing abject poverty o f small towns and villages in the RSFSR was too blatant to be ignored at a tim e o f pro-Russian propa­ ganda. According to Khrushchev, Zhdanov raised the m atter w ith him af­ ter the war. Each republic, he said, had its own Central Com m ittee, which could consult w ith regional and lower party organizations, and then make representations on economic, political, or cultural m atters to the All-Union Central Com m ittee or the Council o f M inisters o f the USSR. O nly the Russian party organizations lacked their own Central Com m ittee, and as a result “each oblast stews in its own juice,” not having the status to raise m atters at so high a level. Khrushchev agreed w ith him : “T hat’s true. T he Russian Federation is handicapped, and its interests suffer as a result.” O n the other hand, he pointed out, Lenin had warned that, if the Russian Federation was to have its own Central Com m ittee, it would become overbearing, because o f the weight o f the Russian population, industry, and agriculture. “We would have two Central Com m ittees in Moscow at the same time: one inter-re­ publican, the other for the RSFSR.” To avoid destructive rivalry at the top, Zhdanov therefore proposed the creation, not o f a separate Russian Com m unist Party, but o f a Russian bureau attached to the Central Com ­ m ittee o f the All-Union C om m unist Party, such as had existed for a tim e in the 1930s.70 As fir as Khrushchev was concerned, the m atter rested w ith that con­ versation, for Zhdanov died shordy after; only later did he hear com­ plaints from Malenkov and Beria about “Russian nationalism .” However, a specific proposal was actually made for the creation o f a Russian bu­ reau. It came not from Zhdanov, but from a protégé o f his (also from Gorkii), M . I. Rodionov, then chairm an o f the Council o f M inisters o f the RSFSR In a letter to Stalin o f September 27, 1947, he made the pro­ posal, which he called “necessary for the prelim inary examination o f prob­ lems o f the RSFSR before they are presented to the Central Com m ittee o f the VKP(b) and the Union Governm ent.” Such a bureau, he stated, would enable local party and soviet organizations to make better use o f their facilities to fulfill the five-year plans, especially in the areas o f m unic­ ipal and road construction, agriculture, local industry, education, culture.

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and propaganda.71 T he fate o f this proposal is not known, but it is sig­ nificant that Rodionov, though not associated w ith Leningrad, was one o f the highest-ranking officials accused in the subsequent trial. It is interesting to note that a C entral Com m ittee Bureau for RSFSR Affairs had actually existed for just under a year in 1936-1937. To judge by its archive, it was set up to improve party supervision o f nonpriority sectors o f the economy, which were generally recognized to be in a deplor­ able condition at that tim e. D uring its brief existence it endeavored to su­ pervise such m atters as the tim ber and construction industries, housing, consum er goods, agriculture, and the local governm ent service sector. Its papers show that it was em broiled in constant dem arcation disputes over w hich economic m inistries should come under its purview, and which should rem ain under the supervision o f the A ll-Union Com m unist Party. Perhaps that tedious in-fighting explains why the bureau was closed, though no reasons appear in its papers.72A t no stage did it deal w ith issues o f crucial concern to the leaders, such as security, heavy industry, or m ili­ tary affairs. It looks then as if any explicitly Russian body in the Com m u­ nist Party had to be given a totally innocuous agenda. T he m ost likely explanation for the Leningrad affair, then, is that there were at least discussions am ong Zhdanovs protégés o f the possibility o f creating a Russian C om m unist Party and o f making Leningrad the capital o f Russia. These discussions were probably never m inuted but sprouted rum ors suitable for use in a political trial. It is im portant to stress that the issue at hand concerned not ethnic Russian nationalism but rather the project o f giving Russia institutional status inside the Soviet Union, and possibly also o f strengthening the appeal o f the party by attaching it more explicidy to rossiiskii patriotism .79 An im portant subsidiary reason for the purge was that Zhdanov and the Leningrad party organization were quite closely identified w ith the Yugoslav C om m unist leaders. In January 1948 a Yugoslav delegation led by M ilovan Djilas had visited Leningrad and had gotten along well w ith party leaders there; they had received inform ation from the Leningraders about Soviet internal politics, a leak that had annoyed Stalin. The idea o f Leningrad s pursuing any kind o f independent line in foreign policy was absolute anathem a. Yugoslavia’s expulsion from the Com inform was a se­ vere defeat for Zhdanov, and the m eeting at which it was decreed was his last public appearance. Two m onths later he died o f a heart attack caused at least partly by heavy drinking.74

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T he break w ith Yugoslavia provided another weapon w ith which to at­ tack Leningrad. Together w ith the "failure” o f the Russian O rthodox Church and o f the All-Slav Com m ittee, it also m eant a sharp loss o f So­ viet influence in the Balkans, an area o f traditional Russian interest, and certainly m ust have helped Beria and M alenkov to turn the tables on their Leningrad-based opponents in the apparatus. Com m unism in Europe had by now become and was to rem ain a facet o f Soviet great-power pre­ tensions, w ith Russian language, culture, and history as its quiescent in­ strum ent, but w ith the RSFSR still a reduced and stunted republic and w ith the Russian people, if anything, disadvantaged am ong the Soviet peoples.

Culture and Science By 1948 the Cold W ar had become the m ain consideration in politics. Potential cells o f civil society had shriveled under the im pact o f renewed nom enklatura dom ination, and Russianness was once again m anipulated as an instrum ent o f imperial control, now in the doubly harsh climate o f great-power confrontation. As in the late 1930s, the system worked by means o f traditionally Russian hierarchical patron-client networks, only w ith one vital difference. In the 1930s Stalin had tried to destroy those networks by means o f terror; now he was more restrained, realizing just how destructive terror could be. Instead, he used corrupt patronage rela­ tionships for his own ends, to divide and dom inate his subordinates. His underlings, however, had also learned from both the 1930s terror and the war. Members o f the ruling elite, not only those in the party-state appara­ tus, but also those in the professions, were m uch more experienced, deter­ m ined to keep their positions and privileges and better able to resist the supreme leader. O ne o f the skills they had learned was how to deploy the rhetoric, the compulsory “Bolshevik-speak” in order to protect their own networks and wherever possible advance their interests. This system consolidated itself in the cultural world. D uring the late 1940s official positions were allocated in the main creative unions and their control o f patronage finally put in place. T he secretaries o f the Unions o f W riters, Artists, and Composers distributed favors at their dis­ posal, including publication o f books, performance o f musical works, stu­ dios, apartm ents, dachas, "creative retreats,” cures in sanatoria, and so on— all inestimable benefits in the bleak, poverty-stricken postwar Soviet

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U nion. They lobbied party-state leaders for higher pay, higher print-runs, better concert halls and practice facilities, the construction o f new apart­ m ent blocks— and even for improved nails, light bulbs, and toilet seats in those apartments!75 T he new power o f the literary barons im plied victims, however. M edi­ ocrities feared real talents, and the need for tru th was less pressing in peacetime than it had been during the war. T he relative cultural freedom that had seemed necessary in war yielded to the consolidation o f the new patronage networks. T he blow fell heaviest on A nna Akhmatova and on the short story w riter M ikhail Zoshchenko, who was known for the verbal inventiveness w ith w hich he pointed up the discrepancy between the soar­ ing aims o f official Soviet rhetoric and the petty squalor o f Soviet reality. In August 1946 both writers were attacked in a Central Com m ittee reso­ lution, together w ith the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, for “groveling to everything foreign.” Zoshchenko was accused o f preaching “a rotten ideological nihilism . . . designed to lead our youth astray and poison its consciousness,” while Akhmatova was stigmatized as “im bued w ith the spirit o f pessimism, decadence . . . and bourgeois-aristocratic aestheti­ cism .” N either was arrested, but they were both expelled from the W riters’ U nion, a penalty that am ounted to a kind o f civil death sentence, since they were barred from publication and lost their ration cards. Akhmatova burned m ost o f her m anuscripts. Both had to live from hand to m outh or depend on the help o f friends, am ong them Boris Pasternak. Akhmatovas son, Lev Gumilev, was once again arrested.76 Akhmatovas ostracism was preceded by a remarkable meeting— one that delighted her, but to w hich she attributed her subsequent disgrace. T he poet was visited in her flat by Isaiah Berlin, first secretary in the Brit­ ish Embassy. Berlin was a Russian Jew, born in Riga in 1909 and now in em igration in Britain, where he had made his name as a scholar w ith a book on Karl Marx. W hile on a visit to Leningrad, he discovered that Akhmatova, some o f whose poems he had read and adm ired, was alive and living there. D uring a rapt conversation that lasted some twelve hours, right through the night, he talked to her about W estern literature and about her friends in em igration, from whom she had been sundered for more than two decades. She described her life to him and read him her two m ajor unpublished works, Poema bez gerota (Epic w ithout a Hero) and Rekviem (Requiem), w hich he recognized as remarkable and wanted to transcribe immediately. For Akhmatova, Berlins visit was like a tem po-

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rary but glorious release from an intellectual and spiritual prison. W ith the return o f peacetime, she had been feeling strongly the loss o f the excit­ ing and cultured m ilieu destroyed in 1914. As Berlin recalls, she told him that "Leningrad after the war was for her nothing but a vast cemetery, the graveyard o f her friends.” His visit was a cosmic event, a gift o f God: "In a world become m ute for all tim e, / There are only two voices, yours and m ine.” She saw in Berlin the w orld culture for which she yearned; she also experienced a reunion w ith her youth and w ith the Russian culture o f em­ igration, from which she had been cut off. Such was her sense by now o f being engaged in a lonely struggle w ith the regime that she actually attri­ buted the outbreak o f the Cold W ar to this m eeting.77 Scientists, like writers, were learning to defend themselves through their institutes in the Soviet Academy o f Sciences. Each institute had its own director, its own "scientific council,” and was developing its own au­ thoritative repertoire o f doctrines and practices. T he links between the di­ rector and his staff were partly personal, based on long acquaintance and possibly trust, and partly rooted in a com m on intellectual approach to the discipline. In the m anipulation o f these links the director, vested w ith the authority o f party and state, could act in a more or less autocratic manner. His opponents would be sum m oned to attend meetings billed as "discus­ sions” o f various kinds, some o f w hich were more open-ended than oth­ ers. A diskussiia, for example, was intended to clarify differences o f opin­ ion on which no binding decision had been taken. An obsuzhdenie, by contrast, usually m eant discussion o f an authoritative decree or text, and on such occasions the conclusions were fore-ordained. O pponents would probably then be required to exercise "self-criticism” and to undergo a re­ buke, dem otion, or even dismissal. However, the practice o f purging and arresting them , com mon in the 1930s, had lapsed. Sometimes, indeed, opponents m ight be relegated to a lower-status college or laboratory but then later revive and reconquer lost territory. M ost academic issues were politically insignificant and did not require the im position o f rigid ideo­ logical unity.78 These practices helped to socialize new members o f the academic com­ m unity and to reaffirm the predom inant political, social, and intellectual hierarchy w ithout term inally destructive consequences for science and learning. They conformed to Russian com munal traditions in com bining strong leadership w ith formally dem ocratic procedures and a hefty dose o f “joint responsibility.”

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D uring the war, Soviet science had enjoyed considerable prestige. T he State Defense Com m ittee had set up a special scientific council including m ajor figures like the physicists Abram Ioffe and Petr Kapitsa and the bi­ ologist Sergei Vavilov to oversee the strategic direction o f scientific re­ search. Effectiveness was param ount, and so it was accepted that Soviet science was merely part o f a “single world science.” T hroughout the war leading Soviet scientists had been able to correspond w ith their colleagues abroad, to visit them , and even to elect them to the Academy. T he Bulle­ tin o f the Academy o f Sciences had included a regular section summariz­ ing foreign scientific research.79 W ith the intensification o f the Cold War, this situation changed com­ pletely, and international contact became grounds for official suspicion. T he turning point came in 1946. Two Soviet scientists, N ina Kliueva and G rigorii Roskin, had been working on a cure for cancer in close consulta­ tion w ith American colleagues and had published a book on their research in the U nited States. In June 1946 they were visited by the U.S. ambassa­ dor, W alter Bedell Sm ith, who had helped them procure necessary cul­ tures from his hom eland. H e proposed a joint U .S.-Soviet research proj­ ect, w ith the U nited States providing finance, facilities, and materials. This proposal provoked a m ajor showdown: Soviet political leaders had been taking a dose interest in the w ork o f Kliueva and Roskin, but they were now beginning to think o f it as more than a prom ising piece o f inter­ national science. Rather they were hoping that curing cancer m ight be­ come a Soviet speciality, a showpiece in international propaganda, and even perhaps be deployed as a bargaining tool when negotiating w ith the U nited States over atom ic weapons. Science, in other words, was no longer a field for international collaboration: it had become an instrum ent in great-power diplomacy.80 Yet in dealing w ith wayward, internationally m inded scientists, the So­ viet authorities did n o t simply return to the brutal m ethods o f the late 1930s. They tried, instead, to induce scientists to engage in sdf-policing. W ith this in m ind, an “honor court” was set up in Kliueva and Roskins institute. This was a revival o f an institution that had existed am ong no­ bles and army officers in tsarist Russia. “H onor courts” had been tried again in the Red Army in 1939 and were extended to the civil service in 1947 under a decree that defined their aim as being “to re-educate work­ ers o f state institutions in the spirit o f Soviet patriotism and devotion to the interests o f the Soviet state.”81 These courts could reprim and of­ fenders w ithout underm ining the professions— as arrests in the 1930s had

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done— but on the contrary uphold and reassert professional pride. T he device suggests that the political leadership was looking for ways to impel scientists and professional people to police themselves, w ithout the vi­ cious reprisals o f the 1930s, and in a way that w ould prom ote both pro­ fessionalism and patriotism . This was another variant o f “joint responsi­ bility.” Before the honor court Roskin adm itted he had been wrong in making American contacts. “H aving assumed that there is civilian science and m ilitary science,” he stated, “1 had thought that [what we were doing] was civilian science. But after the war all sciences became military, every sci­ ence is used against us, cancer included.” T he last sentence m ight stand as the watchword for postwar Soviet scientific policy. Every institute, every laboratory, was assessed in the light o f its contribution to the Soviet posi­ tion in the great-power standoff. T he court publicly reprim anded Kliueva and Roskin for antipatriotic acts, endangering state secrets, and servile be­ havior toward W estern science. But they were not arrested and were al­ lowed to continue their w ork in a smaller laboratory.82 After the court hearing the Central Com m ittee sent a letter to party cells in government agencies and academic institutes denouncing servility toward the West in scientific m atters, and instructing them to hold meet­ ings and report on how they proposed to root out this tendency.83 A few scientific issues did have direct political significance. T he m ost famous ideologically loaded case was that o f Lysenko, whose research suggested that characteristics acquired from the environm ent could per­ petuate themselves in living organisms by hereditary means. This finding im plied that social and environm ental changes could actually im print themselves on plant and animal species and even on hum an biology. It seemed to follow that both agricultural productivity and the evolution o f hum anity m ight be genetically assisted: Lysenkos assertions raised the possibility that “genetically modified Com m unism ” would be more rapid and self-reinforcing than conventional genetics. Lysenko boasted that his doctrine was authentically Russian and promised the victory o f Russian, socialist science over cosmopolitan, W estern, bourgeois science. His fol­ lowers trium phed in the Agricultural Academy elections o f August 1948. A wave o f purges o f scientific institutes followed, in which scientists exer­ cised “self-criticism,” accusing themselves o f servility toward the West, and promised to reorient their work along “M ichurinist” lines— whatever that m ight mean in their individual branches o f learning.84 The case o f linguistics also reveals m uch about the way official Soviet

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attitudes were changing. In the 1930s the field had been taken over by the followers o f Nikolai M arr, according to whom at one tim e, from Asia M inor and the Caucasus to the Pyrenees, a family o f languages known as the Japhetic had been spoken. T he Japhetic had subsequently been sup­ planted by the Indo-European languages and was now discernible only in a few isolated cases such as Georgian, Albanian, and Basque. Japhetic lan­ guages and cultures, he proclaimed, form ed the "ethnic substratum ” o f the M editerranean world, “or indeed the very foundation o f the M editer­ ranean culture, the historic source o f w orld civilisation.” A t a wave o f M arr s w and the primacy o f the Indo-European languages was thus swept aside, while formerly neglected and colonized peoples were awarded new dignity. Indeed, he m aintained that the later incursion o f Indo-European had engendered “confusion . . . hybridization, the emergence o f new mixed linguistic types and the end o f m utual com prehension.”85 This theory chim ed well w ith anti-im perialist, internationalist, and class-based Marxism. So did another o f M arts hypotheses, according to w hich languages pass through various stages closely connected w ith the economic and m aterial evolution o f society. Early com m unication, he m aintained, is m osdy by gesture and mimicry, but spoken sounds gradu­ ally become more complex and semantically richer and then evolve into com plete languages. These in turn tend to cross-fertilize each other, pho­ nological-semantic elements transferring themselves from one to another, creating higher-order languages more suitable for international com m uni­ cation. This doctrine had supplanted both classical Indo-European lin­ guistics and m odern structuralism to establish itself as the one genuinely M arxist linguistics in a debate in the C om m unist Academy in 1929.86 M arr died in 1934, but his “new doctrine on language” continued to be taught and disseminated from his academic bastion, the Institute o f Language and T hought o f the Academy o f Sciences. His followers never managed to establish a monopoly, however; indeed, they suffered in the indiscrim inate terror o f the late 1930s. But they m ounted a comeback, and by 1949 seemed to have gained total victory, when the Presidium o f the Academy o f Sciences adopted a decree denouncing their opponents. T hen, unexpectedly, in June 1950, came an attack on them from the highest o f all sources, Stalin himself. In Pravda he denounced M arrs er­ rors and accused his followers o f running “an Arakcheev regime in linguis­ tics.” From the theoretical viewpoint, Stalins m ost im portant assertion was that language was not part o f the “base” or the “superstructure” o f so-

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ciety, and therefore did not vary in line w ith social changes. T he Russian language, for example, was in its grammatical and syntactical forms essen­ tially the same as that which Pushkin had used, in spite o f the fur-reaching social changes which had taken place in Russia since his tim e and espe­ cially since the O ctober Revolution. “[Language] is created not just by one particular social class,” Stalin m aintained, “but by the whole society, by all classes o f society, by the efforts o f hundreds o f generations.. . . It is created as a single all-national language for the whole society and for all the members o f the society.” As a result o f Stalins intervention the Acad­ emys decree o f July 1949 was annulled, and the Institute o f Language and T hought was amalgamated w ith the Institute o f Russian Language and placed under the directorship o f M arts leading opponent, V iktor Vinogradov.87 W hat m otivated this abrupt reversal o f policy? O n this m atter no direct evidence exists, but one may hypothesize that the change was a delayed as­ pect o f the move away from a class-based and internationalist approach to the building o f socialism toward a Russian cultural and imperial one. M arr’s doctrine had im plied that there m ight ultim ately be an interna­ tional language o f the proletariat, generated by cross-fertilization o f exist­ ing languages but distinct from any o f them . Stalin, however, clearly be­ lieved by now that the appropriate international proletarian language was and would remain Russian. W orld socialism was to be an infinitely ex­ tended Russian-Soviet empire, at least until the ultim ate trium ph over im ­ perialism.88

Anti-Semitism T he Second W orld W ar radically changed the situation o f Soviet Jews, first, o f course, because Nazi genocide exterm inated almost half o f them , most o f those who lived in the shtetls and former Pale o f Settlem ent.89 Thereafter nearly all surviving Soviet Jews were urbanized and the great m ajority Russified too. T he proportion who still spoke Yiddish or regu­ larly attended the synagogue was relatively small. Second, the war intensi­ fied national and ethnic feelings o f all kinds, including the popular antiSemitism that had never disappeared, especially in the west o f Russia. Ru­ mors spread— completely unjustified by the evidence— that Jews were not pulling their weight in the fighting, that they were poor frontline soldiers and sought “comfy” posts in the rear services or in trade, where they were

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alleged to be responsible for the high prices actually caused by wartime. In 1942 there were physical assaults on Jews evacuated w ith other adm inis­ trative staff from central Russia to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, where, like m any other evacuees, they lived by petty trade or found jobs in the lo­ cal supply organizations.90 At this stage ordinary Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians harbored a num ber o f—m utually inconsistent— stereotypes o f Jews. T he Harvard émigré interview project, which in the early 1950s interviewed recent émigrés from the USSR, found that m any believed Jews: were a purely urban and trading people who stuck together: when one Jew landed a good job, he brought in all his friends and relatives, and they excluded everyone else; had lots o f jobs sewn up in the party-state apparatus, especially in the police and security services, so they were responsible for all the di­ sasters w hich had befallen the O rthodox peasantry and ordinary w orking people; were cowards who during the war did everything possible to avoid frontline com bat duties; so they monopolized the rear services; in fret m any o f them sat out the war making m oney in distant places like Tashkent; were disloyal or even traitors; m any o f them w anted to emigrate to Palestine (one respondent reviled them as “Palestine Cossacks”).91 M uch o f this characterization was displaced scapegoating. These stereo­ types represented w hat m ost o f the population resented about the partystate apparatus, o f whose behavior (except on the last point) they gave a far more accurate picture. All the same, the regime took over these stereo­ types and m anipulated them as a propaganda tool to reinforce RussianSoviet patriotism . T he Jews were a convenient target on which the sins o f corruption and self-serving careerism, com bined w ith excessive interna­ tionalism — cosmopolitanism and kowtowing— could be unloaded. D uring the war official attitudes toward the Jews had been ambivalent. O n the one hand, as w ith the Slavs, the Soviet government did its best to cultivate Jewish connections in other parts o f the world for the war effort. As we have seen, it established a Jewish Anti-Fascist Com m ittee (EAK). At its first public rally the Jewish w riter Ilia Erenburg declared: “I grew up in a Russian city. M y m other tongue is Russian. I am a Russian writer.

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Like all Russians, I am now defending m y hom eland. But the Nazis have rem inded me o f som ething else: my m others nam e was H annah. I am a Jew. I say this proudly. H itler hates us more than anything, and this makes us proud.”92 The com m ittees chairm an was the w riter Solomon M ikhoels. T he EAK published a Yiddish newspaper, E inikait, whose articles were syndi­ cated for publication all over the world. It carried regular inform ation on Jewish themes, including the Nazi exterm ination program— inform a­ tion suppressed inside the USSR itself. Lozovskii, the deputy chief o f Sovinformbiuro, was him self one o f the chief figures in the EAK. In Au­ gust 1941 he asked Jewish writers to collect inform ation about the fate o f Soviet Jews under Germ an occupation— but none o f the findings were ever published in the USSR, even though Soviet propaganda disseminated abroad described Nazi anti-Jewish policy in detail. Members o f the com­ m ittee traveled the world, form ing links w ith Jewish and other anti-Fascist organizations, giving lectures, m eeting people, and collecting money. Mikhoels, Itsik Fefer, and others had an especially successful visit to the U nited States in June 1943, where they addressed massive public gather­ ings and were lionized along w ith such stars as Paul Robeson, Yehudi M enuhin, and Charlie C haplin.93 A t the very same tim e the opposite policy was being pursued at home. Concerted official action was being taken to reduce the num ber o f Jews in top jobs. In August 1942 Agitprop began to com plain about the large num ber o f non-Russians engaged in adm inistering Russian cultural in­ stitutions, such as the Moscow and Leningrad Conservatoires, and the distinguished Jewish pianist A. B. Goldenveizer was dismissed from his directorship o f the former. An official o f the state cinema com m ittee complained about the well-known actress Faina Ranevskaia being given a leading role in Eizenshteins film Ivan the Terrible on the grounds that “Ranevskaias Semitic features are very prom inent, especially in closeups.”94 O nce the war was safely over, Stalin asked G. F. Aleksandrov, head o f Agitprop, to investigate Sovinformbiuro. Aleksandrov reported that many o f its reporters were substandard, that cadres were selected “through per­ sonal and family ties,” and that there was an “excessive concentration o f Jews” working there. Lozovskii was accused o f weak budgetary control and irresponsibility: “There cannot be another such string-pulling organi­ zation in the whole Soviet Union, a milch cow for all kinds o f correspon-

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dents and editors. It is a m alignant tum or on a healthy body.” Lozovskii was dismissed both as D eputy Foreign M inister and as head o f Sovinform biuro, and m any o f the staff there, mostly Jews, were also let go.95 T he creation o f the state o f Israel in 1948 exacerbated the anti-Jewish m ood in the Soviet leadership, even though the USSR had actually sup­ ported the campaign to establish a Jewish national hom eland in Palestine. T he Soviet government offered aid to the yishuv, spoke consistently in fa­ vor o f Israel in the U nited N ations, and voted for the admission o f the new state in May 1949. Stalin seems to have hoped that Israel, as a social­ ist state o f a kind, m ight play a role sim ilar to the People s Democracies o f C entral and Eastern Europe and act as a bastion o f Soviet influence in the M iddle East. H e was swiftly disillusioned. Almost from the outset Israel took up a pro-American position; at the stage the Cold W ar had reached by 1949, that had to mean an anti-Soviet stance. Moreover, the very exis­ tence o f Israel exacerbated the anom aly o f the Jews’ status in the Soviet U nion: not only did they have no national territory there (if one ignores the failed republic o f Birobidzhan on the Chinese border), but they now d id have an alternative national hom eland abroad— an increasingly suc­ cessful one, too. T hat is the context in which we m ust view the intensified anti-Semi­ tism o f Stalins final years. H e may have w anted Israel as an outpost o f So­ viet great-power influence, but he certainly never intended to encourage Soviet Jews to seek their hom e there. Despite supporting the creation o f Israel, the Soviet U nion had never supported Zionism as a political move­ m ent, nor had it issued passports to Soviet Jews who wished to emigrate to Israel. Soviet Jews were treated, in other words, as if they were a distinct ethnos w ith no relationship to the new Jewish state in the M iddle East: they were simply Soviet citizens, to be assimilated to a generalized SovietRussian identity.96 In November 1948 the Jewish Anti-Fascist Com m ittee was closed down as “a center o f anti-Soviet propaganda” that “regularly provides anti-Soviet inform ation to foreign intelligence services.” In the following m onths m ost o f its leading activists were arrested. D uring their protracted interro­ gation, they were closely questioned on the trips some o f them had made to the U nited States during the war, and their attem pts to bring welfare help horn abroad to Soviet Jews. In July 1952 fifteen o f them , including Lozovskii, were tried in a secret hearing before the M ilitary Collegium o f the Supreme Soviet; they were all convicted o f treason, and fourteen were sentenced to death.97

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W hile their trial was being laboriously prepared, a broad campaign was gaining m om entum , directed at Jewish organizations o f all kinds. Jewish cultural institutes, museums, theaters, journals, and newspapers were closed down in Moscow, Leningrad, and num erous provincial cen­ ters. Even m any o f the leaders o f Birobidzhan were arrested, which finally ended any hope o f turning that territory into a Jewish national homeland. Significandy, though, synagogues and the Jewish religion were left in relative peace during this tim e, like other "official” religions.98 W hat alarmed the Soviet authorities was not the traditional Jewish faith but evidence o f a dynamic new secular Jewish national consciousness, Zionism , wholly in­ dependent o f the Soviet U nion and its neo-Russian official ideology, in­ deed a rival to it. For the same reason the Soviet leaders deliberately suppressed infor­ m ation about the H olocaust inside the USSR, so that the Soviet public either remained ignorant o f the scale o f the mass m urder o f the Jews or was aware o f it only through inference and rumor. In 1946 two distin­ guished Soviet Jewish writers. Ilia Erenburg and Vasilii Grossman, pro­ posed bringing out their Black Book, originally commissioned by the Sovinformbiuro. It detailed the atrocities com m itted by the Germ an oc­ cupying forces against Soviet Jews and was to be published simultaneously in the USSR, the U nited States, and Palestine. T he Soviet authorities de­ layed and eventually vetoed publication and broke up the type.99 A new escalation o f the anti-Jewish campaign appeared im m inent w ith the accusation, published in a com m uniqué from TASS on January 13, 1953, that a conspiracy had been discovered am ong senior medical staff to m urder high party officials. Like many elderly people, Stalin cherished a chronic distrust o f doctors. In 1952 he discovered evidence that Zhdanov had suffered an infarction which had been ignored by the doctors, and that their neglect had probably contributed to Zhdanovs death. H e be­ came convinced that there was a medical conspiracy directed against the top Soviet leaders. H e ordered arrests o f physicians from leading medical institutes and from the Kremlin Medical A dm inistration. M ost o f those arrested had Jewish-sounding surnames. Gradually the security services wove a web o f alleged treachery involving dishonest medics w ith Zion­ ism, the Jewish international charity Joint, and U.S. and British intelli­ gence (including Isaiah Berlin).100 Immediately after the death o f Stalin in M arch 1953, however, the charges were dropped and those imprisoned were released. The climax o f the anti-Jewish campaign never happened.

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By the early 1950s to be Russian m eant to be the leading people o f a great m ultiethnic state that had won a remarkable victory in the war, and that now claimed to stand for the oppressed and exploited peoples o f the world against their great com m on enemy, the U nited States and the coun­ tries o f NATO. This view o f international affairs com m itted the Soviet peoples— but especially the Russians— to a highly am bitious geopolitical role that entailed massive rearm am ent, spearheaded by nuclear weapons, and to creating a large and penetrative security apparatus. As two contem ­ porary scholars have com m ented, "The Stalinist legacy. . . included a dis­ tribution o f resources skewed towards arms production and heavy indus­ try, a bipolar w orld locked in m utual suspicion and conflict, and a role for informers and security agents who were not ‘afraid o f soiling themselves.’” Stalin also reinforced the "traditional desire in Russia for a tough, powerfill leader, who could show the way forward and save the country and the political order from itself.”101 T hat is why, when Stalin died, millions o f people flocked to Moscow to see his funeral, and why they stood weeping as the cortège passed by. W hatever his crimes, Stalin had been their leader and father-figure at the tim e o f the greatest peril in their history. H e was the em bodim ent o f their Russian-Soviet fatherland, the m an who had saved them from slavery. T he requirements o f the huge m ilitary-industrial complex needed to sustain this superpower role determ ined the shape o f the Soviet economy, and in m any ways o f society too, in the following decades. By the m id1980s the complex consumed some 20 percent o f gross national prod­ uct.102 Its output was secret, unknow n even to those working w ithin it, but its perem ptory claims determ ined the hierarchies o f supply and finance w ithin Gosplan. Its dom inance in the economy ensured that the supply o f consumer goods was insufficient and o f poor quality, and that the income o f the great m ajority o f Soviet people remained low. Given the secrecy the m ilitary-industrial complex dem anded, there was no chance o f public pressure being brought to bear on those priorities— indeed there was not in any meaningful sense a public at all. T he m ajority o f Soviet people remained poor— though not indigent, for the Soviet state was now beginning to guarantee basic necessities for the urban poor—w ithout the means to articulate their political input, dependent on hierarchical pa­ tron-client networks or the more inform al and egalitarian blat for material and other benefits, including social security. A yawning gap remained between the ostensible greatness o f the Rus-

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sian-led Soviet U nion and the actual poverty o f m uch o f the Russian peo­ ple, the dem oralization o f their villages, their relative dem ographic de­ cline, their inability to develop their own culture freely, and the abject state o f their national church. Superpower status was purchased at the cost o f national degradation. T he stage was set for even patriotic Russians to become disenchanted w ith the Soviet U nion.

B TIE RELAUNCI OF UTOPIA

Stalin bequeathed his successors, and the Soviet peoples, a paradoxical and in m ost respects baleful legacy. H e had raised the Soviet U nion to the status o f a superpower, m ightier than any Russian state had ever been be­ fore. To keep it there, though, he had com m itted the country to huge ex­ penditures and a massive leeching o f talent and resources into the m ilitary field, leaving m ost o f society poverty-stricken and demoralized. H e had created a security state also unm atched in Russian history, insulated from the outside world, enclosed in a cocoon o f narrow-m inded ideological dogma, cut off from its own past— even from m uch o f the Soviet past. A nd he left a heritage o f Russian imperial chauvinism and ethnic ha­ tred— resented by the Baltic peoples, many west Belorussians and Ukrai­ nians, m any north Caucasian Muslims, and an increasing num ber o f Jews— which was to poison later attem pts to preserve the Soviet U nion as a m ultinational state. Stalins appalling crimes against the Soviet peoples posed his successors a terrible dilemma. O n the one hand, to keep silent about them m eant leaving a perfect weapon for a future political opponent to use. It also m eant incurring the danger o f another, as yet unrecognized, Stalin arising in their m idst to destroy them all. O n the other hand, to denounce Stalin and reveal his atrocities m eant dethroning the great wartime hero, under­ m ining the founding ideology, and besmirching the shared social memory that had been built up during “socialist construction” and the war. T he new party first secretary, N ikita Khrushchev, decided all the same

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that Stalins crimes could no longer remain completely hidden. H e grasped the netde at the 20th Party Congress o f February 1956. He did so in a socalled secret speech, w hich took place not in the public sessions but at a special closed session held afterward, to which delegates were adm itted by a special pass. They were instructed to brief colleagues back at hom e in closed meetings, but otherwise not to disclose the contents o f the speech outside the party. The speech itself was bitter in tone, but stricdy lim ited in its attacks on Stalin. It was directed almost entirely against the terror waves o f 1935-1939 and 1949-1953. Khrushchev gave detailed accounts o f many individual victims and the hum iliations visited on them , but his enum eration o f arrests and executions was far from complete: the only victims he nam ed were senior members o f the nom enklatura elite. Apart from a m ention o f the deportations o f the late 1930s and 1940s, he ig­ nored the sufferings o f ordinary people. H e thereby im plied that ordinary people were expendable, and that all Stalins other brutalities had been ac­ ceptable, even correct: the oudaw ing o f the various opposition groups w ithin the party in the 1920s, the whole collectivization and dekulakiza­ tion program, the closure o f churches, and the arrest and m urder o f priests. Khrushchev made out that Stalins crimes had been the result o f a tem ­ porary “cult o f personality,” that they had been lim ited in tim e and scope. He im plied that the party had somehow led a separate existence through­ out, struggling to uphold order, legality, and the “Leninist norms o f party life,” even while Stalin was perversely creating havoc in their midst. H e gave his audience to understand that party and people had shared a com­ m on fate in suffering Stalins illegalities. H e was attem pting, in other words, to m aintain the party’s aura o f unique rectitude and its m yth o f a special link w ith the people. If one took his words at face value, both So­ viet institutions and public m emory were still valid, the great project o f building socialism had not been fatally defiled by the passing aberrations o f one leader, and the party could now purge itself o f its errors and resume the advance toward Com m unism .1 For all his attem pts to lim it the damage, however, Khrushchev had rad­ ically devalued the regime s own hallowed memories. He had torn the veil away from the inner sanctum and revealed a blood-stained torture-cham ­ ber. The self-understanding o f all the Soviet peoples, but especially the Russians, was placed under question. The secret speech was fatal to the party as a faith-based movement o f

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true believers. Some o f its own members began publicly to question its right to a m onopoly o f politics. At a Leningrad m eeting a questioner asked: “Is the cult o f personality not furthered by the one-party system and the alm ost com plete am algamation o f government and party organs?” In M olotov (Perm) a responsible party mem ber complained: “W hen party com mittees are being elected, the lists for the secret ballot are discussed w ith lightning speed— G od forbid that anyone should put forward an un­ w anted candidate!” In Kuibyshev (Samara) an undaunted participant at a party conference asserted: “It is difficult to imagine that one man could impose his will on six m illion party members . . . T hat became possible because o f the incorrect upbringing o f party members, because o f coward­ ice, servility, and toadying. Irresponsible party bosses have appeared, an­ swerable to no one, who have several apartm ents, dachas, who are pro­ vided w ith unlim ited supplies o f food and consumer goods, who have become isolated from the party masses and forgotten their needs.”2 T he leaders reacted w ith panic and fury at the irreverent questions they themselves had provoked. People who questioned the party’s sacrosanct rights were expelled and excoriated in the media as “rotten elements.”3 To lim it the damage Agitprop had hastily to erect a countervailing m yth that an unbroken succession led from the founder, Lenin, to the present gener­ ation o f leaders, mysteriously bypassing Stalin. T he propaganda machine began to turn o u t m ultiple portraits and statues o f Lenin, as well as books and articles com m em orating him , while Khrushchev and his successors perm itted themselves only a very m odest allowance o f glorification. Russia’s successive empires have been rendered vulnerable by the fact that m any o f its “colonies” were more advanced than the metropolis, and had vibrant, semi-suppressed civil societies o f their own. T he shock wave touched off by the secret speech provoked both intellectual dissent and popular revolts against C om m unist rule in Poland and H ungary in the sum m er and autum n o f 1956. T he trouble spread to the Baltic republics, where protest was not only anti-C om m unist but also anti-Russian. In N o­ vember 1956 Lithuanians held dem onstrations dem anding freedom for the Catholic Church; they chanted: “Let’s follow H ungary’s « am p le” and “Russians, get out o f Lithuania!” In Estonia young people paraded w ith placards reading: “Down w ith our Russian rulers!” and “Death to the Russian occupiers!” Those gathered for a student m eeting were told: “We could solve the housing problem in Tartu by evicting all the Russians.”4 Because its meetings were less formal than those o f the party itself, the

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Komsomol was the scene o f some o f the m ost serious debates in 1956. A t a meeting in Leningrad University, for example, participants discussed lifting the ban on Akhmatova and Zoshchenko and ending the practice o f compulsory applause after all Khrushchev’s speeches. O ne delegate as­ serted: “We young citizens o f the USSR, students and Komsomol mem­ bers, we w ant to hear firsthand— from our press— the truth about w hat is going on right now in Poland and Hungary.”9 T he Komsomol lead­ ers became alarmed at such frank and guileless demands and tried to steer the m eeting toward more harmless subjects like “Physics or Lyrics?” or “Friendship, Com radeship, and Love.” Those determ ined to explore serious issues took themselves else­ where— to gatherings on Maiakovskii Square in Moscow, for example, where a statue to the poet was unveiled in 1958. For protesters Maiakov­ skii had the advantage o f being a legitim ate figure in the party’s eyes, but all the same a model o f youthful irreverence and rebellion. The meetings began as public readings o f his verse. Gradually, however, speakers began to take up controversial issues, and the gatherings threatened to turn into an open-air d u b , som ething like Speakers’ C orner in Hyde Park, when the KGB intervened and broke them up. T he young V ladim ir Bukovskii was taken to a police station, beaten up, and warned: “Don’t ever go to Maiakovskii Square again. N ext tim e we’ll kill you!”6 O thers sought inform al or underground forums in which to exchange inform ation and ideas. Some inscribed their opinions on wall-newspapers in university corridors, which were then torn down by the authorities. Some joined in discussion circles w ith trusted friends, at which they w ould read Hegel, the early Marx, the less-known works o f Lenin, and sources on Soviet history not m entioned in Stalin’s Short Course. O r they would piece together w hat news they had managed to learn about events in Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia. These young people were not antiSoviet, but they did w ant to discover the truth about the present and re­ cent past, so that they could discuss possible ways forward. T heir aims were both intellectual and practical, and well w ithin the bounds o f the repertoire o f socialism.7 A new mode o f articulating nonconform ist ideas was suggested by Boris Pasternak. By now the doyen o f Russian poets along w ith Akhma­ tova, he could look back on a literary career stretching back more than forty years since his involvement in the prerevolutionary Futurist move­ m ent. After the war, responding to what for a tim e felt like a freer cultural

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atmosphere, he em barked on a long novel, Doctor Zhivago, which reas­ sessed the early Soviet years from the viewpoint o f a doctor and poet, whose rambling, inconsequential life was as distant from the ideal o f the "positive hero” as could be imagined. In 1956, after the “secret speech,” Pasternak subm itted the novel to N ovyi mir, but the editors rejected it as a ram pandy individualist w ork that denied the value o f politics and the im portance o f the collective. W hile N ovyi m ir was still considering the text, Pasternak offered a draft script to a visiting Italian, to give to the M i­ lan C om m unist publisher, Feltrinelli. Like m any o f Pasternak’s acts, this seems to have been an impulsive, unreflective gesture, though he was not wholly unaware o f its significance: he remarked to his visitor, "You’re now invited to attend m y execution.”8 At any rate Feltrinelli published it in 1957. Its appearance and the subsequent award o f the Nobel Prize for lit­ erature provoked a storm o f official abuse directed against Pasternak. H e was castigated as "Judas,” "a literary Vlasov,” and "a pig who fouls his own sty,” and he was expelled from the Soviet W riters’ U nion.9 Pasternak was a loner. H e belonged to no underground organizations, and he did not him self circulate his typescripts am ong acquaintances. Nevertheless, Doctor Zhivago appeared in the private apartm ents o f Soviet writers and scholars. In addition, the text was read over foreign radio sta­ tions, and the Feltrinelli edition was smuggled into the country. Both the content o f the novel and the mode o f its dissem ination suggested new ways o f thinking about the Soviet U nion and new m ethods o f spreading unacceptable ideas. W ithin a year or two the first underground literary journals had begun to appear, w ith names like Syntax, Phoenix, and Boo­ merang clumsily typed in m ultiple copies and passed from hand to hand. They contained the verse o f young poets, but also the first “republica­ tions” o f poetry long banned, o f Akhmatova, M andelstam, and Pasternak. This was not just the dissem ination o f suppressed culture: knowledge o f these texts constituted a badge o f membership for a new form o f sociabil­ ity: “O ne had only to quote a few lines o f favorite poets, and people o f like m ind recognized each other.”10 Consequently, “W hereas Tsarist detec­ tives had had to study socialist treatises in order to infiltrate the youth o f their tim e, our KGB agents were willy-nilly obliged to become devotees o f _ »it poetry. 11 Such was the thirst for free creativity and authentic m emory that even the austere, obscure, and determ inedly nonpolitical verse o f the Jewish poet Osip M andelstam could become a symbol o f Russian cultural self-

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distancing from the Soviet regime. Akhmatovas Requiem, because o f its elegiac and subversive content, became an especially evocative entry ticket to the counterculture. A new form o f the dissemination o f letters was born, gratefully evoked by V ladim ir Bukovskii: “I w ould erect a m onu­ m ent to the typewriter . . . It brought forth a new form o f publishing, sam izdat or self-publishing: w rite myself, edit myself, censor myself, pub­ lish myself, distribute myself, go to jail for it myself.”12 Samizdat was not just an individual enterprise, however: retyping, redistributing, and some­ times reading the tacts was a collective endeavor, in which everyone ran the risk o f being discovered. This was “joint responsibility” in creative mode, re-establishing a Russian cultural com m unity that had been lost in the Soviet “creative” institutions. Even Soviet citizens who had no access to samizdat were beginning to have alternative sources o f inform ation. They heard a non-Soviet version o f events on the newly popular short-wave radio sets. They could tune into faint and crackly Russian-language broadcasts from the BBC, the Voice o f America, and Deutsche Welle, where “enemy voices” swelled and hided like a dem ented harm onica. In the W est, they learned, many people who had hitherto been convinced Com m unists had quit the party in disil­ lusionm ent over Khrushchevs revelations and his brutal suppression o f working-class people in Central Europe. Com m unism , at least in its So­ viet guise, was ceasing to be a worldwide movement enjoying the fervent support o f intellectuals w ith freedom o f conscience.

Refashioning the Future T he post-Stalin leaders were aware that they were losing credibility both inside and outside the USSR. In the era o f “peaceful coexistence” that fol­ lowed the first stage o f the Cold War they needed urgendy to establish a principle o f order and legitimacy to replace millennial terror com bined w ith Russian-Soviet chauvinism, both o f which were now counterproduc­ tive. T heir strategy was to intim ate that the basic goal remained the same, the building o f Com m unism , com bined w ith “catching up and overtak­ ing” the U nited States. In a completely new departure, they announced a date for the com pletion o f these accomplishments, 1980. They also indi­ cated that, having condem ned the “cult o f personality,” they would pro­ ceed in a more systematic, orderly, and above all legal manner. The Soviet leaders were now com m itted to “socialist democracy” in action. O rdinary

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people were to be given a m uch greater right o f participation in the pro­ cess, and also more tangible benefits from it. These ideas had been germ inating inside the party apparatus since the im m ediate postwar period.13 But they were adopted as official policy only in the m id- and late 1950s as part o f the post-Stalin relaunching o f the Soviet project. In its fullest form the resum ption o f the march toward uto­ pia was set out in Khrushchevs report to the 22nd Party Congress in 1961. Since socialism had already been built (theoretically as long ago as 1936), Khrushchev argued, the Soviet state no longer needed to exercise a "dictatorship o f the proletariat”; it had already become the "state o f the whole people.” T he stage was being set for w hat M arx had called the "withering away o f the state,” to be com pleted w ith the full construc­ tion o f Com m unism . In the m eantim e the masses would play a m uch greater part in running the country. N ationwide discussions w ould be held before m ajor laws were passed. O rdinary nonparty people would sit on commissions m onitoring the performance o f official bodies. Organs o f state power w ould be democratically elected and w ould gradually be transform ed into instrum ents o f "social self-adm inistration,” a process in which the C om m unist Party would play a "leading and guiding role.” To ensure that the party also became more dem ocratic, its leading officials were henceforth to serve for only a lim ited period and were to be replaced by properly conducted elections w ith secret ballot.14 If there was to be a new relationship between state, party, and people, then there m ust be a new, more stable, and im partial concept o f law. Khrushchev introduced w hat he called "socialist legality,” which differed from bourgeois law but recognized some o f the same general principles. A reform o f the crim inal law in 1958 stipulated that an accused person could be convicted o f a crim inal offense only by a properly constituted court on the basis o f serious evidence other than personal confession, and only for violating a specific article o f a published law. No longer could people be im prisoned by emergency or m ilitary courts on the basis o f se­ cret instructions or for vaguely worded offenses like “terrorist intentions” or “counter-revolutionary activity.” N o longer could they suffer penalties merely for belonging to a particular social class or ethnic group.15 A more dem ocratic politics required that the mass o f the people should enjoy better living standards and thus have an incentive other than fear to support the regime. T he post-Stalin leaders launched a massive program for the production o f consum er goods, which continued w ith some sue-

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cess right through the 1960s and 1970s. T he m ost noticeable change was in the provision o f housing. From the m id-1950s visitors to the Soviet Union could see that any large town was surrounded by a forest o f tall cranes and a broad m oat o f m uddy building sites, as enorm ous new apart­ m ent blocks were erected. For many townsfolk their construction m eant long-awaited em ancipation from the com m unal apartm ent and a move into separate family accommodations, not spacious perhaps, but equipped w ith all m odern conveniences. Between 1955 and 1964 alone, the ur­ ban domestic housing stock o f the USSR nearly doubled, from 640 to 1,182 million square meters, and by 1980 it nearly doubled again, to 2,202 m illion.16 This new housing was a dram atic im provem ent in people’s lives, and it affected above all the Russians and Ukrainians, who formed the bulk o f the population in the largest cities. They could now rearrange their lives on a more private basis and conduct their conversations away from the ever-alert ears o f potential police informers. They no longer had to fre­ quent the public baths to wash properly, and they found the sociability o f public meetings less alluring. Instead, ordinary townsfolk cultivated their private lives, gradually acquiring a radio, a television set, more presentable furniture, elegant china in glass cupboards, and their own collections o f books. They could invite guests home— though not too many, owing to the m odest dimensions o f m ost apartm ents— and, given m utual con­ fidence, they could discuss whatever they w anted to openly and uninhibitedly. They were creating for themselves a m odest level o f private com fort and a sociable culture outside the party-dom inated public arena. Now, though, they had to make careful choices about whom they trusted; the result was greater cliquishness and a more marked divide between public and private spheres. This situation was very different from the 1930s and the decade or so after the war, when almost every aspect o f daily life had been conducted in at least a semi-public context. T he house-building program also created new forms o f stratification in Soviet society. M ost people rented their apartm ents cheaply from a local authority or from the economic enterprise in which they worked. A tiny group o f nom enklatura appointees at the very top received more opulent apartm ents (the degree o f luxury calibrated according to rank) from the state at a low rent. In the m iddle a new stratum appeared: professional people or skilled workers who through their employers or trade unions could purchase an apartm ent w ith a deposit o f 30 to 40 percent, w ith the

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balance to be paid at a low interest rate over a period o f up to twenty years. Such “cooperative apartm ents” were mostly found in large towns, were usually somewhat larger and better appointed than local authority ones, and could be passed on to heirs— an appreciable benefit in a coun­ try still suffering from a housing shortage. A small but significant class o f m odest property-owners was being created.17 Social security benefits were improved and made more widely available. M en w ith a twenty-five-year w ork record could draw a pension at age sixty; women w ith a twenty-year w ork record at fifty-five. This rate was generous but reflected the needs o f a population that had suffered heavily during the war. It was one o f the legislative initiatives that underw ent popular discussion in the press and at m eetings.18 People were being given a stake in the com m unity through free education, health care, pensions, and social security benefits. Ostensibly they were being encouraged to broaden their dependency beyond the patron-client links at the work­ place. M ost benefits were modest, however, and since (apart from pen­ sions) they were allocated by the trade unions, they were available in prac­ tice only to people w ith a stable em ploym ent record, and they thus reinforced dependency on the patron-client networks o f the statized econ­ omy. Moreover, in one sense, welfare benefits also accentuated social po­ larization: kolkhozniki were not entided to them till 1965 and did not re­ ceive their own passports till 1974, an exclusion that reinforced their inferior social status.

Sport In the two decades after the war sport developed rapidly, both as spectacle and as mass involvement. It became a kind o f substitute for the rodina in the homogenized large-town setting. It offered an excellent replacement for civic identificadon: players and spectators could be loyal to the Soviet system while also subverting its authoritarian and m onolithic aspects. T he soccer league established itself again as the object o f eager public atten­ tion. T he best-known teams drew huge crowds, w hich clogged up roads and transport systems for hours before and after m ajor m atches.19 O ne passionate fan was the composer D m itrii Shostakovich, who had a season ticket for the Leningrad D inam o team, and on m atch days would sched­ ule his classes early at the conservatory so that he could get to the sta­ dium .20

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The bogus amateurism and the system o f rewards in sport enhanced the im portance o f the ubiquitous Soviet patronage system. Firms were quite literally patrons to the players in their teams. Factory directors would urge particular tactics and line-ups, dismiss coaches, and even bribe referees to obtain good results. They were not allowed to pay their players direcdy, but they could retain the best ones by offering them separate apartm ents, access to special grocery stores, and other privileges otherwise available only to the nom enklatura elite. W hen in 1975 the Uzbek Sports Com m ittee asked players in the leading Tashkent soccer team w hat would help them play better, none o f them m entioned improved training: in­ stead, Mit turned out that one player needed a better apartm ent, another needed a telephone installed, and still others w anted scarce consumer goods.”21 Mass involvement in active sport was slower to develop, not least be­ cause creating the facilities for it was expensive. However, physical educa­ tion was given new prom inence in school curricula after the war. By 1956 it proved possible to m ount a Spartakiad o f the Peoples o f the USSR, a kind o f inner-Soviet O lym pic Games, in all the m ajor outdoor sports. Collectives from every district, region, city, and republic were encouraged to hold qualifying contests. T he finals were held in the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow before party leaders and em inent foreign guests, including the president o f the international Olym pic Com m ittee, Avery Brundage. Torch-bearers, running in one-kilom eter laps, brought a flame to the sta­ dium from the tom b o f the Unknown W arrior, outside the Kremlin. T he games began and ended w ith huge gymnastics displays, featuring the slo­ gans “Ready for labour and defense,” “Glory to the Fatherland,” and “Success to the C om m unist Party.” Moscow came first overall in the team chart, followed by the RSFSR, and then Leningrad— a result that well re­ flected the ethnic and propiska (residence perm it) hierarchy now becom­ ing consolidated.22 Spartakiads were held every fourth year thereafter, w ith participation from all regions and peoples. In 1971 Sergei Pavlov, chair­ man o f the State Com m ittee on Physical Culture and Sport, called it “a true festival o f fraternal friendship o f the peoples o f our m ulti-national country.” But the top prizes continued to go to Moscow, Leningrad, the Russian Republic, Ukraine, and Belorussia.23 The regime also decided to begin com peting seriously in international sports. Like m ost countries, the USSR wanted to raise its standing in in­ ternational affairs and bolster its prestige in the eyes o f its own citizens by

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w inning sports events. It had a greater stake than m ost countries in suc­ cess, though. Its explicit aim was “to ensure top performance by Soviet athletes as a means o f widely publicising our attainm ents in building com­ m unism and in prom oting physical culture and sport.”24 Soviet leaders were initially cautious where success did not seem guaranteed: in 1948, though invited, the USSR did not enter the O lym pic Games, since Stalin was advised his country m ight not do well. All the same, from 1946 So­ viet sports associations began to affiliate w ith their international counter­ parts, beginning w ith soccer, basketball, skiing, and weight-lifting. As early as 1945 the Moscow D inam o soccer team visited Britain to play against Arsenal, Chelsea, C ardiff City, and the Glasgow Rangers: they won two matches and drew two. In 1947 a Soviet basketball team, includ­ ing five Russians, two Lithuanians, two Estonians, and two Georgians, won the European cham pionship in Prague.25 From the outset, in fact, Soviet “professional amateurs” had good chances o f success in the Olym pic Games against genuine amateurs from other com peting nations. In the seven Olympics held between 1952 and 1976, the Soviet U nion finished first six times in both the sum m er and the w in­ ter games, and was second on the rem aining occasion in each. Its successes were well distributed in all forms o f sport. W hen the highly centralized Soviet system concentrated resources and organizational efforts into a par­ ticular campaign, it could produce results at the highest international lev­ els: as in the production o f nuclear weapons, missiles, and the conduct o f space exploration, so also in sport. T he priority given to sport overrode even the norm al arthritic sluggishness o f the bureaucracy. O ne report cites the case “o f a soccer player who was suddenly required for [the Rest o f the W orld against an All-England side]. H e was sum m oned and rushed by air from the resort where he was on holiday, approved by all departm ents, including the visa section, delivered from Moscow to England, driven straight from the airport to the stadium , and all this w ithin twenty-four hours.”26 By the 1960s sport fulfilled the same function in the USSR as in most W estern societies, but even more hinged on it, owing to the paucity o f other forms o f civic identity. It simultaneously satisfied two contradictory drives: it offered a form o f collective identification when political collec­ tivism was in decline; and it also presented incentives for com petition and the individual drive to succeed. Furtherm ore, sport provided a relatively painless way for the USSR to prove its great-power credentials when it

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was faltering in the political and economic spheres. O ne point should be noted, however: unlike in the U nited Kingdom, where English teams compete in world sport, fans from the dom inant ethnos identified w ith the USSR, not Russia, w hich did not have its own international team.

Persecution of Religion T he relaunch o f m ilitant messianic socialism necessarily entailed a re­ newed assault on religion. Since 1941 there had been a powerful revival o f religious belief, especially w ithin the established churches. By the late 1950s congregations were very different from the cowed rem nants o f the 1930s. T he war had profoundly affected everybody’s perception o f their country and had resulted in universal concern for hom e and family. M ost people had experienced extremes o f fear, worry, despair, hope, and grief. A whole new generation o f young people had grown up who, though not socialized into religion as children, had heard about their parents’ and grandparents’ experience, and were anxious about the fate o f their people and eager to learn w ithin a generally patriotic framework. A considerable m inority found Russian O rthodoxy attractive because it linked them to the past and provided them w ith a tried source o f spiritual sustenance. T he few surviving, battered, and increasingly frail prerevolutionary priests and bishops were now at last able to hand over to a new generation o f clergy, products o f the seminaries that had reopened in the 1940s. Given that the church was anything but a cushy career, these younger clergymen were perforce men o f strong convictions, some o f whom had undergone a conversion experience that had changed their lives. They were more likely than their predecessors to take tim e and care to explain the faith to congregations who had inherited a culture o f religious igno­ rance. The preaching o f sermons had become m uch more com m on for the same reason; and some priests held besedy— informal dialogues— to elucidate the church’s beliefs and practices.27 O ther churchm en w ent even further. Bishop Arsenii o f Kostroma, for example, preached openly antiM arxist sermons, allowed services to be held outside closed churches, and encouraged pilgrimages to shrines in his diocese. O n May 15, 1956, while his Council o f Religious Affairs (CRA) commissioner was absent owing to illness, he conducted a mass open-air service.28 Alarmed by such revivalism and the public’s strong response, the Cen­ tral Com m ittee tried to boost its own, com peting message. In O ctober

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1958 it issued a statem ent entitled “Shortcomings in Scientific-Atheist Propaganda,” which warned that, thanks to a “deform ation o f the ecclesi­ astical policy o f the socialist state,” opportunities had been created for the dissem ination o f “reactionary ideology” and for “open and hidden ene­ mies o f Soviet power to become more active.”29As always, the religious re­ vival was interpreted in m ilitary terms as part o f the struggle between good and evil. Seeing the clouds darkening, Patriarch Aleksii tried but failed to obtain a private audience w ith Khrushchev to discuss the situation. T hen, in February 1960, he took the offensive himself. A t a disarm am ent confer­ ence held in the Kremlin he rem inded an international audience that the Bible was “the source o f the idea o f universal peace,” for which all the del­ egates were assembled, and that the O rthodox Church represented m il­ lions o f Soviet citizens. Moreover, the church had, he asserted, played a cardinal role in the creation o f the Russian state. “At the dawn o f Russian statehood,” he said, the church had “helped to instil civic order in Russia . . . strengthened the legal foundations o f the family, asserted the woman’s position as a legal person, condem ned usury and slavery, developed the sense o f duty and responsibility in m an and often, w ith the help o f its own canons, filled in the gaps o f state law.” T he church had “created won­ derful m onum ents enriching Russian culture that still remain the object o f national pride o f our people.” It had helped to forge a fragmented land into one whole, “defending Moscow’s significance as the sole ecclesiastic and civic focus o f the Russian land.” It had led and inspired the Russian people during foreign invasions, right up to recent memory: “It remained w ith the nation during w orld war two, helping it by all means possible to win the war and to achieve peace.”30 This speech was nothing less than an attem pt to seize the ideological initiative. By positioning the church at the center o f both Russian na­ tional identity and the international peace movement, Aleksii was tacitly challenging the party in two o f its chosen ideological fortresses. T he au­ thor o f Aleksii’s speech was M etropolitan Nikolai, who after the war had led the campaign to make the Russian church the leader o f world O rtho­ doxy. His words provoked bitter attacks horn the floor: “You make out that the whole o f Russian culture was created by the church, that we owe everything to it, but that is not true!”31 The party responded forcefully. In the next few m onths Nikolai was dismissed as head o f the church’s foreign affairs departm ent and removed

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from Elis m etropolitanate in Moscow, despite a personal appeal to Khrush­ chev. N ot long after, he died suddenly, from w hat was reported to be a heart attack. Karpov was replaced as head o f the CRA by V. A. Kuroedov, who repositioned the office not as the church’s intercessor w ith the state but rather as the states plenipotentiary w ithin the church. As recendy re­ leased archival docum ents show, Karpov had endeavored to be evenhanded and to ensure that the church could genuinely function w ithin the narrow lim its imposed by Soviet law.92 U nder his successor’s pressure its already truncated autonom y was even more severely circumscribed. Kuroedov convened a synod o f bishops in July 1961 which agreed under pressure to reform parishes so that priests lost m ost o f their power. Hence­ forth all secular parish business, up to and including the closure o f the church, was to be decided by an elected executive com m ittee o f three. The priest was to become merely their employee, charged w ith looking after the parish’s spiritual affairs. T he new structure made it m uch easier for party activists to infiltrate parish councils, run them in a way acceptable to the local soviet, and sooner or later decide by “dem ocratic” decision that the church was superfluous to society’s needs and could be closed.33 T he adm inistrative measures were accompanied by intensified cam­ paigns o f “scientific atheist” education. A new journal, Science and Reli­ gion (Nauka i religiia), was founded in 1959, and atheist propaganda was stepped up through public meetings, lectures, and films. Young people known to attend church were sum m oned for “special chats.” Five of. the eight seminaries were closed and entry to the rem ainder restricted, so as to impede the preparation o f a further generation o f clergy.34 The 22nd Party Congress in 1961, w hich launched the program to build Com m unism by 1980, was a natural forum for attacks on the church. O . P. Kolchina, sec­ ond secretary o f the Moscow oblast party com m ittee, warned: “We can­ not help noticing that some amongst us, including the young, have been caught up in the snares o f the clergy and sectarians, who have stepped up their activity o f late . . . It should be added that, as a result o f compla­ cency, some comrades by their actions create for the clergy conditions conducive to the revival o f religious beliefs and the observance o f religious holidays.”35 T he effects were soon felt. By 1965 O rthodox cathedrals had been closed in cities as large as Riga, O rel, Briansk, and Chernigov, while 43 percent o f parish churches still open in 1958 had been closed (a reduction from 13,430 to 7,560). In Kiev only 8 churches remained out o f 25, in

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Odessa 9 out o f 23, in Rostov-on-Don 4 out o f 12. In some large towns and regions, such as Kaliningrad and Kamchatka, no churches were left at all. M any o f the closures were in western Russia, Belorussia, and Ukraine, where churches had rem ained open at annexation in 1939 or had been re­ opened during the G erm an occupation. T he figures varied markedly from one diocese to another, suggesting that m uch depended on the zeal o f lo­ cal CRA commissioners and their interaction w ith the clergy and the local soviets.36 T he campaign was accompanied in places by the disruption o f services and meetings. In one town a group o f young people invaded a service, bearing aloft a naked girl. W hen they tried to break through the iconostasis to place her on the table used for preparing the Eucharist, members o f the congregation intervened, and a general fistfight ensued.37 In some churches icons and other sacred objects were removed and some­ times destroyed, and worshippers were harassed and assaulted, am ounting in a few cases to rape or even murder. In some regions local soviets de­ m anded custody o f children whose parents were believers, claiming the latter were m entally ill. Clergymen (including Archbishops Iov o f Kazan and Andrei o f Chernigov) and believers were arrested and charged w ith “parasitism” or embezzlement o f church funds.38 M onasteries suffered even more. T heir num ber fell from ninety or so to fewer than twenty. They were m ost likely targeted because o f their sig­ nificance as nurseries o f religious culture and memory. They were centers where pilgrims could stay when visiting shrines, where parishioners could come on retreat to read and m editate, and where priests could use librar­ ies, chapels, and the counsel o f elders to refresh their spiritual life. T he closures were sometimes carried out w ith extreme abruptness: monks and nuns were offered no alternative accom m odation but simply advised to go to relatives or apply for a place in an old people s home. In a few cases be­ lievers w ould m ount a tw enty-four-hour vigil, armed w ith sticks, stones, and pitchforks, and actual fighting took place before the closure order could be enforced. Among the monasteries closed was the Kiev M onastery o f the Caves, the first o f the O rthodox monasteries o f ancient Rus and the heardand o f Russian Christianity.39 Ultimately, the renewed persecution served to harden the effects o f pre­ war religious policy. O nce again the half-hearted and the careerists w ith­ drew, while the utterly convinced retreated into a rigid defense o f a sim­ plified version o f their faith. T he num ber o f com m itted believers seems to have been direcdy related to the num ber o f churches w ithin an area, as is

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suggested by a survey undertaken in 1988. It showed that in Lvov oblast, where there had always been a fairly large num ber o f working churches, the num ber o f people considering themselves believers was many times higher than in Kemerovo oblast in Siberia, where there had been almost no working churches for decades.40 Above all, the church remained dependent on the state for everything it did. Its senior clergy were part o f the nom enklatura hierarchy, regu­ larly reported on and assessed for their service to party and state, not the church. Zeal in conducting services or expounding church doctrine earned them black marks, while conform ity to the state s restrictions and energetic work in the peace movement brought praise.41 Concessions made during and after the war were finally w ithdraw n, so that any kind o f public religious activity once again became impossible. T he church re­ mained a closed com m unity dedicated to weekly performance o f the lit­ urgy. It is true that outsiders could attend services, and some did so, but they were drawn to the liturgy as a fascinating and mysterious specta­ cle that sparked their curiosity but remained largely beyond their compre­ hension.

Returning from the Gulag In his “secret speech” revealing Stalins crimes, Khrushchev im plied that those unjustly sentenced should be allowed to return from prisons and la­ bor camps and obtain a hill rehabilitation. T he process began even before the speech and speeded up during the m id-1950s. M illions o f zeks were suddenly granted w hat they had cherished as an impossible dream for years: they were free, they could return home, they had the prospect o f be­ ing exonerated from unjust accusations and o f being able to play a hill part in society. In practice, their fate was less happy than they had anticipated. Evgeniia Ginzburg, on finally being released after ten years in Kolyma, took her certificate o f release to a special office, where, she had been told, she would be given Form A, the first step toward applying for an internal passport. She recalled: “T he window through which docum ents were handed out was so deeply recessed that looking at the man sitting there was like peering through binoculars from the wrong end.” W hen he asked for her hand, she thought he wanted to shake it, as a sign that wrongful im prisonm ent was over and that she was now accepted as a legitimate

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member o f society. She was rudely disabused: “You1ve done ten years in­ side, and still you don’t know the ropes!” he barked at her, pointing to an ink-pad on w hich she was to press her finger. “I’d been imagining I was fire. All my release m eant was that I could come and go w ithout escort for the tim e being. I was stuck w ith jailers for life. Even now, after ten years as a prisoner, they w anted my fingerprints all over again, they w anted to ha­ rass and persecute me to my dying day.”42 H er experience was emblematic. It was rare for former zeks to return to norm al life and be accepted as full members o f their society. True, there was a procedure by which the illegality o f their internm ent could be established in court and they could be rehabilitated, but only a m inor­ ity o f zeks com pleted the process. It has been estimated that some 4 mil­ lion prisoners were released between 1953 and 1958. O f these, between 250,000 and 750,000 were fully rehabilitated between 1954 and 1963. T hen a curtain descended, and only a few hundred more managed it in the next tw enty years. D uring perestroika in 1987-1989, 840,000 further rehabilitations were granted. In 1991 nearly 2 m illion applications were still outstanding, o f which 500,000 had been granted by 1993, but by that tim e a further backlog was building up, nearly forty years after the abolition o f the G ulag and the closure o f m ost o f the camps.43 T he truth was that m ost Soviet officials, w hether consciously or not, considered everyone who had been "inside” residually guilty, and did not wish to see them return to society as citizens w ith full rights. Evgenii Eduardovich Gagen, a journalist who had been "sitting” (that is, impris­ oned) for fourteen years, was fully rehabilitated in 1955, but even so he had great difficulty obtaining even tem porary registration in Moscow, let alone a proper passport. W hen he com plained, an official retorted: "So what? This is Moscow, not the countryside!” A potential employer made it clear that he could never put his camp experience behind him: "Even though I was rehabilitated, in his eyes I was still a person w ith a dark past.”44 In the worst case, those who had fabricated denunciations were terrified o f confrontation w ith their victims. As Anna Akhmatova com m ented in 1956, "Now all the prisoners will return and two Russias will be eyeball to eyeball: those who were sent to prison and those who sent them there.”45 Even w ithout individual confrontations, a swift general rehabilitation for all those unjustly accused would, as Anastasii M ikoian later adm itted, make it "clear that the country was being run not by a legal government, but by a band o f gangsters.”46 To have one’s property and social status restored was often impossible.

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Former apartm ents were now inhabited by someone else, and am id a seri­ ous housing shortage there was litde prospect o f acquiring anything re­ motely comparable. Some former zeks tried to have medals and awards re­ instated, but they ran up against insuperable obstacles: o f 73,000 citizens stripped o f awards between 1938 and 1953, only just over 2,000 managed to reclaim them by 1958. O f those who requested readm ittance to the Com m unist Party, only about half had their claim satisfied.47 People’s life situations, their pride in their social standing, and therewith their alle­ giance to the existing order had been ripped to shreds by Stalins meat grinder and could not simply be patched together. Zeks’ families did not always welcome them back, either. In m any cases too m uch tim e— up to twenty years— had elapsed. Few families could simply return to the starting point after such a long absence. Life had moved on: spouses had made other arrangements, found other jobs, other places to live, brought up children alone or w ith other partners. In any case im prisonm ent bore a stigma. O ne litde girl was told by her m other that her father had died in the war, and she had always slept w ith his photo under her pillow, her childhood hero. T hen out o f the blue in the mid-1950s she received a letter from him: he told her that he had just been released from labor camp and that the thought o f his daughter was the only thing that had kept him alive for so many years. The girls m other froze when she heard about the letter: “Yes, its from your father. He’s been in prison. H e’s an enemy o f the people.” Since she was used to respecting her m other’s feelings, the girl wrote back to her father saying: “I do not w ant to know you.”48A man was deprived o f his family, and a litde girl o f her hero. Thus the shadows o f the past and its paranoid images continued to claim their victims. Even those who were able to return to their families found it difficult to talk o f their camp experiences. Like soldiers who return from war having witnessed atrocities, they found that ordinary civilian life was simply too different from w hat they had experienced. They could find no narrative framework into which to fit their memories w ithout, as they feared, traum atizing their listeners. W orking through painful memories w ith a sympathetic listener is the best way to overcome the past, but sympathetic listening requires a certain shared background and some common as­ sum ptions.49 O ne woman m et her mother, from whom she had been parted thirteen years before, at the age o f eight: “We were the closest pos­ sible people, m other and daughter, and yet we were strangers, we spoke o f irrelevancies, mostly crying and remaining silent.”50

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O ther barriers had to be overcome, too. Some zeks had signed docu­ m ents on release prom ising not to reveal anything about life in the camps; they were afraid that breaking their promise m ight land them back there. Some simply did not w ant to dwell on a past that seemed em inendy w orth forgetting. O thers, on the contrary, were so obsessed by their expe­ rience that it haunted every aspect o f their lives, causing them to wake in bed screaming from nightm ares. Some had bells removed from their front doors, because their journey through hell had started w ith the doorbell ringing. Some w ent through long spells o f anxiety or depression, which Soviet psychiatry was ill equipped to treat. Such people were difficult for any family to cope w ith, and sometimes new separations resulted.51 Perhaps uncertainty and insecurity derived from the past contributed to the energy, even frenzy, that some Russians put into seeking a better collective future. The historian Catherine Merridale, whose study o f death and grief penetrates deep into Russians’ social psychology, hypothesized that m any Russians never re-established a personal equilibrium , but in­ stead tried to lose themselves in the collective. W riting in the 1990s, she observed that “Russians really do seem to have lived w ith their histories o f unspeakable loss by working, singing and waving the red flag. Some laugh about it now, but alm ost everyone is nostalgic for a collectivism and com­ m on purpose that have been lost.”52 However one interprets their reac­ tion, it seems dear that the releases did little if anything to heal the w ounds o f the past and restore a more genuinely cohesive Russian or So­ viet civic community. Instead, old forms o f division and discord were re­ placed by new ones, papered over by artificial displays o f unanimity.

The Technological Dream T he m ost persuasive element o f Khrushchevs relaunch o f utopia was the space program. Its origin lay in the utopian thinking o f the early twen­ tieth century. It developed from the visionary impulse o f K onstantin Tsiolkovskii (1857-1935), who was a pioneer in the fields o f aviation and rocketry. H e had always dreamed o f making space flight possible, so that hum an beings could apply energy from the sun to colonize the solar sys­ tem and erect space cities. H e had nourished vague hopes o f making con­ tact w ith superior, more intelligent beings from elsewhere in the cosmos, and thereby overcoming death. H e was impelled by a vitalist pantheism similar to that o f Fedorov. “D eath is one o f the illusions o f a weak hum an

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mind»” he once asserted. “There is no death, for the existence o f an atom in inorganic m atter is not marked by m em ory and tim e— it is as if the lat­ ter did not exist at all.”53 Tsiolkovskii worked out m any o f the basic principles later applied in space flight, including liquid fuel and successive-stage rockets. These were developed further w ith the encouragement o f M arshal Tukhachevskii. In the 1930s, however, Tsiolkovskii died and Tukhachevskii was arrested; thereafter the research program lacked institutional support and fizzled out. It resumed after W orld War II, but in a completely different context: not for space colonization but as part o f the lavishly financed program to achieve m ilitary parity w ith the U nited States by devising long-range mis­ siles capable o f delivering destructive weapons. This was the second stage o f the m ilitary revolution that Stalin had started by initiating the cre­ ation o f the atom ic bomb. T he book M ilitary Strategy (1962) by C hief o f the General Staff M arshal V. V. Sokolovskii showed that the USSR had moved away from reliance on huge land forces toward a global aggressive capacity based on intercontinental missiles w ith nuclear warheads.54 In ac­ cordance w ith this strategy, in the late 1950s Khrushchev cut the land forces and set up a new branch o f the armed services, the Strategic Missile Forces. T he space program thus eventually took shape as an exuberant off­ shoot o f the grimly unattractive m ilitary-industrial complex. But it was effective. O n O ctober 4, 1957, an SS-6 rocket, developed from the German V2, launched the w orlds first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, into orbit around the earth, provoking disbelief and consternation in the U nited States. It was soon followed by another satellite containing Laika, a black-and-white fox terrior, who thus became the first living be­ ing in space. She was attached to instrum ents that transm itted to earth a detailed account o f her biological reactions to the strains o f cosmic flight. In O ctober 1959 the Soviets launched two more satellites, which took photographs o f both sides o f the m oon.55 Khrushchev took advantage o f these achievements to point out not only the scientific but also the m ilitary significance o f Sputnik: “We can now send a missile to any point on the globe, carrying, if necessary, a hy­ drogen warhead. O ur announcem ent to this effect was greeted w ith disbe­ lief and regarded as an attem pt by the Soviet leaders to instill confidence in their own people and intim idate the W estern governments. But then the Soviet Union, using the inter-continental ballistic missile, launched an artificial earth satellite, and when it started circling the globe, and when

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everyone— unless he was blind— could see it by looking up at the sky, our opponents fell silent.”56 These were the words o f a leader overcompensat­ ing for an inferiority complex by ostentatiously reasserting the status o f his own country as one o f the w orld’s two superpowers. T he climax o f the Soviet space program came on April 12, 1961, when the test pilot Iurii Gagarin took off from the cosmodrome in Tiuratam (Baikonur) on the semi-arid steppes o f Kazakhstan east o f the Aral Sea, to become the first hum an being ever to enter cosmic space. Equally im por­ tant, Gagarin accomplished the return an hour and a half later w ithout being consum ed in the intense heat o f re-entry into the atmosphere, and touched down very close to the planned landing ground near the Volga.57 H e was awarded the tide o f H ero o f the Soviet U nion and was personally received by Khrushchev in Red Square. T he pioneering trium phs o f the 1930s had been repeated on an even grander scale, and for a tim e the So­ viet sacred narradve seemed to have been successfully renewed, even taken to new heights. Pravda wrote that Gagarin’s flight “has convincingly dem­ onstrated to the whole w orld the great superiority o f the new socialist sys­ tem over capitalism .”58 T he w riter Nikolai Gribachev pointed to the les­ son for the G reat O ther, the U nited States: “We still haven’t taken down our posters saying 'L et us catch up w ith America!’ Now the Americans will have to p u t up posters saying 'L et us catch up w ith the Soviet Union!’”59 T he second cosm onaut, Germ an Titov, a more educated and urbane figure than Gagarin, reported from space in terms rem iniscent o f the Cosm ist poets or o f the Suprem atist paintings o f Malevich or Kandinskii: “T he terrible, intense brightness o f the sun contrasts w ith the inky black­ ness o f the planet’s shadow w ith huge stars above glittering like diamonds, while a lovely powder-blue halo surrounds the planet.”60 For a rime it seemed as if the visionary impulse o f Tsiolkovskii was being fulfilled.

The Cuban Missile Crisis Unexpected reinforcem ent for the Soviet utopian vision came when Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba in January 1959. He provided the Soviet U nion w ith both an ideological and a strategic opportunity. He offered a model o f a socialist revolution independent o f Moscow and transferable to countries in the T hird W orld, especially in Latin America; he renewed the international impetus o f socialism and a memory o f the hopes o f the early 1920s.

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In the strategic arena the potential gains for the USSR were no less sig­ nificant. Cuba was a potential bridgehead for Soviet missiles. T he Soviet Union had only just begun to build intercontinental missiles capable o f hitting the U nited States from launchpads on Soviet soil. But on Cuba the Soviet U nion could place interm ediate-range missiles, o f which it had a m uch greater number, capable o f reaching targets from Dallas, Texas, to W ashington, D .C . As Khrushchev said at a m eeting o f the Defense C oun­ cil, "The Americans have surrounded our country w ith m ilitary bases and threatened us w ith nuclear weapons, and now they will learn just w hat it feels like to have enemy missiles pointing at y o u . . . T he USA is now not at such an unattainable distance from the Soviet U nion as formerly. Figu­ ratively speaking, if need be, Soviet artillerym en can support the Cuban people w ith their rocket fire should the aggressive forces in the Pentagon dare to start intervention against C uba.” W hen Castro’s guerrillas were successful, the KGB symbolically changed the name o f its file on Cuba from Iuntsy (youngsters) to Avanpost (bridgehead or outpost).61 Precisely for those reasons, o f course, U.S. President Kennedy was de­ term ined to elim inate Castro and bring Cuba back under U.S. hegemony. To that end he sent a force to invade Cuba at the Bay o f Pigs in April 1961 and continued covert m ilitary preparations after the assault failed. W hen Khrushchev responded by shipping missiles and nuclear warheads to Cuba in Septem ber-October 1962, he was aim ing both to defend Cuba from a U.S. attack and to overcome the nuclear and missile imbalance currendy w orking to the disadvantage o f the USSR. Khrushchevs initiative was a huge gamble. W hen the CIA discovered the missiles and Kennedy challenged the Soviet leader over them , he had no real choice but to concede defeat: the alternative was to risk a mas­ sively destructive nuclear conflict, for he could see that the U nited States had local m ilitary superiority in the Caribbean.62 Khrushchev backed down and w ithdrew the missiles. His decision tore the veil from the bluff he had felt was necessary to sustain the Soviet U nions posidon as super­ power. Clearly, after all it was still not the genuine equal o f the U nited States. His capituladon seriously weakened the Soviet claim, hitherto scarcely contested, to lead the world socialist movement. T he Chinese leaders re­ ceived a golden opportunity to pour scorn on Soviet pretensions. Castro was furious to find that he had been first m anipulated as a frondine pawn in a great-power game, then abandoned w ith no weapons more effecdve than a verbal promise from Kennedy not to attack him . O ther East Euro-

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pean leaders were anxious to be reassured that the USSR would support them in a future crisis.63 Khrushchevs successors were determ ined never to find themselves in a similar plight. As Adam Ulam has remarked, in geostrategic m atters the Cuban missile crisis represented “the collapse o f the m ost comprehensive and far-reaching policy design effected in the Soviet U nion since the end o f world war two; it was now necessary to pick up the pieces and rethink the whole problem .”64 W hile continuing to expand nuclear weapons pro­ grams, the Soviets also returned to massive conventional rearmament, including surface and underw ater naval capacity, so as to project So­ viet power throughout the world, wherever an international crisis m ight arise. Soviet citizens— and especially Russians and Ukrainians—were con­ dem ned to further decades o f austerity and squalor to finance this expan­ sion o f conventional rearm am ent. Such was the cost o f superpower status.

Agriculture, the Food Supply, and Social Unrest By the tim e o f Stalins death, nearly a generation had passed since the col­ lectivization o f agriculture. T he im poverishm ent and dem oralization o f the village had become an established fact. So too, as a result, was the chronic insufficiency o f food supplies. U rban state food shops usually pre­ sented a dismal spectacle to the potential purchaser: a few w ithered cab­ bages, some w rinkled potatoes and carrots, and a pyram id o f dusty tins that never moved from one m onth to the next. Anyone who w anted good food could find it, but only through restricted supplies at work, or for m uch higher prices at the misleadingly nam ed “kolkhoz m arket,” where peasants sold produce they had grown on their small private plots. T he party leaders had to grapple w ith this problem . If the urban work­ ers, allegedly the leading class, could not be properly fed, the party would lose all legitimacy. Moreover, the underproductivity o f agriculture and the low morale o f the farm-workers not only jeopardized the urban diet but also underm ined Russians’ perception o f themselves as a people w ith strong roots in the village. Khrushchev made a few short-lived concessions to private farming, but the central thrust o f his program was the cultivation o f so-called virgin lands, form er nom adic pastures in north Kazakhstan and western Siberia. They were not quite virgin, since “Stolypin peasants” had setded there in the early years o f the tw entieth century, but they had been branded “ku-

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laks” and deported in the 1930s, and m uch o f the land had been ne­ glected ever since. Now it was slated to become the m ain source o f grain for Soviet bakeries, while the traditional grain-producing soil o f Ukraine and the black earth was to be turned over to maize to provide cattle-feed and revive the Soviet U nion’s lagging m eat and dairy sector. To help expe­ dite the program, Komsomol volunteers were mobilized and sent to pro­ vide working hands till the new farms could establish themselves. T heir enthusiasm was displayed in the newspapers and in propaganda films, along w ith pictures o f rows o f com bine harvesters advancing through huge fields, ears o f wheat rippling in the breeze as far as the eye could see. From the outset, though, the initiative was vitiated by defects inher­ ent in the Soviet order. Like the five-year plans, the virgin lands pro­ gram was run like a m ilitary campaign, conducted w ith maximum speed and accompanied by the incessant trum peting o f “victories.” Khrushchev pressed ahead w ithout waiting for scientific reports on the nature o f the soil or taking any precautions to prevent its deterioration. For a few years cultivation worked well, state procurem ents rose substantially, and the danger o f famine seemed perm anendy averted. But w ithout extensive irri­ gation, the planting o f trees and hedges, and the use o f crop rotation or fertilizer, the soil proved vulnerable in prolonged dry weather. Between I960 and 1963, in a series o f dust storms, m uch o f the topsoil was blown away. Some land was rendered arid, and the fertility o f m uch more was se­ riously degraded. The output o f grain once again declined.65 In the 1950s, then, Kazakhstan became a key republic for the develop­ m ent o f the USSR. T he space program and the virgin lands campaign that were at the center o f the relaunch o f utopia were both situated there. Yet there too the optim ism and social dynamism generated by Khrush­ chev am ong young people came up against the road blocks left over from the Stalin tyranny. Since the 1930s Kazakhstan had been used as a dum p­ ing ground for the Soviet penal system. It was suitable for the purpose be­ cause o f its immense size, its harsh climate, and the need to develop an in­ frastructure where wage-laborers would not freely go. The manual work for the large industrial projects was perform ed by zeks, spetsposelentsy, and stigmatized peoples deported from their homelands. It has been estimated that fully one-eighth o f the inhabitants o f Kazakhstan were such “sup­ pressed” victims o f the Soviet state. T he concentration was especially high in and around the raw industrial town o f Karaganda, where a large new metallurgical complex was being constructed, sometimes referred to as a

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“second M agnitogorsk.”66 Heavy drinking, hooliganism, gang fights, and other kinds o f casual violence were com m on, and the local police were used to dealing w ith rowdies in a brusque and often brutal manner. T he influx o f young workers to the new industrial sites and o f Komsomol volunteers to the virgin lands brought a strongly contrasting spirit to the region. These were am bitious, well-educated, often idealistic youngsters, im bued w ith the aims and the spirit o f official propaganda, keen to “build socialism” as well as to start making careers for themselves. They were confronted w ith living conditions more prim itive than m ost o f them had ever experienced, as well as w ith uncouth and recalcitrant locals whose attitude both to w ork and to the authorities was quite different from their own. Unemployed youths recendy released from labor camps and either held in exile or awaiting return hom e gave their tim e to heavy drinking, gambling, fighting, and stealing. Komsomol youths were often their victims. Faced w ith inadequate provisions, lack o f organization, and suspicion or even hostility from the local population, the newcomers pro­ vided their own self-organization in tim e-honored Russian style. They improvised self-defense groups w ith their own elected leaders bound by “joint responsibility.”67 In the sum m er o f 1959, in addition to the virgin lands activists, some two thousand Komsomol volunteers between the ages o f seventeen and tw enty arrived at the Karaganda M etal Works in the suburb o f Temirtau. This was one o f the largest industrial projects o f the epoch, the pride o f Kazakhstan. In spite o f that, the newcomers were accomm odated in large com m unal tents, w hich were torn and leaky and did not have proper facilities for taking baths or washing and drying clothes. T he young N ursultan Nazarbaev (future president o f post-Soviet Kazakhstan) was one o f them: “After a short tim e in dam p and dirty basement accommo­ dation, we were moved to an unheated dorm itory, where we kept warm by sleeping in twos on iron cots covered w ith mattresses. There was no place even to hang out our clothes to dry. . . . There were no recreational facilities— the only entertainm ent that people had was big fights. M urders and other serious crimes were rife.”68 There was no radio, and newspapers arrived only sporadically. O n the building site equipm ent often arrived late or was in disrepair, so that for long periods norm al work was impossi­ ble. W orst o f all, the food supply was interm ittent and the water was often contam inated. T he conditions were calculated to turn idealism into embitterm ent and bloody-mindedness.69

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O n August 1, 1959, workers returned from the building site to one o f the tent sctdem ents to find there was no water for drinking or wash­ ing. Such shortages were com m on enough, but on this occasion tempers flared, and the young people raided a cafeteria, beat up a night watchm an, and stole food and drink from inside. T he police eventually arrived and arrested two participants, selected for no obvious reason. T he volunteers responded by displaying group solidarity and m arching on the police sta­ tion to free their comrades. As m ost o f the policemen were still at the cafe­ teria, the crowd was able to break into the police station and smash equip­ m ent there, though apparendy w ithout managing to free the prisoners. The next evening, the police agreed to release them , but by that tim e sol­ diers had arrived and the conflict reached flashpoint. Crowds o f young people attacked and destroyed the police stadon and tried to do the same to a departm ent store and the adm inistration building o f the metal works. At this point the soldiers used their firearms, and 16 people were killed or fatally w ounded, while a further 27 received nonfatal wounds. T he fight­ ing was serious: 109 soldiers and officers were w ounded, and 190 people were arrested, including 75 Komsomol volunteers.70 T he whole incident showed up very poor crowd control on the part o f the Kazakh police and the Soviet army. It also suggested a rather panicky response from Soviet leaders. Khrushchev and his colleagues were still understandably highly nervous about public reaction to the revelations about Stalin. They had, moreover, just announced their am bitious eco­ nom ic development program at the 21st Party Congress, intended to en­ able the Soviet U nion to overtake the material standards o f the U nited States by 1980. They could not afford to let news o f serious social ten­ sions and economic failures reach the West or even their own public. Temirtau, like all conflicts inside Soviet society, was never m entioned in the Soviet media. M inor incidents o f working-class unrest were quite com mon during the years 1955-1963. They resulted from resentments that had built up since the end o f the war, especially over continuing inequality and injus­ tice, from the sometimes panicky and aggressive behavior o f the m ilitia, and from expectations aroused by the criticism o f Stalin and the move to "socialist legality.” Workers led to believe they were the ruling class had been disillusioned twice: once after the end o f the war, a second tim e after the “secret speech.”71 T he most serious outbreak was the rising in the southern city o f

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Novocherkassk in June 1962. By this tim e, following the dustbowls in the virgin lands, the food supply situation had deteriorated again. There were serious shortages in the towns, and lines o f indignant townsfolk had am­ ple opportunity to discuss the shortcom ings o f the economic system. As often happens, indignation was especially strong because people had expe­ rienced several years o f reliable food supplies and had not expected to be faced again w ith shortages. W orkers by this tim e took it for granted that the state, through the enterprise that employed them , was obliged to pro­ vide a basic living in return for regular work. So their com plaints were not just about w orking conditions and pay but also about housing, food sup­ plies, urban facilities, and the behavior o f the police. From Kuibyshev a pensioner w rote to Khrushchev: “O n the placard that talks o f poverty and unem ploym ent in capitalist countries and o f the im provem ent o f life in our country the headings should be the other way around.” A nother wrote: “T he radio keeps boasting that we are approaching communism. We’ll starve before we get there. You, o f course, have your own com m u­ nism , but w hat we have is hungerism and expensivism.”72 A t the Budennyi Locomotive Works in Novocherkassk, by especially crass bad tim ing, wage rates were lowered on M ay 31, and increases in food prices were announced on June 1. T he Budennyi W orks was a typi­ cal Soviet enterprise o f the period, and conditions there illum inate the way m any urban Russians lived. It had a good reputation, but it had suf­ fered from a recent lack o f investm ent. Technical equipm ent was out o f date and heavy m anual labor still very com m on, while facilities for eating, washing, and resting were poor. T he adm inistrative building, however, had recendy been rebuilt to a high standard. M any employees had lived for years in barracks, and some even in tents. Turnover am ong laborers was high, and the managem ent was often compelled to hire unsatisfactory employees to plug gaps, including candidates w ith crim inal records— though the crim inal activity m ight have been no more than casual pilfer­ ing from work, a more or less universal practice. In the city food supplies were especially poor: people were forced to stand in line for hours to buy potatoes, let alone butter or meat, which was often not available.73 According to KGB reports, popular reaction to the price increases was that the tolstopuzye (fat-bellied) bosses should take a pay cut instead. O ne elderly and respected worker, when told that the price rises were tem po­ rary and that “the tim e w ould come when everyone would live well,” re­ plied: “I have w aited forty years for such a day, and, while I wait, life on

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the contrary gets worse.” A nother opinion was that “we should stop help­ ing under-developed socialist countries”; “the Soviet government ‘feeds’ other states but does not provide for its own workers.”74 These com plaints indicated that ordinary Russians were losing their internationalist senti­ ments, beginning to prefer acceptable living conditions at hom e to com­ m itm ents abroad, the consumer society to revolution. By noon on June 1 a crowd had gathered in front o f the factory adm in­ istration building, exchanging sentim ents such as these. The factory direc­ tor rebuked the “slackers” and added flippantly: “If they haven't enough money for m eat and sausages, let them eat liver pasties (pirozhki).”75 This tacdess pastiche o f M arie A ntoinette was probably the spark that ignited the conflagration. O ne o f the workers present, a former Kom­ somol activist and virgin lands volunteer, now living in a small room w ith a pregnant wife— broke away in fury and set off the factory siren. This sound, the tw entieth-century version o f the alarm bell that used to sum ­ m on peasants to emergency village meetings, provoked many more work­ ers to down tools, quit the shop floor, and congregate in the courtyard, all o f them agitated over the wage cuts and price rises. Some o f them decided to stop a train passing on the m ain Saratov-Rostov Railway just a hun­ dred yards away. They did so in the way they had seen in numerous films on the 1905 and 1917 revolutions: by erecting a barricade out o f broken fencing and planting a red flag on top. O n the stationary locomo­ tive they then hung a placard: “C ut up Khrushchev for sausages!” O thers tore down a portrait o f Khrushchev and broke into the adm inistration building, where they smashed windows and destroyed furniture and tele­ phones. Kurochkin and the first secretary o f the Rostov obkom, A. V. Basov, tried to appear on the balcony and address the crowd, but they were driven back w ith stones and bottles and cries o f “You need to tell us how we are going to live when norms [wages] are lowered and prices raised.”76 By this stage the crowd, thoroughly roused and angry, was responsive to inflam matory appeals, even from individuals who were drunk. A popular Russian saying has it that “w hat the sober have on their m ind, the drunk have on their tongue,” or, in the language o f contem porary sociology, James Scott’s “hidden transcripts” were suddenly made public. D uring the night the disorders spread to other parts o f the town, w ith the aid o f the factory siren. Early next m orning a large delegation o f Budennyi employ­ ees marched into town, breaking through a m ilitary cordon on a bridge,

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and assembled on the m ain square, where they were joined by workers from other factories and many ordinary citizens as well. Some o f them carried red banners and portraits o f Lenin alongside placards reading: “Bread, m eat and a pay rise.”77 Already overnight the crisis had alarmed the leaders in Moscow, and several members o f the CPSU Presidium had come down to take charge. As the situation grew more threatening they ordered all roads and rail­ way lines leading into Novocherkassk to be sealed off, and they gave permission for tanks to be brought in, one o f which crushed a demons­ trator. Now the workers found themselves in a confrontation that was familiar to them from propaganda films: workers facing tanks. O nly now the plus and m inus signs had been reversed: the tanks were on the wrong side. Moreover, the workers lacked any consistent leadership, organization, or purpose. Some o f those who shouted rallying cries were drunk. There were calls for M ikoian, the senior Presidium official present, to come out and negotiate w ith them . M ikoian was reportedly willing to try but was dissuaded by his colleagues; it w ould have been difficult for him to achieve m uch, since the workers had no leaders w ith whom he could talk nor coherent dem ands to negotiate. All the same, the refusal infuriated the crowd. Breakaway groups began to storm the city party headquarters on one side o f the square. O ne o f them appeared on the balcony w ith a botde o f vodka and two dishes piled high w ith cheese and sausages: “Look at w hat they eat!”78 A t this point the senior m ilitary officer present used a megaphone to order the crowd to disperse. W hen his words had no effect, the troops drawn up around the square began to shoot, at first in the air, then at the crowd itself. There are indications that the first fatal shots were actually fired by M V D internal troops stationed on the roofs or inside nearby buildings, even as the Red Army soldiers were still firing w arning shots. A t first the crowd hesitated, aghast and not believing that troops o f their own army could actually try to kill them . T hen they began to flee in panic, but because the square was so tighdy packed, they had difficulty getting away, while the shooting continued relentlessly behind them . Sixteen people were killed on the square, and five more as soldiers cleared the party head­ quarters. Some seventy people were seriously injured, and an unknown num ber incurred m inor injuries. Some o f the wounded did not report to hospital for fear o f being arrested.79

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T he deaths divided the dem onstrators. The m ajority preferred to desist in order to avoid further bloodshed, but a m inority used the accumulated fear and outrage to whip up feelings further. D uring the following night a curfew was declared, and mass arrests followed. N ext m orning Frol Kozlov, from the Presidium, made a speech over the radio, accusing "hoo­ ligan elements” o f having provoked the violence. H e did not speak o f re­ voking the price increases but promised to look into workers’ grievances.80 The authorities fabricated an indictm ent against those they consid­ ered “ringleaders,” accusing them o f “organizing mass disorders” and “of­ fering armed resistance to the authorities.” They decided not to publicize the trial throughout the Soviet U nion, but it was open to invited represen­ tatives o f the “public” in Novocherkassk itself, where it was m anipulated as a warning and a propaganda lesson. T he sentences, including seven death sentences and prison terms o f ten to fifteen years, were greeted w ith applause.81 The whole tragedy dem onstrated how completely the art o f ordinary politics had been lost in Russia and how the political stage was m onopo­ lized by extreme and paranoid imaginings. T he workers acted in accor­ dance w ith assumptions they had inherited unquestioningly from both Russian and Soviet culture: that the distribution o f resources should be egalitarian, that wealth and luxury were iniquitous, that there was a tacit “social contract” under which the authorities take the decisions but have a duty to provide for their protégés, and finally that the tsar/first secretary was just, the custodian o f the truth, but that his local officials were cor­ rupt and deceitful. In striking contrast to Poland in the same period, there was no contact whatsoever between workers and intellectuals: they lived in different intellectual and moral universes. Moreover, although the workers shared m ost o f the declared aims o f the Soviet state, they had no means o f defending their interests and expressing their grievances until they became so overwhelming that the slightest inci­ dent could provoke large-scale violence. Soldiers and internal troops w ith­ out serious training in crowd control were let loose on an unarm ed (though angry and undisciplined) crowd o f civilians. The Soviet leaders in Moscow also overreacted. The frightening abruptness and speed w ith which events developed put them on notice that their party and police ap­ paratus, in appearance so strong, could suddenly and w ithout warning lose control o f a m ajor industrial city. They knew from their studies o f the history o f the CPSU that working-class unrest, once successful in one cen-

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ter, could rapidly spread to others. They were determ ined never to find themselves in such a situation again. But then, to ignore or suppress workers’ protests was no longer possible w ithout reverting to full-scale Stalinist methods. Khrushchev instead took the critical decision to neutralize them by using precious foreign currency to buy grain on foreign markets, and thus keep the price o f bread down. This was the greatest possible hum iliation. T he m uch-derided tsarist re­ gime had exported grain; the Soviet one was now having to im port it. In a policy held that he had made his specialty and where he had promised so m uch, Khrushchev had dem onstrated a lack o f even basic competence. Inevitably his failings were identified w ith the party o f which he was first secretary: far from leading the people to the broad uplands o f Com m u­ nism , the party, it seemed, could not even feed them properly. T he regime learned several lessons: to keep food prices low, at the cost o f making support payments that soon became w hat one econom ist called the “highest food-and-agriculture subsidy in history.”82 Between 1965 and 1985 subsidies on basic foodstuffs rose more than sixteenfold, from 3.5 billion rubles to 58.8 billion. They rose especially sharply in 1971, 1976, and 1980, after workers’ unrest in Poland, also arising from food prices, rem inded Soviet leaders o f the dangers. In 1980 this subsidy consumed 11 percent o f the state budget expenditure, and it continued to rise thereaf­ ter.89 This huge sum represented the cost o f no longer resorting to massive terror and o f fulfilling the “social contract” w ith the urban workers, keep­ ing their food prices low while offering high enough payments to farms to stem the poverty and dem oralization o f the villages and offer some incen­ tives to skilled workers to stay there. T he excessive subsidy was, in short, an absolute necessity if the contradictions o f Soviet policy were not finally to destroy traditional Russia. T he cost o f the subsidy could not be absorbed easily, since the authori­ ties were sim ultaneously spending huge sums to project Soviet power all over the w orld by massive rearmament. T he only way to square the circle was to allow ordinary workers a m odest share in corruption by turning a blind eye to shoddy work and to the “black economy.” This was Leonid Brezhnev’s tacit social contract: “they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to w ork.” For those in regular em ploym ent this formula generated an easy­ paced way o f life, in which m ost people were guaranteed life’s minimal benefits in one form or another, no m atter how slovenly their work. It also guaranteed a more stable society: from 1969 to 1977 far fewer outbreaks

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o f public disorder were recorded.84 But it was a way o f life in which only the bosses could prosper, in which squalor, shoddy goods, and m utual back-scratching became the norm . It was incom patible w ith the drive to create a more hum ane society, let alone build Com m unism , and it could not indefinitely sustain great-power status. O n both grounds the ta d t contract eroded the popular faith which in the 1960s was still alive, as is evident from the slogans and appeals that fueled the unrest o f that decade. In those circumstances either ethnic or consum er aspirations replaced in­ ternational socialist ones.

Ethnic Unrest T he post-Stalin leaders’ policy on nationality issues was less crudely russi­ fying than Stalin’s. They called off the anti-Jewish D octors’ Plot investiga­ tion and released those arrested. They allowed somewhat more cultural and economic autonom y to the non-Russian republics. O n the other hand, they continued to operate on the assum ption that the Soviet U nion was a predom inantly Russian state and that international socialism should have a Russian face. They also took for granted that the national question had been setded, that ethnic conflicts were a thing o f the past, anomalous if they flared up now. Khrushchev told the 22nd Party Congress in 1961 that “the party has solved one o f the m ost complex o f problems, which has plagued m ankind for ages and remains acute in the world o f cap­ italism to this day—the problem o f relations between nations.” T he con­ gress resolution claimed that the nationalities o f the USSR were “all united into one family by com m on vital interests and are advancing to­ gether toward a single goal— Com m unism .”85 T he keyword now was sliianie, the “merging” o f nationalities. It was m eant to denote the creation o f harm onious interethnic relations and the gradual emergence o f a supraethnic working-class community. A major step toward this goal was taken in the language reform o f 1958, which made Russian a com pulsory subject o f study in all Soviet schools, while non-Russian languages became optional. T he explicit objective o f the law was to make Russian the “second native language” o f all non-Russians.86 Its greatest novelty was that parents received the right to choose w hether to send their children to a Russian-language school or a native-language one. In m ost republics— even those where Russians were m ost resented, as in the Baltics— a high proportion o f parents chose the Russian-language

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schools, so that their children w ould have better chances in education, job hunting, and prom otion throughout the USSR. C ontrary to its intention, though, the law raised tension by arousing new fears am ong all ethnic groups. It alarmed the non-Russians, who suspected it m eant the sub­ merging o f their national existence in Russia. Russians, paradoxically, also felt threatened, fearful that in "merging” they too would lose their identity through the creation o f a homogenized international culture, probably dom inated, like m ost o f the world, by the ubiquitous “other,” the U nited States.87 O pen ethnic conflict became more frequent in the 1950s. Now that there were fewer labor camp inmates and the danger o f war seemed less im m inent, soldiers were often used to carry out labor-intensive construc­ tion projects, such as the construction o f roads, railways, and large build­ ings. These battalions were a milieu that tended to generate ethnic ten­ sion. Senior officers w ould often send to them m en who were poor soldiers, undisciplined, weaklings, or prone to heavy drinking. Since the discipline was less strict on the building site than in the barracks and liv­ ing facilities were often inadequate, construction troops w ould form their own spontaneous bands to steal or trade on the black market. They tended to drink and then harass local citizens or beat up traders who they thought had cheated them . T he result would sometimes be gang fighting on city streets, or incidents in which soldiers attacked policemen who tried to restrain or arrest them . Sometimes there was an ethnic element to the m utual hostility. In Klimovsk (Moscow oblast) in May 1955, for example, three Azerbaijani construction soldiers were beaten during a brawl. W hen their comrades tried to take revenge, local young men at­ tacked their dorm itory, shouting: “Beat up the Chuchmeki! They are for Beria!”88 This slogan com bined two especially negative ethnic stereotypes. “Chuchm eki” is an insulting portm anteau term used by Russians to stig­ matize people o f C entral Asian or Caucasian origin. Russians suspected them o f rigging the black market, yet also, illogically, o f being especially closely associated w ith the security police, probably because for many years it was run by Beria, who was a Georgian. Even more serious and sustained ethnic conflict was generated by the attem pt to rectify the injustice o f Stalins deportation o f nationalities. In 1954-1956 the civil rights o f deported peoples were gradually restored, and in January 1957 the Chechen-Ingush ASSR was restored (in its 1944 boundaries, except for the loss o f Prigorod district to the N orth Ossetian

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ASSR). The authorities were prepared to perm it a gradual return o f those Chechen and Ingush who wished to do so, but they wanted tim e to orga­ nize and channel the influx properly. M any Chechens and Ingush were not prepared to wait, and they returned before homes had been assigned to them . They found, naturally enough, that Russians, Avars, and others were now living in their old homes. T he returnees tried to have the “inter­ lopers” evicted. T heir attem pts provoked lasting resentm ent and a num ­ ber o f violent incidents.89 O f these the m ost serious occurred in Groznyï, the capital o f the Chechen Ingush ASSR. T he city had been m ultinational ever since its founding, num erous Russians had always lived there, and Chechens had never constituted a m ajority o f the population. However, the returning Chechens dem anded the restoration o f their former houses and apart­ ments. O n August 23, 1938, after a drunken brawl in Groznyï, a Russian worker from a chemical factory was stabbed to death by Chechens. His colleagues displayed the coffin in front o f the hom e o f his fiancée, in the area o f town where m ost o f the chemical workers lived. T he “lying-instate” turned into a protest meeting. An elderly chemical worker, L. M iakinin, made a speech. M iakinin was widely respected as a civil war veteran who had worked in the chemical industry all his life and had re­ ceived the O rder o f Lenin in 1955. H e called on those present to act: “Chechens are killing Russians. They do not w ant to live in peace. We m ust write a collective letter in the name o f the Russian people, gather signatures and designate a person to carry the letter to Moscow w ith a re­ quest for a commission to be sent to Groznyi, and if the commission is not formed, then let Com rade Khrushchev come him self in order to in­ vestigate on the spot.”90 This procedure was an old Russian way o f ex­ pressing a grievance: drawing up a collective petition, then sending a dele­ gate (khodok) to the ruler w ith a request for his personal intervention to restore justice. T he funeral procession turned into an anti-Chechen dem onstration. The petition, when drawn up, called for the expulsion o f Chechens from Groznyi, and this dem and attracted the support o f townspeople who had nothing to do w ith the funeral. They were further worked up by the speech o f an elderly man who had served in the Special Troops (ChO N ) as long ago as 1922, and had been a long-tim e Komsomol and party member before being expelled. H e recounted outrages that he alleged had been com m itted by Chechens and dem anded their expulsion from the

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city, accusing the present C om m unist leaders o f not being true Com m u­ nists. H e added that “G reat Rus is waking up,” and called for a strike if the protesters’ dem ands were not m et. O n the evening o f the procession a crowd attacked and occupied the headquarters o f the regional party com­ m ittee, and the police eventually arrested some tw enty people in order to clear it. T he next m orning, a crowd gathered outside to dem and their re­ lease. As a result o f the mêlée the m ilitary were brought in. Soldiers m an­ aged to bring the rioting to an end w ithout using their firearms (which ar­ gues considerable skill). All the same, as a result o f the disturbances, two people died and thirty-tw o were injured. M any o f the latter were police and party officials, w hich suggests that violence was directed against them as m uch as against Chechens.91 It is sym ptom atic that in these clashes the two m ost fiery speeches were made by true-believing veterans o f the 1920s. T heir message, in crude and subversive form , was a version o f w hat Khrushchev was currently preaching, a return to the revolutionary idealism o f the early years o f the Soviet state. Now, however, the message was both adulterated and re­ energized by reactive Russian nationalism . T he rebels’ perception o f the authorities was also traditional, only it belonged to an older, prerevolu­ tionary tradition o f the “good tsar.” Local C om m unist leaders were seen as “false Com m unists,” accused o f m aladm inistration and o f ignor­ ing the interests o f the people, but justice was expected from the su­ preme comrades in the sacred city o f Moscow. T he internationalism o f the 1920s was now absent. O n the contrary, ethnic stereotyping was marked: Russians seemed to hope that the C entral Com m ittee would save them from the “evil Chechens.” T heir aspirations were form ulated in a resolution composed by a retired Russian engineer o f the Gudermes state farm and presented to the local party com m ittee. It called for all “privileges” o f the Chechens and Ingushes (that is, their right to return) to be revoked, and the Chechen-Ingush ASSR to be renam ed Groznyi oblast, or even made into a m ultinational Soviet Socialist Republic, in which the Chechen-Ingush population w ould not be allowed to exceed 10 percent.92 Obviously this principle, if widely im itated elsewhere in the Soviet Union, would put an end to its viability as a m ultinational great power. The creeping ethnicization o f the country was beginning to take its toll.

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The Significance of Khrushchev’s Fall Khrushchev was by now unpopular not only w ith the public. Senior party officials were becoming more and more disillusioned and alarmed at see­ ing their privileges and tenure o f office eroded, and at the leader s disrup­ tion o f the patron-client networks by which they sustained their power. In O ctober 1964 Khrushchev was sum m oned to a plenary session o f the Central Com m ittee, where the principal ideological secretary, M ikhail Suslov, read out w hat am ounted to an indictm ent o f the leader. H e was accused o f gross mistakes in agricultural adm inistration, o f erratic con­ duct o f foreign affairs, o f obsession w ith reorganizations inside the party, o f nepotism (though all party secretaries had their protégés, whose careers they prom oted, and o f “crude violations o f Leninist norms o f party lead­ ership.”93 Khrushchevs period o f rule marked the last attem pt to com bine neoRussian empire w ith m illennial socialism. O nce it had failed, the most persuasive argum ent for Russia’s imperial mission finally faded w ith it. O ther than as partners in a great power, non-Russians had litde reason to go on accepting Russian dom ination. In those circumstances Russians be­ came just one ethnos am ong m any others in the USSR; they were the hugest, but they were also faced w ith handicaps from which other ethnic groups did not suffer. Over the next quarter-century, even Russians began to wonder w hether the Soviet U nion was really good for them .

8 tue Rediscovery of R ussia

By the m id-1960s the Soviet U nion had become a stable, hierarchical, and conservative society—and after the upheavals o f recent decades, most people were content to see it that way. A t the apex o f the pyramid was Moscow, and in Moscow the Kremlin and Staraia Ploshchad (O ld Square), the building o f the Central Com m ittee o f the CPSU. From that focal point tentacles o f appointm ent, control, and supplies extended outward to the Russian provinces and to the non-Russian republics. Every enter­ prise and institution had its place in the hierarchy, according to w hether its work was deemed to be o f “all-U nion significance,” o f “republican sig­ nificance,” or lower. The salaries and perks o f its managers and employees depended on that rating. T he positioning o f each town on the ladder would depend on the status o f its enterprises, and on that in turn would depend the quality o f its facilities and the supplies o f its shops. Villages stood on the lowest rung. Individual citizens seeking to rise in the world would apply first for ed­ ucation and then for em ploym ent in a town o f higher standing, if possible Moscow or Leningrad, or, failing that, one o f the U nion Republic cap­ itals. W hether they received a propiska in the town o f their choice would depend on a num ber o f factors: their proposed training or employment, their ethnic origin, their m ilitary service, their standing in the party, and whether or not a patron or protector was prepared to intervene on their behalf. In this way the hierarchy was m aintained and supervised by superiors deriving their authority ultim ately from O ld Square. The only

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way to circumvent the uphill obstacle course was to marry someone o f “higher” rating; that practice was widespread, as com m on as financial marriages in bourgeois society. T he ethnic configuration o f the ruling class had crystallized by the mid1960s and remained fairly stable thereafter. T he Slavs, and especially the Russians, were dom inant, but not overwhelmingly so. For example, in the CPSU Central Com m ittee o f 1981, Slavs constituted 86 percent o f mem­ bers, and Russians alone 67 percent, com pared w ith their 52 percent share o f the population. By contrast, the peoples o f the M uslim union republics formed 5.4 percent o f the Central Com m ittee membership, com pared w ith 11.6 percent o f the population.1 In the union republics the first sec­ retary was normally a local, but the second secretary, the com m ander o f the m ilitary district, and the head o f the KGB would normally be Slavs— in effect Russians, since Ukrainians and Belorussians outside their home republics were generally regarded as Russians. T he same was true o f direc­ tors o f enterprises “o f all-Union significance,” m ilitary enterprises, and se­ cret “postbox” research institutes.2 In spite o f the Slavic “minders” the non-Russian union republics were dom inated by their own ethnic elites. W hen seeking the good things o f life, membership in the republican titular nationality was a decided ad­ vantage. According to M ikhail Gorbachev, who should know, there was a kind o f “gentlem ens agreement” between Brezhnev and local party secre­ taries, under which he left them free to manage their own affairs in return for their continual support and praise. In Azerbaijan, for example, the Aliev family and the Nakhichevan clan dom inated political decision-mak­ ing and the distribution o f economic benefits. If a delegation was sent down from Moscow to investigate possible abuses, the republican bosses would receive it w ith lavish hospitality and a dazzling display o f local color, while drawing a veil over corrupt practices that non-Azeri speakers had little chance o f penetrating anyway. The “government inspectors” would return to O ld Square w ith a hangover and little to report.3 M aintaining superpower status was o f param ount im portance in the Brezhnev era, and accordingly the m ilitary-industrial complex occupied the center o f the power network. M ore than half the members o f the CPSU Central Com m ittee had worked at one tim e or another either in the armed forces or in the m ilitary branches o f industry. In 1950 m ilitary expenditure accounted for nearly a quarter o f gross domestic product (GDP). It fell thereafter, but in 1955 it still consumed nearly half o f all in-

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dustrial investment. W hen Gorbachev became general secretary in 1985 and at last was perm itted to see the figures (to which he had not had ac­ cess even as an ordinary member o f the Politburo!), m ilitary expenditure constituted some 40 percent o f the state budget and about 20 percent o f GDP. As Gorbachev noted in his memoirs, Min virtually all branches o f the economy m ilitary expenditure sapped the vital juices,” so that, for ex­ ample, one and the same factory m ight be turning out the latest tanks alongside the m ost prim itive tractors.4 T he m ilitary-industrial complex was largely a Russian, or at least a Slavic, monopoly. T he language o f com m and was Russian, and the tradi­ tions and symbolism o f fighting men also derived from Russian history and culture. T he great m ajority—about 75 percent— o f m ilitary-indus­ trial research and production facilities were situated in the RSFSR, w ith a further 15 percent in Ukraine. In addition, some 7 percent o f the terri­ tory o f Kazakhstan, m ainly in the north (where m ost o f the Russians o f Kazakhstan lived), was occupied w ith testing sites for the nuclear industry, missile systems, and space satellites. T he greatest concentration o f m ilitary production was in and around Moscow and Leningrad, in the Volga ba­ sin, Siberia, and the Urals. T he greatest num ber o f defense industry em­ ployees were found in Sverdlovsk, Leningrad, Moscow, G orkii, Moscow oblast, Perm, Kuibyshev, and Novosibirsk (all Russian cities w ith a con­ siderable m ajority o f Russians living in them ), as well as in Tatarstan (where in 1989 43.2 percent o f the population was Russian) and in U dm urtiia (58.8 percent Russian). Some cities and regions were especially dependent on the defense sector: in U dm urtiia, for example, the defense industry accounted for 85 percent o f output and 60 percent o f employ­ m ent.5 T he RSFSR contained half o f all industrial enterprises, both m ilitary and nonmilitary, and produced tw o-thirds o f industrial output, that is, heavy industry was especially concentrated there. In the late 1980s, 69 percent o f Russian output was o f “all-U nion significance” (in Ukraine it was 58 percent, in Estonia, 28.5 percent), and 51 percent o f the RSFSR population— 58 percent in the towns— worked in industry, construction, transport, and com m unications, a higher figure than for any other repub­ lic. But output was not m atched by income: per capita, Russia was in tenth place am ong the republics. Some other republics, notably the Baltic ones, were more advanced technologically and incomes were markedly higher.6 Russians, then, were not earning a fair share from their produc­ tive activity.

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M any o f the cities associated w ith the m ilitary were dosed to a greater or lesser degree. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there were about four hundred “installations” and associated “special regime” towns, w ith three levels o f secrecy. At the lowest level were anonym ous factories, designated merely by zip code, in otherwise open towns; at the second level were en­ terprises in cities closed to all foreigners; the third level consisted o f special setdem ents isolated even from Soviet citizens and known by codenames: Arzamas-16 (built on the site o f the m onastery o f St. Serafim o f Sarov in Kursk oblast), Cheliabinsk-40, Penza-19, Krasnoiarsk-26, and so on.7 These production complexes were guarded by Interior M inistry troops and situated on com pounds some distance from the town whose name they bore. Those living and working there needed official approval to leave; they had to present letters to the outside w orld for official censor­ ship; they were unable to invite friends and relatives to visit them ; and they were blocked from the Soviet telephone network. O n the other hand, they had priority for the supply o f food and consumer goods, so that the shops were always well stocked, and they received high pay and generous retirem ent packages. Above all employees o f these special complexes en­ joyed high prestige, the feeling that they were working on a crucial mis­ sion for which they were respected and rewarded. They believed they were fulfilling an essential and urgent patriotic duty, necessary to guarantee the defense o f their hom eland and to preserve w orld peace by putting up a counterbalance to the m ilitary m ight o f the imperialist powers. T he closed settlements had no difficulty attracting the best graduates horn the relevant technological faculties o f universities, pardy because o f the pres­ tige o f the job and partly because new well-qualified arrivals were pro­ vided w ith a separate apartm ent, good child-care facilities, and good schools for a later stage in their childrens lives.8 However secret they were, the “installations” and the surrounding setdements did attract the attention o f the ordinary populadons living nearby. In some cases this was because radio-active waste was escaping and causing ill health, especially in the early years, before proper nuclear-safety standards were established. In August 1956 an anonymous letter was sent from Cheliabinsk oblast to Bulganin, then prim e minister, com plaining that “the health o f thousands o f people in the Urals and Siberia is suffer­ ing.” The letter continued: “It is no secret that there exists a certain Cheliabinsk-40. Its extensive territory is surrounded by barbed wire. W hat goes on there we ordinary mortals do not know, and we don’t w ant to know. But we all feel its bad breath.” T he w riter com mented, “It is prov-

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ing possible to cut the army, so couldn’t we cut these factories as well?” Bulganins secretariat appended a com m entary to the letter for the prim e m inisters inform ation, adm itting that one o f the factories in Cheliabinsk40 regularly discharged (nuclear) waste into the nearby River Techa.9 M any Russians accepted these privations as sacrifices necessary to main­ tain their country’s superpower status. A m ilitary career enjoyed the high­ est prestige. T he daughter o f an officer in the army engineers recalled that her father entered a m ilitary college in 1951 because it was the best way to escape the poverty and hunger o f village life. Later he came to feel that his was the noblest calling as well as the m ost secure: “If my father were a reli­ gious person, he w ould pray for the Army, because for him the Army is like a m other who gave him food, clothing, stability and a middle-class living standard that was very good for Russia.” To put this perception in perspective, she explains w hat a “middle-class living standard” m eant in an arm y that provided almost all living requirements: “O ften when they had to change their residence from one town to another, they took w ith them only simple beds, chairs and a couple o f suitcases. T hat was all the furniture they had. But they also had good prospects: Army officers were treated w ith great respect.”10 In the later Soviet decades taking pride in the armed forces and the country’s defense facilities was an im portant part o f being Russian; but so also was ambivalence and suppressed resentm ent at the privation they imposed on ordinary people.

Continued Urbanization D uring the 1950s a historic change had taken place in the Russian popu­ lation: it was becoming m ainly urbanized. According to the 1959 census 52 percent o f Russians lived in towns in the RSFSR, and 58 percent in other republics. By 1979 the proportion was 69 percent in the RSFSR, and 74 percent elsewhere.11 Large towns grew faster than small ones, and fastest o f all was Moscow, whose population in the 1970s alone rose by 13 percent, according to official figures. In reality the growth was probably greater, since m any employers desperate for labor w ould hire so-called lim itchiki, employees perm itted to live in Moscow (or another large city) for a lim ited period; in practice, many o f them stayed on illegally after­ ward. It was becoming almost impossible to obtain a propiska in Moscow, so that imm igrants tended to setde in the large towns just beyond the city Ring Road, such as Liubertsy, M ytishchi, and Odintsovo. As a result the

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towns o f Moscow oblast expanded even more markedly than the capital city, by 21 percent, and those w ithin fifty kilometers o f the capital by 27 percent.12 T he propiska system actually encouraged people to stay who m ight otherwise have left: a Moscow propiska, once lost, could be regained only w ith the greatest difficulty. A one-room Moscow apartm ent was w orth a two-room apartm ent in G orkii, Kharkov, or Sverdlovsk, a three-room apartm ent in a medium-sized provincial town, and a mansion in the countryside. The only other Russian towns to experience growth com­ parable to Moscow’s were sites o f m ajor new industrial developments, such as Toliatti on the Volga, where cars were produced, or Naberezhnye Chelny on the Kama River in the Urals, where the Kamaz truck was m an­ ufactured.13 T he reason for this growth was clear: large cities, and Moscow in par­ ticular, offered a wide choice o f jobs, educational opportunities, consum er goods, entertainm ents, and hum an contacts in general. Young people were attracted by the absence o f parental supervision, which was still felt in small towns and villages. So m uch was true o f capital cities all over the world in the late tw entieth century. W hat was distinctive about Moscow was that the Soviet "hierarchy o f consum ption” was especially m arked and especially rigid. A disproportionate growth o f conurbations and over­ crowded housing are norm al effects o f m odernization, but Soviet social policies and the nom enklatura appointm ents system exaggerated their ef­ fect by increasing both the relative rewards o f living in large towns and the costs o f staying in a small-town or rural environm ent.14 Yet in m any ways the large cities were unattractive places to live. In spite o f the huge domestic construction program, many people still had to crowd into com munal apartm ents. They also had to suffer the conse­ quences o f heavy industrial pollution. W hen the Soviet media at last be­ gan to adm it to the problem , a report on Sterlitamak noted: "Immense chimneys belching out clouds o f smoke into the sky and a blue-grey pall o f poisonous smog creeping over the horizon— thus awakens the second largest city o f Bashkiria, where 270,000 people live.” This situation was not untypical. In the far north nine-tenths o f the inhabitants o f Nikel, which as its name suggests contained nickel smelters, were reported to be suffering from respiratory ailments. In Nizhnevartovsk, in western Sibe­ ria, w ith its oil and gas refineries, particulates were concentrated in the air at six times the perm itted maximum level; in Bratsk, thanks to its alumi-

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num smelter, the air contained seventeen times the perm itted concentra­ tion o f benzopyrene. Even in the capital, in Izmailovskii Park, where Mus­ covites love to stroll on sum m er evenings, there were notices warning “N o Admission,” indicating danger o f chemical and radioactive emissions from a landfill site o f the 1930s.15 T he rural environm ent was suffering too. Hydroelectric projects and ir­ rigation schemes had so reduced the flow o f the Volga that, in the words o f one com m entator, “[it] has virtually ceased to be a riven it has become a chain o f reservoirs.” In the Volga and m any other rivers the dim inished water flow was heavily polluted by untreated sewage, factory discharges, and fertilizer and pesticides washed off fields. T he supply o f fish had fallen so drastically that people feared for the sturgeon, source o f Russians’ be­ loved caviar.16 Overcrowded, polluted cities were not good places for children. Begin­ ning in the 1960s the birth rate o f the m ost urbanized peoples fell drasti­ cally, especially the Baltic nationalities and the Russians. T he new noncom m unal apartm ents were at least private, but they were cramped. In any case the tall housing blocks offered a poor environm ent in w hich to bring up children, who had litde space o f their own and nowhere to meet neighbors’ children and play in the open air while under parental supervi­ sion. (In the less tall apartm ent blocks built until the m id-1960s— five stories or less— they could still play in courtyards while their m others chatted or their fathers played dominoes n o t far away.) As early as 1972 the dem ographer V iktor Perevedentsev warned that the Russian population was not reproducing itself.17 To keep the popula­ tion stable, he calculated, each couple w ould have to have an average o f 2.65 children; the actual average for the USSR as a whole was 2.4, and in Moscow it was as low as 1.6. Forty-three percent o f Muscovite women stated in answer to a questionnaire that they w anted no more than one child. There were a num ber o f reasons for this situation, associated w ith m odern Soviet urban life. M odern health care ensured that the great ma­ jority o f children survived into adulthood, so that one child now provided security into old age; nor were children needed to sustain the family econ­ omy, as had been the case in small towns and villages fifiy years earlier. Be­ sides, for more people had higher education, were building professional careers, and therefore m arried later. W omen were taking paid employ­ m ent for a num ber o f reasons: to supplem ent the family income, to use their professional training, or to have an independent role and status in

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society.18 As a result they had less tim e to look after children. Typically both parents worked but also had to spend tim e standing in line for scarce food supplies or deficient services, so that they had litde spare tim e or en­ ergy. As one m other reported, “In the shops after w ork there are lines. It’s true that in the superm arket you can find any groceries you w ant in a quarter o f an hour, but it takes half an hour to get there, and as long as that again standing in line at the ch eck-out.. . . T he kindergarten works only while ‘m other is at work.’ G od forbid you arrive quarter o f an hour late to pick up Vovochka. But yesterday I had to wait tw enty m inutes for a bus.”19 Relatively few men were prepared to take on their share o f these bur­ dens, so that women were in effect bearing a "double burden,” holding down a hill-tim e job while also taking care o f hom e and family. T he di­ vorce rate was rising rapidly: by the early 1970s in Russia every tenth m ar­ riage fell apart w ithin a year, and a further tenth ended in the first five years. Fatigue and lack o f leisure tim e figured high am ong the causal htctors, along w ith heavy drinking by m en. Besides, marriage was increas­ ingly seen as a personal choice, and therefore revocable, rather than as part o f the stable relationship o f extended families.20 Meanwhile in the Caucasus and Central Asia, by contrast, fewer women were employed and more people stayed in traditional village or small­ town housing. There were fewer m odern conveniences there but more space and usually a courtyard just outside the dwelling place, and relatives nearby, so that families were willing to have more children and the birth rate remained m uch higher than in Russia.21 As a result, in the later Soviet decades the population o f the Caucasus and Central Asia was gradually growing relative to that o f the European republics, especially am ong the young, which m eant that they formed a larger percentage o f recruits to the armed services. The landscape o f the new industrial towns, or the new suburbs o f older towns, looked similar, wherever they were constructed. Massive apart­ m ent blocks w ent up, first in yellow-pink brick, then from the 1970s in prefabricated concrete panels and blocks, which could t>e assembled quickly, using mass-produced industrial methods. Visiting the Siberian city o f Bratsk, the American journalist H edrick Smith commented: "To me w hat was m ost depressing was the naked, Orwellian m onotony o f row upon row o f identical grey prefab apartm ent blocks.”22 They were gath­ ered in mikroraiony, huge housing estates, which looked impressive as

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cardboard mock-ups for bureaucrats and political patrons, but were often shoddily constructed and situated a long way from em ployment opportu­ nities. They tended to become dorm itory beehives from which stoic ten­ ants w ould com m ute long distances to w ork on overcrowded public trans­ portation.23 These huge housing blocks were no longer always grouped around courtyards, and, when they were, those courtyards were now so large and open that they were often penetrated by high winds, and had none o f the coziness needed for inform al hum an contact. It was not a favorable envi­ ronm ent for the traditional Russian custom o f casual socializing. H eating was provided for a whole estate, and often for a factory or two as well, by area power stations belching out smoke. T heir delivery pipes, often lagged w ith asbestos, ran alongside roads and railways, arching over obstacles. Public spaces, by contrast w ith housing estates, form ed part o f the sym­ bolic geography and were more attractively laid out. Transport thorough­ fares w ould be lined w ith trees and sometimes planted w ith flowers as well. They were broad and spacious, not to accommodate large num bers o f cars— few people owned a car in the 1960s, though their num bers grew quickly thereafter— but rather to serve as the setting for public parades on special occasions. Boulevards, wherever possible, would converge on a m ain square that contained a statue o f Lenin, a war memorial, and per­ haps a stand for announcing local achievements, as well as grand build­ ings w ith classical columns housing the m unicipal soviet, the party com­ m ittee, or the local university. These urban spaces told a story o f a great (recent) past and prefigured the progress toward an even greater future. T he war memorials, on the other hand, did not usually list individual names. Russian grief was represented in large, impersonal, m onolithic slabs, not as the aggregate o f individuals’ grief. Behind public buildings, or just around the corner, a totally different scene usually presented itself: construction firms seldom landscaped a site after com pleting their building work, so that for years afterward the im ­ mediate neighborhood o f apartm ent blocks was disfigured by unsighdy rubble, abandoned breeze blocks, sawed-off metal pipes, and concrete slabs w ith rusty metal rods poking out o f them . Public splendor and pub­ lic squalor coexisted side by side. By the 1960s in m ost Russian towns it was becoming difficult or im­ possible to discern any traces o f the past. T he novelist Alan Sillitoe, who visited the USSR in 1964, com m ented, “All over Moscow they are ripping

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out the past like rotten teeth.”24 O lder buildings had been torn down, while churches had been destroyed or at best had the crosses removed from their domes; they were then converted into cinemas, warehouses, or palaces o f culture. M onolithic high-rise blocks, dual carriageways, and sprawling factory complexes had obliterated m ost relics o f previous settle­ m ent, o f ancient fields and pathways. As they w ent about their daily busi­ ness, m ost Russians saw little to rem ind them o f their history or o f their national culture.

Youth Culture M any o f the social features that generated a specific youth culture in the West— relative affluence, a long period o f “latency” between childhood and adult life—were missing in the Soviet U nion right up to the 1960s. O r rather they were present only am ong the privileged nom enklatura strata, high state and party officials, and top professional people in the large cities. Already by the early 1950s these privileged few lived in an am­ biance which was relatively secure and opulent, and where young people could take years over study and choosing a career. It was in this milieu that the first signs o f a youth culture emerged. Soviet diplom ats, and then party officials, adopted W estern-style clothing and life-styles, complete w ith cocktail cabinets, gin-and-tonics (rather than vodka), and the fox­ trot. T heir offspring became fascinated w ith these borrowed artifacts for their own sake, and took their practices to extremes, violating official ta­ boos and relying on “Papa” for protection in difficulties. These were the stiliagi. They took up jazz, still disapproved in the 1950s as a “bourgeois fashion,” and then rock-and-roll. T hrough their connections they ob­ tained W estern designer clothes, perfumes, and later, short-wave radios, cassette recorders, and other items o f conspicuous consum ption before they reached the general population.25 The 6th W orld Festival o f Youth and Students was held in Moscow in 1957, and it spread images o f m odern W estern youth culture m uch more widely. At the same tim e, in more acceptable Soviet style, Komsomol vol­ unteer groups were taking part in construction work and bringing new soil under the plow in the virgin lands o f Kazakhstan. O thers were going on geological expeditions or standing guard over nature conservation sites to prevent poaching or unauthorized logging. Such groups would im pro­ vise their own forms o f entertainm ent in the evenings, w ith little more

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than a guitar or tape recorder around a camp fire or in a tem porary bar­ racks.26 By the 1970s the m eaning o f youth had changed in Soviet society. H itherto young people had always been at the frontline or in the van­ guard o f socialist construction, urgendy needed for the tasks o f war or peace. Now they were more affluent and better educated, but partly as a result their itch for better things was stronger too, and they knew far more about life in the “W est” (which the USSR was still trying to "catch up and overtake”). Moreover, college graduates were no longer autom ati­ cally finding high-status jobs on com pleting their studies; often their way was blocked by far less qualified incum bents from a previous generation, hanging on to the perks o f office. Condem ned to boring work that they considered beneath their dignity, such young people gravitated to alterna­ tive modes o f self-assertion. They w ould m eet in tusovki, inform al gather­ ings, well away from the eye o f the Komsomol, in the open air in summer, in basements at other times o f year, to dance to their own kind o f music, drink, take drugs, perhaps engage in casual sex. Rokery, bitniki, panki, metalUsty, and other epigones o f W estern musical fashion made their ap­ pearance. Soccer teams w ould attract fan clubs that traveled around w ith their heroes, wearing their colors and taunting and sometimes attacking the fans o f rival teams. Some experim ented w ith drugs or, going in a com­ pletely different direction, w ould cultivate eastern modes o f spirituality through m editation or yoga. Hippies preached a doctrine o f reconciliation and universal love that, while not threatening to anyone, was utterly at odds w ith the official ideology o f class struggle.27 By the 1980s, then, youth culture had definitely established itself as a discrete social category, and it took a great variety o f forms, some o f them more or less acceptable to the Komsomol and assimilable into it, others completely contrary both to Russian tradition and to the proclaimed ide­ als o f Soviet society. In the face o f a com m unal ethos m uch more tighdy defined than was usual in the West, the attraction o f transgression was all the more alluring.

The Russian Countryside From the m id-1960s, the collective farms were given higher priority and more generous and stable investm ent than in earlier decades. By then, however, it turned out that their productive capacities had been so eroded

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that they were not capable o f making good use o f the new resources. Be­ sides, in some ways the investm ent deepened and accelerated the “depeasantization” o f village life. T he party was determ ined to “liquidate the dif­ ference between town and countryside.” This m eant enlarging kolkhozy and wherever possible turning them into sovkhozy, state farms, whose land was owned by the state and whose workforce was paid a wag? and re­ ceived social security benefits, like industrial workers. It also m eant aban­ doning small rural settlem ents— now officially known as “villages w ithout a future” (neperspektivnye derami) — as unviable and concentrating ruraldwellers in larger centers, where m ultistory apartm ent blocks were built to receive them . In m any ways this policy was humane: it elim inated extreme rural pov­ erty and enabled the provision o f more satisfactory educational, medical, and social facilities, not to speak o f lighting, heating, and running water. But it also obliterated m any o f the distinctive features o f village life, which m ost Russians— even, perhaps especially, those who had fled it— still con­ sidered an indispensable part o f their heritage. It was difficult for people living on the fifth floor to look after a cow or to give attention to a garden plot that m ight be some distance away. Besides, abandoning the familiar village or ham let entailed weakening kinship or neighborly ties, and per­ haps disrupting ancestral bonds by leaving family graves w ithout regu­ lar care.28 T he concentration o f farms and villages did not, moreover, prove very productive. Building apartm ent blocks, laying water pipes, providing san­ itation, and constructing tarm ac roads was relatively expensive for the ru­ ral sector, and the improved yield o f grain, h u it, or vegetables did not al­ ways justify the expenditure. Prices paid by the state for specialized or industrial crops, like cotton in Central Asia, or citrus fruits, tea, and grapes in the Caucasus, were quite high. But for the grain, vegetables, ap­ ples, and pears o f Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia, procurem ent prices fluctuated but generally remained low, sometimes lower than the costs o f production.29 It was not only low pay that drove away the young and energetic, but also the general conditions o f the village. Com m unications were very un­ reliable: they depended on rutted cart tracks, which could become im ­ passable w ith m ud during the spring thaw or the autum n rains. Village shops often lacked even basic consumer supplies: whereas in the 1920s m ost households had still been capable o f making their own clothes, foot-

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wear, and furniture, by the 1960s that was no longer the case. People had to find some way o f going into town to obtain these essentials. Plenty o f tractor drivers and mechanics were being trained in agrotechnical colleges. But the great m ajority o f them were using their special skills to get a job in town. T he account o f one such worker helps to ex­ plain why: “They assigned me to the sovkhoz ‘Zaraiskii,’ where my par­ ents live. They had asked the college for tractor drivers. W hen I and my comrades arrived, instead o f tractors they handed us pitchforks and shov­ els to fill sacks w ith hay and straw. We requested work in accordance w ith our specialty, but the answer was always: W e’ve no tractors.’ W hy had we gone to college? You can load sacks w ithout any training.”30 In 1981 a farmer w rote from Tula oblast to the newspaper Selskaia zhizn: “In the cowsheds, where m ilk is poured off, there is m ud up to ones knees. There are no overalls. Sometimes there is no lighting to work by. Cows get milked only every other day, and sometimes there is no one at all to do the milking. Labor accounting is badly handled, and the pay is low. As a result people leave the kolkhoz. T hat’s the kind o f bad manage­ m ent we have, a mere 100 kilometers from Moscow.” Lack o f facilities was legendary. As a popular chastushka had it, “la i baba i muzhik. / la i loshad’, ia i byk. / la i seiu, ia i zhnu, / N a sebe drova vozhu. (“I am both woman and m an. / 1 am both horse and ox. / 1 both sow and reap, / and I carry firewood on my back.”31 Social facilities in the village were m inim al. Large villages w ould have a club, which m ight be the form er parish church. In one village in Vologda oblast it was reported that “the church was a fine brick building w ith a lot o f icons. After they arrested Father Sergii it was turned into a club. Some o f the icons were destroyed, others were stolen, and only bare walls re­ m ained.”32 Eventually it was painted and decorated as a venue for showing films, holding dances, playing chess and checkers, or reading newspapers. M ost smaller villages, though, were w ithout social facilities. Such condi­ tions, accepted for centuries, now seemed intolerable to m id- and latetw entieth-century villagers. M ost im portant o f all perhaps for people o f child-bearing age, many village schools, housed in dilapidated wooden buildings, heated by wood or coal stoves and w ithout running water or a sewage system, were not in a position to provide an adequate education. Teachers were reluctant to work in such conditions; many o f those who did were poorly qualified, and im portant subjects m ight remain untaught for m onths. To bring up a

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child in the village was to condem n him or her to a lifetime o f under­ achievement and dem eaning jobs. There was no easy solution to the prob­ lem o f rural education. M any villages were not in a position to support a general-education school. Larger villages that could were distant from the more remote setdem ents, and there were seldom buses to transport chil­ dren back and forth.33 Em igration from Russian villages was especially marked during the late 1950s and 1960s, when exciting and much-publicized economic projects beckoned workers to the cities and other parts o f the Soviet Union. Kol­ khoz chairmen were under heavy pressure from the party to hand over passports to villagers volunteering for them . Between 1959 and 1973 the num ber o f rural inhabitants in their twenties fell by two-thirds. Between 1959 and 1964 alone, the able-bodied rural population o f the kolkhozy o f Pskov oblast fell from 200,000 to 110,000. 1. S. Gustov, the local party secretary, warned at a Central Com m ittee plenum in 1965: “If the decline in the able-bodied workforce continues at the present rate, then in ten years’ tim e there will be no one capable o f working in the kolkhozy.”34 Actually the em igration rate eased off in the 1970s and 1980s, as there were fewer young people left to emigrate, and urban employers became less willing to take on unskilled workers. All the same the loss o f rural population in the non-black earth oblasti between 1959 and 1989 was everywhere between 40 and 60 percent. By 1974 people aged sixty and over constituted 45 percent o f the agricultural workforce in Novgorod oblast, and 40 percent in Pskov. They could not cope w ith the heavy work during harvesting and potato picking tim e, and so students were brought in from local colleges to help out.35 As a result o f the exodus o f young people, marriages in the village be­ came rare, and consequendy so did the birth o f children. In the largely ru­ ral oblast o f Vologda, for example, births, which were 42,155 in 1940 and 23,651 in 1959, had fallen to 9,647 by 1967.36 Since villagers tradition­ ally had far more children than townsfolk, this decline, as we have seen, affected the entire Russian population. The demoralization o f village life was such that many o f the men took to regular heavy drinking. Because o f state fiscal policy, vodka was one consumer item normally available in village shops; and if it was not, peas­ ants would concoct home-made samogon (moonshine) instead. As one woman complained in O rel oblast in 1969, “They get drunk at public meetings, in the dairy farm, and even in the ‘red corner’ [the center for

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propaganda in the village, usually in the dub]. Instead o f propaganda pam phlets w hat do we see on the table? H alf a liter. T he carters sit and drink w ith the dairym en, swearing at each other. T he chairm an and the livestock man take no notice, as if all this were norm al.”37 It was. T he sale o f alcohol had risen six times between 1940 and 1965, and doubled again by 1975, the figures for the RSFSR being throughout slighdy higher than the Soviet average. Family budget studies showed that in 1967-1968 in the towns 8 to 9 percent o f families were spending 40 percent or more o f their budget on alcohol, while for the collective farms the proportion was 10 to 11 percent. These figures represent only sales in state shops, and do not indude substantial expenditure on samogon. Ac­ cording to a confidential study in the 1970s, nearly 11 to 12 percent o f the adult population were “heavy drinkers” or alcoholics; a similar num ­ ber passed through the “drying-out stations” at least once a year. Com par­ ison w ith other countries is difficult, but these figures certainly place the USSR in general and Russia in particular am ong the world s greatest con­ sumers o f alcohol.38Among males o f w orking age the m ost com m on cause o f death was alcohol poisoning or accidents and traumas resulting from drunkenness. Such deaths were more frequent in villages than in towns, where they were com m on enough. Chronic alcoholism was also higher in the countryside: in 1991, the figure for Russia, Ukraine, Moldavia, and Latvia was 152 cases per 100,000 people as against an average o f 123 for the population o f those republics as a whole.39 For those not condem ned to live in the village permanendy, there was still som ething touching and reassuring about rural existence. Liudmila Selezneva, for example, a university teacher bom in 1956, recalled being sent each sum m er to stay w ith her grandm other as a child in the 1960s: “Life in the villages was m uch as it had been forty, fifty or even seventy years before. There were no conveniences. People lived in small houses w ith two or three ro o m s.. . . W hen we visited my grandm other, we used to help her by carrying water in two buckets from a pond to the kitchen. This was the only source o f water. There was no gas, no petrol. People used ancient stoves built o f stone. To cook and to heat the house they had to have wood, so one o f their m ain tasks was gathering enough wood to last for the whole w inter.” O ne o f the childrens jobs was to help grand­ m other look after the kitchen garden on which the households food sup­ ply depended, apart from the bread they bought from the collective farm. “This was a good way to bring up children,” Selezneva noted, “by having us participate in a job, and we liked it very much. But from an economic

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point o f view it was hopelessly inefficient. This was typical. So my grand­ m other produced lor her family—she and her husband and his sister all lived together— potatoes, onions, beets, cabbage, carrots, com , cherries, apples and plum s.”40 Some Russians attribute the hum an w arm th o f their culture and their remarkable capacity for survival in adversity to the vil­ lage upbringing that, till very recendy, most o f them experienced. It was a dying way o f life, though. W hen V iktor Beliaev visited his hom e village o f Shileksha in 1984, the spectacle he encountered was ut­ terly demoralizing: There were eight homes standing—still quite robust, and not boarded up, as people usually do when they go on a long journey, but simply abandoned. T he doors were not locked, one or two were even wide open, and on the porch o f the one nearest the river stood a samovar. I looked inside— one could have lived there. T he huge Russian stove was still undamaged, and so were the windows, the door, the floor. O utside was a large yard. T he village streets were covered w ith grass, and the former garden plots were wildly overgrown w ith netdes and burdock. T he held where twenty-eight kolkhozniki had sown oats after plowing up the virgin soil was now overgrown w ith trees and bushes. T he other fields were abandoned. T he magnificent meadows on which four villages used to mow hay the year round was water­ logged and covered w ith sedge.41

M igration Even though the whirlwind social change o f the 1930s and the upheavals o f war were over, the continual growth o f industry, the am bitious pro­ grams o f technological development, and the improvements in transpor­ tation and com m unications from the late 1940s right through to the 1970s brought Russians and Ukrainians (Belorussians less so) into m otion in unprecedented numbers. Inside Russia itself, as we have seen, people were leaving the small towns, villages, and central regions for the large towns and also for peripheral regions that offered either employment op­ portunities or a better climate. Certain regions o f Russia, though, experi­ enced serious population loss: the Volga-Viatka basin, western Siberia, the northwest, and the black-earth agricultural region. By 1989 more than half o f all Russians had made at least one major move— out o f their home town or oblast into another part o f the country— at some tim e in their lives.

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The same was true o f the Baltic peoples, but the equivalent figure was onethird for Georgians, one-quarter for Kirgiz, and one-seventh for Uzbeks.42 T he republics that underw ent the greatest Russian influx from the 1940s to the 1960s were Ukraine, especially the east and south, whose towns became largely Russian in language and culture; Kazakhstan, espe­ cially the north; Uzbekistan; Estonia; and Latvia. A lot o f elite Russians also lived in the Crim ea, which in 1954 was transferred to Ukraine. U ntil the 1960s Russians form ed the backbone o f the skilled working class and the technical staff almost everywhere in the U SSR This was especially true in the Central Asian republics, Azerbaijan, and Moldavia, where m ost o f the indigenous population was occupied in agriculture, handi­ crafts, and the retail trade. Russians dom inated heavy industry in these re­ publics right through to the 1980s. They could also be found at the low­ est end o f the social scale, as semi-skilled and unskilled laborers in m ining and industrial operations, especially in Ukraine and in the Baltic repub­ lics. An abiding peculiarity o f Russian labor patterns is that women were employed in roughly the same posts as m en, including heavy manual la­ bor, which non-Russian women, especially M uslims, spurned as inappro­ priate or even sham ing for wom en.49 U p to the 1960s Russians were also prom inent in managerial and pro­ fessional posts, especially in enterprises concerned w ith production o f “allU nion significance,” where it paid to have good contacts in Gosplan and the Moscow ministries. These were w hat one m ight call “all-U nion Rus­ sians,” who treated their location as a fortuitous part o f their hom eland, where they happened to be working. Few o f them learned the local lan­ guage beyond w hat was needed to buy bread, cheese, and melons at the market, and they had only vague conceptions o f the history and culture o f the indigenous population. O ne Russian in Baku, when asked w hether he spoke Azeri, replied: “O nly to swear.”44 T he outm igration o f Slavs from their own republics resulted in many mixed marriages during these decades. In fact nearly all mixed marriages (97 percent) involved at least one Slav partner. T he proportion o f such marriages reached its high point in the 1960s and declined thereafter (though unevenly), especially in Central Asia and Kazakhstan. In the RSFSR the children o f ethnically mixed couples, when applying for their first passport, tended to choose Russian as their nationality. If they lived in one o f the non-Russian union republics, then they w ould usually choose the titular nationality, except in Ukraine and Belorussia, where Russian was often preferred.45

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A striking feature o f these marriages is that more o f them joined a Slav woman w ith a non-Slav man than the other way around. This is probably because Russians, especially those living outside Russia, felt fewer reli­ gious or custom ary inhibitions to such marriages than did other nationali­ ties, inhibitions that would particularly restrain women. In this respect Russians represented “secularity” and "modernity” throughout the USSR. Among Russians the social control exercised by families had become weaker than among m any non-Russians, especially the peoples o f the Caucasus and Central Asia, more o f whom tended to stay at hom e in vil­ lage or small town. Since such control was stronger over the marriage choices o f young women than o f young men, women from those regions generally acted according to the expectations o f their kith and kin, and therefore chose husbands from am ong their own people.46 A turning point came in the 1970s, when inter-republican m igration flows began to go into reverse. For the first tim e the RSFSR experienced a net growth in population, while Kazakhstan, Kirgiziia, Turkmeniia, and Moldavia suffered a net loss. Some o f those leaving were non-Slavs w ith high skill levels seeking opportunities in Russia’s fast-growing cities. O th ­ ers, however, were Russians, who were discouraged to find that their lan­ guage, culture, and education no longer guaranteed them a head-start in the com petition for good jobs, superior housing, and other privileges re­ served for the elite. Local nationals tended, for example, to be preferred for entry to higher education and in the com petition for high-status jobs, especially in Central Asia and Kazakhstan.47 Before the late 1980s this de­ terioration in Russians’ life-chances did not lead to large-scale emigration from the non-Russian republics. Even where the num ber o f Russians out­ side Russia continued to rise, though, their proportion in the population was declining, because their birth rate was lower than that o f locals. D ur­ ing the 1970s, then, overall the prospect o f a "single Soviet people” fal­ tered and then began gradually to recede. T he tendency grew for people to regroup in their national homelands, especially in Central Asia and the Transcaucasus.48 (See Table A.1, p. 412.)

Languages T he tendency toward ethnic distinctiveness, beginning to be clearly marked in the 1960s, did not mean that non-Russians were ceasing to learn Russian. M odernization o f the Soviet Union generated two distinct and at first sight contradictory linguistic tendencies. O n the one hand the

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use o f the Russian language increased; on the other, so did that o f the m ain U nion republics, w ith the acception o f U kraine and Belorussia.49 Actually, o f course, this is not difficult to explain: m any non-Russians were learning Russian for instrum ental reasons, to make themselves avail­ able on the job m arket throughout the USSR. Similarly, in the non-Rus­ sian union republics, locals speaking dialects or m inority languages were learning the republican language as an aid to social mobility. For that rea­ son, m odernization strengthened both the all-U nion language and the m ajor republican national languages. U krainian and Belorussian formed the exceptions because they were so close linguistically to Russian. Up­ wardly mobile Ukrainians and Belorussians found it easy to adapt to the all-U nion language and preferred to do so. T he increased use o f Russian was caused by a num ber o f factors, first o f all the m igration o f Russians to non-Russian republics, where, as we have seen, they did not usually learn the local language. Second, non-Russians were increasing their life-chances through m ilitary prom otion or higher education, w hich in the natural and technical sciences was conducted in Russian alm ost everywhere. T hird, the flow o f paperwork generated by the center tended to increase, and all o f it was in Russian.50 T he drift toward Russian was accelerated by the language reform o f 1958, whose objective was to make Russian the “second native language” o f all non-Russians, though this was done not in order to Russify but in order to Sovietize.51 Offered the choice o f Russian-language or non-Rus­ sian instruction, a high proportion o f parents in m ost republics chose the Russian option, so th at their children m ight have better life chances throughout the USSR. T h at was true even in the Baltic republics and Georgia, where many people were opposed to Russians on principle; par­ ents w ith anti-Russian convictions could still calculate that their children would benefit from a good knowledge o f the Russian language. O n the other hand, the tendency was weaker in the C entral Asian republics, where social m obility was less prized. Parents chose Russian-language schools especially frequently in Ukraine and Belorussia, where educated people in any case spoke Russian w ithout difficulty, and often did so even at hom e.52 T hus in 1955 in Ukraine 73 percent o f children enrolled in Ukrainian-language schools, but in 1967 the figure had fidlen to 62 percent, while in prim ary schools it was esti­ m ated that the proportion o f children receiving their lessons in Russian doubled between 1953 and 1973. In Belorussia in 1959 slightly more

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than half the urban population spoke Belorussian as their native language, but thereafter the proportion began to decline. In 1959 60 percent o f newspapers in the republic were in Belorussian, but by 1970 that propor­ tion had M e n to 36 percent.59 Urbanization, w hich had begun by boost­ ing Belorussian, was now downgrading it in favor o f Russian. M any Ukrainians and Belorussians were naturally alarmed by this tendency, fearing that their national identity was gradually being erased. As for the U nion as a whole, by 1974-1975 64 percent o f day-school pupils were being taught in Russian-language schools, while the proportion o f the population claiming some fluency in Russian rose from 49 percent in 1970 to 62 percent in 1979.54 Non-Russians were ready to accept Russian as a means o f personal ad­ vancement but not as an instrum ent o f rule. In 1978 proposals to make Russian an official language o f Georgia, o f equal status w ith Georgian, provoked a massive student dem onstration in Tbilisi. W hat Georgians feared was that Russian, though theoretically equal, would soon in prac­ tice replace Georgian in m ost spheres o f life. Such was Moscow’s fear o f upsetting Georgians that the proposal was w ithdraw n.59 Similarly, in au­ tum n 1980 Estonian secondary-school students took to the streets o f Tallinn to call for an end to w hat they called "Russian rule.” T heir protest provoked open letters from high-ranking Estonian intellectuals objecting to the increasing num ber o f Russian workers com ing in for large indus­ trial projects, and showing how Russian was increasingly being used for official business and was gradually squeezing out Estonian in the schools and in book publication.56 A spontaneous differentiation o f linguistic functions was taking place, w ith Russian being used for industry, science, technology, m ilitary service, wholesale trade, and adm inistration involving the center, while the local language— republican or regional— was used for agriculture, the service sector, retail trade, the hum anities, and local adm inistration. Russians were seldom employed in the latter spheres outside their own republic, and so they refrained from learning the local language. M ost o f the Rus­ sians who d id take the trouble to learn a second language were women, many o f them probably women who had m arried into a non-Russian family. In any case women were more likely than men to be involved w ith the spheres o f life in which the local language was regularly employed.57 Ukraine was in an especially problem atic situation. It was the second m ost populous republic, home to the Soviet U nions m ost productive agri-

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culture and m uch o f its m ajor industry. Yet its language and national cul­ ture were fading in the face o f the Russian linguistic onslaught. In the towns o f the east and south, Russian was the m ost com m only spoken lan­ guage, though w ith an adm ixture o f U krainian vocabulary, pronuncia­ tion, and syntax. In the 1980s three-quarters o f the population o f Odessa spoke Russian as a native language; less than one-quarter spoke Ukrai­ nian, even then w ith Russian words mixed in. M ost Odessites considered Ukrainian a low-status dialect for country bum pkins. In the Donbass m ost people knew U krainian from school— though less so after 1958— but spoke Russian am ong themselves at hom e. In the Dovzhenko film studio in Kiev a strange situation arose. M ost o f the actors did not know U krainian, so their soundtracks were dubbed in U krainian for showing to audiences in the hom e republic. T hen, however, for wider circulation in the USSR, they had to be redubbed in Russian, the first language o f m ost o f the actors!58 Incongruities o f this kind led some U krainian intellectuals to claim that their country was being deliberately Russified by the Soviet authorities. In 1979 the U krainian Helsinki G roup circulated a samizdat letter by Iurii Badzio com plaining that scientific works and foreign classics were being published in Russian rather than U krainian, that the Kiev O per­ etta Theater staged its shows in Russian, and that television and radio broadcasts in Kiev were largely Russian. Even in the Ukrainian-language schools, "teachers . . . converse w ith each other and w ith the pupils in Russian, thereby instilling children w ith a contem ptuous attitude towards the U krainian language and culture.” Ukraine, Badzio concluded, was be­ ing transform ed into a border region o f the Russian state. T he literary critic Ivan D ziuba lam ented that U krainian cities had become “gigantic Russifying mincing-machines” and noted ironically that “there can be a kind o f U krainophobia that springs from a great love o f the Ukraine as the ‘pearl* o f Russia.”59

Rituals T he antireligious campaign o f the early 1960s had outlawed m any venera­ ble customs and thus posed w ith renewed urgency the question o f giving Soviet citizens a viable set o f rituals through which they could make sense o f their lives. Since the m id-1920s the holiest shrine in Soviet ritual life had been Lenin’s mausoleum, and Red Square in front o f it the principal

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sacred space. W hen the leaders stood on the mausoleum and saluted the march-past on May 1 and November 7 each year, they received, as it were, a fresh injection o f his charisma and passed it on to the soldiers, workers, and young people who were parading below, exhibiting the productivity, energy, and m ilitary m ight o f their country. Soldiers would visit the m au­ soleum at the start o f their m ilitary service. Young newlyweds would go there to dedicate their marriage and their future family. They w ould usu­ ally then proceed around the corner to the Kremlin wall, to stand before the M onum ent to the Unknown Soldier and recall those who had died to defend the Soviet U nion.60 Alarmed at the declining birth rate, the authorities tried from the late 1950s to restore some o f the solemn symbolic elements o f marriage in or­ der to deepen the meaning o f family life, both for the couple and for soci­ ety as a whole. M unicipalities built or adapted special W edding Palaces, to which young couples would come w ith their friends and relatives to hear a short hom ily on wedded love before exchanging rings and signing the civil register. Music would be played, possibly by a band, more likely on a pho­ nograph. In the best-appointed palaces there was an eternal flame, from which the bridegroom would light a torch. T he master o f ceremonies would exhort the couple: “Take this torch w ith the holy fire. Let it be your family keepsake. A nd through all your life carry the flame o f love and de­ votion to our M otherland, the fire o f the hearts o f the heroes who have defended its freedom and independence.”61 T hus the ceremony attem pted to forge a link between the M otherland, the memory o f the war dead, the building o f socialism, conjugal love, and the creation o f a new family. Ceremonies were also introduced for other life-cycle events, such as a child’s first entry into civic life, when he or she joined the Young Pioneers. T he entrant w ould receive a new red scarf and, before donning it, would solemnly pronounce an oath: “I, a young Pioneer o f the Soviet U nion, in front o f my comrades solemnly promise to warmly love my Soviet M oth­ erland, to live, learn and struggle as bequeathed to us by the great Lenin, and as the Com m unist Party teaches.” O nce a year all Pioneers would pa­ rade before a local war memorial, salute their banner, and present wreaths, while a reader proclaimed the words o f the anthem “Eternal Glory to the Heroes.” Similarly, on the first day o f their schooling, children would ar­ rive in new clothes, line up, and march into the assembly hall to place flowers before a bust o f Lenin, after which the star pupils o f the previous year would present them w ith their first textbooks.62

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Russians’ attitude to the very beginning o f life was, however, more tra­ ditional. Even during the harshest periods o f persecution o f the church, many parents— or grandparents— would try to have their children bap­ tized. This was true even o f some nonbelievers: they were continuing pop­ ular tradition as a kind o f insurance policy for their children, to give them the best chance o f health and success in life.63 T he regime did not ignore the past. It endeavored to adapt rituals horn Christian or even pagan festivals already widely popular before the revolu­ tion. But such celebrations were no longer organized by the skhod; they no longer represented the initiative o f village people and were disconnected from any religious festival. O ne example was the start o f the harvest, origi­ nally St. Ilia’s Day in July. O ne o f the older kolkhoz women w ould begin the scything, bind the first sheaf, decorate it w ith flowers and ribbons, and bear it to the D orn Kultury, accompanied by songs from the local folklore group. T he harvest festival on the second Sunday o f O ctober was replaced by the A ll-Union Day o f Agricultural W orkers, when banners and prizes w ould be awarded to brigades held to have perform ed well. Similarly maslenitsa. Shrove Tuesday, was shorn o f its religious associations and re­ placed by the ceremony o f Farewell to W inter, which included the season’s last ice-skating com petitions, as well as horse-riding, singing, and danc­ ing. These rituals tended to hide w ith the depopulation o f the country­ side. W hen revived in the towns, they were unmistakably synthetic and belonged to the same category o f entertainm ent as going to the theater. People enjoyed them w ithout necessarily attributing deep meaning to them .64 D eath faced the C om m unist regime w ith its m ost formidable chal­ lenge, partly because Soviet policies caused so m any prem ature deaths, and partly because it is difficult to be positive about death when one no longer believes in a life after it. T he official Soviet handbook to civil cere­ m onial, published in 1977, om itted funerals entirely. For a consistent ma­ terialist the only sensible course was to dispose o f the corpse as swiftly and hygienically as possible. T he regime did experim ent w ith crem ation horn the outset, but it was slow to catch on. In this symbolic realm the popula­ tion rem ained faithful longer than in any other to O rthodox prescrip­ tions, which forbade crem ation (since it made impossible the resurrection o f the body). From the 1930s, however, it gradually became habitual in the large towns, where the closure o f churches often m eant the destruc­ tion and “redevelopment” o f cemeteries.65

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In practice, though, for this m ost solemn o f rituals, the people rejected materialism and stuck to familiar practices as far as they could, whatever the authorities m ight think. Religious ritual, even w ithout priests, was more tenacious in funerals than in any other ceremonial practice. In the village o f Viriatino, in Tambov oblast, one study showed that in the five years between 1952 and 1956, all but three funerals had been religious: villagers themselves had recited w hat they could recall o f the sacred texts over the body o f the dead. It was still customary there on Shrovetide for older women to place the first batch o f cooked pancakes beneath an icon, in order to rem ind families o f their departed relatives.66 Even official funerals, though w ithout religious rites, preserved as m uch o f the traditional ceremonial as was com patible w ith atheism. T he body w ould be washed, placed in the coffin w ith the lid open, then displayed w ith a photograph and medals, usually in a funeral pavilion or House o f Civic Funerals. An official would pronounce a dedication containing such words as "Citizen o f the R SFSR . . . has concluded his life’s journey. The M otherland takes leave o f her son/daughter. May a good memory o f him / her be preserved eternally in our hearts.” Relatives w ould then accompany the deceased to the cemetery, where a solemn burial would take place, w ith mourners casting earth on the coffin. T hen they would adjourn for a shared meal, w ith speeches and recollections o f the recently departed. O f­ ten memorial meetings (pom inki) would be held on the ninth, tw entieth, and/or fortieth day after the death.67 T he funerals o f well-known people had powerful public resonance, es­ pecially if the deceased had had an uneasy relationship w ith the regime. W hen Boris Pasternak was buried in May 1960, his coffin was carried from his dacha to the Peredelkino cemetery by a relay o f prom inent w rit­ ers, published and unpublished. The philosopher Valentin Asmus made a speech over the grave, openly blaming official persecution for hastening Pasternak’s death.68 Such funerals seemed to endow people both w ith civic courage and w ith a certain impunity, perhaps because they suggested a di­ mension o f existence that even the m ost powerful state could not control. They bore witness to a spiritual life in which it seemed cheap and unwor­ thy to m outh platitudes or untruths. In the late 1970s the British sociologist Christel Lane concluded that the m ost successful Soviet rituals were those which marked a m om ent o f passage in life, especially those involving young people and those com­ memorating the Second W orld War. The ceremonies that replaced former

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religious or seasonal festivals were less successful, probably because they were synthetic, imposed from above, and bore a clearly marked, relatively narrow official meaning rather than a spontaneously generated symbolic one. All the same, people participated in them , probably because the old rituals had faded away, and because they offered the opportunity for vari­ ety, social contact, and a solemn, festive m ood that made their com mu­ nity life somewhat more meaningful. T heir participation generated “a dif­ fuse kind o f identification w ith the political system.”69 T he one festival that was unam biguously popular as well as officially approved was the celebration o f Victory Day on May 9. As a chance ac­ quaintance told the principal American historian o f war com m em oration in 1985, “V ictory Day is the only real holiday, the only one that means anything. As for their holidays— their May Day, their anniversary o f the revolution— you can send them all to hell! But Victory Day . . . Can you imagine: tw enty m illion dead? So m uch suffering. . . I always cry on Vic­ tory Day!” Its reinstatem ent in 1965 as a public holiday was a m ajor turn­ ing point in the evolution o f the regime’s symbolism. People would dress in their best clothes, veterans w ould pin on their medals, and everyone w ould go to visit the local cemetery to remember deceased friends and rel­ atives— not only those killed in the war—w ith a picnic and a glass o f vodka at the graveside. Veterans w ould gather in public parks w ith their form er colleagues to discuss their regimental memories, recall lost com­ rades, and reflect sadly on the decadence o f contem porary youth. Then they would gather in one another’s apartm ents, watch on television the parade from Red Square, and eat w hat for m any was the greatest feast o f the year, swapping stories o f the past. This was the Russians’ greatest an­ nual celebration o f memory, when they would attem pt together to link their past and present into some kind o f continuing narrative.70 In some ways V ictory Day replaced all the festivals Russians had lost along w ith their rural way o f life, their national religion, and any agreed version o f their national history. In the later decades o f the USSR war memorials became the main sites o f public m em ory and the focus o f m any public rituals. They symbolized w hat the authorities and the great m ajority o f Russians could agree on. They rem inded the people why they were making such great sacrifices to guarantee their country’s m ilitary security. They augm ented the pride o f Red Army officers, gave meaning to the grim lives o f conscripts, and legit­ imated and glorified the toil and privations o f millions. True, they em-

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bodied forgetting as well as remembering. T he giant alum inium female figure holding aloft a sword and shield on the banks o f the River D nieper in Kiev both recalled and suppressed memory. Dedicated by Brezhnev in 1980, she called to m ind the huge losses o f soldiers and civilians in the batdes for Kiev in 1941 and 1943. Yet at the same tim e, she stood above the M onastery o f the Caves, the m ost ancient site o f the Russian O rtho­ dox Church, whose golden domes featured in some o f her photographs, but which had been closed to the public for two decades. She consigned to oblivion the fact that many Ukrainians had welcomed the departure o f the Soviet forces in 1941 and that some had never become fully recon­ ciled to their later return. She drew a veil over the millions o f wartim e deaths that resulted from Soviet policies rather than from the Germ an in­ vasion. The memorial, moreover, fists no names o f the dead. As Michael Ignatieff has com m ented, Soviet war memorials “convey the heroic and the grandiose, never the hum ble and particular.”71

Stagnation By the end o f the 1960s the relaunch o f utopia had already blown itself out. Khrushchev had fallen into disgrace. In 1968 the Warsaw Pact occu­ pation o f Czechoslovakia brought an end to hopes o f a pluralist form o f socialism, or “socialism w ith a hum an face.” In 1969 the U nited States landed the first man on the m oon and thus invalidated the Soviet claim to leadership in the exploration o f the cosmos: not a disaster, but a symbolic defeat on territory where the Soviet U nion had asserted pioneer rights. The year 1980, once billed as the target date for entry into full Com ­ munism, gradually faded from the media. T he regime no longer promised the present generation that it would “five in Com m unism ”: blander, more noncom m ittal red banners appeared instead. Political propaganda focused more and more on the past, on w hat had already been achieved, on the great-power status o f the Soviet U nion, on the defense o f the “social­ ist bloc,” and above all on the great, undeniable victory in the Second W orld War. Public fife centered around the celebration o f anniversaries o f past events, sometimes quite artificial ones, like the 175th anniver­ sary o f Pushkins birth in 1974. T he process began w ith one anniversary that at least was a round figure, the 100th anniversary o f Lenin’s birth in April 1970, for which “preparation” started in the media nearly two years in advance. By the tim e the date was at last reached, “hundredth an-

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niversary (ever” had been diagnosed as an acute form o f boredom: nom ostoiubileib.72 T he contrast can be seen in two literary works that appeared only a de­ cade apart, in 1965 and 1976, on the same subject, the construction o f the Bratsk hydroelectric power station on the Angara River in Siberia. T he earlier work, by Evgenii Evtushenko, Bratskii GES, was a lengthy ode to the building o f the future. It celebrated the new dam as the culm ination, first o f an age-old tradition o f m onum ental construction going back to the Egyptian pyramids, and second, o f the Russian revolutionary heritage that began w ith the seventeenth-century Cossack rebel Stenka Razin, who freed slaves like those who had toiled on the pyramids. A t the begin­ ning Evtushenko appeals to the Russian poets o f the past— Pushkin, Lermontov, Nekrasov, Pasternak—to assist him in his task. A t the end they return to observe the com pletion both o f the dam and o f the ode, while Evtushenko evokes cardinal elements o f the Russian tradition: liter­ ature, rebellion, m otherhood: And, as if bearing Russia’s own com m and N ot to barter ideas for mere words, Pushkin, Tolstoi, and Lenin looked down A nd Stenka’s daredevil spirit. I am glad that I was born in Russia W ith Stenka’s daredevil spirit. In the Bratsk GES I dim ly make out Russia, your m aternal image.73 Eleven years later came the novel by the Irkutsk w riter Valentin Ras­ putin, Proshchanie s M ateroi (Farewell to M atera), the story o f an island village due to be submerged by the Angara during the construction o f the Bratsk dam. Here the atm osphere is entirely different. There is no celebra­ tion o f man’s free creativity, no expectation o f a great future. O n the con­ trary, the destruction o f the village is seen as an irreplaceable loss, because it violates the villagers’ bonds w ith their ancestors, and also w ith a way o f life that has lasted for centuries. In place o f Evtushenko’s upbeat, declama­ tory rhetoric, we have Rasputin’s subdued and elegiac tones, evoking lov­ ingly the cyclical rhythm s o f the seasons and the details o f everyday life in the doom ed village. Daria, the old woman who is the last to leave the is­ land, believes that hum an attem pts to transform nature bear witness, not

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to m ans self-emancipation, but on the contrary to his subjection to a new form o f slavery: “M an thinks he’s master o f life, but he lost that mastery lo-o-ong ago. . . . Life has got the better o f him , has climbed on to his back and demands w hat she wants o f him .”74 By 1976 Rasputin was m uch more in tune w ith the m ood o f the read­ ing public than Evtushenko. This reorientation o f Soviet cultural life along w ith the regime s doctrinal impasse set severe lim its on the extent to w hich Soviet society could change, or to which people could even put for­ ward ideas on how it should change. But that very deadlock m eant that debate had to seek new directions, even if it could not do so publicly. It w ent forward am ong the elite in confidential memos, and am ong intellec­ tuals in samizdat and in semi-clandestine discussion groups and study cir­ cles based in scientific institutes. O blique reflections o f these discreet po­ lemics sometimes surfaced in literary journals, now as in the nineteenth century the bearer o f ideas too controversial for a proper public airing.

"Joint Responsibility” Triumphant Messianic socialism, then, was dead by the 1970s as a belief and value system directed toward the future. But the sense o f a special mission had survived as (1) the basis o f a claim to be a w orld power; (2) a belief and value system deriving its im petus from the past, especially from wartime victory; (3) the ideological ballast o f a society that had become rigid, hier­ archical, and conservative. This was, if you like, petrified messianism. By now, though, unlike the 1930s, the Soviet U nion did have its own es­ tablished social structure, its own hierarchy, and its own social mem­ ory, which rested on a Russian substratum . The attem pt to create a self­ regulating “state o f all the people” brought out and consolidated certain features o f this substratum . As we have seen, the basic principle o f selfregulation to which Russians were accustomed was krugovaia poruka. It continued to serve now in a somewhat modified form. T he m ost penetrating, if at times erratic, analyst o f Soviet society at this stage was Aleksandr Zinoviev, a mathem atical logician at the Institute o f Philosophy in Moscow. T he tide o f his first book, Yawning Heights (Ziiaiushchie vysoty, 1976)— not, o f course, published in the USSR— evokes in a verbal pun the haunting absence o f the messianic vision. Zinoviev m aintained that Soviet society was organized and regulated not from above but from below, by the collectives, or “com m unes,” which

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constituted its units. These collectives were workplaces— factories (or in­ dividual shops w ithin them ), farms, transport depots, schools, hospitals, research institutes, branches o f professional unions, and so on. T he com­ munes constituted the setting where individuals conducted the funda­ m ental business o f their lives: "At the level o f the prim ary collective peo­ ple not only work, they spend tim e in the com pany o f people they know well. They swap news, amuse themselves, do all kinds o f things to pre­ serve and improve their position, have contacts w ith other people on whom their well-being depends, go to innum erable meetings, get their va­ cation vouchers, living space and supplem entary foodstuffs.”79 According to Zinoviev, the com m une was the battlefield on w hich the Hobbesian war o f each individual against every other was played out; but its mem­ bers were also vitally interested in its preservation. T he resulting interplay o f individual and collective motives made up the texture o f everyday life w ithin it. T he ostensible econom ic purpose o f the com m une— produc­ tion o f some com m odity or service for society—was secondary to these social functions. Existence outside a com m une was more or less impossible: in a society o f shortages the com m une guaranteed access to a basic m inim um . It of­ fered the setting w ithin which individuals exchanged goods and services they could not obtain through the official economy.76 In any case, those who attem pted life outside were either in the crim inal underground or could at any tim e be arrested and indicted for “dronery.” Life w ithin the com m une, by contrast, was in many ways easy. Members did not have to work hard: pilfering, tukhta (padding the figures), m utual cover-ups, and the absence o f a m arket ensured that everyone w ould get by, no m atter how deficient the output o f the collective. O n the other hand, talented or unusual people inside a com m une found life extremely difficult. To en­ sure the survival o f the com mune, its members would take action against individuals whose behavior m ight threaten its existence through noncon­ form ity w ith the prevailing ideology and social norms. For that reason, the secret police and the C om m unist Party’s panoply o f disciplinary mea­ sures were alm ost superfluous: communes could be relied on to police themselves and to discipline or even expel members who did not subm it to the will o f the collective. M utual surveillance remained, as always, a param ount function o f the collective bound by krugovaia poruka. The “cadres departm ent” and the secret police were, then, no more than a “concentrated essence” o f Soviet society.77

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T he com m une was the indispensable basic unit o f the system, then, yet crucially it also subverted the system. Its productive inefficiency in the long run underm ined the economy and hence the USSR’s claim to greatpower status. It also offered opportunities for getting around the official rationing o f inform ation and ideas: through gossip exchanged at work one could learn a great deal that was not reported in the mass media, and one had the chance to try out ones own assessments and have them informally criticized. (Anyone who tried to conduct genuine business in a Soviet workplace will have observed w ith w hat reluctance employees broke off the endless conversations that were the real content o f their day.) T he risk o f denunciation for political heresy was ever present, though relatively slight where group cohesion was strong; the greater danger in such discus­ sions was violation o f the group’s norms. The line was another social “institution”— ubiquitous in a society o f shortages—which fulfilled the same function. In lines people were forced to spend hours in each others company, their m inds o f necessity focused on the economy’s deficiencies, and w ith nothing to do but discuss them . M en at a loose end would often gather in threes, contribute a ruble each for a botde o f vodka, and drink it together while engaging in unrestrained gossip. Khrushchev’s campaign to involve ordinary people in the law and to make Soviet society self-governing increased the power o f prim ary collec­ tives over their members. Laws dating from the tim e o f revolutionary zeal in the early 1920s were revived. Local soviets, trade union cells, and house committees were empowered to set up so-called comrades’ courts, consist­ ing o f judges chosen from their own members, to try m inor offenses and impose noncustodial sentences, which m ight be a small fine, a reprim and, corrective labor, or in more serious cases dismissal from work. In the same spirit, and in order to reduce the population o f prisons, criminal courts now sometimes dealt w ith m inor offenders by “binding them over in surety” (peredat na poruki) to labor collectives, whose task was to m onitor their behavior and report on it periodically to the court.78 O ne task o f comrades’ courts was to expose and shame heavy drinkers or people illegally brewing samogon. A nother was to examine the way o f life o f individuals who seemed to have more money or property than their working income would suggest. Yet another was to identify “drones,” peo­ ple doing no socially useful work. If w ithin a certain period they did not find regular employment, the comrades could hand them over to the au-

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thorities for a crim inal indictm ent. T his provision could prove very awk­ ward for professional or creative individuals who were working informally and did not belong to an accredited union.79 U nder its terms the poet Iosif Brodskii was indicted for dronery in a district court in 1964. Aged tw enty-three at the tim e, he had been w riting and translating poetry for some years, m uch o f it nonconform ist from the regimes viewpoint, and w ithout joining any officially recognized literary association. A t the tim e o f his trial the newspaper Vechemii Leningrad ac­ cused him o f quitting a beginners’ study circle at the local Palace o f Cul­ ture in order “to scramble up M ount Parnassus on his own . . . H e contin­ ues to lead a parasitic lifestyle. T he healthy twenty-six-year-old [sic] lad has done no socially useful w ork for four years. H e lives on casual earn­ ings, and in an emergency his father lets him have a small sum. . . . It is high tim e for Brodskii to pull him self together, start doing some work, and stop being a drone at the expense o f his parents and society.”80 This is the language o f envious insiders expelling an unusual and tal­ ented individual. Brodskii’s altercation w ith the judge offers a classic in­ sight into this particular collision o f two m ental worlds: j u d g e : W hat is your specialty? b r o d s k i i : I am a poet— a poet and translator. j u d g e : S o who recognizes you as a poet? W ho certified your status as

a poet? b r o d s k i i : Nobody. [Undefiantly] W ho certified my status as a hu­

m an being? j u d g e : But have you received training? b r o d s k i i : For what? j u d g e : For being a poet. Haven’t you tried taking a training course in . . . where they teach you to . . . b r o d s k i i : I didn’t think it required training. j u d g e : Well, how do you become a poet, then? b r o d s k i i : I think i t . . . [lost for words] . . . comes from G od.81 T he judge was unconvinced, and she sentenced Brodskii to five years o f internal exile for “dronery.” Altogether, then, the courts reinforced the m utual surveillance and com pulsory egalitarianism o f traditional Russian institutions. Each collective had its own leadership group, known as the aktiv. A ktiv

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members were the people who em bodied in themselves the norms o f the collective and so were looked up to by the other members— a kind o f col­ lective starosta, in fact. They had personal links to the external authority world, the cadres departm ent, the trade union, the local police station, and the local party cell, and could call on their backing for dealing w ith the m ost difficult or intractable cases. From the 1960s the authorities came increasingly to rely on such aktivy in prisons and labor camps.82 Soviet officials also utilized aktivy in the armed forces, w ith results that proved extremely damaging. D uring the 1950s, as Khrushchev shifted his priorities toward the missile forces, a large num ber o f officers in conven­ tional form ations were laid off, a measure that degraded the prestige and morale o f the officer corps as a whole. A t the same tim e the social compo­ sition o f the army was changing: there were fewer relatively docile peasant recruits and more urban ones. These were more versed in the ways o f the world, but also more affected by urban problems like alcoholism, drugs, and gang warfare, and more likely to bridle at commands they considered unreasonable. Such changes destabilized barracks discipline and rendered N C O s, notoriously the weak link in the Russian and Soviet army, even more vulnerable. They would often react by leaving discipline to be en­ forced on the m ost recent recruits by second- and third-year conscripts. T he result o f this casual approach was the spread o f heavy drinking and drug-taking and the establishm ent o f “do-it-yourself” discipline. Here the aggressively masculine mores o f young soldiers living w ithout women overcame the puritan and conservative features o f traditional Russian col­ lectives, and turned army units into vicious parodies o f joint responsibil­ ity, dedicated to male bonding through drink, drugs, and the hum ilia­ tion o f juniors. T he elders (dedy or “grandfathers”) would take charge o f the barracks in off-duty periods and compel recent recruits to perform the menial tasks: dean their weapons, polish their boots, launder their dothes, and dean out the latrines. Any recalcitrance, the slightest viola­ tion o f accepted practices, would be punished, sometimes extremely bru­ tally, by ritual hum iliations, beatings, even rape. This was dedovshchina, or “grandfathers’ rule.” N C O s would be reluctant to interfere, and m ight even support such treatm ent as an aid to discipline. Officers who were aware o f dedovshchina would be reluctant to report it, since it would re­ flect badly on their own leadership qualities. For that reason such prac­ tices, once established, were extremely difficult to restrain, let alone elim­ inate.

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As national identities became more pronounced and ethnic tensions m ounted, dedovshchina often took on an ethnic coloring. Recruits from the Caucasus or C entral Asia w ould sometimes refuse to perform menial labor on the grounds that it was w om ens work. Young soldiers from those regions and from the Baltics w ould be singled out for m istreatm ent; then their co-nationals from neighboring barracks, linked inform ally by their own zemliachestvo (regional association), w ould exact retaliation. T he re­ sult could be extended feuds, w ith vicious brawls involving dozens o f sol­ diers, some o f w hom w ould be seriously injured or even killed.83 T he growth o f dedovshchina was disastrous not just for the armed forces but also for Soviet society as a whole. After 1945 the arm y had been the pride o f the country. It had not simply enjoyed an extremely high reputa­ tion am ong ordinary Soviet citizens; it had also been a success story in terms o f the integration o f ethnic m inorities. Brezhnev called it “a school o f internationalism .” By the 1970s it had deteriorated into the very oppo­ site: an Augean stables o f alcoholism, drug abuse, and vice, and an arena for interethnic feuds. Rumors o f barrack-room incidents, sometimes ren­ dered more lurid in the telling, spread widely, so that young m en and their parents, especially non-Slavs, would go to almost any lengths to avoid m ilitary service. O ne recruit, on reporting for service, said he had heard stories from old soldiers from w hich he imagined the arm y to be “a prison where people are beaten, hum iliated, and insulted.”84 T he degradation o f the army underm ined the Russian-Soviet patrio­ tism and the sense o f international mission w hich had underlain the atti­ tudes o f m any ordinary Russians. By 1985 soldiers’ m others were w riting to the Soviet leaders pleading for withdrawal from Afghanistan: "Interna­ tional duty? In the nam e o f what? D o the Afghanis themselves w ant it? Is it w orth the lives o f our children, who do not understand why they were sent there, w hat they are fighting for, killing old people and children?”85 W ithin a few years soldiers’ m others had set up their own pressure group, "M other’s H eart,” to m onitor abuse, noncom bat injury and death, and to lobby for guaranteed soldiers’ rights. It had branches all over Russia, and agitated against using the Soviet Army to suppress national liberation movements inside the USSR, organizing large dem onstrations, for exam­ ple, when the army occupied Baku in January 1990.“ T he mothers’ movement offered dear testim ony that Russians were losing the will to go on paying the cost in young men’s lives which empires dem and in order to subjugate the subordinate peoples.

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Dedovshchina was an especially injurious stigma, because it sullied the reputation o f the Soviet U nion precisely where it had been highest: in mil­ itary strength and in the cultivation o f interethnic cooperation. It under­ m ined the attem pt to forge a new cohesive identity for the country after “building Com m unism ” had faded as an ideal. Between the m id-1960s and the m id-1980s, then, the Soviet U nion was unmistakably becoming ethnicized: that is to say, ethnic identity was be­ com ing the prim ary marker o f social and political status. This develop­ m ent was hard on the nationality that on principle was pan-Soviet, the Russians. They were beginning to find that the Soviet diaspora did not bring them the life-chances they had been taught to expea, that the in­ creasingly self-aware local ethnic patron-client networks excluded them . Yet the so-called Russian Republic was not a prom ising hom eland for them either. Its cities were crowded and polluted, not conducive to having families and bringing up children, while its villages were under-populated, under-productive, and demoralized. T he Soviet Army, which had offered a prestigious and satisfying career, was no longer the proud showpiece o f a secure m ultiethnic society. It began to look as if the Soviet U nion was not achieving its professed ideals, but in the attem pt to do so was underm in­ ing Russia’s own culture, economy, and identity. T he stage was set for the Russian question to become the nemesis o f the Soviet U nion.

TIE RETURN OF POLITICS

T he rediscovery o f a “Russia” separate from the Soviet U nion began in the very heart o f the Soviet establishment: not am ong the released prisoners o f the Gulag, not am ong the deported nationalities, not am ong the victim ­ ized peasants, not even am ong the working class that had so obviously been cheated o f its role as “leading class.” In fact Russia began its rebirth am ong writers and scientists, people who accepted at least passively the tenets o f the ideology, and who worked in institutes, associations, and on journals created and m aintained by the Soviet authorities themselves. This reawakening was inherent in the nature o f Soviet society. From the very outset the official ideology and the published constitution had coexisted uneasily w ith inform al and personalized structures which were needed to ensure that the country functioned at all. A t all levels and in all walks o f life individuals were cushioned from the harshness and inef­ ficiency o f the system by their prim ary collectives; and in the post-Stalin period these collectives had been given new responsibilities for society’s self-regulation. Inform al collectives played as vital a role outside the official sphere as w ithin it. As the fear o f denunciation abated during the 1950s, as domes­ tic construction accelerated and people moved out o f com munal apart­ ments into their own private spaces, it became easier for like-m inded peo­ ple, wherever they worked or lived, to gather casually in one another’s homes and chat about whatever concerned them . The new apartm ents were not spacious, and one room often fulfilled several functions, so that

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the natural venue for such gatherings was the kitchen, where food and vodka could be produced from the fridge and tea from the kettle on the stove. W ith the rapid growth o f higher education in the 1960s and 1970s, more people than ever before developed intellectual interests and had ideas to exchange. T he attraction o f forbidden fruit, and the long-stand­ ing obsession w ith the U nited States, m eant that m ost o f those ideas came from the West. Joseph Brodskii called this younger generation “the m ost bookish in the history o f Russia”; “This was the only generation for whom G iotto and M andelstam were more imperative than their own personal destinies. Poorly dressed but somehow still elegant, shuffled by the dum b hands o f their imm ediate masters . . . they still retained their love for the non-exis­ tent (or existing only in their balding heads) thing called ‘civilization.’ Hopelessly cut off from the rest o f the world, they thought at least that world was like themselves.”1 There was a certain rural coziness about the coteries in which they would gather. All the same, in the larger towns these circles attracted peo­ ple o f high intellectual distinction and ability, who in the real (as distinct from the imagined) W est w ould have been overwhelmed w ith profes­ sional and adm inistrative work, but who in the Soviet U nion were dis­ trusted by the authorities and hence largely free o f responsibility. Some o f them , moreover, were not able to publish regularly because o f cultural censorship. So they had tim e on their hands and a desire to com m unicate and exchange ideas. In Stalins tim e they m ight well have been denounced as “enemies o f the people” for their nonconform ist ideas. Now they were relatively free and able to express their thoughts unhindered— at least in oral form, and provided they trusted their interlocutors. T he question o f whom to trust once again became crucial. This was the natural milieu for dissent. In the 1950s and 1960s many participants in such gatherings were intellectuals who had once enthusias­ tically supported the Com m unist project, only to see it tarnished, first in the 1930s terror, then in the petty infighting that followed Khrushchevs “secret speech.” They were by now the m ost em bittered and articulate op­ ponents o f Com m unism , both in theory and in practice. If they were non-Russian— and especially if they were Jewish— they had an additional, national reason for despising and condem ning the existing regime. Such milieux generated the first underground poetry, later works o f fiction, and eventually political, philosophical, and religious treatises.2

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“W hy did the Soviet authorities create their own gravedigger— Soviet culture?” asked a literary critic alter the fall o f the USSR.3 They did so be­ cause the C om m unist Party continued to depend on ideology for its legit­ imacy, and this overriding political need bestowed high status on those whose business was ideas. T he regime paid them to generate and propa­ gate those ideas, and it offered relatively high salaries and privileges to those on whose w ork it particularly depended— am ong them the scien­ tists who elaborated new technologies and the writers and journalists who gave ideas popular currency. A t the very least, even the m ost modestly placed intellectuals had security o f em ploym ent and a guaranteed m ini­ m um income. W ith the dism anding o f indiscrim inate terror, the “joint responsibility” structure o f professional organizations— designed in the 1930s to subject professional people to party authority— now began, par­ adoxically, sometimes to w ork the other way around and to offer litde oases o f security for independent thinking. These factors applied espe­ cially in academic and cultural institutions: there circles o f like-m inded intellectuals could find a refuge, as well as support from colleagues, to study and discuss themes not envisaged in the official curriculum . T he Academy o f Sciences discreedy protected some o f the principal nonconform ists. T he distinguished Russian physicist Petr Kapitsa once remarked: “To be able to m aintain democracy and legality it is absolutely essential for a country to have an independent insdtution to serve as an arbiter in constitutional problems. In the U nited States this role is re­ served for the Supreme C ourt, and in Britain for the House o f Lords. It looks as if in the Soviet U nion that function falls morally on the Academy o f Sciences.”4 In science and the arts, then, the primary collectives formed riny bridge­ heads o f freedom o f speech. They did so because their function was in im­ plicit tension w ith the official ideology. Science at the highest level re­ quires the freedom to think, facilities for keeping up w ith the latest internarional research, and opportunities to discuss ideas w ith leading foreign colleagues; the regime thus had no choice but to provide these resources, even if on a tighdy rationed basis. Soviet officials also recognized the im­ portance o f the arts and especially o f literature, both for the education o f young people and for m aintaining the cultural prestige o f the Soviet U nion in the w orld at large. In particular, the reputation o f nineteenthcentury Russian literature conferred on its m id-tw entieth-century inheri­ tors a moral status given to few others in Soviet society.

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Literature played the role o f the Greek classics in the form ation o f the Victorian Christian gentleman: it introduced an element o f tolerated, even revered, ideological unorthodoxy inherited from an officially ap­ proved past. If your parents were cultured people, or you had access to a good library, you could read the thoroughly heretical and antisocialist Dostoevskii. His unacknowledged closeness to the imperial aspects o f the official doctrine made him a kind o f "shadow” ideologist o f the Soviet pe­ riod. But even the more “acceptable” Tolstoi encouraged a strict con­ science, truth-telling, and extreme suspicion o f the state. Reading them was a revelation for m any young Russians. A teacher at Moscow’s School no. 2 in the 1960s, for example, later told a W estern scholar: “Reading Tolstoi, I realised I was an enemy o f the [Soviet] system . . . My spiri­ tual conscience [was formed] through Russian literature.”5 It was not un­ com mon for readers to discover a religious significance even in writers who were far from mainstream Orthodoxy: in a completely nondenom inational sense, literature fed the spiritual life o f educated Russians.6 In this m ilieu the rediscovery o f Akhmatova, M andelstam, Bulgakov, and Platonov—some o f whose works were now at last being laboriously nego­ tiated through Soviet publishers, others o f which circulated in samizdat— was a revelation o f a Russian identity m ost people thought had long ago been buried under the Soviet m onolith.

Aleksandr Tvardovskii and Novyi mir The literary figure who made greatest use o f these opportunities, both as author and as editor, was Aleksandr Tvardovskii. H e was a complex per­ sonality who reflected in his own character m any o f the contradictions o f contem porary Russian consciousness. He was born the son o f a peasant in Smolensk province. His hither had been dekulakized in the early 1930s, just as Tvardovskii was starting out on his literary career, and for a tim e he kept his distance from his family while making his way as a young poet. As we have seen, during the war he created the m ost popular emblem o f simple Russianness, the fictional soldier Vasilii Terkin. As editor o f Novyi m ir from 1950 to 1954 and from 1958 to 1970, he was entrusted w ith the country’s m ost prestigious literary monthly. From 1961 to 1966, moreover, he was a member o f the Central Com m ittee o f the CPSU, and hence one o f the two hundred highest-ranking officials in the Soviet polit­ ical pecking order.

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As principal editor o f the num ber-one journal o f the Soviet W riters' U nion, Tvardovskii im plem ented the official doctrine o f wsocialist real­ ism ,” but he gave it a twist that ultim ately underm ined it. H e repudiated the aesthetic o f the heroic rejection o f byt (routine everyday life) in the nam e o f the future. For him "socialism” m eant som ething more prosaic: the effort to improve people’s lives so that they would be properly fed, clothed, housed, and educated; "realism” m eant publishing works that gave a frank picture o f Soviet social life and o f the history o f the Soviet peoples; "narodnost” m eant focusing on the life o f ordinary people, using their language and concepts. Tvardovskii specifically disavowed the "positive hero” who had been the staple figure o f Stalin-period fiction. H e com plained that "exalting the personality o f the principal character . . . inevitably m eant despising the ordinary masses.’”7 A persistent them e o f N ovyi m ir was that peasants lacked the feeling o f being a khoziain, a w ord th at implies both "master” and "owner,” so that it could be interpreted as m eaning that peasants suf­ fered either because they lacked their own property or because they had no control over their own fate— probably both. In the Russian tradition generally the categories o f ownership and political power tend to be fused, so th at a hybrid reading o f the w ord is legitimate. It m ight well be argued that Tvardovskii—w hether he thought o f it in this way or not—was attem pting to revive the two ideals o f pre-1930 peasant com m unities, m ir and pravda. O ne o f his watchwords was pravda zhizni, “life’s tru th .” “T he failing o f m any o f our books,” he claimed, “is above all the lack o f pravda zh izn i.” H e specifically did not mean truth as expounded by official ideologists, but som ething more like truth as taught by the experience o f life itself, as lived by ordinary people in their com m u­ nities—which in Russia till recently had still been peasant com m unities.8 For m ost o f his life he believed in the basic virtues o f the Soviet system, but he understood them in a different way from the official ideologists, in the light o f the moral precepts learned from peasant culture.9 Tvardovskii was reviving another Russian tradition, too, that o f the “thick journal.” H e was guided by the example o f Nikolai Nekrasov, who, like himself, was both the editor o f a major journal and a poet depicting the life o f the ordinary Russian people. N ovyi m ir proclaimed on its mast­ head that it was a "belletristic and sociopolitical journal,” and Tvardovskii took both aspects extremely seriously. H e believed that in Russia the "thick journal” had an altogether broader function than the specialized lit-

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erary journals o f the West: it had a cognitive and civic role, helping to form an educated public. “T he second half o f that masthead is no mere accidental formality,” he declared. “T he editors know that m any o f our subscribers and readers do not always have access to specialist journals, and therefore we do our utm ost to satisfy their interest in problems o f contem porary politics and science, problems o f the struggle for peace, problems o f the economy, culture, art, education, and so on.”10 To fulfill its civic role, Tvardovskii believed that a serious journal should have its own recognizable napravlenie (civic and aesthetic position, ten­ dency, or identity). It should publish writers and critics who were kindred spirits, and not only publish them but draw them into its work and into contact w ith its readers. A journal should become a focus for the intellec­ tual and spiritual life o f like-m inded people, com m itted to the same hu­ mane ideals— which were those o f the party, though they were not always prom oted by the party. As one scholar has com m ented, “O ne m ust imag­ ine the Novyi m ir editorial offices— at least under Tvardovskii— as not merely the offices and desks o f editors and their staff, but also as the meet­ ing place for a fringe o f active, interested writers and intellectuals, who w ould drop in to talk, to discuss m atters o f m utual interest, to bring manuscripts which they considered worthwhile, or just to share the cama­ raderie.”11 Novyi m ir was a norm al cell o f Soviet society, like m any others, but it was also the haven for a counterculture that would eventually un­ derm ine the official Soviet culture. In fulfillment o f its editorial aims, Novyi m ir published works o f fiction that reported in a realist style— and as fin as possible frankly (this was the subject o f continual batdes w ith the censorship and the officials o f the W riters’ Union)— the history o f ordinary people during the critical junc­ tures o f Soviet history: the civil war, the collectivization o f agriculture, the first five-year plans, and the Second W orld W ar.12 It published numerous ocherki, a characteristic Russian genre o f semi-fiction and semi-reportage that described the contem porary lives o f ordinary people in farm, factory, and office. As Tvardovskii pointed out, the ocherk lay on the boundary be­ tween the journals two functions, “belletristic” and “sociopolitical,” and its aim was to express pravda zh izn i.13 Novyi m ir also began the key task o f publishing works that had been suppressed from the 1930s to the 1930s: Akhmatova, Pasternak, Bul­ gakov, and others.14 It brought out memoirs, diaries, and other docum ents that reflected the past direcdy. Thus Novyi m ir fulfilled the function o f

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m onitoring memory, which Barbara Misztal has identified as crucial in sustaining a viable national identity. This m onitoring involved correct­ ing mistaken impressions, rehabilitating the forgotten or suppressed, and initiating a dialogue in place o f a monologue. In the early 1960s the pub­ lic eagerly devoured the memoirs o f Ilia Erenburg, who, as a partici­ pant in the European cultural life o f the 1920s, had personally known many m ajor artistic figures whose names had long been under a veil: Akhmatova, Babel, Tatlin, Malevich, Gide, Malraux. Readers could dis­ cover w ith pride the great and innovative contribution Russia had made to Europe’s cultural life in the early decades o f the tw entieth century.15 Tvardovskii’s m ost celebrated contribution to both politics and litera­ ture was the publication in 1962 o f Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns novel A Day in the L ift o f Ivan Denisovich. A t the tim e Solzhenitsyn was a completely unknow n figure. W hile serving in the Red Army in 1945 he had been ar­ rested for w riting a letter critical o f Stalin; after nine years in prisons and labor camps, then in exile in Kazakhstan, he was now an obscure school­ teacher in Riazan. Yet Ivan Denisovich was a path-breaking work in several respects. It was the first frank account o f w hat life had been like in Stalins labor camps. It also challenged the dom inant Soviet m entality by pioneer­ ing a new and unfam iliar narrative standpoint. In place o f the om niscient narrator who sees history unfold and understands the place o f every char­ acter and every action in its texture, in place o f the dauntless hero leading waverers and doubters along the tough and battle-strewn road to social­ ism, Solzhenitsyn employed the discourse o f a character from the narod, using the language o f village, army, building site, and labor camp. H e ac­ cepted all the lim itations such a discourse implied: little education, no po­ litically inform ed oudook, no superior knowledge o f events or personali­ ties. T he action led to no particular achievement, no breakthrough to higher knowledge; indeed, the narration im plied that tim e was cyclical rather than unilinear. This was the viewpoint o f Russians as victims o f the upheavals o f their era. T he publication o f Ivan Denisovich unleashed a flood o f memories, an extraordinary “return o f the repressed,” poured out in letters to the editors and to Solzhenitsyn himself. T he rediscovery o f memory provoked feel­ ings ranging from proud civic consciousness to suicidal impulses: “Now I read and weep, but when I was im prisoned in U khta for ten years I did not shed a tear”; “After reading it the only thing left to do is to knock a nail in the wall, tie a knot and hang oneself”; “Although I wept when I read it, I felt myself a citizen w ith full rights among other people.”16

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Tvardovskii in his personality and activity tried to encompass several contradictory worlds. Son o f a “kulak,” he attem pted to become a thor­ oughly loyal poet; later a senior member o f the nom enklatura elite (and in the Central Com m ittee for four years), he sponsored the journal that did more than any other to corrode that elites belief system. Overall he was trying to achieve the same thing as Dostoevskii, though by completely dif­ ferent means: to reconcile peasant pravda and collectivism w ith the em­ pire and great power that was the Soviet Union. T he two were not recon­ cilable. Tvardovskii was torn apart by the contradiction between them — which probably explains why at times he drank heavily. Tvardovskii s heritage was sufficiently flexible and all-embracing that it could be taken up by both “Russianist” and “cosmopolitan” wings o f the literary world. His dedication to high-quality literature and to freedom o f speech, his cham pioning o f authors in political difficulties, his exposure o f the seamy side o f Soviet life, and his batdes w ith the censors and the cul­ tural authorities all placed him in the camp o f the “liberals.” Yet at the same tim e, his dedication to Russian civic-literary traditions, which he considered “holy,” his determ ination to depict the true story o f the Rus­ sian narod, and especially the peasantry, in a literary language close to their colloquial speech, placed him close to the Russian nationalists.17Af­ ter he lost his editorial post in 1970, Tvardovskii s collective o f authors moved in both directions. M ost o f the village writers (though not all) w ent to Nash sovremennik, which em bodied the nationalist tendency.18 M ost other authors either w ent to D ruzhba narodov (Friendship o f the Peoples), whose very title proclaimed the liberal tendency, or actually emi­ grated, feeling that an open-m inded literature was no longer possible in the Soviet Union itself.

The Fonnation of a Russian Party The ethnicization o f the Soviet U nion left both intellectuals and Com m u­ nist Party leaders in the RSFSR in an anomalous and unhappy position. T he non-Russian party bosses were now able discreetly to seek political and cultural support from nationalists w ithin their own republics. They were able to build a tolerated culture o f ethnic distinctiveness attractive to non-Russian intellectuals, which took the sting out o f their feelings o f na­ tional hum iliation and relative deprivation in the USSR.19 Russians, however, w hether party bosses or intellectuals, did not have the fallback position o f cultivating Russian distinctiveness. There was no

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"hom eland” nationalism in which they could take refuge. Moreover, the attem pt to create one w ould defeat its own ends, since Russians’ national identity was bound up w ith the Soviet U nion as a whole. To "liberate” Russia from the Soviet U nion would destroy the Soviet U nion and hence Russia too. So w hat kind o f Russian identity should they cultivate? H istory was an uncertain and am bivalent guide, for Russians had a m ultiplicity o f na­ tional ideals. Several different models were available for "Russia,” and in crucial respects they contradicted one another: 1. T he Stalinist state victorious in the Second W orld War; 2. T he tsarist Russian Empire; 3. T he peasant com m une and the associated Russian tradition o f col­ lective solidarity and consensus decision-making; 4. T he Russian O rthodox Church. T he first model was in m any ways the easiest and m ost obvious one to adopt. N ineteen forty-five had been a m om ent o f mass support for the Soviet regime, and the historical apogee o f Russian national conscious­ ness. It was still fresh in the memories o f m any people, and it was the road through w hich the current party-state leadership had consolidated its power. For those reasons the Stalinist outlook had enduring attraction and staying power in the late Soviet decades. All the same, those who adopted it had to face serious questions. Stalin had been responsible, not just for w inning the war, but also for bringing the Soviet U nion close to defeat, and therefore for the length and cost o f the war. H e had unleashed the ter­ ror and caused the deaths o f millions o f innocent people, m any o f them Russians. H e had destroyed or attem pted to destroy cardinal elements o f the Russian social and cultural tradition: the O rthodox Church, the vil­ lage com mune, m uch o f the best art, literature, and music. After Khrush­ chev’s "secret speech” and the return o f millions from the Gulag, these crimes were on many people’s m inds, even if they were not folly illum i­ nated in the media. H ow could one seriously take Stalin as a Russian na­ tional hero? As for the tsarist state, it could not serve on its own as a satisfactory model. There was no question o f restoring the monarchy. But Com m u­ nists could save some o f the tsarist heritage by linking it w ith the Soviet U nion as the bearer o f Russian statehood: this was the theory o f the “sin­ gle stream” (edinyi potok), outlined by Shestakov in his prewar textbook.

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The authoritarianism o f both could be held up as a more appropriate po­ litical form for Russians than W estern liberal democracy. But if a Com ­ m unist accepted those premises, how was he to explain why Lenin had supported the overthrow o f tsarism? H ad the February and O ctober revo­ lutions, the m urder o f the royal family and o f millions o f "form er people” been merely m onum ental historical misunderstandings? T he peasant com m une was not in itself a practical ideal, but in m odi­ fied form it had considerable attractions. O ne could argue that Russians practiced com m unity consensus and m utual aid, whereas the West was succumbing to ever more ram pant individualism, hedonism , and merce­ nary materialism. Com m unism , in this theory, was a modified version o f the Russian tradition. T he O rthodox Church was a more viable option, at least for some o f the oppositional intelligentsia, since it had—just— survived the upheavals o f the Soviet decades in recognizable form. But its long cohabitation w ith the regime rendered it an uncertain harbor for those seeking spiritual se­ curity and independence in a storm y world. T he fundam ental question remained: H ad Sergii’s compromise o f 1927 been a betrayal o f the faith or a measure regrettable but necessary for a greater good, the survival o f the church? A nd w hat should people think about those prelates who had made themselves servants o f an atheist regime and collaborated w ith a m urderous secret police? O ne could argue that the O rthodox C hurch exemplified the old Rus­ sian spirit o f com m unity continued in the C om m unist Party— but only if one were prepared to ignore decades o f atheist propaganda and official persecution o f the church. T he Soviet U nion was an indissoluble part o f Russian history, yet it had destroyed much o f Russia. T he Soviet model had succeeded in certain ways: it had educated the masses; it had created m odern industry, science, and technology; and it had defeated the Germans at war. Yet it had also precipitated a Russian dem ographic disaster, devastated Russian agricul­ ture, destroyed the Russian peasantry, underm ined the Russian church, and paralyzed Russian culture. It was both Russian and anti-Russian. T hat was the fundam ental dilemma.

Russian Nationalism T he tensions between “Russia” and the Soviet U nion are reflected in the memoirs o f Stanislav Kuniaev, the chief editor o f Nash sovrtm ennik in the

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1990s. Kuniacv was a Russian from Kaluga who studied at Moscow U ni­ versity and then worked for a tim e in the editorial offices o f the literary journal Znam ia, before moving on to Nash sovremennik. H e claims even in his youth to have felt a sense o f foreboding about Russia’s future: “1 saw the still bleeding gash, only pardy healed, between Russia’s past history and the Soviet epoch. I realized that we could not have a hilly viable \po!notsennyt[ future w ithout reviving everything durable and flourishing that had been created before the revolution. But how could we launch that revival w ithout destroying the real historical life o f the last seventy years? How could we reconcile the W hites and Reds? Bunin and Esenin? Sholokhov and Solzhenitsyn? T he Russian and the Soviet?”20 O ne way to evade these paradoxes was to ascribe all the “bad” results o f Soviet rule to the Jews. This was the Dostoevskian tem ptation in a new form, and it was the stratagem adopted by Kuniaev. It especially appealed to young writers like him from provincial Russia who were struggling to make their way in the highly cultured literary w orld o f Moscow or Lenin­ grad. T he difficulties o f the early stages o f his career he p u t down to Jew­ ish dom ination o f the literary world. H e caricatured the “arrogant expres­ sions,” the “thrusting chins and lower jaws” o f established Jewish authors. According to his version, Jewish writers had flourished while their Russian colleagues were being arrested and m urdered by “the fellow tribesmen o f the Odessans Agranov and Iagoda”— that is, the supposedly Jewish-run N K V D .21 (This is to ignore the fate o f M andelstam and Babel, to name only the m ost prom inent Jewish literary victims o f the NKVD.) Literary life— like all forms o f Soviet life— compelled people to band together w ith like-m inded colleagues to fight for w hat they believed in. Everyone felt they belonged to a besieged m inority condem ned to strug­ gle against great odds, while the “others”— the “opponents,” “they”— en­ joyed official favor w ithout lifting a finger. T he “Russian party” was no ex­ ception, even though its members were securely ensconced in the official journals and publishing houses that form ed the well-barricaded fortresses o f the literary batdefield. M any o f them had been students at Moscow University in the early 1950s, and they had im bibed the Soviet-Russian anti-Sem itic patriotism o f the late Stalin era. W hen they later studied at the Gorkii Literary Institute, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, though, they encountered a very different atmosphere: the tone was being set by the “thaw,” whose eponymous w ork had been w ritten by a Jew, Ilia Erenburg (albeit one who in his tim e had been a protagonist o f the most m onolithic Soviet-Russian patriotism ).

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Russianists felt themselves outnum bered and disadvantaged. They be­ came uneasily aware that, by com parison w ith the champions o f the “thaw,” they were making litde im pact on the reading public and had no following whatsoever outside the Soviet Union. In their eyes, their neglect simply dem onstrated that there was an international conspiracy against genuine Russian values. The young poet Evgenii Evtushenko was filling stadiums w ith his declam atory verse, delivered in a dramatized, even bom ­ bastic manner, which irritated his rivals, especially when he deployed it to attack anti-Sem itism, to evoke the ghosts o f Babii Iar, and to warn that the “Heirs o f Stalin” were planning a comeback. He identified him self w ith Dreyfus, w ith Anne Frank, w ith the victims o f the Bialystok pogrom and the Babii Iar massacre: “In their callous rage, all anti-Semites / M ust hate me now as a Jew. / For that reason / I am a true Russian!”22 O ne antiSemite, a certain A. Markov, proved Evtushenko right by dedicating to him a poem entided “W hat kind o f true Russian are you?”23 T he conflict between “Russian” and “cosmopolitan” literary figures was an extremely serious one— indeed, for all anyone knew at the tim e, it was a m atter o f life and death. Each side accused the other o f com plicity in the denunciations o f the recent past— denunciations which for some had been equivalent to a prepackaged death sentence. T he Moscow branch o f the W riters’ U nion was a stronghold o f “liberals.” In 1953 nearly onethird o f its members were Jews, and m ost o f the rest, like Evtushenko, considered anti-Sem itism repugnant and redolent o f Stalinism.24 They m ounted a campaign to uncover the tru th about the recent past, especially the story o f those arrested or m urdered for their part in the Jewish AntiFascist Com m ittee: W hich writers had denounced their Jewish or “cos­ mopolitan” colleagues? T he events had taken place only a decade or so earlier, yet those responsible had not been dismissed, let alone punished; nor had anti-Semitism been officially condem ned. There was no guaran­ tee whatsoever that similar m urderous campaigns m ight not resume at any m om ent.25 Hence the bitterness w ith which accusations were ad­ vanced and rebutted. Although Khrushchevs “secret speech” made these accusations a subject o f legitimate debate, it offered no resolution to them. Those who were under suspicion decided to defend themselves by orga­ nizational methods. Profiting from the Soviet leaders’ reaction against the “excesses” unleashed by the “secret speech,” they obtained permission in 1957 to set up a U nion o f W riters o f the RSFSR as a counterweight to the dom inant influence o f the Moscow branch o f the Union o f W riters o f the

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Soviet Union. This was a m om entous step. After all, as we have seen, So­ viet leaders were very reluctant to create Russian institutions o f any kind: in the C om m unist Party, in the academic world, in the mass media. Yet here was a Russian institution in the m ost sensitive cultural sphere o f all. T he new union was intended to give greater weight to Russian writers living in provincial towns and in villages as opposed to those o f Moscow and Leningrad. Its newspaper Literatum aia Rossiia and its journals Nash sovremennik and Literatum ai i zh izri became influential forums for the "Russian” point o f view, and not only in literature. Unions o f Russian composers and artists were created at the same tim e.26

Village Prose Between the m id-1960s and the m id-1980s m any o f the m ost widely read works o f fiction were w ritten by a unique generation o f Russian novelists: graduates o f the G orkii Institute who in their youth had been peasant lads. They com bined real literary skill w ith genuine knowledge o f village life. Bom between the 1910s and the 1930s, these writers had witnessed or at least heard their parents evoke the last years o f traditional peasant ag­ riculture and the creation o f the collective farms. They were in a unique position to portray in artistic terms the great sociological and psychologi­ cal split at the heart o f their generation: between the gentle, cyclical rhythm s o f traditional rural life, oriented toward the past, and the hectic, forw ard-thrusting tem po o f m odern urban life, directed in unilinear fash­ ion toward the future. T heir first task was docum entary, to compile a kind o f oral history, to assemble m em ory and make it available before it disappeared. As one vil­ lage prose writer, the Siberian Sergei Zalygin, noted: "I feel that the roots o f m y nation are . . . in the village, in the ploughed field, in daily bread. Furtherm ore it seems to me that our generation will have been the last to see w ith its own eyes the thousand-year-old way o f life in which each o f us grew up. If we do not w rite about it and about its radical transform ation in a short space o f tim e [a reference to collectivization], then who will?”27 T he village writers were chroniclers, then, but they were also moralists. It is no accident that their works began to be published just at the tim e when the urge toward creating a better future no longer seemed convinc­ ing. N arrating past customs was no longer o f merely antiquarian interest: it had become a moral quest. M any Russians had left the village w ith relief

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and moved to the town in search o f superior chances. Now they began to ask themselves w hat they had gained and w hat they had lost. A num ber o f stories in this mode began w ith the narrator or hero returning to the vil­ lage o f his childhood, which he had not visited for decades, seeing the churchyard, the familiar family home, dilapidated but still standing, the bathhouse, the samovar, ua world he thought had long ceased to exist.”28 This self-questioning mode was well exemplified in a story by the Vologda w riter Vasilii Belov, “T hat’s the Way Things Are” (Privychnoc delo). It was published in 1966 in Sever, a hitherto litde-read journal o f the Arkhangelsk branch o f the W riters’ U nion. The story is a simple one. It concerns Ivan Afnkanovich, his wife Katerina, and their nine children. Ivan cannot earn enough from his labor on the kolkhoz to feed and clothe them all. His brother-in-law persuades him that he would do better to leave for the city, earn some money, and resetde his whole family there. Against his better judgm ent Ivan is persuaded to go, but as soon as he leaves the village he finds life so bewildering that he is unable to cope. H e does not even get as far as the city, but is throw n off the train for travel­ ing w ithout a ticket. Struggling back home, he finds that Katerina, ex­ hausted by years o f drudgery and the strain o f parting, has had a heart at­ tack and died. In this work the village is a universe o f seasonal rhythms and work pat­ terns, where men, women, children, and animals share the same way o f life. (Symptomatically, one o f the chapters is the autobiography o f the fiunily cow.) If they work conscientiously and help one another out in dif­ ficulties— in other words, if they observe traditional “joint responsibil­ ity”— they survive physically and flourish morally. But in Belov’s portrayal urban modes o f exploitation have invaded this pristine microcosm, taking the shape o f the kolkhoz, w ith its high-handed officials, its restrictive reg­ ulations, and its compulsory grain deliveries. T hus alienated from the pri­ meval Eden, Ivan brings destruction on him self and his family.29 In a variety o f forms, this moral universe was replicated in other village prose works. It was o f course the reverse o f the socialist realist morality. Its setting was the village, the peaceful, unchanging, yet threatened rodina, not the otechestvo, where great transform ations were taking place. The life experience evoked was often childhood, the tim e o f direct, unm ediated feeling and spontaneous integrity. Its ideal world was found in the past, not the future; its version o f tim e was cyclical not unilinear; its content was pessimistic not optim istic; its principal characters, and usually the

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narrator too, were uneducated, colloquial in their language, and lim ited in their oudook: they did not understand the grand movements o f his­ tory. These rambling, easy-going novels evoked a “non-Soviet” past that could easily be presented as a model o f Russian national existence, de­ stroyed by the irruption o f the W esternizing or Jewish (according to your taste) ideology o f Marxism. T hat model had the potential to become, in the words o f A nthony Sm ith, “an idealised golden age and heroic past that could serve as exemplars for collective regeneration in the present.”30

Human Rights and Conscience T he questioning o f the 1960s also generated a completely different view o f m orality from the one im plied by “joint responsibility,” one that could not be claimed as intrinsically Russian but which nonetheless also had deep roots in Russia’s intellectual tradition: pursuing all-hum an ideals, and linking up w ith international institutions that em bodied them . This trend was one possible interpretation o f the official ideology. Ten o f the twelve points o f the “M oral Code o f the Builder o f Com m unism ” were all-hum an ones, that is, not specific to socialist or Com m unist move­ ments. Besides, the 1961 party program asserted that “Com m unist moral­ ity includes the fundam ental all-hum an moral norms which were worked out by the popular masses in the course o f the thousand-year struggle w ith social oppression and moral vices.”31 T he leading exponent o f hum an rights and conscience was someone at the heart o f the Soviet U nions m ost destructive research establishment, the nuclear physicist Academician Andrei Sakharov. Science had an hon­ ored place in the school curriculum , and scientists were members o f the Soviet pantheon o f glory. But the qualities and practices that were re­ quired for real achievement in science— skepticism, rational thinking, constant questioning o f accepted notions, keeping up w ith the latest ideas and inform ation, and regular contact w ith foreign colleagues— were con­ trary to those fostered by the Soviet system. Science requires a culture o f trust, for no scientist can replicate all the experiments and measurements he would need to be sure o f his facts. H e m ust be able to trust his col­ leagues to do their w ork honestly and conscientiously.32 By the same to­ ken, he m ust be in a position to send and receive ideas across frontiers, and to evaluate and discuss them openly. Hence there was a paradox at the heart o f the official Soviet adulation o f science: a closed society was extol­ ling an open system o f cognition.

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Sakharov began his career attracted by w hat he considered “superb sci­ ence.” But he also felt that the Soviet U nion had to stand up to the U nited States. To defend again w hat had so nearly been lost in the Second W orld War, and to create at least a balance o f international terror, the So­ viet U nion could not allow the U nited States to hold its m onopoly on nu­ clear weapons. Evaluating him self critically later, Sakharov felt that he had been gripped by a “war psychology,” but those were his genuine feelings at the tim e.33 O nce he and his colleagues succeeded in producing a working Soviet hydrogen bomb, however, he realized w ith horror that the atm ospheric testing o f such bombs would inevitably, through radiation, cause the deaths o f an unknown but potentially very large num ber o f people. H e also realized that he had put terrible weapons in the hands o f politicians who were capable and energetic, but who w ould take decisions on criteria quite different from his own. Even his own colleagues, he discovered to his dismay, did not share his concerns: “D uring the 1950s I had come to regard testing in the atmosphere as a crime against humanity, no different from secretly pouring disease-producing microbes into a city’s water sup­ ply. But my views were not shared by my associates, and I saw how easy it is for people to adapt their thinking to w hat they regard as their own best interest.”34 H e tried but failed to persuade Khrushchev not to resume atmospheric testing in 1961. This was a turning point in the physicists life. “It was the ultim ate defeat for m e,” he recalled. “A terrible crime was about to be com m itted, and I could do nothing to prevent i t . . . . T hat was probably the m ost terrible lesson o f my life: you can’t sit on two chairs at once. I de­ cided that I w ould devote myself to ending biologically harm ful tests.”33 Sakharov's spiritual crisis was paradigmatic. H e was tom between dif­ ferent and ultim ately incom patible ideals o f the Soviet system. H e re­ solved to pursue some o f them single-mindedly— internationalism , hum anitarianism , devotion to science—while rejecting others w ith equal determ ination: utopianism , class struggle, great-power status. H e con­ dem ned Soviet messianism along w ith “delusions as to the uniqueness o f a society . . . dogmatism, adventurousness and aggression.”36 In his memo­ randum “Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom” he projected the image o f a world run on scientific principles, that is, by m ethods “based on the deep study o f facts, theories, and opin­ ions, and assuming open discussion, unprejudiced and dispassionate in its findings.” He warned that the present disunity o f hum ankind threatened

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it w ith com plete annihilation, that hum an beings m ust try m uch harder to live together in peace and m utual tolerance, and that for this purpose they needed intellectual freedom and the ability to choose their own governm ents. H e spelled out the dangers posed by nuclear war, famine, and environm ental degradation, but also by closed societies and tyrannical po­ litical systems that violated the law and were unresponsive to the aspira­ tions o f their own peoples. H e proposed that statesmen should aim to dism ande the barriers which divided them , cooperate to tackle the problems which could only be solved by com m on effort, and ensure the rule o f law and democracy in their own countries. H e called specifically on the Soviet leaders to reverse the trend o f the late 1960s to impose sanctions on non­ conform ist thinkers who tried to disseminate their views, and to under­ take a com plete re-exam ination o f Stalins crimes, w ith a view to making the results public.37 Like Lenin’s colleagues a half-century earlier, Sakharov was a convinced internationalist, but o f a com pletely different kind. A lthough he still occa­ sionally referred to “socialism,” the source o f his ideals was som ething else entirely. H e was a prim e example o f the way in w hich contact w ith the W est had transform ed the outlook o f m any Soviet intellectuals. H e was inspired by the principles on which the U nited N ations was founded, and which in theory the USSR had endorsed. Sakharov explicitly recom­ m ended the convergence o f socialist and nonsocialist systems, not their continuing struggle. In later years Sakharov referred repeatedly to U .N . docum ents in appealing for the rule o f law inside the Soviet Union, espe­ cially after the USSR signed the final act o f the Helsinki Conference in 1975. Thenceforth, international agreements endorsed by the USSR in pursuit o f peaceful coexistence became a m ajor source o f both concepts and inspiration for a generation o f hum an rights activists, am ong whom Sakharov was the leading but far from the only figure. T he principal organ o f the hum an rights movement was the samizdat journal Chronicle o f Current Events. Each issue bore on its masthead a quotation from article 19 o f the U nited Nations Declaration o f H um an Rights o f 1948 guaranteeing freedom o f speech. T he journal’s text carried no political commentary; it simply enum erated cases in which the Soviet authorities had violated their own laws in proceeding against Soviet citi­ zens. This bald, unadorned presentation was deliberate: it was intended to elevate the rule o f law to the supreme principle o f social life. The channels through which inform ation was collected (in one direction) and the jour-

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nal was discreetly disseminated (in the other) constituted a durable net­ work o f alternative opinion.38 T he problem w ith this stance was that it was easily represented as sub­ versive, drawing on W estern “bourgeois” ideals. Moreover, since hum an rights activists could not publish their materials in the Soviet media, they were compelled to have recourse to foreign publications and radio stations for their publicity, a practice that their opponents stigmatized as at best disloyalty, at worst treason. T he ideal that had perhaps the broadest resonance am ong the noncon­ form ist intelligentsia, even broader than hum an rights, was “conscience.” T he word had different meanings for different people, but it was accept­ able to O rthodox believers, W estern liberals, and reformed Marxists alike. Even the regime could not object to it. O ne o f the prescribed norms o f the “M oral Code o f the Builder o f Com m unism ” was “honesty and tru th ­ fulness, moral purity, modesty, and unpretentiousness in social and pri­ vate life,” which was a kind o f item ization o f the qualities o f a good con­ science.39 Taking “conscience” as an absolute seemed especially appropriate: the ruthless violence o f the early Soviet decades had convinced many people that the notion o f a relative m orality was suspect. The proposition that one should not vest ones conscience in the state or in any political move­ m ent— perhaps any collective movement at all— was both appealing and persuasive. T he ideal also had secure roots in Russian culture. Before the revolution writers had felt obliged by their literary calling to speak out for the oppressed and deprived narod, and in their works to prom ote enlight­ enm ent, morality, good conscience, and creative freedom.40 Furtherm ore, in Russian émigré philosophy sovest and lichnost (conscience and personal­ ity) had been key concepts, precisely as a reaction against the statization o f both in the Soviet U nion. In the late 1950s and 1960s intellectuals were discovering that already well before 1917 some Russian socialists had turned against Marxism because it left no room for free personality and belief in transcendental ideals. They began avidly reading the 1909 neoKantian symposium Vekhi, along w ith the philosophers Soloviev, Berdiaev, Bulgakov, and Frank, and then through their prism returned to Dostoevskii and discovered new meanings in him . Some o f them con­ verted to the O rthodox Church and rejected socialism outright.4' So the idea o f conscience came to be connected w ith that o f personality as a fun­ dam ental value in the discourse o f Russians who otherwise held many di-

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verse convictions. From the 1960s to the 1990s, Russian intellectuals be­ lieved in “personality” and “conscience” more steadfastly and eloquendy than the great m ajority o f W estern intellectuals to whom they looked as a model. T he imperative o f reviving good conscience was stated at its starkest by Solzhenitsyn, in a widely circulated samizdat letter he wrote just before he was expelled from the USSR in 1974. Sweeping aside the excuses o f help­ lessness in the face o f power that m ost people made to themselves for not resisting spiritual and ideological oppression, he declared: “It is not ‘they’ who ate guilty o f everything, it is we ourselves and only w e!. . . Violence has nothing w ith which to cover its nakedness save the lie, and the lie can sustain itself only through violence. . . . This is where the simplest and m ost direct key lies to our self-emancipation: personal nonparticipation in the Ue! All right, lies blanket everything, hold everyone in their grip . . . but not through m e!.. . T he way ahead is never consciously to uphold the lie ” According to this recipe, Soviet citizens should never w rite anything they did not hold to be true; they should not hold up placards w ith slogans they did not believe in; they should walk out o f meetings where the speaker m outhed official untruths to general applause.42

The Environment T he Soviet U nions role as a great power and its com m itm ent to m odern­ ization entailed a ruthless attitude toward the environm ent. From the 1920s to the 1950s the requirem ents o f industrialization, m ilitary power, and economic growth had absolute priority: nature was there to be “con­ quered,” in Bolshevik-speak. Heedless gigantism was the order o f the day, as m inistries vied w ith one another in the am bition o f their projects: huge hydroelectric power schemes, chemical and arm am ents factories belching smoke and discharging toxic waste. Yet even at the height o f these preoccupations a few small and inse­ cure islands still existed w ithin the establishm ent where people were dedi­ cated to the defense o f the environm ent. These were in the Academy o f Sciences and certain RSFSR ministries, where people worked to preserve zapovedniki, reservations where flora and fauna could develop in their own way, protected from pollution. For others w hat m attered was rescu­ ing an indispensable elem ent in Russia’s history and culture, ensuring that its ancient buildings (many o f them churches), its forests, lakes, and rivers survived for the appreciation and edification o f later generations.43

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Eventually, during the “thaw” in the 1960s the environm ent became a political issue. T he first m ajor campaign concerned a question close to the heart o f all Russians: W hat was to become o f their capital city? Moscow symbolized Russian identity, and up to the early 1930s it had retained m uch o f its nineteenth-century character as a ram bling semi-rural city, loosely clustered around its ancient Kremlin. As we have seen, however, in the 1930s the regime had begun to demolish and rebuild extensively, under the terms o f a “general plan” that was never subm itted to public discussion. T he plan envisaged destroying m ost o f the low-rise nine­ teenth-century buildings near the center and replacing them w ith more m onum ental constructions. Khrushchev was an enthusiastic supporter o f this concept, and he was notorious for his contem pt for old chinches, which he used to refer to sarcastically as Spasy na iaitsakh (“the savior o f the bollocks”).44 T he m ain opposition to this destruction came from P. D . Baranovskii, an architect and restorer w ith experience going back before the revolution. In the late 1950s he set up an initiative group to organize petitions for the preservation o f threatened buildings. W hen unsuccessful, he would pho­ tograph and record every detail o f a building before dem olition. Members o f his group would m eet on Wednesday evenings in his apartm ent in the Novodevichii M onastery to discuss their work and to hear lectures and papers on architectural history. Baranovskii lobbied organizations like the Soviet Peace Com m ittee, the Academy o f Arts, and the Moscow branch o f the U nion o f Artists, w ith growing success, and he gained the support o f the w riter Vladim ir Soloukhin, the sculptor Sergei Konenkov, and the painter Ilia Glazunov. The clubs work was singled out for praise at the December 1965 Komsomol plenum .45 In 1962 a group o f architects, engineers, and artists published a letter in the journal Moskva, protesting the continuing destruction o f Moscow’s old buildings. T heir appeal com bined arguments o f aesthetics and histori­ cal tradition w ith protest against undem ocratic procedures. These acts o f vandalism had been carried out w ithout any public discussion, the writers accused, even though architecture was an art that belonged to the people, and love o f one’s home town was a vital part o f patriotism . The Moscow “master plan,” a m atter affecting every Muscovite, had remained secret: “It is tim e to end the situation when Muscovites see only fa its accomplis and the magical formula ‘This has already been decided’ cuts short any further discussion o f the issue.”46 Moscow was not the only threatened city. M any young people brought

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up in Russian towns in the 1950s and 1960s, w ith new buildings all around them after wartim e destruction, had very litde idea o f the way the urban landscape had changed and knew nothing o f old Russian archi­ tecture. In 1964 students from the Chemical-Technological Institute in Moscow made a bus trip to Pereiaslavl, Rostov, and Uglich, centers o f medieval church architecture. They were so surprised and impressed by w hat they saw that they m et w ith Baranovskii and began to organize m bbotniki—a C om m unist practice o f donating unpaid labor to society— cleaning up the sites o f old buildings, such as the Krutitskoe Podvore (headquarters o f the Moscow Patriarchate). They set up a club, Rodina, dedicated to the preservation o f old buildings. Its board o f trustees (obshchestvennyi sovet) included leading Russian writers, such as Leonid Leonov and V ladim ir Soloukhin, as well as Komsomol officials.47 In July 1965 the RSFSR {not the Soviet) Council o f M inisters an­ nounced that it was sponsoring an organization to prom ote preserva­ tion, V O O PIK , the All-Russian Society for the Preservation o f Historical and C ultural M onum ents. Its foundation undoubtedly reflected growing concern about the destruction o f old buildings, especially old churches, which was still going on at the tim e. V O O PIK became w hat in Britain m ight be called a “quango”; that is, though legally a nongovernmental or­ ganization, it was actually staffed largely by senior RSFSR officials. Its huge membership num bers— seven m illion by 1972, fifteen m illion by 1985— suggested not that its m ain strength was enthusiastic volunteers, but that it was a front organization like the Soviet Peace Com m ittee. Probably it represented a bid by the RSFSR government to strengthen its position in the Soviet hierarchy by drawing on widespread Russian na­ tional feeling and outrage at the destruction o f old buildings.48 This is not the whole story, though. T he society prom oted tourism in w hat became known as the “golden ring” o f old Russian towns to the north and east o f Moscow; it published brochures and guidebooks to make old buildings and sites o f m em ory more accessible to ordinary peo­ ple. It sponsored the revival o f folksongs and folk dancing and the celebra­ tion o f significant Russian dates, such as the 600th anniversary o f the Batde o f Kulikovo in 1980. It fought batdes in public over the threatened dem olition o f more old buildings. Reportedly, for example, it had a sau­ sage factory ejected from a m onastery in Smolensk and compelled the Kalinin town soviet to make good damage it had caused to two old houses. It mobilized students to carry out voluntary restoration work at the monastery o f St. Kirill o f Belozersk and at Solovki.49

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T he headquarters o f V O OPIK , in the dilapidated but still habitable Petrovskii M onastery in Moscow, hosted weekly meetings o f w hat became known as the “Russian C lub,” usually chaired by either the literary critic Petr Palievskii or the historian Sergei Semanov. Here, at first cautiously, but w ith increasing boldness, participants raised questions about reli­ gious art, the physical condition o f Russian churches, non-M arxist Rus­ sian philosophy, Zionism , and the state o f Israel. For those involved it was a course o f self-education in Russian national culture. M any o f these themes were taken up, more cautiously, in the pages o f journals such as M olodaia gvardiia and Nash Sovremennik-50 Young people were beginning to mobilize to resist the heedless exploi­ tation o f nature. O ne unexpected fruit o f Khrushchev’s experiment w ith the druzhina, or popular m ilitia, was the creation o f a student natureprotection service. H igh party-state officials were in the habit o f build­ ing themselves country cottages in remote and beautiful locations, and inviting colleagues and guests to hunting parties to shoot animals, some o f which were already endangered species. In some universities, includ­ ing the Biological Faculty o f Moscow University, student druzhiny were formed in the early 1960s. They would patrol stretches o f country popu­ lar w ith hunters and check the papers o f anyone found shooting. Those unauthorized they w ould denounce as poachers to their workplace.51 A ttem pts were made to initiate a gender and more radonal exploitadon o f the environm ent. Students o f the Leningrad Forestry Academy, led by Sergei Shipunov, announced that they aimed to protect a tract o f forest in the Altai containing many Siberian stone pine (sibirskii kedr) trees, and to undertake sustainable harvesdng and m arketing o f their nuts, as well as dm ber and furs. This so-called Kedrograd experiment had the support o f officials both from the RSFSR government and from the Altai region. All the same the students soon came up against loggers from the dm ber in­ dustry who simply wanted to fell large numbers o f trees for their wood. The long struggle that ensued became a cause célèbre. The preservationists’ principal cham pion in the national press was Vladimir Chivilikhin o f Komsomolskaia pravda. At one stage Iurii Gagarin took up their cause and selected wood from the stone pine for the handle of the controls in his space module. By 1963 the project was making a profit from nuts, dmber, sable, and squirrel fur. Nonetheless, in the end the students lost out to their rivals. The RSFSR M ain Forest A dm inistration sent loggers into their tract and forced the activists to relocate to a less favorable site.52 Chivilikhin was a Siberian, born in the coalmining region o f Kuzbass,

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who studied at Moscow University. In his youth he was strongly influ­ enced by Leonid Leonov's novel Russian Forest (Russkii les), published in 1953, which warned against excessive exploitation o f tim ber resources at a tim e when it was highly unfashionable to hint that Russia’s resources m ight not be limidess. T he fate o f the Kedrograd project confirmed Chivilikhin’s views and turned him into a convinced campaigner on envi­ ronm ental issues, which he raised ffequendy in the Komsomol over the next thirty years, as well as w riting a regular series called Memory in the m onthly journal Nash sovremennik. For Chivilikhin protection o f the environm ent was indissolubly linked w ith defense o f the nations cultural memory. H e called the link “the ecol­ ogy o f culture": “T he natural environm ent creates what, poetically, we call the soul o f the people and in reality determ ines the salient characteristics o f national culture. . . . T he Russian character is impossible to imagine w ithout expanses o f forest." Like Solzhenitsyn, Chivilikhin viewed Siberia as containing the essence o f Russia: it had not known foreign conquest and occupation; and its inhabitants, who had never lived as serfs, had on their own efforts and skills built a viable economy despite the severe cli­ mate. “Almost every sum m er I come down w ith an attack o f ‘Siberian longing’ and travel to my hom eland,” Chivilikhin said, to the land o f “strong characters and uncorrupted language."” It is natural, then, that Chivilikhin was am ong the first to take up w hat became the m ost im portant environm ental battle o f the late Soviet de­ cades, that concerning Lake Baikal. As the largest fresh-water lake in the world, Baikal was unquestionably a unique resource, the focus o f an eco­ system containing fish and plants not found elsewhere in the world. By the early 1960s the lake was threatened by two developments: heed­ less tim ber felling near its shores and the planned construction o f two factories to produce a special cellulose cord for aircraft tires. Scientists had already protested to the ministries involved, held conferences, and pub­ lished open letters, but Chivilikhin was the first to seize the public imagi­ nation, w ith an article entitled “T he Bright Eye o f Siberia,” published in April 1963. His article provoked a flood o f letters from concerned read­ ers, all o f them echoing his alarm at w hat the planners had in m ind. In the next few years he was joined by other writers, including M ikhail Sholokhov, who at the 23rd CPSU Congress in 1966 exclaimed: “O ur de­ scendants will not forgive us if we do not preserve this glorious lake, this sacred Baikal!” For the first tim e the country’s best-known writers joined

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w ith its top scientists to launch a united and coordinated protest cam­ paign.54 Formally the campaign was defeated. In 1966 the cellulose factories started production w ithout the elaborate purification equipm ent that the campaigners wanted to see installed. But the defeat had remarkable con­ sequences for Russian national identity. A well-informed public opin­ ion had taken shape, even if initially over only one issue. It had identified a nodal point where the imperatives o f m aintaining great-power status clashed not only w ith environm ental priorities but also w ith strongly held convictions about w hat it m eant to be Russian. It was a warning that be­ ing Russian m ight sometimes mean being opposed to the Soviet U nion, or at least to the policies o f its leaders.

Official Russian Nationalism Both the hum an rights movement and the revival o f Russian nationalism presented the top party leaders w ith an uncom fortable dilemma. They wanted to mobilize public opinion in support o f the Soviet state and its drive to superpower status, and they w anted to retain the hierarchical and conservative society they had inherited from Stalin and rescued from Khrushchev. A t the same tim e they regarded law as an instrum ent o f the state, not as an autonom ous value system. A nd they were aware that the uninhibited prom otion o f Russian traditional values— and even more, o f Russian institutions— m ight tear the Soviet U nion apart; it would cer­ tainly alienate both non-Russians w ithin the USSR and world opinion outside it. Accordingly the leaders adopted a compromise. They upheld MarxismLeninism as the official ideology, but they tolerated sim ple-m inded Rus­ sian imperial nationalism as a kind o f "working ideology,” a routine ev­ eryday outlook, especially in the armed forces and in the medium and lower levels o f the apparatus. They appointed RSFSR obkom secretar­ ies to many o f the top posts in the Central Com m ittee.55 They gave pref­ erence to the RSFSR in budgetary allocations for m ilitary industry (most o f which was in the RSFSR and Ukraine), subsidies for agriculture, and programs to rescue the economy o f the non-black earth regions. They were not unswerving in their support for the various Russian nationalist groups, but for m ost o f the period 1965-1985 they found it expedient to allow Russian nationalist journals high print-runs and to award their au-

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thors lucrative contracts and state prizes. This is w hat the scholar Yitzhak Brudny has called "the politics o f inclusion,” which was intended to give Russian nationalists a real stake in the system w ithout yielding fully to their dem ands.56 T he Russianists themselves w anted this unacknowledged "shadow” ide­ ology to be converted into the official ideology o f the Soviet state. In the higher levels o f the apparatus, the Russianist outlook had the strongest support in the Komsomol. This was natural, since Komsomol members were acutely aware that the official ideology was losing its power to act as a m agnet for the loyalty o f young people. They also realized that, after the "secret speech,” the suppression o f the H ungarian revolution, and even more so after the crushing o f the "Prague spring,” Soviet Com m unism no longer attracted the hopes o f socialists throughout the world, as it had once done. Isolation and dem oralization threatened. T he m ost obvious way to com bat them was to w rite off W estern public opinion and pro­ m ote the kind o f Russian patriotism th at had proved so effective during the Second W orld War. Sergei Pavlov, Komsomol first secretary, com­ plained at the December 1965 plenum o f the Komsomol C entral Com ­ m ittee o f the "unpatriotic” nature o f the youth journal Iunost. O ther speakers accused writers o f underm ining national morale if they dwelt on the horrors o f Stalins labor camps or recalled the neglect o f Soviet prison­ ers o f war. T he congress resolution warned o f the dangers posed by West­ ern media, which was attem pting to underm ine the morale o f Soviet youth by preaching "pacifism, abstract hum anism . . . and peaceful co-ex­ istence in the realm o f ideology.” T he resolution specifically resurrected the Stalinist bogy o f "groveling” (nizkopoklom tvo) and called for more ef­ fective patriotic propaganda and m ilitary training for young people.57 In terms o f reaching the public, Pavlovs m ost im portant allies were in the w orld o f literature and publishing, notably the periodicals o f the RSFSR W riters’ U nion. T he Komsomol m onthly M obdaia guardiia— its name evoking the heroic Red Youth detachm ents o f the revolution and civil war— and its associated publishing house took the lead in prom oting the oudook articulated in the Komsomol resolution. N ineteen sixty-five was a key year for them , since for the first tim e the anniversary o f the vic­ tory in the Second W orld War, May 9, was celebrated as a public holi­ day. Pavlov hoped to use the occasion to encourage schoolchildren and youth groups to visit the sites o f victorious batdes, to take care o f graves, to seek out docum entation o f the war and its heroes, and to take oral tes-

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tim ony from form er Red Army soldiers. A t the highest level, Pavlovs groups found support from Politburo member Aleksandr Shelepin and from Aleksei Epishev, head o f the army’s C hief Political A dm inistration. The M obdaia Gvardiia publishing house issued the memoirs o f several W.W. II generals, sometimes ghost-w ritten by its in-house editors.58 In the late 1960s in a series o f articles the journal M obdaia gvardiia, under its editor Anatolii Nikonov, tried to construct a coherent Russian national identity that could underpin the status o f the Soviet U nion as a great power. Each m onth the journal ran a feature under the rubric “Pre­ serve our Sacred Heritage” [Beregite nashu sviatyniu]. According to its con­ tributors, w hat distinguished Russian culture was that it was rooted in the collective life o f the ordinary people yet also exhibited lofry moral values and universal, all-hum an concerns w hich justified the USSR’s engage­ m ent in international affairs. This argum ent portrayed Russian national pride as frilly com patible w ith the national identity o f the Soviet non-Rus­ sian peoples. V iktor Chalmaev remarked on a “deeply Russian characteris­ tic: to sympathize w ith others’ sufferings to the point o f forgetting one’s own. Today’s Russian, who has borne m uch in his tim e, who participated actively in the struggle against fascism, cannot watch unconcernedly the sufferings o f a distant C ongolese.. . . After the destruction o f fascism is it possible that evil and crim inality are not eradicated from the world? T hat is the question the Soviet warrior-citizen asks him self when he hears about the atrocities o f reaction in various parts o f the planet.”59 Some authors tried to bolster their moral claims in a different way, by evoking, not proletarian solidarity, but the O rthodox Church. They did so not by extolling religious belief or even the church as an institution— neither would have been acceptable to the censorship— but by portraying the church as part o f the popular heritage, which should be protected. They protested against the continued neglect and destruction o f church buildings, contending that church architecture, icons, and frescoes were fine examples o f popular art and reflected mass protest against the ruling class’s abuse o f power. T he w riter D m itrii Balashov com m ented that “in religious buildings the architect was able to express in an exalted and pure form the ideas o f the unity o f all the people, to reflect the people’s spirit and character.. . . In the m idst o f a gloomy and cruel reality, the maestro could express ideals o f justice, goodness, and hum anism .” The painter Ilia Glazunov wrote that Andrei Rublev’s Trinity icon “reflected the collective traits o f the Russian people during the epoch when Russians began to re-

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alizé that victory comes to those who are united and m orally exalted.. . . [It] will always remain as an appeal to eternal peace and to the brotherly unity o f our nation.”60 T he w riter V ladim ir Soloukhin breached a long-standing taboo by con­ dem ning Stalins destruction o f the Cathedral o f C hrist the Savior, "the tallest and m ost majestic building in Moscow, visible from all over the city,” built by Muscovites to com m em orate the Russian people’s great vic­ tory over Napoleon in 1812 and to give thanks for the survival o f their d ty in spite o f the great fire o f that year. It had been blown up, Soloukhin pointed out sardonically, to build a swimming pool.61 T he new Russian patriots praised Russia’s continuing tradition o f au­ thoritarian statehood and m ilitary might: "For centuries the Russian peo­ ple asserted and defended both Russia as a state and its own remarkable m oral dignity, not by prayers, but w ith weapons, w ith the support o f a painstakingly created, mighty, organized state and an integrated patriotic philosophy. . . . Sergii o f Radonezh did not deny the warrior D m itrii D onskoi, nor did Pushkin the state-builder Peter the First, nor Sergei Esenin the great revolutionary Lenin! T hat is the greatness o f the Russian character, that it has been em bodied in very different historical figures, from A w akum to Chekhov, from Chaadaev to Kirov.”62 Chalmaev took the opportunity to attack the Soviet Union’s O ther, the U nited States. Russian patriotism , he asserted, was quite different from the soulless international consum er culture prevalent in the West, the "pa­ triotism o f cars and refrigerators,” accompanied by "standardization o f ways o f life, consum er items, work conditions, and the leveling o f hum an character, the disintegration o f religious, community, and family bonds,” which turned the notion o f the H om eland into an "overblown abstrac­ tion.” H e asserted that "money, which, as is well known, has no smell and no hom eland, does not tolerate any feeling for hom eland in those who fall under its dom ination.”63 M ikhail Lobanov w arned that “m any profound Russian m inds have gone through the disease o f w anting to replace Rus­ sia’s spiritual and cultural distinctiveness, its unique national way o f life, w ith a new ‘Europeanized,’ standardized Russia, like the countries o f the West. Either Russia will be distinctive (samobytnoi) and give the world its own message, or it will be bourgeois and faceless on the W estern m odel.”64 In this reading, the Soviet revolution was a logical development o f earlier Russian history, not its negation. Altogether, then, the M obdaia gvardiia writers now depicted Russia as

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an age-old great power, thanks to the church and the tsars; as a cham pion o f all-hum an values, a nonm aterialist faith, and a social solidarity resting on long-established peasant institutions. T heir message recalled Patriarch Aleksii’s spirited defense o f the church in 1960, and it was certainly a long 'way from the revolutionary, future-oriented, atheist, proletarian rhetoric w ith which the Soviet U nion had launched itself on the world scene sev­ eral decades earlier.65 These implications were picked up by N ovyi mir, which became the main opposition forum to the new Russian nationalism . In one article Novyi m ir editor Aleksandr Demeniev accused Chalmaev o f speaking the language o f “Slavophile messianism,” o f adm iring not Russia’s revolu­ tionary traditions but, on the contrary, the conservative, patriarchal, and mystical ones. H e was rehabilitating O rthodox obscurantism, racism, and Stalinism. The struggle against the West was not national, Dem entiev m aintained, but socioeconomic, in fact a class struggle. T he CPSU pro­ gram "requires us to conduct a resolute struggle against any kind o f na­ tionalism and chauvinism ,” D em entiev rem inded his opponent.66 Soon D em entievs article itself came under attack for underm ining So­ viet security by weakening vigilance against W estern "bourgeois” ideas. In an unprecedented display o f “Russianist” solidarity, eleven writers and ed­ itors wrote a letter to the weekly journal Ogonek attacking Novyi mir. In February 1970 the Soviet W riters’ U nion accepted their protest and dis­ missed m ost o f Tvardovskii’s colleagues on the editorial board o f Novyi mir. W ith his own position thus made intolerable, Tvardovskii him self re­ signed. Ironically, his journal had suffered, not for its oppositional stance, but for an article defending party orthodoxy. A few m onths later, as if to balance his removal, the Soviet W riters’ Union also dismissed Anatolii Nikonov.67 T he Central Com m ittee o f the CPSU was reserving for itself the right to determ ine the doses o f Russian nationalism to be adm inis­ tered to the sick Soviet patient. Thereafter, until the early 1980s, Russian nationalism was preached in a less systematic, more fragmentary way, both in official journals and more outspokenly in samizdat oudets such as Veche, which appeared spo­ radically and was distributed through the mail between 1971 and 1974. Veche voiced Russians’ widely shared concern about growing crime, alco­ holism, individualism, the instability o f the family, and a low birth rate. Its line was that the Russian people needed to rediscover their traditional collective morality by returning to O rthodox Christianity.68

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Solzhenitsyn made his own idiosyncratic contribution to the debate. His "Letter to the Leaders o f the Soviet Union” o f 1973 also pleaded for a revival o f Russian national values, but unlike the M olodaia gvardiia au­ thors he argued that class struggle and international revolution did not strengthen those values but underm ined them . H e urged the Soviet lead­ ers to abandon their ideology, because it had inflicted on Russia such enorm ous damage: its collectivized agriculture was unproductive, its air and water were polluted, its industry had become gigantom anic and per­ verted for m ilitary needs, its schools drum m ed em pty ideological slogans into bored children, and its cities had lost their old two-story buildings and green spaces in favor o f soulless m odem concrete boxes in w hich peo­ ple lived cooped up on top o f one another. Depressed and demoralized, m en had become drunkards, drawing on the one consum er item regularly available in the shops, while women perform ed unfem inine and degrad­ ing m anual labor and had no tim e for their children. Solzhenitsyn attri­ buted all these evils to the O ne True Ideology, which ignored genuine na­ tional interests in favor o f invented international ones; altogether, so he claimed, it had cost Russia the lives o f sixty-six m illion people. Russia was not ready for W estern-style democracy, so the soviets, he thought, m ight be kept, but as the backbone o f a system in w hich people could influence their own fate, not as the bearers o f party dictatorship.69 If Russia was to recover, then in Solzhenitsyns view it m ust renounce all international am bitions and stop financing revolutionary parties all over the world. It m ust also avoid the W estern illusion o f endless material progress taken over lock, stock, and barrel by Marxism. Instead Russians should devote themselves to creating a sustainable nongrowing economy by developing the one resource they still had in unspoiled abundance, land. They should open up the vast spaces o f their northeast, o f Siberia, which Solzhenitsyn described in a vivid if inelegant image as "our hope and our settling tank,” the territory where the m aterial and spiritual pol­ lution o f life under the Ideology m ight be cleansed and national convales­ cence initiated.70 Solzhenitsyn was far from being a typical Russian nationalist. T he great virtue o f his exposé was that it distinguished, as no one else had, between the Russian people and the Russian-Soviet state. His Russianist critics failed to see the distinction between russkii and rossiiskii; they were assum­ ing that Russian national feeling automatically takes imperial forms and has the right to do so. Russian liberals also ignored the distinction: they

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simply assumed that the values they espoused were universal, and they were largely uninterested in ethnic characteristics. Solzhenitsyn’s vision here was clearer, but he could also be accused o f the opposite failing, o f not acknowledging that Russian national feeling, even though distinct from Russian imperialism, is indeed attracted by universal "missionary” ideals and therefore does tend to assume the right to hegemony over other nations. Socialism may have come to Russia from the West, but messianic socialism is a distinctively Russian version o f it.

Official Westemizers Russian nationalists did not have everything their own way at the party’s highest level. Liberal and W esternizing tendencies also had their defend­ ers, under the cautious patronage o f Iurii Andropov, head o f the KGB. They were especially strong in the International D epartm ent o f the CPSU Central Com m ittee, w hich was a kind o f successor to the C om intern and hence to the party’s internationalist traditions. T he departm ent’s function was to advise the Soviet leaders on events abroad and to liaise w ith nonSoviet Com m unist parties. T he working atmosphere that prevailed there was different from that o f m ost Central Com m ittee departm ents, and by some officials it was regarded w ith suspicion as a "white crow.” Its mem­ bers were genuine professionals, people who had worked hard to study the languages and cultures o f the countries for which they were responsible. They were widely read, had seen a great deal o f the m odern world, and knew a lot o f people outside the USSR. They were "cosmopolitans” in the best sense o f that misused word. They valued the Soviet U nion’s greatpower status— w ithout which m ost o f them would have been w ithout a job— but they were not thoughdess chauvinists. They knew that cap­ italism, in its revised Keynesian variant, had improved workers’ living standards more effectively than the Soviet planned economy. M any o f them favored some kind o f evolution toward European social democracy or even liberalism. O thers merely w anted a gradual and gentle reformism w ithin the Soviet mold, and they regarded Russian nationalism w ith con­ cern because they associated it w ith Stalin: this was Andropov’s own po­ sition.71 T he approach o f the International D epartm ent received strong and well-informed backing from the Central Com m ittee’s policy studies think tanks, such as the Institute for the Study o f the U nited States and Can-

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ada, run for many years by Georgii Arbatov, and the Institute o f the W orld Economy and International Relations (IM EM O ), under N . N . Inozemtsev and from 1983 Aleksandr Iakovlev. In 1981 M ikhail Suslov was sufficiently worried by the “subversive” advice com ing out o f these think-tanks to propose closing IM EM O , but he was outvoted in the Po­ litburo. T he cosm opolitan eggheads had their value for the leaders, both for their expertise and for the am m unition they provided in the ideologi­ cal batde against C hina.72 For tw enty years, then, from the m id-1960s to the m id-1980s, there was a tense stand-off, both am ong the Soviet leaders and also am ong the unofficial intelligentsia, over the path that the Soviet U nion should take to renew its ideological appeal and improve the effectiveness o f its social and econom ic system. M arxism-Leninism was still unchallenged as the of­ ficial ideology, but it was beginning to split into its Russian and W estern com ponents. O ne current o f thought w anted to attach the Soviet U nion more securely to the Russian statist tradition, the other to return to the W est European roots o f Marxism and rediscover the m ain road from which Stalin— or, some whispered, Lenin— had gone astray. Gorbachev’s perestroika represented a final, brief surge o f this W esternized Marxism, com bined w ith missionary Com m unism returning to first base: hum an­ ism (all-hum an values), the Enlightenm ent, the “all-European hom e.”73 T he conflict was serious, but the front lines were never clear and unam ­ biguous. T he issues were complex, as we have seen, and individuals wa­ vered in their interpretation o f them , aligning themselves w ith different individuals and groups according to the subdeties o f each contendous issue.

Lev Gumilev and the Eurasianists Russianists’ ideas received a new im petus in the early 1980s. It stemmed indirecdy from the émigré movement o f the Eurasianists, as extended and reinterpreted by Lev Gumilev, the son o f Anna Akhmatova. H e had spent many years in the labor camps, where he had m et the last survivor o f the Eurasianists, Petr Savitskii, and afterward conducted a long correspon­ dence w ith him . G um ilevs ideas on ethnic idendty generally and on the fate o f Russia in particular provoked strong disagreement among official ethnographers, and his w ork remained largely unpublished. All the same, he managed eventually to defend and deposit his thesis in Leningrad.74 Gumilev believed that the driving force in hum an history was “ethnogenesis,” the rise and decline o f peoples, which he saw as determ ined

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partly by geography, landscape, and climate, pardy by the forces o f the cosmos and the biosphere (here he drew on the ideas o f Vladim ir Vernadskii), and pardy by the leadership o f "passionary” (passionamye) per­ sonalities, im bued w ith great energy and determ ination to achieve col­ lective goals. Neighboring ethnoses sometimes com bined to form a "superethnos,” and when this happened a whole epoch o f 'world civiliza­ tion was launched. But ethnoses from wholly different backgrounds or, as Gumilev put it, from different "galaxies,” should not try to mix, for the result would be destructive wars. This had happened in the thirteenth century, when Catholic and O rthodox Christians had tried to combine against the Saracens, but found they were incom patible and fought each other instead.75 Applying his theory to Russia, Gumilev asserted that it was one o f the w orlds great superethnoses, wholly different from W estern Europe and N orth America. O f course, in a sense this idea was familiar from the nine­ teenth-century Slavophiles. But Gumilev made his claim in a far more radical sense than they. Russia, he contended, was “Eurasian,” that is, it derived its way o f life from the nomads o f the Eurasian steppes, and from the Finno-Ugrian and Turkic peoples, a statem ent that w ould have horri­ fied the Slavophiles— and indeed horrified more conventional Russian na­ tionalists.76 The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union were the heirs o f the great medieval empire o f the Mongols. Its superethnos was character­ ized, according to Gumilev, by a collective ethos, religious tolerance,.non­ destructive use o f the environm ent, and acceptance o f authoritarian rule. Gumilev drew from his claims the lesson that Russians should not try to adopt forms o f life derived from W estern Europe or N orth America, where the dom inant ethic was individualist and politics were constitu­ tional and parliamentary. Any attem pt to do so would be disastrous.77 In the 1970s Gumilev was unable to publish his ideas in social science journals, but he found an outlet in geographical and natural science publications at Leningrad University. His articles circulated unofficially among scholars during the 1970s, and exerted such influence that in 1974 the prom inent ethnologist V. I. Kozlov issued a rebuttal, claiming that Gumilevs theories "im peded a true scientific understanding” o f ethnic de­ velopment, discouraged interethnic contact, failed to explain the “emer­ gence o f a new historical community, the Soviet people,” and “justified cruel conquests and bloodly interethnic conflicts.”78 The idea that Russia was a distinct Eurasian superethnos assumed a new im portance in the final decade o f the Soviet Union, as its internal cri-

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sis became ever sharper. T he deputy editor o f Nash sovrtm m nik, Iurii Seleznev, an expert on Dostoevskii, took the initiative in propagating the idea when he was responsible for a special num ber o f the journal that ap­ peared in November 1981. T he m ost im portant article in the issue was by the literary critic Vadim Kbzhinov. H e denied that Russia’s culture came m ainly from the West and quoted Dostoevskii’s view o f Russia as “all-hum an.” “T he genius o f the Russian soul is perhaps more capable than any other nation o f assimilat­ ing the idea o f all-hum an unity.,” he said. “A Russian understands equally well the social pathos o f the Frenchman, the practical activity o f the Eng­ lishman, the misty philosophy o f the G erm an.” Russia, Kozhinov as­ serted, should not simply take over W estern social structures or cultural attitudes. M ost im portant, Russia was m ultinational and devoid o f the national egoism that disfigured European peoples and led them to exploit other cultures, treating them as objects. Hence the extra spiritual dim en­ sion in Russian literature; hence also Russians’ enhanced capacity to adopt Bakhtin’s “aesthetic o f the dialogue.”79 Kozhinov called for a reassessment o f the Russian attitude to Asia, som ething Dostoevskii had pointed toward in his later writings. H itherto virtually all Russian intellectuals had simply mimicked the European arro­ gance toward Asia. In actual fact, com pared w ith Europeans, Asians had a superior capacity for tolerance and m utual understanding, w hich enabled Russians to interact fruitfully w ith them . H ere Kozhinov quoted w ith ap­ proval the w ork o f Lev Gumilev, and he drew on his scholarship to rein­ terpret the battle o f Kulikovo (the great stem batde o f the Russians) as a struggle not against the Tatars but against a cosmopolitan slave-owning plutocracy w ith its center in Genoa, which happened at that tim e to be al­ lied w ith the Tatar breakaway, M arnai.80 Kozhinov’s conception was a kind o f “Occidentalism” (that is, the con­ verse o f Edward Said’s “O rientalism ”). H e was laying the groundwork for a new geopolitical conception which was to assume greater im portance w ith the collapse o f the Soviet Union: that Russia should seek its future not in a bloc w ith the West, w hich was bound to exploit and underm ine it, but rather as a Eurasian power. T he m athem atician Igor Shafarevich, widely read in samizdat in the 1980s, sculpted the m ost folly crafted “enemy image” against which Rus­ sians could define themselves. H e asserted that socialism was a dangerous mirage which had tem pted hum an beings throughout history, but had al-

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ways proved in practice to entrench the absolute power o f a small elite.81 In recent centuries o f European history he identified this tendency w ith a “m inor people” (malyi narod) whose purpose was to underm ine and de­ stroy established ways o f life. As examples he pointed to the Calvinists in seventeenth-century England, to the Jacobins in the French revolution, and to the left Hegelians in 1840s Germany. T he natural habitat o f such people was dubs, academies, and masonic lodges. They rejected the pre­ vailing norms and traditions o f the sodety in which they lived, its reli­ gion, its monarchy, its folk customs, in favor o f abstract ideas about soci­ ety that they had dream ed up in their studies. They infiltrated institutions or seized power by violence in order to p u t their ideas into practice, dis­ playing nothing but contem pt for the outlook o f ordinary people and those who loved their nations inherited way o f life.82 Todays “m inor people” Shafarevich identified directly w ith the Jews, and he accused them o f deliberately spreading “Russophobia,” o f painting Russians as a servile people addicted to tyranny: “Almost foaming at the m outh they dem onstrate to us that W estern democracy is absolutely alien to the spirit and history o f our people, and in the same breath insist just as forcefully that we should adopt that very political system.” They got ex­ cited about hum an rights— but “the fate o f the Crim ean Tatars attracts m uch more attention than that o f the Ukrainians, and the fate o f the Ukrainians far more than that o f the Russians.” Jews did not wish to share the fate o f a people they considered “servile,” but instead dem anded the right o f em igration “to a distant tropical count ry. . . to which they are at­ tracted, not by the icons to which their fathers and grandfathers used to pray, but by a Temple destroyed almost two thousand years ago!” T heir real aim was “the complete destruction o f the religious and national prin­ ciples o f life,” as a result o f which the Russian people would cease to exist.83 By the m id-1980s, then, Russianists were developing their own distinct ideology. T heir reform ulated nationalism taught that the great conflicts in world history were not socioeconomic but ethnic; that Russia had its own distinct role to play as a superethnos w ith its own collectivist m entality and authoritarian politics, exemplified by both the tsarist and the Soviet states; and that Russia should not attem pt to follow W estern precepts in solving its current crisis.

11 IN UNANTICIPATED CREATION: THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

Paradoxical though it may seem, it was Russia that destroyed the Soviet Union. In the words o f one political scientist, “W hat distinguishes the ter­ minal phase o f the Soviet em pire from m ost o f its [twentieth-century] counterparts was the remarkable and quite rapid transform ation o f Rus­ sian national identity from imperial to separatist.”1 T hat outcom e is all the more remarkable in that few Russians, o f whatever persuasion, in­ tended it. Rather, Russia’s anomalous and unsatisfactory status w ithin the Soviet U nion had never been solved, and, when a serious crisis developed, that anomaly became ever more serious and began to dictate the political struggle. T he begetter o f that crisis was M ikhail Gorbachev. The program o f perestroika and glasnost that he launched soon after becoming CPSU general secretary in 1985 presented all Russians w ith a new and unfamil­ iar situation which challenged m any o f their habitual assumptions and w ith which they were ill equipped to cope. Perestroika legalized private firms, including those that had long flourished on the black market. T heir newfound freedom o f operation enabled them to outperform state firms, sucking goods out o f the state sector o f the economy, on which m ost ordi­ nary people still relied. As a Saratov worker complained to Pravda, “In the shops everything has vanished, but in the private markets there is more and more. How does it get there? You have to pay 250 to 300 rubles for a pair o f womens boots. My daughter needs some, but she earns only 115 rubles a m onth.”2 The mechanisms o f blat and patronage, which had en-

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abled m ost employees to keep their heads above water, began to unravel, threatening their subsistence. T he cozy if claustrophobic “communes” o f late Soviet Russia could not survive in a m arket economy. T he m arket was not only in commodities. Glasnost created for the first tim e an incipient free m arket in public ideas and initiatives. In 1986 the RSFSR M inistry o f Justice issued a set o f “Regulations on Am ateur Asso­ ciations,” which made it possible for people to open dubs or societies w ithout applying for official sanction, merely by following the rules. Up to then, even a stamp-collectors’ d u b had required permission, so this was a m ajor new departure. A variety o f nefbrmaly, or inform al dubs, move­ ments, and associations, sprang up in the m ajor cities, mosdy in the fields o f culture, sport, and hobbies. A few, however, had civic im plications, like the Leningrad group that campaigned to save the H otel Angleterre, an old building where the much-loved Russian poet Sergei Esenin had com m it­ ted suicide. In Moscow the residents o f the outsize high-rise Brateevo es­ tate banded together to protest the construction o f a toxic heavy industrial plant opposite their front doors, and in the process took over m uch o f the day-to-day running o f their estate.3 M ost members o f such associations were young people under thirty, and they drew on the experience o f unofficial youth movements: they were lively, casual, disorganized, and often relied on the inspiration and energy o f one person. T he participants were not dissidents or hum an rights activists, but they did w ant to carve out some social field in which they could exercise initiative. Some o f them were sponsored by local sovi­ ets or Komsomol organizations that welcomed public support or w anted to pursue certain local aims. As political pressures eased, civic associations began to seek one another out, exchanging correspondence, or m eeting in conferences to swap ideas and plan wider activities. O ne such association representing twelve cities m et in Moscow in August 1987.4 M any students and scholars were eager to use their special knowledge to discuss serious social issues and then do som ething effective about them. Discussions held in 1987 on the new economic reforms at the Cen­ tral Economic-M athematical Institute in Moscow led to the creation o f specialized action groups, for instance, to protect legal rights or to tackle environm ental problems.5 O ne o f these groups proved especially significant. “M emorial” began life as a petition campaign calling for a m onum ent to be erected to Stalin’s victims. The dem and was a shrewd and well-conceived one. It was per-

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missible from the party viewpoint, since Khrushchevs condem nation o f the “cult o f personality” had never been explicitly revoked; the idea o f a m onum ent was in fact approved by a CPSU conference in the summ er o f 1988. Yet the m onum ent campaign also spoke to the profound feelings o f num erous Soviet citizens who w anted social m em ory to be restored and their suffering and grief over loved ones acknowledged in a dignified m an­ ner. In November 1988 M emorial held a “week o f conscience.” A “wall o f memory” was constructed, exhibiting photographs o f those arrested under Stalin. People peered intendy at it, seeking out relatives they had lost, and leaving notes o f the kind, “Does anyone know my father?”6 M emorial was an um brella movement, the first receptacle for the long unexpressed hopes and fears o f Soviet citizens from a great variety o f back­ grounds. Its significance reflected the crucial im portance o f suppressed m em ory for both Russians and non-Russians. T he movement had to take on an almost insupportable diversity o f functions. O ne o f the founders, the historian Iurii Afanasiev, summ ed up its m eaning at the initial confer­ ence: T he m ost im portant task o f M emorial is to restore to this country its past. But the past is alive in the present. Therefore M emorial is a po­ litical movement, insofar as today has not yet settled accounts w ith yesterday. O ur problem is the hum an being in history. But for us his­ tory is not just politics projected into the past, for m ans historical habitat is culture. Therefore M emorial is also a cultural movement. By talking about terror and lawlessness, we help to form a notion o f legality in the public m ind. Therefore M emorial is also a movement concerned w ith the rule o f law (pravovoe dvizhenie).7 M emorial also prom oted networks where none had existed before. It brought together for the first tim e young “informais” w ith form er dissi­ dents and hum an rights activists, as well as w ith leading figures from the Academy o f Sciences and the cultural world: its Public Council, elected by popular vote on the street, included Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn, the writers Evgenii Evtushenko and Bulat Okudzhava, the literary scholar D m itrii Likhachev, the actor M ikhail Ulianov (famous for his portrayal o f his namesake, Lenin), and Boris Yeltsin, recendy expelled from the CPSU Politburo for dem anding more radical reform. An alliance o f such figures would have been inconceivable up to a year earlier. From M em orials sue-

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cess came the confidence that it was possible to organize outside the party, even on occasions against it, w ith the support o f prestigious personalities.* This confidence in turn helped to generate genuine political debate over issues and personalities. Political influence now em anated not only from the hushed and discreet cabinets o f Staraia Ploshchad, but also from noisy public meeting halls, on television, and in electoral campaigns which were becoming increasingly frank and heated. T he “democrats” created inform al campaigning movements and “popular fronts to support perestroika” w hich caught the publics im agination and effectively con­ tested the C om m unist Party’s political m onopoly under a slogan it had it­ self approved. Young people were taking to the streets w ith slogans and banners not decorously fashioned in the local party bureaus but in bois­ terous public meetings. In Iaroslavl, for example, a popular front was formed at a public meet­ ing in June 1988 to protest the autom atic dispatch o f the long-standing oblast first secretary, F. I. Loshchenkov, to the 19th Party Conference, w ithout any consultation w ith ordinary party members. This had been norm al procedure for decades, but Loshchenkov was unpopular because he had backed the construction o f a chemical works in the town. T he Popular Front meeting dem anded his recall and open, unrigged elections for a successor. In the long run, using the weapons o f glasnost, they were successful. They moved on from their victory to hold meetings in the soc­ cer stadium and agitate on other local issues, including the abolition o f privileged stores for the nom enklatura elite, a grievance that had never been publicly aired before. It was not officially acceptable even now. T he editor o f the local party newspaper refused to publish their materials, fall­ ing back on familiar authority mechanisms: “I answer to the party. If they tell me to publish this, I will. But they haven’t, so I won’t.”9 T he party’s defense mechanisms no longer worked automatically, how­ ever. In the M arch 1989 elections to the new Congress o f People’s Dep­ uties, the popular fronts did manage to score sensational victories over ap­ paratus nominees in a few constituencies. T heir greatest success was the election o f Boris Yeltsin in Moscow. In a situation o f rapid political change, a key figure is one who breaks away from a dom inant elite in or­ der to stand up for that elite’s own traduced values. T hat was w hat Yeltsin had done. H e had made his name by speaking out publicly against the privileged and corrupt life-style o f the nom enklatura hierarchs— the very grievance that the public m ost resented— and he had been thrown out o f

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the Politburo for his im patience and forthrightness. W ith his electoral success in M arch 1989 he became a popular tribune, a spokesman for the m any long-suppressed— and not always com patible— aspirations o f the Russian people. Alarmingly for Russians, the opening up o f politics was proceeding faster in some o f the non-Russian republics, especially the Baltics and Georgia, where opposition candidates swept the field. In Moldavia, too, and a little later Ukraine, “popular fronts” w ith various names dem anded greater autonom y for the titular peoples and sometimes turned upon Rus­ sians as “occupiers,” “aliens,” or “im m igrants.” Russians, who had long felt themselves increasingly marginalized in everyday life and in economic exchanges, now found political agitation directed against them as well. T he First Congress o f Peoples Deputies, held in M ay-June 1989, trans­ form ed the political situation. It was televised live in its entirety, and som ething like three-quarters o f the urban population stayed hom e to watch it. W hat they saw am ounted to a crash course in Soviet political re­ ality. Deputies openly questioned w hether Marx’s hundred-year-old w rit­ ings were still relevant, attacked the KGB for “crimes unknow n in the his­ tory o f hum anity,” called for an end to the C om m unist Party monopoly, and dem anded that Lenin be removed from the mausoleum. M any had individual horror stories to tell to illustrate their accusations.10 W hen the congress was over, few Soviet citizens can have had many illusions about the system under w hich they had lived for seventy years. But in many ways the revelations were too diverse and too overwhelming: it was dif­ ficult to disentangle from them coherent proposals about w hat should be done, especially since the economic situation was fast deteriorating and seemed to require emergency solutions. M ost people entrenched them ­ selves in the political attitudes that had been form ing gradually over the previous decades. Among Russians there were broadly three tenden­ cies: W estern liberal-dem ocrat, Russianist imperial, and labor-based eco­ nom ic— the last being the reaction o f Russian workers to their long ex­ ploitation by the apparatus and the m ilitary-industrial complex. M uch depended on w hat allies this third tendency would seek.11 There was another problem too. T he congress offered a forum for the first outbreaks o f publicly expressed ethnic hatred. Russians were hor­ rified to discover that the oppression they attributed to Com m unism was identified by Balts, Georgians, and Armenians as being the result o f Rus­ sian arrogance. T heir attacks provoked the w riter Valentin Rasputin to

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com m ent sardonically, "Perhaps it is Russia that should secede from the Union, since you accuse her o f all your misfortunes and since her back­ wardness and awkwardness obstruct your progressive aspirations?. . . We could then pronounce the word ‘Russian’ w ithout fear o f being rebuked for nationalism, we could talk openly about our national identity. We could set up at last our own Academy o f Sciences. . . . Believe me, we re fed up w ith being scapegoats, w ith being mocked and spat upon.”12 Rasputins sour w itticism was probably intended ironically, but it high­ lighted Russia’s anomalous position in a country where ethnic identity had become param ount. M any a true word is spoken in jest. In order to offer a constructive alternative to interethnic quarrels and to reaffirm the joint struggle against the C om m unist apparatus, Yeltsin gath­ ered around him self an “Interregional G roup o f D eputies,” consisting o f both Russians and non-Russians, com m itted to “the transition o f the country from totalitarianism to democracy,” and to “the economic inde­ pendence o f the republics and regions.”13 These rather vague aspirations im plied that the non-Russian nationalities should be able to determ ine their own future, if they wished outside the USSR. In this way Russian liberals, for tactical reasons, become allied w ith movements whose im­ plicit— soon explicit— aim was the break-up o f the USSR. T he first mass association o f Russian liberals was Dem ocratic Russia. It was hastily patched together in January 1990 from a large num ber o f in­ formal movements in order to organize a political campaign for the nonparty candidates in the republican Soviet elections due in M arch. Symp­ tomatically, it did not succeed in holding a founding congress till much later. Dem ocratic Russia never ceased to be a loose patchwork o f person­ alized political groups w ith vague, am bitious, and partly contradictory aims, held together by litde more than anti-Com m unism . T he movement aimed to propagate “the ideas o f Andrei Sakharov” (who had just died), meaning a com m itm ent to “liberty, democracy, the rights o f m an, a m ulti-party system, free elections and a m arket economy.” T he move­ m ent’s m ost obvious political model was Polish Solidarity o f ten years ear­ lier, a movement o f anti-C om m unist national revival. Among Democratic Russia’s specific goals were the ending o f the party political monopoly, the subjection o f the KGB to parliam entary supervision, the creation o f a “regulated market economy,” and the declaration o f sovereignty for the RSFSR.14 But Russia was a very different political entity from Poland. Sovereignty o f the RSFSR was a key demand. It was borrowed from the

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Russianists and indirecdy from the Baltic popular fronts. It is not clear how seriously anyone took the idea at this stage, or even if people under­ stood w hat it implied. Sakharov, and all Russian liberals hitherto, had al­ ways assumed that the reforms they envisaged would apply to the USSR as a whole. They had never considered ethnic identity im portant and had not grappled seriously w ith the national question. T he two words “Dem­ ocratic” and “Russia” had hardly ever been used together before, and it took people some tim e to realize that when inscribed together on a ban­ ner, they im plied the dissolution o f the Soviet U nion, which was neither dem ocratic nor Russia. T he liberals perform ed extraordinarily well in the republican soviet elections o f M arch 1990. They took control o f Moscow, Leningrad, and a num ber o f other large Russian industrial cities, defeating party nominees and installing their own chairm en in the m unicipal councils. However, they did not do well enough to outnum ber the party-nom inated candi­ dates in the RSFSR Supreme Soviet, the people whom Iurii Afanasiev in another context called “the aggressively silent majority.” In the attem pt to com plete the job and end C om m unist Party rule, the liberals took two im portant steps: they tightened their alliance w ith Yeltsin, and they pressed the slogan o f “Russian sovereignty” into service as a political weapon.

Russianists Unlike their liberal counterparts, who were spontaneously united by in­ formal sociability and by their dislike o f Com m unism , the Russianists were slow to mobilize and com bine, partly because they were accustomed to protection from above and partly because they came from contradic­ tory backgrounds. H ow could people who had in their homes portraits o f Nicholas II and his reforming prim e minister, Petr Stolypin, ally them ­ selves w ith those whose portraits were o f M arx and Lenin? How were Vasilii Belov or Valentin Rasputin, who in their novels had outspokenly and vividly condem ned Stalins collectivization o f agriculture, to find com m on ground w ith neo-Stalinists like Egor Ligachev or m ilitary enthu­ siasts like Aleksandr Prokhanov, sometimes known as the “nightingale o f the General Staff” for his paeans to the Soviet war effort in Afghanistan? And how could the Stalinists embrace the prelates o f the Russian Orthodox Church, which their hero had spent m uch o f his life trying to destroy? Nevertheless, those who believed in “Russia”— whatever they m eant by

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it— did in the end contrive a kind o f cooperation for one simple reason: they discovered that the dangers facing all o f them together were more se­ rious than the issues which had divided them . D uring the autum n and w inter o f 1989-1990 political developments challenged everything they held dear. T he fall o f the Berlin Wall, the w inding-up o f Com econ and the Warsaw Pact, and the collapse o f Com m unist governments brought the “outer empire” to an end and threatened the “inner em pire” too. Ger­ many, the ancient enemy, long divided and held down, was on the way to being reunited. In February 1990 the C om m unist Party o f the Soviet Union surrendered its political monopoly, leaving the way open for even more fiercely contested elections and the “politics o f the street” to become universal. In M arch 1990 Lithuania declared its secession from the USSR; Latvia and Estonia announced their intention to follow suit. Russianists realized that w hat they faced was the disintegration o f the Soviet U nion— and hence, as they all understood it, o f Russia. In the Rus­ sian writers’ newspaper Literatum aia Rossiia, Aleksandr Prokhanov drew a terrifying picture o f the collapse o f the Soviet state, which he contended w ould lead to a civil war, conducted “w ith all the ruthlessness o f the last war, com pounded by new nightm arish com ponents added by m ilitarytechnological civilization.” H e predicted that “the world will look w ith horror at our blood-torn expanses, belching nuclear and chemical fumes into the atmosphere and the oceans,” and w ould intervene to try to stabi­ lize the situation.15 Less apocalyptic but still threatening was the specter o f W esternization, which some Russianists considered alm ost as destructive as war. T he in­ cursion o f pop music, pornography, mass culture, a sensationalist me­ dia, and a m arket economy oriented toward the maximization o f profit seemed to them to underm ine the whole Russian way o f life. W riters were the first to sound the alarm, at the USSR W riters’ U nion Congress o f April 1987. V ladim ir K rupin, editor o f the journal Moskva, declared that “Elvis Presley, soft rock, then hard rock, then punk rock— these are all species o f narcotics.” Iurii Bondarev, a prom inent war novelist, drew on his wartime memories to dramatize his point: “I would define the present situation in Russian literature as that o f July 1941 . . . when the progres­ sive forces, showing unorganized resistance, retreated before the battering onslaught o f civilized barbarians . . . If this retreat should continue and the tim e o f Stalingrad not come, then it will end w ith our national values and everything that represents the spiritual pride o f our people being top­ pled into the abyss.”16

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Some Russianists began to perceive that their long, tacit alliance w ith the Soviet authorities was now actually a source o f weakness. T he Fellow­ ship o f Russian Artists, form ed in autum n 1988, said in its founding doc­ um ent, “It has become com m on to identify the will o f the adm inistrativebureaucratic apparatus w ith the view o f the Russian people, whereas it is precisely Russia that is in the m ost critical position, close to collapse. And the collapse o f Russia will inevitably lead to the loss o f the unity o f the po­ litical and state system o f the whole country.”17 T he first constituency the Russianists attem pted to mobilize was the in­ dustrial workers. T his strategy reflected the dom inance o f Russians in in­ dustry throughout the USSR, especially in the m ilitary-industrial com­ plex and in enterprises o f all-U nion significance; and it spoke to Russian workers’ sense o f grievance over their lowly social status in some o f the non-Russian republics. T he creation o f workers’ protest movements began in the Baltic republics in the w inter o f 1988-1989: Interfront in Latvia, Interdvizhenie and the Council o f Labor Collectives in Estonia, Edinstvo (Unity) in Lithuania. Significandy, their names reflected internationalist aspirations, not ethnic ones: at this stage Russianists still saw themselves as speaking for the entire Soviet population. They protested against the Baltic governments’ plans to restrict im m igration and to institute lan­ guage tests which, they claimed, w ould discrim inate against Russians and threaten the integrity o f the Soviet U nion as a whole. In M arch 1989 some fifty thousand workers marched through Tallinn, carrying banners w arning o f “creeping counter-revolution underm ining socialism in Esto­ nia” and dem anding: “Give Russian the status o f an official language.”18 In July 1989 a U nited W orkers’ Front was founded in Leningrad, and it held its first congress in Sverdlovsk in September. Anatolii Salutskii, a journalist from Literatum aia Rossiia, warned that for all their internation­ alism Russians w ould now have to defend their own interests: “T he Rus­ sian people has shown in deeds its unbending adherence to socialist inter­ nationalism . But this does not contradict a Russian’s considering it his patriotic duty to do everything possible to strengthen the economic life o f Russia and bring about a rebirth o f her historical and cultural values.”19 However, even industrial workers turned out to be unreliable allies for the Russianists. M ost o f them did not w ant the electoral process to be squeezed back into the party cabinets. T he m ost serious expression o f working-class m ilitancy was the wave o f strikes in the coal-m ining indus­ try in the sum m er o f 1989. Though m any participants were Russians liv­ ing in non-Russian republics (Ukraine, Kazakhstan), the strikes were di-

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rected not against the local non-Russian peoples but against the partystate apparatus, w hich condem ned miners to low pay, squalid and danger­ ous working conditions, cram ped housing, and uncertain food supplies. The strikers actually favored Gorbachev’s reforms but w anted them taken further. They called for an end to the party’s political m onopoly and for the right to em ancipate their mines from the dictates o f Gosplan, as well as to sell their coal on the open m arket.20 T he strikes fizzled out, though, since in the era o f economic reform the miners were even more dependent on their employers than they had been earlier. T he first political organization to articulate the Russianist approach for a broader constituency was the U nited Council o f Russia (Obedinennyi sovet Rossii), founded in September 1989. Among its constituent members were cultural societies, environm ental associations, m ilitary-patriotic or­ ganizations, workers’ fronts from Russian cities, and "international fronts” from the Baltic republics and Moldavia. T he council also received advice and adm inistrative support from local CPSU committees; this was the m om ent when Com m unists stopped regarding Russian nationalists as raw material to be exploited instrum entally and started to accept them as al­ lies.21 The council’s principal aims were to preserve the “state sovereignty o f the USSR as a voluntary union o f republics” and to “assist the develop­ m ent o f the sovereignty o f the RSFSR and its international status as a fill member o f the U nited N ations.” These two goals were potentially contra­ dictory: as both Lenin and Stalin had seen, the achievement o f the latter would lethally weaken the former. However, the dem and for Russian sov­ ereignty sounded patriotically Russian, and it reflected the popularity o f dem ocratic political movements at the tim e. It was fateful, as it was soon taken over by Yeltsin and used against the Russianists. D uring the winter o f 1989—1990 the United Council o f Russia drew un­ der its wing a bloc o f other Russianist organizations including V O OPIK , the U nited Workers’ Front, the Association o f Russian Artists, and the All-Russian Cultural Fund. Together they launched a “Patriotic Bloc” manifesto ready for the republican soviet elections o f M arch 1990. It warned o f the destruction o f “established adm inistrative and economic structures” and their replacement by “an uncontrolled m arket mecha­ nism .” It reproached the CPSU for adopting an approach o f com pliant passivity in the face o f these dangers, “progressively yielding to a bloc o f separatists and ‘le f radicals’ who are ready to dismember the USSR and to sell out our national wealth to W estern ‘partners.’” As a countermeasure the bloc recommended that Russia dem and its full rights as a member o f

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the Soviet U nion and create its own system o f economic adm inistration and its own Russian C om m unist Party, followed by a separate Russian Academy o f Sciences, w hich would w ork out a specifically Russian eco­ nom ic development program. Russia w ould stop making payments into the U nion budget to subsidize other republics and would dem and rent from all-U nion institutions that wished to locate on Russian territory.22 Com ing from people who insisted on the unity o f the USSR, this pro­ gram was a breathtaking departure. It was also contradictory: it aimed to strengthen the Soviet U nion, yet it w ithdrew the Russian leadership and financial support that made that U nion possible. It reflected the frustra­ tion and alarm o f Russians who saw their primacy in the USSR chal­ lenged and who were freed w ith the possibility o f not even being able to assert the m odest but tangible rights belonging to other nationalities. This was the dilem m a o f a hitherto dom inant ethnicity compelled to defend it­ self in real politics. Russians themselves, however, responded coolly to the Russianists’ pub­ lic appeal. In the republican soviet elections o f M arch 1990 the Patriotic Bloc perform ed disastrously. In the first round not one o f its sixty-one candidates gained the 50 percent needed to win outright; only sixteen sur­ vived till the second round, and they were all defeated at that stage. Ac­ cordingly, Russianists switched back to operating through the existing power structure. In order both to save the C om m unist party and to Russianize it, in June 1990 they set up a Russian C om m unist Party, of­ ficially as part o f the CPSU, but actually in opposition to it, or at least to its current leadership. This was a step o f decisive im portance. Both Lenin and Stalin had explicidy warned against any such move on the grounds that it w ould endanger the cohesion o f the USSR. As late as November 1989 Iurii Manaenkov, a C entral Com m ittee secretary, had warned: “T he form ation o f a Russian C om m unist Party . . . could strengthen the cen­ trifugal forces in the CPSU and, obviously, in the country as well.”23 Yet, ironically, it was now the protagonists o f the USSR who were form ing a Russian party, in order to give weight to their opposition to Gorbachevs reforms. For both sides the identity o f Russia had become an instrum ent o f power politics.

Yeltsin and Russian Sovereignty Before 1990 there is litde evidence that Yeltsin regarded Russian sover­ eignty as a m ajor issue. H e was well-liked am ong Russians because he

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symbolized their resentm ent at the dom ination o f the nom enklatura elite and because he seemed to embody the one aspect o f C om m unist policy which remained very popular its declared aspiration to social justice. T hat appeal and the support o f the inform al democrats helped him to his electoral success in Moscow in M arch 1989. O nce he had clinched his political comeback, though, Yeltsin soon real­ ized that Russian sovereignty could be used as an instrum ent in his strug­ gle against Gorbachev. H e took it up in the election campaign o f 1990, during which, stim ulated by the recent Lithuanian declaration o f sover­ eignty, he warned that Russia could no longer continue as an “appendage o f the center,” and that “as a U nion Republic, it is also entitled to leave the U nion, and this is not only a formal right.”24 Eventually Russian au­ tonom y became his principal weapon, and he steered a “declaration o f sovereignty” through the Russian Congress o f People’s Deputies on June 12,1990. Both Russianist deputies and democrats voted for it, though for completely different reasons. By then Yeltsins assumptions were widely shared: in an opinion poll o f September 1990,48 percent o f the RSFSR population stated that their re­ public should have the right to revoke decisions o f the Soviet government on RSFSR territory; only 22 percent thought not.25 In the campaign for chairmanship o f the RSFSR Congress o f Peoples Deputies, Yeltsins main opponent, Aleksandr Vlasov, backed by Gorbachev, also supported a dec­ laration stating that Russia suffered from “a rapacious Soviet government ‘even more than the others,’” and calling for Russia to regain control o f its natural resources and industrial wealth. Yeltsin criticized “the long-stand­ ing policy o f the center”— implying that Russia was not the center and that Russians were victims, not the leading nationality, o f the USSR. At this stage Yeltsin seems to have envisaged Russia, not as a seceded state, but as a self-governing republic in some kind o f confederal USSR. He may have hoped Russian sovereignty would im part new strength at the heart o f the Soviet system and make possible the negotiation o f a new union treaty. His use o f the words “sovereign” and “independent,” like ev­ eryone else’s, was capaciously am biguous.26 By the end o f 1990, legitim ated and even pressured by the Russian de­ cision, all the U nion republics and most autonom ous ones had issued dec­ larations o f sovereignty and stated that their own laws took precedence on their own territories.27 By this tim e the leading apparatchiks in the nonRussian republics had begun to appropriate the independence agenda for themselves, seeking alliances w ith their own nationalists to replace the fal-

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tering support from Moscow. They had com m on ground on which they could work together: to nationalists “sovereignty” m eant democracy and national self-determ ination, while to republican apparatchiks it m eant an end at last to interference from Moscow. Over the next year Yeltsin turned Russian sovereignty from a symbolic statem ent into a reality. His m ain motive was to gain economic and ad­ m inistrative freedom o f action. In the sum m er and autum n o f 1990 Rus­ sian liberals contem plated an alliance w ith Gorbachev, under w hich eco­ nom ic reform w ould speed and reinforce republican autonomy, though still w ithin the framework o f a restructured USSR. They also hoped to obtain W estern financial support for the plan: at this stage m ost Russian liberals still held a highly idealistic view o f the West as genuinely dem o­ cratic, genuinely civilized, and allied w ith them in a com m on struggle against totalitarianism . This conception was em bodied in a plan proposed by the econom ist Stanislav Shatalin, which called for a m arket economy to be introduced w ithin 500 days. T he plan was predicated on support from the U nited States and international financial institutions. It also de­ volved m ost economic decisions to the republics. T he RSFSR legislature accepted the Shatalin plan, but the International M onetary Fund was highly critical o f it, and shordy afterward Gorbachev decided to reject it. Thereafter Yeltsin became more confrontational. O nly if Russian sover­ eignty m eant som ething could he carry out the m arket economic reforms he and his advisers were planning. As we have seen, owing to Russia’s dom inance in the m ilitary-industrial complex, many o f the enterprises on RSFSR territory were all-U nion ones, under the aegis o f USSR m inis­ tries.28 G aining control over them was a key to Yeltsins strategy. Gorbachev hoped to overcome the divisions by negotiating a new union treaty that w ould give the republics m uch more autonomy. His dis­ agreement w ith Yeltsin made these negotiations m uch harder to conduct. In fact, under pressure from both Russianists and “democrats” led by Yeltsin, Gorbachev was increasingly losing control o f events. In the Baltic republics Russianists and imperial Com m unists com bined to create “Na­ tional Salvation Com m ittees,” w hich in January 1991 announced they were assuming power there to “avert an economic collapse” and prevent the establishm ent o f a “bourgeois dictatorship.” Paratroopers and M inis­ try o f the Interior troops tried to seize strategic buildings in Vilnius and Riga but were thw arted by large crowds. After a tense stand-off they backed down. The “center” had already lost its firm grip on the periphery.

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A t around this point some o f the leading figures in Dem ocratic Russia at last woke up to the fact that the alliance o f Russian liberals and nonRussian nationalists against the C om m unist Party was endangering the Soviet Union. This was a situation scarcely any o f them had consciously intended: they had all assumed that their planned reforms would be car­ ried out w ithin a more dem ocratic Soviet U nion. Nikolai Travkin, V iktor Aksiuchits, and M ikhail Astafiev form ed a tem porary alliance, the People’s Accord (Narodnoe soglasie), to try to revive liberals’ support for the union treaty.29 But by this stage Gorbachev was already too weak to help them , while Yeltsin’s trajectory was carrying him ineluctably along the line o f de­ stroying the Union. Unable to prevent the collapse o f the U nion, Astafiev and Aksiuchits later drifted into the Russianist camp by joining the Na­ tional Salvation Front. All the same, by M arch 1991, Gorbachev had prepared the draft o f a new union treaty, which he put to a referendum. Both in the USSR as a whole and in Russia the voters gave their approval, somewhat contradicto­ rily, both to sovereignty for their own republics and to membership in a reformed USSR. Yeltsin profited by the occasion to insert a clause on the creation o f a Russian presidency, to give him enhanced legitimacy. There­ w ith the demands o f Russian liberals finally coalesced hilly w ith the de­ m and for Russian sovereignty.30 T he w ording o f the referendum was am­ biguous, and some republics adopted slightly different versions. Signifi­ cantly, Yeltsin used the civic term rossiiskie rather than the ethnic russkie. H e considered all those who lived in the RSFSR to be “Russians,” regard­ less o f ethnicity, and he had no policy for ethnic Russians living outside Russia. O n this basis, on June 12, 1991, Yeltsin became the first demo­ cratically elected leader in the history o f Russia.

The End of the Soviet Union All this still did not mean the final disintegration o f the USSR. W hat pre­ cipitated the end, ironically, was the action o f its m ost convinced support­ ers. O n August 19,1991, a so-called State Com m ittee for the Emergency, consisting o f senior ministers and the head o f the KGB, seized power in Moscow, warning that “extremist forces have embarked on a course to­ ward liquidating the Soviet U nion, destroying the state, and seizing power at any cost.” The com m ittee claimed that it aimed to “overcome the pro­ found and comprehensive crisis, political, ethnic, and civil strife, chaos.

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and anarchy that threaten the lives and security o f the citizens o f the So­ viet U nion.” T he putschists prepared to arrest Yeltsin and, if necessary, storm the W hite House, the seat o f the Russian Supreme Soviet.31 Signifi­ cantly, their public statem ent made no m ention o f defending Com m u­ nism: it was devoted to preserving the USSR, preventing economic break­ down, and m aintaining public order. T he coup foiled partly because o f sheer incompetence. The coup lead­ ers were used to senior positions in a sm oothly running state machine. They had always had underlings to handle the details, and they did not foresee the consequences if even a few o f their subordinates declined to obey orders. For th at reason, Yeltsin managed to elude arrest, fox and tele­ phone lines rem ained open, and oppositionists were able to publicize their views in newssheets and even on television. Even more im portant, the coup foundered on its own internal contra­ dictions. There was som ething incongruous about the prim e minister, the defense minister, the interior minister, and the head o f the KGB m ount­ ing a coup. As General Aleksandr Lebed, deputy com m ander o f the para­ troopers and by no means a dem ocrat, remarked, “H ow could these peo­ ple seize power? They were already the very em bodim ent o f authority.”32 But that was the point. T he coup leaders were reacting to the very contin­ gency every Soviet leader since Lenin had done his utm ost to avoid: Rus­ sia’s becoming a serious political actor. Worse still from their viewpoint, Yeltsin was an elected head o f state, w hich they were not. Even under the Soviet constitution, that fact gave him a legitimacy which they lacked. It enabled him to scramble dram atically and photogenically onto one o f the tanks sent to assault the W hite House, to denounce the coup as “a state crime” directed against “the legally elected authorities o f the Russian Re­ public,” and to warn that those who supported it w ould be indicted under the Russian crim inal code.33 T hat w arning was enough to paralyze the intended m ilitary repression: no com m ander wished to give the order to fire on civilians if his action m ight later be denounced as illegal. Thousands o f Russians came to sur­ round and defend the W hite House, em boldened by the well-publicized arrival o f M stislav Rostropovich, the famous cellist, who had flown in post-haste from Paris through the still open Moscow airport. For a few brief, heady days it seemed as if Russian civil society was not only alive but could trium ph over anybody. The Emergency C om m ittees action was, then, a coup o f the Soviet

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Union against Russia. O nce it failed, the Soviet U nion was doom ed, even though Gorbachev continued for several m onths to try to hold it together by renegotiating his union treaty. T he very day after the coup collapsed, Yeltsin ritually hum iliated Gorbachev before the Russian Supreme Soviet by forcing him to sign a decree suspending all CPSU activity on Russian soil. T he parliam ent w ent on to decree a new Russian flag— red, blue and w hite—which from December was flown above the Kremlin.34 This was great theater, but it did not offer a strong institutional basis for Russian politics to build on. O n December 1, 1991, the population o f Ukraine in a referendum voted overwhelmingly for independence. O nce more Ukraine demon» strated its key position: w ithout it, as Gorbachev had warned, there could be no Soviet U nion, even on a reduced basis. W ithout the Union, though, how could U kraine and Russia continue to coexist? A new umbrella struc­ ture was urgendy needed that would include both w ithout infringing the sovereignty o f either. This is w hat Yeltsin tried to achieve when he m et w ith the leaders o f Ukraine and Belorussia in Belaia Vezha on De­ cember 8. Together they created the Com m onwealth o f Independent States, which was to coordinate— though not direct— the economic, for­ eign, and m ilitary policies o f those former Soviet states that wished to join it.35 This step was ratified by the RSFSR Supreme Soviet on December 12, so it was, stricdy speaking, consdtutional— despite later attem pts to argue the contrary. A t the same tim e, it was a hasty device, adopted w ithout m uch forethought, and its results were meager. D uring the following years the Com m onwealth o f Independent States achieved very litde in the way o f effective coordination o f policy. W hat was happening was that not just the Soviet U nion but a Russian Empire going back to the six­ teenth century was being dism anded. Russia, Ukraine, and Belorussia— and therefore the rem aining republics o f the USSR, which were not even consulted—were restarting life as nation states from the flimsiest o f foun­ dations. It is scarcely surprising that the Russianists regarded the process as an act o f conscious betrayal. They, however, were also to blame: the idea o f Russian sovereignty was originally theirs, and they did not lift a finger to help Gorbachev, whom they loathed, when he was trying to save the U nion to which they were devoted. Overall, then, the way in which politics had revived in Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s bore the marks o f the system out o f which it

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grew. For decades the party had occupied the political stage w ith its own ersatz institutions, and had monopolized all political com m unications from above, through persons at the apex o f each power network. For that reason it proved very difficult for concerned citizens now to create genu­ ine institutions or horizontal com m unications. T he new political associa­ tions began in the role o f neformaly and retained many o f their “inform al” characteristics right through to the creation o f the Russian Federation. Nearly all political movements were dom inated by individual person­ alities, proclaimed very general ideologies, and found no framework o f institutions and laws w ithin which to operate. All their activities were conducted either on a very lim ited and local basis or on a huge and un­ structured political stage. For the same reason, they were unable to articu­ late the interests o f specific groups o f the population: nearly all political movements tried to speak for everyone.36 All this made the construction o f an ordered contestatory democracy extremely difficult. These problems were aggravated by the institutional setup. W ith the end o f the Soviet U nion, Russia had gained its freedom but lost its birth­ right. As a political entity, Russia came into being as a negative: “not-theUSSR.” There was no founding election, no constituent assembly, and no new constitution. T he Russian Supreme Soviet continued to exercise the m andate it had inherited from the USSR; as Yeltsins partner in victory over the Emergency Com m ittee, it could scarcely be dissolved. Yet the m ajority o f deputies were CPSU nom enklatura nominees, whose names had been p u t forward before opposition parties had had a chance to orga­ nize themselves. So there was no symbolic m om ent when Russia broke w ith the Soviet past and created its own institutions. T he CPSU was banned, but there was no investigation o f its crimes or trial o f those re­ sponsible for its abuses. Since the CPSU had been the de facto executive branch o f governm ent in the USSR, its elim ination left gaping holes in the adm inistrative transm ission system. “Russia” was an am orphous and undefined entity, the repository o f the hopes o f innum erable individuals and movements, many o f them incom ­ patible w ith one another. Above it floated the rather undefined figure o f Boris Yeltsin, as a kind o f father to the Russian nation in its painful birth. Because Russia emerged at a tim e o f deep crisis, imm ediately after the August coup, it was generally accepted that he should rule by emergency decree. T he institutions o f the new Russia took shape, then, in an uncoordi-

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nated and piecemeal manner. As the scholar Liliia Shevtsova observed at the tim e, “W hat has arisen is a completely chaotic accum ulation o f sepa­ rate power blocs, which not only belong to different periods o f social de­ velopm ent but even to different social systems.”37 O n the whole they as­ sumed a modified but unmistakable Soviet form because there was no other framework into which to fit them , no alternative memories o f polit­ ical practice. In accepted nom enklatura tradition, Yeltsin brought some o f his former associates from Sverdlovsk to Moscow to assume responsible posts in the executive, com bining them w ith leaders o f the anti-C om m unist movements. M any members o f Dem ocratic Russia were now in the Supreme Soviet and in the various city soviets, but it soon turned out that their parliam entary discipline was weak. As one observer wrote, “vote after vote would be suspended for lack o f a quorum while deputies sipped tea in the buffet or jawed w ith one another outside the legislative chamber.”38 T he habits o f cozy oppositional conversations in kitchens proved difficult to shake, especially when in any case the president ruled by decree. Yeltsin largely ignored the deputies; he never cultivated regular contacts w ith par­ liam entary leaders, as any constitutional president has to do. His decree powers, coupled w ith the shapeless state o f Russia’s institutions, enabled him to act independendy o f the Supreme Soviet more or less as Com m u­ nist Party first secretaries had always done. By now he had a vision o f Russia’s future that intersected only pardy w ith that o f the democrats, and he held it w ith ruthless intolerance. H e had converted to “democracy” and “the free m arket” at the crisis o f his ca­ reer, after his expulsion from the Politburo in late 1987. Having found that it brought him popular support and a weapon w ith which to destroy the party that had rejected him , he now clung to it w ith all the missionary tenacity o f the convert.39 To put the vision into effect, he appointed a team o f bright young economists from academic institutes, men w ithout any practical experience o f politics, but brim m ing w ith ideas and convic­ tions derived from their study o f Hayek, Friedman, and the Chicago school o f economics. Like Yeltsin, they were determ ined to destroy the Com m unist system root and branch, since they believed it was utterly pernicious. They were confident that a m arket economy, by contrast, would generate E>oth prosperity and freedom. Anatolii Chubais, one o f their leaders, liked to quote Hayek: “A m arket economy is the guarantee not just o f the effective use o f financial and natural resources . . . but also of a free society and o f the citizen’s independence.”40 Egor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s

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deputy prim e m inister w ith responsibility for the economic reform, be­ lieved, like all his reformist colleagues, that the world was divided into two camps, and that Russia should move decisively from one to the other. Alternatively, as one o f them put it, Russia m ust "return from the twilight o f ‘beyond the looking-glass’ to the real w orld.”41 T he Soviet economy had failed, so it seemed to follow that the great "O ther,” the U nited States, m ust provide the only viable alternative. Ideas o f "genuine democracy” and "a norm al society” had a magic ring after decades o f C om m unist rule; they were seen as connoting a prosper­ ous, civilized, and cultured society where individuals were free to fulfill themselves in their own way, protected by the rule o f law and guaranteed a basic m inim um by the welfare system. This, o f course, is the ideal imag­ ined by m ost W esterners too, but they know their own society is some distance from it. It was difficult for Russian democrats to adm it the pos­ sibility o f im perfection for themselves, so com pelling was the notion o f escaping from C om m unist dom ination. In that way a kind o f reverse messianism was at work, the ideal o f struggling for absolute good w ith support from the dem ocratic, economically advanced West. This m ood ensured that in the first year or two o f post-Soviet Russia there was wide­ spread support for m arket reforms: as late as April 1993 a popular referen­ dum specifically confirm ed the population’s approval o f Yeltsin’s social and economic policies. T he new rulers called themselves "democrats,” and they had some sup­ port from the population. All the same, these "boys in pink pants” (as their opponents dubbed them ) had no clear m andate for reform from the Russian Supreme Soviet, w hich was divided on economic issues. They de­ pended on Yeltsin’s emergency powers. They were not fazed by the situa­ tion, since they knew that they did indeed face an emergency: the distor­ tions o f perestroika had caused a serious food-supply shortage. Region was ceasing to trade w ith region, and towns were threatened w ith starvation: shops dem anded proof o f residence before they would sell bread, potatoes, or cheese. A highly distorted m arket economy already existed; the reform­ ers felt their task was to convert it into a proper one. They faced a practical difficulty: it was not possible to reform every­ thing at once, but doing so piecemeal created destructive strains and dis­ tortions. By choosing to prioritize the freeing o f prices and the privatiza­ tion o f firms, the reformers revived trade but provoked hyperinflation, which wiped out the savings o f a potential m iddle class. They also en-

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abled the nom enklatura bosses to convert their adm inistrative power into the ownership o f assets. In these circumstances the basic units o f the still essentially Soviet system (Zinovievs "communes”) functioned as one m ight expect. Instead o f trying to negotiate a favorable plan target from Gosplan, as in the old days, industrial bosses now used their personal con­ nections to privatize their firms and receive government contracts, or, if they could not achieve that, to dem and subsidies, pile up debts, and trade by barter in order to avoid bankruptcy. In this way, they could line their own pockets but also continue to shoulder the social responsibilities they had traditionally borne on behalf o f their employees. Even Gaidar was not prepared to insist on pure m arket remedies for them , which w ould have entailed massive bankruptcies and unem ploym ent affecting the entire population o f large cities like Sverdlovsk and Gorkii (Ekaterinburg and N izhnii Novgorod, as they were now called, in a return to their pre-Soviet names). Full-scale "shock therapy” was not really an option, then, but Gaidar s adaptation o f it actually reinforced some o f the m ost unm arket­ like structures o f Soviet society.42 There was an international dim ension to these paradoxical develop­ m ents, too. Yeltsin continued Gorbachevs line o f seeking Soviet/Russian security through cooperation w ith international institutions, which m eant w ith the leading W estern powers. From Yeltsins standpoint, the support o f financial institutions such as the IM F and the G -7 was especially vital. They gave it w ith w hat was by now their usual conditionalities: w ith the collapse o f Soviet Com m unism , the U.S. government had become even more convinced that its own economic system was a model for the entire world. All this chimed nicely w ith the Gaidar reforms. But in sending their advisers to help w ith reform, the IM F and the U.S. Treasury actually intensified the operation o f nom enklatura cliques by insisting on collud­ ing only w ith Chubais and his associates, dismissing all other potential al­ lies as unsound and refusing even to consult w ith them .43 In that way, U.S. financial messianism augm ented post-Soviet Russian radicalism, to the detrim ent o f the living standards o f m ost o f the population. Meanwhile, in the Russian Supreme Soviet, some deputies were learn­ ing the same lessons as the economic bosses, and acting in the way Soviet parliamentary deputies had always done. They were taking advantage o f their position to forge personal contacts, make deals, and secure their por­ tion o f the gravy train. U nder the Soviet system, the benefits that could be acquired that way had been modest, but as Russia privatized, the opportu-

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nities for corruption and quick profits were breathtaking. Being at the center o f things and having the right contacts made possible gains that were unimaginable just a few years before. Sidelined by Yeltsins “boys in pink pants,” the Supreme Soviet was in any case given litde to do in the economic sphere. T he new leaders carried out economic reform in a radical and ruthless m anner because they wished to elim inate every vestige o f the old power structure. But in doing so they also dism anded both the formal and infor­ mal protections that Soviet society had offered ordinary people: the of­ ficial welfare system and the patronage extended by state firms. Blat con­ tinued to operate but became m uch more dependent on money, and hence unavailable to m any people.44 T he result was a serious deterioration in medical provision and a rise in the death rate. Between 1992 and 2000 the population o f the Russian Federation declined by 2.8 m illion, or nearly 2 percent. M en were worse affected than women: their life expectancy, which had reached 64 by the 1980s, fell to 57 in 1994, a staggering drop in such a short tim e.45 T he ef­ fects o f a lifetime o f drinking, smoking, and w orking in a polluted envi­ ronm ent were now exacerbated by a sharply reduced pension and a health care system difficult to access w ithout money. T he worst sufferers were those who had spent their teenage years and early adulthood in the war and now reached retirem ent age w ith m inim al expectations for the future. It was a poor reward for the generation that had done the m ost to deserve the support o f their fellow citizens. Such people could be seen lined up outside Moscow M etro stations, selling anything they could spare— old clothes, ornam ents, books, flowers, even their wartime medals. N ot sur­ prisingly, m any Russians came to identify “democracy” w ith poverty and degradation.

The Refugee Crisis T he disintegration o f the Soviet U nion raised urgendy the question o f w hat was to happen to the 25 m illion Russians who lived outside the newly formed Russian Federation. Initially the Yeltsin government, nota­ bly his foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, took a purely civic view o f the obligations o f the Russian state: those who lived w ithin its boundaries were Rossiane, citizens o f Russia, whatever their ethnic origin. Those who lived outside it were citizens o f other states, even if they were ethnic Rus­ sians, and should look to the rule o f law in those states, or to international

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institutions like the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, to defend their interests. This position soon became untenable. Ethnic conflict and local dis­ crim ination against Russians escalated sharply in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Russian em igration from the Caucasus and Central Asia, which had been a steady trickle, turned into a flood and became a critical politi­ cal issue. Russians in particular and Slavs in general were increasingly identified as “outsiders,” “aliens,” or even “occupiers.” Economic reform m eant upheavals in everyone’s way o f life, but Russians and Ukrainians, long somewhat disadvantaged in com petition w ith indigenous ethnic net­ works, now found themselves especially marginalized and impoverished. Large enterprises o f “all-U nion significance,” w ith their considerable Rus­ sian and U krainian workforces, were often the first to dose in the course o f reform programs. V iolent ethnic conflict broke out in some republics; Russians were not often direct targets— though they were in Moldavia and Azerbaijan— but the degradation and unpredictability o f the social environm ent, the pros­ pect o f becoming chance victims o f other peoples bloody dashes, gave them additional motives to leave. Finally, as republics declared their own sovereignty and the primacy o f their own legislation, many o f them passed laws that reduced the civil rights o f nontitular peoples, or at least de­ m anded a good knowledge o f the local language for full citizenship rights and certain types o f em ployment. Few Russians had troubled to learn the local language, and, in the competitive m arket economy, they found their property rights and civic status seriously jeopardized.46 It took the government o f the RSFSR and then the Russian Federation a long tim e to recognize the seriousness o f the refugees’ plight. M ost o f them arrived having lost nearly all their property and w ithout jobs or edu­ cation for their children. They would be tem porarily housed in hostels and barracks, but were typically given only two m onths to find a job and alternative accommodations— difficult to achieve in a country w ith a housing shortage, a filtering economy, and daunting official hurdles to surm ount. In any case, as the wave o f refugees m ounted, even that emer­ gency provision was discontinued.47 In January 1990, alarmed by the violence in her hom e town o f Baku, a Russian woman wrote a desperate letter to Literatum aia Rossiia: The problem o f leaving and finding work in Russia is incredibly complicated. I have made enquiries in Saratov, Lipetsk, Smolensk

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and towns around Moscow. N othing doing. It is impossible to ex­ change our apartm ent for one in those towns: nobody is interested. I can’t settle in the countryside: I haven’t got the right training. I have no money to buy a house. I am astonished at the indifference that we, Russians from other republics, encounter in Russian towns. Al­ though they need specialists, they will not issue a propiska or even a promise o f a propiska, nor put one down on the housing list. After all, I could hand over our Baku flat to the state. Are we really un­ w anted by our historic Homeland?48 T he answer to th at question, it seemed, was “yes.” T he Russian govern­ m ent offered refugees, m ost o f them ethnic Russians, no civil status which even guaranteed them the right to live in Russia, let alone to obtain work or welfare benefits. They relied on chance em ployment, on relatives’ help, and on the care and kindness o f ordinary people in order to survive. This neglect is especially striking when one considers the very different reaction o f the Federal G erm an parliam ent nearly half a century earlier to the floods o f refugees reaching western Germ any from the eastern territories and the Soviet occupation zone. In 1931 the parliam ent had passed a law entided “the Equalization o f Burdens,” making the provision o f help for refugees a duty o f the W est G erm an taxpayer. T he Russian parliam ent, and Yeltsin’s government, it seems, felt so little solidarity w ith their cona­ tionals returning from “the near abroad” (as the ex-USSR became known) that they never took such a step. A political movement was formed specifically to defend the interests o f the Russian diaspora: the Congress o f Russian Com m unities (CRC). Its leader, D m itrii Rogozin, had a m uch broader definition o f Russia than Kozyrev: We are convinced that Russia is not contained w ithin the borders that have been assigned to it today. Russia is a special, unique civili­ zation, uniting the m ost diverse peoples and ethnic groups. T he CRC considers Russians (Rossiiane) to be all those who recognize that they belong to this civilization, value its history, care about the development o f its culture, and believe in the future o f Russia. In the struggle for survival, several tasks stand before the Russian (russkii) people. W ithout a revival o f the Russian N ational Idea it will not be possible to return to the age-old bases o f Russian spirituality and Russian (rossiiskii) Statehood.49

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Under the influence o f such ideas, the Russian Supreme Soviet passed a m otion in summ er 1993 declaring that Sevastopol in the Crim ea— base o f the Im perial and Soviet Black Sea Fleets—was a Russian (rossiiskii) city. This declaration that "Russia” existed well outside the borders o f the Rus­ sian Federation was one o f the m ain reasons Yeltsin dissolved the Supreme Soviet in September 1993 and announced new parliam entary elections, to be followed by new presidential elections. This was a fateful decision. Some members o f the Supreme Soviet denounced the dissolution as illegal and led an arm ed uprising against it. Yeltsin sent in tanks to crush the re­ bellion: in the course o f the operation, according to official figures, 187 people were killed and 437 w ounded.50 The dissolution o f the Supreme Soviet was m eant to m ark the final end o f Soviet Russia. It should have been an occasion for rejoicing, national unity, and a new dem ocratic beginning. Instead it was a tim e o f terrible bloodshed, in which new hatreds were ignited and a new authoritarian spirit was generated. Its symbolism was destructive: Yeltsin had fired on the very building, the W hite House, that had been his own bastion o f de­ mocracy two years earlier. T he birth o f the new Russia was tainted and desecrated. In any case, after the conflict, Yeltsin felt bound to move m uch closer to the Supreme Soviets viewpoint. At New Year 1994 he addressed dias­ pora Russians: "Dear compatriots! You are inseparable from us and we are inseparable from you. We were and will be together. O n the basis o f law and solidarity we defend and will defend you and our com m on inter­ ests.”51 T he Russian Federation pledged to use its influence in the new states and w ithin international organizations to defend the interests o f ethnic Russians and Russian speakers, wherever they lived. This was an im portant m om ent in the evolution o f Russian national consciousness, for the Soviet U nion had never seen itself in the role o f interceding for Russian émigrés. Evidendy realizing that building a m arket economy and W estern-style dem ocradc institutions had ceased to attract m uch loyalty am ong Rus­ sians, Yeltsin also, after his re-election in July 1996, instructed his advisers to form ulate a new "national idea.” T he official newspaper Rossiiskaia gazeta advertised a com petition: the person who devised the best "national idea” would win a prize o f ten m illion rubles. Symptomatically, however, though many correspondents sent in proposals, no w inner was identified and the prize remained unawarded.52 There was absolutely no consensus on what “Russia” was.

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The New Russianist Synthesis There was, then, am ple fuel for a Russianist reaction. Remarkably, how­ ever, racist Russian nationalism was relatively insignificant. True, in the late 1980s a party o f anti-Sem itic blackshirts had hijacked the name Pam iat (Memory) for their Russian supremacist dem onstrations. But they never attracted m uch public support, and soon they split into squab­ bling fictions and faded away, though a splinter group under Aleksandr Barkashov played a role in the anti-Yeltsin arm ed rising o f O ctober 1993. A nother figure who could be accused o f racism is Vladim ir Zhirinovskii, whose misnam ed Liberal D em ocratic Party perform ed well in the presidential elections o f June 1991 and the parliam entary elections o f December 1993. Zhirinovskii was a truculent politician with a penchant for terse, cutting soundbites that played well on television. Some o f his remarks im plied th at he sought supremacy for Russians w ithin a reconstituted So­ viet Union. But his ideas were inconsistent, and his party’s program was imperial rather than racist, seeking to reinstate the Soviet U nions (and the Russian Em pire’s) great-power status w ith Russians playing an integrative rather than a dom inating role. In other words, behind the aggressive buf­ foonery, he held a rather traditional view o f Russia as m ultiethnic em­ pire.53 T he mainstream o f the Russianist reaction lay elsewhere. Eurasianism, geopolitics, the perception o f “Russophobia,” and the synthetic patriotism o f M olodaia gvardiia com bined to provide the ideological underpinning for the new Russian C om m unist Party, founded in 1990. Its principal spokesperson and later its leader, G ennadii Ziuganov, emphasized Russia’s distance from the West. Russia, in his interpretation, was a distinct civili­ zation “whose fundam ental values are collectivism, sobomost, statehood, and striving for the em bodim ent o f the highest ideals o f goodness and jus­ tice.” Contem porary W estern civilization, on the contrary, “is based in the last analysis on an atomized, mechanical picture o f the w o rld .. . . M arket individualism has become the basic hum an disposition. . . . Hence the absolutization o f the rights o f the individual, which in the nationality sphere has justified the welding o f tiny peoples into nations; hence the ‘war o f all against all’ in the social arena.” Russian statehood, by contrast, w hether tsarist or Soviet, was well equipped to absorb non-Russian peo­ ples w ithout underm ining their identity. Russia he defined as “a state based on the indissoluble fraternal union o f the Great Russians, the Litde

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Russians, and the W hite Russians, and also all the tribes and nationalities that voluntarily wish to join that union.”*4 This was inclusive, statist na­ tionalism as opposed to exclusive, ethnic nationalism. O n this basis, Ziuganov presented a “single-stream” vision o f Russian history, arguing that O rthodoxy and Com m unism were merely different expressions o f one basic Russian ideal: If we look at our thousand-year-long history, it becomes dear that the moral-ethical principles o f O rthodox C hristianity and socialist ideas coincide in m any respects. There have been two core tenden­ cies that have shaped w orld development. O ne is private-egotistical, and the other is social-collectivistic. T he private-egotistical tendency has been expressed variously through fascism and war, between gen­ erations and across continents. . . . We are a com m unal nation, brought up on a thousand years o f experience in m utual support and patriotic feeling. A nd the W est is trying to impose on us their indi­ vidualism and Protestant egotism.55 Like Gumilev and Shafarevich, Ziuganov viewed the Jews as the van­ guard o f the W estern project. H e asserted that “the Jewish diaspora, which has traditionally controlled the financial life o f the continent,” was now becoming the “controlling shareholder” in the W estern economy as a whole, and making its bid for “leadership o f the w orld.”56 For a Com m unist, the greatest volte-face was the new acceptance o f the O rthodox Church. According to Ziuganov, the church had played a deci­ sive role in the creation and sustenance o f the Russian state: “A politician cannot understand Russia if he does not understand the central role o f re­ ligion in the process o f developing and establishing our statehood and cul­ ture. . . . By baptising Russian a m illennium ago, the grand prince St. V ladim ir laid the foundation o f our unity. W ithout this Rus would not have overcome the Tatar invasion or survived the Tim e o f Troubles. D ur­ ing the G reat Patriotic War the O rthodox Church called upon the people to defend our native land.”57 This declaration was a virtual replay o f Patri­ arch Aleksiis 1960 speech, which had incensed so many Com m unists at the time. It annoyed many even now. Ziuganovs position required Com m unists to de-emphasize or drop altogether the elements in their ideology that had to do w ith atheism, dialectical materialism, and proletarian international-

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ism. Class struggle remained, though in shadowy form as the conflict be­ tween nations w ith a collectivist principle and those w ith an individualist principle. These omissions, com bined w ith the new acceptance o f O rtho­ doxy, alienated m any form er members o f the CPSU. T he resulting dis­ agreements and splits weakened the Russian C om m unist Party’s appeal to the electorate at this critical tim e.58 There was m uch in com m on between Ziuganovs oudook and the post1945 Soviet official ideology, including its anti-Sem itism. Ziuganov was prepared to rehabilitate Stalin, who, he claimed, "understood as no one else the need for an updated worldview w ithin the framework o f the new geopolitical form , the USSR. H e understood the urgent need for a con­ gruence o f the new realities w ith age-old Russian traditions. T he result o f his understanding was a radical change in the official ideology o f the So­ viet U nion in 1945-1953.”59 Some O rthodox believers were ready to support this anti-W estern ideo­ logical amalgam. O ne party in the church, led by M etropolitan Ioann o f St. Petersburg, com bined geopolitical conceptions w ith anti-Sem itism. Ioann drew a picture o f Rus and Russia as a nation constantly under threat from cunning and malicious foreigners. He quoted the words o f Alexander III: "Russia has no friends. Everyone fears our immensity.” Russia had been able to survive only thanks to the staunchness o f its O rthodox faith, the firmness o f its autocratic leaders, and its readiness to sacrifice everything in defense o f the hom eland. T he tw entieth-century form o f this threat Ioann saw as em bodied in the Protocols o f the Elders o f Zion. H e com pared the post-Soviet evolution o f Russia w ith the alleged plans o f the "elders”: dom ination o f Russia through the power o f international finance and the media, underm ining the national faith, the family, and traditional morality.60 This view was far from universal am ong clerics. T he O rthodox Church had benefited both politically and symbolically from the revival o f Russia. Since 1988 it had reopened m any o f its parishes and restored many o f its buildings, culm inating in the reconsecration o f Moscow’s Cathedral o f C hrist the Savior. But the condition o f the church, though outwardly flourishing, reflected the confusion over Russian nationhood. In question­ naires as m any as 80 percent o f Russians described themselves as "O rtho­ dox,” but this self-identification did not translate into religious belief or practice. O nly 6 to 7 percent o f Russians attended church at least once a

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m onth, while 18 percent claimed belief in a living G od, and 24 percent believed in life after death. Q uite a few Russians who professed themselves O rthodox believed in phenom ena explicidy disavowed by the church, such as extrasensory perception and the m igration o f souls.61 In actual fact, identification w ith O rthodoxy was more a statem ent about national feeling than a reflection o f religious beliefl M ost church hierarchs also emphasized this aspect o f the church, preaching loyalty to the Russian state, the development o f national traditions, and the preser­ vation o f national unity as m uch as they dealt w ith personal salvation or moral issues. This approach continued the role o f the church as it had been under the tsars and, w ith modifications, in the later Soviet decades, as the spiritual extension o f the state. T he church was defensive in outlook, in spite o f its obvious external success in reviving parish life, creating choirs, and restoring buildings. It remained sensitive to the charge that many o f its clergymen had cooper­ ated w ith the Soviet secret police. M any urban Russians found their spiri­ tual needs better m et in the Protestant churches, especially the Baptist and Pentecostalist, both by now well established in Russia. W ith the stunted congregational life and weakly developed pastoral experience it had inher­ ited from the Soviet U nion, the O rthodox Church felt disadvantaged when faced by the open com petition o f other denom inations, especially Christian ones financed from abroad. In 1997, after a long campaign, it persuaded the State D um a to pass a law restricting the activity o f “nontraditional” churches and sects. There were three m ain factions w ithin the O rthodox clergy. The impe­ rial nationalists, led by M etropolitan Ioann (quoted above), were left w ith no obvious leader when Ioann died in 1995. T he relatively small num ­ ber o f reformists and ecumenists, mostly in the big cities, welcomed con­ tact w ith other Christians and w anted to reform their own church from w ithin, for example, by increasing the use o f the Russian language w ithin services and allowing a greater role for lay people in running parish affairs. But by far the greatest num ber o f clergymen belonged to w hat we m ight call the “institutionalists,” who simply emphasized restoring canonical structures and practices w ithin the church, re-establishing the hill range o f educational activities, and overcoming the long deficit o f the Soviet pe­ riod.62 M ost likely their aims will have to be achieved before the church can decide exactly where it is going.

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An Emerging Nation State? W hat did m ost Russians think o f the headlong developments o f the early 1990s, about the country they had lost and the one they had gained? T heir attitudes were revealed in a survey conducted by Iurii Levada and the All-Russian C enter for the Study o f Public O pinion in 1991-1992. Levada found that Russians were still predom inantly imperial or suprana­ tional in their oudook, and that they considered ethnic characteristics rel­ atively unim portant— though when the supranational state foiled in its fonctions, they did often blame ethnic factors. They viewed Russia as a distinctive and exceptional country, w hether or not they considered that a good thing. They identified w ith the USSR as a whole, and w ith a malaia rodina, a hom e town or rural region, rather than w ith the RSFSR or the Russian Federation. (Non-Russians, by contrast, tended to identify w ith their individual republic.) Russians were also more likely to define their sense o f themselves by opposition to “others,” w hether those “others” be Jews, Muslims, or “the W est.” They took a paternalist view o f the state: they felt it should be present in all spheres o f social life, should provide so­ cial and economic benefits for everyone, and should offer a safety net when needed. They expected society to be hierarchical, for example in ac­ cess to inform ation and m aterial benefits, but they viewed hierarchy in moral terms and resented “undeserved” superior status. They valued “sim­ plicity,” believing that hum an beings should not aspire to more than the satisfaction o f basic needs. Strikingly, the survey found no objective evi­ dence o f “collectivism,” even though m any Russians believed themselves to be oriented to the collective rather than the individual: Levada con­ cluded that the Soviet state had prevented the form ation o f civil associa­ tions and had “atomized” society.63 T he ambiguities and uncertainties that plagued the form ation o f postSoviet Russia were soon reflected in the choice o f symbols for the new state. Even its official name caused difficulties: deputies eventually setded for “Russian Federation (Russia),” an awkward concoction which implied that the Federation was not really Russia. N o law was ever passed abolish­ ing the symbols o f the Soviet Union, and the Russian army continued to bear a red banner w ith a star, though w ithout a ham m er and sickle. M any Russians, including Yeltsin, folt that it was tim e to remove Lenin from the mausoleum and give him a norm al burial, but Yeltsin never did so, since he knew that such a move w ould m ortally offend the substantial m inority

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o f Com m unists in the electorate. So there was no symbolic dissociation from the USSR. T he white, red, and blue tricolor was chosen as the new national flag, but only over the objections o f those who identified it w ith the tsarist regime, for which it had been the symbol o f the m erchant navy, or, worse still, w ith the Vlasovite anti-Soviet movement. T he adoption o f the imperial double eagle, w ith St. George spearing the dragon, as a na­ tional emblem was even more contentious, since it was not only tsarist but also explicitly O rthodox.64 T he national anthem aroused more controversy still. Yeltsin scrapped the Soviet anthem and adopted a melody by the nineteenth-century com­ poser Glinka, which remained w ithout words, however, because the D um a would not ratify them . At the 2000 Olym pic Games Russian athletes complained that they were made to look foolish on the victors’ podium , having no words to sing when their anthem was played, unlike any other nation. T he new president, Vladim ir Putin, then took a major symbolic decision, to bring back the Soviet anthem , w ith new words by the aged poet Sergei M ikhalkov—who, by an exquisite irony, had composed the original Soviet words fifty years earlier.63 This compromise seemed to re­ flect perfectly Russia’s dual identity, both attached to and dissociated from the Soviet Union. O n July 18, 1998, a remarkable ceremony took place in the church o f the Peter-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg. T he remains o f Nicholas II and his family, recovered from the woods north o f Ekaterinburg and positively identified after DN A testing, were finally laid to rest in a special service conducted by the local parish priest, exactly eighty years after their brutal m urder in the Ipatev House. W hat was m ost striking about the occasion was the absence o f m ost o f Russia’s political establishment. The service was boycotted by the entire Com m unist and Russianist wing o f the State Duma; the patriarch and senior prelates o f the O rthodox Church did not attend either; even President Yeltsin decided to be present only at the last m om ent. W hat m ight have been a m om ent o f national reconciliation, a coming to terms w ith at least one o f Russia’s great tragedies, became in­ stead a further symbol o f the disagreements that still divided Russians on the most fundam ental questions o f their national identity. M any Com ­ m unists did not wish to honor the imperial family in any form. O thers were kept away by their insistence that Nicholas II had been m urdered in a “Jewish-masonic plot,” and the bodies then burned in a cover-up. For those who gave credence to this version, “the killing o f the tsar’s family is

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the m ost terrible and sinister crime o f the tw entieth century. This is where the greatest catastrophes o f our country and the world had their origin— Bolshevism and Fascism, mass m urders. . . . T he Gulag system began in the Ipatiev House, and w ithout the Gulag it is impossible to understand H iders camps.”66 N ot all O rthodox clergymen accepted this view, but enough did so to divide the church hierarchy and prevent any bishop from attending. In this way the shadows o f the great batde between good and evil continued to cast their gloom over the young Russian nation state. Today Russia’s identity is still unsetded, and there are several forms it m ight take.67 They reduce, however, to two fundam ental alternatives: it can become a Russian nation state or it can rem ain a modified empire. In the form er case, Russia accepts its status as one am ong a large num ber o f nation states in the world, w ith a special responsibility to speak for Rus­ sians, wherever they may be. In the latter case, it tries to preserve its role as a great power, w ith dom inant interests throughout the form er Soviet U nion and a worldwide mission. So far, Russia has vacillated between the two concepts. It has accepted the breakup o f the Soviet U nion, including the existence o f a separate U krainian nation state (a very hard pill for Russians to swallow); it has w ithdraw n its troops from the form er Soviet bloc and from its own for­ m er Baltic republics, accepting, w ith some reluctance, diat the European U nion and even NATO can move into those regions. O n the other hand, it has continued to take on imperial responsibilities and assert imperial in­ fluence around the old Soviet U nion, including in the defense o f the Tadjik frontier and a continuing m ilitary presence in Moldavia, Central Asia, and the Transcaucasus. In Chechnia more than anywhere else it has behaved in the m ost overbearing imperial traditions, seeking m ilitary rather than political solutions to complex problems, bom barding cities and forcing their inhabitants to become refugees. In its coercive policy, it has treated Russians living in Chechnia just as badly as Chechens. As one recent com m entator has put it, “T he problem o f Chechnia lies between two models o f Russian statehood, and, like a spanner throw n into a ma­ chine, it blocks a m uch-needed transitional phase.”68 O f all the forms which “Russia” m ight take, it appears that a modified imperial identity is likely to prove dom inant. T he threat o f international terrorism has augm ented that tendency, since it provides a persuasive jus­ tification for Russia to operate beyond its borders w ithout international

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mandate, and to emulate— not for the first tim e— the U nited States. M ost Russians accept that the Soviet U nion is gone forever, but they be­ lieve nevertheless that Russia has a supranational role in the post-Soviet space, which is officially designated as the “near abroad”— in tacit distinc­ tion to the “full-scale” abroad. It is norm al for a postimperial power to seek continuing association w ith its former colonies: the British still have their Com monwealth, and the French the Lomé Convention. Russia has the additional motive o f concerns about security in countries adjacent to its borders. So its interest in the post-Soviet space is wholly legitimate, even if its m ethods are sometimes questionable. Driven by considerations such as these, it seems likely that for some tim e to come, Russia will be a residual empire rather than a nation state.

CONCLUSION

Russia is a formidable problem for theorists o f national identity, especially for those who believe nations are the product o f modernity, like Karl D eutsch, Ernest Gellner, and John Breuilly.1They are faced w ith the para­ dox that m odernization seems to have im peded rather than advanced Russian nationhood. W hen Peter the G reat consciously prom oted an am­ bitious m odernizing agenda in the early eighteenth century, he did so by borrowing a foreign culture and by reinforcing an authority system that rested on archaic social structures o f “joint responsibility” rather than on institutions and laws.2 It now looks as if the Soviet project o f m odernization was carried out in similar abrupt and headstrong fashion, and w ith comparable results. Ac­ cording to Breuilly, the nation is “a m odern political and ideological for­ m ation w hich developed in close conjuncture w ith the emergence o f the m odern, territorial, sovereign and participatory state.”3 Furtherm ore, “the process which created the m odern idea o f the state in its earliest form also gave rise to the political concept o f the nation.” T hat is because the powers which the m odern state needs to govern effectively, such as taxa­ tion, m ilitary recruitm ent, and law enforcem ent, could only be achieved “through a process o f negotiation between the ruler and the political com­ m unity o f the core territory under his sway.”4 T hat process not only strengthened the ruler but also consolidated the political com m unity and gave it firmer outline— created, in effect, a potential nation. In the Soviet U nion, however, this was not at all w hat happened. Al-

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though the Soviet state assumed and perform ed m any o f the functions o f a m odern state, it did so w ithout generating a political community. T he Com m unist Party functioned as a substitute for such a community, and its conduits o f power were largely directed from above through personal channels. At the lower levels, at the workplace and in domestic life (the “com m unal apartm ents”), social units reemerged resting on the archaic practices o f krugovaia poruka. “Urbanization” really m eant ruralization o f the cities. T he trust o f ordinary people was placed in patron-client hierar­ chies and m utual aid networks rather than in institutions and laws. T he Soviet m odernization project did not advance but rather obstructed the form ation o f a Russian nation, especially in the civic sense. The m ost per­ nicious product o f this paradox was Stalins terror, w hich resulted from a confluence o f frustrated messianism, personalized power structures, and “joint responsibility.” In appearance, it is true, the Soviet U nion did create m any o f the char­ acteristics o f a m odern nation: large industrial cities, a mass education sys­ tem , a penetrative network o f com m unications and public media, a cen­ tralized welfare system, and universal m ilitary service for young adult males. T he language employed as the cem ent o f the system was Russian, the com m on history, myths, and memories evoked in education and the media were mainly Russian; the Soviet state also did m uch to overcome the split between elite and popular Russian culture. But the potential na­ tion thus prom oted was not Russia; it was “the Soviet people.” Russians were the state-bearers o f the Soviet U nion, but they were also rendered anonymous by it. “T heir” republic, the RSFSR, was a puny and somno­ lent giant, a glaring anomaly that, if awoken, had the potential to destroy the Soviet U nion. Benedict Anderson has talked o f “print capitalism” as a vital motive force in the generation o f nations.5 In some ways “print socialism” oper­ ated in a similar m anner; but once again the “nation” thus constructed was Soviet, not Russian. It is true that it drew much o f its symbolic reper­ toire from Russian culture, but as an instrum ent o f Sovietization, not as an expression o f growing Russian national consciousness. In any case, “print socialism” generated a “language o f wood” which was so distant from reality that it actually obstructed com m unication. Instead, inform a­ tion and opinion were conveyed largely through gossip, rumor, and anec­ dote. Moreover, the Soviet authorities were never able to generate either a narrative or a com m em oration o f the past which would enable the Soviet

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peoples to feel themselves members o f the same community, w hether Rus­ sian or not. N ation-building, when it came, articulated itself in opposi­ tion to the Soviet m ultiethnic community, and therefore usually also against its apparent bearers, the Russians. All the same, the Soviet U nion was in a real sense Russian. Bolshevism revived elements o f the inherited system o f Russian myths and symbols dating right back to the sixteenth century: the idea that Russia has a spe­ cial mission in the world, to practice and disseminate Truth and Justice (Pravda) based on egalitarianism and the frugal way o f life o f ordinary toiling people. This was krugovaia poruka in m odern dress, if you like. By virtue o f this special mission, so the assum ption w ent, Russians were entided to exercise patronage or protection over less developed people, and also to speak for the poor and oppressed in the developed or “capitalist” world; this was a form o f service to them , w hat one m ight call “the Rus­ sian’s burden.” Such an outlook was folly com patible w ith Soviet Com ­ m unism , and it constituted the practical, w orking ideology o f many Rus­ sians employed by the Soviet state.6 Actually, then, the Soviet U nion represented Russia’s crisis o f messianism. It was the state form in which the Russians’ sense o f being a chosen people worked itself out in reality. It is true that the deity doing the choosing was not G od b u t rather history itself. It is also true that the mes­ sianic impulse was not uniquely Russian, but also Jewish. T he Soviet U nion in its energetic early phases was a Russian-Jewish enterprise, and the later exclusion o f the Jews from its roll o f honor profoundly changed its nature. Russians entered the USSR w ith a national identity that was itself split, into imperial and ethnic elements. Those Russians who felt the messianic urge o f their culture were also divided, into m utually hostile O rthodox and socialist tendencies, both o f which overlapped pardy, but incom ­ pletely, w ith the peasants’ oudook. T he Soviet project was an experiment conducted not only by Russians, but also on Russians, by the rulers against the ruled, by socialists against Chrisdans, by townspeople against peas­ ants. O nly during the Second W orld W ar did imperial and ethnic, social­ ist and O rthodox Russians really pull together, united for the defeat o f a m ortally dangerous external enemy. As the war receded, they drifted apart again. The international mission was in one sense a Russian idea. All the same, it ran counter to the needs and customs o f ordinary Russian people.

[INCLUSION

407

As a m odern Russian scholar has put it, "Bolshevisms exploitation o f the Russian mytho-symbolic system had ambiguous consequences. O n the one hand it ensured that the C om m unist ideology was convincing, it im­ parted immense dynamism to all spheres o f social life and guaranteed the legitimacy o f the new state and its sociopolitical institutions. O n the other hand, the glaring contradiction between the new reality and the ethnic in­ terests o f Russians in the long run weakened the mobilizational potential o f the Soviet mythologems and degraded the imperial mythology.”7 T he contradiction was deepened by the way Russians’ historical mem­ ory was uprooted and fragmented between 1917 and 1921 by revolu­ tion and civil war. T he monarchy, the keystone that had held ethnic and imperial Russia together, was destroyed and discredited. T he O rthodox Church survived, but in a reduced and jeopardized condition that ren­ dered it incapable o f contributing to the social and cultural life o f the Russian people. T he public media operated in a defective and mendacious fashion that made serious frets and opinions a field for rum or and gossip. The Soviet state’s attem pts to create new rituals and ceremonies was partly successful, but did not compensate for the loss o f an organic link w ith the past. Victory in the Second W orld War did restore a sense o f national pride to the Russians as "first am ong equals” o f the Soviet nationalities. It also provided a heroic narrative and an array o f compelling symbols to which to attach Russian national identity and Soviet citizenship. Yet at the same tim e, the regime’s treatm ent o f returnees, its brutal social reforms in the new western republics, its deportation o f whole nationalities, and its antiSemitic campaigns both weakened Russian national feeling and under­ m ined Russian leadership o f the Soviet U nion. In the second half o f the Soviet Union’s existence the messianic impulse took a different form. In part, it became backward-looking, fixated on the great victory achieved in the past. In its attitude to the future it crystal­ lized around the am bition to become a great world power, the equal o f the U nited States and the leader o f peoples who rejected the American version o f capitalism and democracy. The U nited States had always been a preoc­ cupation o f Soviet idealists. Now it became the great O ther, a model to be im itated but also rejected, aspired to but also reacted against. The huge effort o f m obilization, especially m ilitary mobilization, re­ quired to sustain this am bition turned the USSR into a m ilitarist society whose resources were monopolized by the priorities o f the armed forces.

408

CINClimiN

M any o f the cities o f the RSFSR and Ukraine became centers o f m ilitary industry, w ith the m ajority o f their workforce directly or indirectly em­ ployed by the m ilitary-industrial complex. They lived in cramped but ser­ viceable newly built apartm ents in nondescript high-rise blocks. They were poorly paid and owed m ost o f their goods, amenities, and services to the enterprises where they worked. All young men were in principle re­ quired to perform m ilitary service, and to be an officer in the armed forces was to enjoy special respect am ong the population. O rdinary people grum bled at the heavy burdens imposed on them and the often squalid conditions in w hich they lived, but they appreciated the basic services provided by the socialist state and took pride in their country’s greatpower status— a pride o f w hich they became fully conscious only when that status was lost. This m ilitary m obilization was accomplished at the cost o f all nonm ili­ tary aspects o f society, especially in the three Slavic republics. T he villages and small towns o f Russia, Belorussia, and Ukraine, especially those in the non-black earth regions, became demoralized and decayed, am ong the m ost abject and poverty-stricken regions in the entire Soviet U nion, for­ saken by all who had any choice about where to live. T hus the m ainte­ nance o f a neo-Russian em pire m eant the abandonm ent o f a core aspect o f ethnic Russia. Similarly, the continued preaching o f the international socialist ideology entailed the strict lim itation and supervision o f the O r­ thodox Church, the Russian peoples ancient and long-standing religious faith. It gradually became obvious, moreover, that the urbanized, m ilita­ rized life-style o f the core republics was leading to a decline in the birth rate o f the Slavic peoples. For intellectuals and professional people, the nom enklatura dom ina­ tion needed to sustain great-power status was doubly irksome. T he ideo­ logical system did accord intellectuals a status they w ould not have en­ joyed in a more commercially oriented society. O n the other hand, it also imposed on them forms o f self-lim itation that severely ham pered their freedom o f thought and creativity. This applied especially to scientists and people working in the arts and hum anities. It was they who produced the solubles th at eventually loosened the cem ent o f the Soviet system. Their challenge to Soviet institutions and attitudes packed a punch because it came from deep w ithin Russian value systems long despised and sup­ pressed by the Soviet state. It had appeal and credibility because o f what the Russians, not least am ong the Soviet peoples, had suffered under Sta-

CINCLISIIN

409

lin, and because the past crim inality had never been properly disclosed and purged. In the end, the Russians destroyed the Soviet Union, not because they wished to— very few o f them did— but because o f the logic o f their re­ public’s position in the country’s institutional structure. As it acquired tangible powers under perestroika, the anomalous position o f the RSFSR was exploited by the liberals to weaken the over-centralized CPSU and Soviet state, and by conservatives and Russian nationalists to attack G or­ bachev. They agreed on nothing else, but because they both used the RSFSR as a tactical instrum ent, they worked in unintended alliance to underm ine the USSR. M ost Russians would agree that the disintegration o f the Soviet U nion was a disaster, not because they are inveterate Stalinists, but because it was “their” country. Unlike the other Soviet nationalities, they experienced in­ dependence not as liberation but as deprivation. They are now building a nation state few o f them wished for. They have no choice, though. As President Putin has com m ented, “H e who does not regret the break-up o f the Soviet U nion has no heart; he who wants to revive it in its previous form has no head.”8 Russians have great resources, economic, political and cultural above all, to bring to this reluctant nation-building enterprise. They are begin­ ning to piece together, horn the Soviet and non-Soviet past, a coherent identity and the institutions o f a m odern nation. Yet, because the over­ hang o f the imperial and messianic past is so strong, much o f w hat they create feels to Russians themselves makeshift and unworthy. Like the Eng­ lish, they have lost an empire and still not found a role. There is still a long way to go before we can feel certain w hat kind of com m unity Russia has become.

APPENDIX: TABLES

412

Table A .1

Russians in U nion republics, 1959-1989, in thousands (w ith percentage o f to ta l republican population)

1970

1959 Total

Urban

Total

1979

1989

Urban

Total

Urban

Total

Urban

56 3.2%

40 4.5%

66 2.7%

52 3.8%

70 2.3%

n/a

52 1.6%

44 1.5%

Azerbaijan

501 13.6%

439 25%

510 10%

470 18.3%

475 7.9%

n/a

392 5.6%

372 9.8%

Georgia

408 10.1%

327 19.1%

397 8.5%

328 14.6%

372 7.4%

n/a

341 6.3%

264 8.7%

Kazakhstan

3,974 42.7%

2,343 59%

5,522 42.4%

3,818 59.3%

5,991 40.8%

n/a

6,228 37.7%

4,823 50.1%

Kirgiziia

624 30.2%

360 51.7%

856 29.2%

564 51.4%

912 25.9%

n/a

917 21.4%

641 39.1%

Tadjikistan

263 13.3%

228 35.3%

344 11.9%

323 30%

395 10.4%

n/a

388 9.6%

365 21.9%

Turkmeniia

263 17.3%

248 34.9%

313 14.5%

300 29%

349 12.6%

n/a

334 9.5%

326 20.3%

Uzbekistan

1,091 13.5%

913 33.5%

1,474 12.5%

1,312 30.6%

1,666 10.8%

n/a

1,653 8.3%

1,567 19.3%

APPENDIX

Armenia

TABLES Table A .2

413 Russians as percentage o f population in RSFSR A utonom ous republics

Republic

1926

1939

1959

1970

1979

1989

Bashkiria

39.8

40.6

42.4

40.5

40.3

39.3

Buriatia

52.7

72.0

74.6

73.5

72.0

66.7

2.6

28.8

49.0

34.5

29.6

23.1

Chuvashia

20.0

22.4

24.0

24.5

26.0

26.7

Dagestan

12.5

14.3

20.1

14.7

11.6

9.2

7.5

35.9

38.7

37.2

35.1

31.9

Kalmykia

10.7

45.7

55.9

45.8

42.6

37.8

Karelia

57.1

63.2

63.4

68.1

71.3

73.6

Komi

6.6

22.0

48.6

53.1

56.7

57.7

Mari

43.6

46.1

47.8

46.9

47.5

47.5

Mordovia

59.2

60.5

59.1

58.9

59.7

60.8

N. Ossetia

6.6

37.2

39.6

39.6

33.9

29.9

Tataria

43.1

42.9

43.9

42.4

44.0

43.3

Tuva

n/a

n/a

40.1

38.3

36.2

32.0

Udmurtia

43.3

55.7

56.8

58.3

58.3

58.9

Yakutiia

10.4

35.5

44.2

47.3

50.4

50.3

Chechen-Ingushetia

Kabardino-Balkaria

Source: Viktor Kozlov, The Peoples o f the Soviet Union (London: Hutchinson, 1988), 80-81; Robert J. Kaiser, The Geography o f Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 118,174-175.

APPENDIX

414 Table A 3

Russians as percentage o f population in U nion republia

Republic

1926

1939

1959

1970

1979

1989

Armenia

2.2

4.0

3.2

2.7

2.3

1.6

Azerbaijan

9.5

16.5

13.6

10.0

7.9

5.6

Belorussia

7.7

6.5

8.2

10.4

11.9

13.2

Estonia

n/a

n/a

20.1

24.7

27.9

30.3

Georgia

3.6

8.7

10.1

8.5

7.4

6.3

Kazakhstan

19.7

40.3

42.7

42.4

40.8

37.8

Kirgiziia

11.7

20.8

30.2

29.2

25.9

21.5

Latvia

n/a

n/a

26.6

29.8

32.8

34.0

Lithuania

n/a

n/a

8.5

8.6

8.9

9.4

Moldavia

8.5

10.2

10.1

11.6

12.8

13.0

Tadjikistan

0.7

9.1

13.3

11.9

10.4

9.6

Turkmeniia

8.2

18.6

17.3

14.5

12.6

9.5

Ukraine

9.2

12.9

16.9

19.4

21.1

22.1

25.4

11.5

13.5

12.5

10.8

8.3

Uzbekistan

Source: Viktor Kozlov, The Peoples o f the Soviet Union (London: Hutchinson, 1988), 81-82; Robert J. Kaiser, The Geography o f Nationalism in Russia and the USSR (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 174-175.

NOIES

Preface

1. I offered an introduction to the village prose writers in my article “The Russia Pleasant Rediscovered: ‘Village Prose’ o f the 1960s,” Slavic Review 32 (1973), 705-724, and in my book Beyond Socialist Realism: Soviet Fiction since Ivan D enisovich (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980).

Introduction 1. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, M y Struggle: The Explosive Views o f Russia’s M ost Controver­ sia l P olitical Figure (New York: Barricade Books, 1996), 15, 17. 2. Edward Allworth, ed., Ethnic Russia in the USSR• The D ilem m a o f D om inance (New York: Pergamon, 1980), 156. 3. Irina Kantor, “Ashche zabudu tebe, Ierusalime,” Vestnik russkogo khristianskogo dvizh en iia, no. 144 (1985), 209-210. 4. Irina Ratushinskaia, Stikhi (Ann Arbor: Ermitazh, 1984), 9—12, 22. 5. For a recent study that highlights such groups see Eric Hoffmann, ed.. R ethinking E thnicity: M ajority Groups an d D om inant M inorities (London: Roudedge, 2004). 6. Clifford Longley, Chosen People: The B ig Idea That Shaped England an d Am erica (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2002). 7. Anthony D. Smith, “Ethnic Election and National Destiny: Some Religious O ri­ gins o f Nationalist Ideals,” N ations an d N ationalism 5, part 3 (July 1999), 332, 335-336; see also his M yths an d M emories o f the N ation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 4. 8. Smith, “Ethnic Election,” 336-337. 9. Krishan Kumar, The M aking o f English N ation al Iden tity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 31, 34; Kumar compares English with Austrian, O ttom an, and

416

MITES Tl PAIES 6-13

Russian consciousness in “Nation and Empire: English and British National Identity in Comparative Perspective,” Theory an d Society 29, no. 5 (2000), 575-608. 10. Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources o f N ation al Iden tity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 96. 11. Eric P. Kaufmann, “D om inant Ethnicity: From Background to Foreground,” in Kaufmann, ed., R ethinking E thnicity, 1-14. 12. N . A. Berdiaev, Russkaia ideia (Paris: YMCA Press, 1946), 12. 13. Ibid., 250-251. 14. Ibid., 12. 15.1 have argued this point at length in Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People a n d Em pire, 1552—1 9 1 7 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). 16. This point is discussed at length in Tim McDaniel, The Agony o f the Russian Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 24-29.

1. Marxism and the Crisis of Russian Messianism 1. These matters are more folly explored in Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People an d Em pire, 1552—1 9 1 7 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 5 -8 ,6 4 -7 4 . 2. Adrian Hastings, The Construction o f N ationhood: E thnicity, Religion an d N ation­ alism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), chap. 1. 3. Susan Reynolds, Kingdom s an d Com m unities in Western Europe, 9 0 0 -1 3 0 0 (Ox­ ford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 115—116, 149; H ilton L. Root, Peasants a n d K ing in Bur­ gundy: A grarian Foundations o f French A bsolutism (Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1987). 4. Jerome Blum, “The Internal Structure and Polity o f the European Village Com­ m unity from the Fifteenth to the N ineteenth Century,” Journal o f M odem H istory 43 (1971), 543-576. 5. H . Dewey and A. Kleimola, “From Kinship Group to Every M an His Brother’s Keeper: Collective Responsibility in Pre-Petrine Russia,” Jahrbücherfu r Geschichte Osteuro­ pas 30 (1982), 321-335.

6. P. Czap, “Peasant Class Courts and Peasant Customary Justice in Russia, 1861— 1912,” Journal o f Social H istory 1 (1967), 149-178; L. V. Danilova and V. P. Danilov, “Krest’ianskaia mental’nost’ i obshchina,” in V. P. Danilov and L. V. Milov, eds., M entaU tet i agram oe ra zvitie v Rossii (xix—xx w .) (Moscow: Rosspen, 1996), 22-39; L. S. Prokop’eva, Krest’ianskaia obshchina v Rossii vo vtoroi polovine x viii— pervoi polovine xix veka (Leningrad: Nauka, 1981), chap. 4. 7. Poslovitsy russkogo naroda: sbom ik V D alia (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Litcratura, 1984), 22, 26. 8. B. N . Mironov, Sotsial’n aia istoriia Rossii perioda im perii 1 (St- Petersburg: D m itrii Bulanin, 1999), 330; T. K. Dennison and W. W. Cams, “The Invention o f the Russian Rural Commune: Haxthausen and the Evidence,” H istorical Journal 46 (2003), 561—582, argues that Russian peasants acted in a less egalitarian and collective spirit than is usually thought. However, the article takes its evidence from only one village and con­ cerns practices rather than attitudes.

M H S 11 PUES 13-1? 9.

417

Danilov and Danilova, “Rrest’ianskaia mentaTnost’”; L. V. Milov, Velikorusski p a k h a ri osobennosti rossiiskogp istoricheskogo protsessa (Moscow: Rosspen, 1998), 418-423. 10. M . M. Gromyko, Traditsionnye norm y povedeniia i fbrm y obshcheniia russkikh krest’ian xix veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), chap. 1. 11. C. A. Frierson, “Razdel: The Peasant Family Divided,” Russian Review 46 (1987), 35-51; C. D. Worobec, Peasant Russia: Fam ily an d Com m unity in the Post-Em ancipation Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), chap. 6. 12. Geroid Tanquary Robinson, R ural Russia under the O ld Regime: A H istory o f the Landlord-Peasant W orld an d a Prologue to the Peasant Revolution o f 1 9 1 7 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1932), 34—35; Robert Edelman, Proletarian Peasants: The Revolu­ tion o f 1905 in Russia’s Southwest (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 61-62. 13. Andreas Rappeler, “The Ukrainians o f the Russian Empire, 1860-1914,” in Rappeler, ed., The Form ation o f N ation al Eûtes (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 106; Jan Zaprudnik, Belarus: A t a Crossroads in H istory (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), 62. 14. Alexei Miller, “Shaping Russian and Ukrainian Identities in the Russian Empire during the Nineteenth Century: Some Methodological Remarks,” Jahrbücher fu r Osteuro­ päische G e sc h ic h te t (2001), 257. 15. M . K. Lemke, Epokha tsenzum ykh reform, 1 8 5 9 -1 8 6 5 (St. Petersburg, 1904), 303; David Saunders, “Russia and Ukraine under Alexander II: The Valuev Edict o f 1863,” International H istory Review 57 (1995), 31. 16. Zaprudnik, Belarus, 63-65. 17. Rappeler, “The Ukrainians,” 105-131. 18. Peter Gatrell, A W hole Em pire W alking: Refugees in Russia during W orld War I (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 165—168. 19. M ark von Hagen, “The Great War and the Mobilisation o f Ethnicity,” in Barnett R. Rubin and Jack Snyder, eds.. The Post-Soviet P olitical Order: C onflict an d State-B uilding (London: Routledge, 1998), 34-57. 20. Wolodymyr Stoiko, “Ukrainian National Aspirations and the Russian Provisional Government,” in Taras Hunczak, ed.. The Ukraine, 1917—1921: A Study in Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), 4-32. 21. Geoff Eley, “Remapping the Nation: War, Revolutionary Upheaval and State For* mation in Eastern Europe, 1914-1923,” in P. J. Potichnyj and Howard Aster, eds., U krainian-Jewish Relations in H istorical Perspective (Edmonton: Canadian Institute o f Ukrainian Studies, 1988), 240. 22. S. L. Guthier, “The Popular Base o f Ukrainian Nationalism in 1917,” Slavic Re­ view 38 (1979), 30—47; Andrew W ilson, “Ukraine: Between Eurasia and the West,” in Seamus D unn and T. G. Fraser, eds., Europe an d E thnicity: W orld War I an d Contem porary Ethnic C onflict (London: Roudedge, 1996), 110-137. 23. Zaprudnik, Belarus, 63-65; Nicholas P. Vakar, Belorussia: The M aking o f a N ation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 87-92; Steven L. Guthier, “The Belorussians: National Identification and Assimilation, 1897-1970,” Soviet Studies 19 (1977), 37-61; Andrew W ilson, “Myths o f National History in Belarus and Ukraine,” in Geoffrey Hosking and George Schöpflin, eds., M yths an d N ationhood (New York:

418

MITES îl PAGES 17-24

Routledge. 1997), 186-194; Grigory Ioffe, "Understanding Belarus: Belarusan Identity,” Europe-Asia Studies (2003), 1241-1249. 24. Robert Service, Lenin.: A P olitical Life, vol. 3: The Iron R ing (Basingstoke, Eng­ land: Macmillan, 1995), 92-94. 25. Hosking, People a n d Em pire, 271-275. 26. N . Riasanovsky, Russia an d the West in the Teachings o f the Slavophiles: A Study o f Rom antic Ideology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952), 135. 27. Hosking, People an d Em pire, part 4, chap. 2. 28. Jay Bergman, “The Image o f Jesus in the Russian Revolutionary Movement: The Case o f Marxism,” International R eview o f Social H istory 35 (1990), 223-224. 29. David McLellan, cd., K arl M arx: Selected W ritings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 576-577. 30. Peter J. S. Duncan, Russian M essianism : T hird Rome, Revolution, Communism an d A fter (London: Roudedge, 2000), 50. 31. Erich Haberer, Jews an d Revolution in N ineteenth-C entury Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 253—272; quotations on pp. 270, 260. 32. Duncan, Russian M essianism , 51; Baruch Knei-Paz, The Social an d P olitical Thought o f Leon Trotsky (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), chap. 4 and pp. 308-310. 33. Daniel Field, "Peasants and Propagandists in the Russian Movement to the People o f 1 8 7 4 Journal o f M odem H istory 59 (1987), 415-438. 34. A. I. Klibanov, Istoriia religioznogp sektantstva v Rossii (60-gody xix vcka-1917g) (Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 39—49; A. A. Panchenko, Khristovshchina i skopchestoo: Jbl’k lor i truditsionnaia kuTtura russkikh m isticheskikh sekt (Moscow: O G I, 2002), chaps. 2-3. 35. A. S. Prugavin, Staroobriadchestvo vo vtoroipolovin e X IX veka (Moscow, 1904), 7 23; Roy R. Robson, O ld Believers in M odem Russia (DeKalb: N orthern Illinois University Press, 1995), 20-21. 36. Frederick C. Conybeare, Russian D issenters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer­ sity Press, 1921), 245. 37. “Ispoved’ V. I. Kel’sieva,” Literatum oe nasledstvo 41-42 (1941), 319. 38. Pierre Pascal, The Religion o f the Russian People, trans. Rowan Williams (London: Mowbrays, 1976); A. A. Panchenko, N arodnoepravoslavie (St. Petersburg: Aleteia, 1998), especially chap. 2. 39. Vera Shevzov, Russian O rthodoxy on the Eve o f R evolution (Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 2004). 40. John Meyendorff, "Russian Bishops and Church Reform in 1905,” Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis G. Stavrou, eds., Russian O rthodoxy under the O ld Regime (Minne­ apolis: University o f M innesota Press, 1978), 170-182. 41. J. Y. Cunningham, A Vanquished Hope: The M ovem entfo r Church Renewal in Rus­ sia, 1905—1 9 0 6 (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1981), 133—162. 42. Edward E. Roslof, R ed Priests: Renovationism , Russian O rthodoxy an d Revolution, 1905—1 9 4 6 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 7. 43. Geoffrey Hosking, Russia an d the Russians: A H istory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 381-382. 44. Plot. Ioann Vostorgov, Rech' v den prazdovaniia kazanskoi ikony B ozhiei M ateri (Moscow, 1909), 4 -6 , quoted in Shevzov, Russian O rthodoxy 245.

UTES 11 MIES 2 5 -3 3

419

45. F. M . Dostoevskii, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, vol. 23 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1981), 41. 46. Ibid., vol. 25 (1983), 17. 47. “Dnevnik pisatelia,” April 1877, ibid., p. 100. 48. Ibid., vol. 25, p. 85. 49. David I. Goldstein, Dostoevsky an d the Jews (Austin: University o f Texas Press, 1981), 160-163. 50. Richard W ortman, Scenarios o f Power: M yth an d Ceremony in Russian monarchy, vol. 1 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 49-50. 51. This is my own interpretation, but it rests in part on V. M. Zhivov and B. A. Uspenskii, “Tsar’ i Bog: semioticheskie aspekty sakralizatsii monarkha v Rossii,” in B. A. Uspenskii, ed., Iazyki kul'tury i problem y perevodim osti (Moscow: Nauka, 1987), 47-153. 52. Abraham Ascher, The R evolution o f 1905, vol. 1, Russia in D isarray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 92-98, 164. 53. M ark D. Steinberg, “Workers on the Cross: Religious Imagination in the W rit­ ings o f Russian Workers, 1910-1924,” Russian Review 53 (1994), 213-239; quotations on pp. 220, 223. 54. L. T. Senchakova, Prigovory i nakazy rossiiskogo krest’ianstva, 1 9 0 5 -1 9 0 7gg (Mos­ cow: Institut Rossiiskoi Istorii RAN, 1994), 133. 55. Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers’, Peasants’, an d Soldiers’ Councils, 1 9 0 5 -1 9 2 1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), esp. 40-43, 51-55. 56. Peter Holquist, M aking War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum o f Crisis, 1914—1921 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), chap. 1. 57. W illiam G. Rosenberg, Liberals in the Russian Revolution: The C onstitutional D em ocratic P arty 1917—1921 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 142-144, 170-175; Oliver H . Radkey, The Agrarian Foes o f Bolshevism (New York: Columbia Uni­ versity Press, 1958), 274-278,473—484. 58. John Channon, “The Bolsheviks and the Peasantry: The Land Question during the First Eight M onths o f Soviet Rule,” Slavonic an d E ast European Review 66 (1988), 593-624. 59. Hosking, People an d Em pire, part 4, chap. 6. The best overall account o f the 1917 revolution is Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Rstssian Revolution, 1891—1 9 2 4 (Lon­ don: Jonathan Cape, 1996). 60. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 523—524, 529. 61. Konstantin Paustovsky, Story o f a Life, vol. 3: In That D aw n (London: Harvill Press, 1967), 18. 62. Figes, People’s Tragedy, 531-532, 462—463. 63. A. D. Maliavskii, Krest’ianskoe dvizhenie v Rossii v 1917g m art-oktiabr’ (Moscow: Nauka, 1981), 343-346. 64. Lev Kopelev, I sotvorilsebe kum ira (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1978), 112. 65. This view o f the revolution is well set out in Figes, Peoples Tragedy. 66. Aleksandr Blok, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii ipisem , vol 5 (Moscow: Nauka, 1999), 20. 67. Avril Pyman, The Life o f Alexander Blok, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 365; John Garrard, “The Twelve: Bloks Apocalypse,” Religion an d Literature 35, no. 1 (Spring 2003), 45-72.

420

NOTES TI PACES 3 3 -4 4

68. Anatolii Lunacharskii, “Revoliutsiia i iskusstvo,” in Lunacharskii, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7 (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura, 1963-1968), 484. 69. Lunacharskii, “Novyi russkii chelovek,” in Lunacharskii, Sobranie sochinenii, vol. 7, pp. 303-308, quotation on p. 305. 70. Peter Kenez, “A Profile o f the Pre-Revolutionary Russian Officer Corps,” C alifor­ nia Slavic Studies, no. 7 (1973), 121-158.

2. The Effects of Revolution and Civil War 1. Andrzej Walicki, M arxism an d the Leap to the Kingdom o f Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), chap. 4, "Leninism: From ‘Scientific Socialism’ to Totali­ tarian Communism.” 2. V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., vol. 35 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1962), 67 (hereafter Lenin, PSS). 3. Walicki, M arxism , 361. 4. N . Buharin and E. Preobrazhensky, The A B C o f Communism : A Popular Explana­ tion o f the Program o f the C om m unist Party o f Russia, trans. Eden Paul and Cedar Paul (London: Com m unist Party o f Great Britain, 1922), 69-75; quotation on p. 72. 5. Ibid., 198,203,200. 6. Ibid., 140. 7. Trotsky, L iterature a n d R evolution (Ann A rbor University o f Michigan Press, 1960), 256. 8. Jane Degras, ed.. The Com m unist International, 1 9 1 9 -1 9 4 3 : Documents, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), 43,46; Adam Ulam, Expansion an d Coexistence: The H istory o f Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917—1 9 6 7 (New York: Praeger, 1968), 115—116. 9. Lynn Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin: C ollectivization an d the Culture o f Peasant Resistance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 10. Emma Goldman, M y D isillusionm ent in Russia (London: Heinemann, 1923), 1112. 11. D . R. Brower, “‘The C ity in Danger’: The Civil War and the Russian Urban Pop­ ulation,” in Diane P. Koenker, W illiam G. Rosenberg, and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds.. Party, State, an d Society in the Russian C iv il War: Explorations in Social H istory (Blooming­ ton: Indiana University Press, 1989), 75. 12. O rlando Figes, A Peoples Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891—192 4 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1996), 603. 13. M. M . Prishvin, D nevniki, 1918—19 1 9 (Moscow: Moskovskii rabochii, 1994), 169. 14. Tim e o f Troubles: The D iary o flu r ii V ladim irovich G ot’e, trans., ed., and with an introduction by Terence Emmons (London: I. B. Tauris and Co., 1988), 233. 15. Sofia Volkonskaia, “The Way o f Bitterness,” in Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine, eds., In the Shadow o f Revolution: Life Stories o f Russian Women from 1 9 1 7 to the Second W orld War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 156. 16. Tim e o f Troubles, 246-248, 262, 269, 258. 17. D. Berto [Berteaux], “Transmissii social’nogo statusa v ekstremal’noi situatsii,” in

I I I E S II H IES 4 1 -5 3

421

V. Semenova and £. Foteeva, eds., Sud’by liudei: Rossiia X X vek. Biografiia sem ei kak ob*ekt sotsiologicheskogo issledovaniia (Moscow: Institut sotsiologii RAN, 1996), 213-214. 18. Igor Narskii, 2Zbizri v katastrofe: budni naseleniia Urala v 1917—1922gg (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001), 392. 19. Figes, Tragedy, 529. 20. Goldman, D isillusionm ent, 16-17. 21. Figes, Tragedy, 610-611. 22. O n towns in the civil war, see Brower, “‘The C ity in Danger,’” 58-80. 23. Narskii, U tizn v katastrofe, 261-262. 24. Ibid., 231. 25. Ibid., 281. 26. Lars Lih, B read an d A uthority in Russia, 1 9 1 4 -1 9 2 1 (Berkeley: University o f Cali­ fornia Press, 1990), 135. 27. Russkaia Biblioteka-Fond Zarubezh’ia (hereafter RBZ), fond R 243 (KuderinaNasonova), list’ia (henceforth 11.) 57-58. 28. Figes, Tragedy, 524; Lenin, PSS, 5th ed., vol. 35, p. 204. 29. Narskii, TJtizn’ v katastrofe, 235—236. 30. N aselenie Rossii v X X veke: istoricheskie ocherki, vol. 1 (1900-1939) (Moscow: Rosspen, 2000), 78-81. See also Iu A Poliakov, Sovetskaia strana posle okonchaniia grazhdanskoi voiny: territoriia i naselenie (Moscow: Nauka, 1986), 92-128. 31. N aselenie Rossii, 95—96. 32. Ibid., 105-106, 113. 33. Barbara Evans Clements, “The Effects o f Civil War on Women and Family Rela­ tions,” in Koenker et al., Party, State, an d Society 105—122. 34. Barbara Misztal, Trust in M odem Societies (London: Polity Press, 1996), 139. 35. Maurice Halbwachs, On C ollective M em ory ed., trans., and with an introduction by Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1992), 40; Jan Assmann, D as kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Id en titä t in frühen Hochkulturen

(Munich: Verlag C. H . Beck, 1992), 35-49. 36. Assmann, K ulturelle Gedächtnis, T I. 37. Misztal, Trust, 195. 38. Hans-Joachim Neubauer, The Rumour: A C ultural H istory trans. Christian Braun (London: Free Association Books, 1999), 90. 39. Ibid., 4, 116; Francis Fukuyama, The G reat D isruption: H um an N ature an d the Reconstitution o f Social O rder (London: Profile Books, 1999), chap. 9. 40. Neubauer, Rumour, 94-101. 41. James C. Scon, D om ination an d the A rts o f Resistance: H idden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 144. 42. Nadezhda Mandelstam, H ope Abandoned, trans. Max Hayward (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 20. 43. This is the basic thesis of Joshua A. Sanborn, D rafting the Russian N ation: M ilitary Conscription, Total War, an d M ass Politics, 1 9 0 5 -1 9 2 5 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univer­ sity Press, 2003). 44. Ibid., 122-131, chaps. 4 and 5; Elena Dubrovskaia, “‘Shkola muzhestva’— for-

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mirovanie novykh tscnnostci v armeiskoi i flotskoi siede v 1920-ye gody,” in N orm y i tsennosti povsednevnoi th izn i: stanovlenie sotsialisticheskogo obraza zh izn i v Rossii v 2 0 -3 0 gody (St. Petersburg; Institut Finliandii, 2000), 317-346.

43. Stefan Plaggenborg, "Gewalt und M ilitanz in Sowjetrussland, 1917-1930,”/