Writing History in the Soviet Union: Making the Past Work 1315145669, 9781315145662

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: Inherited Traditions of Historical Scholarship
1. The Histories of History in the Soviet Union
2. The Impact of Glasnost’ on the Writing of History
3. Histories of the Communist Party as Histories of the Soviet Union
4. Depictions and Revisions: The Russian Revolution in History
5. The Historical Archive
6. History in Russian Schools
A Select Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Writing History in the Soviet Union

Writing History in the Soviet Union Making the Past Work

by

Arup Banerji

First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Arup Banerji and Social Science Press The right of Arup Banerji to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Print edition not for sale in South Asia (India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan or Bhutan). British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-50394-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14566-2 (ebk) Typeset in Plantin 10.5/13.9 by Eleven Arts, Delhi 110 035

This book is dedicated to Alysha and Aman for being everything always.

Contents

Preface

ix

Introduction: Inherited Traditions of Historical Scholarship

1

1. The Histories of History in the Soviet Union

24

2. The Impact of Glasnost’ on the Writing of History

92

3. Histories of the Communist Party as Histories of the Soviet Union

134

4. Depictions and Revisions: The Russian Revolution in History

181

5. The Historical Archive

225

6. History in Russian Schools

258

A Select Bibliography

298

Index

311

As the future ripens in the past, So the past rots in the future— Anna Akhmatova, Poem without a Hero. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date ... All history was a palimpsest scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. George Orwell, 1984.

Preface

TWO CONSIDERATIONS PROMPTED THE DRAFTING OF MAKING THE PAST WORK.

The first emanated from the need to explore the background from which historical issues, institutions, journals and historians’ work had altered in the light of the reforms inaugurated after 1986 and collectively termed glasnost’, openness; as research proceeded the background receded further and the introductory chapter emerged. Given that compendia on Soviet historiography in the USA were relatively dated, as in the case of two of the three edited volumes précised below, a scrutiny that paused with the revolution, and that the two volumes by the renowned British historian of Soviet history Professor R.W Davies had concentrated on the years between 1986 and 1996, the need for an updated review was palpable and relevant.This provided the second prompting. The essays here took shape against a backdrop that sought to combine breadth of canvas with a judicious choice of themes. Historians usually discuss historiography within a frame that favours pivotal issues, institutions, publications and historians over the continuous tale, and this approach remains apt for a study that is principally concerned with the context for the writing of history in the erstwhile Soviet Union, an exercise in historiography, rather than on any aspect of history per se. That states strive to mould history to grand objectives is more an adage than a hypothesis. History in the Soviet Union was nurtured by

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the Communist Party and the Soviet state in ways that were geared to bolstering political objectives over academic rigour; of making the past serve different ends differently than observed in other societies. This ‘argument’ underlies the content of every chapter after the Introduction. Political imperatives, for their part, altered at ‘turning points’: the end of the New Economic Policy (NEP) (1928–31), the Second World War (1941–5), the reappraisal of Stalin’s historical record (1956–9), the advent of the reform-driven Gorbachev administration from 1985, or the nationalist desiderata imposed by the Putin regime since early in this century. A brief survey of the principal western texts on Soviet historiography that were influential for my research is in order here to delineate the markers evident in Writing History in the Soviet Union (the bibliography provides references for the works mentioned). In its choice of subjects, Rewriting Russian History, edited by Cyril E. Black, (1956, 1962) reflects upon the problems that intrigued academia in the USA just after the death of Stalin in 1953. There are five essays by Leo Yaresh on problems of periodization, the role of the individual, the formation of the Great Russian State, Ivan the Terrible and the Campaign of 1812. C.E. Black reviewed the principal trend modulations in Soviet historiography related to interpretation, Konstantin Shteppa examined the shifting fortunes of the ‘Lesser Evil’ Formula, according to which the annexation of the territories of non-Russian peoples by Tsarist armies was preferable to their incorporation into any other empire of the time, Alexander Vucinich surveyed the historical treatment of the first Russian state, Ihor Sevcenko investigated the contentious histories of Byzantine studies, while Black, Volodomyr Varlamov and John M Thomson contributed essays on the reforms of Peter the Great, Bakunin, the Russian Jacobins and Blanquists, and Allied and American Intervention in Russia, 1918–21, respectively. Windows on the Russian Past, edited by Samuel H. Baron and Nancy W. Heer (1977), revisited the theme more than two decades later with essays that bore the stamp of another inquisitiveness: on the Feudalism versus Asiatic Mode of Production debate (Samuel Baron), the Byzantine impact on Russian civilization (John Meyendorff), Ivan the Terrible (Robert O. Crummey), the impact of the west on Russian thought between 1689 and 1861 (Donald Treadgold), the Reforms of the 1860s (Daniel Field), Russian Imperialism and Colonialism (Lowell R. Tillett) and the October Revolution (John Keep). Historiography of Imperial Russia:The Profession andWriting of History

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in a Multinational State, edited by Thomas Sanders (1999) is valuable for essays on the towering figures of imperial history, the master craftsmen as it were, the most notable among those singled out being Kliuchevskii (Terence Emmons, Robert F. Byrnes), Solov’ev (Ana Siljak), Miliukov (Melissa K. Stockdale), and Platonov (Aleksei Nikolevich Tsumatali). Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution by R.W. Davies (1989) will remain a work of enduring import for being the first monograph to discuss the virtual gamut of thorny issues that literary figures and historians rescued for novel analysis. The entire territory is divided into four parts, dealing with what he terms a ‘mental revolution’ that fostered new approaches to the study of the Civil War, the New Economic Policy (NEP), the collectivization of agriculture, the Stalinist system and the society that it created, as well as the Second World War, the politics that underlay it, the circumstances that surrounded historians and the teaching of the discipline, and a contemplative weighing of the debates. His Soviet History in theYeltsin Era (1997) was rightly considered valuable for similar reasons, those of an early stocktaking of the health of the discipline in the aftermath of the demise, and of a representative scope in the choice of themes. That political regimes have had a resilient, undeniable and robust interest in nurturing the production and communication of ‘history’ is scarcely worth reiteration. What does make it so, however, is the scholarly effort that has been expended on imparting a ‘historiographical’ dimension to the discussion on the structures and processes of what constitute histories. Gravity and veracity surround the political jibe that history has, and will remain, too important to be left to historians. In the west, the Second World War, with the Holocaust, Japanese atrocities in East Asia, the late entry of the United States into combat and the collaborative nature of the Vichy regime in France, to mention a few minefields, have compelled official intervention in ‘contemporary’ history; their contemporaneity carries robust resonance in a present that always stretches into the future.The criminality of the Third Reich delayed instruction on it in German classrooms for decades and American society preferred a protractedly mute avoidance of introspection on the American invasions of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Revolutions in Russia and China in 1917 and 1949 still compel sweeping modifications in constructing the past of those two nations. A recent instance of official anxiety about historical updating in China (‘revisionism’?) was provided by the banning of two textbooks

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in July 2007. Their compilation had involved a group of more than 100 scholars and middle-school teachers and they had been introduced into middle schools in Shanghai, amidst praise by liberal historians, in September 2006. In the view of Li Datong, who reported the incident in the journal Open Democracy, one book was an irritant because it broke with the system of ‘one text, one author, one curriculum’ and questioned the historical significance of certain leaders of the Chinese Revolution. The western arsenal of criticism of the handling of history in the Soviet Union has been overdrawn. The criticisms are that official meddling caused darkness at the intersection of history and theory, that Marxist determinism made the gloom more nocturnal, that assertion was elevated over explication, and that considerations of usefulness overrode those of understanding in the discourse. Soviet historians have been criticized for their singular adherence to Marxist methods and this has been considered to have produced a body of history marred by an atheoretical core. This is because Marxist historical theory has been considered as propaganda rather than theory. While much of this irritation betrayed a partial fluency with the actual historical materialism that pervades Soviet historiography, it begged the question, recurrently, of the extent to which non-Soviet historians tackled Soviet history theoretically and, for long, even historically. The damming by any state of diverse flows of history, the actual and the probable, inevitably entailed erasure.The interplay between precept and inclination traced a complex path in the Soviet Union, but it did find routes. Historical materialism, or the materialist conception of history, which is the social-scientific core of Marxist theory afforded a palimpsest for enunciation and explication in one phase. At another point, the exigencies of politically mobilizing an ethnically diverse Soviet population by diluting that historical materialism, provided both motives and sinews for a supervisory stance towards history. In the west, if the Cold War supplied an aspic in which to congeal Soviet history as essentially Soviet politics, then recoil from that confection drove historians towards the histories of social strata, institutions and regions, a bewilderingly profuse and revealing archaeology of sites that Soviet historians could not, or perhaps would not, explore. Fortunately, an exhaustive history is as chimerically elusive and functionally futile as a complete historiography. Historians engaged in both exertions wield the proverbial shears to narrow the space between the contested record and the imaginable silence, and to elaborate upon

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the tension between the overseeing institution and the inquisitive historian. Both fascinate the allied skeins of institutions, communities and individuals; it is in their braided and graded geometries that historians classify and evaluate both history and the histories of history. The essays that follow ‘chose’ their themes according to a personal curiosity that could not but be swayed by the consensual identification of the decisive moment. Understanding, however partially, and partial it must remain, the production of historical knowledge in the Soviet Union in terms of a ‘total’ exertion or intention by the state to control the past by deception and exclusion is as unfruitful as comprehending the jostle of strife in ‘democracies’, that also pare and parse the past in their own ways, singularly in terms of inter-party jousting. But if the history of Soviet history had merely been similar to that of ‘moulded’ histories elsewhere then the timber to assess it might have remained uncut. It is in the specific chemistry between the government, institutions, historians, mature readers of history and its pupils in schools that the impulses to unravel historiography in the Soviet Union have found their charge. These essays, gratefully reliant on others, have as their scaffolding the policies of the Soviet state and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as forces that influenced enquiry into and presentation of national and Party history, that of the archive, of the revolutions of 1917, of the work of influential historians and of the institutions they worked within. The chapters are structured around a set of dominant motifs: historians, moments, themes, texts, the revolution of 1917, the institution of the archive and the confluence of the state and the school. The introductory chapter, ‘Inherited Traditions of Historical Scholarship’, is devoted to a consideration of the scholarship of certain pre-revolutionary historians. The substantive body of the text, the first chapter, attempts to throw decisive moments in Soviet history into relief: the NEP; the assault on non-Party (bourgeois) historians at the end of the 1920s, the discarding of histories permeated by Marxist methodologies and their replacement by others that revalidated the political narrative, and celebrated certain personages from the past and a Russo-centrist ethnicization that was less than just with the role played by other ethnic groups in imperial history; and the hesitancy of the Soviet leadership after Stalin’s death, in honestly and fully dealing with the history of the Stalinized decades. If a particular phase of Soviet historiography can be singled out for

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the concentrated attention it has attracted, the best candidate must be the years of glasnost’, after 1986. Historians were sidelined by literary writers and the issues that were hotly discussed were those that had caused massive social harm. The themes that were churned in the popular press constitute the substance of the second chapter, ‘The Impact of Glasnost’ on the Writing of History’. Dictating the order of priority for texts in terms of their potency in forming public attention has enduringly and extensively engaged the academy and the bureaucracy around the world. The temptation of capturing the entire history of the Soviet Union, until 1938, and then 1961, in friezes contained within a single book was one that the Soviet leadership yielded to. Two histories of the Communist Party form the predominant content of the third chapter, ‘Histories of the Communist Party as Histories of the Soviet Union’. The chapter is less concerned with issues of inaccuracy of fact and more in indicating the density to which the Soviet past was marinated in an ideological sauce, the inevitable triumph of the Bolshevik Party and the unmarred and inexorable advance towards socialism thereafter. The Russian Revolution, as focus of historiography, has few, if any, peers in the dual facets of its impact and the size of the library. The sheer volume of output compelled a choice of work for evaluation that could provide a representative range for classroom purposes. The fourth chapter, ‘Depictions and Revisions: The Russian Revolution in History’, seeks to offer a sampling of the diverse manner by which the Russian Revolution has slid into history. Much of the corpus of work related to Soviet historiography has allowed the archive a rather marginal entry into the broader picture. Due to their function as the repositories of the ‘primary’ information on and from which portrayal and interpretation would emerge, archives have usually been fortified to discourage close scrutiny and unmonitored access. Commentators on the histories of national history have, not infrequently, studied the archive as a gauge for the nature of state policy towards historical research.The Soviet archive was, arguably, as non-permissive as many others but, distinctively, this was legitimized by elevating the political antecedent of the scholar over his academic reputation. The fifth chapter, ‘The Historical Archive’, looks at the marbled and guarded splendour of Soviet archives, the procedures that ruled the opening of their gates and the assimilation of their contents. Fortunately for non-Soviet historians, and regrettably for those who labour to maintain vigour and impartiality in Putin’s Russia, that administration has dictated

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certain conformities for the presentation of Soviet history. This was apparent in pronouncements concerning the publication of a manual for history teachers, produced from within the Kremlin, by the presidential adviser Vladislav Surkov and President Putin, in August 2007. Both Putin and Surkov wanted history textbooks that would present a balanced and respectful interpretation of the Soviet past— ‘If we had the Purges, they had the Holocaust’—rather than other interpretations created ‘by people who work for foreign grants and so dance to whatever tune they’re told to (dance to)’. School students were the group whose instruction had to be closely observed. The classroom has featured in more than one essay below and its centrality and reappearance prompted a separate chapter, the sixth and final one, to locate the coordinates of the confluence between the state and history: ‘making the past work’ in the early-twentyfirst century. Imperial Russia boasted of an erudite community of historians whose work was archivally grounded, evidentially sensitive and readably presented. Significantly, much of it was also repudiated after the revolution as ‘bourgeois’ scholarship. Attitudes towards the autocracy, the role of the state in the formation of the nation and of society and weighing the pre-modern centuries of Russian history on scales that either tilted towards European or Asiatic patterns were some of the significant questions that divided historians. The St. Petersburg (a stress on primary sources) and Moscow schools (a penchant for abstract theorizing) of history are etched for their differences. The historians who are included in the introduction are Vasilii Nikitich Tatishchev (1687–1750), the ‘father of modern Russian historiography’ and believed to be the author of the first full-scale history of Russia; Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766–1826), the first ‘State Historian’ and ‘national historian’ preeminently of the autocracy; the ‘statist’ historians, Konstantin Dmitrievich Kavelin (1818–85), Sergei Mikhailovich Solov’ev (1820–79) and Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin (1828–1904), who regarded the state as the prime mover in history. From Solov’ev onwards, Russian historians stressed geographic, demographic and ethnic factors in Russia’s social development. Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii (1841–1911), with a staggering sweep of curiosity and publication, is best known for his general course on Russian history, taught in Moscow University from 1879 onwards and published as ‘Course in Russian History’. Other historians who figure in this chapter are Vasilii Ivanovich Semevskii (1848–1916), the historian of the peasantry, and Pavel Nikolaevich

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Miliukov (1859–1943), who wrote on Muscovite and Petrine history, on historiography and cultural history.The debate between Aleksandr Evgeneevich Presniakov (1870–1929) and Matvei Kuzmich Liubavskii (1860–1937) on the formative influences of the autocratic state is discussed as is the Marxist Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rozhkov (1868– 1927) and his research on the sixteenth-century economy. An important focus of acrimonious ire, one-sidedly for Pokrovskii, revolved around whether Russian historical development resembled the route traversed by Western Europe, including a feudal phase (Pokrovskii), or had charted a path that was akin to Asiatic patterns (Plekhanov and Trotsky) and the chapter measures the tractability of the two enquiries. The first chapter, ‘The Histories of History in the Soviet Union’, is meant to serve as defining territory. It begins with how the revolution and civil war disrupted the lives of historians and the book trade and moves to the conditions for research in, and teaching of history during the 1920s. The republic of history was then a big place. Consensus was elusive. There were numerous institutes like RANION, the Institute of Red Professors and the Society of Marxist Historians where historians practiced their craft.The circumstances that enabled Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovskii (1868–1932) to forge a hegemonic sway over all the planes of the terrain of history for about fifteen years is depicted as prototypical of Bolshevik strategy in ‘controlling’ the production of history. His departure was concurrent with the rupture in the fabric of historical research and training that occurred after 1931 with the purge of historians and the closure of institutions and journals. Stalin’s insistence that the Marxist categories of class struggle and modes of production be replaced by the referents of political history, like events, the running narrative, or dominant individual(s), and an emphasis on the Russians over other ethnic groups in the course of imperial history, an ideological stress derived from certain perceived imperatives of the time, are elaborated upon in the chapter. The manner by which these categories were embodied in directives concerning teaching history in schools from 1934 is outlined as is the revaluation of the legacies of the Tsars Ivan IV and Peter the Great. The focus then shifts to the war years for historians, especially non-Marxist ones, and the swift reassertion of official diktat on the profession; the controversy stirred by the publication of a history of the war by Alexander Nekrich in 1965 that challenged the received wisdom on Soviet war preparations and the impact of so-called ‘deStalinization’ (after 1956) and a tentative ‘re-Stalinization’ after 1964.

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The second chapter, ‘The Impact of Glasnost’ on the Writing of History’, studies the elaboration of Gorbachev’s agenda for history and tries to explain why it was literature (creative writers) rather than professional historians who first revived old historical issues for fresh debate.The Civil War and the NEP, the collectivization of agriculture, and the Second World War were the principal themes of intense reassessment. Gorbachev had invited suggestions to revise the procedures for instruction in schools in 1987 and this furnished an overdue context for new textbooks and examination. Since secondary schools had been affected by state policy on history teaching and learning from the revolution itself, this chapter amplifies the relationship outlined in the introductory chapter into the glasnost’ period by delving into the context of interrogation that caused historical revision to percolate to instruction in schools. The history of the Communist Party was a generically significant form of representing the Soviet past. Although this history was meant for the wider society, in that such histories presented broader developments as well, its principal readership was intended to be members of the Party, actual or candidate (aspirant), and it was intended to carry an appeal beyond Soviet borders as well. Until the demise of the USSR, and from the 1930s, these histories set the tone for research, conclusion and communication. The third chapter, ‘Histories of the Communist Party as Histories of the Soviet Union’ examines two of the most momentous Party histories: The Short Course on the History of the Communist Party (Bolshevik) (1938) and History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1962). In these two histories, the principal ‘turning points’ in Soviet history and the careers of leading functionaries in the state and Party were remembered in rhythm with political pivots like the Civil War, the NEP and the Second World War often in radically divergent patterns. If the first text celebrated the maturation of a thoroughly Stalinized party that, naturally, demanded its own portrayal, the production of the second text was concomitant to the reassessment of Stalin’s historical reputation, from the Twentieth Congress of the Party (1956) and The Secret Speech delivered to its delegates by Khrushchev. The fourth chapter, ‘Depictions and Revisions: The Russian Revolution in History’, explores writing about the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in different parts of the forest. It begins by looking at Soviet history writing on the revolution. This body of output exemplified a more general tendency in Soviet history in its locating

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the Bolshevik leadership and Party at the centre of the process by exalting the principle of partiinost’ or the primacy of diktat over evidential interpretation. The chapter glances at the varying impulses that underlay Soviet historiography of the revolution, arguably the fastest growing stack in the library of Soviet history. Among the earliest non-Soviet literature on the revolution was that produced by Allied diplomatic and military personnel and the chapter takes brief stock of this literature. An examination of the work of John Reed, the American Socialist journalist, held in esteem by Lenin and an eyewitness to the revolution in Moscow and Petrograd follows. The earliest accounts by Russian participants (Alexander Kerenskii,Viktor Chernov, Nikolai Sukhanov, and Leon Trotsky); early western accounts (Edward Ross, James Mavor,William Chamberlin); western accounts of the 1970s, strongly pickled by the politics of the Cold War; and the influential studies by Robert Daniels, Alexander Rabinowitch and John Keep are other works reviewed for their distinctive approaches. The first western professional research agenda for the study of Soviet history developed after the Second World War around the ‘totalitarian model’ and the chapter considers the work of its star, Richard Pipes. The manner by which the so-called ‘Revisionist’ historians, who belonged to a new, younger generation, used the gradually improving opportunities to work in Soviet archives and turned to writing the history of social groups (particularly the working class), or the history of the revolution in specific regions or localities is discussed. Since the 1960s, this growing body of enquiry has been at its best and most prodigious on the field of 1917. Procedures governing access to archives have often been regarded as barometric of the possibility of thorough and accurate research in any nation. If historians seek the archive in search of the least varnished records, then regimes guard their portals because they hold material best suited to test official claims about history. If the Bolsheviks initially continued with the late-Imperial tradition of building exhaustive bodies of information on the local and the minute, the social and the economic, on paper, then the perceived illegality or fallaciousness of many decisions, especially from the end of the 1920s, through the purges, Terror and the Second World War, meant that many critical orders remained oral and when recorded, in closed files. The fifth chapter, ‘The Historical Archive’, investigates the stages in the formation of numerous archives after the revolution, the rules of research within the archive and the phases in the declassification and reclassification

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of holdings in the archives. As access to archives depended more on the political reliability than the academic merit of historians in a system that was administered by the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (the notorious NKVD), and that even led to the destruction of holdings that testified to a past best removed from scrutiny, researchers chafed at stifling restrictions but were unable to seriously contest them until the 1950s. A significant achievement of the Gorbachev administration was to liberalize access to and working conditions within various archives. Separate departments of state and Party had their own archives, and the chapter outlines the holdings in them and the extent of freedom to access those repositories since the demise. For historians, if decidedly not for officials of the Russian Federation, the brief history of the new century has already revealed disquieting tendencies in the use of power to sculpt history. The swift pace and sweep of change in the last few years has been the staple of vibrant commentary across the world. Presidential intervention in the domain of teaching history in Russian schools in the form of homilies delivered to judiciously selected listeners has received less attention. Historians have been exhorted to inculcate values necessary for fostering a loyal and patriotic citizenry by producing suitable school textbooks. The demise of the Soviet Union yielded an imperative to produce texts that could encompass its history ‘from the Beginning to the End’, as Peter Kenez titled his history of that former nation. Politicians wrestled with the appropriate values for school children to imbibe even as prospective authors of textbooks worked in a competitive market environment where textbooks selected by committees would circulate most freely. The sixth chapter, ‘History in Russian Schools’, examines two history textbooks for senior grades in Russian schools. National History, Twentieth Century, by Igor Dolutskii was withdrawn from use in 2003, after ten years of serving as a textbook, and replaced by The History of Russia and the World in the Twentieth Century by Nikita Zagladin. Critical chapters in the history of the country—like the age of Stalin, the Second World War or the war in Chechnya—were depicted differently. In their approaches to Soviet history, theYeltsin and Putin administrations have displayed considerable differences, and these find mention in the chapter. Prominent in this regard, for the Putin administration, is a respectful stance towards Stalinism. There has been a silencing of honest enquiries of the Stalin period since the beginning of Putin’s presidency, an act of complicity that has been

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acknowledged officially and resisted valiantly by teachers of history, authors of school textbooks and, most strikingly, by the public organization, Memorial. Tantalizingly few and brief accounts were available to sound out how students heard history in the classroom but they appear to have reflected a dismissive, ignorant and disinterested attitude to the Soviet past. The chapter, and the book, ends with a depressing forecast for history in the Soviet Union. In late September 2007, at a discussion marking the seventieth anniversary of the Great Terror, when almost two million were arrested and about half that number shot ‘for crimes against the state’, the former President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev warned against whitewashing the crimes of Stalin. He stressed that Russia could not move forward without facing the truth about its past: “We must remember those who suffered because it is a lesson for all of us—a lesson that many have not learned. It is impossible to live in the present or build long-term plans for the future if the disease of forgetfulness afflicts the country and society, or at least certain sections of it.” Irina Scherbakova of Memorial reinforced the perils of an imposed amnesia: “It is not just forgetfulness, not just a lack of cultural memory, what is happening is a massive attack at revising our memory.” The American Library Association and Library of Congress (ALALC) system of transliteration has been used almost universally to spell Russian names in this book.Thus Pokrovsky becomes Pokrovskii, or Zaslavskaya has been rendered as Zaslavskaia, but the names of persons like Trotsky have been left as Trotsky. It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to Dilip Menon and Denys Leighton for their kindness in locating research literature. These essays are testimony to the pleasing growth in the number of history books on imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in libraries in Delhi, particularly in that of my university, the University of Delhi; may their number proliferate!

Introduction: Inherited Traditions of Historical Scholarship

Historians, cannot, if they have not lost sight of their principal obligation, reject the necessity of replying to the questions of contemporary life through an exact portrayal of the past.1 —Vasilii Ivanovich Semevskii, Russian historian, early twentieth century.

HISTORIANS OF THE SOVIET UNION COULD LAY CLAIM, IF THEY SO

chose, to traditions of scholarship in the discipline of Russian history that were rich in erudition, abundant in volume and diverse in range and interpretation. The extraordinary ferment and spurt of creative energy in Russia before the war is not possible to confine within the Modernism of the ‘Silver Age’ of Russian culture, from the 1890s, which principally affected art, music, literature, and most specifically, poetry. Marc Raeff has however suggested that history was not immune to these new currents of the period. Although the essays in this volume are concerned with history in and of the Soviet period, Tsars like Ivan IV (r. 1533–86) or Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) enter the first chapter as subjects of recasting in accordance with the political dictates of the Soviet time. The fact that much of the body of pre-revolutionary history, its practitioners and methods alike, were rejected, as the bedrock of one epoch became detritus for another, 1Michael

B. Petrovich, ‘V.I. Semevskii (1848–1916): Russian Social Historian’ in John Shelton Curtiss, ed., Essays in Russian and Soviet History in Honor of Geroid Tanquary Robinson, New York, 1968, 73. The peasants of Russia found their first, albeit not seminal voice in the historian Semevskii. He made the peasants the cynosure of his life’s work but because of the lack of substantial scholastic reproduction, his work is not considered seminal.

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made it appropriate to attempt an outline, to identify the histories that were repudiated, in this introductory chapter. Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovskii, whose domination of the province of history during the 1920s and until his death in 1932 is described in the first chapter, considered the work of all pre-revolutionary historians hopelessly marred by class bias, although he was once caught commenting that only fools would ‘throw Kliuchevskii or Solov’ev under the table.’ The extent of animus nurtured by Pokrovskii for having been failed in his magister (master’s) examination by Kliuchevskii is impossible to gauge. Indeed, his own major books, The History of Russia from the Earliest Times and Essays on the History of Russian Culture, were intended as Marxian alternatives to the studies by Kliuchevskii and Miliukov. The major works of Solov’ev and Kliuchevskii were republished in 1959–66 and 1956–9 respectively. In an essay on Kliuchevskii in 1930 that was part of a volume edited by Pokrovskii, M.V. Nechkina echoed the common Soviet view when she wrote that it was Kliuchevskii’s ‘tragedy’ that he did not make it to Marxism, and this remained her view in her massive biography of Kliuchevskii in 1974. The hard-liner Boris N. Ponomarev, Central Committee Secretary and Academician, in his opening address to the All-Union Conference of Historians in December 1962, warmly recommended ‘pre-revolutionary Russian, Soviet, and foreign’ historical works as ‘first class models’. His strictures to historians to anchor their work in the tasks of socialist construction are mentioned in the first chapter. Reprints of nineteenth-century classic historical books were in brisk demand from the mid-1980s onwards, often devoured before replenishment by fresh supply. If the contributions of the ‘state school’ (gosudarstvennaia shkola) discussed below, had been derided through the Soviet years as antithetical to Marxism, Russian historians began to take a keen, but inadequately critical, interest in this corpus of historiography after the demise.2 The leading historians of late Imperial Russia developed the discipline in a cluster around two ‘schools’ based in the two ‘capitals’, the so-called ‘St. Petersburg school’ and the ‘Moscow school’. Students 2Marc Raeff, ‘Historians and History in Emigration’, Survey, 30:4, June 1989, 8; Roman Szporluk, ‘Pokrovsky and Russian History’, Survey, No. 53, October 1964, 117; Arthur P. Mendel, ‘Current Soviet Theory of History: New Trends or Old’, The American Historical Review, 72: 1, October 1966, 50, citing B.N. Ponomarev, ‘The Tasks Facing Historical Scholarship and the Training of History Teachers and Researchers’, translated from Voprosy istorii, no. 1, 1963, in Soviet Studies in History,

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of this historiography have made a distinction between a preference for narrowly defined topics and a greater attention and closer adherence to the primary sources as a hallmark of the St. Petersburg school, while the Moscow school was distinguished by a greater abstraction in approach and a broader theoretical perspective in presentation, sometimes captured by the adjective ‘sociological’. Few would deny Kliuchevskii the appellation of heading, if not founding, the Moscow school, while historians like Sergei Feodorovich Platonov, Aleksandr S. Lappo-Danilevskii and Aleksandr E. Presniakov worked within the traditions of the St. Petersburg school. Presniakov, who believed that the ‘Moscow historical school’ suffered from ‘an approach that is too theoretical’, defined the dominant characteristics of the St. Petersburg school in his remarks just before his doctoral defence, as ‘scientific realism as reflected primarily in the specific, direct treatment of the source and the fact—without regard to historiographical tradition’, that is, reinstating the rights of sources and facts, according them more complete and immediate importance without subordinating their selection, analysis and interpretation to a schema developed in advance and without the sociological dogmatism so damaging to any critical treatment of sources. The revolution and civil war were harsh to both schools, although the St. Petersburg school traced a contributory path through the NEP, particularly by creating scholarly circles (kruzhki) that met primarily at the homes of participants, just as they had before 1917. This was less discernible in the case of the Moscow school, the city from where Pokrovskii dominated the discipline. With a distinctive historical craftsmanship distant from the operating grammar of both schools, M.N. Pokrovskii had little hesitation in remaining aloof from the purge of historians that commenced in 1929; in an article in 1922, that attacked the spetsy (specialists of the old intelligentsia), II: 1, 1963, 26; Gary M. Hamburg, ‘Inventing the “State School” of Historians, 1840– 1995’ in Thomas Sanders, ed., Historiography of Imperial Russia: The Profession and Writing of history in a Multinational State, Armonk, New York and London, 1999, 98, 100, citing the Russian historian of social thought, on the ‘state school’, Vladimir Anatol’evich Kitaev, ‘Gosudarstvennaia shkola v russkoi istoriografii: vremia pereotsenki’, in Voprosy isrorii, no. 3, 1995, 164; Alexander M. Nekrich, ‘Perestroika in History The First Stage’, Survey, 30: 4, June 1989, 22. In her biography, Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii: Istoriia zhizni i tvorchestva, Moscow 1974, M.V. Nechkina, surveyed the memoir literature and the public response to Kliuchevskii’s classic and enduring Kurs russkoi istorii (‘Course in Russian History’).

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Pokrovskii wrote that ‘the door to the Cheka must always be left hospitably open for them’.3 A secret political trial was fabricated against more than 100 academics working in the research institutions of the humanities in 1929–31.This was on orders from the Politburo by the Plenipotentiary Representative Office of the OGPU (the secret police) in the Leningrad Military District. It became known as the infamous Case No. 1803, or the ‘Academic Affair’ as it was later called.The Purge of the Academy of Sciences is discussed in the first chapter and is mentioned here to demonstrate how its sweep left little behind of the two famed schools. Those arrested were charged with forming a counter-revolutionary organization called the All-People’s Union to Struggle for the Revival of a Free Russia, aimed at overthrowing the Soviet regime and restoring the monarchy.4

*** The eminent Russian statesman and historian Vasilii Nikitich Tatishchev (1686–1750) has been considered the ‘father of modern Russian historiography’ for his attempt to envision and narrate Russian history on a scale that was absolutely novel. The so-called ‘amateurs’ who first started writing history in Russia faced the problem of destroying all previous, unauthenticated history, placing the study on an entirely new and scientific basis, and turning to the original documents.Tatishchev published critical assessments of legal monuments like Russkaia Pravda (Russia’s first code of law, collected under Iaroslav the Wise, 1019–54) and the law books, the Sudebniki of 1449 and 1550. Influenced by Rationalism and an ardent admirer of the westernizing policies of Tsar Peter the Great, Tatishchev tried 3For a sense of the differing priorities of the two schools, see ‘Introduction’, Sanders, ed., Historiography, 7, and Alter L. Litvin, Writing History in Twentieth-Century Russia: A View from Within, translated and edited by John L.H. Keep, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and NewYork, 2001, 27–9. For Presniakov’s characterization and the fate of the two schools after 1917, see Boris Anan’ich and Viktor Paneiakh, ‘The St. Petersburg School of History and Its Fate’, Ibid., 147, 149; Aleksei Nikolaevich Tsumatali, ‘Sergei Fedorovich Platonov (1860–1933): A Life for Russia’, Ibid., 315. For Pokrovsky’s penchant for unleashing the Cheka, see Tsumatali, Platonov’, Ibid., 326. 4Anan’ich and Paneiakh. ‘The St. Petersburg School’, Ibid., 154–5; Litvin, Writing History, 130.

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to show that Russia had a distinctive and proud history of her own. He was chiefly interested in the economic development of the national resources, and history came second in his priorities. He understood history as a political history of the country. In his magnum opus ‘Russian History from the Earliest Time’ (published posthumously in six volumes), considered to be the first full-scale history of Russia, he set a trend for classifying Russian history into periods. Tatishchev also compiled the first encyclopedic dictionary of the Russian language.5 Tatishchev elaborated a defence of the autocracy in terms of it being the most ‘rational’ and therefore, ‘natural’ form of government for Russia that may have functioned as a prodrome for linking backwardness and the necessity for a patrimonial state in later scholarship. In a country of Russia’s size, location and cultural level, Tatishchev argued, autocracy was indispensable because only its principal property of absolute power could ward off invasion and anarchy: ‘Large regions, open borders, in particular where the people are not enlightened by learning and reason and perform their duties from fear rather than an internalized sense of right and wrong, must be an [unlimited] monarchy.’6 In its first phase, the Russian Academy of Sciences, founded in 1724, was dominated by German professional historians, notably Gerhard Friedrich Muller (1705–83) and August-Ludwig Schlozer (1735–1809). Muller was more of a compiler than a scholar. He copied voluminous collections of government records, of decrees, orders, charters and official correspondence, located in remote Siberian settlements, from 1733–43, and published ‘A Description of the Siberian kingdom’ in 1750. His principal contribution lay in editing and publishing Russian chronicles of the ninth and tenth centuries. Schlozer was among the first to insist upon the importance of carrying out a systematization of the primary sources, that being a necessary 5V.N. Tatishchev, Istoriia rossiiskaia s samykh drevneishikh vremen (‘Russian History Dating from the Earliest Time’) six volumes, Moscow, 1768–1848; republished in seven volumes, Moscow, 1962–8. For a pre-revolutionary study of Tatishchev, see N. Popov, Tatishchev and his Time, Moscow, 1861, and for a Soviet study, see G.M. Deutch, Vasily Nikitich Tatishchev, Sverdlovsk, 1962. Death prevented Tatishchev from completing his work, which was later destroyed by fire and reproduced on the basis of copies in the possession of his colleagues. Anatole G. Mazour, ‘Modern Russian Historiography’, The Journal of Modern History, 9: 2, June 1937, 169–71. 6Cynthia Hyla Whittaker, ‘The Idea of Autocracy Among Eighteenth-Century Russian Historians’ in Sanders, ed., Historiography, 25. See Richard Pipes, Russia under the Old Regime, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1974, especially Chapter 1.

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prerequisite for him, for the writing of critical history. The writing of history in Russia in the first half of the eighteenth century was permeated with a spirit of nationalism, expressed in a struggle against foreign domination of Russian intellectual life, and at one level this played out in the conflict between Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–65) and Schlozer within the Academy of Sciences. If Muller fervently propagated the autonomy of the historian as an individual, a man ‘without a fatherland, without a religion, without a sovereign’, then Schlozer espoused the view that history must reach beyond political developments and base itself only on sources whose authenticity was verifiable: ‘The first law of history is to state nothing false. It is better not to know than to be deceived.’7 Major General Ivan Nikitich Boltin (1735–92) was an example of the diligent but ‘amateur’ historian from the nobility who, in conformity with a turn to the archives from the 1750s, gathered and made himself conversant with archival material and private collections in the belief that any competent history must be based upon exhaustive reliance upon all documents, within the country or abroad. He held the view that the development of social and political institutions are primarily determined by climatic factors.8 Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766–1826) was the first Russian historian to be honoured by the title of ‘State Historian’ by Alexander I (1775–1825, r. from 1801) in 1803 and commissioned, on an annual stipend, to write a history of Russia from its earliest known past. He is also credited with reforming the Russian literary language. According to Pushkin, ‘Russia’ was discovered by Karamzin, just as ‘America’ was discovered by Columbus. After returning from extensive travel in Germany, France, Switzerland and England, his Letters of a Russian Traveller (1790–1801), modeled on Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, met with much acclaim. It was not until 1802, after having translated French literature, published his own sentimentalist fiction, 7Mazour, The Journal of Modern History, June 1937, 172–3; G.F. Muller, Opisanie Sibirskogo tsarstva, St. Petersburg, 1750. 8Mazour, Journal of Modern History, June 1937, 175–7. Ivan Nikitich Boltin, Primechaniia na istoriiu derevniia I nyneshniia Rossii g. Leklerka (‘Notes on the History of Ancient and Modern Russia of Mr. Leclerc’) two volumes, St. Petersburg, 1788. Le Clerc was a French physician who was invited by the court to visit Russia in 1759. Boltin’s Notes on the History was an assiduous attempt to correct numerous errors in the Le Clerc’s history, particularly the view that Russia was a barbaric country governed by a despot, that Le Clerc expressed in his writing, as a result of his brief sojourn in the country.

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notably Poor Liza (1792), and poetry and edited the influential journal Evropeiskii Vestnik (‘European Messenger’), that Karamzin turned to history as a vocation. He is best remembered for his ‘History of the Russian State’, modeled on the work of Gibbon. The first eight volumes were published in 1816, and four were published just before his death in 1826. He did not live to carry his work beyond the accession of Michael Romanov in 1613. Karamzin was lauded as the first national historian and his History remained the official history for some considerable period. All three thousand copies of the first edition were sold out within a month. According to Joseph Black, Karamzin became ‘the standard authority of Russian history until the 1850s’. The apogee of historical writing in eighteenth century Russia was represented by Karamzin’s ‘History’. The first proper instance of non-chronicle writing, it was free of the stilted style of earlier work, but freighted by a non-discriminatory plunder of citations from documents. In that sense, Karamzin iconically stood for the phenomenon whereby the emergence of people who could ‘think historically ... was one of the basic innovations of post-Petrine culture’.9 It was the autocracy that was the history of Russia: Karamzin originated the idea that the history of the people belongs to the tsar. Indeed, Karamzin has rightly been considered the first historian panegyrist of the autocracy; his exposition of its dynamic was more substantial than that by Tatishchev. An admiration for Ivan IV (the Terrible, 1530–84), and his grandfather Ivan III (1440–1505), pervade the relevant volumes. Tsar Alexander I read each completed sheet of this History in the gardens of the palace in Tsarskoe Selo. Karamzin’s conservatism was fervent and unblemished. In an epigram dedicated to Karamzin, Pushkin wrote ‘In his history beauty and simplicity/ Prove without bias/The necessity of autocracy/And the charm of the whip.’ His ardently conservative views were expounded in The Memoir on Old and New Russia, written for the Tsar in 1812, and intended as an attack on the liberal constitutional system proposed, in vain, by 9Allison Y. Kataev, ‘In the Forge of Criticism: M.T. Kachenovskii and Professional Autonomy in Pre-Reform Russia’, in Sanders, ed., Historiography, 50, 52 citing Joseph L. Black, Nicholas Karamzin and Russian Society in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Russian Political and Historical Thought, Toronto, 1975, 138. For the statement on the post-Petrine historical sensibility, seeWhittker, ‘Autocracy’, in Sanders, ed., Historiography, 19, citing Iu. M. Lotman and B.A. Uspenskii, ‘The Role of Dual Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture’, in A. Shukman, ed., The Semiotics of Russian Culture, Ann Arbor, 1984, 35.

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the Tsar’s Minister of State, Count Mikhail Mikhailovich Speranskii (1771–1839). Karamzin’s best accomplishment may well have been his industrious enthusiasm for accumulating and reflecting upon masses of official and private material, and the notes to his volumes are mines of information.10 As a counter-weight to Karamzin’s history of the state, the publisher and journalist Nikolai Aleksievich Polevoi (1796–1846) tried to create one of the people in the eponymously titled ‘History of the Russian People’ (1830–3). The emergence of society was eclipsed by the chronicle of the rise of the Russian state in these six volumes as well. Polevoi also wrote ‘A History of Peter the Great’. In his extremely detailed ‘History of Russia’, Polevoi’s contemporary, the historian Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin (1800–75) displayed a thorough grasp of the available Russian sources. This ‘History’ has actually been considered as more of a source book than a history per se. Pogodin maintained that the Russian state had been formed by the twin forces of Byzantine Christianity and Slavic learning.11 Russian historiography acquired a professional quality from the nineteenth century onwards, from when most histories were written by scholars at universities.To meet its need for better-qualified officials, the state expanded the university network and sponsored study in European universities for Russian students. Some of the components in the European arsenal were imbibed in Russia, like French archival and source analysis or German-style seminars and graduate training. From the early 1840s to the late 1870s and early 1880s, Konstantin Kavelin, Sergei Solov’ev and Boris Chicherin, built the scaffolding for the Russian ‘state school’ of historiography. Historians like V. I. Sergeevich and A.D. Gradovskii extended the original agenda to include the history of local self-government and problems of comparative political and legal history, in the 1860s. Chicherin was 10N. M. Karamzin, Istoriia gosudarstva rossiiskogo, twelve volumes, St. Petersburg, 1816–28, another edition, Moscow, 1903. For a sense of the breadth of Karamzin’s oeuvre see Roger B. Anderson, N.M. Karamzin’s Prose:The Teller and the Tale, Houston, 1974; J.L. Black, Nicholas Karamzin and Russian Society in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Russian Political and Historical Thought, Toronto, 1975; and, for an assessment by one conservative of another, see Richard Pipes, Karamzin’s Memoir on Ancient and Modern Russia: A Translation and Analysis, Russian Research Center Studies, 33, Cambridge, MA, 1959. 11Mazour, Journal of Modern History, June 1937, 181–3. N.A. Polevoi, Istoriia russkogo naroda, six volumes, Moscow, 1830–3. Polevoi also wrote the Istoriia Petra Velikogo, second edition, Moscow, 1899.

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the first serious historian of Russian provincial government (in the seventeenth century), Gradovskii (and Chicherin) of the land assemblies before their disappearance in the seventeenth century, while Sergeevich explored the immensely varied strands in the relationship between the veche assembles in the village or town and princely government.The ‘statists’ saw the state as both the ‘fundamental creative element of history and its motive force’, and, as the ‘highest form of social life’. The people or nation (narod) had merely provided the spawning ambience for the emergence of the state, and for its part, remained an amorphous, largely undifferentiated, inert historical force when imagined in isolation from the state. The idea of an inverse relationship between the quantum of popular public activity and the capability of the state to realize its mission was another creedal tenet. The statists logically regarded the study of the state’s appearance and development as the principal object of their investigations, an effort that would have to draw in the development of private, civil and public law. The concept that Russia and Europe differed in the sources of their social development was another staple of this school. While in Russia, the state was the organizer of classes and of the relations between them because society was weak and constantly in flux, social development emerged from the base in Europe.The theoretical views of the state school were best expressed in Solov’ev’s ‘History of Russia from Earliest Times’. In his work on the regional administration of seventeenth-century Russia (1856), the jurist and philosopher Boris Nikolaevich Chicherin (1828–1904) continued Solov’ev’s tradition of underscoring the role of the state (as against the people) in the development of a nation.12 Sergei Mikhailovich Solov’ev (1820–79) laid the prodromes for the reactive shift against the statist historians in the 1890s, by privileging Russia’s social and economic development rather than its political institutions. Solov’ev displayed a staggering precocity: he claimed to have read Karamzin’s ‘History of the Russian State’ twelve times before the age of thirteen. He read Russian history at Moscow University, graduated in 1842 and published his dissertation on the 12B.N. Chicherin, Opyty po istorii russkogo prava, Moscow, 1858. Another member of this school, Konstantin Dmitrievich Kavelin (1818–85) was one of the leading Westernisers, along with Alexander Herzen and Timofei Granovsky, but he later gravitated to a Slavophilic position, expressed in his ‘Short Review of Russian History’ (1887), where the state was exalted as the key institution in historical development. See also Hamburg, ‘The “State School”’, in Sanders, ed., Historiography, 99.

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‘History of the Relations between the Russian Princes of the House of Riurik’ in 1847. He was the influential advocate of a conception of Russian history that was based on the theory of the ‘organic whole’, a surge away from enthroning the state at the centre of history. This had a dual implication. The historical process itself possessed an organic pattern that was defined by objective, primarily geographical factors, and its dynamic was preeminently expressed in the state being the supreme embodiment of the history of the people. He believed that the colonization of the Eurasian space was the critical formative force in Russian history, a view that his pupil Kliuchevskii was to elaborate upon. The reign of Peter the Great, and the concomitant turn to Europe, was the pivotal point in the history of Russia. In another sense, since history was fused by an organic unity of events, he contended, it could not be fractured into periods, individual epochs, or eras, like those associated with the Normans or the Mongols. After being appointed full professor at Moscow University in 1850, he began to publish the 29 volumes of his ‘History of Russia from the Earliest Times’ from 1851. He had intended to develop the History to the nineteenth century, but he had only reached the year 1774 when he died, apparently in the middle of writing a sentence. All of Solov’ev’s work is based on largely untapped archival sources. If this is a major virtue, the notes and bibliography remaining a mine for his successors and readers, then the unassimilated nature of presentation of the voluminous amount of evidence has made the work, by someone labeled a ‘dry historian’, a difficult read. It fell to the lot of his stellar pupil at the University of Moscow and successor, Vasilii Osipovich Kliuchevskii (1841–1911), to produce the first comprehensive and multi-faceted history of Russia in which the focus shifted away from autocrats to society and the economy.13 From Solov’ev onwards, Russian historians typically stressed geographic, demographic and ethnic factors in Russia’s social development. The geographical environment, the ‘nature of the country’ had to be the point of methodological departure for Solov’ev. 13S.M. Solovyev, Istoriia

Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, 29 volumes, St. Petersburg, 1851–79. Among his other books are one on the ‘History of Poland’s Downfall’ (1863), another on the ‘Public Readings on Peter the Great’ (1872), and another on the ‘Political and Diplomatic History of Alexander I’ (1877). For Solov’ev’s work, see Ana Siljak, ‘Christianity, Science, and Progress in Sergei M. Solov’ev’s History of Russia’, in Sanders, ed., Historiography, 218–19.

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If Karamzin had justified the necessity of autocracy as an antidote to Russia’s vast spaces and shifting population, Solov’ev rooted Russia’s backwardness in her forbidding climate and geography that were meaner in their effect on human life than that of Western Europe. In the latter, the natural environment was a positive bounty: ‘the proximity of the sea, of long mountain chains, the ease of internal lines of communication ... the mild nature of the climate without African heat and Asian frost’. Russia lacked natural frontiers to frustrate invasion, its size impeded communication and its soil and climate delayed economic development. If Solov’ev thought of nature as a ‘mother’ in Europe, he lamented her being a ‘stepmother’ in his country. As keen observers of Russia’s changing relationship with Europe over the centuries, Russian historians after Solov’ev watched with dismay as Russia kept falling behind the west; Kliuchevskii memorably remarked that ‘Russia and the west stand on common foundations but are distinguished by certain peculiarities.’ Kliuchevskii thought that the entire Russian historical experience had been shaped by colonization and he famously characterized the modern period in Russian history as one in which ‘the state grew fat, but the people wasted away’ (Gosudarstvo pukhlo, a narod khirel). Typically, they painted broad canvases in which the state, although engaging in incessant wars and pursuing colonization relentlessly, receded from the foreground.14 Kliuchevskii is the most renowned exemplar of the prerevolutionary generation of historians. He studied at the University of Moscow under G. Ivanov, the leading scholar on ancient civilization, from 1857 and graduated from its Historical-Philological Department in 1865. He became Professor of Russian History at the University of Moscow in 1879. Kliuchevskii was most influenced by two disparate traditions of erudition, one represented by Solov’ev, and the other by Chicherin. The scope of his scholarship was broad and, broadly, he stressed location and geography, economic and social forces, national character and the slow flow of history. In Drevne-russkiie zhitaia sviatykh kak istoricheskii istochnik (1871) (‘The Old Russian Historiography as a Historical Source’), he proved that hagiography did not contain reliable historical facts. The Boiarskaia Duma drevnei Rusi (1882) (‘The Boyar Council of Old Russia’), his doctoral dissertation, was a landmark study of the history of the most important government 14Siljak, ‘Solov’ev’,

Ibid., 222–3.

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institution in pre-Petrine Russia between the tenth and lateseventeenth centuries, in which Kliuchevskii asserted his view of the Russian state as the product of collaboration between diverse social groups. In Proiskhozhdeniia krepostnogo prava v Rossii (1885) (‘The Genesis of Serfdom in Russia’), he suggested a new conception of the origins of serfdom, according to which serfdom was engendered by peasant debt to landowners. His Podushnaia podat i otmena khlopstva v Rossii (1885) (‘Poll-Tax and the Abolition of Bond Slavery in Russia’), showed that a purely financial reform had serious social and economic consequences. Sostav predstavitel’stva na zemskikh soborakh drevnei Rusi (1892) (‘The Composition of Representatives at Assemblies of the Land in Russia’) substantiated the point of view that these assemblies never constituted any limits upon the monarch’s powers because they were not representative institutions themselves. He published biographies of ‘representative men’ like Prince Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbskii (1528–83), military commander, adviser to Ivan IV and the author of a ‘History of the Grand Duke of Muscovy’, (1560–70), the statesman and diplomat Afanasii Lavrentievich Ordyn-Nashchokin (1605–80), the nobleman (boyar) Fedor Mikhailovich Rtishchev (1625–73), and the writer and publisher Nikolai Ivanovich Novikov (1744–1818). Kliuchevskii also prepared a number of special courses on the study of sources, the historiography of the eighteenth century, methodology and terminology, and wrote several articles on the history of Russian culture. From 1879 he taught a general course on Russian history at Moscow University, from antiquity to the reforms of the 1860s and 1870s. As he stated, it aimed to discover the ‘secret of Russian history, to assess what had been done and what had to be done to put the developing Russian society into the first rank of European nations. In his opinion, a student who mastered his course should become ‘a citizen who acts consciously and conscientiously’, capable of rectifying the shortcomings of the contemporary Russian social order.15 15C.E. Black, ‘History and Politics in the Soviet Union’, in Cyril E. Black, ed., Rewriting Russian History: Soviet Interpretations of Russia’s Past, Second Edition, Revised, New York, 1962, 4–5; Anatole G. Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, New York, Toronto and London, 1958, 100–6, 112–21; Idem., Journal of Modern History, June 1937, 187–90. On Klyuchevsky, see also Robert F. Byrnes, V.O. Klyuchevsky: Historian of Russia, Bloomington, 1995; Anatole G. Mazour, ‘V.O. Klyuchevsky: The Making of a Historian’, Russian Review, 31:4, October 1972; and Idem., ‘V.O. Klyuchevsky: The Scholar and Teacher’, Russian Review, 32:1, January 1973, 15–27.

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Kliuchevskii was always a historian who combined the idea of a scrupulously ‘scientific’ history and an artist whose lectures were major cultural events, described in the memoirs of many who heard them as unforgettable aesthetic experiences. From the point of view of his admirers, the most valuable and attractive feature of his course consisted in his artistic descriptions of historical events and phenomena, replete with vivid images and everyday scenes of the past; his original analysis of sources and psychological analysis of historical figures; and, his skeptical and liberal judgements and evaluations— in other words, in his figurative and intuitive comprehension of the past, what a historian of Russian historiography has called ‘his harmonization of the rare qualities of an erudite historian, a sociologist, an artist, and a teacher.’ The historian Marc Raeff compared the aesthetics of the Course to art: ‘In many ways, Kliuchevskii’s Course, a literary monument to boot, became the historian’s counterpart to impressionist painting and symbolist poetry. In this way, too, Kliuchevskii publicly called attention to the role psychological factors and political and cultural symbols played in shaping the nation’s history.’ All these features of his style attracted crowds of students who understood his ideas of the past as part of a commentary on the present. His course exhibited such a mastery of literary style that Kliuchevskii was named an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in belles lettres in 1908. He created an eponymous ‘school’ at Moscow University, which prepared prominent historians like Aleksandr Kizevetter (1866– 1933), Matvei Liubavskii, Ivan Got’e (1873–1943) and Pavel Miliukov (1859–1943). After his first work to gain recognition, an account of the Muscovite state by foreign travellers, he transferred his focus to the relations between church and state and the role of the church in fostering economic development. This was presented in a study of the Solovetsky monastery as a factor in the economic development of the north of the empire. Kliuchevskii is best remembered, however, for his lectures to full houses at the University of Moscow, that were compiled from the notes of a former student and published in five volumes from 1904 to 1921, despite the author’s reticence, as Kurs russkoi istorii (‘Course in Russian History’).16 16V.O. Kliuchevskii, Kurs russkoi istorii, five volumes, Moscow, 1904–21; a Soviet edition was published in 1956–9 as part of his Works, V.O. Kliuchevskii: Sochineniia v vos’mi tomakh, volumes 1–8. The only full translation of the five volumes was by J.

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It was not until the 1880s that in this most peasant of European nations, historians—actually, one historian—registered a significant scholarly ‘discovery’ of the peasantry. This was two decades after the autocratic state had stared down considerable rural unrest by conceding a partial emancipation of serfs, the second instance of socially engineering a revolution from the apex after the hectic welter of Petrine reforms in the early-eighteenth century. Kliuchevskii had devoted long chapters to the Kievan peasantry, but this was tucked within the magnificent vistas offered by his Course; in the work of Nikolai Ivanovich Kostomarov (1817–85), the peasantry was submerged beneath the history of Ukraine’s struggle for independence from the empire and against Poland.The Slavophile leader, Konstantin Sergievich Aksakov (1817–60), never managed to publish an intended history of the peasantry in medieval Russia, but found the opportunity to chide Solov’ev for disposing of the peasantry in six pages in his ‘History of Russia from Earliest Times’ (1858): ‘In the History of Russia’, Aksakov commented, ‘the author has omitted just one thing: the Russian people. Karamzin did not take note of the people either, but one could hardly expect that then, as one might in our own time. Besides, Karamzin called his history the History of the Russian State. The History of Russia [by Solov’ev] may also be called with complete justice the History of the Russian State, nothing else; the land, the people—the reader will not find them there’.17 In 1881, Vasilli Ivanovich Semevskii (1848–1916), the first substantive and untiring historian of the ‘peasant’ in imperial Russia, albeit not a University historian titled an article ‘Is It Not Time to Write a History of the Peasants in Russia?’ It took him about a decade to fill the gap; in 1891 he published a work on the Russian peasantry in the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century, that was hailed as the work of a pioneer by the Free Economic Society. Semevskii was moulded by the late nineteenth-century turn in Russian historiography from political and military history to social and economic concerns. His prolific and varied contribution to that Hogarth and published in New York and London, 1911–31. For the Course, see also Terence Emmons, ‘Kliuchevskii’s Pupils’ in Sanders, ed., Historiography, 118–19; Mazour, Journal of Modern History, June 1937, 188; Raeff, Survey, June 1989, 8; Michael Karpovich, ‘Klyuchevsky and recent trends in Russian historiography’, Slavonic Review, XXI, March 1943, 31–9. 17Petrovich, ‘V.I. Semevskii’, in Curtiss, ed., Essays in Russian and Soviet History, 64; Thomas Prymak, ‘Mykola Kostomarov as a Historian’ in Sanders, ed., Historiography, 332–40.

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corpus included two volumes on the Russian peasantry, a study of labour in Siberia, monographs on the Decembrists (1825), the Petrashevtsy (the 1840s) and other revolutionary groups, on modern social thought in Russia, on the Russian Masons and over a hundred scholarly articles on these and related subjects.18 Semevskii published an article on serfdom in the reign of Catherine II in 1876. He presented the fruit of nine years of research on untapped archival material, a study whose parts had previously been published in respectable journals and one that had already earned critical acclaim, as a Master’s (magister) thesis to St. Petersburg University in 1880. It was on The Peasantry in the Reign of the Empress Catherine II. The assassination of the Tsar who had initiated the emancipation prevented the grant of a degree for a thesis that had been critical of the emancipation. Semevskii then presented himself to Moscow University as a candidate for the same degree.There, he met Kliuchevskii’s disdain, but received his degree after a public defence on 17 February 1882. Semevskii was unable to find a teaching position at the universities of Kharkov and Odessa and was offered an unassigned course in 1882 on the history of the Russian peasantry at St. Petersburg University in the capacity of a privat-dotsent rather than a full-fledged member of the faculty.19 On the intervention of the Minister of Education, he was summarily dismissed in 1886; Minister Delianov resorted to the chronically abrasive imposition of official diktat on academic finding: ‘A vast field would thus have been opened to him in transmitting to his audience [in packed halls, always], events which are quite out of place in the halls of an institution which is being supported by Treasury funds and which has the honor of being called Imperial’. Several hundred 18Petrovich, ‘V.I. Semevskii’, in Curtiss, ed., Essays in Russian and Soviet History, 61, citing V.I. Semevskii, ‘Ne pora-li napisat’ istoriiu krest’ian v Rossii?’, Russkaia mysl’, February 1881, 215–65. In this article, Semevskii declared that ‘It is high time for our agrarian country, which has been maintained for a thousand years almost exclusively at the expense of the peasant, to pay due tribute to the class to which we owe everything’. A survey of Russian agricultural history up to 1850, by O.Turchinovich, was limited to government measures, as were other studies on agriculture, by S.M. Khodetskii in 1856 and by A.K. Chuganov in 1858. There were more works on the history of Russian industry than of Russian agriculture before 1861. Semevskii’s twovolume monograph on the workers in the Siberian gold mining industry, an extremely important contribution to the historiography of Siberia was published as Rabochie na sibirskikh zolotykh promyslakh, St. Petersburg, 1898. 19Thomas Sanders, ‘The Third Opponent. Dissertation Defenses and the Public Profile of Academic History in Late Imperial Russia’, in Sanders, ed., Historiography, 83.

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students, including one Aleksandr Ulianov (the brother of Lenin) protested a violation of academic freedom that the press and the faculty demurred from reacting to. After his second great work, the twovolume survey on ‘The Peasant Question in Russia in the Eighteenth and First Half of the Nineteenth Century’ (St. Petersburg, 1888), won him a doctor’s degree from Moscow University, the Uvarov Prize of the Academy of Sciences and the Great Gold Medal of the Free Economic Society, Semevskii commenced upon a career as a historian outside the classroom.20 After Kliuchevskii’s death in 1911, but especially during the 1920s, as the first chapter elaborates, the historical territory was dominated by his student, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovskii (1868–1932). Other notable members of what has been considered the ‘Kliuchevskii school’, a broad church indeed, included liberals like A. A. Kizevetter, a conservative like M.K. Liubavskii and the Marxist, N.A. Rozhkov. The revolution forced some of his students, like G.V. Vernadskii, N.M. Karpovich, A.A. Kizevetter and P. Miliukov, to emigrate. Others became victim to an assault by the state, on their person and reputation: this depressing roster included Ivan V. Got’e, M.K. Liubavskii, V.I. Picheta and N.A. Rozhkov. Posterity has tended to rehearse the reputation of Pavel Nikolaevich Miliukov (1859–1943), mainly, even if only partially, as a failed Liberal politician rather more than as an able historian. Although his political activity almost completely prevented him from writing scholarly works between 1906 and 1917, he had by then, written fourteen books in addition to numerous reviews, articles and encyclopedia entries in which he displayed a familiarity with a spectrum of subjects that included the origin of the Slavs, Byzantine influence on Russian ideas of sovereignty, the history of Russian art, and nineteenth-century agrarian policy. Miliukov was the first to defend a magister dissertation under Kliuchevskii’s supervision in 1892. Two members of the Moscow University examining board at this defence, P.G.Vinogradov and V.I. Ger’e, recommended that Miliukov be granted a doctorate, and several others from the floor concurred. But when Kliuchevskii, 20Petrovich, ‘V.I. Semevskii’ in Curtiss, ed., Essays in Russian and Soviet History, 67–75. V.I. Semevskii, ‘Krepostnye krest’iane pri Ekaterine II’, Russkaia starina, XVII, 1876, 579–618, 653–90; Idem., Krest’iane v tsarstvovanie Imperatsy Ekateriny II, vol. 1, St. Petersburg, 1881, vol. II, St. Petersburg, 1901. Semevskii’s death in 1916 prevented the appearance of a third volume.

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the third member of the board demurred, and was asked why, Miliukov later recalled, Kliuchevskii replied ‘then let him write another one; the discipline will only gain thereby.’ Miliukov never embarked on a Ph.D. His magister thesis was later published as the hefty ‘State Economy in Russia during the First Quarter of the Eighteenth Century and the Reforms of Peter the Great’ (St. Petersburg, 1892, 1905) and in writing his penetrating essay on the ‘Debatable Questions Concerning the Financial History of the Muscovite State’ (St. Petersburg, 1892), Miliukov made extensive use of new archival material. His highly regarded but incomplete ‘Currents in Russian Historical Thought’ is considered to be one of the most competent accounts of Russian historiography, and in this book, Miliukov demolished the notion of Karamzin as the founder of Russian historiography. His bestrecognized opus, Kurs russkoi istorii (‘Course in Russian History’), was a text that filled some lacunae that Kliuchevskii had exposed. Miliukov’s ‘Studies in the History of Russian Culture’ ably complements Kliuchevskii’s History.The first volume is about population, the economy and political ideas; the second is devoted to the church, sects and education, and the third to ‘nationalism and public opinion’.21 The Russian variant of the debate contesting primacy between the state and geographic and/or economic forces in the emergence of feudalism found rich expression in the scholarship of Aleksandr Evgeneevich Presniakov (1870–1929) and Matvei Kuzmich Liubavskii (1860–1937). In the work of Presniakov the politically unifying role of the state, rather than either the greed of the landowning nobility (pace Chicherin) or economic expansion through trade (Solov’ev and Kliuchevskii) was accorded pride of place. He wished to draw similarities between the origins of feudalism in Western Europe and Russia. In his monograph on ‘The Formation of the Great Russian State between the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries’, he insisted on 21The

anecdote about Miliukov is recounted by Alter L. Litvin, in his Writing History in Twentieth-Century Russia: A View from Within, translated and edited by John L.H. Keep, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2001, 5, and is drawn from P.N. Miliukov, Vospominaniia, 1859–1917, two vols., New York, 1955; the Russian edition, Moscow 1990, 1: 160. See also Melissa K. Stockdale, ‘The Idea of Development in Miliukov’s Historical Thought’, in Sanders, ed., Historiography, 263–71. The works by Miliukov cited above are Gosudarstvennye khoziasistvo v Rossii v pervoi chetverti XVIII stoletiia i reforma PetraVelikogo, St. Petersburg, 1892; Glavnye techeniia russkoi istoricheskoi mysli, Moscow, 1898; Ocherki po istorii russkoi kultury, three volumes, St. Petersburg, 1896–1903.

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devoting special attention to the history of the ethnically settled Great Russian lands. This medievalist turned to nineteenth-century history after the revolution.22 Liubavskii and Presniakov shared congruent fields of study. A strong but not over-deterministic proponent of the influence of geography on historical structure and process, Liubavskii attempted to demonstrate his conviction, first in 1892, in ‘Provincial Division and Local Administration of the Lithuanian-Russian State’, and then in 1929, in ‘The Formation of the Basic State Territory of the Great Russian People between the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’. Where Presniakov had identified the process of political centralization as critical in the rise of Lithuania, Liubavskii traced the same to ethnographic and geographic impulses, territorial concentration. In the formation of the Muscovite state, both historians attributed success to power rather than territory, in the sense of the grand princes’ strengthening hold over the military class, and their command of taxed and landed resources. Liubavskii published a general course on Russian history up to the end of the sixteenth century in 1915, a work that he hoped would make it obligatory for his students to study the work of his own teacher, Kliuchevskii’s Course. He also completed ‘A Survey of the History of Russian Colonization’ in the early 1930s, but this was only published, to great acclaim, in 1996.23 Within this community of Russian historians only the very few Marxists such as Pokrovskii and Nikolai Aleksandrovich Rozhkov (1868–1927), challenged the inherited tenets of historical scholarship and their writing predated the revolution. Rozhkov was probably the most gifted disciple of Kliuchevskii. He was a prolific writer who produced over 300 books, articles and reviews over a short period of time. His dissertation, grounded in a formidable archival effort, was 22A.E. Presniakov, Obrazovanie velikorusskogo gosudarstva. Ocheki po istorii XIIIXV stoletii (‘The Formation of the Great Russian State: Notes on the History of the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries’) Petrograd, 1918; Idem., ‘The Formation of the Great Russian State: A Study of Russian History in the Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries’, Chicago, 1970. See Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, 130–3. 23M.K. Liubavskii, Oblastnoe delenie i mestnoe upravlenie litovskogo-russkogo gosudarstva, Moscow, 1892; Idem., Lektsii po drevnei russkoi istorii do kontsa XVI veka, Moscow, 1915, 1918; Idem., Obrazovanie osnovnoi gosudarstvennoi territorii velikorusskoi narodnosti, Leningrad, 1929, repr., 1996; Idem., Obzor istorii russkoi kolonizatsii, ed. A. Ia. Dektarev, et al., Moscow, 1996. See also Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, 129–30; Terence Emmons, ‘Kliuchevskii’s Pupils’ in Sanders, ed., Historiography, 125; Samuel H. Baron, ‘Plekhanov,Trotsky, and the Development of Soviet Historiography’, Soviet Studies, XXCVI: 3, July 1974, 390.

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on agriculture and the economic crisis of the late-sixteenth century, and it dealt with climatic and soil conditions, demographics, trade and property relations. After a brief career as a Bolshevik revolutionary, Rozhkov turned to the Menshevik wing of Russian Social Democracy (also Communists) and voiced a robust criticism of Leninism and Bolshevik political ideas in the 1920s. Being an influential Marxist historian of the late imperial and early Soviet periods did not save him from arrest several times in 1921–2. Although much of his work was dismissed as Menshevik, and he was criticized by Pokrovskii, his major work on Russian history was published in twelve volumes in 1919–26. Rozhkov’s ‘Russian History from a Comparative-historical Viewpoint’ attempted to ground the political unification of the Great Russian principalities in economic advances associated with monetization, internal trade and a domestic market. 24 Even apart from Rozhkov’s work, Pokrovskii had produced a rather than the definitive Marxist history of Russia by 1917. Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856–1918), regarded as the first Marxist historian of Russia, who was influenced by Solov’ev and Kliuchevskii, had started writing his magnum opus, the ‘History of Russian Social Thought’, in 1909.25 Even as it was beginning to be published, Pokrovskii sought to belittle the author rather than polemically grapple with his contentions. In 1922 he said that Plekhanov had to be fought ‘no less energetically than we are now fighting against religious prejudice’. The animus derived only partially from Plekhanov being a Menshevik who had opposed the revolution in October 1917. Pokrovskii did not seek to impale Plekhanov merely on the absurd charge that he was ineligible to be considered a Marxist historian because he had become a ‘spokesman for the bourgeoisie’. Pokrovskii must have known that 24His doctoral dissertation was published as Sel’skoe khoziaistvo moskovskoi Rusi v XVI veke, Moscow, 1899. He published an 84–page sketch of ‘Town and Country in Russian History’ in 1902, Gorod I derevniia v russkoi istorii. His magnum opus was, however, Russkiia istoriia v stravitelno-istoricheskom osveshchenii (osnovi sotsialnoi dinamiki), 12 volumes, Petrograd, 1919–26. For the archival document that records Lenin’s wish that Rozhkov should be exiled, abroad or to Pskov, and held ‘under close surveillance, because this fellow is our enemy and will probably remain one for the rest of his life’, in RTsKhIDNI, f.2, op.2, d. 1344, l. 1.2, see G.D. Alekseeva, Oktiabr’skaia revoliutsiia i istorcheskaia nauka v Rossii (1917–23 gg.), Moscow, 1998, 103, 220–3, cited by Litvin, Writing History, 7 25Plekhanov’s ‘History of Russian Social Thought’ was published in 1914–17 and reprinted in his Collected Works, or Sochineniia, ed. David Riazanov, 24 volumes, Moscow, 1923–7, volumes 20–22.

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Plekhanov’s interpretations of Russian history had matured long before the split in Russian Social Democracy in 1903.26 Plekhanov devoted more attention to his country’s past than had Marx and Engels, who never studied Russian history comprehensively. His conception, however, resembled that offered by the founders of Marxism. Essentially, this was that the tsarist autocracy shared similarities with those of a semi-Asiatic society, even an ‘oriental despotism’.The absence of the need for control over large-scale irrigation systems in Russia however, made the Asiatic label inaccurate. The key shared traits were a strong state that claimed ownership of productive resources in a patrimonial manner and the existence of dispersed village communes. Solov’ev had been struck by the exceptional reach and power of the state in Russian history, Kliuchevskii had used the term ‘patrimonial state’, and P.B. Struve had borrowed a term that Max Weber had coined to describe regimes which extracted extraordinary tribute and services from their subjects, a ‘liturgical state’. Plekhanov was influenced by non-Marxist historians like Solov’ev and Kliuchevskii, but he was, of course, fully aware of the great importance of feudalism and capitalism in Marxist historical theory. He did not, however, make those categories the basis of his interpretation because he became convinced that his country’s historical development resembled that of certain oriental societies more than the history of Western Europe.The incompatibility between autocracy and feudalism made pre-revolutionary historians disinclined to recognize feudalism as a formative feature of Russian history. Even if Russian appanage holdings, or the territorial estates that multiplied as princes divided their principalities among their sons, are considered to share features of the feudal fief, the unification of the country under the Muscovite rulers in the sixteenth century formed an autocratic realm that absorbed the extant political-territorial units. 27 Pokrovskii assimilated Russia’s history to a pattern of historical development that he considered universal, and of which feudalism, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, was a principal 26Samuel H. Baron, ‘The Resurrection of Plekhanovism in Soviet Historiography’, The Russian Review, 33: 4, October 1974, 387–9; Idem., ‘Plekhanov, Trotsky’ Soviet Studies, July 1974, 392. 27Samuel H. Baron, ‘Feudalism or the Asiatic Mode of Production: Alternative Interpretations of Russian History’, in Samuel H. Baron and Nancy W. Heer, eds., Windows on the Russian Past: Essays on Soviet Historiography since Stalin, Columbus, Ohio, 1977, 25–7.

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component. He castigated all those who had emphasized the peculiarities of Russian historical development—from Chicherin and Solov’ev through Kliuchevskii and Miliukov, to Plekhanov and Trotsky—all of whom, he contended, had been led to error by the statist school. It should be noted that Pokrovskii had written extensively, and edited collections of essays on Karamzin, Solov’ev, Kliuchevskii, Chicherin and Miliukov. In his own work, he strove to de-emphasize the role of the state: it was regarded alternately as merely the instrument of a feudal ruling class, or, one ‘whose basic units were the squire’s estate and the merchant’s capital’. Though not oblivious to certain distinctive elements in Russian history, including the nature of the state itself, he chose to minimize their significance, and to subordinate them to broad similarities he professed to see between the West European and Russian patterns of history.28 In ‘The History of Russian Social Thought’, Plekhanov had designated Muscovite Russia as an Asiatic or semi-Asiatic society; for Pokrovskii, that formation was the ‘embodiment of commercial capitalism’s dictatorship’. If Pokrovskii stressed similarities between Russian and West European developments between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, Plekhanov threw the differences into high relief. Pokrovskii envisaged the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the era for the growth of commercial capitalism in Russia, as it was of capitalism in the west, and both processes underlined the emergence of the modern state. In his ‘Brief History of Russia’, Pokrovskii wrote that ‘My originality, a very relative originality, consisted merely in this: that from the indisputable economic fact that in Russia merchant capital was the predecessor of industrial capital, I tried to draw the political conclusion that the formation of the ‘Russian Empire’ was influenced by this same merchant capital.’ Plekhanov was formulating his ideas in the period immediately preceding the First World War, at a time when the accepted theories of Russia’s history stressed its uniqueness, its non-European development, and the evolution of a state standing above classes. In contradistinction, Pokrovskii argued 28Pokrovskii’s training in Moscow University under Paul Vinogradov inclined him towards identifying shared patterns of universality in Russian and Western history. When the historian N.P. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii suggested in 1907, that Russia had accommodated feudal institutions, Pokrovskii endorsed the conception. For Pokrovskii’s views on the Russian state, see Baron, ‘Feudalism or the Asiatic Mode of Production’, Ibid., 27; Szporluk, ‘Pokrovsky and Russian History’, Survey, No. 53, October 1964, 110.

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that feudalism, having existed in Russia from about the thirteenth century, began to be superseded by a capitalist economy in the sixteenth century.29 The manner by which the vexed notions of feudalism and its concomitant commercial capitalism that ruled the Soviet roost during the 1920s was thoroughly discredited in the 1930s, and repudiated by its author, is discussed in the first chapter. The idea of Russian feudalism had, however, a pre-revolutionary parentage. In his ‘Feudalism in Ancient Russia’, N.P. Pavlov-Sil’vanskii (1869–1908) contended that typical feudal institutions such as vassalage, subinfeudation and immunities were widespread in Kievan and appanage Russia; feudalism in Russia, therefore, bore a juridical-political character. His plan to write a detailed comparative history of Russian and western feudalism was cut short by his death from cholera in 1908 at the age of 39. The other proponent of Russian feudalism, Boris Ivanovich Syromiatnikov (1874–1947) continued PavlovSil’vanskii’s investigation in a multi-volume work also intended to demonstrate the essential similarity of Russian history and the history of the west, in his ‘The Origins of Feudal Relations in Ancient Rus’.30 For Plekhanov, Russia’s backwardness was of critical import, not the moot points of feudalism or commercial capitalism. He identified peculiarities in the historical evolution of Russia that derived from her backwardness, that set it apart from the history of the west and recalled, instead, the developmental process of ‘the great Oriental despotisms’. Old Russia had developed in a manner that produced an institutional order strongly resembling that of China, Persia and ancient Egypt. This was evident from state control of the means of production; the reduction of the population to varying degrees of dependence and facing greater exactions from the state than in the west. The rarity of upheaval and the glacial pace of development were defining components of immobility and stability, and were other attributes of the ‘oriental’ character of pre-Reform Russia’s development. The massive disproportion between a natural economy and military imperatives necessitated by protracted external threat was the prime factor that shaped the nature of the state in Russia. 29The relevant portions of Plekhanov’s History of Russian Social Thought were published in his Sochineniia, 24 volumes, Moscow, 1923–7, vol. XX, chapters 10–13; M. N. Pokrovsky, A Brief History of Russia, translated by D.S. Mirsky, two volumes, New York, 1933, 1: 11–13, 62–71. 30Terence Emmons, ‘On the Problem of Russia’s “Separate Path” in Late Imperial Historiography’, in Sanders, ed., Historiography, 168–74.

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The elements that combined to form Plekhanov’s theory of Russia’s history up to the mid-nineteenth century—the natural economy, discrete village communities, primitive agricultural techniques, feeble urban activity, low levels of productivity reflected in a chronically low surplus—have an undeniably Marxist ring about them, and they chime with the ideas of Trotsky in the first five chapters of his 1905 and his History of the Russian Revolution. In 1905, Trotsky wrote ‘the whole of our history was stamped with the features of our extreme backwardness ... the government balked at nothing to exact from the population the revenues and services needed to develop its military power ... the pendulum swung much further in the direction of state power than was the case in the history of Western Europe’.31 Pokrovskii and Trotsky traded charge and counter-charge in the pages of Pravda in 1922 on the contents of 1905, in which Plekhanov’s biographer, Samuel Baron,32 writes that ‘Trotsky to a large extent became a surrogate for the deceased Plekhanov.’ In his Fundamental Problems of Marxism (1908), Plekhanov had distinguished between two lines of historical development, arguing that multi-linear development conformed to Marxist historical theory: while stages of production had succeeded one another in the west, in the east, primitive communism was followed by an ‘oriental system’. Pokrovskii unflinchingly adhered to a belief in the universality of the uni-linear process of five successive socio-economic formations (or modes of production), sketched by Marx and Engels. Pokrovskii dominated Soviet history for 15 years, but this did not flow from his being the author of the only Marxist history; he was virtually the only Bolshevik professional historian in 1917. Pokrovskii’s insistence on assimilating Russia’s history to Marx‘s stages for Western European development, particularly in the spawning identification of a feudal epoch in Russia between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries was about the only surviving remnant of his theoretical legacy in the 1930s. His institutional legacy was devastated by a storm. 33 31The

first edition of Trotsky’s 1905 was published in German (Dresden, 1909), in Russia in 1922 and an English edition appeared in New York in 1971. These references are from the English edition of 1905, 3–8, 12–15, 38–9. Baron, The Russian Review, October 1974, 390–2; Soviet Studies, July 1974, 382–4, 388–91. 32Pokrovskii’s review of 1905 appeared in Krasnaia Nov’ in 1922. Szporluk, ‘Pokrovsky’, Survey, October 1964, 117; Samuel H. Baron, Plekhanov, The Father of Russian Marxism, Stanford, 1963. 33 The designation of being virtually the only Marxist Bolshevik historian stemmed from his Russkaia istoriia s drevneishikh vremen, first edition, five volumes, Moscow, 1910–13.

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The Histories of History in the Soviet Union

‘Remember how we used to boast that ours would be the generation to change history? I always assumed we were talking about changing the historical future. Now it seems like I was wrong. Seems like we were planning to change the historical past as well’. —The historian Anton Antonovich Abramov to the Party member Boris Alexandrovich, Ivanov, in the 1930s.1

Historians, War and Revolution HISTORICAL SCHOLARSHIP WAS MORE DEEPLY SHAKEN AND STIRRED BY THE

privations and shortages that marked all of life during the revolution and Civil War than obstructive state policies. Many intellectuals fled from Petrograd during the Civil War, most commonly to the apparently calmer south of the country, even as others moved to Moscow as that city was named the capital.The denuding by institutes of their staff to meet the needs of the front, the shortages of paper; or the limited funds available for research salaries and for publication of findings crippled academic activity. Universities and other institutions of learning were disrupted, scholars and teachers fled, were arrested, mobilized, or eked out a precarious existence. Private book publishing too was hampered by the paper shortage, as well as by the requisition of private and co-operative printing presses, the mal- or non-functioning of others and the municipalization of the book trade which was first introduced in Moscow in October 1918, 1Gillian

Slovo, Ice Road, London, 2005, 67.

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that curtailed freedom of the press or by the operations of the State publishing house (Gosizdat) The years of the wars isolated Russia from the European book market, while within the country the few books that were published—in Kiev, Odessa, Kazan, Kharkov or Siberia—could be obtained only with difficulty in Petrograd. Traffic in books between Moscow and Petrograd dwindled to a thin stream even as soaring costs made them luxury articles. Financial stringency forced the closure of half a dozen scholarly history journals. Bolshevik concern with maintaining tolerable educational standards shrank as the imperatives of winning the Civil War and administering universal scarcity obscured all else. Soviet scholarship began with considerable capital on hand in the form of historians trained under the old regime. Many historians chose to remain in the country and in the first aftermath of the peace, their scholarly endeavour was allowed to proceed unimpeded. The general line of the Party with respect to all scholarship was defined as follows: for the time being, to tolerate the existence of the ‘old’ scholarship as a fact and let them hold the same posts they had held before the revolution until cadres of the ‘new’ were prepared and strengthened; then, to abolish the ‘old’ because of its complete uselessness, and in its place to establish the ‘new’.2 The revolution sealed the working careers of numerous historians. Many perished, a fifth of all historians in Russia, according to one source. The average age of death was 60 to 65 years, an age when most reach the height of creative development. Some professional historians like Paul Miliukov, George Vernadskii, Otto Struve and M.I. Rostovtzeff, primarily the younger representatives of the ‘old’ generation, emigrated after 1917, but the majority remained. Among those who remained some were highly critical of the Bolsheviks, like Academician Sergei Fedorovich Platonov, regarded by some as the most distinguished historian of Russian society since Kliuchevskii, and his former pupil S.V. Rozhdestvenskii. The majority of historians were at least prepared to co-operate with the regime by working in state or Party academic establishments. Even by comparison with 2Sheila

Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, Cambridge, 1970, 262, 133–4; Konstantin F. Shteppa, Russian Historians and the Soviet State, New Brunswick, NJ, 1962, 13, 14, 3, 7; A. Presniakov, ‘Historical research in Russia During the Revolutionary Crisis’, The American Historical Review, 28: 2 January 1923, 248.

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the depleted ranks of non-Marxist historians remaining in the country, the number of Marxist historians in the years immediately following the revolution was small indeed. The Bolsheviks could in fact, boast of only one historian of real professional standing, M.N. Pokrovskii. Besides him, the only other Marxist historian was N.A. Rozhkov, and he had been a Menshevik Minister in the Provisional Government. Of younger established historians well set in their profession before 1917, only three were Bolsheviks: N.M. Lukin, a lecturer at Moscow University and a Bolshevik since 1904; S.A. Piontkovskii, from Kazan University, who joined the Party in 1919; and V.P. Volgin, also from Moscow, an ex-Menshevik, who joined the Party in 1920. Besides these, several Party intellectuals had historical works to their credit, such as V.I. Nevskii, M.I. Olminskii, F.A. Rothstein, D.N. Riazanov, and Iu. M. Steklov—but none had been primarily historians before 1917. And in the years immediately following the revolution, few were able to devote themselves exclusively to historical study. Bolsheviks in the main were too preoccupied with the making of history to be able to write it. Conditions for historical work in the immediate post-revolutionary years were uncongenial. The legalization of private trade in 1921 and the reanimation of private publishing houses sent the cost of books soaring, and rising publishing costs, paper shortages and heavy taxation kept books expensive throughout the NEP.3 The literature of the period unanimously speaks of the need to train a new cohort of historians, both professional researchers and school-teachers, to make up for the great shortage of historians. The principal objectives of the discipline during the 1920s were to infuse the historical profession with Marxist methods, to make documentary sources more widely available and to centralize the administration of the archives; they had, indeed, been brought under state control in 1918 as Glavarkhiv (The Main Archive Administration). Not only were formerly closed sections of the archives opened for research and students encouraged to mine their contents, but as the foremost Western authority on Soviet archives Patricia Grimsted has written 3Shteppa, Russian Historians, 16; Anatole G. Mazour and Herman E. Bateman, ‘Recent Conflicts in Soviet Historiography’, The Journal of Modern History, 24: 1 March 1952, 57; John Barber, Soviet Historians in Crisis, 1928–1932, London and Basingstoke, 1981, 12–13; Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, MA and London, 144.

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‘archival inventories and reference compilations prepared in those years extended scholarly pre-revolutionary traditions, and were still on a European standard.’4 Academic titles were preserved. It is curious that although scholarly degrees were abolished (and restored only in 1937), the new regime staunchly defended the title of Professor, albeit reserving it with very few exceptions, for those who had held it in the pre-revolutionary period. The title of Professor was almost the only one that remained from the old regime. The government was cautious in conferring it upon untested scholars of the new generation.5 History institutions sprouted in a monsoonal flurry, ephemerally however, as a storm was to raze them to the ground barely a decade later. In an early assertion of the proverbial bigger picture, the Soviet state somewhat understandably, drew them into its pastoral and tutelary embrace by placing Party leaders at their helm, like M.S. Olminskii in the Commission on the History of the October Revolution and the History of the Communist Party (Kommissia po istorii oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii i istorii partii, hereafter Istpart), L.B. Kamenev at the Lenin Institute or Iu. K. Milonov at the Institute for Trade Union History (Istprof).The biggest role was played by M.N. Pokrovskii, who held no less than 19 posts during his career as elaborated below. The first institution which was created for the purpose of laying the foundation for a new scholarship in general, and for the social sciences in particular, was the establishment of a Socialist Academy for the Social Sciences in 1918 under the supervision of M.N. Pokrovskii, which was soon renamed the Communist Academy. It fell under the Central Executive Committee of the Russian Republic (RSFSR) and was therefore, a state institution. This Academy was envisaged as a body that would supplant the prestigious Academy of Sciences. Staffed by pro-Bolshevik scholars who had not emigrated, it was more of a dominant force in training the so-called 4P.K. Grimsted, Intellectual Access and Descriptive Standards for Post-Soviet Archives, 1992, 9–10, cited by R.W. Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era, Basingstoke and London, 1997, 83. 5Shteppa, Russian Historians, 14. From 1924–5, the Commission for Improving the Life of Scholars paid salary supplements to the two highest categories on the professorial scale, but by then professorial salaries had begun to rise to levels that permitted them to employ servants. Professors typically had a six-hour weekly teaching load. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia, Ithaca and London, 1992, 55–7.

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istmatchiki, the professional champions of historical materialism, to set ideological basics rather than advance historical research. Founded in 1921, RANION (Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia nauchno-issledovatel’skikh institutov obshchestvennykh nauk or the Russian Association of Scientific Research Institutions in the Social Sciences) was an array of a dozen or more institutes. Its faculty of Marxist and non-Marxist historians made it a testing ground for the quintessentially NEP strategy of ‘using non-Communist hands in the building of Communism’, and it aimed to train Marxist students for scholarly careers.6 Although leading non-Marxist historical journals faced closure from 1922—Dela i dni and Russkii istoricheskii zhurnal ceased publication in 1922, followed by Golos minuvshego in 1923, Annaly in 1924 and Byloe in 1926—books by non-Marxist historians continued to appear, and for some time constituted the majority of published historical research. In an attempt to reduce the predominantly bourgeois (nonParty) composition of university staff, prominent Marxist intellectuals were inducted into the universities and key administrative posts were given to Communists. Even after the Institute of History was transferred from Moscow University to RANION, which was closer to state management, it remained the leading site for collaboration between Marxist and non-Marxist historians. It included sections on ancient, medieval and modern history, Russian history and the history of the colonial peoples. Under the authority of the Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narodnyi Kommissariat Prosveshcheniia (po Prosveshcheniiu) or Narkompros) it had a predominantly Communist leadership, but was mainly staffed by bourgeois scholars. In January 1928, five out of seven members of RANION’s governing body were Party members (though not its chairman, Petrushevskii), but only 15 of the 66 academic staff were Party members. Many of the leading figures in the historical world of the 1920s taught there, including, among Marxists, Lukin, Nevskii, Piontkovskii, Pokrovskii, Rozhkov, Riazanov and Volgin; and among non-Marxists, Picheta, 6Alter

L. Litvin, Writing History in Twentieth Century Russia: A View from Within, translated and edited by John L.H. Keep, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2001, 7, citing a Soviet study on The sources of Soviet historical science in 1968 by L.V. Ivanova, U istakov sovetskoi istoricheskoi nauki: podgotovka kadrov istorik-marksistov v 1917– 1929 gg., Moscow, 1968, 181, that provided the figure for the number of positions held by Pokrovskii. See also Shteppa, Russian Historians, 20–1; John L.H. Keep, ‘The Rehabilitation of M.N. Pokrovskii’, in Alexander and Janet Rabinowitch with Ladis K.D. Krostof, ed., Revolution and Politics in Russia: Essays in Memory of B. I. Nikolaevsky, Bloomington and London, 1972, 296.

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Preobrazhenskii, Presniakov and Tarle. Despite its short life, RANION’s Institute of History was responsible for training a greater number of young historians than any other NEP establishment. In 1929, the final year of its existence, 31 students completed their research training. In 1929, RANION was replaced by a new Institute of history planned, organized and directed by Pokrovskii.7 RANION’s Institute of History was deliberately built on the principle of compromise and co-existence. By contrast, historical study at the Institute of Red Professors (IRP), founded by Pokrovskii in February 1921, and situated incongruously in a monastery in Moscow, had an emphatically Marxist character. Pokrovskii ascribed the original idea for IRP to Lenin, who told him that ‘all social science teachers should be set the task of studying the fundamentals of Marxism in the shortest time possible, so that in future, their teaching will be wholly in accordance with Marxist programmes’. The Commissariat of Enlightenment had started restructuring the schools of history, philology and law as social science schools during the Civil War—in Moscow, a faculty of social sciences (FON) was created after the law faculty and the historical section of the historicalphilological faculty of Moscow University were closed down at the end of 1918—but Communist faculty were in short supply for them. Despite Lenin’s insistence that the old professors be given themes to teach ‘that will objectively force them to take our point of view ... [and] require of each of them a basic knowledge of Marxist literature; announce that anyone who does not pass a special Marxist exam will be deprived of the right to teach’, the non-Marxist professors were never required to pass such an exam. In fact, a rich fare of covertly anti-Soviet courses was being taught in the early 1920s. Since proletarian origin was the prime criterion for admission to IRP, a sound competence in history was not ensured upon graduation; unsurprisingly, of the 236 students who completed the IRP course between 1924 and 1929, only 60 were historians while the rest were Party activists. The History Section of IRP was headed by M.N. Pokrovskii, who was also the Rector of the institute. Many of the teachers here 7Barber, Soviet Historians, 13–14; Litvin, Writing History, 7; Paul H. Aron, ‘M.N. Pokrovskii and the Impact of the First Five-Year Plan on Soviet Historiography’, in John Shelton Curtiss, ed., Essays in Russian and Soviet History in Honor of Geroid Tanquary Robinson, NewYork, 1963, 285; C. E. Black, ‘History and Politics in the Soviet Union’, in Cyril E. Black, ed., Rewriting Russian History: Soviet Interpretations of Russia’s Past, New York, 1962, 5–8.

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were Marxists.The institute was initially a state establishment, coming under the authority of first, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets (TsIK SSSR) and then, the Party Central Committee’s Agitation and Propaganda section (Agitprop). The resultant atmosphere there was highly political, with students frequently being employed in political campaigns or even being seconded to work in the Party apparatus. The IRP did not offer the traditional post-graduate research course as RANION did, but aimed to train its students to an equivalent level. The fellows at this institute, the ikapisty, (IKP was the Russian acronym for IRP, from krasnyi for red) were typically young but politically experienced Party members who had already received higher education. During each of the four years spent at the IRP, a student would attend and deliver a paper at one or two seminar courses.These papers, which were often subsequently published, represented a significant part of Marxist historical research in the 1920s and the IRP produced a considerable proportion of the new generation of Soviet historians. During the 1920s virtually all the leading Marxist intellectuals taught at the Institute.8 Several other institutions were founded after the revolution to conduct work in historical subjects of particular relevance to the regime. Of these, the most distinguished undoubtedly, was the Institut K. Marksa i F. Engel’sa pri TsIK SSSR, or the Marx-Engels Institute (MEI). Established in 1919 and directed by the renowned David Riazanov, it amassed one of the richest collections of socialist literature in the world. Having worked assiduously in establishing a new archival system, discussed in the fifth chapter, Boris Nikolaevskii became its Berlin representative in 1924. In that capacity he hunted through Central and Western Europe, tracking down and collecting unique source material on the international workers’ and socialist movements, particularly on the periods of the 1848 revolutions and the First International, and on the activities of Russian revolutionaries abroad. Nikolaevskii assisted Riazanov in preparing the Complete Works of Marx and Engels for publication, a project that was interrupted by Riazanov’s arrest during theTerror. By 1930, the MEI archives contained 15,000 manuscripts and 175,000 photocopies of documents, 55,000 of them by Marx and Engels alone. Its total holding of books and journals numbered 400,000.Work at MEI was not limited to collecting 8Litvin, Writing History, 8, citing M.N. Pokrovskii, ‘Desiatiletie IKP’, Pravda, 11 February 1931; Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, 41–4, 50, 60; Barber, Soviet Historians, 15; Idem., ‘The Establishment of Intellectual Orthodoxy in the U.S.S.R. 1928–1934’, Past and Present, No. 83, May 1979, n. 24, 147.

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materials, but also included research on the works of the founders of Marxism, the sources of their theories, and the history of their epoch. By 1930, the MEI contained sections on the history of the First and Second Internationals, of Germany, France, England, America and southern European countries, and the history of international relations. Of the 109 people working in MEI in 1930, 87 were historians.There were relatively few Soviet Communist Party members on the staff of MEI, a state establishment, and the staff included many former members of other socialist parties. Even in 1930, only 39 of its staff were Party members.9 The Lenin Institute (LI) had been set up by the Central Committee of the Party in 1923 for the purpose of collecting and publishing Lenin’s works and in 1925, the Central Committee decided that all work on Lenin should be concentrated within this institute. Istpart was merged with it in 1928. In 1924 it was designated by the Twelfth Party Congress as ‘a base for the study and dissemination of Leninism among the broad party and non-party masses’. In this capacity, it gradually extended its activity to publishing works connected with the origins of Bolshevism, thus removing Istpart’s raison d’etre.10 Work in the field of history, Marxist and other, also went on in a number of other establishments. History was one of the main subjects taught at the Communist universities, and historical research was conducted at the Museum of the Revolution, the Lenin Library and the Society of Former Political Prisoners and Penal Exiles. A single institutional centre of Marxist historiography, however, did not exist until the end of the 1920s. At the nominal centre of Communist Science, the Communist Academy, there was no institute or section dealing with history in general. To compensate for the lack of a Marxist historical centre, Pokrovskii and his associates founded the Society of Marxist Historians (SMH) (Obshchestvo istorikov-marksistov) in 1925. Based in the Communist Academy, it was sometimes described as the historical section of the Academy, but in fact, it was both more and less than this. On the one hand it had many members beyond the walls of the Academy; if one of its principal aims was the unification of all Marxists engaged in scholarly work in the field of history and the popularization of the Marxist methodology, others included the study of Marxian 9Barber, Soviet Historians, 15–16; Alexander Rabinowitch, ‘Forward’, viii, and Ladis K.D. Kristof, ‘B.I. Nikolaevsky: The Formative Years’, 126, in Rabinowitch, et al. eds., Revolution and Politics in Russia; Shteppa, Russian Historians, 21. 10Barber, Soviet Historians, 16–17; Litvin, Writing History, 9.

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methodology; the combating of anti-Marxist distortions (‘bourgeois falsification’) in historical writing; and, the establishment of a body of critical Marxist literature. On the other hand, it never achieved very much by way of historical research. It attracted a considerable number of historians, its membership rose from 29 to 800 between 1925 and 1931, and there were branches in 22 towns by the end of 1929. The main activities of SMH consisted of organizing meetings, often to celebrate major anniversaries, or to discuss controversial historical issues; and publishing its journal, Istorik-marksist (‘Marxist Historian’, 1926–41) which was initially edited by Pokrovskii. This, the first Soviet Marxist journal wholly devoted to critical historical writing rather than to the publication of source materials or popular history, did succeed in providing a real centre for Marxist historical debate. The SMH suffered from a dilemma whether it should have a generally Marxist or a specifically Bolshevik character. It also had a paucity of Marxist forces in historical science. While the dilemma was brutally resolved by an assault upon non-Marxist historians, the paucity kept SMH activity capital-centric. Despite being an AllUnion organization in 1930, 374 of its members that year, out of a national total of 523, resided in the capital.11 A significant contribution to historical knowledge in the early years of the Soviet regime was the publication of archive materials, some of it of a sensational nature, on the history of World War One, the correspondence between the last Tsar and Tsarina and a number of memoirs. There were few monographic works of lasting value that were published, the main books being concerned with the revolutionary struggle. In Twenty-Five Years of Historical Scholarship in the USSR published in 1942, not a single monograph during the preceding 25 years is mentioned, the principle accomplishment of Soviet scholarship is stated to have been the overcoming of the mistakes of M.N. Pokrovskii and his ‘school’. A.M. Pankratova, the editor of the volume, wrote that ‘truly serious research and fundamental works in the field of contemporary history are as yet very few in number. A single general work on contemporary history (1918–30)—a textbook for the higher schools, written by Professor L.I. Zubok—was completed 11Ibid., 17–18; Anatole G. Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, Princeton, NJ., London and Toronto, 1958, 189; Mazour and Bateman, The Journal of Modern History, March 1952, 57.

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long ago, but up to the present time has not yet been published! Research studies have been prepared and dissertations have been defended ... but as yet they have not been published.’12 Even as the regime maintained an impalpable control over institutions like the Academy of Sciences and the universities, its hand was prominently felt at the level of schools. History experienced more change in the school curriculum than any other discipline. In 1923, Anatoly Lunacharskii, as Commissar of Enlightenment (prosveshchenie), proscribed any teaching of history in schools that might stimulate nationalism or a nostalgic admiration of the past. Russian political and literary history was removed from the school curriculum. Six years later in the published findings of a survey on History and Socio-Political Education, the predictable result of this revealed not merely an ignorance of history but ‘a low intellectual level, and the absence of any originality of thought among the pupils’. Some scholars like Shteppa believe that history was ‘almost completely replaced, first by “political literacy” (politgramota) and then by social science, which dealt with Marxist modes of production’. Many teachers of history in schools were removed because the government considered that they lacked the ability to impart a ‘Communist education’. 13 The Bolsheviks were not in a position to fasten their grip on historical scholarship until the end of the NEP. The control of budgetary allocations, publication outlets, research and training of historians, components of the ‘commanding heights’, in the view of one historian, eluded the Party until the end of the 1920s. Until 1927, Marxist and non-Marxist historians gazed across a charged space at each other, within a working relationship effectively dominated by the non-Marxists. Bourgeois and Marxist historians represented their country together at a Special Conference of Russian Historians 12Shteppa, Russian Historians, 22, 178, 180, referring to V.P. Volgin, E.V. Tarle and A.M. Pankratova, eds., Dvadtsat piat’ let istoricheskoi nauki v SSSR, Moscow, 1942. For an earlier assessment of the first decade of historical scholarship, that anticipated many of these findings on the Social Sciences in the USSR, in 1928, see M.V. Nechkina, ‘Nauka russkoi istorii’, in V.P. Volgin, G.O. Gordon and I.K. Luppol, eds., Obshchestvennye nauki SSSR, 1917–1927, Moscow 1928, 126–62. 13Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, 193, 195, citing, for 1929, L. Mamet, ‘Istoriia i obshchestvenno-politicheskoe vospotanoie, Istorik-Marksist, XIV, 1929, 159 ff.

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in Berlin and at the Sixth International Congress of Historical Studies in Oslo, in 1928.14 An extremely coarse public campaign was mounted against nonMarxist historiography from 1928 onwards. Pokrovskii did not initiate the campaign and was reticent about joining it initially, although he was not averse to rhetorically invoking the Cheka (the secret police) to frighten and humiliate historians. In 1922, he wrote that ‘the door to the Cheka must always be left hospitably open for them’. Purges of historians began in late 1929 and by 1931, highly respected ‘old’ historians like S.F. Oldenberg, Rozhdestvenskii, S.F. Platonov and E.V. Tarle were arrested and sent into exile.15 By the beginning of 1929, Pokrovskii had decided to attack the institutional base of the non-Marxist historians. At the first All-Union Conference of Marxist Historians (28 December 1928 to 4 January 1929), he gave his assent to a proposal to liquidate RANION’s Institute 14C.E. Black, ‘History and Politics in the Soviet Union’, in Cyril E. Black, ed., Rewriting Russian History: Soviet Interpretations of Russia’s Past, New York, 1962, 7; George M. Enteen, ‘Marxist Historians during the Cultural Revolution: A Case Study of Professional In-fighting’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, Bloomington, 1978, 156–7; Mazour and Bateman, The Journal of Modern History, March 1952, 58. 15The career of Eugene Tarle, a non-Party member of the Society of Marxist Historians, illustrates the futility of striking a balance between the demands posed by historical evidence and the intuitive sinuosity required in sensing out shifts in the politically correct and adjusting to them.Tarle was a prominent historian of the French Revolution, and he was criticized by Pokrovskii as a bourgeois historian, his principal error apparently being the identification of Soviet foreign policy with that of tsarist Russia and of assigning a major share of guilt for World War One to Germany, this being a view that contravened Pokrovskii’s concept of economic determinants being primary in historical causation. Tarle was exiled to Alma Ata in 1931, restored to grace in 1934, wrote congratulatory works on the newly-discovered military heroes, Alexander Suvorov, Mikhail Kutuzov and Piotr Bagration in the mid-1930s, published the politically conformist Bonaparte in 1936, and found his biography Talleyrand praised in Voprosy istorii as a superb biography of the “prince of lies” in 1942 for its thesis that Talleyrand’s significance lay in aiding the triumph of the bourgeoisie and the concomitant establishment of bourgeois democracy in France. He was punished for past sins in 1951, particularly for those linked to his conclusions in Napoleon’s Invasion of Russia (1938), regarded as the definitive work in the 1940s. Enteen, ‘Marxist Historians’, in Fitzpatrick, ed., The Cultural Revolution, 156–7; Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, 38; Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, 194 ff.; LeoYaresh, ‘The Campaign of 1812’ in Black, ed., Rewriting Russian History, 268–72; Mazour and Bateman, The Journal of Modern History, March 1952, 58–9, 64; A. Powell, ‘The Nationalist Trend in Soviet Historiography’, Soviet Studies, 2: 4, April 1951, 374. The review of Tarle’s Talleyrand appeared in Voprosy istorii, No. 10, 1948, 157–60.

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of History and replace it by a new institute under the Communist Academy. As the national centre for research and graduate teaching, the Communist Academy had absorbed all the institutes of the erstwhile RANION and IRP by the summer of 1929. Over the course of 1931 more than 100 historians were arrested, some executed, and others compelled to emigrate while their works went out of circulation. Most of the historians who had participated in any of the five sections of the First All-Union Conference of Marxist Historians—on the Peoples of the USSR, the West, the Party, Sociology and Methods— either lost prominence or disappeared. Bourgeois historical science faded from Soviet historiography, and its leading representatives like S.F. Platonov, E.V. Tarle, M.K. Liubavskii, N.P. Likhachev, Iu. V. Got’e and S.V. Bakhrushin were either in exile or in prison. It was at this time that the Pokrovskii school came to dominate the Marxist historians, who from 1929, dominated the profession through their control of scholarly institutions and publications. By autumn 1931, the turmoil in the Soviet world of history exceeded that in any other academic field. Loren Graham has estimated that as many as 130 historians in the Academy of Sciences were liquidated in 1929 alone as part of the process of bringing the Academy firmly under Party control. By 1932, only one member of the pre-1929 staff remained after this purge. The ‘popular’ chief of Leningrad, S.M. Kirov helped to organize the veritable pogrom of the Academy of Sciences in 1929, when the NKVD fabricated the ‘Academy case’. In 1934, the headquarters of the Academy of Sciences and many of its institutes were moved to Moscow; although unconnected, Kirov was assassinated the same year. The Academy had provided a hub for the city’s intellectuals for two centuries, and the shift ‘decimated the city’s scholarly community’.16 16John

Barber, ‘Stalin’s Letter to the Editors of Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya’, Soviet Studies, 28: 1, January 1976, 24, 37; V.V. Chernavin, ‘The Treatment of Scholars in USSR’, The Slavonic Review, 11: 33, 1933, 710–14; George M. Enteen, ‘M.N. Pokrovskii as an organizer of scholarship’, Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas, vol. 22, 1974, 56–7; Idem., ‘Marxist Historians’, in Fitzpstrick, ed., Cultural Revolution, 157–8; Shteppa, Russian Historians, 49, 50–2; Aleksandr M. Nekrich, ‘Perestroika in History: The First Stage’, Survey, no. 30, 4 June 1989, 23; see the list of Academicians in Loren H. Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927–1932, Princeton, NJ., 1967, 227–9; Clark, Petersburg, 299. In March 1917, Kirov came out in support of the Provisional Government, but joined the Bolsheviks after they took power. In 1919 he was directly involved in shooting down striking workers in Astrakhan; later he sided with Stalin against the supporters of Trotsky and Zinoviev, replacing the

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The transformation of intellectual life in the Soviet Union was no less sudden or extensive than that in the economic and political spheres. With the end of the collaborative tolerance of the NEP, in about 1929, and until about 1938, with occasional interruptions, a scything sweep of the intelligentsia as a whole, that involved the wellchronicled processes of purges, trials, incarceration and execution, ended the professional careers, often the lives, of millions of Soviet citizens. Establishing relative proportionalities of historians as victims in this process is fraught with difficulty but what is clear is that militant Marxists with the support of the Party leadership, waged a bitter campaign against not merely those designated as ‘bourgeois historians’, who were treated as class enemies (‘vragi narodov’), but others of more impeccable social provenance and ideological inclination as well. And scores who worked in other disciplines like sociology, political science and economics, disappeared too. In the purges of the later 1930s, casualties on the historical front were high. Most of Pokrovskii’s closest followers fell, as did Old Bolsheviks and prominent political figures associated with historical work.17 The relatively pluralist and autonomous trends in historical scholarship of the NEP were replaced by an intense monitoring of the profession. The great traditions of pre-revolutionary historical writing surveyed in the Introduction, wide-ranging, prodigiously researched, multi-volume histories that were as much literary as historical works, exemplified by historians like S.M. Solov’ev and V.O. Kliuchevskii were destroyed. SMH never recovered from the attacks that followed the publication of Stalin’s letter to Proletarskaia revoliutsiia. Already declining in importance by 1931, with the Communist Academy’s Institute of History providing a more effective focus for the activities of Marxist historians, SMH became increasingly occupied with ‘popular’ history. Its membership shrank dramatically (from 36 in 1931 to six in 1932), Bor’ba klassov was no latter as Leningrad Party chief in 1926 and becoming Stalin’s loyal henchman. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, he did all he could to promote the violent collectivization drive in the north-western region of the USSR. Alter Litvin and John Keep. Stalinism. Russian andWesternViews at the Turn of the Millennium. London and New York, 2005, 52. 17Barber, Soviet Historians in Crisis, 140, mentions Fridlyand, Gorin, Lukin, Piontkovskii. Tatarov, Vanag and Zeidel as Pokrovskii’s followers who perished. The same fate befell Old Bolsheviks active in historical work like Nevskii, Riazanov, Savelyev, Steklov and Teodorovich. Bubnov, Knorin and Stetskii were among the prominent political leaders involved with historical work who also met their deaths. On the fate of other disciplines, see for instance, Litvin and Keep, Stalinism, 161.

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longer published as its journal from 1933 onwards and its original journal, Istorik-marksist, was published by the Institute of History. Though officially dissolved only in 1936, SMH had in effect, been defunct for two or three years. As for the Institute of History, its public role as a forum for the discussion of historical issues was almost curtailed by 1934 and its work was increasingly concerned with the production of textbooks. The MEI and the LI were merged and the new combined institute was placed under the direct jurisdiction of the Party’s Central Committee. Eventually, on 27 January 1936, a statement of the Party Central Committee and Sovnarkom (the Cabinet) condemned the drafts of textbooks whose authors included members of the Institute. Less than a fortnight later, the Institute was closed and the staff that remained was transferred to the Academy of Sciences, where the decision had been taken in November 1935 to create an Institute of History. The Institute of Red Professors (IRP) that had been divided into separate institutes, by subject, in 1931, was closed in 1937. After Stalin’s letter it had passed completely out of the hands of Pokrovskii’s school and was run by young Stalinist post-graduates. The Sverdlov Communist University was transformed into an agricultural college in 1932.18 The demise of NEP institutions was signaled by the loss of independence by the Academy of Sciences in 1929 and the dissolution of RANION, the leading centre of Marxist and non-Marxist cooperation, also in 1929. While traditional centres of learning were attacked, the Communist Academy was charged in March 1931 with executing the ‘general methodological leadership’ of all scientific establishments. All the centres of Party historiography built up in the 1920s had been dispersed or merged, leaving the field to the MarxEngels-Lenin Institute and the Historical Institute of the Academy of Sciences—the one organization responsible for processing and publishing documents, the other for history in general. But the definitive and canonical history of the Party was yet to be written. By 1931, academic debate between Marxist historians had degenerated into rancorous polemic. Whatever genuine intellectual content remained in the interlocutions was rapidly permeated with accusations of political deviance and ideological heresy, as empty as they were vehement. Until late 1931, historians felt the need for a Party line in history more strongly than Party leaders; from then onwards, the Communists came to the conclusion that it was necessary to fetter 18Barber,

Soviet Historians, 137–9; Markwick, Rewriting History, 39.

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historical activity by political strictures. Even as the theoretical influence and the reputation of Stalin’s leading political opponents, like Bukharin, were destroyed, Stalin was elevated to the rank of theoretical genius, while loyal adherents were steadily moved into key administrative positions in the intellectual world. Institutional changes too, such as the renovation of the culture and propaganda section of the Central Committee (Kul’tprop) in 1930 and the strengthening of the censorship powers of the Chief Administration for Literary and Publishing affairs (Glavlit) in June 1931 bolstered the regime’s capacity to prevent its opponents from exerting influence through cultural or scientific channels.19

Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovskii (1868–1932) Pokrovskii was not merely a historian, although his reputation was greatest as a historian. He was one of the most influential people in Soviet intellectual life generally, regarded as the ‘Supreme Commander of the Army of Red Historians’, who formed a ‘historical front’ to ‘wage battle with bourgeois historians’. His interpretation (or ‘scheme’) of Russian history provided the framework for most Marxist discussion about Russia’s past. It was praised by Lenin, who congratulated him in December 1920 on the publication of his Brief History of Russia. It was also endorsed by Stalin in a letter concerning the origin of the Russian autocracy, to two IRP students in 1927: ‘I consider comrade Pokrovskii’s theory basically correct, although not devoid of extremes and exaggerations in respect of a simplified economic explanation of the process of the Autocracy’s formation.’ Few institutes or journals connected with historical studies existed which he had not founded or directed, or at least had a part in running. It was Pokrovskii who, more than any other, recruited, trained and led the new cadres of Marxist historians.20 19Merle Fainsod, How Russia is Ruled, Cambridge, Mass., 1963, 193; Barber, Past and Present, May 1989, 156–7; Jonathan Frankel, ‘Party Genealogy and the Soviet Historians (1920–1938)’, Slavic Review, 25: 4, December 1966, 600–1; Barber, Soviet Historians, 118, 120. 20Barber, Soviet Historians, 19–20, n.60, p. 149. Shteppa, no admirer, has written that ‘Pokrovsky’s personal authority proceeded from the unity in one individual, as in no other in the party, of a knowledge of Marxist theory and real scholarly erudition, such as even Lenin had not possessed, to say nothing of Stalin’. Shteppa, Russian Historians, 96.

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Born in 1868, the son of a government official, he studied history at Moscow University under Pavel Vinogradov and Vasilii Kliuchevskii. On graduating in 1891, he took up a teaching career in Moscow University as the youngest member of its history department, where his research interest was first sparked by problems of medieval European history. He went on to explore the resemblances between western and Russian feudal institutions. His early work was influenced by the ‘legal Marxists’ and his political sympathies lay with the liberal constitutionalists. He turned to the Social Democrats in 1904, enthused by their activism and probably persuaded by the polemically-errant Bolshevik, A.A. Bogdanov, with whom he collaborated on Pravda. He was a member of the Bolshevik Moscow Party Committee in 1906, and was elected as a candidate member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party Central Committee in 1907. He was banished to Finland in 1907, from where he emigrated to France. He lived in Paris from 1909 to 1917 and wrote the historical works that were to lift him to the pinnacle of the Soviet academy during these years. He split from Lenin, together with Bogdanov and Lunacharskii, in 1909 to become one of the founders of Vpered. When he returned to Russia from France in August 1917, his first and brief affiliation was to Trotsky’s Nashe slovo group rather than to the Bolsheviks.21 Pokrovskii’s Russian History from the Earliest Times, was the first attempt to portray several centuries of Russian history, from the period of the early Slav settlements to the twentieth century, within the frame of a strictly Marxist analysis; the book covered a longer span of time than Plekhanov’s History had. In adhering faithfully to the sequence of modes of production, he advanced the view that history (read class conflict) had followed the same broad pattern in Russia as in the rest of Europe: feudalism had been succeeded by a form of capitalism in the sixteenth century. This ultimately led Pokrovskii to the conclusion, stated elsewhere, that far from being driven either by chance or the specific vicissitudes of Russian backwardness, the Russian Revolution was the product of proletarian activity and the harbinger of an international wave of revolutions. He was criticized for his overestimation of the importance of trade and merchant capital in Russian history, and his view that tsarist foreign policy was 21Barber, Soviet Historians, 20–1; Harvey Asher, ‘The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of M.N. Pokrovsky’, The Russian Review, 31:1 January 1972, 50; Keep, ‘M.N. Pokrovskii’, in Rabinowitch, et al., eds., Revolution and Politics in Russia, 293–4; Mazour and Bateman, The Journal of Modern History, March 1952, 57.

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consistently and principally prompted by domestic propensities rather than by relations between states.This ‘economistic determinism’ was to earn him severe censure. An obvious attempt to supplant his former master, Kliuchevskii, then in his heyday, the work was not well received by the critics.22 But it was this work, together with the first part of his Essays on the History of Russian Culture (1914),23 which established his reputation as the leading historian among Russian Marxists. His considerable administrative talents were recognized with the revolution, and he was elected chairman of the Moscow Soviet. Early in 1918 he became chairman of the Moscow Sovnarkom (regional council of the government), a position that he relinquished in May for that of Deputy Commissar of Education (Narkompros). His last unorthodoxy was being a Left Communist and opposing Lenin’s line on peace with the Germans in spring 1918. The remainder of his life was to be unblemished by political deviation.24 In 1920, M.N. Pokrovskii’s popular textbook, Russian History in Briefest Outline, was published. It was intentionally oriented to meet the needs of the time: the absence of a satisfactory textbook, maximizing facticity and minimizing length, meant for a population caught up in a daily struggle for survival in the Civil War and apparently thirsting for historical tuition. In his approving remarks, Lenin added that the book must contain a chronological index, running tables and columns devoted to chronology (a method Pokrovskii seemed averse to) and separate columns devoted to bourgeois and Marxist views. In 1924, Pokrovskii believed that ‘In exposition, this is probably the 22M.N. Pokrovskii, Russkaia istoriia s drevneishikh vremen first edition, five volumes, Moscow, 1910–13; eighth edition, four volumes, 1933–4; chapters to 17–25 translated and edited by J.D. Clarkson and M.R.M. Griffiths, based on seventh edition, 1924– 5, as History of Russia from the Earliest Times to the Rise of Commercial Capitalism, NewYork, 1931. Although the work was definitively written by Pokrovskii, others contributed: V.K. Agafonov wrote an introductory chapter on pre-historical Russia; N.M. Nikolskii, the chapters on church and religion; and the ‘documentary supplements’ and numerous illustrations were arranged by V.N. Storozhev. Anatole G. Mazour, TheWriting of History in the Soviet Union, Stanford, 1971, 7–14; Roman Szporluk, ‘Pokrovsky and Russian History’, Survey, no. 53, October 1964, 109. See also the biography of M.N. Pokrovskii, by George M. Enteen, The Soviet-Scholar Bureaucrat: M.N. Pokrovskii and the Society of Marxist Historians, Philadelphia, PA, 1978 and the review of this biography by J.L.H. Keep in The American Historical Review, 84:5, December 1979, 1436. 23Ocherki istorii russkoi kul’tury, vol. 1, Moscow, 1914; vol. 2, Moscow, 1918. 24Barber, Soviet Historians, 21.

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worst of my books ... Not all of it was ever written; in large part it was just a revised shorthand record of lectures.’25 In his heyday, Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovskii enjoyed an image that was all his own and that had little to do with the mere trappings of power. His presence was ubiquitous, his influence all-pervasive, his manner abrasive and his erudition, seemingly oceanic. As Deputy Commissar of Education in the RSFSR from 1918, and as a member of the All-Union and All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, Pokrovskii was responsible for major innovations in Soviet education and science. His political acumen ensured that he scaled a similar height in the Party’s edifice in 1930, when despite being stricken by cancer, he became a member of the Central Control Commission’s Presidium. He directed and supervised the teaching of history, the policy on the appointment of history teachers and often, the selection of beneficiaries. He played a leading part in the establishment of rabfaki (workers’ faculties, to prepare workers for higher education). In the role of historian, he was equally influential as an organizer of historical study, a teacher and a scholar. The main centres of Marxist historical study and discussion—the History Section of IRP, SMH and from 1929 onwards, the Institute of History at the Communist Academy—were all directed by him. He was on the editorial board of the philosophical journal Pod znamenem marksizma and of the literary-critical Pechat’ i revoliutsiia. He became the leading editor of two historical journals, Istorik-marksist, an academic journal 25M.N. Pokrovsky, Russkaia istorii v samom szhatom ocherke, 1st ed., Moscow, 1920; 10th ed., 1931, reprinted in 1933; translated by D.S. Mirsky, based on 10th ed. as Brief History of Russia, 2 vols., New York, 1933. The tenth and final edition of Brief Outline was published in Moscow in 1933, a year after the author’s death. Lenin’s letter to Pokrovskii read, ‘I congratulate you very heartily on your success. I like your new book Brief History of Russia immensely. The construction and the narrative are original. It reads with tremendous interest. It should, in my opinion, be translated into the European languages. I will permit myself one slight remark. To make it a textbook (and this it must become), it must be supplemented with a chronological index ... The students must know both your book and the index so that there should be no skimming, so that they should retain the facts, and so that they should learn to compare the old science and the new.What do you say to such an addition?’ Although nationalism was conspicuous by its absence in Pokrovsky’s later works, Brief History ascribed an exceptional role to the ‘Great Russian people’. Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, 187–8; Idem., TheWriting of History in the Soviet Union, Stanford, 1971, 9–10; Szporluk, ‘Pokrovsky’, Survey, October 1964, 109; Mazour and Bateman, The Journal of Modern History, March 1952, carries the letter from Lenin to Pokrovskii.

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and Bor’ba klassov, a popular journal. He headed the historical section of the leading state publisher of historical works, Gosizdat. His seminars at IRP were one of the most prolific sources of Marxist historical research in the 1920s, and the single most important breeding ground of young Marxist historians. His own publications were numerous. On one calculation, 600 works of one kind or another, including only first editions, were published in his lifetime, two-thirds of them after 1917.26 Unfortunately for Pokrovskii, there was to be relatively little opportunity for him to enjoy the fruits of the project he had prosecuted. At the pinnacle of his success and influence, he was stricken with cancer of the bladder in 1927. Although temporarily arrested by a long series of operations, secondary tumours appeared in 1931 and eventually led to his death from heart failure on 10 April 1932. Pokrovskii was given all the honour due to a great Soviet figure when he died. The Central Committee resolution announcing his death and published in the press on 12 April, was florid in its homage to the ‘Supreme Commander of the Army of Red Historians’, ‘... a renowned representative of the old Bolshevik guard, an active participant in the revolution of 1905 and the October proletarian revolution, an 26Barber, Soviet Historians, 21–2; Frankel, Slavic Review, December 1966, 570, n. 27, p. 570; Aron, ‘M. N. Pokrovskii’, in Curtiss, ed., Essays, 284, 286; Szporluk, ‘Pokrovsky’, Survey, October 1964, 116. In her study of The Commissariat of Enlightenment, Sheila Fitzpatrick introduced Pokrovskii as being ‘belligerent, sharp-tongued, radical in his political and intellectual views, intolerant to his former academic colleagues, a born academic politician but not one that played an important role in internal Party politics’. Fitzpatrick, The Commisasariat of Enlightenment, xii. Pokrovskii’s principal postrevolutionary publications were The Class Struggle and Russian Historical Literature, The Diplomacy andWars of Tsarist Russia in the 19th Century (1923), Essays on the Russian Revolutionary Movement of the 19th and 20th Centuries (1924), Marxism and Special Features of Russian Historical Development (1925), The Decembrists (1927), The Imperialist War (1928) and The October Revolution (1929). Barber, Soviet Historians, n. 69, p. 150. A complete, chronological list of Pokrovskii’s publications appeared as ‘Bibliografiia rabot M.N. Pokrovskogo’ in Istorik Marksist, nos. 1–2, 1932, 216–48. On Pokrovskii’s career as an academic administrator, see ‘M.N. Pokrovskii: Kratkaia biograficheskaia spravka’, Istorik Marksist, no. 9, 1928, 80–3. Two essays on Pokrovskii differ in their assessment of his power and status in the Soviet historical world. Aron writes that “by 1932 he held complete control over the entire field of Russian history” and that in the years 1929–32, ‘although the inconsistency of Pokrovskii’s theoretical position grew painfully and increasingly evident, there were none who publicly dared to indicate the obvious state of affairs’, in Curtiss, ed., Essays, 286, 292. Szporluk, on the other hand, concludes that ‘the 1920s were ... anything but a period of ideological domination for Pokrovskii and his school’, in ‘Pokrovsky’, Survey, October 1964, 117.

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irreconcilable fighter for the general line of the party, a world-renowned scholar-communist, a renowned organizer and leader of our theoretical front, a tireless propagandist for the ideas of Marxism-Leninism ...’ Stalin, Molotov and Kalinin were among the pall-bearers. His body lay in state for two days before being cremated. At the funeral meeting in Red Square, Bukharin, on behalf of the Party, and Kuibyshev, on behalf of the government, delivered orations, after which his ashes were placed in the Kremlin wall. The Central Committee issued a resolution on 26 January 1936, less than four years later, attacking the textbooks he had authored and condemning the ‘well-known errors’ of the very same M.N. Pokrovskii.27

The Pokrovskii ‘School’ Given the vast breadth of Pokrovskii’s achievements, it was natural that a group of historians should nestle around him. The ‘school of Pokrovskii’ in a general sense, comprised the majority of the new generation of Marxist historians. Not only did his theories constitute the accepted interpretation of Russian history, but also he had personally taught numerous young historians at institutions like IRP, RANION, SMH, and the Sverdlov Communist University. Indirectly, directly, or both, most of the new generation were his pupils. His school was described by the historian and ethnographer, Vladimir Dmitrievich Bonch-Bruevich (1873–1955), in a speech in 1933 commemorating Pokrovskii, as a ‘galaxy of Marxist historians’. In a narrower sense, the school of Pokrovskii referred to those holding positions of responsibility in the institutions where Pokrovskii’s influence was dominant. Prominent among them was G.S. Fridlyand, a member of the Presidium of the Society of Marxist Historians and head of the Department of Foreign History at the Sverdlov Communist University; P.O. Gorin, secretary of SMH; N.M. Lukin, a member of the SMH’s Presidium and that of the Communist Academy; and, A.M. Pankratova, a member of the bureau of the Party cell at IRP.28 Theoretically, the ‘Pokrovskii School’ was defined by a set of ideas and interpretations about specific historical questions and by a general 27Barber, Soviet Historians, 22–3, n. 73, p. 151; Aron, ‘M.N. Pokrovskii’, in Curtiss., ed., Essays in Russian and Soviet History, 283. 28Barber, Soviet Historians, 23.

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approach to history as a discipline. It laid heavy emphasis on the role of economic and social forces in historical causation at the cost of political factors like aspects of state power. It saw the historical evolution of Russian society as having corresponded in all essentials to the west European path of development. Methodologically, the school was conspicuous for its insistence on the political character and purpose of history. For Pokrovskii, history was the ‘explanatory chapter to politics’; or, ‘It is precisely in order to understand what is going on today that we study the past’.29 The abstract ‘sociological’ complexion of his presentation— characterized by an over-schematic adherence to modes of production, his aversion to individual ‘facts’ and consensually set periods, his suspicion of the grandeurs of Russian achievement and of the exploits of Russian heroes, drew most fire in the 1930s. Although Pokrovskii always scorned the exaltation of ethnic Russians in history and minimized the role of Russian rulers, generals and saints, some of whom Stalin was to resurrect as props to a renewed Russian nationalism in the 1930s, Pokrovskii was willing to acknowledge that revolutionary leaders and elites could decisively alter the course of history, and he considered the October Revolution, and specifically Lenin, as the paramount instance of this. A series of decrees in the 1930s, over the names of Stalin, Kirov and Zhdanov, called for greater ‘appreciation of the national past’, and an approach that glorified the contributions of leading (Russian) personalities in tsarist history like Ivan the Great and General Suvorov. For Pokrovskii however, they were mere individuals, if exceptional ones, and leaders who gained fame by shaping circumstances to their will.30 John Barber has persuasively demonstrated that most of Pokrovskii’s remarks quoted as evidence of his ‘vulgar Marxism’ are 29The first quotation is from Pokrovskii’s article ‘Lenin i istoriia’, Bor’ba klassov, no. 1, 1931, and the second one from Brief History of Russia, vol. 1, London, 1933, 23, both cited by Barber, Soviet Historians, 24. 30Barber, Soviet Historians, n.91, 151–2; Alexander Dallin, ‘Recent Soviet Historiography’ in Abraham Brumberg, ed., Russia under Khrushchev: An Anthology from Problems of Communism, New York, 1962, 475; Keep, ‘M.N. Pokrovskii’, in Rabinowitch, et al., eds., Revolution and Politics, 308. For Soviet compilations that posthumously denounced Pokrovsky, see especially Protiv istoricheskoi kontseptsii M.N. Pokrovskogo: sbornik statei, vol. 1, Moscow, 1939; Protiv antimarksistskoi kontseptsii M.N. Pokrovskogo: sbornik statei, vol. II, Moscow, 1940, a two-volume symposium, edited by B. Grekov and others, setting forth the official criticisms of Pokrovsky’s interpretation, published by the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences.

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taken either from his early writings or from works of popular history by him. The mature Pokrovskii was not an economic determinist, did not deny the role of the individual in historical causation, and did not reduce historical analysis to ‘sociological’ generalizations. He strongly attacked determinism in 1928: ‘Economic materialism and Leninism, belief in fatalistic laws of economic development once and for all determining the course of history, and recognition of the revolutionary dialectic of history, are two incompatible things.’ He also clearly distinguished between historical and sociological explanation: ‘The living historical process is a combination of all kinds of currents .... If history were not so involved, it would not be worth studying history; sociology would be quite enough!’ When compared with history, sociology was severely wanting for Pokrovskii: ‘Sociology shows only the direction in which we ought to move. It is a scientific map with no mountains, marshes, forests, ravines. To mark all these on the map is the business of concrete historical analysis.’ He denied that Marxism was a universal, all-explaining theory. He argued that historians must not discount the role of the individual in history; his authorship of no less than 68 biographical studies suggests some appreciation of the role of personality in history.31

Feudalism and Commercial Capitalism A striking feature of Soviet historiography since the 1930s is the contention that Russia experienced a millennial period of feudalism that ended only in the mid-nineteenth century. This view appears to conflict with that of Marx and Engels on Russia’s historical development. If pre-revolutionary historians overwhelmingly denied the existence of a feudal era, the primary reason was succinctly stated by M.F. Vladimirskii-Budanov in 1909. Like the great majority of them, he was impressed by the extraordinary part played in Russia’s past by the autocratic state, and he contended that ‘feudalism and autocracy are quite incompatible’. Of course, Russian autocracy took first shape only in the sixteenth century, and both Russian and western writers have considered the preceding appanage period with the fracturing and inheritability of princely holdings that followed the collapse of the Kievan state in 1240, the closest thing to feudalism 31Barber, Soviet Historians, 25–6. For his comment on sociology, see Szporluk, ‘Pokrovsky’, in Survey, October 1964, 110.

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that Russia ever knew. No matter how the appanage period is categorized, however, the rise of the Muscovite state put an end to the multiple political-territorial units that the appanages were, as all were merged into a unified realm.32 The ascendancy of Pokrovskii caused a breach to occur in the prevailing consensus, on the absence of feudalism in Russia; a feudal epoch in Russian history, from the sixteenth century, became a standard feature of Soviet historiography. The justification for so classifying Russia rested on Soviet historiography’s definition of feudalism. It was described as a society in which agriculture predominated, the land belonged to a landlord class, and the peasants, who enjoyed its use, were compelled to contribute their surplus labour or product to the landlords. This order of things, it was affirmed, had endured basically unchanged through the rise and fall of the Kievan state; the period of the Mongol conquest; the rise, consolidation and expansion of the Moscow state; and the imperial era from its inauguration by Peter the Great until the emancipation of the serfs in 1861.33 No single concept was so identified with Pokrovskii as that of commercial capitalism, and none had such influence during the 1920s on the study of Soviet society. The very title of his first major work, Russian History from Earliest Times to the Rise of Commercial Capitalism, indicated the central place of this concept in his thought. Neither Marx nor Engels, however, spoke of commercial capital in relation to Russian history.Their observations stressed Russia’s non-capitalist features, her being ‘semi-Asiatic’ and ‘semi-Eastern’, and Engels had called tsarism an ‘Oriental Despotism’. Although both made observations on the controversial question of the future of the peasant commune and the possibility of avoiding capitalist development, neither elaborated any clear and consistent theory about Russia and its history.34 32Samuel H. Baron, ‘Feudalism or the Asiatic Mode of Production: Alternative Interpretations of Russian History’, in Samuel H. Baron and Nancy W. Heer, eds., Windows on the Russian Past: Essays on Soviet Historiography since Stalin, Columbus, Ohio, 1977, 25, notes 2 and 3, pp. 37–8. 33Baron, ‘Feudalism’, Ibid., 28. 34Barber, Soviet Historians, 57–8. This book was translated and edited by J.D. Clarkson and M.R. M. Griffiths as M.N. Pokrovsky, History of Russia: From Earliest Times to the Rise of Commercial Capitalism, London, 1931. In the third volume of Das Kapital, Marx had indicated the importance of commercial, merchants’ capital as an agent of change but one that was not capable of directly leading to a capitalist economy.

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For Pokrovskii, the most original feature of his scheme was that it indicated the political consequences of the rise of commercial capitalism, in ‘that the formation of the “Russian Empire” was influenced by merchant capital’. He decisively rejected theories that the tsarist autocracy had developed in response to the danger of invasion, or in the struggle against the steppes, or as the manifestation of a unique Russian spirit. It arose from economic causes, and its ultimate expression, the Romanovs, were nothing but ‘the loyal servants of the new feudal aristocracy and commercial capitalism’.35 There was much that was less unsubstantiated by Pokrovskii in his expositions of commercial capitalism. He himself stated that the term was used ‘to characterize that phase of economic organization in which ‘capital is employed in large-scale trade in order to yield a profit’. He generally used the term to designate a period in which the influence of commercial capital was dominant. It was certainly not part of his case that the central features of classical capitalism— large-scale industry, proletariat, bourgeoisie—were also typical of commercial capitalism.36 His research on commercial capitalism dwelt on the three and a half centuries that separated 1564 from 1917. He upheld one theory until February 1931. According to this theory, commercial capitalism united the autocracy, the empire and serfdom: it was, indeed, the ‘real Tsar’ and ‘real directing force’ in Russian history from Ivan the Terrible to Nicholas II. It created serfdom, controlled the peasants by an ‘iron discipline’, was predominantly articulated as an exchange economy, where the landlords acted as ‘agents of commercial capitalism’. In its relentless pursuit of new markets, commercial capitalism translated Russian expansion into an empire. This theory of commercial capitalism enabled Pokrovskii to align himself with the official view that the Bolshevik Revolution was the result of a long period of capitalist development, so that after some 350 years Russian capitalism had acquired a maturity to mutate into socialism. This was opposed to both the Menshevik view that Russia was not in a state of preparation for socialism in October, and the Trotskyist one of a generically Russian backwardness sustained for centuries by the 35M.N. Pokrovskii, Brief History, 12; Barber, Soviet Historians, 59, citing M.N. Pokrovsky, ‘The Writers of Russian History before the Marxists and How They Wrote It’, Brief History, 83. 36Barber, Soviet Historians, 59, citing M.N. Pokrovsky, History of Russia from the Earliest Times to the Rise of Commercial Capitalism, London, no date, 357.

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enormous power of the state and the weakness of social classes like the bourgeoisie that underlined Russia’s eligibility for revolution led by workers and contingent upon European revolutionary support. The latter view, according to Pokrovskii, not only exaggerated the prowess of the autocratic state, but derided the possibility of building socialism separately in the USSR, a country that was the inheritor of a historically long phase of capitalist development. An alternative theory that Pokrovskii espoused from February 1931 to his death, rejected ‘commercial capitalism’ as an inaccurate designation, and replaced it by a new term ‘commercial capital’. The same period from 1564 to 1917 was now labeled as ‘feudalism’, of a non-classical type because it combined the features of a natural economy with those of a commercial one. The autocracy was now regarded as resting not just on the nobility, but also on merchants. Within these 3.5 centuries (1564–1917), the period from 1800 to February 1917 was one that witnessed the struggle between commercial and industrial capital, between small-scale production and unfree labour, on the one hand, and large factories that employed free workers, on the other. Unfortunately, Pokrovskii’s view of Russia as developing after 1800 through the economic forces of capitalism collided with Stalin’s strategy of justifying a particular form of industrialization.This was advertised as the surmounting of backwardness by the will and the enthusiasm of the masses, rather than being captive to the availability of resources or the ‘feasibility’ of plan targets.37

The Attack on Pokrovskii’s Commercial Capital/ism For several years after the revolution, his interpretation of Russian historical development went unchallenged among Marxist historians in Russia. Although Trotsky, in reply to a hostile review of his book 1905 by Pokrovskii in 1922, sharply criticized Pokrovskii’s theory of historical development a few months later, the attack by this stillvenerated Bolshevik found no supporters. Much later, while reviewing Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, Pokrovskii wrote that Trotsky had underestimated the ‘colossal economic collapse’ between the revolutions and pointed out that it was in ‘objective shifts’ like the peasant revolution that the motive force of the revolution lay, rather 37Aron, ‘M.N. Pokrovskii’ in Curtiss., ed., Essays in Russian and Soviet History, 289–92; Keep, ‘Pokrovskii’, in Rabinowitch, et al., eds., Revolution and Politics in Russia, 298.

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than in what he referred to as Trotsky’s ‘fickle psychic processes’. In response, Trotsky chastised Pokrovskii for perfectly exposing the ‘worthlessness of that vulgarly economic interpretation of history which is frequently given out for Marxism’. Later, assessing Pokrovskii after his death, Trotsky wrote ambiguously of how he had ‘enriched the most recent historic literature with precious works and beginnings. But nonetheless he never fully mastered the method of dialectical materialism. It is a matter of simple justice to add that Pokrovskii was a man not only of high gifts and exceptional erudition, but also of deep loyalty to the cause which he served’.38 The first expression of criticism by Marxist historians appears to have been an article in the ‘Herald of the Communist Academy’, Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii in 1926 by S. Tomsinskii: ‘commercial capital is for him a self-sufficient factor’. In May 1927, Pokrovskii’s views were challenged in his own establishment, IRP, when V. Rakhmetov read a critical paper. At a meeting to celebrate Pokrovskii’s sixtieth birthday in October 1928, S. M. Dubrovskii, a student and friend of Pokrovskii’s, had paid tribute to him on behalf of his pupils, as the leading Marxist historian. Dubrovskii singled out Pokrovskii’s major contribution to historical study: the latter’s analysis of the commercial capitalist origins of the autocracy. But just three months later, in a paper to the Association of Oriental Studies, Dubrovskii repudiated his teacher’s theory as un-Marxist: ‘neither commercial capital nor usury creates its own special mode of production ... This ought to be clear to every Marxist’. Dubrovskii is given credit, if that is the due term, for being one of the first Marxists, at least one of the first, who grew up in Pokrovskii’s own circle IRP to adversely criticize the master’s overall interpretation of Russian history. He was also one of the first to speak out against his former teacher when the official campaign got underway in 1936. Subsequent banishment spared him from participating in the campaign when it rose to its peak of deformity and rudeness.39 Then, in April 1929, at a discussion on Pokrovskii’s scheme in the History Section of IRP, one A. Lomakin sought to impale him on a sharper point, namely that ‘In this concept, commercial capitalism 38Leon Trotsky, Introduction to Volumes Two and Three of History of the Russian Revolution, selected and edited by F.W. Dupee, trans. by Max Eastward as The Russian Revolution, New York, 1959, 248–9. 39 George M. Enteen, ‘Soviet Historians Review Their Own Past: The Rehabilitation of M.N. Pokrovsky’, Soviet Studies, 20: 3 January 1969, 307; Barber, ‘Stalin’s Letter’, Soviet Studies, January 1976, 38.

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is presented as the creator of all Russian history—from Kievan Russia almost up to the 1917 Revolution. Such a scholastic, undialectical treatment of the role of commercial capital is based on an extreme exaggeration of the influence of commercial capital on the Russian historical process. It may be said that the hypertrophy of commercial capitalism comprises the chief and basic weakness in comrade Pokrovskii’s concept.’40 If the attack on Pokrovskii in 1929 centred on his theory of commercial capitalism, then by 1931 his entire ‘historical conception’ was being assailed for being un-Marxist. In bare outline, his reputation came under fire in meetings at SMH in May 1929, at the Sverdlov Communist Academy late in 1929, at SMH early in 1930, and at three seminars, in November and December 1930 and February 1931, in IRP. At the last seminar, the now-failing Pokrovskii presented a revised version of his concept. Though commercial capital was still declared to have played an important role, the idea of commercial capitalism was totally abandoned as a description of Russian society from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries; elsewhere, in 1931, Pokrovskii said that his use of the term ‘merchant capitalism’ had often been ‘illiterate’, and it was incapable of independently determining the political superstructure of any society. The Party organized the publication of two volumes of writing by scholars who had been his associates, but took a hostile tone to Pokrovskii in 1939–40.41 Bernard Eisenstat singled out five accusations against Pokrovskii as consistent weapons in the arsenal of his detractors. First, his interpretations of history were the ‘official’ interpretations of that time and consequently had to be ‘reflected’ by other Soviet historians because he was ‘dictator’ of the historical ‘front’ from 1928 to 1932; second, he was complicit in, if not responsible for, the purges that historians suffered because his control over the historical front was complete; third, he wrongly denied the effect of the individual or contingency on historical evolution on account of his being a vulgar economic materialist rather than a Marxist; fourth, he did not adhere to any consistent periodization of Russian history; and fifth, and finally, 40Barber,

Soviet Historians, 60. 61–2; Frankel, Slavic Review, n. 28, p. 571; Shteppa, Russian Historians, 100; Asher, The Russian Review, 1972, 55. The two volumes were entitled Protiv istoricheskoi kontseptsii M.N. Pokrovskogo (Against the Historical Conception of M.N. Pokrovsky); and, Protiv antimarksistkoi kontseptsii M.N. Pokrovskogo (Against the AntiMarxist Conception of M.N. Pokrovsky). 41Ibid.,

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he was unscholarly in interpreting the past in conformity with the political needs of the present because he liked to repeat the phrase, ‘History is present-day politics turned to the past.’42 Pokrovskii and his views remained anathema during Stalin’s lifetime. The first reference to Pokrovskii that attempted to represent his views with some justice and accuracy appeared in a new Soviet encyclopedia published in May 1955. In 1956, the premier history journal, Voprosy istorii (‘Problems of History’), estimated Pokrovskii’s place in Soviet historiography as representing ‘The first attempt to give a Marxist view of the history of aristocratic and bourgeois scholarship in Russia’, although he had also been guilty of ‘vulgarizing errors’ which had been justly condemned. At a conference of readers of Voprosy istorii a month later, the historian A.L. Sidorov, was warmer in his assessment of Pokrovskii: ‘Side by side with serious errors, the works of M.N. Pokrovsky also contain valuable criticisms of bourgeois historiography. Therefore, it is impossible to classify Pokrovsky, as some authors have done, in the ranks of bourgeois scholars’,43 and in 1959, with the publication of Volume VII of the third edition of the Small Soviet Encyclopedia (Malaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, Moscow, 1959, column 298), Pokrovskii was brought back into the Marxist fold. Praise of his energy, his devotion and his practical leadership, coupled with warnings against a revival of ideas long ago transcended might be considered the essence of the official interpretation. The chief ideologist, L.F. Ilyichov, told delegates to the Twenty-Second Party Congress in October 1962 that Pokrovskii had been a victim of the personality cult, and although there were mistakes in his scholarly and political career, ‘it is well known that he defended Marxism and made a great contribution to the writing of Russian history.’ At a meeting in December, 1961, to discuss the implications of decisions taken by the Congress, Dubrovskii ironically, was chosen to deliver the report, and he drew a line beneath the Twentieth and Twenty-Second Congresses by declaring that ‘an objective assessment of our historiographical legacy, including 42Bernard W. Eisenstat, ‘M.N. Pokrovsky and Soviet Historiography: Some Reconsiderations’, Slavic Review, 28:4 December 1969, 604. 43Dallin, ‘Recent Soviet Historiography’, in Brumberg, ed., Russia under Khrushchev, 475; Shteppa, Russian Historians, 366, citing ‘Ob izuchenii istorii istoricheskoi nauki’ Voprosy istorii, 1956, no. 1 January 1956, 4, 11; no. 2, pp. 199–213; Harvey Asher, ‘The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of M.N. Pokrovsky’, Russian Review, 31: 1, January 1972, citing Voprosy istorii, no. 2 February 1956, 212.

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Pokrovskii’s works’ had been accomplished. This led to Pokrovskii being reinstated as a Bolshevik and accorded guarded recognition for his achievements as a historian. Sullied since the Stalin period as an ‘economic materialist’, restoration of Pokrovskii’s reputation, if not that of his much-maligned ‘school’, was, Markwick argues, a shot in the arm for the proponents of de-Stalinization.44

Slutskii’s Article and Stalin’s Letter, 1930, 1931 The world of history in the Soviet Union was convulsed and reshaped in 1931. The precipitating factor was fairly innocuous. By October 1931, Soviet historians had been studying the Bolshevik role in the Second International for almost three years.That all the interpretations were controversial emerged from several discussions in the Institute of History in 1930, and in the view on the subject offered in Iaroslavskii’s Party history. The subject had gained relevance because of the abandonment of the united front strategy by the Comintern in the summer of 1928 and its denunciation of the Social Democrat’s reformism. At the end of 1928 a group headed by the Hungarian Communist Bela Kun was set up at the LI to examine the part played by the Bolsheviks in the international socialist movement before the war.45 In 1930, in an article on the Bolsheviks and German Social Democracy before 1914, in the leading journal on the history of the Party and of the revolutionary movement, the Istpart journal Proletarskaia revoliutsiia (PR), the young Bolshevik historian A. G. Slutskii traced the development of fundamentally divergent tendencies in German Marxism, represented by Centrists like Kautsky and Bernstein, on the one hand, and the Left radicals, particularly Rosa Luxemburg, on the other. Slutskii suggested that the Bolshevik attitude towards the leaders of the Second International before the war had been somewhat uncritical. He argued that Kautsky had been a theoretically orthodox Marxist, but never had he been a revolutionary. In contrast, he showed how on almost every issue, Rosa Luxemburg 44Enteen, Soviet Studies, January 1969, 306; Markwick, Rewriting History, 70; Asher, ‘The Rise, Fall’, The Russian Review, January 1972, 49–63; Keep, ‘M.N. Pokrovskii’, in Rabinowitch, et al., eds., Revolution and Politics in Russia, 303. 45Enteen, ‘Marxist Historians’, in Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution, 163–4; Barber, ‘Stalin’s Letter’, Soviet Studies, January 1976, 27–30.

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had advanced a consistently revolutionary line against the opportunism of Kautsky and the revisionism of Bernstein. Luxemburg had rejected a parliament-oriented strategy for one, based on the direct action of the masses; she had clearly perceived that revolution meant the political seizure of power. Luxemburg had also offered a Marxist understanding of imperialism. Barber points out that this article was ‘a remarkable mixture of historical insight and political naivety’. Even as it succinctly expressed the difference between Kautsky and Luxemburg, its praise for Luxemburg exceeded the conventional. Bolshevik theorists from Lenin onwards had criticized Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism, which they had always presented as the basis of both her mistaken tactics and her attack on revisionism. Most damningly, Slutskii maintained that Lenin had missed the essential difference between the Left Radicals and the Centrists until 1914.46 In their foreword to Slutskii’s article, the editorial board of PR noted that it had already published an article earlier in the year criticizing Slutskii’s approach, and pointed out that they disagreed with him ‘over the question of Lenin’s appraisal of international opportunism’.The board maintained that the article was simply being published for purposes of discussion: it was ‘politically most urgent and essential’ to continue the discussion of an ‘entire circle of problems connected with the relations of the Bolsheviks to the prewar Second International.’47 That it was published at all—and especially in the journal which more than any other stood for orthodoxy in Party history—can only have been because the study of this question had not yet reached the point at which a particular interpretation could gain general approval. A letter was sent to the editorial board of PR in October 1931 from the Central Committee demanding an explanation for the publication of A.G. Slutskii’s article. The editors’ reply was apologetic but not unctuous. They agreed that Slutskii’s article was ‘anti-Party’, and that it contained ‘essentially Trotskyist ideas’, together with ‘slandering distortions of Lenin’s position’. Such a reply was not enough to satisfy Stalin. His letter to the editors, ‘Some Questions Concerning 46Barber, Soviet Historians, 113–14, citing A. Slutskii, ‘Bolsheviki o germanskoi sotsial-demokratii v period ee predvoennogo krizisa’, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 6 (101), 1930, 38–72 (The Bolsheviks on German Social Democracy at the Time of Its Prewar Crisis); Shteppa, Russian Historians, 88; Frankel, Slavic Review, 596. 47Frankel, Slavic Review, 596, citing ‘Ot redaktsii’, Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, No. 6 (113), 1931, 199. Hereafter, PR.

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the History of Bolshevism’, was published in PR on 28 October 1931.48 Stalin began by protesting against the very publication of Slutskii’s ‘anti-Party and semi-Trotskyist’ article. In his letter, which many consider marked the beginning of Stalin’s ideological autocracy, Stalin wrote that Slutskii had called into question something about which there could be no doubt: How could anybody argue whether Lenin ‘was or was not a real Bolshevik?’ or dispute Lenin’s understanding of centrism and opportunism. Slutskii’s argument, insisted Stalin, was tantamount to saying that up to 1914 or even 1917, Lenin was not a ‘real Bolshevik’ because he had ‘underestimated the danger of centrism in German social democracy ... [and] did not carry on an implacable struggle with opportunism’. The article was ‘Trotskyist’ because it suggested that Lenin had not sought to promote a split in the international socialist movement. Slutskii’s other offence was to accuse Lenin of not giving firm support to the German Left radicals in their struggle against Kautsky’s opportunism. Stalin held that the Bolsheviks had been correct in withholding support to the German Left Radicals because of their leanings towards Menshevism. But Stalin cited no evidence to show that Lenin had aimed to split the Comintern or that he had been consistent in opposing centrism. So eager was Stalin to discredit Rosa Luxemburg that he went so far as to attribute to her and Parvus ‘the utopian and semi-Menshevik scheme of permanent revolution’. Even Stalin was compelled to qualify this outlandish charge later. Stalin then penned the momentous lines that had an enormously baleful effect on history in the country. Stalin wondered how historians could write political history without understanding politics; ‘Who except hopeless bureaucrats’, he asked, ‘could rely solely on written documents?’ ‘Who except archive rats does not understand that the Party and leaders must be tested by their deeds and not alone by their declarations? Why did Slutsky not use the most reliable method of testing Lenin and the Bolsheviks—by their ideas, by their 48Stalin’s

letter was simultaneously published in the Party’s main theoretical journal Bolshevik, No. 19–20, October 1931, and in PR, 28 October 1931. See also; Barber, Soviet Historians, 115, 127–8; Barber, Past and Present, August 1979, 161; I. V. Stalin, ‘O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii bolshevizma’ (pis’mo v redaktsiiu zhurnala “Proletarskoi revoliusii”), Sochineniia, Moscow, 1951, xiii: 84–102; Works, 13: 86–104.

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actions? Why did he prefer to use the less reliable method of digging into papers chosen at random?’49 Stalin went on to the issue of the point in publishing articles like this one at all, and attributed it to the phenomenon of that ‘rotten liberalism, which has spread to some extent among a section of the Bolsheviks’, who ‘made what ought to be axioms into matters for discussion. Some Communists regarded Trotskyism as still a faction, though mistaken, of Communism, and therefore worth arguing with. In fact, it was ‘the advanced detachment of the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie’, and any liberalism towards it was ‘stupidity bordering on crime, on treason to the working class’. Stalin pointed out that when some ‘smugglers’ tried to prove that Lenin prior to the war ‘did not recognize the necessity of the growing-over of the bourgeoisdemocratic revolution’, they were, in effect, attributing a key role for Trotsky in developing Bolshevik theory. Instead of facilitating the activities of such historians, the task of genuinely Bolshevik historians was to expose ‘Trotskyists and all falsifiers’ of Party history. Stalin laid down the Party line on the issue in question: namely, that Bolshevism was and always had been synonymous with total opposition to opportunism.50 As ‘blows of steel’ fell on Marxist historians, normal historical work ground to a halt. Marxist historians frantically dredged historiography for politically harmful elements. Stalin’s letter instantly convoked meetings, provoked self-criticism and ignited discussion in virtually every institution of the sprawling Communist Academy, and in every Party organization in the country.The Society of Marxist Historians called for a review of all existing historical literature, and students of the IRP were formed into brigades to prepare assessments of this literature in the press. More than 130 speakers spread themselves through Moscow alone to deliver reports, and many more fanned through the Republics of the USSR. According to I.I. Mints, later a distinguished Academician, ‘extermination of cadres of historians began. Many historians were slandered, then repressed. 49Shteppa,

Russian Historians, 89; I.V. Stalin, Sochineniia, Moscow, 1955, vol. XIII, pp. 86, 98–9; Barber, Soviet Historians, 128–9; Idem., Soviet Studies, July 1976, 31; George M. Enteen, ‘Problems of CPSU Historiography’, Problems of Communism, 38: 5, September-October 1989, 77–8. 50Barber, Soviet Historians, 129; Idem., Past and Present, 1979, 161; Enteen, ‘Marxist Historians’, loc. cit., 164–5.

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Many, like Pokrovskii’s followers, were compelled to admit errors.’ The criticism of historians was apparently more widespread outside Moscow, in the provinces, where, it was reported in early 1932, ‘everyone who has written historical works has been condemned for Trotskyist contraband or pure Trotskyism’. Sweeping conclusions were drawn that affected all research, beyond that of the history of the Party or the country; essentially, Stalin’s strictures signaled the end of any reliable and credible Party (and indeed, Soviet) history. Shteppa sums up these lessons: ‘rotten liberalism’ and all forms of falsification had to be shunned; ‘class vigilance’ had to completely replace ‘digging into papers’; all scholarship, preeminently that related to history, had to be Party scholarship. Barber evaluates the largely negative significance of this letter as a political intervention, although not on behalf of any party or faction, rather than as a contribution to still lively debate on the subject, but abroad. Stalin’s letter posited a fixed, unchanging (and unhistorical) concept of Bolshevism. In its blatantly chauvinist interpretation of Party history, Stalin’s case rested on the assumption that the whole essence of the international socialist cause was contained in the Russian revolutionary struggle. Critical analysis, on the basis of a Marxist worldview or any other, was no longer required. Instead, conformation of known ‘axioms’ and denunciation of deviations from them were now the prime task of historians.51 This issue was the last number of PR (no. 6(113), 1931) to appear; although the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute did begin to publish a new series of PR from 1933, only twelve issues had appeared by the end of 1939. But it was clear that this old stronghold of Party historiography was not the only target at which Stalin’s letter was directed. As with PR, the main organ of Soviet Marxist historiography, Istorik-marksist, was also silenced for many months, and its editors purged. All historians, indeed anybody involved in any kind of cultural or ideological work was threatened. The letter also triggered the expulsion of numerous University teachers of history.52 51Enteen, ‘Marxist Historians’, loc. cit., 165; Shteppa, Russian Historians, 90; Barber, Soviet Historians, 131; Barber, Soviet Studies, 1976, 32, 23; R.G. Pikhoia, ‘Certain Aspects of the “Historiographical Crisis,” or the “Unpredictability of the Past”’, Russian Social Science Review, 43:2, March-April 2002, 7, citing I.V. Stalin, ‘O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii bol’shevizma. Pis’mo v redaktsiiu zhurnala Proletarskia revoliutsiia, in Propaganda i agitatsiia v resheniiakh i dokomentakh VKP (b), Moscow, 1947, 281–91. 52Frankel, Slavic Review, December 1966, 596; Litvin, Writing History, 12–13; see also Dev Murarka, Gorbachov: The Limits of Power, London, 1988, 341.

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The Reintroduction of History in Schools History as a specific subject had begun to appear in Soviet schools after the First Conference of Marxist Historians in December 1928January 1929, but it still retained its former abstract-sociological character, inflected with Pokrovskii’s penchant to privilege formations over chronology and factual detail. In studying Russian history, Pokrovskii had tried to disseminate an impeccably materialist methodology whose core was formed by a ‘scheme’ of the ‘succession of social structures’, primitive communism, slaveholding, feudalism, capitalism and socialism. The foregrounding of the socio-economic base, or structure and of economic history, sat beside a sharp and concomitant disdain for chronology, events and individuals: he once memorably stated that ‘ideas are nothing more than the reflection of the economy in the human brain’. In the institutes he had founded and ran, fault-lines dividing ancient or medieval or modern history were set aside in favour of ‘pre-capitalist structures’, or ‘industrial capitalism’. In addition, Pokrovskii had actually started to oppose the teaching of history as an independent subject in schools by 1925. The People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment of the Russian Republic (Narkompros RSFSR) reintroduced history as an independent classroom subject in schools in September 1931, by when Pokovskii was seriously ill.53 In early March 1934, A.I. Stetskii (Head of the Central Committee’s Department of Culture and Propaganda), A.S. Bubnov (RSFSR Commissar of Education), and A.A. Zhdanov (Central Committee Secretary) presented reports on the deficiencies of the school history curriculum to the Politburo. At a Politburo discussion of history textbooks later that month, Stalin objected to the presentations of several distinguished Bolshevik pedagogues. He launched into a vicious critique of their advocacy of textbooks that privileged materialism and class analysis over a more traditional historical narrative. A leading ideologist present at the meeting paraphrased Stalin’s remarks several days later: The textbooks and the instruction [of history] itself is done in such a way that sociology is substituted for history ... What generally results is some 53Shteppa, Russian Historians, 133; Aron, ‘M.N. Pokrovskii’ in Curtiss, ed., Essays in Russian and Soviet History, 287; Asher, ‘The Rise’, Russian Review, 1972, 51; D.L. Brandenburger and A.M. Dubrovsky, ‘‘The People Need a Tsar’: The Emergence of National Bolshevism as Stalinist Ideology, 1931–1941’, Europe-Asia Studies, 50:5, 1998, 874.

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kind of odd scenario for Marxists—a sort of bashful relationship—[in which] they attempt not to mention tsars and attempt not to mention prominent representatives of the bourgeoisie ... We cannot write history in this way! Peter was Peter, Catherine was Catherine. They relied on specific classes and represented their mood and interests, but all the same they took action— these were historic individuals—they were not ours, but we must give an impression of this epoch, about the events which took place at that time, who ruled, what sort of a government there was, what sort of policies were carried out, and how events transpired. Without this, we won’t have any sort of civil history. 54

Stalin’s commentary was understood by insiders as a call for the revival of conventional state and personality-based narratives in historically oriented propaganda. A.S. Bubnov followed up on Stalin’s prescriptions at a historian’s conference a few days later, on 8 March 1934. He complained that theory was dominating the discussion of histor y in schools, leaving events, personalities and their interconnection to play only a secondary role. As a result, Bubnov noted, ‘an entire array of the most important historical figures, events, wars, etc. slips past [our students] unnoticed. Under such conditions, we have a very large over-encumbrance of what can be referred to as the sociological component, and a major lack, even a complete absence in some places, of what can be referred to as pragmatic history.’55 Two weeks later, on 20 March the Politburo reconvened, inviting an elite group of historians to their textbook discussions. As a stenogram was either not kept or remains unavailable for scrutiny, only the little-known diary of one of the historians present, S.A. Piontkovskii, can cast light on the proceedings. Stalin pointed out that ‘These textbooks aren’t good for anything (nekuda ne godiatsa) ... What,’ he thundered, ‘the heck is the “feudal epoch”, “the epoch of industrial capitalism”, “the epoch of formations”—it’s all epochs and no facts, no events, no people, no concrete information, not a 54Brandenberger

and Dubrovsky, Europe-Asia Studies, 1998, 874. and Dubrovsky, Europe-Asia Studies, 1998, 875. A.S. Bubnov had been a member of the party since 1903, of its Central Committee since 1913, a Left Communist in 1918 and a signatory of the Platform of the Forty-Six in October 1923. He was the head of the Political Administration of the Red Army from 1924 to 1929 and A.V. Lunacharskii’s successor as Commissar of Enlightenment from 1929. A member of the Presidium of the Communist Academy, Bubnov taught at IRP and wrote a history of the civil war, Grazhdanskaia voina, partiia I voenno delo, Moscow, 1928, and a party history, Istoriia VKP(b), Moscow-Leningrad, 1931. Barber, Soviet Historians, 28–9, n.120, p. 153, 140. Bubnov was shot in the Terror. 55Brandenberger

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name, not a title, not even any content itself. It isn’t any good for anything.’ He wanted textbooks with facts, events and names, textbooks on antiquity, the middle ages, modern times, the history of the USSR: ‘History must be history’, he said. Stetskii and Bubnov were instructed to collect proposals for new history textbooks.56 A decree issued jointly by the Council of People’s Commissars (V. Molotov) and the Party Central Committee (J. Stalin) on 15 May 1934, entitled ‘On the Teaching of Civic History in the Schools of the USSR’, laid the bases for forging the teaching of history in schools on the anvil of a Marxist understanding of history.Two further decrees of 8 and 9 August 1934, on the implementation of the main decree, signed by Stalin, Kirov and Zhdanov, were not published but circulated among a small group of historians. The May decree began by stating ‘that the teaching of history in the schools of the U.S.S.R. is not administered satisfactorily’. It added that textbooks and teaching were of an abstract and schematic nature; ‘instead of teaching civic history in a lively manner, narrating in their chronological sequence the most important events and facts accompanied by characterizations of historical figures, the students are given abstract definitions of social-economic structures, thus substituting obscure schemes for the coherent narration of civic history.’ It defined an essential requirement for the thorough mastery of history as lying in the ‘observance of historical-chronological succession in the presentation of historical facts, personalities and chronological dates. Only such a course of history can assure the student accessibility to, and clarity and concreteness in, historical records; on this basis alone can correct analysis and synthesis of historical events be arrived at, which will guide the student to a Marxist understanding of history.’ Five textbooks for schools were called for by June 1935, dealing with a history of the ancient world; of the Middle Ages; modern history; the history of the USSR; and, a modern history of dependent and colonial countries. It named members of groups to compile the textbooks and announced that two contingents of 150 students each would be admitted into the restored history faculties of the Universities of Moscow and Leningrad on 1 September 1934, ‘in order to train qualified specialists in history’. The historian Anna Pankratova shortly thereafter explained precisely what a Bolshevik reorganization of history teaching would imply, in the official theoretical 56Brandenberger

and Dubrovsky, Europe-Asia Studies, 875–6.

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journal, Bolshevik: ‘To produce a scientific history textbook is to create a Bolshevik science. The problem in preparing a Bolshevik history textbook of any period is to demonstrate history in the light of our own grandiose epoch and the historical struggle of the labouring class for a proletarian dictatorship and socialism in the entire world.’57 Kings, battles and dates were back in fashion, especially battles won by the Russians. Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great were once again national heroes, model rulers, even if the regimes they presided over had been oppressive: the foundation and consolidation of a strong Russian national state was now held to be a virtue outweighing the exploitation of the masses.58 From the mid-1930s, the historical record on Ivan IV came in for refurbishment, prompted rather more by the exigencies of politics than by the protocols of the academy. Pokrovskii’s thesis of ‘commercial capital’ gave way to a conceptualization that viewed the long centuries from the tenth to the mid-nineteenth as the epoch of the sway of feudalism in Russia. Ivan was glorified as a positive figure, a hero, in novels, poetry, films—and—in history books, even though the Soviet historian Militsa Nechkina had argued that depicting this Tsar in a positive frame was reminiscent of ‘bourgeois historiography’. Ivan’s Livonian War, 1558–83, a policy of expansion to secure a base on the Baltic Sea and direct access to the west for the empire at the expense of Lithuania and the Livonian Order who controlled the Baltic coast, was invoked to justify Soviet expansion into the Baltic region in 1939.The British historian, Maureen Perrie has exhaustively examined the popularity of The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s 57As far as modern history was concerned, Stalin had listed the following as core components: the rise of modern capitalism from 1789 to 1871; its decay and defeat from 1871 to 1918; post-war imperialism and economic crisis, including fascism; and, finally, the planned economy and the triumphant construction of socialism in the USSR. See Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, 197–8, for a translated text of the decree ‘O prepodovanii grazhdanskoi istorii v shkolakh SSSR’, Pravda, 16 May 1934 and Direktivy VKP(b) i postanovleniia sovetskogo pravitel’stva o narodnom obrazovanii za 1917–1947 gg., Moscow, 1947, 170–1, translated in Slavonic and East European Review, XIII, July 1934, 204–5. A. Pankratova, ‘Za bolshevistkoe preobrazovanie istorii, Bolshevik, XXIII, 1934, 40, quoted by Mazour, Ibid, 198. See also Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution, 66, for the argument that in celebrating narrative history and condemning schematism, this decree was a broadside aimed at Pokrovskii, who was not mentioned by name. 58Barber, Soviet Historians, 139; Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, Europe-Asia Studies, 876; Shteppa, Russian Historians, 123–6; Mazour, TheWriting of History, 18; Geoffrey Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union, London, 1984, 215.

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Russia. Stalin’s biographer, Robert Tucker had considered that Stalin had consciously modeled his domestic and foreign policies on those of Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great, a view that Perrie does not share. That Stalin admired Tsar Ivan, however, is clear: he called him ‘a great and wise ruler in preserving the country from foreign influence’. He expatiated further on Ivan in a conversation with the film director Sergei Eisenstein in February 1947, when Stalin laid out the problems he had with Eisenstein’s film Ivan Groznyi ‘... you have to show why he had to be cruel. One of Ivan the Terrible’s mistakes was to stop short of cutting up the key feudal clans. Had he destroyed these five clans, there would gave been no Time of Troubles. And when Ivan the Terrible had someone executed, he would spend a long time in repentance and prayer. God was a hindrance to him in this respect. He should have been more decisive.’ In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a number of prominent writers and artists were commissioned to create works about Ivan the Terrible. In 1941, for instance, Dmitri Shostakovich was asked, and refused to compose an opera, while Eisenstein was commissioned to make what many consider his subversive parable (if not best) film. At the same time, Alexei Tolstoy the author of the Stalin Prizewinning novel Peter the Great and a literary figure who managed to remain in Stalin’s good graces, agreed to write a play Ivan Groznyi. In 1942, the historian R.Iu. Ripper had eulogized Ivan IV as a ‘people’s ruler and great patriot ... [whose] reforms assured Russia order within and effective security from without. His policy was warmly supported by the Russian people’. Alexei Tolstoy’s fictional representations of Peter I had to be revised four times to tack to the prevailing Party winds. In 1917, his short story Peter’s Day, had depicted Peter as a coarse, greedy and tyrannical individual. In the dramatized rendition of On the Rack in 1929, the image was conveyed of a statesman-like individual but a year later the play was banned. In a new version of the play, Peter I in 1931, the subject was depicted as shorn of some of his coarseness even as his accomplishments were lauded. By 1938, when Tolstoy had laboured in the face of charges of being too parsimonious with the ruler’s record, the ruler featured in the final version of a play, a novel and a film scenario—in all of them, he regaled readers and viewers as a national hero.59 59Maureen Perrie, The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia, New York, 2001, 1–10, 79–86, 103–28; Idem., ‘‘The Tsar,The Emperor, The Leader’ Revisited: Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great and Robert Tucker’s Stalin’, Paper presented to the Soviet

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During the pre-revolutionary period, despite a welter of diverse opinion, there were two broad approaches to the historical legacy of Tsar Ivan Vassilievich, Ivan IV (who went down in history as the ‘Terrible’, from the Russian word ‘groznyi’, b. 1530, Grand Prince of Moscow, 1533–47, Tsar of Russia, 1547-84). The record of Ivan IV has invited spectacularly-divergent readings by scholars and lay persons alike. Tsar Ivan initially ruled under the name of the Selected Council (1549–59), during which period several administrative, judicial, financial and ecclesiastical reforms were conducted. His reforms of the 1550s contributed to the development of united corporate estates (sosloviia), similar to those in Western Europe, although as yet only in embryonic form. Ivan revised the law code (the sudebnik), created a standing army (the streltsy), convened the first Assembly of the Land (the Zemsky Sobor), and confirmed the position of the Church with the Council of the Hundred Chapters, which unified liturgical rituals and ecclesiastical regulations for Christians throughout the country. In 1552, he destroyed the Kazan Khanate, whose armies had repeatedly devastated the north-east of Russia and in 1556, he annexed the Astrakhan Khanate and destroyed the largest slave market on the river Volga. However, despite Ivan’s role in the promulgation of these reforms, he decided in the 1560s that corporate estate institutions, like those for a landowner estate, placed unacceptable limits on his autocratic power. His morbid suspicion of the senior nobility and the aristocracy (the boyars) prompted him to divide the realm into two parts in 1565. One, known as the oprichnina (‘special court territory’ or ‘realm apart’), in a section of Russia (mainly the north-east), was directly ruled by himself and policed by his personal service-men, the oprichniki (members of the ‘special court’). Ivan enhanced the dominance of state over society and imposed state service on all sections of society. Industrialisation Project Seminar (SIPS), University of Birmingham, 27 November 1991, 1–14; Idem., ‘Studying Stalinism by Proxy: Soviet Medievalists, Ivan the Terrible and the Anatomy of Despotism’, Paper presented to SIPS, 6 December 1989, 1–4; Orlando Figes, Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, London, 2002, 497–8; C.E. Black, ‘The Reforms of Peter the Great’ in Black, ed., Rewriting Russian History, 252–3; Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, 206–7; Alexandra Popoff, ‘The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia’, Canadian Journal of History, December 2004, 2–3; Robert O. Crummey, ‘Ivan the Terrible’, in Baron and Heer, eds., Windows on the Russian Past, 59.

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The oprichniki were turned upon ‘traitors’, individuals from the ‘serving’ and boyar nobility suspected of disloyalty, who were exterminated. The oprichnina generated its own opposition, which led to more repression. In its final stages the desire of lower-born oprichniki for career advancement inspired a purge of the upper ranks of older oprichniki.The oprichnina successfully destroyed local boyar-aristocratic corporations. Although Ivan abolished the oprichnina in 1572, repression, mass resettlement and violence continued until Ivan’s death in 1584. It is beyond dispute that the reign of Ivan IV was the most repressive in Muscovite history. For 24 years, the Livonian Wars dragged on, deranging the economy and the military, but winning Russia no territory. The wars contributed to an economic crisis in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Urban settlements were abandoned and large numbers of people moved from central and north-western Russia to the south and south-east. The oprichniki under Maliuta Skuratov massacred between two and three thousand of the inhabitants of Novgorod in 1569 (on the pretext of treasonable plotting with the King of Poland, relegating Novgorod to a permanently secondary economic role thereafter), perpetrated a similar blood-letting in Moscow in 1572, and conscripted men to fight wars. Depopulation and famine ensued.60 One group of scholars, which included Karamzin and Kostomarov, and of which the most prominent exponent was Kliuchevskii, sought the reasons for the oprichnina in the pathological character of the Tsar. The case for the primacy of Ivan’s personality in grasping the nature of his rule was most forcefully made by Kliuchevskii. Other historians like Kavelin, Solov’ev and Sergei Feodorovich Platonov (1861–1933) tried to find a justification for the oprichnina terror in Russia’s ‘state interests’, which demanded that the remnants of feudal fragmentation be overcome regardless of the methods used; Platonov, for instance, considered that Ivan faced implacable opposition from the boyars, whose power was rooted in their ownership of non-service ancestral votchina estates. The oprichnina served that end by physically annihilating or driving from their old estates the princes and boyars. Much of the argument 60Philip Longworth, Russia’s Empires.Their Rise and Fall: From Prehistory to Putin, London, 2006, 104-6; Andrei Pavlov and Maureen Perrie, Ivan the Terrible, London, 2003.

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between Kliuchevskii and Platonov boils down to the question of what Ivan was trying to accomplish in the oprichnina.61 Soviet historiography was heterogenous in its assessments too. The monographs by Vipper and Platonov continued the line of evaluation favoured by Kavelin and Solov’ev. The unusual aspects of his life and work made Vipper strangely susceptible to attack on the problem of the historical Ivan. He was not a specialist on Russian history, having completed a dissertation on Geneva during the Reformation at Moscow University, whose faculty he joined in 1897. Most of his scholarly work before the revolution was concerned with ancient Greece and Rome. He had opposed the revolution and emigrated to Latvia, where he taught from 1927 to 1941. After Latvia was annexed by the USSR, he returned to Moscow in 1941, aged 81. Just before he left Russia, Vipper had published an apologetic biography of the Tsar in 1922 in which he had praised ‘the broad, orderly system of centralization’ and argued that ‘it would be difficult to find another state system that would have made possible to such a degree the employment of the various classes of society’, and maintained that the founding of the oprichnina was ‘a major administrative reform’. On his return to Russia, Vipper revised the work and scathingly criticized the oprichnina and argued that the key feature of the reign was constant warfare. It was his earlier biography of Tsar Ivan, of 1922 that was to become a founding text in Stalin’s rehabilitation of this Tsar, depicted here. The same years presented Peter I (the Great, r. 1682–1725) to Soviet citizens in a warmer glow than had been the case earlier. Stalin had wryly told the biographer Emil Ludwig in an interview in December 1931 that while any comparison between Peter and himself would be inappropriate, ‘So far as Lenin and Peter the Great are concerned, the latter was a drop of water in the sea, but Lenin— an entire ocean.’ In the first official secondary school textbook since Pokrovskii, Short History of the U.S.S.R. edited by Shestakov in 1937, 61Crummey, ‘Ivan the Terrible’ in Baron and Heer, eds., Windows on the Russian Past, 57. For their views on Ivan the Terrible, see V.O. Kliuchevskii, Sochineniia, 8 v., Moscow, 1956–9, II: 157–99; S.F. Platonov, Ocherki po istorii smuty v Moskovskom gosudarstve XVI-XVII vv., St. Petersburg, 1899, 118–50. This work, An Outline of the History of Troubles in the Muscovite State, stands above all other scholarship on the subject with regard to its mastery of the sources. Platonov also wrote Lektsii po russkoi istoriii, St. Petersburg, 1899; Boris Godunov, Petrograd, 1921; Ivan Groznyi, Berlin, 1924. His History of Russia was translated from Lektsii po russkoi istorii by E. Aronsberg and published in New York in 1925.

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Peter’s reforms were applauded with caution: ‘Under the reign of Peter I, Russia made great progress; nevertheless, it remained a country in which serf oppression and the tyranny of the tsar reigned supreme. The Russian empire was enlarged and strengthened at the cost of the lives of hundreds of thousands of toilers and the impoverishment of the people.’ In a larger school textbook edited by A.M. Pankratova, History of the U.S.S.R. (1948), Peter was described as ‘a good organizer and an outstanding statesman ... [whose] ruthless methods were common to the society of his day’. The ruler that had emerged from the mid-nineteenth century archival perusals of N. Ustrialov and S. M. Solov’ev was a large figure—in proportion, vision, and accomplishment, but one whose reforms had tended to extend seventeenth-century trends, and were tainted by the climate of medieval brutality towards ruthlessness in the high price they exacted on all of society. The evaluation of Peter I’s record in the Soviet period proceeded without any substantial scrutiny of the ruler’s Letters and Papers; the editing of the collection had been suspended in 1918 and was resumed in 1946. Three volumes had appeared by 1952, covering the period from the middle of 1708 to the end of 1709, but then publication was again suspended.62

The Short Course in the History of the USSR, Edited by A.V. Shestakov for Schools, 1937 On 25 June 1934, the Politburo named members of a commission to supervise the creation of new history textbooks for use in primary and secondary schools. The members were A.S. Bubnov, A.A. Zhdanov, L.M. Kaganovich, V.V. Kuibyshev, I.V. Stalin and A.I. Stetskii. The author’s groups were unable to deliver draft texts by the set date of June 1935 and several other drafts were regarded as unsatisfactory. A.N. Artizov suggests that the authors were unable to meet the deadline because of the problems they faced in establishing conformity with Stalin’s notions of history. It was then decided to 62C.E.

Black, ‘The Reforms of Peter the Great’ in Black, ed., Rewriting Russian History, 235–48 citing A.V. Shestakov, ed., A Short History of the U.S.S.R., Moscow, 1938, 81; A.M. Pankratova, ed., History of the U.S.S.R., II: 43; N. Ustrialov, Istoriia PetraVelikago, 6 v., St. Petersburg, 1858–63; S.M. Solov’ev, Istoriia Rossii s drevneishikh vremen, 29 v., St. Petersburg, 1851–79. In his Kurs russkoi isttorii, Kliuchevskii had tended to agree with the assessment of Solov’ev. The Letters and Papers were published as Pisma i bumagi imperatora Petra Velikago, Moscow, 1946–52.

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select a textbook on the basis of a competition. N. I. Bukharin indicated desirable directions for the forthcoming book in his Noted: ‘Announcement of a Competition to Compile an Elementary Textbook on the History of the USSR’ in mid-February 1936: ‘the book should focus on the Russian state as a unified entity, as a “prison of peoples” transformed by revolution into a socialist union of them’, it must desist from both ‘abstract definitions ... and dry and dead schematism’ (the so-called Pokrovskii errors), and it must present Soviet history by combining economic, political and cultural histories. The competition was published in Soviet dailies on 3 March 1936, and 42 manuscripts had been received by July, most of them written by lay individuals, workers and peasants included. In spite of the wishes of the ten-member jury,63 selection of the best manuscripts was delayed beyond the deadline of 1 July 1936, to January 1937, when seven manuscripts, rather than a single ‘best’ one, were selected. The jury decided to award a third prize (no first and second prizes were awarded) to the manuscript, To the Happiest Children in theWorld prepared under the supervision of A.S. Shestakov, by the author’s collective of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, whose Director was A.S. Bubnov. The authors were asked to prepare them as standard school textbooks. Stalin initiated revisions throughout the process of its preparation; for instance, he struck out a passage announcing that Ivan had ordered the massacre of the population of Kazan following its sack. He was personally responsible for a ‘lucidly formulated evaluation of the accomplishments of Ivan the Terrible’ and he was just as involved in the glorification of Peter in the textbook. Stalin was, nevertheless, unhappy with all the submitted manuscripts and in April he suggested that corrected versions of the old textbooks be used for the pre-revolutionary period, until an ideologically acceptable textbook for primary schools was made available.64 The third and final stage of the competition, revising the book submitted by the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, commenced in mid1937. It is impossible to determine which sections were written by 63The

jury comprised the following members: Zhdanov, Bukharin, Gorin, Svanidze, Iakovlev, Bystrianskii, Bubnov, Zatonskii and Khodzhaev. 64A.N. Artizov, ‘V ugodu vzgliadam vozhdia ‘Konkurs 1936 g. na uchebnik po isrorii SSSR’, Kentavr, October-December 1991, 125–35, translated and republished as ‘To Suit the Views of the Leader: The 1936 Competition for the [Best] Textbook on the History of the USSR’, Russian Social Science Review, 34:3, May-June 1993, 73–88; this article was also published in Russian Studies in History, 31:4, Spring 1993, 9–29.

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which author or even the principles that governed the presentation of individual themes, beyond the underlying prescriptions of ‘exalting the old state and the idea of the inevitability and beneficial effect of the victory of socialism in Russia’. In any case, the individual authors disappeared from the title page. By 1938, the commission had been dissolved, many of its members had perished, and the need to obtain the consent of surviving members of the competition jury had been obviated by the Terror. The final version of Kratkyi kurs istorii SSSR therefore, in five million copies, was brought to life, ironically, by the ‘Decree of the Jury of the Governmental Commission on the Competition for the Best Textbook for the Third and Fourth Grades of Secondary Schools on the History of the USSR’ (sic: no first prize had been awarded on 22 August 1937 and the Short Course was awarded the second prize of 75,000 rubles).This was ironical because the competition jury had been dissolved before the deadline for the submission of entries. Zhdanov retained the name of only A.S. Shestakov on the title page although the bulk of the writing had been done by Zhdanov himself and three other historians of the Moscow Pedagogical Institute, namely, N.G. Tarasov, N.D. Kuznetsov, and A.S. Nifontov. Smaller portions were contributed by three others. In its final version, the textbook was the product of the combined effort of a group of young Marxist historians and scholars of prerevolutionary vintage. Among other strengths of the new textbook, Shestakov singled out two in 1937: first, a language that school children would understand easily, and second, the inculcation of historical knowledge and the concomitant values to buttress patriotism. The closing chapter of the introduction says: ‘We love our motherland, and we must know her remarkable history well. Whoever knows history will better understand current life, will fight the enemies of our country better, and will consolidate socialism.’ This sentiment was to reverberate through the decades. The Short Course in the History of the USSR was the proverbial lucid, settled and unquestionable Stalinist ‘last word on history’. It established a standard interpretation of Russian national history for the Stalinist era. Although the work was intended as an elementary school textbook, it quickly assumed a central position in Soviet educational and propaganda efforts at all levels, extending from schools to Party courses, military training and agitational reading circles. In the following decades the work was reprinted in multiple mass editions and translated into all the languages of the Soviet Union, as well as

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major languages of Asia and the west, remaining the fundamental statement on the pre-history of the Soviet lands until Stalin’s death opened a new era in historical and educational practice in the 1950s. Among the many startling innovations of this text, the most fundamental was its radical reconfiguration of the relationship between the Russian national past and the Soviet present. In Pokrovskii’s now discredited account, the history of Russia per se had figured as a necessary precondition for the revolutionary transformations of Russia in the twentieth century, but as nothing more. History was a battlefield of social forces and actors who were alien to the classes and political institutions of the Soviet present. The Shestakov text, in marked contrast, was founded on a principle of political and social genealogy linking the Russian past and the Soviet present, and it exhorted readers to realize an affective continuity with the progressive actors of human history, whose accomplishments blurred together in a coherent grand march towards Soviet reality. Its most striking feature was perhaps the clinical manner with which it established the Russia of princes, Tsars and emperors as a prefiguration of the Soviet Union. Of all Russian Tsars, the textbook offers biographical accounts of only Ivan and Peter. The only Russian leader who is discussed in the Shestakov textbook at the same length as Ivan, is Peter.The text devotes six pages, an entire short chapter, to Ivan and seven to Peter, out of a total of 74 pages covering all history up to the end of the eighteenth century. The textbook credits Ivan and Peter with the completion of the great work of pre-modern Russian history: state consolidation, imperial expansion and, lastly, modernization and enlightenment. Not only did the textbook’s treatment of Ivan unequivocally establish the foundation for later literary, dramatic and film projects in its apologetic tone and interpretative strategy, but the positioning of the Tsar in the narrative of Russian history as a whole, established the historical logic underlining his cardinal importance. The text celebrates Ivan as an enlightener, consolidator of state power, and military leader. It explains the oprichnina as a tool in political struggle to centralize power. Peter was given a central place as the instigator and genius of eighteenth century modernization. Records from the competition and editing process dating from 1935–7 demonstrate the striking variety of competing historical interpretations in play just months before the final version’s publication. Certain of these cast both Ivan and Peter in a far more negative light.

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In April 1937, Zhdanov and Ia. V. Iakovlev demanded that A.V. Shestakov and his group ‘strengthen throughout the [textbook] elements of Soviet patriotism and love for the socialist motherland— not declaratively, as it is presently done in the textbook, but concretely, with reference to the facts.’ Brandenberger and Dubrovsky have argued that historical continuity with the Russian empire was evidently insisted upon in order to endow the current regime with a state-oriented legitimacy that an undiluted Marxism-Leninism had been unable to provide. The textbook emphasized the quality of leadership in Russia’s history; certain tsarist state-builders came in for fulsome praise, like Iaroslav the Wise and Peter the Great, even as peasant rebels like Stenka Razin and Emilian Pugachev, or the Cossack leader, Shamil, were downplayed. All imperial wars were cast in a defensive framework. In the same article in Istorik Marksist, Shestakov mentioned some themes where the latest research had been mined to provide content to the chapters: the rise of the old Russian state, the feudal mode of production, the formation of the centralized autocratic Romanov empire and the origins of capitalism in Russia.65 Released on the eve of the November holidays in 1937, the press characterized the Short Course on the History of the USSR as a ‘wishedfor gift on the twentieth anniversary of the Great Socialist Revolution’. The extensive campaign of laudatory reviews unanimously proclaimed the textbook to mark a ‘Victory on the Historical Front’. In its final form, the five million copies of the Short Course strongly reflected Stalin’s idea, on the tsarist imperial ancestry of the Soviet state, that he expressed the same day during a dinner at K.E.Voroshilov’s house. Stalin’s remarks were reported by one A.G. Latyshev and are derived from the unpublished diary of someone who was close to him: ‘The Russian tsars did a great deal that was bad. They plundered and enslaved the people. They waged wars and seized territories in the interests of the landowners. But they did one good thing—they put together a vast state reaching as far as Kamchatka. We have inherited 65Artizov, Russian Social Science Review, 1993, 88–90, citing A. Shestakov, ‘Osnovnye

problemy uchebnika: Kratkii kurs istorii SSSR’, Istorik Marksist, No. 3, 1937. See Artizov, n. 17, pp. 92–3 for the names of those associated with the textbook and who disappeared in the Terror and Purges. See also Untitled, http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/ slavic/calendar/TerrorGreatness Ch51.pdf.; Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, Europe-Asia Studies, 1998, 879; D.L. Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956, Cambridge, MA and London, 2002, Appendix, 259; Mazour and Bateman, The Journal of Modern History, March 1953, 60.

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this state.We Bolsheviks were the first to put together and strengthen this state not in the interests of the landowners and capitalists but for the toilers and for all the great peoples who make up this state.’ Brandenberger and Dubrovsky point out that in master-narratives after 1937, non-Russian histories and those of Soviet minorities were marginalized.66 Such calls for ‘pragmatic history’ (essentially the ‘usable past’) echoed throughout the mid-1930s. At another Politburo discussion the same month, Bubnov proposed that the official line relating to history ought to concern not just the linear pre-revolutionary ‘history of the USSR’ but a broader and more inclusive ‘history of the peoples of Russia’. A textbook on ancient history by Mishulin, one on the history of the Middle Ages by Kosminsky, and another on modern history by Efimov and Fainberg followed The Short Course. A special methodological journal, The Teaching of History in Schools, made its appearance, as did separate university history texts. The teaching of Soviet history was organized on the concentric principle: the most elementary information was imparted in the fourth class; it was then repeated in fuller detail in the seventh and in still fuller detail in the ninth. Party and Soviet history was studied in close connection in the tenth class.67

The Privileging of Russo-centric Themes Although Soviet patriotism generally strove to forge all nationalities in a common commitment to building socialism, in the 1930s it had a more immediate purpose.With the growing threat of war from Japan in the east and Germany in the west, the regime sought to mobilize popular enthusiasm for the defence of what was now once again called the ‘motherland’ (rodina). The patriotic symbols and heroic past that were required had to be summoned from the pre-revolutionary past; Soviet history was still inadequate to the task. Although classconsciousness undergirded the philosophical foundation of the Soviet 66A.V. Shestakov, ed., Kratskii kurs istorii SSSR, Moscow, 1937, translated as A Short History of the U.S.S.R., Moscow, 1938; Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, EuropeAsia Studies, 880; Artizov, Russian Social Science Review, 89, citing Soiuz, No. 41, 1990, 12; See also Robert Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928– 1941, New York, 1990, 482–5. 67Shteppa, Russian Historians, 135.

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experiment, scholars like Grigor Suny and Yuri Slezkine contend that in practice, Stalin and his entourage actually behaved like ‘nationalists’, actively promoting nation-building throughout the USSR.68 Russo-centric themes were privileged in Soviet ideology during the late 1930s within the context of the decade’s increasingly pragmatic ideological orientation. The Party hierarchy came to believe that the proletarian internationalism that had permeated Soviet ideology during the first fifteen years was inhibiting the mobilization of Soviet society for industrialization and war. Searching for a more populist rallying call, Stalin and his inner circle eventually settled upon themes that privileged the ethnically Russian tsarist past as the best way to promote state building and popular loyalty to the regime.69 A shift to ethnic particularism in the 1930s—especially Russian ethnic particularism—would seem to have been utterly incompatible with Party ideology of the 1920s. Over the course of the first fifteen years, M.N. Pokrovskii and other early Soviet historian-ideologists had vilified Russocentrism, painting pre-revolutionary Russian history in exclusively dark colours as the story of a chauvinistic, colonizing nation carrying out the will of an oppressive tsarist system. In his 68This point is made by David Brandenberger, ‘Propaganda State: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination and Stalinist Terror’, http:www.oncampus.richmond.edu/~dbrandden/ PS.html. He cites a welter of scholarship as evidence: Ronald Grigor Suny, The Revenge of the Past: Nationalism, Revolution and the Collapse of the Soviet Union, Stanford, 1993; Yuri Slezkine, ‘The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism’, Slavic Review, 53:2, 1994, 414. According to this line of reasoning, early Soviet NEP policies celebrated non-Russian ethnic diversity, but this gave way to countervailing populist, russificatory tendencies during the mid-to-late 1930s (Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Ethnicity and the Soviet State, 1923–1938, Ithaca, 2001). Apart from these two schools of thought, other scholars have asserted identity formation under a variety of other factors from the Second World War (Amir Weiner, ‘The Making of a Dominant Myth: the Second World War and the Construction of Political Identities within the Soviet Polity’, Russian Review, 55:4, 1996, 638–60; Idem., Making Sense of War, Princeton, 2000; Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and fall of the Cult of World War Two in Russia, New York, 1994), to the Party press (Jeffrey Brooks “Thank You, Comrade Stalin”: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Civil War, Princeton, 1999) or the peculiar Soviet practices of everyday life (Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia, Cambridge, Mass., 1994; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s, New York, 1999). 69David Brandenberger, ‘from proletarian internationalism to populist russocentrism’, 3, 7; Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, ‘The People Need a Tsar’, Europe-Asia Studies, 1998, 871–90.

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Brief History, Pokrovskii had argued that the Russian state had been built by the conquest of native ethnicities, and elsewhere, he iterated the imperialist nature of tsarist diplomacy. They proposed as an alternative a propaganda line based upon Marxism-Leninism which fore-grounded the study of historical materialism, social forces, class antagonism and economic development on an international scale. Even after the adoption of the doctrine of Socialism in One Country in the mid-1920s, with its nationalist insistence that socialism could and would be built in the USSR alone by relying upon domestic devices, Soviet propagandists continued to stress class as a more fundamental and decisive social category than other paradigms drawn along ethnic or national lines.70 What was responsible for the change in the mid-1930s? Apparently the Party hierarchy had become frustrated with the previous decade’s ineffective ideological line, particularly its materialistic and antipatriotic aspects. The search for a ‘usable past’ not only focused on shock-workers in industry and agriculture, but also lavished attention on prominent ‘Old Bolshevik’ revolutionaries, industrial planners, Party leaders, Komsomol officials, Comintern activists, Red army heroes, non-Russians from the republican party organizations and even famous members of the secret police.71 A Pravda editorial in February 1936 proclaimed that ‘All the people-participants in the great socialist construction—may be proud of the results of their labour, every one of them—from the smallest to the largest—are Soviet patriots enjoying a full array of rights. First among these is the Russian people. The Russian workers and the Russian toilers, whose role throughout the Great Proletarian Revolution, from the first victories to the present day’s brilliant developments, is exceptionally large.’ In the wake of this article, the parenthetical expression ‘first among equals’ would be used with increasing frequency in reference to the Russian people’s place in Soviet society, foreshadowing the later emergence of an explicit ethnic hierarchy.72 Placing the Russians at the head of the multi-ethnic Soviet family 70Brandenberger, ‘from proletarian internationalism’, 5; Keep, ‘M.N. Pokrovskii’, in Rabinowitch, et al., eds., Revolution and Politics, 308. 71Brandenberger, ‘from proletarian internationalism’, 6, 9. Brandenberger traces the phrase ‘search for a usable past’ to an essay by Henry Steele Commager, reprinted in his book The Search for a Usable Past and Other Essays in Historiography, New York, 1967, 3–27. 72Brandenberger, ‘from proletarian internationalism’, 17. My emphasis.

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of peoples, the Minor Soviet Encyclopedia would assert on the eve of the war that ‘the culture of the USSR’s peoples is historically tied to the history of the Russian people. It has always experienced and will continue to experience the benevolent influence of the Russian cultures’. This registers a shift in emphasis in Soviet ideology from the workers as the vanguard class of the Soviet experiment to the Russian people as the vanguard nation. Russo-centrism and the celebration of the Russian past would form an important part of official propaganda campaigns until after Stalin’s death in 1953.73 In 1942, George Orwell pondered on the notion that ‘what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written’. The Soviet of the 1940s saw an intensive reworking of history on Russian nationalist lines. Claims for according a Russian provenance for scientific inventions were made: one ‘Kryakutnoy of Nerekhta’ was said to have been the first hot-air balloonist in the world, rising into the air before the Montgolfier brothers. In 1953, this Russian, who was a literary creation by the nineteenth-century Russian forger, A. Sulukadzev, had earned an entry in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia as an ‘eighteenth-century Russian inventor, who built the first hot-air balloon in the world’. Exposure of this falsification only occurred in 1981 in Voprosy literatury.74 But a stronger and more serious strain of Russian nationalism was evident in the Russophilic historical treatment of other Soviet ethnicities and nationalities. Lenin had caustically commented that tsarist expansion and subjugation of non-Russian peoples and nationalities—the ‘national minorities’ in the language of the NEP— had led to the formation of an empire which closely resembled a ‘prison of the peoples’ with ‘colonies of the purest type’, and he frequently warned about the menace of ‘Great Russian chauvinism’. As Commissar for Nationalities, Stalin once stated that tsarist nationality policy ‘aroused in Eastern peoples a feeling of distrust and hatred of everything Russia’. The national liberation struggles of these nonRussian ethnicities had earned a measure of support from Moscow 73Brandenberger, ‘from proletarian internationalism’, 18–19, citing Malaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, vol. 9, Moscow, 1941, s.v. ‘Russkie’ by B. Volin, 319–26, citation on p. 326. 74George Orwell, ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’, in George Orwell, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Penguin, 1970, 2:296; Boris Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present, London and New York, 1988, 288, 131.

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and heroes like the Chechen leader Shamil had garnered favourable notice by historians. Up to the mid-1930s, Soviet historical study of Russian imperialism had unvaryingly singled out its negative features; for the next 20 years, the obverse was stressed. The turn-about that was registered by the rejection of Pokrovskii’s assumptions and directions implied the beginning of a shift in official and academic stances on the histories of the non-Russian peoples; and, on judgements concerning the implications of their absorption into the empire. The new directives called for an acknowledgement that they had been ‘younger brothers’ of the Russians, although some of them, like the Tajiks or the Armenians, had histories that preceded Slavic genealogies by more than a millennium. The idea was bruited that all non-Russian cultural traditions had been linked with Russian ones even before their military absorption into the Muscovite and tsarist empires. This sometimes bordered on the burlesque: in Tajikistan in the 1950s, one Radzhabov argued that Firdausi’s poetry was impossible without the influence of ideas from Kievan Rus.75 As Stalin hastily sought to confect a new ‘Soviet patriotism’ in the 1930s, in the face of possible invasion, numerous historians were called upon to propagate the so-called theory of the ‘lesser evil’, according to which annexation by imperial Russia of the territories of non-Russian peoples like those of Georgia and the Ukraine was a lesser evil than annexation to some other empire like that of the Turks or the Poles—actually, ‘objectively progressive’—but nevertheless an evil, particularly when annexation meant ceding independence. Soviet historians on the problem of the ‘lesser evil’ often drew upon a statement by Engels in a letter to Marx in 1851: ‘Russia in reality plays a progressive role in relation to the East ... Russian rule plays a civilizing role on the Black and Caspian Seas and Central Asia, for Bashkir and Tatar...’. Reflecting on the apologies for Russian imperialism in Soviet historiography of the 1930s, Hugh Seton-Watson observed in 1961 that ‘the arguments of Soviet historians that the 75Ibid., 131–2; Lowell

R. Tillet, ‘Russian Imperialism and Colonialism’ in Baron and Heer., eds., Windows on the Russian Past, 105–6. While Marx and Engels had derided Russian colonialism, they also recognized that Russia had played a civilizing role for some of her colonial victims. This apparent ambiguity in their stance on the problem of ‘the lesser evil’ is also reflected in the fact that while Marx and Engels espoused national liberation for colonial peoples, they sometimes argued that some small nations were better off under Russian rule in the short run, than as subjects of the only two alternatives, the Turks or the British.

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conquest of Central Asia was objectively progressive are essentially a Marxist-Leninist version of the arguments of Kipling.’76 Although the theory of the ‘lesser evil’ was first imposed by a government commission in 1937, and although this appreciative refurbishment of tsarist colonialism was fortified by the war-induced patriotism, it received substantive definition in 1951. This occurred in an articulation that heroically grappled with the elasticity of the dialectic in conjuring up a ‘Russian people’, even a ‘Russian proletariat’, decades before either had been sighted. In an article ‘On the question of the “lesser evil” formula’, by the historian M. Nechkina in Voprosy istorii, the following proposition was offered: Tsarism was the prison of peoples—that formula is profoundly true. In that prison our country’s elder brother—the great Russian people—languished also ... In the struggle against the common enemy, tsarism, the friendship of our peoples took shape ... In evaluating the results of the incorporation of various peoples into tsarist Russia, historians must pay particular attention to the intercourse among those peoples, to the new and positive element which, in spite of tsarism, the great Russian people introduced into their economic and cultural life. The task of historians is to depict the historical prospect of unity and struggle of the workers of the various peoples in the future under the leadership of their elder brother—the Russian people— and its proletariat.

Essentially, the argument ran that annexation brought its subject peoples to a higher cultural and economic level and, that this enabled them to share in the multinational revolutionary struggle.77 Andrei Zhdanov’s interpretation of the tsarist annexation of Ukraine and Georgia deployed this theory.The religious characteristics of Ukrainians and Georgians, he reasoned, made them more akin to the (Eastern Orthodox) Russian Empire than to any other neighbouring state, like Poland, the Ottoman Empire or Persia. The view bolstered Russian nationalism by arguing that rather than being a misfortune, the subjugation of the Caucasus or Central Asia was actually beneficial for the populations involved because they were able thereby to avoid the greater evil of conquest by the British. The ‘lesser evil’ 76Tillet, ‘Russian Imperialism’, in Baron and Heer., eds., Windows on the Russian Past, 105, quoting Hugh Seton-Watson, The New Imperialism, London, 1961, 128. 77Konstantin Shteppa, ‘The “Lesser Evil” Formula’, in Black, ed., Rewriting Russian History, 109–10, quoting from M. Nechkina, ‘K voprosu o formulae “naimenshee zlo”’ Voprosy istorii, VI: 4, 1951, 44–8.

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not only morally legitimized tsarist imperialism, but garnished it with the specious overlay that the vanquished peoples were enabled to work alongside their Russian ‘elder brother’, especially the proletariat, in opposition to the autocracy. When the Georgian historian, N.B. Makharadze made the case that Russian occupation of Georgia in 1801 was better than its annexation by Turkey or Persia, Pokrovskii declared that the occupation was a ‘forcible seizure’. He opposed the lesser evil theory because he believed that ‘in the past we Russians were the greatest possible plunderers’.78

The Second World War During the first, disastrous period of the war, from July to December 1941, as the war correspondent I. Ehrenberg noted ‘Stalin’s name was hardly mentioned; for the first time for many years there were neither portraits nor enthusiastic epithets; the smoke of nearby explosions banished the smoke of incense.’ For a long time Soviet writers kept silent about the first months of the war and began their account with the counter-offensive of December 1941.79 The literary community concentrated its energies on the single subject of the war for its entire duration. Nearly 1000 writers joined the armed forces as combatants or military correspondents and 417 of them were killed. Political control over fictional production was chronic and became more intense as victory was assured. Deming Brown identified 23 of the 36 writers he investigated as being Party members, the bulk of whom had become Communists during the war. While he did not perceive differences in the presentation of issues like patriotism or of Stalin and his role between non-Party writers and Communists, the same issues were treated differently by writers who were Party members. It is difficult to gauge the extent to which this stemmed from Stalin’s close and constant interference in literary life during the war. As someone who joined other members of the Writer’s Union in its meetings with Stalin then, the renowned novelist Konstantin Simonov recounted how Stalin discussed to 78Asher, Russian Review, 1972, 54; Konstantin Shteppa, ‘The “Lesser Evil” Formula’, in Black, ed., Rewriting Russian History, 109; Brandenberger and Dubrovsky, Europe-Asia Studies, 1998, 878; Shteppa, Russian Historians, 175; Kagarlitsky, The Thinking Reed, 132. 79Rosalind Marsh, Images of Dictatorship: Portraits of Stalin in Literature, London and New York, 1989, 40–1, citing I. Ehrenburg, ‘Lyudi, gody, zhizn’, Novy mir, 1963, no. 1, 70–1.

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whom prizes, premiums, blame and censure should go; he nominated leaders and editors (and their deputies) of literary journals, he commissioned novels and plays on specific subjects, demanded alterations and sharply told writers off. 80 After the tide of the war changed and the Red Army began to push back the Germans, Soviet historians undertook to gather materials for the history of the war and to discuss among themselves questions of methodology, that is, what the Party line should be. But soon after the end of the war, Stalin called a halt to all historical enquiry about the war. Thenceforth, until his death in 1953, the major source of information about the war was his own wartime writings and speeches.81 Since Khrushchev had made Stalin’s failures during the war the centre-piece of his denunciation, the possibilities for historians to mention the early disasters, the impact of the purges and Stalin’s obstinate deafness to intelligence warning of the German invasion grew. In September 1957 the Central Committee of the Party authorized the preparation of a multi-volume history of the war and created a Department of History of the Great Patriotic War at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism to do so. In 1959, the Soviet journal of military history, Voenno-istoricheskii zhurnal’, which had not been issued since the war, began to reappear, publishing articles and memoirs by top military officers. They uniformly presented a revisionist, anti-Stalinist view of the military conduct of the war. In 1960, the first volume of a history of the war prepared under the auspices of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism appeared; the sixth and final volume came out in 1965.82 80Deming Brown, ‘World War II in Soviet Literature’, in Susan J. Linz, ed., The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union, Totowa, NJ., 1985, 243–8. Moshe Lewin regards Simonov as an avid and avowed Stalinist, instanced by his composing a novel at Stalin’s behest, earning a Stalin Prize for it, but, later regretting it as ‘a moral low in his life’. See Moshe Lewin, ‘Stalin in the Mirror of the Other’ in Lewin, Russia/USSR/ Russia:The Drive and Drift of a Superstate, New York, 1995, 236. Lewin is referring to Simonov’s autobiography, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniaa, Moscow, 1990. 81Lucy Dawidowicz, The Holocaust and the Historians, Cambridge, MA., and London, 1981, 74. 82IstoriiaVelikoi Otechestvennoi voiny Sovetskogo Soyuza 1941–1945, Moscow, 1960– 65. Mark von Hagen, ‘From ‘Great Fatherland War’ to the Second World War: new perspectives and future prospects’, in Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, ed., Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison, Cambridge, 1997, 239; Dawidowicz, The Holocaust, 76–7, citing P. Zhilin, The Second World War and Our Time, Moscow, 1978, 118 and Kurt Marko, ‘History and the Historians’, Survey, 56, July 1965, 71–82. See Matthew P. Gallagher, The Soviet History ofWorldWar II: Myths, Memories and Realities, New York, 1963 for the history of conflicts between writers and military personnel during the Khrushchev period.

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The editors of the 1962 edition of the History of the Party omitted all references to Stalin’s leadership in the war against Germany. In apportioning credit for the Soviet victory, the 1959 edition of the Party history had maintained that ‘The victory of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War was achieved under the leadership of the Communist Party and its Central Committee, led by J.V. Stalin’, while the 1962 edition has it that ‘The Soviet people’s heroic struggle for their freedom and independence completely refuted the legend invented at the time of the personality cult, a legend alleging that Stalin alone was responsible for all the major victories on the war and home fronts. In reality, the Soviet Union’s victory in the war was won by the Soviet people under the leadership of the Communist Party headed by its Central Committee, and was a result of their tremendous efforts and heroism’.83 The twentieth anniversary of the triumph of the Red Army over Germany was the occasion for a flood of celebratory articles. The gradual reversal of the historical record of the Stalin period was interrupted in October 1965 when the late-Boston-based expatriate Soviet historian Alexander Nekrich published his 22 iunia 1941 (Moscow, 1965; ‘June 22, 1941’), aimed for a wide and educated public and with a print-run of 50,000. His basic argument was that Stalin’s ‘mistakes’ were directly responsible for the disastrous military defeats of 1941 and 1942. Although his book was consonant with the line of the Twentieth and Twenty-Second Congress and the Central Committee resolution of June 1956 which acknowledged Stalin’s culpability for mistakes like ignoring intelligence warnings of the attack, there was a concerted campaign in late 1965 to reverse these judgements and change the Party line on the issue. After passing four censors—the general, the military, and that of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and of the Interior—and of the KGB, which alone opposed publication entirely, an amputated version of the original June 22, 1941 was finally published by Nauka, the Academy of Science’s publishing house in 1965. Soviet historians generally considered the book as ‘honest and useful’, and some of them mentioned that its problems, historical and political, should stimulate reflection and research by historians. 83History

of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, second, revised edition, translated from Istoriia Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza and edited by Andrew Rothstein and Clemens Dutt, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d., 587. Emphasis in the original.

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In 1967, the book was attacked in the organ of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Party, Voprosy istorii KPSS84 for its ideological transgressions more than its historical lapses or inaccuracies. The latter included his portrayals of the first months of the war, where he apparently failed to see the first defeats as foreshadowing the later victories, or for pointing out that Soviet victory had to be understood as one earned primarily by the people rather than by the exertions of the Party or the state: ‘Having descended into the ideological captivity of the bourgeois falsifiers of history, [and having] betrayed the scientific principles of Marxist historiography’, Nekrich was expelled from the Party the same year, a party of which he had been a member since 1943. His expulsion was decided at the pinnacle of the Party, its Control Commission, and not, as the statutes required, by the Party unit at his place of employment, for, as the motion ran, ‘having deliberately contributed to destroying the image of the policy of the Party and the Government on the eve of the Great Patriotic War, which did not fail to be used for the benefit of enemy propaganda’. The book itself was withdrawn from all libraries and bookshops in the Soviet Union and sent to the shredders in accordance with the directives of the ‘Principal Body for the Protection of Military and State Secrets in the Press’. Nekrich later wrote that when an ‘instructor’ from the Party Central Committee asked him whether he regarded ‘political expediency or historical truth’ as being more important, he opted for the latter.85 Alexander Nekrich (b. 1921) fought in the front-line, was decorated, became a Doctor of Historical Sciences, a member of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, and the author or editor of several books and pamphlets on Soviet and British diplomacy. After his expulsion from the Party in 1967, 84See

G.A. Deborin and Major-General B.S. Tel’pukhovskii, ‘V ideinom plenu i falsifikatorov istorii’, Voprosy istorii KPSS, No. 9, 1967, 127–40. The article issued a general warning that the sensitive files of the past were not to be re-opened. Deborin and Telpukhovskii were well-known historians of the Stalin period and Voprosy istorii KPSS had a reputation for ‘militant orthodoxy’. The two historians ignored the documents of the Twentieth and Twenty-Second Congresses that had condemned the Stalinist prosecution of the war, detailed above, indicted Nekrich on the basis of preWar Congress deliberations on history generally and in their reliance on Stalin-citology referred only to his utterances, oral or written. For Nekrich’s account of this campaign, see his Forsake Fear: Memoirs of a Historian, Boston, 1991, chapters 7 and 8. 85George Haupt, ‘An Iconoclast Muzzled: The Nekrich Affair’, Critique, No. 7, Winter 1976–7, 5–7.

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Nekrich became a researcher in the Institute of General History until he emigrated in 1976. He held a teaching position in Harvard University until his death in 1993.86 There was a wider context to the ‘Nekrich Affair’. The political leadership of the Soviet Army launched a campaign for ‘psychological rearmament’ in 1965 that included extending the terms of military training for youth and strengthening patriotic education. As the Party was preparing for its Twenty-third Congress, Moscow was swept by the rumour that ideological diehards were plotting a substantive rehabilitation of Stalin and the annulment of the decisions of the Twentieth Party Congress on the subject.The rumour was confronted by a group of ‘Old Bolsheviks’, intellectuals, scholars and Party members, and historians ranged across the Stalin divide contentiously clashed. On 30 January 1966, Pravda attacked liberal historians for condemning the ‘cult of personality’ while incarnadined conservatives used the Nekrich book as a pretext to halt de-Stalinization. The next month, 130 historians, military personnel and Party members discussed the book at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Nekrich’s defenders, convinced of Stalin’s ineptitude, were in a majority, but his opponents accused him of ‘treachery toward Marxism-Leninism’. The late 1960s witnessed an absolution of responsibility for the 1941 defeats by Stalin. In 1968 and 1969, military chiefs, including Marshall Zhukov, paid homage to a Stalin ‘whose clear-sightedness and firmness had saved the country’, and, in August 1968, official theses on the course of the war in the year 1941 by historians supported a Partyorchestrated campaign for restoring Stalin. Although never fully restored, Stalin’s record in the war enjoyed considerable support 20 years later. In the Brezhnev years, historians and veterans who wrote about the war were forbidden to refer to anything that had not already been published somewhere else and even the memoirs of protagonists were checked to make sure that they did not break new ground. Whole areas of wartime life, including desertion, crime, cowardice and rape, were banned from public scrutiny.87 86His books included The Politics of British Imperialism in Europe, October 1938– September 1939, Moscow, 1955, and The Foreign Policy of Great Britain in the First Years of theWorldWar, Moscow, 1963. Markwick, Rewriting History, 209; Heer, Politics and History, 254; Haupt, Critique, 7; Litvin, Writing History, 24, citing A.M. Nekrich, Otrekshis’ ot strakha: vospominania istorika, Moscow, 1979. 87Merridale, Night of Stone 348; Merridale, Ivan’s War, 323. She wrote of how ‘the war was not a topic for right-thinking scholarly research. My friends at Moscow

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At a meeting of the Politburo on 4 April 1985, the newly appointed General Secretary, M. S. Gorbachev, said it was ‘no secret that when Khrushchev took his criticism of Stalin’s actions to unbelievable limits, it caused only harm, and to some extent we haven’t managed yet to pick up all the pieces’. After 30 months, as the Politburo debated the draft the General Secretary was to deliver on the seventieth anniversary of the revolution in November 1987, they agreed, in a majority, to a critical assessment. The broader audience at the speech itself reacted quite differently, however. Gorbachev mentioned Stalin three times during that speech, discussed in chapter two, and was greeted by applause, for pointing out that ‘In the attainment of victory a role was played by the enormous political will, the purposefulness and persistence, the ability to organize and discipline people, shown by I.V. Stalin during the war years.’88

*** The influence of non-Marxist historians was at its height during the Second World War, when many controls were relaxed and Soviet society was united in the struggle against the common enemy. The historical profession was freer than at any time since the revolution, and doctrinal issues were submerged in the upsurge of patriotism. Evaluating ‘Twenty-Five Years of Soviet Historical Science’ in 1942, the historian A.M. Pankratova bestowed praise on S.M. Solov’ev and V.O. Kliuchevskii.89 Control by the government and the Party over historians was reasserted after the war. Exactly one month after Victory in Europe Day (VE Day), editors of the leading historical journal, Istoricheskii zhurnal’ the successor to Bor’ba klassov, from January 1937, which had been edited in the relatively open ‘spirit of the Grand Alliance’, were informed by the Central Committee of the Party that the journal University in the 1980s viewed it with a mixture of boredom—for they had to hear it all too frequently—and horror, mainly at the way genuine memories of death and struggle had been turned into a patriotic myth. The war seemed to belong to a corrupt and ideologically bankrupt state.’ Ibid., 7. 88Haupt, Critique, 12–18; Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire, 453–4. 89C.E. Black, ‘History and Politics’, in Black, ed., Rewriting Russian History, 25; Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, 210; Mazour and Bateman, The Journal of Modern History, March 1952, 60, citing V.P. Vologin, E.V. Tarle and A.M. Pankratova, eds., Dvadsat piat let istoricheskoi nauki v SSSR, Moscow 1942, 7–8.

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had been unequal to its tasks, that they had neglected their duties, and had lowered the scholarly standard of the publication and the level of historical scholarship. Istoricheskii zhurnal’ was replaced by Voprosy istorii (‘Questions of History’), with a new board of editors, charged with functioning as the only ‘militant organ of the MarxistLeninist historical school,’ and being ‘vigorously active in applying dialectical materialism to the past as well as acting as a ‘progressive influence’ on research within and beyond the Soviet Union. Its name symptomized an intention to highlight questions of theory. Of equal significance is the fact that the remit given to the editors of Voprosy istorii, that entailed greater attention to studying the Russian revolution in an international context and to Soviet rather than Russian history, implied a strategy to downplay the nationalist patriotism that had been critical in the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War. It also placed the accent on the Soviet Union as a Marxist, socialist and class-conscious society, and one that had recently adopted a new constitution, advertised as the most democratic one in the world.90 In 1946, the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences evolved a five-year plan and projected the compilation of a teambased, twelve-volume History of the USSR, designed to provide a Marxist interpretation of Russian history from its earliest origins until the recent transformations wrought in the Soviet Union. The project was not only to facilitate the writing of monographs on specific problems but was to serve ‘as an effective weapon against the partly malicious and partly bona fide misinterpretation of Russia then current in foreign countries’. Another collective work of six volumes was to cover the history of towns in Russia, while additional projects in social history involved the Russian peasantry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the proletariat in the nineteenth. A few months later that year, the plan—and these publishing projects—were denounced in the pages of Kultura i zhizn’ (‘Culture and Life’), the official organ of the board for propaganda and agitation of the Central Committee, for neglecting several subjects, like the histories of America and Asia in the age of imperialism, colonial exploitation, non-Russian 90Bertram D. Wolfe, ‘Operation Rewrite: The Agony of Soviet Historians’, Foreign Affairs, No. 31, October 1952, 49–50; Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, 212– 13; Sergius Yakobson, ‘Postwar Historical Research in the Soviet Union’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 263, The Soviet Union since World War II, May 1949, 124–5; Mazour and Bateman, The Journal of Modern History, March 1953, 60–1.

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revolutionary parties and movements, and Moscow’s role in providing such movements with leadership. It was quietly buried.91

From the Twentieth Congress, 1956 to Glasnost’ The plight of the Soviet historian who concerned himself with Party affairs under Stalin was described in the terms cited below in March 1956: The work of many researchers and teachers in the social sciences amounted to popularisation of J. V. Stalin’s ideas. This promoted the widespread dissemination of pedantry, dogmatism, and excessive use of quotations.There appeared in science second-rate people who had no initiative, who were unable or unwilling to think for themselves, who acted only within the limits of ‘approved principles’ and strove to camouflage their intellectual barrenness with someone else’s authority ... The significance of archive materials as historical sources was subjected to doubt, and the majority of these documents proved to be inaccessible to the research worker. There was no study of sources of party history. The discovery and criticism of new sources were considered unnecessary and even reprehensible. The overwhelming majority of dissertations were nothing more than compilations of quotations and miscellaneous facts, and to a considerable extent repeated each other.92

The Soviet historian Iakov S. Drabkin recalled the expectations aroused by the Twentieth Congress on his generation of colleagues in an interview with the Australian historian Roger D. Markwick on 20 April 1992: We saw in the decisions of the Twentieth Congress a call to undertake research, but not with a view to reporting it back to the Central Committee on the results of our inquiries. We hoped that we could raise those questions which concerned us; that we could critically interpret the historical path of both the Soviet Union and the world revolutionary process. We hoped for this almost until the end of the 1960s. In that decade we placed our hopes on Khrushchev, although we saw that he by no means had a consistent outlook. On the one hand, he tried to overcome some things from the past; on the 91Mazour, Modern Russian Historiography, 213–14;Yakobson, Annals, May 1949, 125–6. 92The author of the article was not mentioned in this passage excerpted by Merle Fainsod from Voprosy Istorii, No. 3, 1956. See Merle Fainsod, ‘Historiography and Change’, in John Keep, edited with the assistance of Liliana Brisby, Contemporary History in the Soviet Mirror, London, 1964, 20.

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other, we saw that he was shaped by the very same past. On the one hand, he said that Stalin was a ‘criminal’; on the other, usually more vociferously, that he was a ‘great Marxist’. Khrushchev, however, had no idea how to reconcile ‘Stalin the criminal’ with ‘Stalin the great Marxist’. But we understood that these were irreconcilable notions. As a result we increasingly diverged from the official party line, although we considered it our task to deepen and reinforce the line of the Twentieth Congress. We persistently demanded that the party leadership meet us halfway and enable us to analyse the meaning of ‘the cult of the personality’; a conditional term, an euphemism which glossed over the essence of the question. We requested documents and to be allowed into the archives.We complained that we were not being allowed to really research the question. We promised that we would deal openly with the material they gave us; that we would not rush to publish it or broadcast it on foreign radio. But our request was denied ... Had we been able to continue our work, then I think we would have been able to achieve some fundamental successes. In any event, we would not have had to wait for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to explain the meaning of the Gulag archipelago. We ourselves wanted to find these documents to expose Stalin and Stalinism.93

The processes of refurbishment and renovation directly speak to the contours of the scarred historical landscape. The most important gain of the decade spanning the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s, it was noted, is the widening of horizons and professional opportunities. Other markers of improvement, also noted by visiting scholars, included an increased input of energy resources into historical study and publication, improved access to archival sources, broadened scope of historical inquiry, expanded contacts with historians of the non-Communist world, an extensive exposure to ‘bourgeois’ historians and philosophers, mainly through articles and books of refutation that are often theoretically fair, full, and reasonable, a plethora of publications, the abundance of controversy and polemic, the recognition of diversity and complexity, resort to pluralist explanation and an increase in overall flexibility. 94 The ideological armature, nevertheless, retained a stubborn resilience. This is clear if one examines the galvanization of energy 93Markwick, Rewriting History, 48–9. Drabkin was a specialist on the German revolution of 1918. Born in 1918, he was a student in the history faculty, Moscow State University ((MGU) from 1936 to 1941. He served on the front throughout the Second World War, worked in the Soviet military administration in Germany after the war and in 1963 he became a researcher in the Institute of History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Ibid., n. 78, p. 259. 94Baron and Heer, eds. Windows on the Russian Past, v-x, 271–2.

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in dismantling the dark Stalinist shadow with the advent of glasnost’, the subject of the next chapter. In his opening address to the All-Union Conference of Historians in December 1962, Academician B.N. Ponomarev, also a Central Committee Secretary, pontifically declared that, ‘A historian is not a dispassionate reporter who identifies facts or even places them in a scientifically valid pattern. He is a fighter who sees his goal in placing the history of the past at the service of the struggle for communism, and whose purpose it is to promote a firm conviction of the inevitability of the triumph of communism.’ 95 Over 20 years from 1946–7, The Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences grew from a mere 150 historians to about 400. They were the cream of a profession that numbered 17,000 in 1961 (the number of historians in Vuzy and research historians as of 1 October 1961). Many of them, like V.P. Danilov and E.N. Burdzhalov, discussed in these pages, had served on the front (the frontoviki), and Markwick is among those who have suggested that they later matured into the dissidents of the 1960s, or the ‘people of the 1960s’ (the so-called shestidesiatniki). Rather few of them, however, had earned their doctorate degrees or achieved professorial rank. At a national conference devoted to identifying measures for preparing ‘scientificpedagogical cadres’ in history in December 1962, historians articulated a broad plaint that reflects the domestic mood: there had been a declining tendency in the publication of history journals and books of quality (the number of books on historical topics issued in 1957 increased two and a half times over 1956, and the number of copies printed more than doubled), well-organized libraries and archives, even paper and microfilm were scarce. The participants heard about the poor social status of members of the historical profession and learnt that only two per cent of students chose to pursue history at university. The numbers of history students at the History Faculty of Moscow University, as well as the number of doctoral candidates (aspiranty) had been falling since 1956. Historians had just three journals to 95Arthur P. Mendel, ‘Current Soviet Theory of History: New Trends or Old’, The American Historical Review, 72: 1, October 1966, 56, 50, citing B.N. Ponomarev, ‘The Tasks Facing Historical Scholarship and the Training of History Teachers and Researchers’, translated from Voprosy istorii, no. 1, 1963, in Soviet Studies in History, II: 1, 1963, 5,6; ‘Soviet Historiography at a New Stage of Development’, translated from Voprosy istorii, no. 8, 1960, in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, XII, 2 November, 1960, 11; ‘The Party Central Committee Resolution ‘On the Tasks of Party Propaganda in Present-Day Conditions’ and Historical Science’, translated from Voprosy istorii, No. 6, 1960, Ibid., 31 August 1960.

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choose from until 1957, namely the stellar Voprosy istorii (‘Problems of History’), Istoricheskie zapiski (‘Historical Transactions’), which specialized in medieval and modern Russian history, and Vestnik drevnei istorii (‘Bulletin of Ancient History’). Among the 82 historical journals on offer by 1962—five of which were founded in the two years, 1957 and 1958—only two dealt specifically with Party history, Istoria SSSR (‘USSR History’) and Voprosy istorii KPSS (‘Problems of CPSU History’).96 A questing spirit was abroad as historians looked anew at problems concerning periodization, the relationship of fact and law in history, the admissibility of various types of causal factors and even the utility of historical materialism to the historian. Within operational methodologies, the Marxian dialectic between the base and the superstructure was gingerly reworked in a manner that deemphasized the primacy of the economy and the economic base.97 Robert Conquest provides a useful narrative on how Stalin was to be represented in the new edition of the Large Soviet Encyclopedia; the only volume that remained unpublished was the one to carry the contribution on Stalin. Its publication was held back for eighteen months, and when it appeared in 1958, the relevant entry had shrunk to six pages; shrunk because the previous edition had taken 44 pages to inform readers about the late leader. Stalin was exempted from principal responsibility for the Terror and the Purges, which were attributed to Iagoda,Yezhov and Beria. He was bestowed with considerable credit for Soviet victory in the war, but criticized for permitting an initial state of unpreparedness and for attaching an excessive importance to building diplomatic friendship with Hitler, particularly for signing the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939.98 To instance a weakening of the Stalinist grip, the ‘lesser evil’ theory was condemned as mistaken; to instance another, in 1965, a group of historians wrote that they regarded it as their duty ‘in the name of the past and of the future, to comprehend historical truth in all its fullness’; 96Markwick, Rewriting History, 64–8. On the conference, he cites Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie o merakh podgotovki nauchno-pedagogicheskikh kadrov po istoricheskim naukam 18–21 dekabria 1962 g., Moscow, 1964. See also Nancy Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union, Cambridge, MA., and London, 1971, 76. 97James P. Scanlan, ‘From Historical Materialism to Historical Interactionism: A Philosophical Examination of Some Recent Developments’, in Baron and Heer, eds., Windows on the Russian Past, 3, 8–9. 98Robert Conquest, Power and Policy in the U.S.S.R., London, 1961, 354–5.

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this was more than merely a statement of rhetorical intent in the Soviet Union of the time. The next year V.A. Dunaevskii criticized Stalin’s letter to the editors of Proletarskaia revoliutsiia in 1931, pointing out that Stalin put an end to discussion about the history of the revolution at the very moment ‘when Soviet historiography was beginning to arrive at a number of constructive solutions’. Khrushchev had called for the construction of a monument in Moscow ‘to perpetuate the memory of comrades who fell victim to arbitrary rule’ in his concluding speech to the Twenty-second Party Congress. Days later, Stalin’s embalmed remains were secretly moved in the dead of night on 31 October 1961 from the Lenin Mausoleum, which displayed a notice on the outside that it was ‘closed for repairs’, a fairly common sight anywhere in the Soviet Union of the time. His body was then cremated and the ashes, buried below the Kremlin wall near those of four of his former comrades, namely Kalinin, Sverdlov, Frunze and Dzerzhinskii. During the months that followed, countless statues and portraits of Stalin were removed, usually without reluctance, except in Georgia, where one of the largest statues, one that gazed down on Tiflis, disappeared on the eve of Khrushchev’s visit to that city with Castro later in the year. Towns were renamed (Tsaritsyn had been called Stalingrad and became Volgograd), as were streets, parks and squares.99 The establishment of the Sector of Methodology in January 1964, within the Institute of History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, an expression of the questing spirit, had preceded Khrushchev’s demitting office and may have prompted one reason for the appointment of Academician S. P. Trapeznikov. As a recent scholar of its brief fouryear history, from 1964–8 (but formally dissolved in 1969) has revealed, the Sector was the product of a summit-level decision, made by the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences. The Academicians wished to confront their political adversaries by creating a controlled institutional-intellectual space to pursue ‘vital step(s) towards overcoming serious inadequacies in the methodology of history’. But over the next few years the historians involved in the Sector of Methodology went considerably further in the issues they raised than the founding intent. At the first session of the Sector, the Director Mikhail Gefter, singled out dogmatism and ‘rote-learning’ (nachetnichestvo) as particularly pernicious features of Soviet historical practice. 99H. Montgomery

Hyde, Stalin:The History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, 605–6.

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The Sector of Methodology attracted anti-Stalinist historians keen to return lost theoretical approaches to their discipline as well as scholars from other disciplines. Discussions included, for example, the subject of the Asiatic Mode of Production, that had not been seriously debated since the appearance of the Short Course, and a paper by the archaeologist A.L. Mongait who argued that in its acceptance of the notion that an archaeological culture represented a retrievable (or otherwise) relationship between artifacts and people, the current practices of Soviet archaeology seemed innocent of the perception that ‘spiritual’ data (artistic forms, language) were also essential to an understanding of the specific past being investigated. As Markwick suggests, however, the deliberations ceaselessly throbbed around the crises that plagued the historical and other social sciences: in many of them, reference was made to the still regnant istmat/diamat paradigm as a ‘fatalistic Marxism’ that had harmed primary research and creative engagement with proximate disciplines. Much of the research generated at the Sector remained unpublished for decades.100

Soviet Historiography in the Brezhnev Period After Khrushchev’s fall, the Brezhnev-Kosygin regime was unprepared to make any more revelations about Stalin, but was also unwilling to permit the total rehabilitation of Stalin at the Twenty-third Party Congress in 1966.The issue of Stalin and his rehabilitation was gradually shelved by the Party leaders; it was not mentioned at either the TwentyFourth or Twenty-Fifth Congresses of the Party, in 1971 and 1976 respectively. Under Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko the official Soviet line was to minimize Stalin’s personal role in Soviet history, to play up the role of the Communist Party, and, inter alia, describe his policies as the necessary and proper development of MarxismLeninism and the dictatorship of the proletariat.101 100For an account of the history of the Sector of Methodology, see Roger D. Markwick, ‘Catalyst of Historiography, Marxism and Dissidence: The Sector of Methodology of the Institute of History, Soviet Academy of Sciences, 1964–68’ EuropeAsia Studies, 46: 4, 1994, 579–96 and Idem., Rewriting History, chapters 5 and 6. 101Rosalind Marsh, Images of Dictatorship: Portraits of Stalin in Literature, Cambridge, MA. and London, 1981, 13, citing R. Medvedev, ‘The Stalin Question’ in S. Cohen, A. Rabinowitch and R. Sharlet, eds., The Soviet Union since Stalin, Bloomington, 1980, 32–49; S. Cohen, ‘The Stalin Question since Stalin’, in S. Cohen, ed., An End to Silence: Uncensored Opinion in the Soviet Union, New York and London, 1982, 42–50.

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S.P. Trapeznikov, a close ideological associate of both Brezhnev and the ideological chief Suslov and the author of several studies of Soviet agriculture, was appointed to head the Department of Science and Educational Establishments of the Party’s Central Committee in 1965, one of the highest posts in the Party hierarchy since it entailed a guardianship of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and of the Ministry of Higher Education. This appointment confirmed a resolute turn towards conservatism in matters affecting the social sciences in their entirety, but as some have argued, history in particular. His elevation signaled the start of a determined attack on non-orthodox historians. Many historians were removed from their positions during Trapeznikov’s stewardship over Soviet scholarship. Some of the prominent ones included the agrarian historian Viktor Danilov and Pavel Volobuev. After a general conference of Soviet historians in March 1973 had sat to reiterate the official line on history, Volobuev was dismissed from his post as Director of Institute of the History of the USSR in March 1974 for advancing ‘revisionist’ interpretations of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and for his outspoken criticism of Trapeznikov. A leading specialist on the Russian Revolution,Volobuev was an active participant in cutting-edge discussions in Soviet historiography. He was a conspicuous member of the group which mounted a powerful and apparently successful attack on the formerly prevalent view that the Russian autocracy was fundamentally like West European absolutism. He argued that the February Revolution was a spontaneous event; the general strike in Petrograd began in a spontaneous manner on 23 February and it took some time for the local Bolshevik organization to relate to it. This earned him the charge of denying the principle of ‘proletarian hegemony’ over all the revolutionary forces from the very outset of the process.102 Volobuev was replaced by the undistinguished Alexei Narochnitskii. Edvard Burdzhalov, author of a study on the role of the Bolsheviks in spring 1917 discussed in the third chapter, served as chair of an informal group of historians that met after 1956 to discuss the damages wrought by the Short Course and was the Deputy Editor of Voprosy istorii until his removal in 1957. The bleak prospects held out by the profession were summed up by the Byzantine-era scholar Sergei 102Baron and Heer, ‘Introduction’, in Baron and Heer, eds., Windows on the Russian Past, xii-xiv; John Keep, ‘The Great October Socialist Revolution’, Ibid., 140, 152.

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Ivanov: ‘Only a fool or an ideologue would even think about making the study of Soviet history his profession. Anyone with a genuine interest in history and a sense of honesty made sure to stay as far away from the Soviet period as possible ... if you really made Soviet history your field, you were sure to lose.’103 Access to Soviet archives was tightened. Sections of the Cabinet archives that had been opened during the Khrushchev era were closed and numerous documents related to the Central Statistical Administration of the USSR (TsSU), Gosplan, the Ministry of Finance and the State Bank, located in the economic archives (TsGANKh), were also removed from historians’ scrutiny. At a conference of social science instructors, which met in November 1965 to consider the forthcoming third edition of the History of the CPSU, Trapeznikov proposed reissuing the Short Course of 1938. An article in Pravda in January 1966 repudiated the term ‘period of the cult of personality’ in relation to Stalin as ‘un-Marxist’. Apparently the threat of Stalin’s rehabilitation at the forthcoming Twenty-Third Congress was averted by a letter of protest signed by several distinguished figures from the Soviet world of arts and sciences, including Academicians Sakharov and Kapitsa, but, by only one professional (medieval) historian.104 At the Twenty-Fourth Party Congress in 1971, General Secretary Brezhnev had called for ‘an atmosphere of bold questioning, fruitful discussions and comradely exactingness’, self-contradictorily oblivious of the fact that compliance with the third of these desiderata would largely nullify the first two. Soon after the deliberations at the Congress ended, the author of a leading article in Voprosy istorii asked Soviet historians to intensify their campaign against non-Communist historiography (or ‘bourgeois falsification’) as well as to devote more 103Jutta Scherrer, ‘“Blank Spots” in Soviet Russia’s past: Perestroika and historical consciousness’, draft paper, 2–3; R.W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution, 2. Sergei Ivanov’s statement is quoted by David Remnick, Lenin’s Tomb:The Last Days of the Soviet Empire, London, 1993, 39. 104Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era, 84; Markwick, Rewriting History, 201. In a political portrait of Brezhnev that Roy Medvedev published in Moscow in 1991, he described Trapeznikov in the following words: ‘Five years of intense training in the Higher Party School and the Academy of Social Sciences in the mid-1940s could not have given a young party worker any serious knowledge in Marxism, the social sciences, history or philosophy; but they could foster a stubborn, self-opinionated dogmatist and Stalinist, such as Trapeznikov (1912–84) showed himself to be throughout his scientific and political career’. Ibid., n. 5, p. 289, citing Roy Medvedev, Lichnost’ i epokha: Politichesky portret L.I. Brezhneva, Kniga 1, Moscow 1991, 143, 166.

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attention to (the implicitly neglected) problems of Soviet social history and the economic application of science.105 During the 1970s and 1980s Soviet officials still drank deeply of a potent Stalinist brew. It became easier to publish works containing qualified praise of Stalin than criticism of him; the use of Khrushchev’s phrase ‘the period of the personality cult’ was forbidden, and censure of Stalinism was largely banished from the official press. Although under Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko, Stalin was no longer regarded as a demi-god, a revaluation of his historical role, particularly during the war, took place. Stalin was seen as a great national leader who manifested ‘devotion to the working class and the selfless struggle for socialism’, and the whole Stalin era was regarded as a necessary, heroic period of Soviet development. Military leaders and historians were officially encouraged to write articles or reminiscences circumspectly commending Stalin’s role in the war; in their memoirs, Marshals Zhukov, Rokossovskii and Budennii dealt measured assessments that combined reasoned censure with broad approval.106 The Brezhnevite regime (1964–82), in sum and conclusion, remained overwhelmingly faithful to the root Russian word for its leader’s surname, berezhnyi (‘careful’). Sensational disclosures about the Stalin decades were firmly abjured after the Twenty-Third Party Congress (1976) and the period was burnished in Party and state texts. Stalin was applauded for having modernized the nation by the processes of planned industrialization and a voluntary and necessary agricultural collectivization and for having led the country to victory in the war. But there were other directions as well, in that Stalin’s victims continued to be rehabilitated and exonerated, camps continued to be closed down, and in 1969, the Politburo resolutely rejected a bid by pro-Stalin forces to confer even greater legitimacy to his record.

105John Keep, ‘The Current Scene in Soviet Historiography’, Survey, no. 19,Winter 1973, 3–4. 106Marsh, Images of Dictatorship, 15; Hyde, Stalin, 607.

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Every evening I go to sleep with one question which, probably, has come to mean damnation and not just for me: how could it happen that I sincerely believed in Communism and took part in Communist construction? How could it happen that until I was thirty years old I had been living in comfortable ignorance that the entire post-October history of my people was mixed with blood, crime and lies? That the people whom I believed, whose portraits were encouragingly looking at me from the pages of school textbooks, whom I worshipped and considered to be disinterested fighters for the radiant future, turned out to be either criminals or maniacs? The system managed to turn me into an idiotic true believer.1 —A Russian citizen, 1992

IN THE HISTORICAL SOVIET UNION, 95 PER CENT OF ITS LIFE HAD TO AWAIT ITS

eleventh hour to authentically yield its own history. The last three years of the lifespan of the multi-national, multi-ethnic, imperial Union of Soviet Socialist Republics generated a voluminous body of literature—in the historical, literary and in their combined genres— that not only probed virtually every facet of the previous seven decades of history, but did so in a manner that was aimed at reaching the entire highly literate population of the nation. In other words, during less than one-twentieth of the temporal history of the USSR, the shackles that had fettered historical production were enfeebled and the surgical operations that had been performed on history, discredited. A series of registers were struck in the spheres of 1The

statement is by Vasilii Krasulia, a leader of the Stavropol Popular Front, and is quoted from his memoirs, Dissident iz nomenklatury, Stavropol, 1992, 4–5, by Alexander Lukin, The Political Culture of the Russian ‘Democrats’, Oxford, 2000, 116.

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legislation, declamation, dramatization, and publication. The importance of history, of the counter-productivity and futility of arresting memory, in any process of national and social regeneration has gained wide acceptance since the Soviet 1980s. Although these Soviet efforts were influenced and informed by the political shifts among the groups, allied or hostile to the General Secretary, they were not aligned with those manoeuvres and exhibited a generally linear movement forward in the excavation of evidence and the publication of findings. The process of ‘unleashing the energy of history’ was vital in paving the way for the demise of the USSR, because the knowledge that was engendered bred the conviction of the impossibility of persevering in the 70-year-long manner any longer; it also served as theoretical and programmatic sustenance for the Democratic Movement(s) that organized resistance to the Soviet leadership. Both within and beyond Soviet borders, in the mind and on the ground, even as the new histories prompted elation, bewilderment and offence, the authenticity of the exertions was generally endorsed. The Soviet Union had inherited an extremely rich corpus of archival material that ought not to have presented problems of utilization for Soviet researchers; after all, they had been extensively tapped before the revolution, even up to the 1930s. Nor was it a problem of the lack of published work; Anatole G. Mazour’s The Writing of History in the Soviet Union (1971) introduces us to a quantitatively vast array of writing from early Russian history to the 1960s. The conjoined effects of a dominant ideology of partiinost’, party-mindedness, or writing that placed ‘redness’ before competence, and quarantined archives has meant that much (but far from all) of this has been pedantic, unverifiable for its findings because of the strictures against attribution, methodologically poor from an almost ubiquitous inability to anchor disparate ‘facts’ within an apparent logic, and mendacious in its conclusions. In the USSR, the sequestration of evidence and the quarantining of institutions became dominant objectives of the regime for most of its history. Historians were generally prevented (the exceptions were insubstantial and benefited few) from discussion with foreign colleagues, the perusal of foreign publications, becoming conversant with western debates on Soviet history and gaining fluency in foreign languages. It was politically hazardous to associate with foreign scholars without official

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approval. Unauthorized contact with foreigners would be considered reason to punish someone by denying them the right to travel abroad, or even invite a fine. Soviet citizens did not possess a legally affirmed right to travel abroad and could do so only if they possessed an exit visa, which was granted only on conditions that included political reliability. Most writing about the Stalinist past after 1988, when the approach to Soviet history sharply changed, was driven by the urge to understand and learn from that period. The explanation of Stalinism offered by the Communist Party in 1956 and 1961, as the first chapter has argued, had been inadequate, unsubtle and selfjustificatory—the criticism of the man divorced from the role of the leadership or of broader social forces. In his report to the Central Committee, Khrushchev had made it clear that he would address the factors underlying the growth of the ‘cult’ of Stalin, an abnormal growth that had to be exposed and rooted out for the health of the Party and Soviet society. He explicitly did not intend to make a thorough evaluation of the system of Stalin. The slogans of the time, like ‘cult of the personality’, ‘violations of socialist legality’, or ‘contradictions of the period’, therefore, obscure rather than elucidate, because Khrushchev wanted to contain the repercussions from the exposure of Stalin’s crimes. The glasnost’-inspired flood, in which diverse historical narratives could vie for dominance in the public discourse is vast in breadth and equally vibrant. This chapter does not attempt a comprehensive account of the new fictional literature, vital as it was in its partnership with what was properly ‘history’, because of its preferred focus on ‘history proper’. It also leaves out themes like the reappraisals (if that is not too mild a term) of the Terror and Purges, as well as of the rehabilitation of both Stalin’s political adversaries in the Party and state apparatuses, and the millions of his victims from Soviet society of those decades. R.W. Davies, Rosalind Marsh, Stephen Wheatcroft, and Jutta Scherrer are among the authors of studies in English devoted to these subjects.2 2R.W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution, Basingstoke and London, 1989; Rosalind Marsh, History and Literature in Contemporary Russia, Basingstoke and London, 1995; Stephen Wheatcroft, ‘Unleashing the Energy of History, Mentioning the Unmentionable and Reconstructing Soviet Historical Awareness: Moscow 1987’, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies (ASEES), 1: 1, 1987; Jutta Scherrer, ‘ ‘Blank Spots’ in Soviet Russia’s Past: Perestroika and Historical Consciousness’, draft paper.

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The Political Background In the years before Gorbachev became General Secretary, reformminded members of the Party’s Central Committee, with Andropov’s blessing and Chernenko’s benign neglect, fostered reformist analyses and a consultative approach to policy making. Andropov commissioned a series of reports on domestic and foreign policy issues and put Gorbachev in charge of their preparation. Gorbachev himself indicated that in the early 1980s, he with the help of (the future Premier) Nikolai Ryzhkov, solicited approximately 110 reports from heads and deputy heads of scientific organizations and institutes, writers and intellectuals on the need for change in the Soviet Union. This group included the stars of glasnost’: economists Abel Aganbegian, Nikolai Petrakov and Stanislav Shatalin; Tatiana Zaslavskaia, the ‘founder of sociology’ in the Soviet Union, and later Director of the National Centre of Public Opinion; the foreign policy advisers, Alexander Iakovlev, Georgii Arbatov and Yevgenii Primakov; and editors like Vitalii Korotich and Yegor Iakovlev. Aganbegian headed the famous Aganbegian Centre in Novosibirsk in Siberia,The Institute of Economics and Industrial Organization, of which Zaslavskaia was also a member. In April 1983, economists and sociologists from Novosibirsk invited reformists from all over the Soviet Union to discuss ‘the social mechanism underlying our system’.3 Many of Gorbachev’s ideas about domestic reform were therefore contemplated before he became General Secretary. Addressing an audience in December 1984, that included ‘Old Guard’ Party leaders like Grigorii Romanov, Party chief in Leningrad, and Boris Ponomarev, head of the International Department of the Central Committee, Gorbachev outlined the agenda that prefigured his crucial speech to the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February 1986: income would have to be redistributed, socialist ownership had to be improved; social and economic development had to be accelerated; and he hinted that he was prepared to transform the language of Soviet politics in the direction of ‘delegitimizing’ the patterns of the Brezhnev period.4 3Sarah E. Mendelson, Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, Princeton, NJ, 1998, 81–6, 124; Tatyana Zaslavskaya, ‘Socialism with a Human Face’, in Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina Vanden Heuvel, eds, Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev’s Reformers, New York and London, 1989, 121. 4Mendelson, Changing Course, 89–90. See also George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev and Yeltsin as Leaders, Cambridge, 2002, 56, for an account of this speech. Breslauer characterizes this speech as ‘the most radical single speech by a leader member of the

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Gorbachev’s Agenda for History When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March 1985 as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he had neither a particular interest nor a predetermined plan to promote historical revisionism. In the first eighteen months, the Politburo and Party organs of lower instance took a cautious and conservative approach to Soviet history. In February 1986, for instance, Gorbachev told a French journalist from L’Humanite that ‘Stalinism is a concept made up by opponents of communism ... to smear the Soviet Union and socialism as a whole ... [the KPSS] had already drawn proper conclusions from the past.’ Four months later, he told Soviet writers that, ‘If we start dealing with the past, we’ll lose all our energy. It would be like hitting people over the head. And we have to go forward. We’ll sort out the past. We’ll put everything in its place. But right now we have to direct our energy forward.’ Six months later, Gorbachev’s stated postures on reappraising Soviet history had undergone considerable modification: going forward was impossible without retrieving the past. In a conversation with a group of writers from the Writers’ Union on 19 June 1986, Gorbachev insisted on the need to make the process of change irreversible and added: ‘If we do not, who will? If not now, then when?’ This might not have been the first, but certainly one of the earliest occasions, when Gorbachev twinned glasnost’ and democratization: ‘We don’t have an opposition .... How then can we monitor ourselves? Only through criticism and self-criticism. And most of all through glasnost’.’ But he warned that although ‘there can be no implementation of democracy without glasnost’, [at the same time] democracy without limits is anarchy.’ At the same meeting, Gorbachev asked writers to desist from making the issue of Stalin and Stalinism the touchstone of glasnost’. He argued that it was more important to concentrate attention and energy on the present and the future, rather than dissipate it on arguments about the past.5 Politburo since Khrushchev (in 1956)’. General Secretary Chernenko tried to prevent him from delivering the speech, and with his allies he prevented its publication in full in Pravda. The meeting was reported in Pravda, 11 December 1984, but the 43-page speech was cut down to two pages. Gorbachev included it in his Izbrannye rechi i stat’i, vol. 2, Moscow 1987. 5The term glasnost’ had been used by dissidents as well as by Brezhnev in 1968, as meaning (for Brezhnev) ‘the informing of the party masses and of all working people

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It was only in the course of his seeking to legitimize perestroika that it became imperative to understand the taproots of what had gone wrong in the past. Thomas Sherlock has suggested three factors that may have prompted Gorbachev to endorse another look at Soviet history: one, excessive controls had diminished society’s ability to understand its own deficiencies; two, the notion that Stalinist ideological and cultural supports could be weakened by their delegitimization; and three, the need to secure an alternative base of social support by enabling the intelligentsia to create and utilize fuller and freer channels of expression.6 In a conversation with fifteen media chiefs in February 1987, Gorbachev responded to an opinion that critical analysis of Soviet history was like ‘indulging in a strip tease for the whole world to see’ by launching into a long speech that was actually the first published account of his views on the imperative need for a better understanding of history. He told the journalists: ‘It is agreed that there should not be any more white spots [blank pages] in either our history or our literature. Otherwise it would not be either history or literature but an artificial, conjunctural construct .... And in the seventieth year of our great revolution we must not place in the shadow those who made the revolution. We must value each of the 70 years of our Soviet history ....We must not forget names ... History has to be seen as it is.’ Gorbachev did, however, abridge the scope of this intention by remarking that ‘criticism should always be from a party point of view’.7 about the activity of the party’ and it was incorporated into article 9 of the Soviet Constitution of 1977, which called for ‘the extension of glasnost’ as well as constant responsiveness to public opinion’. Gorbachev had described glasnost’ in 1984 as ‘an integral part of socialist democracy and a norm of all public life’, adding that ‘extensive, timely and frank information is evidence of trust in people, of respect for ... their ability to interpret events for themselves’ and Gorbachev mentioned the term again in his acceptance speech on becoming General Secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985. David Wedgwood Benn, From Glasnost to Freedom of Speech: Russian Openness and International Relations, London, 1992, 12–14, citing Aaron Trehub, ‘Gorbachev Meets Soviet Writers: A Samizdat Account’, Radio Liberty Research Report (Munich), No. 399/86, 23 October 1986. 6 Thomas Sherlock, ‘Politics and History under Gorbachev’, Problems of Communism, 38: 3–4, May-August 1988, 17. 7Gorbachev’s entire speech was printed in Pravda, 14 February 1987 and Yegor Iakovlev, the editor of Moscow News published a report in that journal on 22 February 1987. For someone like the historian Iurii Afanas’ev, the problem was not one of

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Gorbachev’s speech on the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1987, probably a multi-authored amalgam of drafts, inevitably provoked diverse responses. It was hostile to Trotsky, defended the Molotov-Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939 between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and was cautious about criticizing the Purges. At the same time, it praised both planned industrialization and collectivization. Gorbachev pointed out that these very industrialization and collectivization drives had been associated with the rise of the ‘administrative-command’ system of Party-state management of the country, which though good for industry, was unsuitable for agriculture, as it curbed democratic possibilities. Stalin’s personality and politics had impregnated a quarter of a century of Soviet history. Historical reassessment was central to a renewed de-Stalinization drive, the previous one having been halted, some would say reversed, after Khrushchev’s removal in October 1964. The thorough examination of the political and moral aspects of the Stalinist period was, as Ernest Mandel put it, ‘a kind of supreme test of the credibility of glasnost’, because the crimes of Stalin were the greatest secret and the major shame of the regime .... Without revealing the truth about the past, without publishing the archives and documents of the epoch, it will be impossible to liberate history from being manipulated in the service of this or that fraction of the leadership, impossible to write history with the necessary minimum of objectivity and impossible to assemble all the facts which make the writing of history possible in the first place.’8 Many would have agreed with Iurii Afanas’ev, Rector of the Moscow Institute of Historical filling in ‘blank spots’ but recognizing that Stalinist historiography ‘was one huge blank spot, so our entire history remains to be studied and written.’ See an interview with Yuri Afanas’ev, ‘The Agony of the Stalinist System’, in Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina vanden Heuvel, eds., Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev’s Reformers, New York and London, 1989, 103. Iurii Afanas’ev had spent a year in France as a graduate student ‘unmasking the so-called bourgeois historiography’ and made the acquaintanceship of Andrei Sakharov in Paris. He had been Pro-Rector of the Higher Komsomol school and Editor of the History section of the Party’s theoretical journal, Kommunist. He had published an important collection of essays Inogo ne dano (‘There is no Alternative’), Moscow, 1988, shortly before the Nineteenth Party Conference in mid-1988, which was intended to attack its deliberations. From early 1989, he emerged as a leading ‘Democrat’ and was selected as one of the leaders of the Inter-Regional group of Deputies and of Democratic Russia. 8Ernest Mandel, Beyond Perestroika:The Future of Gorbachev’s USSR, London, 1989, 86, 87. See Chapter 6 for the fate of this theme in Putin’s Russia.

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Archives, when he told delegates to a conference of historians and writers in April 1988 that ‘there is probably no country in the world with such a falsified history as ours ... It is important to realize that Stalinism needed history as a handmaiden of propaganda ....’9

History and Literature Since 1985, literature had been vital in exposing new historical questions for discussion. Many have argued, not entirely fallaciously, that fiction initiated the whole process. Whereas for the most part, journalists, historians and economists only started to provide a frank treatment of formerly taboo historical subjects after about 1988, novelists and poets had been concerned with these questions since the Khrushchev ‘thaw’ in the early 1960s and even earlier. ‘Round table’ discussions on ‘history and literature’ held in the years 1987 and 1988 repeatedly emphasized the greater readiness of literary writers than historians to tackle controversial historical issues.Tatiana Zaslavskaia explains that historians entered the fray later than fiction writers, and defensively at that, because ‘The majority of those engaged in the social sciences and ideological education are held back by what they said in the past and published in the past ... now that the error of their ideas is becomingly increasingly apparent, many social scientists are in a state of genuine crisis and are trying to prove the rightness of at least some of the ideas they had argued for earlier.’10 In July 1987, the leading Literary Gazette, Literaturnaia gazeta quoted the senior historian Iurii Poliakov as recognizing the fact that ‘the writers have long since overtaken the historians in posing sharp questions’. One reason why historians entered the fray after their creative counterparts in the fictional genres was because of the stark paucity of trained young historians of the Soviet period. In the 1970s, 9 This statement by Iurii Afanas’ev, in his Inego ne dano, 498, was extensively quoted outside the country too. See, for instance, Aleksandr M. Nekrich, ‘Perestroika: The First Stage’, Survey, 30: 4, June 1989, 29; Michel Heller, ‘Current Politics and Current Historiography’, Survey, 30: 4, June 1989, 1; Roger D. Markwick, ‘Catalyst of Historiography, Marxism and Dissidence: The Sector of Methodology of the Institute of History, Soviet Academy of Sciences, 1964–68’, Europe-Asia Studies, 46:4, 1994, n. 5, p. 591. 10Rosalind Marsh, ‘History and Literature in Contemporary Russia’, Socialist Industrialisation Project Series, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, (SIPS/ CREES) Paper, University of Birmingham, January 1995, 15; Tatiana Zaslavskaia, in Inego ne dano, 29, quoted by Heller, Survey, June 1989, 2.

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and even before then, independent-minded students either went into other disciplines, or at best, into the history of the pre-Soviet-period. Iurii Poliakov ruefully confirmed this and in the same issue of the journal in 1987, the historian V.Z. Drobyzhev wrote of how those who remained lacked analytical abilities. In a discussion in November 1988 among the historians Vladlen Loginov, Genrikh Ioffe and Vladlen Sirotkin, published under the title of ‘While Clio Was Asleep’, Loginov said that many people regard Soviet historians as virtually being members of the world’s second oldest profession. He went on to mention the withdrawal by historians into medievalism, ethnography, paleography or archaeology.11 As the first chapter demonstrates, historians who had remained, either in the profession and/or in the field of Soviet history, had done so in a rigidly constrictive environment and were slow to shed an ingrained skepticism about the durability, for some even the plausibility, of the new reality. Archives, institutes and journals concerned with historical research and publication retained their heads, scholars and administrators alike, from the Era of Stagnation until well into the 1980s, even as Gorbachev replaced numerous editors of literary journals. They turned these publications into popular and important sources of information and the circulation of the most daring ‘flagships of glasnost’’ doubled and redoubled. Between 1987–8, the circulation of the leading monthly pro-reform ‘thick’ literary journals soared. Among them for example, the circulation of Druzhba narodov, increased by 433 per cent; Novy Mir, by 132 per cent; Oktiabr’, by 35 per cent; and, the weekly, Literaturnaia gazeta, by 23 per cent. After Vitalii Korotich was brought in by Alexander Iakovlev to head Ogonek, at that time a relatively unknown literary magazine, its circulation rose from 260,000 to 4 million; in the same period, from 1987–8, the circulation of Argumenty i fakty rose from 1.4 million to 3.5 million. People thronged newspaper kiosks all over the country in search of transformed journals and magazines that were sold out within hours. Publishers were hard pressed to meet demand and deal with newsprint shortages. Among the important changes of personnel were the return of the historian Alexander Iakovlev to his former post (before 1973) of the head of the Central Committee Propaganda Department and his bringing in of V.A. Grigor’ev to head the Central Committee 11Poliakov

and Drobyzhev in Kommunist, No. 12, August 1987; the discussion was summarized in The Moscow News, No. 45, 6 November 1988, pp. 8–9.

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Department of Science and Educational Institutions, notoriously headed by S.P. Trapeznikov from 1964, and the appointment of Iurii Afanas’ev as Rector of the Moscow State Historical Archives Institute. Several new editors were appointed in 1986: Grigori Baklanov (Znamya), Sergei Zalygin (Novyi Mir), Vitalii Korotich (Ogonek) and Yegor Iakovlev (Moscow News). In May 1986, the union of film-makers elected Elem Klimov as the head (first secretary), and his first act was to set up a commission to review all the cases of films banned in the country in the last two decades.Two-thirds of the union directorate was also voted out of office at this time. Elections in 437 Soviet theatres in April and May 1986 resulted in the replacement of ten per cent in the leadership of this industry.12 Glasnost’ was spurred in 1986 by the abolition of the censorship functions of Glavlit, the Chief Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs, the principal censorship organization. Tsarist censorship was brought to an end by the Bolshevik Revolution. The Decree on the Press, adopted on 27 October 1917, two days after the revolution, was the first Soviet measure of censorship. It described the ‘bourgeois press’ as ‘one of the most powerful weapons of the bourgeoisie’, being ‘no less dangerous than bombs and machine guns’. The Chief Administration for the Preservation of State Secrets in the Press was set up in June 1922, even before the USSR itself was established.The last statute on censorship was a Decree of the People’s Commissars of the RSFSR of 6 June 1931, which established Glavlit and its local organs. Its function was ‘to effect political, ideological, military and economic control of all kinds over printed works, manuscripts, photographs, pictures, etc., as well as radio programmes, lectures and exhibitions, which are intended for publication or distribution’. Only publications of the Communist Party and the Academy of Sciences were not subject to political and ideological control, but for these as well Glavlit and its local organs were ‘charged with ensuring the complete preservation of state secrets by means of preliminary perusal of them’. Glavlit representatives would be installed in publishing houses and maintained at the expense of the latter. Reacting to the findings of Arlen Blium on the illiteracy of Soviet 12Ritta H. Pittman, ‘Perestroika and Soviet Cultural Politics: The Case of the Major Literary Journals’, Soviet Studies, 42: 1, January 1990, 116; Minxin Pei, From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union, Cambridge, MA, 1994, 182; Mendelson, Changing Course, 108–9; Leon Aron, ‘Glasnost at Twenty’, Russia Profile, 18 January 2007, online edition, http://www.russiaprofile.org/cdi/2007/1/ 18/5064.wbp, p. 3.

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censors, the suffering they inflicted on authors and the courage of those who took a stand, Stephen Kotkin makes the important point that Soviet censorship ‘was not merely preventative but also constitutive, spreading vast stores of information and inculcating new ways of thinking and a new vocabulary’. In her splendid study of Petersburg as Crucible of Cultural Revolution, Katerina Clark reminds us that the powerfully prevalent view of the NEP as a ‘good time’, marked by a relative cultural pluralism akin to ‘normal’ western intellectual life must be tempered by the fact that in the same period, the state, through Glavlit, prosecuted a considerably more interventionist project in culture than was previously believed.13 From 1986 onwards, censorship was limited to state and military secrets, pornography, racism and war propaganda. Members of the Artists’ Union who had been censored or banned from displaying their work for years held an exhibition in Moscow in January 1987; as the visiting British journalist Martin Walker observed, ‘Pop-art jostled with religious primitives, abstract expressionism jarred against conceptualist joke-sculptures, op-art with brutalist realism. There were canvases which cruelly caricatured the iconography of the Soviet state, its medals and its busts of Lenin, its prison garb and its rockets.’14 In March 1987, Afanas’ev wrote how people who ‘were dependent’ on Trapeznikov and bound to him by ‘business ties’, continued to lead historical science, and two months later in an article in Izvestiia, the historian S.V. Tutiukhin pointed to a ‘serious gap between the interest of our people in history, which is growing and continues to grow, and the ability of professional historians to satisfy this interest’. He wished for the convening of a national conference of historians, 13M.T. Choldin, Censorship in the Slavic World, New York, 1984, 9; M. Matthews, Soviet Government: A Selection of Official Documents on Internal Affairs, London, 1974, 18–19, 71–3; Raymond Hutchings, Soviet Secrecy and Non-Secrecy, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1987, 39; Stephen Kotkin, ‘1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks’, The Journal of Modern History, 70: 2, June 1998, 402, addressing Arlen Blium, Za kulisami “Ministerstva pravdy”: Tainaia istoriia Sovetskoi tsenzury, 1917–1929, St. Petersburg, 1994; Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution, Cambridge, MA and London, 1995, 144. See Robert Conquest, ed., The Politics of Ideas in the USSR, London, 1967, for information on the early history of Soviet censorship and Michael S. Fox, ‘Glavlit, Censorship and the Problem of Party Policy in Cultural Affairs, 1922–28’, Soviet Studies, 44: 6, 1992, 1045–68 for censorship during the NEP. 14Martin Walker, The Waking Giant: The Soviet Union under Gorbachev, London, 1988, 272; John B. Dunlop, ‘Soviet Cultural Politics’, Problems of Communism, NovemberDecember 1987, 34–56; Idem., The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire, Princeton, 1993, 70.

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(apparently none had been convened since the early 1960s), the publication of a new historical journal and the founding of a Historical Society of the USSR, in the interests of a lay public.15 It was only after 1988 that the state censorship organization allowed the shifting of books from library special reserves to general shelves, after which all Soviet Ph.D. students had the right to work in the special reserves.The prospects for publication by historians improved with changes in late 1987 in the editorial board of Voprosy istorii, with a mass subscriber base of a tenth of a million by then. A.A. Iskenderov, a respected and liberal-oriented historian of Imperial Russia, was appointed Editor, and P. V. Volobuev and V.P. Danilov joined the editorial board, thereby creating a 21 to 17 reform-minded majority on that board.16 Fiction published in the journals of mass circulation in the Gorbachev era, strongly reminiscent of the pre-revolutionary ‘fat journals’ (the tolstyi zhurnaly that combined literature, commentary and criticism), became the first medium to introduce new historical topics to a wide Soviet public, even as they served as a powerful means of illustrating the human cost of certain historical events. They also explored the impact of policies such as dekulakization (a reprehensible term that historians have used for convenience), the famine of 1932–3, or the torture of individuals in the prison camps. Some of the most important contributors to the critical examination of Soviet history were the so-called ‘mass media historians’, dramatists like Mikhail Shatrov, the film director Tengiz Abuladze, or writers like Anatolii Rybakov, whose Children of the Arbat highlighted Stalin’s role in Kirov’s assassination, or Boris Mozhaev whose Muzhiki i Babi dealt with peasant resistance to collectivization and criticized the role of rural Party officials in supporting collectivization, or Daniil Granin’s novel Zubr that dealt with the persecution-ridden climate of the Soviet scientific establishment in the 1930s.17 The new literature was accompanied by new revelations from the Soviet archives. These came both from Soviet historians as well 15For Trapeznikov, see chapter one. Afanas’ev in Sovetskaya Kultura, 21 March 1987, translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, 22 April 1987 and cited by Sherlock, Problems of Communism, May—August 1988, 29, and Davies, Soviet History, 170–1; Tutiukhin in Izvestiia, May 3, 1987, cited by Davies, Ibid., 171. 16Ibid., 175–7; Idem., Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era, 117; Sherlock, Problems of Communism, May-August 1988, 31–2. 17Mozhaev, Muzhiki i Babi (‘Peasants and Peasant Women’), Don, Rostov na Donu, Nos. 1–3, 1987; Granin, Zubr (‘Aurochs’), Novyi Mir, Nos. 1 and 2, 1987.

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as from the Memorial Society, founded by a group of young historians. Among them was Arsenii Roginskii, founder of the journal Pamyat (‘Memory’), which first began to appear in samizdat, and then abroad, as early as the 1970s. Initially, the group around Roginskii attempted to compile a database of the repressed (to use a neutral term). In August 1987, Memorial began collecting signatures calling for a thorough re-examination of the illegal repressions of the past and for the erection of a monument to honour the memory of Stalin’s millions of victims. Later, Memorial Society would lead the battle to identify the corpses buried in mass graves outside Moscow and Leningrad, organize antiStalinist rallies, exhibits and meetings of conscience and build monuments and memorials to the victims of the Stalin era. After a brief failed attempt to turn itself into a political movement after its constituent conference in Moscow in January 1989, Memorial would finally emerge in the 1990s, as the most important centre for the study of Soviet history, as well as for the defence of human rights in the Russian Federation. By drawing attention to the crimes of the Stalin era, it was making a political statement relevant to the present: Memorial Society combined investigation of the crimes of the past with concern for human-rights victims of the present.18 Substantial efforts at remembrance or commemoration of Soviet repression, the task of ‘working up the past’ as it were, were not successful until the emergence of Memorial Society in 1987. Even after that it faced opposition from the top. At a Politburo meeting in November 1988, Gorbachev proposed that the (increasingly antiStalinist) Memorial organization be limited to the regional level under Party supervision. Its registration was delayed and access to its bank account was blocked. Nevertheless, Memorial succeeded in placing a monument to victims of Stalinism across from the secret police headquarters in Lubianka Square in Moscow in 1990. It went on to expand its archival record on Soviet victimization, publish execution lists as well as a number of reference works on the GULAG (the acronym of Main Directorate of Corrective Labour Camps) and the NKVD. It also set up a small museum in Moscow and established a prominent Human Rights Centre.19 18Anne Applebaum, GULAG: A History, New York, 2003, 558; Scherrer, ‘‘Blank Spots’ in Soviet Russia’s Past’, 21. See Chapter 6 for activity by Memorial in Putin’s Russia. 19Nanci Adler, ‘The Future of the Soviet Past Remains Unpredictable: The Resurrection of Stalinist Symbols Amidst the Exhumation of Mass Graves’, EuropeAsia Studies, 57: 8, December 2005, 1096–7.

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Variants of Glasnost’ History In his novella ‘Kapitan Dikshtein’ (Novyi Mir, 1987), Mikhail Kuraev made it clear that the insurrection at the Kronstadt naval base outside Petrograd in 1921, that had been critical for the swerve away from War Communism towards the NEP, had been a genuine mass revolt against Bolshevik tyranny, rather than a counter-revolutionary rebellion instigated by foreign powers, and that it had been followed by indiscriminate executions. Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which also features the Civil War, was fully published in his native country in 1988 (Novyi Mir), 28 years after its author’s death. The same year, while examining the twin errors of War Communism that built ‘barracks socialism’ and ‘state ownership without democracy’, Vasilii Seliunin argued that it was not hunger which prompted the forcible requisition of agricultural produce by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War (1918–21), but the reverse: requisitions had hunger as their consequence.To mention just one more instance of historical reprises of the 1918–21 period, all the articles in a 1990 issue of Iunost’, the eponymous journal for Soviet youth, were devoted to assessing diverse aspects of the Civil War: as a national tragedy (in clear contradistinction to its prolonged celebration in the triumphant annals of Red heroism), as a meditation upon Wilfred Owen’s ‘pity of war’, as remembrance for its victims and of the need to avoid fratricidal conflict, of the sort that had once again started to convulse the rimlands of the empire as a harbinger of its imminent demise. The experience of the NEP of the 1920s, with its incentives for individual effort and its political and cultural freedoms was of great inspirational value for the perestroikili (the ‘reconstructionists’) around Gorbachev and a major focus of the historical debate. Alexander Iakovlev, then a Central Committee Secretary and an influential inspiration for some ideas that nourished glasnost’, told social scientists at the Academy of Sciences on 17 April 1987 that a direct link existed between the Lenin period of the 1920s [of the NEP] and the Gorbachev one of the 1980s; the intervening decades were merely transitional phases that bound the 1920s and 1980s as ‘an indissoluble entity’.20 Analogies were drawn comparing the 1920s with the imperatives of perestroika/glasnost’ of the 1980s. At the TwentySeventh Party Congress in February 1986, Gorbachev invoked the 20 Jerry F. Hough, Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991,Washington DC, 1997, 73–4; Iakovlev is quoted by Nekrich, Survey, June 1989, 26.

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tax-in-kind (prodnalog) that replaced the forcible requisitions of the Civil War (prodrazverstka) to envision the elements of an agricultural policy worth emulating. Mikhail Shatrov praised the structures and debates of the NEP in his play This is HowWe Conquer. In an extraordinary episode (rather, an epistle) that hinted at the potent animus against the NEP half a century after its premature death, Shatrov wrote in 1988 that when the play was completed in 1982, Academician A. Yegorov, then Director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, recommended in a letter to Iurii Andropov, head of the KGB, that the play be removed from the repertoire of the Moscow Arts Theatre.21 In one of the first criticisms of the ban on factions within the Party (independent of its Central Committee) imposed in 1921 by a resolution of the Tenth Party Congress, Agdas Burganov argued in 1988 that this ban was an important contributing factor in the failure to prevent the rise of Stalin. In Vse techet Vasilii Grossman accomplished what Marsh terms ‘the most complex and extensive reappraisal of the Soviet myth about Lenin to appear in the USSR’.22

The Collectivization of Agriculture Public knowledge of landmark events, cataclysmic turning points in the history of their country was substantially limited by official distillations brewed by Party historians and bottled in biographies of Stalin, histories of the Party, or textbooks for secondary school. As instances of historical reassessment inspired by glasnost’, this chapter investigates three themes, the collectivization of agriculture in 1929– 33, the famine of 1932–3 and the Second World War.23 Collective agriculture was predicated upon a state monopoly on land and the primary purchase claim of state agencies on all marketed agricultural products. The process, from 1929, was one of the most ambitious and flawed exercises in social engineering ever conceived. 21Marsh,

History and Literature, 8, n. 7, p. 221

22Burganov in Druzhba narodov, 1988, Grossman Vse techet, (‘Everything Flows’)

composed in 1955–63, rewritten in 1964, published in Frankfurt, 1970; and in Oktyabr’, 1989. Marsh, History and Literature, 117. 23 There is a discussion of the context for the production of Party histories like the Short Course in Chapter 3. The Short Course refers to History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) Short Course, Edited by A Commission of the C.C. The C.P.S.U. (B.), Authorised by The C.C. of the C.P.S.U. (B.) Bombay: People’s Publishing House, (1943), 1944, 310–11. All references to this book are from this edition, hereafter referred to as the Short Course.

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The decision was permeated by the political intention to build Party power in a countryside that had stubbornly resisted it. It gave birth to deep and enduring fault lines in Soviet society between peasants and the rest. More importantly, it perpetuated production relations that were almost guaranteed to foster a reliance on subsidies to counter waste, loss and high cost.24 The Short Course limits the identification of agricultural problems during the NEP to the grain economy, where only 37 per cent of the amount of grain marketed before the war (1913) came from an output that had attained 91 per cent of the 1913 volume. The discrepancy between output and marketing posed grave problems for a state on the verge of industrialization, an industrialization that was itself to be strongly dependent on the export of grain. The Short Course attributes the deficit in the marketing of grain to the single factor of the overwhelming predominance of small farms that were intrinsically incapable of raising the share of output they could market.The severe crisis of 1927–8 outlined here, is an instance of brevity at the aid of obfuscation; there are 21 lines in the Short Course on the crisis.25 The exhaustive history of the Party that replaced the repudiated Short Course in 1962, referred to here, as Party History, is rather more explanatory: three paragraphs are allotted to explain the procurement crisis in 1927–8. It attributes the crisis to various factors: grain production being far smaller than before the war; crop failure in southern Ukraine and the North Caucasus; the 1928 harvest being five million tons lower than the 1927 harvest; and state procurements in January being 2.048 million tons short of target. It also attributes the crisis to kulak activity: their refusal to sell grain to the state at officially set prices; middle peasants who sold grain to the state procurement agencies being terrorized by the kulaks; the latter’s attempts to weaken and undermine the building of collective farms in 1928 [sic], before collectivization had swept rural Russia.26 If the hydra-headed and ubiquitous kulak villain of the piece went unmeasured in the Short Course, Party History provides an indication of the economic profile: as comprising ‘the most numerous exploiting class in the USSR’ in 24See Banerji, ‘Can Private Farms Redefine Rural Russia?’ in Madhavan K. Palat and Geeti Sen, eds., Rethinking Russia, New Delhi, 1994, 247–8. 25Short Course, 305. 26History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, second, revised edition, translated from Istoriia Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza and edited by Andrew Rothstein and Clemens Dutt, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d., 420. All references to this book are from this edition. Hereafter, Party History.

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1927, when they apparently worked 25 of the 230 million acres of land sown to grain and were responsible for one-fifth of marketable grain. Party History also mentions that in the period between early 1930 and autumn 1932, 240,757 kulak families, or about one per cent of all peasant households were evicted from the districts of ‘fully accomplished (solid) collectivization’ (sploshnaia kollektivizatsiia) or those in which the majority of family farms had been absorbed into collective farms.27 Between October and December 1927, official grain collections had fallen to 54 per cent of the amount obtained in the corresponding months of the previous year. This was insufficient to supply towns and the military, and jeopardized plans for the export of grain to balance the import of capital goods. The official Soviet versions have always had the peasants refusing to sell grain per se, as miscreants engaged in a strike. Peasants actually preferred to sell to traders rather than official agencies, for several reasons: consumer goods were scarce as the state’s industrialization strategy shifted progressively to investment in heavy industry; they cost more to buy because official procurement prices were low, to hold a stable bread price line; and stocks tended to be better at private outlets. Moreover, the official procurement price for grain was low relative to prices offered for non-cereal and dairy products, and peasants preferred to meet their obligations from the sale of such produce. The Short Course describes the process of collectivization in terms of peasants joyfully entering collective farms (kolkhozy), and welcoming new machinery in the Machine Tractor Stations; it celebrates the mass production of tractors and machines; justifies the anti-kulak measures of 1928 and 1929; and is self-congratulatory on the spread of agricultural co-operative societies. In a word, in the Short Course, Soviet collectivization was not just a peaceful process— the overwhelming bulk of the peasantry simply joining the collective farms—but was a struggle of the peasant masses against the kulaks, accomplished from above, on the initiative of the state, and directly supported from below by millions of peasants.28 Party History is distinguished by an attempt to tilt the tarnished Stalinist narratives towards some accuracy. In this vein, its authors allude to peasant resistance to joining collective farms as a result of the ‘mistakes of party organizations and the downright provocateur 27Party History, 438, 464. This estimation was to remain standard in popular, even semi-scholarly Soviet literature for decades thereafter. 28Short Course, 316–17, 322, 324.

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actions of the class enemy, in the latter half of February 1930’, and it states that against ‘the general background of the unquestionable success of collectivization, there were dangerous signs of serious discontent among the peasantry in a number of districts. Here and there, the kulaks and their agents even succeeded in inciting the peasants to outright anti-Soviet actions.’29 About a 100 pages later, perhaps in the awareness that an account of the effects of collectivization that was honest about extensive and legitimate peasant resentment might be premature in the 1960s, Party History mentions numerous peasant delegations who visited the new factories and construction sites, attended workers’ meetings and were transfixed by their enthusiasm. Upon returning to their villages, it goes on, the advanced representatives of the working peasantry took the initiative in setting up new collective farms.The staff of industrial enterprises and building sites assumed ‘patronage’ over rural areas, and sent numerous workers’ teams to the countryside. That was how the ‘mass movement for joining the collective farms’ was prepared and began.The peasantry turned to the socialist path of development, to the collective farm path. The middle peasants followed the poor peasants into the collective farms. In just three months, from July to September 1929, about one million peasant households joined collective farms, almost as many as during the last twelve years.30 Peasants responded to collectivization with large-scale passive resistance and sporadic armed resistance: assassinations of, and assaults upon officials; riots and mutinies; brigandage and flight. In 1930, OGPU security troops put down thousands of local revolts and outbreaks: the figures vary from 7,382 to 13,754. The slaughter of livestock was the most endemic expression of protest: by 1933, there were only one-third as many sheep, and about half as many cattle, horses and pigs as there had been in 1928. Many peasant households slaughtered their livestock because excessive state procurements left them short of fodder, while others did so to avoid being regarded as kulak. State slaughterhouse and procurement agencies for meat and hides had more traffic than they could handle.31 Party History attributes the ‘numerous mistakes at the beginning of the mass collective-farm movement to Stalin’s underestimation 29Party

History, 327. History, 430. 31In a growing western, and Russian literature on the subject, see for instance, Lynn Viola, ‘The Peasant Nightmare:Visions of Apocalypse in the Soviet Countryside’, The Journal of Modern History, 62, December 1990, 769; Idem., Peasant Rebels under 30Party

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of the power of the peasant’s attachment to their small, privatelyowned households’, and argues that ‘his refusal to lend ear [sic] to the reasonable proposals made by local Party officials was the greatest miscalculation’.32 This History explicitly criticizes ‘the experience of collectivization in the first two months of 1930’ for being moved by an anti-Leninist haste. In this endeavour, it marshals support from the following evidence: the proportion of farms that had been collectivized in February 1930 considerably exceeded the rate envisaged by the Central Committee of the Party ‘because Stalin had called for a higher rate of collectivization at the end of December 1929’. Pressure had been mounted on local Party and state organizations, and ‘the harmful practice of hunting for high percentages of collectivization had been encouraged on instructions from Stalin’. Pressure from above resulted in ‘collectivization being artificially speeded up’, for instance in the Central Black Earth and Moscow regions. It even states that peasants were forced into collective farms under threat of ‘dekulakization’ and disfranchisement.Violations of the Leninist principle of voluntary entry into collective farms were resented by the peasants, particularly the middle peasants. Other stated shortcomings of the leadership include ignoring the building of production co-operatives and the lack of clarity on how the means of production of peasants joining the collective farms should be socialized, a silence on the future of household allotments and about the socialization of the livestock of peasant families who had very few animals. As a result of socializing the whole livestock, including small livestock and poultry, all livestock was forcibly seized and slaughtered.33

The Famine of 1932–33 The famine of 1932–3, in which between five and seven million may have perished, was the greatest one in Soviet history, and one of the Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance, New York, 1996; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization, New York, 1996, Chapter 2. Viola places greater emphasis on peasant resistance to collectivization than does Fitzpatrick. See Alter Litvin and John Keep, Stalinism: Russian and Western Views at the Turn of the Millennium, London and New York, 2005, 53–4,122 for the estimate on local revolts and riots. 32Party History, 444. 33Party History, 442–4.

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most devastating of the twentieth century. Alec Nove has said that ‘1933 was the culmination of the most precipitous peacetime decline in living standards known in recorded history.’ Its epicentres were the Ukraine (the highest absolute losses of human life, up to 4.2 million in 1933, and where the government declared it an act of genocide in November 2006), Kazakhstan (the highest rates of mortality, where an estimated 1.7 million, almost half the population of the republic perished) and the Steppe regions of the Don and Kuban to the north of the Caucasus range.34 What were the factors that produced this appalling and avoidable tragedy? The absolute lack of food formed the dominant background. Shortage of grain and other food products in the towns resulted in widespread malnourishment; the acute shortage of grain in the countryside resulted in widespread starvation. The amount retained by the peasants for food in 1932–3 was about 20 million tons, compared with 27 million in 1927–8. Grain consumption per head of the rural population declined substantially, but this decline was even more marked when it came to meat and dairy products. Livestock had been devastated during collectivization in Kazakhstan in 1929–31. A severe famine continued there until at least the summer of 1933. A secret report by the Kazakh statistical agency claimed that the rural population of Kazakhstan had declined from 5.87 million on 1 June 1930 to 2.49 million on 1 June 1933; almost 2 million died in 1931–2 alone. In the Ukraine, the regional Party bureau reported that 48 of the 75 grain-growing districts were suffering from famine by February 1933. By June 1933, the registered rural mortality level was thirteen times as high as the normal level on the eve of the 1933 harvest for the Ukraine as a whole. In the Central Black-Earth Region (CBE) region, not generally listed as a famine area, the rural death rate reached over four times the normal level by July 1933. Serious food difficulties were also reported from the Ural region and the Far East. And the famine continued, even intensified in Kazakhstan. Even excluding the Urals, Siberia and the Far East, the famine-affected 34In his The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, New York and Oxford, 1986, (Russian edition, Zhatva skorby, Moscow, 1990) the main non-Soviet (British) historian of this famine, Robert Conquest suggested that there were seven million deaths during this famine. The main Soviet agrarian historian, the late V.P. Danilov, estimates deaths at three to four million. For these estimates, see Alter L. Litvin, Writing History in Twentieth-Century Russia:AView fromWithin, translated and edited by John L.H. Keep, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2001, 86–7; Litvin and Keep, Stalinism, 125.

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areas included over 70 million of the 160 million people in the USSR. Moscow imposed severe measures to restrict refugees from the famine areas traveling into other regions and the OGPU was ordered to arrest people leaving the famine-affected areas.35 State grain procurement and the export of grain from the poor harvest of 1931 rose dramatically over the amount in the previous year, as did state seed grain and emergency reserves. On 6 June 1932, Stalin and Molotov announced that ‘no matter of deviation—regarding either amounts or deadlines set for grain deliveries—can be permitted’. Pleading to Moscow that the Ukraine was in ‘a state of emergency’, Chubar and Kossior, members of the Ukrainian Communist Party’s Politburo, begged for assistance. Stalin blamed Chubar and Kossior for perpetrating a ‘hostile act’ (the famine) against the Central Committee of the CPSU itself, and accused Terekhov, the Secretary of the Ukrainian Party’s Central Committee, of ‘Fabricating such a fairy tale about famine! Thought you’d scare us but it won’t work’. Mikoian was visited by a Ukrainian who asked, ‘Does Comrade Stalin—for that matter does anyone in the Politburo—know what is happening in Ukraine? Well, if not, I’ll give you some idea. A train recently pulled into Kiev loaded with corpses of people who had starved to death. It had picked up corpses all the way from Poltava ...’. Death on a mass scale, brought on by an unvarying state demand for grain from a dramatically shrunken harvest, began in early March 1933.36 The famine remained almost invisible, for the official purposes of the state, for its citizens, throughout the Soviet era. At the time, the newspapers were full of stories about rising living standards among workers, the spread of education among peasants (who were prevented from leaving the famine-afflicted regions by manned blockades) or better child health. A Soviet journalist, who was witness to the death of most of his friends and relatives, was surprised about the complete absence of the subject from textbooks in 1988. Even in the late-1990s, the British historian, Catherine Merridale, found it difficult ‘to establish what it was that people knew, how much they ignored, how much they were forced to overlook or chose to condone. Historians who 35R.W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, Industrialisation of Soviet Russia 5. The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2004, 432–4, 408–11, 426; Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia, London, 2000, 198; Richard Overy, Russia’s War, London, 1999, 23; Gijs Kessler, ‘The 1932–33 Crisis and Its Aftermath beyond the Epicenters of Famine: The Urals Region’, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, 25: 3/4, 2001, 253. 36Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin:The Court of the Red Tsar, London, 2003, 74–6.

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work with documents from the time find very little. The Soviet state did not encourage rumour. It even banned the word “starvation” from the press.’ She added that talking to survivors was ‘clouded ... by dense layers of guilt, repression, and later memory’. Stalin dismissed reports from the Ukraine at the end of 1932 of ‘starving peasants’ as ‘fairy tales’. Instead, in the winter and spring of 1932–3 the newspapers told readers about the disastrous famines and harvest failures outside the USSR. In denying the famine, the press was taking its cue from Stalin. In January 1933, Stalin boasted of ‘the annihilation of begging and pauperism in the countryside’, and in February—when the famine was at its worst—he told an audience of kolkhoz activists that collectivization had saved ‘at least twenty million bedniaks (poor peasants), ...from ruin and poverty’. Stalin also said that the peasants were staging a go-slow strike (ital’ianka). Their unwillingness to work in the kolkhoz and meet procurements quotas was a form of political protest.37 In 1958, A.L. Sidorov, the Director of the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences, appointed Viktor Petrovich Danilov (1926– 2004) to head a Group on the History of the Soviet Peasantry and the Organization of Collective Farms. Nikolai Ivnitskii and Ilia Zelenin were among the historians in this group.The Group completed The Collectivization of Agriculture in the Soviet Union 1927–1932 in 1964.38 Zelenin discovered that during 1931 and 1932, the Union government and the Central Executive of Soviets of the Russian Republic received numerous ‘complaints’ about ‘the inability of people with large families to exist’. Letters in the archives from collective farmers ‘in the name of Stalin’ recorded the ‘serious food supply situation’ on collective farms (kolkhozy) in the Lower Volga, the Ukraine and Kazakhstan. In 1964, in his contribution to Danilov’s unpublishable manuscript Zelenin wrote that grain procurement organs were trying to obtain both the seed and food grain, according to the principle ‘seize grain down to the last seed’. He wrote: ‘In some kolkhozy starvation had begun’. It was in the year 1964 that Soviet historians gingerly 37Stalin’s response to starving Ukrainian peasants was published in Pravda on 26 May 1964. Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone, 218–19, 204, 199, 15. The Soviet journalist was Mikhail Alekseyev, the editor of Moskva, and his statement is cited by Merridale, Ibid., 204. See also Roger D. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956–1974, Basingstoke and London, 201, n. 150, 151, pp. 277–8; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants, 74–5. 38Markwick, Rewriting History, 113 citing V.P. Danilov, ed., Kollektivizatsiia i kolkhoznoe stroitel’stvo v SSSR: Kollektivizatsiia sel’skogo khoziaistvo v SSSR 1927– 1932, Moscow 1964, unpublished proof pages (pervaia sverka).

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began to report this famine. Nikolai Ivnitskii had experienced starvation in his childhood, but it was not until interviews with Roger Markwick in January and February 1998, that he was able to state that hunger in those years had affected 50 million people, even driving some to cannibalism. Zelenin quoted from letters to Stalin, preserved in the Central State Archive of the National Economy (TsGANKh), that Stalin remained unmoved by the plight of the peasants in the faminestricken regions.39 V.P. Danilov was the leading specialist on Soviet agrarian history in the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Russian History. Danilov was born into a peasant family in Orenburg. His service as an artillery officer in the war was a transforming experience because as he said in an interview decades later, he wanted to know ‘how it was that people could conduct themselves as they did in war, particularly those from such a highly cultured country as Germany’. Since it was clear to him that no historian could ‘grasp all history’, s/he must understand their own country first: ‘and the history of my country is above all the history of the peasantry and the countryside’. From the mid-1950s, Danilov established collaborative contact with major British historians like E.H. Carr, R.W. Davies, Teodor Shanin and Orlando Figes.40 In 1954, he was forced to abandon a kandidat thesis on ‘socioeconomic relations in the Soviet period’ in favour of an enquiry into the material-technical basis of Soviet agriculture. In an article in 1956 and in a book in 1957,41 he demonstrated that on the eve of collectivization in 1929, the country lacked the necessary material and technical prerequisites for the complete collectivization of agriculture. Danilov was not opposed to collectivization per se; indeed he viewed it as ‘an objective necessity’. But even this argument flew in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy that held that an adequate materialtechnical basis had been established prior to collectivization.42 39Markwick, Rewriting History, 145–6, citing V. P. Danilov, ed., Kollektivizatsiia i kolkhoznoe, 649–50. 40Markwick, Rewriting History, n.3, p. 272. 41‘Material’no-tekhnicheskaia baza sel’skogo khoziaistva SSSR nakanune sploshnoi kollektivatsii’ Voprosy istorii, VI: 3, 1956, 3–17; Sozdanie materialnotekhnicheskikh predposylok kollektivizatsii sel’skogo khoziaistva v SSSR, Moscow, 1957. 42The young historians in the group established by Sidorov in 1958—Maria Bogdenko, Nikolai Ivnitskii, Mikhail Vyl’tsan and Il’ia Zelenin—were the children of peasants, had lived in rural Russia through the 1930s, experienced the traumas of forced collectivization and embarked on scholarly careers, the study of the Soviet peasantry in particular, after the war. Markwick, Rewriting History, 113.

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The proofs of the volume produced by the historians in the Sidorov group were literally withdrawn from the publishers within 24 hours of Khrushchev’s dismissal as CPSU First Secretary on 14 October 1964, never to see the light of day. Meanwhile Danilov continued to research Soviet rural society during NEP, despite being shunned by the Party and marginalized in the academy. Some of his findings were published in 1977 and 1979 in the shape of two major studies of the Russian countryside on the eve of collectivization.43 Glasnost’ afforded an opportunity for Danilov and his colleagues to finally contemplate publishing their long-buried work. But with the opening of the archives and the subsequent revelations about the tragedy that had befallen the Soviet countryside under Stalin of which they, the leading Soviet historians in the field, had at least been partially aware, they decided against publishing their suppressed manuscript. Instead, they turned their attention to rewriting the history of the years after 1927. Assisted by an international team that included Roberta Manning (Boston) and Lynn Viola (Toronto), Danilov edited a five-volume documentary series on collectivization and its aftermath (1927–38).44 The monthly party journal Izvestiia TsK KPSS (‘Central Committee News’) resumed publication after a gap of 60 years in 1989 and half the numbers that appeared that year were devoted to collectivization; material from the Party archives was published for the first time in its pages. The same year V.P. Danilov and N.I. Ivnitskii edited the most substantial publication of archival documents on rural Russia and collectivization thus far.45 Apart from these historical studies, collectivization attracted fictional historical interest in 1987 and 1988. A large number of novels, stories and articles dealing with the fate of the peasants after 1929 were published. The three major novels about collectivization were Andrei Platonov’s novel Kotlovan, Boris Mozhaev’s Muzhiki i Babi and Sergei Antonov’s Ovragi. Perhaps the most haunting evocation 43Sovetskaia dokolkhoznaia derevniia: naselenine, zemlepol’zovanie, khoziaistvo, Moscow, 1977, published in English as Rural Russia Under the New Regime, translated and introduced by Orlando Figes, Bloomington and London, 1988; and Sovetskaia dokolkhoznaia derevniia: sotsial’naia struktura, sot’sial’nye otnosheniia, Moscow, 1979. 44Markwick, Rewriting History, 152–4. V.P. Danilov, R. Manning and L. Viola, eds., Tragediia Sovetskoi derevni: kollektivizatsiia i raskulachivanie: dokumenty i materially v 5 tt., 1927–1938 gg., Moscow, 1999–2001. 45R.W. Davies, ‘Soviet Historians on Collectivisation: Recent Publications’, SIPS/ CREES Paper, Birmingham, December 1989 citing Dokumenty svidetel’stvuiut: iz istorii derevni nakanune i v khode kollektivatsii, 1927–1932 gg.

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of the peasantry was Aleksandr Tvardovskii’s poem Po pravu pamyati (‘By the Right of Memory’, 1969, 1987) about his father who was exiled as a kulak. In 1987, Danilov published three articles on the mistakes of collectivization and in 1988, the economist Seliunin denounced Stalin’s God perelom (‘Year of the Great Breakthrough’) as ‘The year of the breaking of the backbone of the people’ in Novyi Mir. G.I. Shmel’ev published a penetratingly trenchant analysis of collectivization and ‘dekulakization’ in Oktiabr’ in 1988, one that defended the Bukharinist alternative for the construction of socialism.46

The Second World War The Second World War slashed the fabric of Soviet history more sharply than any other event, and in doing so, left larger gaps for the official historians to repair. Reports in Istoricheskii Zhurnal and Voprosy istorii during 1945–6 reveal that plans that historians had laid for extensive research into the history of the war were abruptly canceled in 1946. From the 1980s, the ‘myth’ of Stalin, the great war leader, was assailed and questions were asked about why the USSR was so unprepared in 1941 or why so many people and so much territory had been lost in the first phases of the war. These would be embarrassing questions for any government, but far more so for the Soviet government with its pretensions to foresight and infallibility.47 The Soviet German Non-Aggression Pact of 23 August 1939 and the Agreement on Friendship and Frontiers of 28 September 1939 with their secret clauses relating to spheres of influence in Poland, Finland, the Baltic states and Bessarabia was an issue that affected interpretations of the highly touchy issue of Soviet performance in the early phases of the war; the deal had silently 46Platonov’s Kotlovan (‘The Foundation Pit’), written in 1929–30, was published in 1987 in Novyi Mir; Antonov’s Ovragi (‘The Ravines’), was published in Druzhba narodov, 1988. 47Matthew Gallagher, ‘Trends in Soviet Historiography of the Second World War’, in Keep, ed., Contemporary History, 222. Nancy Heer, Politics and History, 247, citing History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, second revised edition, Moscow, 1962, pp. 537, 538; Seweryn Bialer, ed., Stalin and His Generals: Soviet Military Memoirs ofWorldWar II, New York, 1969,16. See also Matthew P. Gallagher, The Soviet History of World War II, New York, 1963.

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shaken Soviet society and spread consternation in western foreign ministries and allied Communist parties. For decades, the official Soviet posture was that the Baltic republics had been liberated, not occupied, and communism had been a free choice, not a military imposition. Following the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, however, the national homelands of the Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian peoples were annexed and incorporated into the Soviet Union as Soviet Socialist Republics. At a meeting of the Politburo on 5 May 1988 to discuss the question of the ‘secret Soviet-German documents of 1939 as they affect Poland’, the chief ideologue Vadim Medvedev advocated a go-slow approach, while Georgii Smirnov, the Director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, admitted that the Soviet Union was bereft of convincing arguments for its defence and Gromyko stuck to the tortuous mendacity that distinguished his long career: ‘There definitely were originals. And not to recognize this is a big risk. On the level of history it is better to tell the truth. But the truth should be that we have copies but not the originals. The originals might have been destroyed under Stalin or without Stalin.’ Chebrikov of the KGB said: ‘It’s too soon to decide about publishing’, while Gorbachev resorted to the tactical twists he was adept at: ‘I have a proposal. I believe the Politburo can work out a position when it has the official documents in its hands .... I suggest we limit ourselves to an exchange of opinions. We’ll continue to work in the archives to locate the documents. If the documents should become available, maybe we’ll come back to this issue ....’ Did the original documents exist and did the General Secretary Gorbachev, know what they contained?48 The members of the Russian Supreme Soviet Commission for the transfer of Party and KGB archives to the public domain, akin to a parliamentary dispensation authorizing declassification, found an envelope with ‘Documents relating to the Soviet-German Talks of 1939–1941’, subtitled ‘Original texts of the Soviet-German secret agreements concluded in the period 1939–1941’. These documents were the original six protocols about the announcement of the Soviet and German governments of 28 September 1939, the exchange of letters between the then foreign ministers, Molotov and Ribbentrop, 48Dmitri Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire:The Seven LeadersWho Built the Soviet Regime, edited and translated by Harold Shukman, New York, 1998, 527, citing Fond 84 from the Presidential Archive (AP RF).

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and two maps of Poland signed by Stalin and Ribbentrop. A note indicated that Gorbachev had seen the file in July 1987. Similar file notations indicate that Gorbachev had seen the Special File on the Katyn massacre too in April 1989, as had Iurii Andropov in April 1981.49 Alexander Iakovlev was asked to head a Commission to investigate the pacts in 1988. At the end of that year, perhaps presciently sensing the nature of its findings (still a whole year from their formal presentation), Iakovlev, Shevardnadze and Vadim Medvedev built a case for condemnation of the pacts at a Politburo meeting. Ligachev, Chebrikov and Marshall Iazov, the Minister of Defence, opposed this position: if the Baltic republics had been secretly and involuntarily incorporated into the USSR, then their claims for independence were legitimate.50 Soviet historians had considered the secret articles as western falsifications for 40 years; the originals could not be found and the microfilm copy was probably fabricated. Incidentally, it is worth noting that even Roy Medvedev, in his scathing Marxist history of Stalinism (1976) did not refer to the secret pacts, perhaps because of the impossibility then of examining the relevant documents. Apart from the impulses of glasnost’ itself, however, public pressure from Poland and the Baltic states dictated that the pacts be publicly acknowledged. The 23 August 1939 protocol was published in Voprosy istorii in June 1989 and the terms of the secret protocol in it, which led to the partition of Poland, were revealed in the memoirs of the highly versatile and politically adroit Konstantin (Kirill) Simonov (d. 1979). His poem of 1942 in Krasnaia Zvezda soon acquired legendary status: Do you remember, Alyosha/The Smolensk roads/Where the dank rains fell unending. His novel of Stalingrad, Days and Nights, began appearing serially in 1943. The Living and the Dead, his greatest war novel, drawn from his war diaries—Simonov had been a correspondent for Krasnaia Zvezda (‘Red Star’), the main Red Army newspaper, from 1941 and reported from all the major fronts in 1942—was published to tumultuous acclaim in 1960. Its leading protagonist is the Red Army officer Sintsov, who, at the outbreak of war, returns to the front from a vacation with his wife in Crimea, and discovers how misleading 49Ibid.,

528. See Chapter 5 for more on this Commission. Spring, ‘A Note on the debate about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact: Developments of 1988–9’, SIPS/CREES Paper, Birmingham, December 1989, 1–2; David Pryce-Jones, The Fall of the Soviet Empire 1985–1991, London, 1995, 93–5. 50D.W.

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official information on the German advance is. Readers often encounter the theme of a bungled war in Simonov’s oeuvre.51 He was pithy about the adverse psychological impact of the Purges on members of the Soviet armed forces and the military impact of the Purges on early Soviet defeats: ‘If there had been no 1937, there would have been no summer of 1941’.52 In his Triumph and Tragedy, Colonel-General Dmitri Volkogonov fully examined the years 1939–41 and the first extracts of the book were published in Pravda in 1988. In his anniversary speech in November 1987 Gorbachev’s view remained a conservative one that argued that the pact was the only possible policy in the circumstances.53 Within weeks of the German invasion on 22 June 1941, Soviet Order Number 227 threatened all who shrank from a fight to the death, the ‘panickers’ and the ‘cowards’, with summary execution or service in penal battalions (shtrafbaty). Shortly after that, Stalin approved NKGB Order No. 246 that stipulated the destruction of the families of men who were captured. This was made enforceable in August 1941 by Stalin’s Order No. 270, whose spirit is best conveyed in its letter: I order that (1) anyone who removes his insignia ... and surrenders should be regarded as a malicious deserter whose family is to be arrested as a family of a breaker of the oath and betrayer of the Motherland. Such deserters are to be shot on the spot. (2) Those falling into encirclement are to fight to 51Simonov was a distinguished poet, a former war correspondent and later a writer on its themes—but very much a keeper of the faith, for he had won the Stalin Prize an almost incredible six times, served twice as Editor-in-Chief of Literaturnaia Gazeta (1938, 1950–4) and twice of Novyi Mir (1946–50; 1954–8), both then having been recondite bastions of the literary establishment. Simonov’s Dni i Nochi was translated as Days and Nights, New York, 1945. See Dev Murarka, Gorbachov: The Limits of Power, London, 1988, 346–7; Deming Brown, ‘WorldWar II in Soviet Literature’, in Susan Linz, ed., The Impact of World War II on the Soviet Union, Irvine, CA, 1985, 243; Anthony Barnett and Nella Bielski, Soviet Freedom, London, 1988, 211–12. 52Konstantin Simonov, ‘Through the Eyes of a Man of My Generation’, Znamia, no. 3, 1988. See also Orlando Figes, TheWhisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia, London, 2007; Murarka, Gorbachov, 346–7. As the central figure in TheWhisperers, the sinuous twists in Simonov’s political career, his gradual abandonment of an ardent reverence for Stalin and his understanding that Stalin was responsible for the initial military debacle are traced most exhaustively in this mammoth and magisterial study by Figes. 53Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin,Triumph and Tragedy, London, 1991; Pravda, 20 June 1988.

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the last ... those who prefer to surrender are to be destroyed by any available means while their families are to be deprived of assistance.

The authorities proceeded to arrest the wife of Lt. Iakov Iosifovich Stalin (1907–43), Stalin’s son, after he was captured on 16 July 1941 and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Stalin refused to exchange him for a senior German officer, and in 1943 Iakov Stalin was shot by a guard for deliberately walking into the forbidden perimeter zone of the prisoner-of-war camp where he was held. One of the guards, Konrad Harfisch, told the camp commandant that “Yakov Stalin thrust his right foot into an empty square in the barbedwire fence and put his left foot on the electric wire. For a moment he stood there motionless, with his right foot thrust forward and his body leaning back. Then he called out “Harfisch, you’re a soldier! Don’t funk, shoot me!” So I shot him.” It had been forbidden to publish any details about these Orders since the war had ended.The existence of Order Numbers 227 and 270 were first revealed to the Soviet public in 1988. Even in 2002, a graphological examination of the evidence drew the hypothesis that Iakov Stalin had been killed in action. His daughter, Galina Iakovleva Dzhugashvili, was given papers relating to her father’s death, Izvestiia reported, on 13 September 2003.54 As the fiftieth anniversary of the pacts approached, there was increased public activity, especially in Lithuania, to clarify their authenticity. In August 1989, Alexander Iakovlev, Politburo member and Chair, Investigating Commission on the Pacts of 1939, ended the discussion of their existence by stating that “although the original of the protocol has not been discovered (it was later disclosed that the originals had been residing in the Soviet archives for half a century), of its existence in the light of the documents available, there can be no doubt.” So from 1989, the authenticity of the pacts was beyond dispute. From there the debate shifted to how the policy of allying with Germany could be explained and justified, and whether the evidence suggests that there were alternatives, even to the issue of how far if at all, the Soviet leadership was responsible for the outbreak of the war. 54Richard Overy, Russia’sWar, London, 1998, 158–60; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, note on p.335. For the story about Iakov Stalin, see Svetlana Alliluyeva, Only OneYear, New York, 1969, 370; Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Stalin, Man of the Borderlands’, The American Historical Review, December 2001, 1680; Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and Tragedy, 430; E. Radzinsky, Stalin, London, 1996, 461–2; Litvin and Keep, Stalinism, 15–16; n. 46–8, p. 29.

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Before 1985 fiction rather than historical scholarship served as the medium to explore sensitive issues related to the Second World War, as in novels by Vasilii Bykov and Grigorii Baklanov. In these novels of the Khrushchev years, Simonov, Baklanov and Bykov portrayed Stalin as a bungler, whose disregard of German war preparations and the mass purge of the military had resulted in the initial German victories. By the 1970s, writers like Iurii Bondarev in his novel about Stalingrad, depicted Stalin as a wise and decisive leader, while another by Ivan Stadniuk is hortatory about Stalin. But these works must cede primacy to Vasilii Grossman’s Zhizn’ i sud’ba. Grossman was invited to report on the war for Krasnaia zvezda and he spent over 1000 days at various fronts of the war. Grossman’s first war novel, The People are Immortal, had been acclaimed in 1942 as had the first volume of his For the Just Cause, in 1952. Life and Fate, the second volume of this series, met a different fate. Zhizn’ i sud’ba (Life and Fate) was deemed to be too frank and critical when it was first completed in 1960 at the height of The Thaw.55 In February 1961 two KGB officers came to his home with orders to confiscate the manuscript. They took away every scrap of paper they could lay their hands on, even sheets of used carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. Grossman told them the whereabouts of any remaining copies or fragments. It is worth noting that the only other book to have merited such serious attention from the Soviet authorities is The Gulag Archipelago, a work of history rather than imaginative literature.56 Grossman wrote to the Politburo to request the return of his manuscript. In response, Mikhail Suslov, the principal Party ideologist, told him there could be no question of Life and Fate being published for another 200 years. Suslov asked “Why should we add your book to the atomic bombs that our enemies are preparing to launch against us? ....Why should we publish your book and begin a public discussion as to whether anyone needs the Soviet Union or not?” A group of editors from Znamia (‘The Banner’) met to discuss the draft of Life 55Konstantin Simonov, The Living and the Dead, New York, 1962; Soldatami ne rozhdaiutsia, Moscow, 1964; Grigorii Baklanov, Tri povesti, Moscow, 1963; Iiul’ 41 Goda, Moscow, 1965;Vasilii Bykov, The Third Flare, Moscow, n.d.; Alpine Ballad, Moscow 1966; Mertvym ne bol’no, Moscow, 1966; Iurii Bondarev, Goriachii sneg, Moscow, 1974; Ivan Stadniuk, Voina, volumes 1 and 2, Moscow, 1977, volume 3, Moscow 1980;Vasilii Grossman, Narod bessmerten, Moscow, 1942; Za pravoe delo, Moscow, 1955. 56All references are to Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, translated by Robert Chandler, London, 1986, 9.

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and Fate in 1960. “This is not a book about great deeds,” a member of the board pointed out. “It is not about the historic victory of our troops in Stalingrad, the home front, or our fighting spirit .... It is about unbridled cruelty, meanness and duplicity.”57 ‘The historic victory of our troops in Stalingrad’ was the centrepiece of the novel, but this was a victory, Grossman argued, that had been bought at huge political and moral cost, pre-eminently the waste of lives. That made it impossible to publish at the time. No other writer has so convincingly established the identity of Nazism and Soviet Communism. The parallels between the two systems are repeatedly drawn. The SS representative in the concentration camp administration, Obersturmbannfuhrer Liss, tells the Old Bolshevik prisoner, Mikhail Sidorovich Mostovskoy, that ‘When we look one another in the face, we’re neither of us just looking at a face we hate— no, we’re gazing into a mirror. That’s the tragedy of our age. Do you really not recognize yourselves in us—yourselves and the strength of your will? .... You may think you hate us, but what you really hate is yourselves—yourselves in us. It’s terrible, isn’t it?’ A few pages later, Liss elaborates the resemblance, to Mostovskoy: ‘In essence we are the same—both one-party States. Our capitalists are not the masters. The State gives them their plan. The State takes their profit. Your State also outlines a plan and takes what is produced for itself. And the people you call masters—the workers—also receive a salary from your one-party State.’58 On the national cataclysm of a coerced deprivation of memory and an abdication of moral responsibility, Grossman displays a candour that is searing. He has Viktor Pavlovoich Shtrum, Physicist and Academician, say to his wife, Liudmila Nikolaevna Shaposhnikova: ... the greatest tragedy of our age is that we don’t listen to our consciences. We don’t say what we think. We feel one thing and do another. Remember Tolstoy’s words about capital punishment? I can’t remain silent. But we remained silent in 1937 when thousands of innocent people were executed. Or rather some of us—the best of us—remained silent. Others applauded noisily. And we remained silent during the horrors of general collectivization .... Yes, we spoke too soon about Socialism—it’s not just a matter of heavy industry. Socialism, first of all, is the right to a free conscience. To deprive a 57Grossman, Life and Fate, 9; Keith Gessen, ‘Under Siege: A Beloved Soviet Writer’s

Path to Dissent’, The New Yorker, 6 March, 2006, 86; Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone, 319. 58Grossman, Life and Fate, 11, 395, 401.

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man of his conscience is a terrible crime. And if a man has the strength to listen to his conscience and then act on it, he feels a surge of happiness.59

Stalin had once vaunted an uber-mortality. His adopted son, Artom Sergeyev remembers Stalin shouting at his son, Vasilii, for exploiting his father’s name. When Vasilii said, ‘But, I’m a Stalin too,’ Stalin had sharply rebuked him, saying ‘No, you’re not. You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, no, not even me.’ Grossman has Shtrum conjure up a similarly unreal and omnipotent Stalin, when he says, ‘It began to seem as though Stalin himself ploughed the fields, forged metal, fed babies in their cradles and handled a machine-gun—while the workers, students and scientists did nothing but pray to him. But for Stalin, a whole great nation would have perished long ago like helpless cattle.’ Grossman conveys Stalin’s ubiquity too: ‘One day Viktor counted eighty-six mentions of Stalin’s name in one issue of Pravda; the following day he counted eighteen mentions in one editorial. He railed against the illegal arrests, the absence of freedom, and the way semi-literate Party members had the right to give orders to scientists and writers, to correct them and tick them off.’ As he does with the banal philistinism that smothered officialdom and citizenry alike: ‘Viktor had thought that important administrators and Party officials never talked about anything, even with their families, except the ideological purity of their cadres. He had thought they did nothing except sign papers in red pencil, read a Short Course in the History of the Party out loud to their wives, and dream of temporary rulings and obligatory instructions.’60 The novel was ‘arrested’ by the KGB in 1961; Suslov thought Grossman’s book was far more dangerous than Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. A decorated Lieutenant-Colonel by the end of the war, Grossman lost his official standing and died in penury in September 1964, doubting that Zhizn’ i sud’ba, or for that matter, 59Grossman, Life and Fate, 699. When Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that the criminal acts committed by Stalin ‘would be punishable in any state in the world except in fascist states like Hitler’s and Mussolini’s’, Strobe Talbott, the editor of Khrushchev Remembers, pointed out that this was the first time any Soviet politician had actually equated Stalin’s actions with those of Hitler. See Khrushchev Remembers, translated and edited by Strobe Talbott, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1977, 1: 368 and n. 13, p. 368. 60My emphases. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, 4; Grossman, Life and Fate, 751, 821.

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The Black Book, an exhaustive and factual account of the fate of the Soviet Union’s Jews under Nazi occupation, would ever be published at all. The Black Book, discussed here, was never published inside the Soviet Union. In fact it took 27 years for Zhizn’ i sud’ba to appear: in the USSR, an extract was first published in 1987 (Ogonek), and then published (with some omissions) in 1988 (Oktyabr).The Russian edition of the full work appeared in 1985. In the west, extracts had been published in Kontinent in 1975 and 1976, in Russian language in full in 1980, and in English as Life and Fate in 1985. With a reclusive Stalin distant from political matters from early 1946, Andrei Zhdanov appeared to control the reins of the Party as well as cultural and foreign policy matters, as the International Relations Secretary of the Central Committee. Showered with accolades like the ‘second man in the Party’ and its ‘greatest worker’, Zhdanov was aware that Stalin toyed with appointing him General Secretary. As head of the Ideological Department of the Central Committee, he launched the so-called Zhdanovshchina (a pejorative term to distinguish an era associated with a personality) in Moscow from 1946. It was infamously identified with the reinforcement of censorship, depriving scientists of access to most foreign publications, ending the translation of certain Soviet academic journals into English, ‘courts of honour’ to try scientists accused of anti-Soviet behaviour and the defamation of writers like Zoshchenko and Akhmatova. On his death on 31 August 1948, questions of foreign policy were handed over to the 46-year-old Mikhail Suslov, a Secretary of the Central Committee who also took charge of ideological matters. In the course of 1949–52 Suslov considerably extended the ideological empire bequeathed to him by Aleksandr Shcherbakov, Georgii Aleksandrov and Andrei Zhdanov. He began to exert a greater influence on Soviet life than any other member of the Politburo barring Stalin: educational and cultural institutions, the press and publishing operations, radio and television, and even the writing of history itself came under Suslov’s authority. The Medvedev brothers consider that Suslov undoubtedly was ‘the conductor-in-chief of the Cold War’ including being involved in the creation of Cominform in 1947. Suslov was immediately made head of two departments when he entered the apparatus of the Central Committee: Agitation and Propaganda (Agitprop) and International Relations. In addition to controlling travel abroad by Soviet citizens, the Department of International Relations carried out various secret operations supporting communist

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parties in other countries and had close links with the MGB. Suslov presided over a dense mesh: there was a close relationship between the MGB and Agitprop, since the Central Committee and the MGB jointly controlled the enormous all-embracing censorship structure dealing with the press, radio, TV, international correspondence, films and theatre. Suslov’s past included a sordid spell of purge activity as well. He had purged Rostov in 1938, supervised the deportation of the Karachai ethnic group during the war, repressed the population in the Baltic republics after the war, and vigorously prosecuted the anti-Semitic campaign there.61 In The Complete Black Book, Il’ia Ehrenberg and Vasilii Grossman collected oral testimony and official documentation of events and institutions in the occupied Soviet Union and Eastern Poland to compile the most complete account of the Holocaust in these territories. Almost from the end of the war, it was considered inopportune to acknowledge local collaboration in the implementation of the Final Solution. The slogan ‘Do Not Divide the Dead!’ discouraged any recognition of the special suffering of the Jews during the war. Cold War considerations made it impolitic to dwell on the bestiality of the Germans. Although a version of the Black Book was completed and typeset, and a few galley proofs printed, the project for publication was abandoned in 1946 and never revived in the Soviet Union. Portions of The Black Book that survived were published variously from 1945 to 1981 and the Patterson edition of 2002 lays claim to being the most complete version.62 From 1988, liberal newspapers started publishing previously unknown war stories. Death was one of the first issues to be reassessed, so that by 1991, the number of war dead was estimated to have been considerably greater, perhaps twice as many as was formerly believed to have been the case.63 The British historian, Catherine Merridale, who taught in Russian schools and wrote an extremely powerful study of the Soviet war ‘from below’ called, Ivan’s War, noted that a 61Zhores A. Medvedev and Roy A. Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin. Translated by Ellen Dahrendorf, London and New York, 2003, 2006, 45–6, 51, 54; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, 557. 62Ilya Ehrenberg and Vasily Grossman, eds., The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewry, translated and edited by David Patterson, New Brunswick, NJ, 2002; review by John D. Klier, The Journal of Modern History, 76:3, September 2004, 741–3. 63Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia, London, 2001, 400.

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‘renewed interest in the Soviet Union’s war, shorn of much of the cant of the last half-century, is sparking new research, new conversations, new writing.’ Teaching history classes in Russian schools in 2001, she asked the students, teenagers, what historical subject they would most like to see revived and researched. ‘Without hesitation, they all mentioned the Second World War’.64 The truth about the massacre of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn forest in the Smolensk region during the war, that had been shrouded in an impenetrable blanket of secrecy and denial, and stained Soviet relations with Poland over decades, had to await the advent of glasnost’ for emergence into the light. It was not until 1990 that the USSR finally admitted responsibility for the execution of Polish officers in Katyn in the spring of 1940. In 1995, a Russian security spokesman revealed that 21,857 Polish soldiers had been murdered at three separate sites in the area by NKVD liquidation squads.65 In July 1941, when the Germans occupied Smolensk, one of the two NKVD officers who had been assigned to detonate explosives in the NKVD archive, had instead shot his partner and defected to the Germans, handing them the Smolensk NKVD archive intact.66 Documents in this archive testified to the execution of the Polish officers. In April 1943, the German Army uncovered the bodies of approximately 11,000 Polish army officers buried in a forest at Katyn, twelve kilometres from Smolensk. All had their hands bound behind their backs and had been shot in the head. A total of 22,000 Polish Army officers and intellectuals had been taken into Soviet custody during 1939 and 1940, all of them, subsequently executed by the 64Carherine

Merridale, Ivan’s War: The Red Army, London, 2005, 7–8. had published details of the massacre two years earlier; see his ‘Katyn’, Novoe russkoe slovo, 27 May 1988, 20. The first and most authoritative Soviet account was the book by N. Lebedeva, Katyn: prestuplenie protiv chelovechestva, Moscow, 1994. 66As American forces advanced into Germany in 1945, they removed the ‘Smolensk archive’ to the USA. In the 1950s, the US military granted exclusive access to Merle Fainsod, who wrote a trend-setting monograph, Smolensk under Soviet Rule (Cambridge, MA, 1958) on the structures of power and authority in the Soviet Union from material in this archive, of a single province, and added his mite, thereby, to a growing corpus of self-belief in Soviet totalitarianism. See also Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, ‘The Odyssey of the Smolensk Archive: Plundered Communist Records for the Service of Anti-Communism’, Carl Beck Occasional Papers in Russian and East European Studies, no. 1201, Pittsburg, PA, 1995. I have discussed the impact of this archive and the limiting nature of enquiry it spawned on local history in the Soviet Union in Chapter 4. 65A. Antonov-Ovseenko

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NKVD. The news of the execution was broadcast by Berlin radio on 3 April 1943 but two days later, Soviet radio accused the Germans of the massacre after the latter had occupied the Smolensk region in the summer of 1941. Stalin denied any knowledge of the murder and blamed the Germans after June 1941, although later archival disclosures proved that the massacre was the result of a Politburo decision, chaired by Stalin in March 1940. Churchill and Roosevelt accepted the Soviet denial in order to avoid a split in the Alliance. Members of the Nuremberg Nazi War Crimes Tribunal (November 1945 to October 1946) decided in July 1946 not to include the Katyn massacre in their record as part of the formal indictment of German war crimes, as Stalin had wished for, and the Americans and the British offered no challenge to the Soviet Union offering the ‘scientific’ evidence of German guilt. On 3 March 1959 the Chairman of the KGB, Shelepin, wrote to Khrushchev suggesting that ‘the records and other documents relating to the shooting of 21,857 Polish officers, gendarmes, police, settlers and others in 1940 should be destroyed. None of these files are of any operational interest to Soviet agencies, nor are they of historical value ... On the contrary, some unforeseen event might lead to the exposure of the operation with all the undesirable consequences for our state. Especially as the official version on the shooting of the Poles in Katyn forest is that it was done by the German Fascist invaders.’ Khrushchev preferred to keep the files classified. A joint commission of Soviet and Polish historians resolved to reveal the truth about this massacre and in February 1990 Soviet guilt was established in the press of that country. Two months later, on 14 April Gorbachev publicly stated that the Soviet regime had committed the atrocity. The inscription on the monument that was later erected at Katyn reads ‘Here were buried prisoners—officers of the Polish Army, who perished in horrible torment at the hands of German-Fascist occupiers in the fall of 1941’. Even in November 1988, when a memorial was being planned for the victims of Katyn, a Soviet official claimed that the Polish officers had been executed by the ‘fascists’. Eventually, as President of the USSR, Gorbachev, apologized to the President of Poland for the massacre in April 1990.67 Interestingly enough, even 67A Red Cross Commission examined the personal belongings of the officers and established that they were Polish officers from a Soviet camp in Kozetsk and had been murdered in the spring of 1940, more than a year before the German invasion. After the Red army recaptured the Katyn area in January 1944, the remains of 925 Polish

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in 1994 a school history textbook by A.A. Kreder completely ignored this massacre, and failed to mention Marshall Zhukov.68 Catherine Merridale’s Ivan’s War, an account of World War Two as experienced by Red Army soldiers at the front (frontoviki), is testimony to the opportunities for better use of military archives since the demise. In her stated quest for the ‘true Ivan’, the British and American term for Red Army soldiers, beneath the long-regnant images of heroic and self-effacing Red Army soldiers, she interviewed about 200 veterans. She also drew on letters and diaries of the frontoviki, substantial archival material published since the early 1990s, and material in central repositories in Moscow, Party and state archives in Kursk and Smolensk where some of the heaviest fighting occurred as well as material in the German military archive in Freiburg. Apart from having to overcome the problems of being, as Sheila Fitzpatrick put it in a review, ‘a foreign, female, middle-aged academic’, Merridale had to tease her interlocutors into overcoming their profound reluctance to dredge their memories on a subject as sensitive as the war. Even as Merridale uncovered evidence of the taut tensions between the official propaganda on the war and the brutalities that suffused soldiers’ lives, the frontiviki who talked to her retained ‘a sense of pride so powerful that few could see how thoroughly it disinherited them’. ‘Ivan’, of course, was personified in the eponymous hero, Private Vasily Tyorkin, in Aleksandr Tvardovskii’s poem. Ivan-Tyorkin ‘was an ideal everyman. He was simple, healthy, strong and kind, far-sighted, selfless and unafraid of death. He almost never dwelled upon the dark side of the war’. In fact, some sources indicate that this patriotic work was the most popular reading for ordinary Red officers from the Katyn forest were altered by the NKVD in Moscow—by equipping them with newspaper articles and forged diaries—in a manner that would suggest that the executions occurred after the German invasion of the area. Brackman, The Secret File, 358–9; Overy, Russia’s War, 295–6; Bradley Lightfoot, The Second World War: Ambitions to Nemesis, London, 2004, 202; Davies, Soviet History in theYeltsin Era, 45, 18–19. See also E.M. Thompson, ‘The Katyn Massacre and the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in the Soviet-Nazi Propaganda War’, in J. Garrard and C. Garrard, eds., World War 2 and the Soviet People, London, 1993, 220; Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire, 220–1; G.C. Malcher, Blank Pages: Soviet Genocide against the Polish People, Woking, UK, 1993, 35; E. Radzinsky, Stalin, London, 1996, 483. 68A.A. Kreder, Noveishaia istoriia, Moscow: Interpraks, 1994. For a comparison of the way the Second World War was treated in school history texts in Britain, the USA, France, Germany, Russia and Japan, see ‘Treatment of World War Two’, Journal of Social Studies Research, Winter 1999, http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles.

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Army soldiers during the war. This also happens to be the ‘Ivan’ that Merridale never found, for his existence was the product of the official mind.69 Vasilii Grossman had written a novel about the frontoviki, The People Immortal and courted disaster by chronicling the war in a series of notebooks; even discussing the war could invite punitive action, let alone keeping notebooks. His war diaries, from 1941–5, were first published in 1989 by his daughter Yekaterina Korotkova-Grossman in the collection Gody voiny. Antony Beevor, the British historian of both Stalingrad (1998) and Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002) translated and edited these notebooks with LiubaVinogradova.Written during the war by an enormously admired journalist, these episodes convey a flavour of raw immediacy that is unrivalled in the Soviet depiction of the Great Fatherland War, and are further testimony to the fruits of opening the archives.70 The Belorussian writer, Svetlana Alexievich, who also collected eye-witness accounts of the war, wrote in her foreward to the book by Anatoly Danilevich and Ella Maximova of Izvestiia, an edited collection of excerpts from thousands of letters sent to that newspaper from the late 1980s, that it is about the ‘proletariat of the war’. They were from soldiers who felt betrayed when they had to fight without weapons at the onset of the war (by February 1942, 250 Soviet soldiers had perished for every German combat death), from relatives who were stigmatized for decades because their sons were listed as ‘missing in action’, from nurses and doctors, and from Soviet soldiers who were captured by the Germans and then labeled disloyal soldiers. The majority of letters relate to events in 1941 and 1942, when the German offensive was surging forward.71 Very recently, the Russian Federation government authorized the Moscow firm,Terra, to publish an extensive series of archival documents 69Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945, NewYork and London, 2005. Useful reviews include those by Antony Beevor, ‘Facing up to the Horrors of the Past’, The Sunday Times, October 23, 2005; Anne Applebaum, ‘The Real Patriotic War’, NewYork Review of Books, 53: 6, April, 2006, 6–7; and Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Slogging through the Soviet Facts of War’, International Herald Tribune, 8–9 April 2006, 8. 70AWriter atWar:Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945, edited and translated by Antony Beevor and Liuba Vinogradova, New York, 2005. 71Anatoly Danilevich and Ella Maximova, Ia eto videl: novoe pisma o voine Moscow: Vremia, 2005; see also Kevin O’Flynn, ‘Uncensored Memories’, The Moscow Times, 6 May 2005.

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related to World War Two. However, while this series represents an important step forward, the production of new volumes has been lagging seriously, and later volumes are far less comprehensive and candid than their predecessors.72 The list of themes that featured as part of the impact of a greater openness in Soviet society is longer and must remain unexplored. One that deserves special mention, concerned as it is with the most inveterate critic of the Soviet regime, the only Old Bolshevik opponent of Stalin who was assassinated (rather than killed after a show trial) was Leon Trotsky (1879–1940). Trotsky provoked an anathema that was as groundless as it was fathomless. Trotsky studies flourished in the Gorbachev era as at no other time in the history of the USSR. Alongside Bukharin, he became the most talked about Old Bolshevik. The archive journal Istoricheskii arkhiv published some of his letters from exile in 1992, and the first full-length feature film on Trotsky was released in 1993. Studies on aspects of Trotsky’s life were not limited to academic journals, but appeared in youth magazines too. Vadim Rogovin’s Was There an Alternative? [to Trotskyism] was published in Moscow in 1992 and N.M. Nikulin published a book on Trotsky for Russian school children in 1993.73

Textbooks and Examinations This chapter opened with a statement of anguish by an adult Soviet citizen of how he was mentally reared on a false diet as a child and adolescent. It was inevitable that the reassessment, if not renovation, of the historical record of the Soviet Union, percolate down to Soviet school pupils, and this chapter closes with that theme. What was wrong with textbooks at the beginning of glasnost’? Since, as in India, most Soviet citizens do not study history beyond secondary school, the history curriculum furnished those who sought to shape the social environment with a final opportunity to present 72David M. Glantz, ‘Dissecting Hitler’ The Moscow Times, ‘This Week in Arts and Ideas’, 23 December 2005–12 January 2006. 73Ian D.Thatcher, ‘Trotsky Studies—After the Crash, a Brief Note’, paper presented to the Soviet Industrialisation Project Seminar, University of Birmingham, (SIPS/ CREES), January 1996, 1–4. See also his ‘Recent Writings on Leon Trotsky’, Coexistence, vol. 27, 1990, 141–67 and Idem., ‘Soviet Writings on Leon Trotsky: An Update’, Coexistence, vol. 29, 1992, 73–96.The book by N.M. Nikulin was L.D.Trotskii: Otstuplenie v istoriiu, Moscow: A.O. Vega, 1993, and the one by V. Rogovin was Byla li al’ternativa? Trotskizm: vzgliad cherez gody, Moscow: Terra, 1992.

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their own version of history and its lessons; the Soviet application of Marxism-Leninism strongly emphasized history’s didactic potential. To take the example of one textbook prepared in 1986 for the penultimate class in schools, the eleventh grade,74 Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries are said to have intentionally worked against the masses; Trotsky emerges not as a key revolutionary but rather as an opponent of the October Revolution; decrees on workers’ control and the nationalization of industry in 1917–18 are said to have been implemented without the severe difficulties they actually encountered; and socialism is declared victorious in 1937. Or, take another of 1988, covering 1941–86 for the tenth grade.75 It is above all, an uplifting chronicle of the nation’s economic and material achievements, and the treatment of the Second World War (86 out of 271 pages) is largely a paean to the heroics of the leadership; Stalin’s cult of personality (denounced more than 30 years before) appears as little more than the undesired by-product of the campaign against Trotsky. The section from 1960–86 (just 52 pages) barely mentions Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev.76 In a speech in October 1986 to heads of social science departments in schools, Gorbachev had called for the revision of academic lectures, textbooks and curricula in order to foster independent judgement and ‘creative thinking’.77 Responding to Gorbachev’s plea for a new history textbook that had to be ‘an honest, courageous and fascinating book, throwing light on the great and fascinating road traversed by the country and the party, the road of trailblazers.This book must not be shy of the drama of certain events and some individuals’ destinies. It must be free of blank spaces, subjectivist pros and cons and opportunism’, the Union Ministry of Higher and Specialized Secondary Education launched an open competition for a new textbook on the history of the CPSU in July 1988. It also insisted that school examinees should have the unconditional right ‘to express their own well-grounded opinion, which may not coincide with the opinion of the teacher or of the authors of the present textbooks’.78 74Iu. S. Kukushkin, Iu. I Korablev, I.A. Fedosov, V.P. Sherstobitov, Istoriia SSSR: Uchebnik dlia deviatogo klassa srednei shkoly, Moscow, 1986. 75Iu. S. Kukushkin, V.D. Esakov, A.P. Narenkov, Istoriia SSSR: Uchebnik dlia desiatogo klassa srednei shkoly, Moscow, 1988. 76William B. Husband, ‘Secondary School History Texts in the USSR: Revising the Soviet Past, 1985–1989’, The Russian Review, vol. 50, October 1991, 477. 77Sherlock, Problems of Communism, May–August 1988, 22. 78The Moscow News, 19 July 1988; Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era, 120.

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G.V. Klokova, the head of the Laboratory for History Education of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, had demanded history textbooks to be ‘free from dogmatism and schematism’ in March 1987. This was echoed and amplified at a seminar held by the Moscow City Party Committee for teachers of Party history. Dr Nikolai Maslov, head of the Department of Party History at the Academy of Social Sciences in Moscow and someone who was closely involved in the preparation of the new texts, identified several negative features of Soviet social science—dogmatism, scholasticism, the near-complete absence of ‘images of living people’, tendentiousness, and a certain one-sidedness in the assessment of many periods in history. He suggested that several (‘systems’) texts, rather than a single one, representing different views, be used, with all texts scrubbed clean of four dogmas: (i) that of the ‘non-conflicting’ development of the Party as a procession of victories and thus as a distortion of the truth, (ii) that any historical personality who had made any sort of political error was a primordial opponent of Lenin and Stalin, (iii) that the leading role of the Party had been growing steadily, nearly automatically, all the time, (iv) that all Party documents are one hundred per cent true; this dogma was impeding an objective study of party history.79 Soviet authorities acknowledged that the former official treatment of Soviet history, especially of Stalinism, had become so corrupted and debased as to be meaningless. This averment was implicit in the decision of the State Committee on Public Education in May 1988 to pulp school textbooks on the history of the USSR and to cancel the secondary school history and social science exams in 1988 for the final two classes, during which the history of the Soviet period is introduced, until more satisfactory textbooks could be prepared. The front-page article in Izvestiia that announced the cancellation of the exam described the level of instruction as being so poor that ‘even the best and most inquisitive teachers presented the history of our homeland in a monstrously distorted and unrecognizable form’. In these circumstances, the cancellation of the exams and concomitant reassessment of texts, it went on, constituted ‘a victory of common sense and ordinary conscientiousness’. Iurii Afanas’ev was even more scathing when he was quoted as saying: “I can give you my assurance 79Husband, The Russian Review, October 1991, 472 citing Nikolai N. Maslov, ‘The Documents of the CPSU as Historical Sources’, Voprosy istorii KPSS, July 1987, 152; The Moscow News, 19 July 1987.

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that there is not a single page without a falsification. It is immoral for young people to take exams based on such a textbook.” The examination was replaced by an ungraded individual interview or ‘free conversation’ conducted by the teacher, and pupils were given a grade based not on this interview, but on their work during the year. The same Committee later reported that the interviews had revealed both the greater interest in history on the part of the pupils than expected and that the pupils’ opinion frequently differed from that of the teacher. The writer in Izvestiia had suggested that in the period pending the appearance of a new textbook(s), an agreed set of articles by historians and economists could be circulated, but went on to add: ‘Only one thing is important. To have school books from which you can learn and teach without lying’. In May 1988 Soviet television ran a newsreel film of one of Stalin’s show-trials of the 1930s. In November 1988 the State Committee on Public Education and the State Publishing Committee announced a competition for the creation of new syllabi and texts on the history of the USSR in the twentieth century for use in the final two classes of secondary school, with a deadline set for 1 December 1990.80 When history examinations for the senior classes were reinstated after a new textbook on Soviet history of the 1900–41 period appeared in September 1989, the Ministry of Education sent instructions to schools that students ought to be permitted to express opinions that were at variance with the teacher and the textbook. Students had to, however, strengthen their opinions with the relevant facts and arguments. A year before the demise, a new history textbook provided information not only about the GULAG and the failings of Soviet leaders from Stalin onwards but included excerpts from a letter sent to the Soviet leadership by Andrei Sakharov in the early 1970s.81

80Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution, 183; Robert Cornwell in The Independent, 11 June 1988, p. 1; Husband, The Russian Review, October 1991, 460, 471; Izvestiia, 10 June 1988. 81Benn, From Glasnost to Freedom of Speech, 47; Tatyana Volodina, ‘Teaching History in Russia After the Collapse of the USSR’, The History Teacher, 38:2, February 2005, 179–88; George M. Enteen, ‘Problems of CPSU Historiography’, Problems of Communism, 38: 5, September–October 1989, 73. For the film on the show-trials, see Pravda, 17 May 1988. The school textbook published in 1990 was by V.P. Ostrovskii, et al., Istoriia SSSR: Uchebnik dlia 11 klassa srednei shkoly, Moscow: Prosveshchenie, 1990. It was described as a ‘temporary, transitional textbook’, and the edition ran to 2,905,000 copies. Benn, From Glasnost, 47 and n. 7, p. 101.

3

Histories of the Communist Party as Histories of the Soviet Union

‘Paper will put up with anything that is written on it.’ —Joseph Stalin in Marxism and the National Question

HISTORIES OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF THE SOVIET UNION PLAYED A ROLE

that was so distinctive as to be arguably unique. They were intended to serve as master narratives within which all that was permissibly knowable, doctrinally reliable, and pedagogically suitable was to be condensed. They were also to inspire imitation and serve as the touchstone for research into the history of the Soviet Union during the 70 years that linked the revolution with the inauguration of the policies collectively termed glasnost’. Leonard Schapiro, the British historian of The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, wrote in 1970 that ‘Stalin’s most important achievement in effecting control over thought was in the writing of party history’. This chapter intends to probe and test the practice of Party histories serving as histories of all of the evolving patterns of Soviet society as well, by studying the two most influential histories of the Party, 383 pages of The Short Course on the History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolshevik), 19381 and 1Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, second edition, revised and enlarged, London, 1970, 475; History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, edited by a Commission of the C.C. The C.P.S.U. (B.), Bombay, 1943, translated from Kommissia TsK VKP(b), Istoriia Vsesoiuznoi

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761 pages of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Second Revised edition, 1962.2 A Commission on the History of the October Revolution and the History of the Communist Party, (Komissia po istorii oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii i istorii partii, hereafter Istpart), was founded in September 1920 in the thick of the Civil War. It came directly under the authority of the Party Central Committee, with M.S. Olminskii, a senior Party historian as its first Director. Emilian Iaroslavskii, his successor, subsequently the author of several histories of the Party, led the group of historians who worked on the first post-revolutionary history of the Party. Its eponymous function was the collection and publication Kommunisticheskoi Partii (bolshevikov): kratkyi kurs, pod redaktsiei komissii TsK VKP(b), odobren TsK VKP(b), Moscow, 1938 god. All references to this book are from this edition. Hereafter, this text will be referred to as Short Course. The name of the party was changed to ‘Communist Party (b)—(Bolsheviks)’ at the Seventh Party Congress in March 1918. The Indian publishers of the Short Course, the Communist Party-run People’s Publishing House in Bombay waxed lyrical about the book: ‘It is meant for all—Communists, Democrats, Patriots—all who have the freedom and happiness of mankind at heart.The story it tells will inspire all those who are struggling against oppression and slavery ... it will always be a beacon of humanity’s onward march to freedom and life abundant.’ The back flap then clocked its publishing strides: the epic was translated into all the languages of the USSR and 19 non-Soviet languages. In 1950, Pravda extolled it as ‘the book that has sold more copies than any other in modern times, the work of a genius, The Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, by Joseph Stalin’. Bertram D. Wolfe, ‘Party Histories from Lenin to Khrushchev’, in John Keep and Liliana Brisby, eds. Contemporary History in the Soviet Mirror, New York and London, 1964, 50, n.1, p. 50; several years earlier, in 1952, Wolfe had described the Short Course as ‘the greatest, dullest and most mendacious best seller in the history of literature’. See Bertram D. Wolfe, ‘Operation Rewrite; The Agony of Soviet Historians’, Foreign Affairs, XXXI, October 1952, 47. The Italian scholar, Paulo Spriano, noted that its circulation dwarfed that of the Communist Manifesto, but paled before that of Mao Tse-Tung’s Red Book. Robert Service, A History of Modern Russia from Nicholas II to Putin, London, 2003, 237, citing Paulo Spriano, Stalin and the European Communists, London, 1985; Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, Harmondsworth, 1966, 378–9. 2History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, second, revised edition, translated from Istoriia Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza and edited by Andrew Rothstein and Clemens Dutt, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d. All references to this book are from this edition. Hereafter, this text will be referred to as Party History. This history was prepared by a group of authors headed by Academician B.N. Ponomarov. The ten other members were V.M. Khvostov, A.P. Kuchkin, Academician I.I. Mints, L.A. Slepov, A.I. Sobolev, B.S.Telpukhovskii, Professor A.A.Timofeyevskii, M.S.Volin, Professor I.M.Volkhov andV.S. Zaitsev.The name of the party was changed to Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 1952.

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of materials concerning Party history. In this capacity, it published the first edition of Lenin’s Collected Works in 20 volumes between 1920–6. It also reissued old Party newspapers and the protocols of Party Congresses besides publishing many personal reminiscences of the revolutionary movement, chiefly in its journals Proletarskaia revoliutsiia and Istoricheskii zhurnal istparta. An extensive network of Istpart branches attached to local Party committees was created to assist in the work of collecting materials and to popularize Party history. These branches numbered 100 by 1928. Istpart, however, did not enjoy a high reputation in academic circles. The pre-revolutionary journal Byloie (‘The Past’, founded in 1906–7), devoted to the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia, and edited by Paul Shchegolev during the NEP, had ceased publication during the war but resumed again in the summer of 1917 when Shchegolev headed a commission to investigate the tsarist Okhrana (secret police) archives.3 The NEP is justly renowned for the robust vibrancy of debate on a range of subjects that included economics, political theory and the arts, and for our purposes, the history of Social Democracy in imperial Russia. Among the many such accounts, those by V. Nevskii, N. Sergievskii and Lev Deich have been singled out to communicate the divergent manner in which many of the stalwarts of the movement, and the groups they founded, were recalled two or three decades after their heyday. V. Nevskii was a veteran Bolshevik leader, a member of the first Soviet government of 1917 and had won a central position in Party historiography for having written two histories of the Party, published in 1925 and 1926. His history of the revolutionary movement, published in 1925, was regarded as the most influential such history of the 1920s by one scholar of the subject. His approach was more influenced by Lenin than the domineering Pokrovskii. For Nevskii, as for Plekhanov and Lenin, the emergence of Marxist ideology in Russia was heralded by Plekhanov’s Social Democratic activity in 1883–4. His periodization of revolutionary history followed closely 3John Barber, Soviet Historians in Crisis, 1928–1932, London and Basingstoke, 1981, 16, 28; A. Presniakov, ‘Historical Research in Russia During the Revolutionary Crisis’, The American Historical Review, 28: 2, January 1923, 252–3. M.S. Olminskii was Director of Istpart from its creation in 1920 until 1924, and from then, Chairman of its council. He also founded and was an editor of the Istpart journal Proletarskaia revoliutsiia. Paul H. Aron, ‘M.N. Pokrovskii and the Impact of the First Five-Year Plan on Soviet Historiography’, in John Shelton Curtiss, ed., Essays in Russian and Soviet History in Honor of Geroid Tanquary Robinson, New York, 1963, 286.

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on Lenin’s, taking the development of the industrial proletariat rather than the evolution of the revolutionary intelligentsia as the touchstone. Also, like both Plekhanov and Pokrovskii, he accepted that the Group for the Emancipation of Labour had developed logically out of the populist organization Chernyi peredel or Black Repartition, while Narodnaia volia had deviated from the socialist path. Nevertheless, at the same time, Nevskii lavished attention on the other strand of the Marxist intelligentsia, the praktiki, (the activists, as opposed to the theorists) who throughout the 1880s and the early 1890s fought within Russia itself to make contact with the proletariat. His history was stridently criticized for overstating the part played by certain individuals and thus neglecting the underlying socio-economic forces. One critic, Baturin, argued that Nevskii had disparaged the view that Plekhanov had totally dominated the movement in the 1880s and that Lenin alone had blazed the trail in the 1890s.4 As Director of the Historical Revolutionary Archive in Leningrad in the mid-1920s, N. Sergievskii published a number of studies of revolutionaries he called ‘native Marxists’, or members of groups at work within Russia in the 1880s. He published a mass of valuable material from the archives and sought to show that Marxism had, to a large extent, developed within Russia independently of the Group for the Emancipation of Labour. His work was like that of Nevskii, but he went much further in that he saw Marxism as the emergence of a totally new ideology, the ideology of the emergent class of the proletariat.5 Those most eager to uphold the traditional view of the Party’s origins were not necessarily highly placed Bolsheviks; they were determined to defend the role and ideas of Plekhanov from his Soviet detractors.Thus, Lev Deich (a non-Bolshevik and a founding member of the Group for the Emancipation of Labour) defended his old comrade against all and sundry.To him, and to V.Vaganian, Plekhanov was not just the father of Russian Marxism but the man whose ideas had inspired the entire movement, its most original thinker and philosopher. Deich castigated Nevskii and Sergievskii’s attempts to show that Marxist groups had grown up in Russia independently of 4Jonathan

Frankel, ‘Party Genealogy and the Soviet Historians (1920–1938)’, Slavic Review, 25: 4, December 1966, 572, 580–2 citing V. Nevskii, Ocherki po istorii Rossiiskoi Kommunisticheskoi Partii, second edition, I, Leningrad, 1925; Idem., Istoriia RKP(b). Kratskii ocherk, Leningrad, 1926. 5Frankel, Slavic Review, December 1966, 573, citing, N. Sergievskii, ‘Gruppa Osvobozhedenie truda i marksistkie kruzhki’, in V.Nevskii, ed., Istoriko-revoliutsionyi sbornik, II, Leningrad, 1924, 86–167.

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Plekhanov’s Group for the Emancipation of Labour abroad. He insisted that the first Social Democratic groups in Russia had evolved towards Marxism under the direct influence of the Group for the Emancipation of Labour. Vaganian’s biography of Plekhanov, that portrayed Lenin as a brilliant pupil rather than as a truly original thinker, provoked attack in the Party’s leading ideological journal Bolshevik. Any weakening of the Lenin cult then could, of course, only be to the advantage of Trotsky.6 The year 1923 marks a watershed in the writing of histories of the Party, a year that Trotsky was to remember much later as ‘the first year of the intense but still silent stifling and routing of the Bolshevik party ... a fight [by the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev] against the ideological legacy of Lenin’. The struggle between the triumvirs and Trotsky over the histories of the Party and revolution was later euphemistically referred to as ‘the literary debate’. Trotsky was berated for his ambiguous line of ‘no war, no peace’ in BrestLitovsk in 1918, his advocacy of subsuming the trade unions within the state in 1920, and as an enemy of the peasants. The master heresy was, however, Trotsky’s idea of the Permanent Revolution, which the Party had implemented in October 1917, and his essays on the subject had been published in the country. Stalin responded in 1924 to the notion of Permanent Revolution, by advancing the theory of Socialism in One Country, which countered Trotsky’s claim that the prospects for socialism in the Soviet Union ultimately depended on revolutions abroad by asserting the self-sufficiency of the country in building socialism. The falsifications that were strewn through the Short Course made an early entry in Stalin’s contribution to Za Leninizm (‘For Leninism’), in which he wrote that the October uprising had been directed by a ‘Centre’, of which Stalin not Trotsky was a member, and not, as history till then had unexceptionally recorded, by the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC) of the Petrograd Soviet, headed by Trotsky.Trotsky ‘had played no special role’ in the October Revolution, although as an agent of the Central Committee, he ‘did fight well’. Earlier, on the first anniversary of the revolution in 1918, Stalin had written: ‘The entire work of the practical organization of the uprising was 6Frankel,

Slavic Review, December 1966, 576–9, citing L.G. Deich, Gruppa ‘Osvobozhdenie Truda’ iz arkhivov G.V. Plekhanova, i Zasulich i L.G. Deicha, Moscow, 1924.

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carried on under the immediate direction of the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Comrade Trotsky. One may state without hesitation that the party was indebted first and foremost to Comrade Trotsky for the garrison’s prompt going over to the Soviet and for the able organization of the work of the Military Revolutionary Committee.’7 By 1924, less than one per cent of Party members had been in the Party in 1917, and as Isaac Deutscher explains, to them ‘the revolution was already a myth as vague as it was heroic. The earlier political struggles with all their tangled alignments appeared even more remote and unreal’. Deutscher brilliantly foregrounds the degrading of the Soviet historical past with his customary verve: ‘Thus that prodigious falsification of history was started which was presently to descend like a destructive avalanche upon Russia’s intellectual horizons: it began as a mere attempt to bolster the reputations of Zinoviev and Kamenev ... [but] in 1924 most of the future victims of the falsification were united in a frantic effort to cast Trotsky into the shadows.’8 Zinoviev delivered six lectures on ‘The History of the Communist Party of Russia (Bolsheviks)’ (up to February 1917) in 1923, in which he described Trotsky’s many disagreements with Lenin, and Stalin published a collection of his own articles written in 1917. Isaac Deutscher characterizes Trotsky’s interpretation of the Party’s history in a collection of essays, 1917, prefaced by an introduction entitled, ‘The Lessons of October’ as one ‘which not merely vindicated him [as leader of the October insurrection], but also impugned the records of most of his assailants [especially those of Zinoviev and Kamenev in opposing the insurrection in October 1917]’. Implementing a Central Committee decision, the state publisher, Gosizdat, published a multi-volume edition of Trotsky’s Works in 1924, which contained his speeches and writings of 1917; The Lessons of October was the preface. Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev, the triumvirs, organized vituperatively crafted responses to The Lessons of October by themselves 7On 21 October 1917, a conference of the regimental committees of the capital officially recognized the MRC as the supreme authority over the Petrograd garrison, and on 23 October, the MRC appointed its commissars with almost every detachment stationed in and around the capital. Stalin was not on the Committee. See Isaac Deutscher, Stalin:A Political Biography, Harmondsworth, 1968, 91; Leon Trotsky, My Life:An Attempt at an Autobiography, with an introduction by Joseph Hanson, New York, 1970, 231. 8Trotsky, My Life, 488; Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed.Trotsky: 1921–1929, New York, 1965, II: 152–5; For Stalin’s essay see I.V. Stalin, Sochineniia, VI: 324–31.

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and by others like Bukharin, Rykov, Sokolnikov, Krupskaia (!), Molotov and Bubnov, as well as foreign Communist writers like Kviring and Kuusinen to be gathered in Za Leninizm.9 In The Lessons of October (October 1924) Trotsky rehearsed the roles of Zinoviev and Kamenev in the 1917 ‘October episode’ and recalled that Lenin had called them ‘strikebreakers of the revolution’. The major theme was his theory of Permanent Revolution, according to which the October Revolution was only the first in a series of forthcoming revolutionary upheavals elsewhere in the world. The theory was not new: Lenin and most Bolsheviks were convinced that socialism could not win in Russia without victorious revolutions in other countries, and were disappointed that the revolutions in Germany and Hungary had suffered defeat. Replying to Trotsky in his On the Road to October and in Pravda, Stalin wrote: ‘I must say that Trotsky did not play any special role in the October rising, nor could he do so—being chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he merely carried out the will of the appropriate bodies, which directed every step that Trotsky took’. If one volte-face was prompted by the exigencies of the power struggle, that pitted the triumvirs against a popular but increasingly hapless Trotsky, another about-turn was dictated by the need to confront Trotsky on the theoretical-strategic plane. In a pamphlet titled Foundations of Leninism published in early 1924, Stalin stated that socialism could not be built in one country before the victory of revolutions in other countries. But his opinion underwent a sudden change a few months later when he published another pamphlet, entitled Problems of Leninism, in which he introduced his new theory of ‘building socialism in one country, taken separately’. The essence of Stalin’s new theory was that even if other countries did not follow the Russian example, the Russian people alone could go on building socialism. A moment would come, Stalin argued, when the other countries would join the world revolution.Trotsky interpreted Stalin’s theory as a ‘conservative nationalist deviation from Bolshevism’.10 9Deutscher, The

Prophet Unarmed, 151, note 1, p. 154; Deutscher, Stalin, 281–2. of Leninism was the title under which a series of lectures delivered by Stalin at the Communist University named after Sverdlov in Moscow was published. Leonard Schapiro considers this text as ‘the first canon on Stalinist orthodoxy’. Schapiro, The Communist Party, n.2, p. 286. The military historian, General Dmitri Volkogonov, wrote in a similar vein: ‘Stalin became a theorist by writing commentaries and exegeses of Lenin. The two most characteristic of these are Foundations of Leninism and Questions of Leninism. This was the ideological fodder that fed millions of people 10Foundations

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From 1923 until 1938, when Stalin ordered and edited The Short Course, waging intra-Party warfare was the main function of producing Party histories. Those who wrote Party histories had to weigh every line not merely as a justification for the Bolsheviks against the world, but with greater care, as a justification of the ‘true’ Bolsheviks against the ‘deviator’ Bolsheviks, who in due course would turn out to be anti-Bolshevik enemies within the Party. Scholarly works on the history of the Party until 1931 were usually written by individuals who ‘however strong their pro-Bolshevik bias, nevertheless usually retained some respect for the facts’. In his The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Schapiro considered much of this work to have been ‘of value, and some of it outstanding’.11 revolution: socialism-imperialism; friend-enemy; white-black’. In the 130 pages that comprised these two books, ‘Stalin managed to compress the whole of Lenin ... He at least deserves credit for his ability to simplify and abridge the most complex issues into short, telegraphic phrases. But he did so not to make them more accessible, but because that was the way he thought: in schematic, binary terms’. See Dmitri Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire:The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime, New York, 1998, 96–8. See also Roman Brackman, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life, London and Portland, Oregon:, 2001, 184, citing Lev Trotsky, Stalin, New York, 1941, 376. 11Voprosy’ istorii KPSS, in its editorial, ‘Towards a New Upsurge of the Science of Party History’, No. 5, 1960, recognizes the following as ‘scientific works and systematized textbooks of party history’ which in their time represented ‘significant material ... but contained many methodological and theoretical errors’; A.S. Bubnov, Fundamental Problems of the History of the RKP, 1924;V.I. Nevskii, Outlines of the History of the Russian Communist Party, Part 1, 1923 (there was no second part; the published part was scrapped and in 1925 he started again); N.N. Popov, Outlines of the History of the AllUnion Communist Party, from 1925 to 1935, 16 editions; V.I. Nevskii, History of the RKP(b), Short Outline, 1925 and 1926; Em. Iaroslavskii, Short Outlines of the History of theVKP(b), Part 1, 1926, no second part; Em. Iaroslavskii, Ocherkii po istoriiVKP(b), 3rd edition, M, 1937. He kept writing histories which kept disappearing in favour of new histories by the same Iaroslavskii, so that by now no bibliographer can decipher how many Iaroslavskii histories there really were and what happened to them; a collective work under the editorship of Iaroslavskii, History of the All-Union Communist Party, I, 1926, II-IV, 1929–30; P.M. Kerzhentsev, Pages of the History of the RKP( b), 1925; D.I. Kardashev, Fundamental Historic Stages and Development of theVKP, 1927; History of theVKP(b) in Congresses, edited by P.N. Lepeshinskii, 1927; A.S. Bubnov, VKP(b), in two volumes; Em. Iaroslavskii, History of the VKP(b), Parts I-II, 1933 (reissued until 1938); Short History of the VKP(b), edited by V. Knorin; History of the VKP(b), Short Course under the editorship of a commission of the CC of the VKP(b), 1938. Wolfe, ‘Party Histories, in Keep, ed., Contemporary History in the Soviet Mirror, n.2, p. 47, 47–9; Schapiro, The Communist Party, 475. Trotsky, against whom Iaroslavskii nursed a deep animus, returned the favour by writing of Iaroslavskii, ‘As the official corrupter of the history of the party, he represents the past as an unbroken struggle of Trotsky against Lenin’. Trotsky, My Life, 492.

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For the next decade, Party historiography experienced constantly worsening crises. Histories succeeded one another at a faster and faster rate, even as each of these histories and cycles of histories had been entrusted to its respective authors by Stalin as weapons in his struggles with Trotsky, then the former triumvirs, and finally with the ‘right-opportunist’ Bukharin. In an essay in 1952 that described how an ‘Operation Rewrite’ had caused ‘the agony of Soviet historians’, Bertram D. Wolfe, no Cold Warrior, wrote that ‘Histories succeed each other as if they are being consumed by a giant chain smoker who lights the first volume of the new work with the last of the old. Historians appear, disappear and reappear; others vanish without a trace’. Each of the histories was designed to belittle Stalin’s opponents or annihilate them. In despair at the mediocrity of these efforts of his faithful minion, Stalin ordered V. Knorin, an Old Bolshevik of Lettish origin, ‘who’, as Bertram Wolfe acidly puts it, ‘was not even on speaking terms with Clio’, to assemble a kollektiv of pliable Red Professors to write the definitive Party history. The collective was formed under the group leadership (rukovoditel) of B. N. Ponomarev. Published in 1935, Knorin’s History proved to be as short-lived as its predecessors. In 1937, its editor was arrested, accused of ‘nationalist deviation’, tortured, forced to confess that he had been a tsarist agent first, then an agent of the Gestapo. He was shot within a year.12 For several years the competing and conflicting versions of Party history had rapidly met oblivion not only because of the elevation and removal of important figures, but also because they were written in the absence of any guideline as to the substance of a history of the Party acceptable to Stalin. Several of them had earned Central Committee approval and their authors and editors, like Nikolai Popov, Emelian Iaroslavskii and Andrei Bubnov, had earned large royalties only to find that their histories were later proscribed.13 Emelian Iaroslavskii was a force to be reckoned with: his stature rivaled, if not exceeded, that of Mikhail Pokrovskii. An Old Bolshevik, he had been Secretary of the Central Control Commission of the Party, the head of Istpart and a member of the editorial boards of Pravda, Izvestiia and Bol’shevik, and like Pokrovskii, of Istorik Marksist 12Bertram D. Wolfe, ‘Operation Rewrite: The Agony of Soviet Historians’, Foreign Affairs, 31, October 1952, 39. 13Alexander Dallin, ‘Recent Soviet Historiography’ in Abraham Brumberg, ed., Russia under Khrushchev: An Anthology from Problems of Communism, New York, 1962, 474.

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(the journal of the Society of Marxist Historians) since 1923. Crucially, he was chief editor of four substantial volumes on the history of the Party, published between 1926–30, and played an important role in the governing bureau of a new section of SMH that dealt with Party history (and Leninism and the Comintern). Stalin found a ‘number of errors in matters of principle and history’ in all the histories that the section produced. Iaroslavskii never discovered what these were, from Stalin or anybody else. Andrei Bubnov held responsible posts in the Party and state, as a member of the Orgburo of the Central Committee, and RSFSR Commissar of Education, in which capacity his role in the creation of a new history textbook for schools has been discussed in the first chapter.14 Stalin’s name was largely absent from the authoritative Party histories of the mid-1920s. In his history of the Party from it’s founding to the death of Lenin in 1924, Bubnov made no mention of Stalin, while he entered Nevskii’s pioneering history only in passing. In his Secret Speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, Khrushchev recalled Stalin’s anonymity at the time he was already General Secretary of the Party: ‘I will probably not sin against the truth when I say that ninety-nine per cent of the persons present here heard and knew very little about Stalin before the year 1924 ...’ A single official statement, a definitive history of the Party, was required by the mid-1930s, when as Robert Service puts it, ‘unflinching orthodoxy was a matter of life and death’.15 This intention was enunciated in a Central Committee decree of 14 November 1938, ‘On the Conduct of Party Propaganda in Connection with the issuance of IstoriiaVsesoiuznoi Kommunisticheskii Partii (Bolshevikov)’. Kratkii Kurs or The Short Course on the History 14George M. Enteen, ‘Marxist Historians during the Cultural Revolution: A Case Study of Professional In-fighting’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, Bloomington, Ind., 1978, 160; John L. H. Keep, ‘The Rehabilitation of M.N. Pokrovskii’, in Alexander and Janet Rabinowitch with Ladis K.D. Kristof, eds., Revolution and Politics in Russia: Essays in Memory of B.I. Nikolaevsky, Bloomington and London, 1972, 298; John Barber, ‘Stalin’s Letter to the Editors of Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya’, Soviet Studies, 28: 1, January 1976, n.6, p. 21; Iaroslavskii, et al., eds., IstoriiaVKP(b), four volumes, Moscow, 1926–30; A. Bubnov, Osnovnye voprosy istorii R.K.P. Sbornik statei, Moscow, 1924. 15Robert C. Tucker, ‘Stalin’s Revolutionary Career Before 1917’, in Rabinowitch et al., eds., Revolution and Politics in Russia, 157. Khrushchev is quoted from N.S. Khrushchev, The Crimes of the Stalin Era: Special Report to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, New York, 1962, p. S57; Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography, London, 2005, 361

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of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks), which stated the purposes that would be served by a fresh text will pellucid clarity: ‘... to provide unified leadership regarding the history of the Party, leadership representing the official interpretation of the main questions of the history of the Communist Party and of Marxism-Leninism as validated by the Central Committee, one that does not permit any arbitrary interpretation. [Its publication] ends all arbitrariness and confusion in the presentation of Party history and eliminates the plethora of different viewpoints and arbitrary interpretations of the most important questions of Party theory and history that we have seen in numerous earlier textbooks on Party history’. The Short Course was to be accepted, accordingly, as the first accurate and ideologically sound history of the Party, and all previous histories of the Party were withdrawn from circulation after its appearance in 1938.16 There was an intense process of educating Party members in ‘Leninism’ and the history of the Party during the NEP; by 1927–8 more than three quarters of a million members were enrolled in 40,000 Party schools. During the purge of 1936–8 the vast network of Party schools (there were four and a half million students in the schools in 1934) appears to have been very largely closed down. With the publication of the Short Course, an entirely new system of Party schools at all levels was established and their main activity was to consist of studying the Short Course. And not just there, the Short Course and texts like the ‘brief biography’ of Stalin were meant for obligatory reading in schools and universities, and formed part of the vast number of courses prepared by the Agitprop Department of the Party and the Komsomol. Schapiro’s assessment of the enduring potency of the Short Course merits substantial quoting: ‘As a means of propaganda it could scarcely have been excelled. It became the basis for the training of a generation of Communists who, little tempted to think for themselves, need never be at a loss for the official answer to every problem. No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring 16R.G. Pikhoia, ‘Certain Aspects of the “Historiographical Crisis”, or the “Unpredictability of the Past”’, Russian Social Science Review, 43:2, March-April 2002, citing ‘O postanovskoi partiinoi propagandy v sviazi v vypuskom Kratkogo kursa istorii VKP(b)’, in Propaganda i agitatsiia, 365–81. See also Schapiro, The Communist Party, 476; Bertram D. Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History, Harmondsworth, 1966, 296.

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dissonance. Apparently it had proved easier for a totalitarian power to control men’s tongues and actions than to gain dominion over their minds’. Indeed, a case can be made for the proposition that the Short Course, and Stalin-approved biographies of himself (that reduced the genre of the biography to the lowest common denominator of historicism) operated as domostroy, or manuals for legitimation (the Short Course) and aggrandizement (the biography).17 From then, and for the rest of the lifespan of the Soviet Union, if anything embodied the subordination of history to politics it was the exalted status of the textbook Party history; it was this that established the framework of conformity for all other historical writing. M.M. Khataevich, Party Secretary of Dnepropetrovsk, had expressed a wish for ‘a book of our own, in place of the Bible’ to provide answers to most problems. Since he perished in the Terror, he was unable to judge whether his wish had been granted. The living believed it had, for even as the Short Course was sacralized, it was placed beyond criticism. In November 1938, the Central Committee declared that the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, whose main authors were G.V. Knorin, E.M. Iaroslavskii and P.N. Pospelov, with Stalin himself contributing a chapter on dialectical materialism and editing the entire text five times, was the only ‘official’ guide to Marxism-Leninism and the bible of Party history, thereby prohibiting any ‘arbitrary interpretations’ of these fundamental questions.The Short Course was described in the following unctuously hagiographic terms in Stalin’s Short Biography: ‘The Short Course... contains an exposition of genius, in the clearest and most compact form, of the foundations of dialectical and historical materialism, and is a genuine peak of Marxist-Leninist philosophical thought’.The journal of the historical discipline, Voprosy istorii, limned its virtues eloquently: ‘In this excellent work of Stalin, the historians found a classic formulation of the methodology of history ... the Short Course became for historians a model scientific work in which rich factual material is combined with deep Marxist analysis, a high theoretical level with simplicity and accessibility of presentation.’18 17Stalin’s ‘brief biography’ was first published in 1939, with a print-run of more than four million, as I.V. Stalin: kratkaia biografiia, Moscow 1939. The print run for the second edition, G.F. Alexandrov, et al., comps., I.V. Stalin: Kratkaia biografiia: 2. izd., ispravlennoe I dopolnennoe, Moscow 1947, ran to over thirteen million. Schapiro, The Communist Party, 347, 477. 18Konstantin F. Shteppa, Russian Historians and the Soviet State, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1962, 227, citing Voposy istorii, No. 12, 1948; Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire, 140, citing IosifVissarionovich Stalin: Kratkaia Biografiia, Moscow 1951, 164, 165.

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Over the next 20 years, 50 million copies of the Short Course were published, despite the war and shortages of paper. The release of the Short Course was repeatedly postponed as the Purges necessitated the removal of the names of ‘un-persons’ from its pages, not only from the narrative, but from the editorial board of the book as well. It was eventually launched by an elaborate decree of the Central Committee on 14 November 1938. This made it abundantly clear that the new textbook was not only to be the basis of all political education, but was to become the only source of propaganda to the exclusion of all others, and in particular, to the exclusion of primary sources.19 The Short Course reduced Soviet history to Party history and it reduced Party history to the struggle against ‘opportunism’ of every shade. Logically one might expect the history of a (the) Party to be the history of a political instrument of control; but the Short Course contained no analysis of the growth, development, or variations in the methods of control. Its teleological rendering of history, in which Soviet socialism was the only lawful culmination of the long march of humankind, fulfilled the role of what Isaac Deutscher once called ‘primitive magic’, the ‘transmigration of political souls’ from Lenin to Stalin, as it elaborated the demonology of ‘Trotskyite-wreckers’, or as he expanded on this theme, ‘Under Stalin, the story of Bolshevism came to be rewritten in terms of sorcery and magic, with Lenin and Stalin as the chief totems. In the tribal cult there can be no graver sin than to offend the totem; and so in the Stalin cult whoever had at any time disagreed or quarreled with Lenin was guilty of sacrilege’.20 Khrushchev began his denunciation of the Short Course at the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956 by pointing out that the book was ‘permeated with the cult of the individual’. Given that it 19 David Brandenberger, ‘from proletarian internationalism to populist russocentrism: thinking about ideology in the 1930s as more than just a ‘Great Retreat’’, internet edition, http://nationalism.org.librar y/science/ideology/brandenberger/ brandenberger-havighurst.pdf, p.14; Leonard Schapiro, ‘Continuity and Change in the New History of the CPSU,’ in Keep, ed., Contemporary History, 71–2. 20Roger D. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia:The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956–1974, Houndsmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and NewYork, 2001; Schapiro, ‘Continuity and Change’, in Keep, ed., Contemporary History, 83; Isaac Deutscher, ‘Marxism and Primitive Magic’ in Tariq Ali, ed., The Stalinist Legacy: Its Impact on 20th Century World Politics, Harmondsworth, 1984, 115; Anthony Barnett, Soviet Freedom, London, 1988, 145–7.

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was a book ‘which speaks principally about Stalin, about his speeches, about his reports’, where ‘everything without the smallest exception is tied to his name’, Khrushchev rhetorically pondered why Stalin needed, additionally, ‘to praise himself so much and transform the whole post-October historical period solely into an action of ‘the Stalin genius?’ He asked his audience to consider whether ‘a MarxistLeninist can [indeed] write about himself in the manner he apparently has, or, whether the book properly reflected the efforts of the Party in the socialist transformation of the country, in the construction of socialist society, in the industrialization and collectivization of the country’. In the closing sections, Khrushchev insisted that it was especially necessary, from the points of view of critically examining Marxism-Leninism and correcting the widely spread erroneous views connected with the cult of the personality, ‘to compile a serious textbook of the history of our Party which will be edited in accordance with scientific Marxist objectivism, a textbook of the history of Soviet society, a book pertaining to the events of the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War’.21 The Short Course had fallen short of eligibility as Soviet history. The veteran Bolshevik leader Anastas Mikoian also sharply attacked the Short Course and other Party histories, particularly those dealing with the histories of regions where Stalin had been prominent in the early years of the century (mainly Georgia and the TransCaucasus), for distortions of historical truth. While lamenting the theoretical poverty of Soviet social science as a whole, he pointed out that ‘scholarly work in the history of our party and of Soviet society is perhaps the most backward sector of our ideological work ... Most of our theoreticians are engaged in the repetition and rehashing in every possible way of old quotations, formulas and postulates. This is more like classroom exercises than research, for science is above 21References from the text of the Secret Speech, 24–25 February 1956, are drawn from ‘Khrushchev’s Secret Speech’, Appendix 4, (as released by the U.S. Department of State on 4 June 1956) in Khrushchev Remembers, trans. and ed. by Strobe Talbott, 1: 580–643, Harmondsworth, 1977. Hereafter Khrushchev Remembers, 630–1, 642. See also Nikita S. Khrushchev, ‘Secret Report to the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU’, Tariq Ali, ed., The Stalinist Legacy, 221–72 for the text of the report. Although his name does not appear in the long table of contents, the book was filled with lengthy quotations from Stalin’s works, 26 in the last 100 pages; by 1932/33 the public had bought 16.5 million books and pamphlets by Stalin, compared with 14 million by Lenin. For this count, see Richard Overy, The Dictators. Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, London, 2005, 118.

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all creative ... not a repetition of the old’. He urged the historians ‘to make a genuine and profound study of the facts and events in the history of our party in the Soviet period ... including those that the Short Course deals with’, ... to ‘delve properly into the archives and historical documents, and not only into the back issues of newspapers’. He called for ‘special theoretical textbooks, written for comrades at different levels of training’. The Short Course was formally repudiated at the Twentieth Party Congress and mandatory examinations on Party history were suspended that year. From July 1956, when a group of writers calling themselves Agitprop produced 7500 words on ‘Theses on Fifty Years of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’22 until June 1959, there was no approved history of the Party. The Short Course was replaced in 1962 by The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union written under the direction of B.N. Ponomarev, then head of the Central Committee’s International Section and soon to become a Central Committee Secretary. The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union requested by the Twentieth Congress went to press in June 1959.23 An editorial in the leading journal of history, Voprosy istorii, on ‘The Twentieth Party Congress and attendant tasks for historians’, variously inveighed against the Short Course: Plekhanov had been belittled; his great work in developing Russian Marxism had been examined from the fallacious standpoint of his subsequent evolution toward Menshevism; Lenin’s opposition to great-power chauvinism and his interpretation of Russian socialism as part of the international workers’ movement ignored.The editorial urged historians to resume their ‘abandoned study of the October period’, give a truthful picture of the situation within the party before Lenin’s return [in April 1917, AB] as well as the struggle to construct a wide democratic bloc in the period between the revolutions. It added that Party history can no longer be treated as a ‘straightforward, constantly ascending process’, and, that local Party organizations must be thoroughly researched in order to study the Communist Party itself as constantly being shaped by local conditions. Special attention should be devoted to establishing truthful accounts of other neglected or distorted periods and aspects of party history like the Civil War, Collectivization, or the Great 22Pravda,

26 July 1953.

23History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, B.N. Ponomarev, chief editor,

translated by Andrew Rothstein, Moscow, 1960; Nancy Whittier Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union, Cambridge, MA., and London, 1971, 63–4, 105.

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Patriotic War. The editorial also called for better access to historical documents and more professional sourcing of materials. It stated that the release of Party records and stenographic minutes of Party congresses and conferences was essential.24 Far from being a ‘concise history’, at twice the length of the Short Course, its pages, like its predecessor, too seem void of non-heroic individuals and non-momentous events alike; in their place are the Party, the government, the masses, Lenin, theses and formulas. The hagiographic rendition of Lenin-Khrushchev was milder than the Lenin-Stalin play in the Short Course. The 1959 text attempted to relax some of the diamat rigidities of the Short Course and moderated the strong invective aimed at the victims of the Terror and other snakes in Stalin’s grass that had been rife in the first version, with milder terms of opprobrium such as ‘former ideological opponents’. Although he never claimed personal authorship, this was the history according to Khrushchev. Perhaps it had to be. Khrushchev told a French delegation in 1956 that “Historians are dangerous people [who] are capable of upsetting everything.They must be directed.” Commentators pointed out that from the point of view of standards of scholarship this new history showed little advance on the old. Both were political instruments rather than narratives meant to define the boundaries of the knowable rather than satisfy the curiosity of readers; Party History, though, was so profuse as to induce mental indigestion.25 The most dramatic aspect of the revision in the 1959 edition is that of the historic Stalin, who is transformed from the demigod of the Short Course into a figure of relative insignificance during 1917, who ‘at first took up an erroneous position’ early in the year of revolution, whose qualifications for leadership were called in question by Lenin’s letter to the Thirteenth Party Congress, whose ‘misappreciation of the strategic situation’ contributed to early defeats in World War II, who warned against exaggerations of the role of the individual in history but in practice deviated from this and other Marxist-Leninist propositions and encouraged the cult of his own personality, and whose ‘erroneous thesis’ of ‘intensified class struggle’ as the state strengthened in 1937 ‘served as a justification for mass repressions 24Ibid., citing ‘“XX s”ezd KPSS i zadachi issledovaniia istorii partii,’ Voprosy istorii,

no. 3, 1956, 3–12. 25The successor to The Short Course (1938) was Istoria Komunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, Moscow, 1960. The last chapters of this publication were reprinted after each Party Congress until the 1980s. Fainsod, ‘Historiography’, in Keep, ed., Contemporary History, 34–5;Wolfe, ‘Party Histories, Ibid., 43, 51–3; Leonard Schapiro, Ibid., 69, 76, 82; Markwick, Rewriting History, 45–6.

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against the Party’s ideological enemies who had already been routed politically’. Stalin is still quite frequently credited with specific speeches, reports and policy decisions; he ‘rightly stressed the necessity ... of keeping a watchful eye on the intrigues of enemies’. His famous 1930 article ‘Dizzy with Success’ is praised for having ‘clarified the Party line on the collective-farm movement and directed the members of the Party towards rectifying the mistakes committed in the process of collectivization’, and it is Yezhov and Beria who, ‘taking advantage of Stalin’s personal shortcomings’, bear primary responsibility for the Purges. Kirov’s assassination in 1934 is no longer the work of either ‘a member of the secret counter-revolutionary group made up of members of an anti-Soviet group of Zinovievites in Leningrad’, or of a ‘united Trotsky-Bukharin gang’, as in the Short Course, but ‘an embittered renegade’ who ‘held a Party card and had used it as a cover for his heinous crime’. The Purges are discussed for the first time in popular Soviet historiography: ‘Many honest Communists and non-Party people, not guilty of any offense, became victims of these repressions’, but Yezhov and Beria were duly punished and the victims exonerated by the Central Committee in 1954 and 1955. Khrushchev’s flamboyant descriptions of Stalin’s last years are subsumed into the flat statement that success and praise ‘turned his head’ and that ‘the cult of personality caused particularly great damage to the leadership of the Party and the State’.26 In a review of the ‘outstanding and essentially revisionist arguments’ of the 1959 edition, Nancy Whittier Heer enumerated the following themes as novel: (i) Stalin’s role was positive until the Seventeenth Congress (January-February 1934); thereafter he made serious mistakes, but they could not alter the socialist nature of the system, (ii) Lenin was the central figure in Soviet and Party history, completely overshadowing all others as the ‘genius theoretician, leader and organizer of the working masses’, (iii) The Bolsheviks were always completely distinct from the Mensheviks in theory and practice, despite temporary tactical alliances; the Bolsheviks were the only revolutionary Marxist party in Russia, 26Heer, Politics and History, 105–7, 20–5; History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, B.N. Ponomarev, chief editor, translated by Andrew Rothstein, Moscow, 1960, 217, 387, 548, 512, 513, 450, 671, 492, 513; Panas Fedenko, Khrushchev’s New History of the Soviet Communist Party, Institute for the Study of the USSR, Series 1, Number 48, Munich, December 1963, vii-xi.

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(iv) Lenin and Stalin were correct in insisting on unremitting struggle against anti-Leninist opposition groups because, although not enemy agents, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries in fact objectively aided the bourgeoisie by their practices, (v) Until the July Days in 1917, Lenin’s line was peaceful development of the revolution, which was at that point undermined by the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries, (vi) Industrialization, full collectivization, and thus the foundations of socialism were achieved only with difficulty; but the Party led the people to these successes, which are dated as accomplished by 1932.27 The 1959 edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was revised in 1962 to align its formulations to the deliberations of the Twenty-Second Party Congress held that year.The Mensheviks, the Oppositions of the 1920s, Left and Right, even Trotsky, are criticized for their policies but regarded as political or ideological foes, rather than as enemies of the people. Virtually all the favourable references to Stalin were deleted and attributions of his speeches or decisions were made to the Party Central Committee or the leadership as a whole. Stalin is directly charged with using the Kirov murder to bring on the ‘wholesale repressive measures and the most flagrant violations of socialist legality’ of the Purges. Stalin’s longrange responsibility for the Soviet lack of preparedness in 1941 is further amplified by naming the purged generals, explaining in detail the harm done to industrialization by the Purges, irrational shifts in senior personnel, and the repressive treatment of factory managers and experts.28

*** The rest of this chapter is concerned with the varying treatment of certain cardinal landmarks in Soviet history—the revolution of October 1917 (OS), the Civil War, the NEP, the ‘great overturn’ (velikii perelom) that supplanted the market, debates and cultural plurality, collectivization, planned industrialization, the Terror, and the Second World War in these two histories of the Party. The Short Course and Party History (as the 1962 edition will be referred to) offer politically27Heer, 28Heer,

Politics and History, 109–10. Politics and History, 143–4.

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affective renditions of these turning-points; the propensity to embroider incidents and concoct outright inventions vary, and they will be chronicled in the context of assessing the Short Course as an attempt to project the man as a book; Party History usually places Comrade Stalin amidst other Party members. If Short Course was intended to educate rather than edify readers, a faint inversion of priorities is discernible in Party History. In a rare fictional recreation of the Soviet Union of the 1930s, one leading protagonist, the historian Anton Antonovich Abramov voices his anguish to his friend, the Leningrad Party official Boris Alexandrovich Ivanov thus: ‘I’m no longer a historian. I’m a transmitter of historical materialism, but I guess there are compensations. I’m not required to teach my students to think— which, let’s face it, was always the most challenging part of the job. I only have to drum the catechism into them which leaves me plenty of time for my own research, if, that is, any research I was interested in was on the list of permitted topics.’29 The Short Course opens with a chapter on the economic and political history of imperial Russia from the 1860s and ends with the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, created by the new constitution of 1936, in December 1937. No individual authors are named anywhere in the book. Stalin may have been the author of chapter 4.2, ‘Dialectical and Historical Materialism’, that appears between a description of Lenin’s attack in 1909 on the Bolsheviks, Bogdanov, Bazarov and Lunacharskii and the Mensheviks, Iushkevitch and Valentinov in his Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, and the dramatic decline of Social Democracy after the failed revolution of 1905–7.30 Like the Short Course, Party History begins with a chapter on the economic history of imperial Russia from the mid-nineteenth century and traces the spread of capitalism in industry and agriculture. The bulk of the chapter is devoted to the labour movement, the history of the Populists, and the growth of Social Democratic groups. It closes with the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party in 29The imaginary conversation between Abramov and Ivanov is from Gillian Slovo, Ice Road, London, 2005, 71. Bertram Wolfe characterized the Short Course as a text that was ‘the most striking example in all history of a man who has succeeded in inventing himself ... There is none to challenge, for textual criticism is ‘treason’ and challenger and evidence are destroyed together. This retroactivity concerns itself with minuscule details and larger facts ...’ Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 478. 30Short Course, 110–39.

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October 1961. Unlike the Short Course, edited by unnamed members of a Commission of the Central Committee of the party, the group of authors who prepared this textbook, History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, is listed with their professional titles. Stalin makes his first appearance in the Short Course in the third chapter on 1905, ‘At this period (in late November 1905) Comrade Stalin was carr ying on tremendous revolutionary work in Transcaucasia. He exposed and lashed the Mensheviks as foes of the revolution and of the armed uprising. He resolutely prepared the workers for the decisive battle against the autocracy’.31 In December 1904 a protracted and powerful strike by about 47,000 workers at an oil refinery in Baku had ended in the conclusion of the first collective agreement to be signed in Russia between workers and employees. Stalin was touring the province with lectures against Mensheviks, Anarchists, Federalists, Armenian Dashnaks (seminationalist and semi-socialist) when the strike broke out.Throughout 1905 Stalin played no national role. He remained one of the provincial Caucasian leaders. Stalin spent most of 1905 fighting Mensheviks in the Caucasus; he seems to have taken little part in the assault upon the autocracy. He also traveled extensively through Georgia.32 Stalin is next mentioned in Short Course with reference to an article he wrote, ‘Notes of a Delegate’ (1907), where he assessed the results of the Fifth Party Congress (May 1907, London), and stressed the differences between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks: ‘The significance of this Congress lay in unifying advanced workers under the banner of revolutionary Social Democracy, that Bolshevik tactics were identical to those of workers in big industry, the ‘real proletarians’, while Menshevik tactics were those of handicraft workers and peasant semi-proletarians, of ‘the semi-bourgeois’ elements among the 31Short

Course, 86. Deutscher, Stalin, 83–4; Alex de Jonge, Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union, Glasgow, 1987, 60; H. Montgomery Hyde, Stalin:The History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, 92–3. In his eulogistic official biography of Stalin, Iaroslavskii quotes Stalin in 1926 on how formative this period was: ‘Two years of revolutionary work among the oil workers of Baku hardened me as a practical fighter and as one of the local political leaders ... first taught me what it means to lead large masses of workers.There I became a journeyman in the art of revolution’. E. Yaroslavsky, Landmarks in the Life of Stalin, London, 1942, 57–8. On this period, see also Robert C.Tucker, ‘Stalin’s Revolutionary Career Before 1917’, in Alexander and Janet Rabinowitch with Ladis K.D. Kristof, eds., Revolution and Politics in Russia: Essays in Memory of B.I. Nikolaevasky, Bloomington and London, 1972, 160–2. 32Isaac

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proletariat’. Fifty pages on, his future victims are clairvoyantly, conspiratorially and fictively linked, and that too in opposition to Lenin: ‘With the aid of Zinoviev, Kamenev, Rykov and other covert allies of Trotsky, a Plenum of the Central Committee was convened in January 1910, against Lenin’s wishes. Here it was decided to close down the Bolshevik newspaper Proletary and to give financial support to Trotsky’s Pravda, published in Vienna. Kamenev joined its editorial board and together with Zinoviev strove to make it the organ of the Central Committee’.33 Party History mentions Stalin in the following moments, before the revolution: As a Bolshevik delegate to the Fourth (Unity) Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in Stockholm (April 1906) where ‘J.V. Stalin and others supported the demand that the landed estates be divided and transferred to the peasants as their private property whereas Lenin had opposed the ‘divisionists’’; as a Bolshevik delegate to the Fifth Congress (AprilMay 1907, London); for being co-opted to the Central Committee at the Sixth All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP (Prague, January 1912); for being a member of the editorial board and active contributor to Pravda in 1912; for opposing the Bolshevik Central Committee demand that the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks be granted equality in the Fourth Duma in 1913, because six Bolsheviks had been elected from industrial provinces and represented over one million workers, while the seven elected Mensheviks represented non-industrial provinces with only 136,000 workers; and, as just one among several Bolshevik Central Committee members and leading Party workers who returned from exile, prison and abroad after the February Revolution.34 Lenin persuaded delegates to the Prague Party Conference to consider itself a ‘Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party’ and to assume all the rights and functions of a Party Congress. Stalin was not among those who were elected to the Central Committee at this Congress, a pure, ‘irreconcilable’ Bolshevik Central Committee to speak in the name of the entire Party. He was not even among the alternative members, who were to function in case of arrest of the regular members. Lenin did not propose Stalin’s name at the Prague Congress, but introduced a motion to return to the system of co-opting additional members whenever the Central 33Short 34Party

Course, 96–7, 145. History, 115–16, 123, 164, 166, 174, 211.

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Committee should see fit, a system in abeyance since 1905–7. Shortly after the Congress adjourned, Lenin had the new Central Committee co-opt Stalin as a member.35 In his Stalin, Montgomery Hyde wrote: ‘In the days of his supreme power Stalin liked to claim a much more important part in the foundation of Pravda than the known facts disclose, purporting to be the editor-in-chief and the author of the original editorial setting out the aims of the new journal.’ As an aside, on the subject of Stalin as a journalist, the first time Koba used the name by which he was to become known to history, was an article he wrote on ‘Marxism and the National Question’, under Lenin’s guidance (Lenin needed a non-Russian to project his views) in January 1913 in Sotzial Demokrat (Paris), 12 January 1913. He signed the article K(oba) Stalin, a revolutionary nom de plume that was inspired by the hero of a Georgian novel by Alexander Kazbegi called The Parricide.36 Party History discloses that after the February Revolution, ‘Stalin adopted a semi-Menshevik attitude to the Provisional Government’ (PG), similar to that of Kamenev: ‘He did not understand the significance and nature of the Soviets as a new form of state power. He backed the policy of “pressure” on the PG and the demand for immediate peace negotiations, which was an attitude which led the masses to imagine that the bourgeois government could bring them peace’. The authors mention that Stalin subsequently acknowledged that ‘This was a profoundly mistaken position for it gave rise to pacifist illusions, brought grist to the mill of defencism and hindered the revolutionary education of the masses.’ He also called for unity with the Mensheviks until mid-April when he adhered to Lenin’s platform.37 35Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 590; Hyde, Stalin, 104, 105, 110. A year before the Short Course appeared, Lenin’s CollectedWorks offered exactly this description, ending with ‘shortly after the conference were co-opted into the C.C.: Stalin and Belostotsky’. Lenin, Collected Works, third edition, Moscow 1937, XV: 653, cited by Wolfe, 591. 36For a useful account of the context for Stalin’s contribution on the National Question, see Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Stalin, Man of the Borderlands’ The American Historical Review, 106: 5, December 2001, 1681; Hyde, Stalin, 105, 110. On Stalin’s adoption of the nom de plume Koba and all the other pseudonyms, aliases and cover names that he used, see Edward Ellis Smith, The Young Stalin: The Early Years of an Elusive Revolutionary, London, 1968, 453–4, and Rieber, loc. cit., 1678–9; for the partial discarding of the nom de plume Koba, see Brackman, The Secret File, 100 and Wolfe, Three Who Made a Revolution, 514. 37Party History, 213–14; see also J.V. Stalin, Works, English edition, Moscow, 6: 348.

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The Short Course is prudently discreet on Stalin in these early revolutionary months. Lenin did not arrive in Petrograd until 3 April 1917. During the month between the revolution and his arrival the policy pursued by the Russian Bureau of the Party on the critical issues of the attitude to the war and the policy towards the PG, was very different from what Lenin had in mind and put in place. For a short time Alexander Shliapnikov strove to put Lenin’s views, as he knew them, into practice. On 23 March, for example, the Russian Bureau issued a declaration under his guidance demanding fraternization at the front, immediate negotiations for an end to the war and turning the war into a civil war against the imperialists. But shortly after the arrival of Stalin and Kamenev in Petrograd, Bolshevik policy changed substantially. By virtue of their seniority they took over the Russian Bureau and the direction of policy. The slogan ‘down with the war’ was useless, Stalin wrote in Pravda on 29 March; one issue of Pravda thundered that so long as the German army remained behind the Kaiser, the Russian soldier should ‘staunchly stand at his post, answering bullet for bullet and salvo for salvo’. The proper course was ‘pressure on the Provisional Government’ to induce it to open peace negotiations; Stalin also wrote that Pravda would support the PG ‘in so far as it is fighting reaction or counter-revolution’, prompting Trotsky to comment later that, paradoxically, the only important agent of counter-revolution was the PG itself. Kamenev was on the same page as Stalin in this respect. Stalin succeeded in winning unanimous approval for a resolution on relations with the PG governed by the notion that the dictatorship of the proletariat had to be consigned to the future because the period of bourgeois democratic government just commenced was likely to be a prolonged one; the Menshevism of this position does not need clarification. Shliapnikov reported that the ‘indignation in the outlying districts [of Petrograd] was stupendous’ and when the ‘proletarians found out that Pravda had been taken over by three of its former editors [Kamenev and Muranov being the other two] recently arrived from Siberia, they demanded their expulsion from the party’; Lenin’s rage is recorded as well.38 In articles in Voprosy istorii in 1956, soon after the Twentieth Party Congress, the historian E.N. Burdzhalov, who was also the deputy 38Schapiro, The Communist Party, 163–4, citing Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, no. 4(63),

1927, 50–2, Hyde, quoting Shliapnikov in Stalin, 128; Stalin, Works, III: 4–8; Pravda, 28 March 1917.

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editor of the journal, investigated Bolshevik activity in Petrograd in March and April 1917. Based on hitherto inaccessible Party archives, he showed that Kamenev’s advocacy of a conciliatory approach towards the PG, while underestimating the militancy of the soviets was a position that Stalin shared. Both Kamenev and Stalin stuck to this strategy until Lenin’s arrival in Russia in April 1917. Burdzhalov demanded more accurate portrayal of the Mensheviks during the revolutionary period.39 Party History rebukes Stalin for ‘misinterpretations’ a few months later: ‘At the Sixth Party Congress (26 July to 3 August 1917), Stalin presented reports of the Central Committee and on the political situation, but, along with Volodarskii and Manuilskii, considered it possible for Lenin to appear in court, provided his safety was guaranteed because he thought the bourgeois courts would give him a fair trial; the Congress, however, declared against Lenin appearing in court. Stalin misinterpreted the political situation in the country, saying that it was not clear who was in power, although the bourgeoisie had fully established its authority following the July events.’40 Short Course singles out other events involving Stalin before the revolution: The entire text of his Report on the National Question to the Seventh Party Conference (April 1917) is provided, a speech that goes unmentioned in Party History.41 Likewise, if Short Course refers to Stalin telling workers in Petrograd, who are about to present their demands to the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets on June 3 (16) 1917 that ‘... it is our task to make sure that the demonstration in Petrograd on June 18 takes place under our revolutionary slogans’ the speech is ignored in Party History.42 Stalin makes his presence felt for the last occasion before the revolution in Short Course in relation to his stand on the Pre-Parliament: ‘After the rout of Kornilov, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries made one more attempt 39E.N. Burdzhalov was by no means an individual who was out of official favour: he had previously written several popular histories and lectured at the Party’s Higher School. Markwick, Rewriting History, 54; Leonard Schapiro, ‘Continuity and Change in the new History of the CPSU’, in Keep, ed., Contemporary History, 69–70; Nancy W. Heer, ‘The Non-Bolshevik Left and the Idea of Political Opposition’, in Samuel H. Baron and Nancy W. Heer, eds., Windows on the Russian Past: Essays on Soviet Historiography since Stalin, Columbus, Ohio, 1977, 158. The articles by E.N. Burdzhalov are ‘O taktike bol’shevikov v marte-aprele 1917 goda’, Voprosy istorii, No. 4, 1956, 38–56 and ‘Eshche o taktike bol’shevikov v marte-aprele 1917’, Voprosy istorrii, No. 8, 1956, 109–14. 40Party History, 233. 41Short Course 202–4. 42Short Course, 205.

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to stem the rising tide of revolution. With this purpose in view, on 12 September 1917, they convened an All-Russian Democratic Conference, consisting of representatives of the Socialist parties, the compromising soviets, trade unions, zemstvos, commercial and industrial circles and military units. The Conference set up the Provisional Council of the Republic (the Pre-Parliament), which the Central Committee decided to boycott, although Zinoviev and Kamenev insisted on participating in it, to divert the party from preparations for an uprising. Stalin vigorously opposed participation, calling it a “Kornilov abortion”.43 Stalin did not play a prominent part in the early months of the revolution. He continued to edit and contribute to Pravda, opposed Lenin’s demand for state ownership of all land to the peasants because he wanted land to be transferred unconditionally to the peasantry, attended the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, was one of the nine candidates picked by Lenin for election to the new nine-member Central Committee (this being his first victory as the result of a vote), and, like Kamenev, Stalin also opposed Lenin’s call to soldiers and workers to convert the existing ‘imperialist war’ into a ‘European civil war’ by arguing that the Bolsheviks could increase their mass base by standing forth as the only party which could bring about peace; the points on land and the war were made by Lenin in his April Theses. He worked with Lenin to prepare a Party conference in April, and in Lenin’s absence (he was in hiding), played an important part in the Sixth Party Congress held in July and August, months during which he had run the Central Committee with Sverdlov. He made two major speeches and was considered Lenin’s representative. One of them, his enunciation of the doctrine of Socialism in One Country, at the Sixth Party Congress (July-August 1917), and hence, unlike in many standard histories, before the revolution, is not mentioned in The Short Course, but is quoted in Party History: ‘The possibility is not excluded that Russia will be the country that will lay the road to socialism ...We must discard the antiquated idea that only Europe can show us the way.’44 In this speech, responding toYevgenii Preobazhenskii who wanted a greater emphasis on revolutions elsewhere in Europe, Stalin, in anticipation of his own contribution to Marxist doctrine later, said that Russia did not necessarily require 43Short 44Party

Course, 216–17. History, 234; J. V. Stalin, Works, English edition, Moscow, 3: 199–200.

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revolution in the west: ‘The possibility is not excluded that Russia will become the country that blazes the trail to socialism. Until now not a single country enjoys such freedom as Russia ... the base of our revolution is wider than in Western Europe where the proletariat confront the bourgeoisie in complete isolation. Here the workers are supported by the poorest strata of the peasantry. We must reject the outmoded idea that only Europe can show us the way. There is a dogmatic Marxism and there is a creative Marxism. I stand on the ground of the latter.’ By 1924, and as General Secretary, Stalin was insisting that the Soviet Union could and ought to construct ‘socialism in a single country’.45 Short Course offers a lean-limned ‘account’ of the revolution in Petrograd: On October 25 (November 7), Red Guards and revolutionary troops occupied the railway stations, post office, telegraph office, the Ministries and State Bank. The Pre-Parliament was dissolved. The Smolny, the headquarters of the Petrograd Soviet and of the Bolshevik Central Committee, became the headquarters of the revolution .... On the night of October 25 the revolutionary workers, soldiers and sailors took the Winter Palace by storm and arrested the PG. The armed uprising in Petrograd had won’,46 and a single sentence on the revolution in Moscow: ‘It took several days to oust the rebels (Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, White Guards, cadets) and to establish the power of the Soviets in Moscow.47

In recalling Stalin during the days preceding the revolution, the Short Course strays from the evidence more than does Party History: if the Short Course has it that ‘on 16 October 1917 a Central Committee meeting elected a Party Centre headed by Stalin to direct the uprising. This Party Centre was the leading core of the Revolutionary Military Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and had practical direction of the whole uprising’, then Party History mentions Stalin merely as a member of the Revolutionary Military Centre of the Central Committee, along with A.S. Bubnov, F.E. Dzerzhinskii,Y.M. Sverdlov and M.S. Uritskii, to direct the insurrection.48 There is no evidence of what part, if any, was played by a Military 45Alex de Jonge, Stalin, 108–9, citing Shestoi s”ezd RSDRP bolshevikov. Avgust 1917 goda. Protokoly, Moscow 1958, 250. See also Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography, London, 2004, 128–30, 136, 147. 46Short Course, 221–2. 47Short Course, 224. 48Short Course, 220, 247; Party History, 286.

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Revolutionary ‘Centre’, consisting of five, including Stalin, which was set up on 16 October.The organization of the uprising was in the hands of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, formed on 12 October with Trotsky as Chairman. It controlled military units in the capital which were prepared to support the Bolsheviks and also maintained control over about 20,000 Red Guards, organized by the Bolsheviks after June from within factory and shop committees, and which was actually the real armed might behind the uprising in Petrograd. Trotsky organized the seizure of important points in Petrograd on the night of 24–25 October, on the eve of the meeting of the Second Congress of Soviets and the demise of the PG on 25 October. The Military Revolutionary Committee remained the main centre of government until it was dissolved on 5 December 1917.49 Stalin’s role in the Bolshevik seizure of power grew steadily with time until he eclipsed everyone. In order to preserve the record as Stalin would have it, the first three editions of Lenin’s CollectedWorks were withdrawn as ‘harmful’ because they contained documents revealing Stalin’s situation at the time. Volume 21 of the third edition of Lenin’s Collected Works contains records of Central Committee meetings from 10 to 16 October 1917.These describe the preparations for the coup and establish its command centres.They record a decision taken on 10 October to form a small ‘bureau’ of Central Committee members ‘for the political guidance of the insurrection’ on the initiative of Dzerzhinskii. It consisted of Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Stalin, Sokolnikov and Bubnov. It never functioned. Lenin and Zinoviev were in hiding; Zinoviev and Kamenev opposed the uprising; Trotsky was busy as Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet and in the Soviet’s Military Revolutionary Committee. This ‘bureau’ has, however, been considered to be the forerunner of the Political Bureau or Politburo, created anew at the Eighth Party Congress. This is because it never functioned since October 1917, as the Central Committee’s inner group was entrusted with shaping Party policy in the ensuing decades. As for the uprising itself, Stalin’s role eludes exactitude. On 11 October, Zinoviev published a letter in Novaia zhizn’, owned by Maxim Gorky but edited by Nikolai Sukhanov, informing the public that the Bolsheviks were preparing for an uprising. Lenin branded Zinoviev and Kamenev as ‘traitors to the revolution,’ and demanded their expulsion from the Party. On 16 October, the Central Committee 49Schapiro,

The Communist Party, 175–6, n.2, p. 176.

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delegated Stalin, Sverdlov, Bubnov, Dzerzhinskii and Uritskii to represent the Bolshevik Party on the Petrograd Soviet’s Military Revolutionary Committee. The fact that Stalin was not asked to direct any armed activity has perpetuated a legend that he counted for nothing in the Central Committee. As one among ten members of the Central Committee, he was deputed to reinforce the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. This meant that he was at the centre of political operations.50 Stalin is absent from the pages of Short Course during the days of the uprising, 24 and 25 October. Party History is laconic and inserts him into the uprising days before it took place: ‘Stalin, backed by Miliutin and Uritskii, opposed Lenin’s demand for the expulsion of Kamenev and Zinoviev from both the party and the Central Committee, in the Central Committee on 20 October’. One eyewitness, John Reed, mentions him twice in general terms as a Bolshevik Commissar in his Ten Days that Shook theWorld, and another, Nikolai Sukhanov, describes his role as bound to be perplexing on account of his character and personality: As quoted in the fourth chapter, Sukhanov wrote that ‘The Bolshevik Party, in spite of the low level of its ‘officer corps’, had a whole series of most massive figures and able leaders amongst its ‘generals’. Stalin, however, during his modest activity in the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, produced—and not only on me—the impression of a grey blur, looming up now and then dimly not leaving a trace. There is really nothing more to be said about him.’51 The two texts under principal consideration are broadly similar in their analyses of the factors that resulted in Bolshevik victory in October. Short Course orders these factors as follows: The economic weakness, lack of political self-reliance and initiative, poor organization, 50The best edition of Lenin’s Collected Works, published in 30 volumes, is the third (1935–7), published under the auspices of the Marx-Engels Institute, with invaluable annotations and appendices, concurrently with the second edition.The fourth edition (1942–50) was more complete and a fifth edition was published between 1959 and 1968. Hyde, Stalin, 138–9; Alex de Jonge, Stalin, 112–13, citing V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 14 volumes, fifth edition, Moscow, 1959–68, 21:444, 507; Service, Stalin, 143, 146; Roy Medvedev, On Stalin and Stalinism, 1979, 10. In her memoirs, Stalin’s granddaughter Anna S. Alilueva wrote that Stalin spent the evening of 24 October and the day of 25 October with the Aliluyev family. Brackman, The Secret File, 140, citing Anna S. Aliluyeva, Vospominaniia, Moscow, 1946, 61; quoted by Smith, TheYoung Stalin, 374. 51Party History, 248. John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, New York, 1919 and 1967, 186, 345; N. N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917, London, 1955, 229–30.

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and political inexperience of the bourgeoisie; its belief in ‘war to a victorious finish’; leadership of the revolution by a working class that had recently experienced two revolutions and thereby earned the confidence of the people, especially its ability to form an alliance with the poor peasantry without which the October Revolution would have been impossible; and, the poor peasantry had chosen the Bolsheviks, after testing all the other parties, as the only party authentically opposed to the landlords.The strengths of the Bolshevik Party were identified as its being courageous enough to lead the people in decisive attack, cautious enough to steer clear of all the submerged rocks, flexible enough to be able to combine the democratic movement for peace, the peasant democratic movement for the seizure of the landed estates, the movement of the oppressed nationalities and the socialist movement of the proletariat, and finally, absorbed in war and split into two hostile camps, the principal bourgeois states were unable to intervene effectively in ‘Russian affairs’ and to actively oppose the October Revolution.52 Party History, for its part, interprets the same triumph as prompted by a different ensemble of factors, some working domestically and others outside the country, but preeminently by working class leadership, with tremendous experience in a short period, the first class to form its own party; followed by the importance of the alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry. The October Revolution differed from all other revolutions because the workers created their own organs of power, the Soviets. The revolution was victorious because in the Russian bourgeoisie it was confronted with a comparatively weak enemy. A decisive circumstance in the victory was leadership by the ‘tested, militant and revolutionary Bolshevik Party, guided by the advanced theory of the working class, the theory of Marxism-Leninism’. In addition, ‘The Bolshevik Party succeeded in uniting all the diverse revolutionary movements and in directing them towards a single goal, that of overthrowing imperialism. The Bolshevik Party merged into a single revolutionary torrent the movement of the whole people for peace, the peasants’ fight for the land and against landlord oppression, the struggle of Russia’s oppressed nations against national oppression, and the fight of the proletariat for socialism’.53 Among reasons of an international character, Party History argues that the revolution began during a war, when neither the Anglo-French 52Short 53Party

Course, 225–8. History, 254.

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nor the German bloc was able to assist the Russian bourgeoisie with arms; it was assisted by the support of the international proletariat, particularly in Germany and Austria-Hungary.54 The complex geometry of forces and circumstances that ensured the victory of the Bolsheviks in the Civil War, the actual defence of the revolution, against their domestic White and foreign interventionist opponents is arranged differently in the two texts. If the Short Course opens the relevant section with a teasing nudge at the reader’s credulity, ‘Not a single writer, military or civilian, believed that the Bolsheviks or Red forces could win, since they would have to create an army from scratch, rely on a backward industrial system and entirely on domestic resources because of the blockade’, Party History, for its part, interprets the Red triumph as driven, inevitably, by the nature of the Civil War: The war was a just war; Soviet policies were correct in expressing the interests of the people; the Red Army fought for the interests of the people.55 In the Short Course, analogously, Bolshevik victory is explained in terms of the argument that ‘The Red Army was victorious because Soviet policies corresponded to popular interests and garnered widespread support, was able to muster the whole rear, because its leading core was the Bolshevik party, because it was able to produce from its own ranks military commanders of a new type, like Frunze, Voroshilov, Budyonnii. The counter-revolutionaries in Russia had the manpower to start a rebellion, but not the money or arms, while the foreign imperialists had the money and the arms but could not “release” enough troops from the western front’.56 Party History attributes the Bolshevik triumph to six factors: (i) The principal reason was the social and political system, founded on the stable alliance of the workers and peasants, economically founded on the peasant receiving land and protection against the landlord and kulak from the workers’ state and workers receiving farm produce from the peasants under the surplus-requisitioning system, and friendship among the people of the Soviet Republic, (ii) The correct nationalities policy, (iii) Partisan help, organized by the Party, to the Red Army, (iv) Soviet foreign policy of equal rights for all peoples, the skilful use made of contradictions among the imperialist countries and of enemies’ miscalculations, 54Party

History, 252–6. Course, 259–60; Party History, 330. 56Short Course, 261. 55Short

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(v) The struggle of the international proletariat against intervention, (vi) The decisive condition was Party leadership.57 Party History mentions Stalin as one among 27 other Party leaders ‘on whose shoulders fell the burden of eliminating the consequences of the war and building a socialist society’.58 Stalin always regarded the defence of Tsaritsyn as the crowning military achievement in his Civil War. After Lenin’s death he had the town renamed Stalingrad. Since both Short Course and Party History are similar in the brevity of their treatment of this episode, it is pertinent to probe deeper:What did Stalin actually accomplish there? In a section entitled ‘the struggle against Denikin in the summer of 1918’, the Short Course offers the following tantalizing vignette (why would Trotsky essay the foolish?): ‘Trotsky was removed from directing Red Army operations in the south because he wanted the operation to proceed from Tsaritsyn, through the Don steppe, inhabited by hostile Cossacks and without proper roads. So the Central Committee sent Stalin,Voroshilov, Ordzhonikidze and Budyonny to the Southern Front—Stalin proposed attacking Denikin by way of Kharkov— Donets Basin—Rostov, areas sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, wellsupplied by railways and success would facilitate the delivery of coal from the Donets’.59 Party History is even more parsimonious on the subject: ‘A Military Council of the North Caucasian Military District was set up which included J.V. Stalin, K.Y Voroshilov and S.K. Minin. The defence of Tsaritsyn also relieved the strain on the Eastern front.’60 By the end of 1918, the White opponents of the Red Army had begun a concerted drive on Moscow, threatening that city with starvation by severing communication with grain supplies in the Northern Caucasus. Alexander Tsiurupa, the Commissar in charge of supplies in Moscow, urged Lenin to send Stalin to Tsaritsyn: ‘He knows local conditions and Shliapnikov (who had been ordered to the Kuban on a similar mission) will find it useful to have him around’. On 31 May 1918, the Cabinet (Sovnarkom) asked Stalin and Shliapnikov to travel to southern Russia and ensure the flow of foodstuffs for the capital cities. They reached their destination, Tsaritsyn, on 6 June. The city was strategically important, since it was situated on a bend of the lower Volga, and was also a key supply point, 57Party

History, 330–1. History, 332. 59Short Course, 254. 60Party History, 299. 58Party

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since it was superbly connected by rail, north to Moscow, and south to Rostov-on-Don and Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea. Stalin’s assignment as ‘Director-General of Food Supplies for the south of Russia invested with extraordinary powers’, was to maintain the supply of grain to the capital; military operations in the region had been entrusted to Andrei Snesarev, a former Imperial Army general, then with the Red Army as commander of the North Caucasus Front. The functions of Stalin and Snesarev were meant to complement each other. But Stalin had other plans; his ambition was twofold: to obtain a military command and to undermine the authority of Trotsky, the Military Commissar in overall charge of the Red Army. He cabled Lenin that ‘the food-supplies question is naturally entwined with the military question. For the good of the cause I need full military powers. I’ve already written about this and received no answer. Very well, then. In this case I myself without formalities will overthrow those commanders and commissars who are ruining the cause ... of course the absence of scrap of paper from Trotsky won’t stop me’. Soon Stalin was heading a Military Council with Voroshilov, Egorov and Budyonnii in the region renamed the Southern Front. Lenin and the Moscow leaders agreed to sack Snesarev on Stalin’s request, in early July on the ground that a tighter blend of military and economic measures was necessary. Stalin proceeded against Trotsky’s commanders. He imprisoned the senior ‘specialist’ (a former tsarist army officer) and most of his staff of military specialists on a barge in the middle of the Volga. Trotsky sent an angry telegram which Stalin dismissed with the instruction ‘Disregard’.The specialist was eventually released, but his staff was less fortunate: the barge sank with all hands in circumstances that remain unexplained. When Trotsky challenged Stalin’s decisions as the head of the Revolutionary Council of the Southern Front (Trotsky was his military superior as Chairman of the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic), in September 1918, Stalin asked Lenin to remove Trotsky. As a military commander Stalin was undistinguished and profligate in his use of men. Once he committed an entire division of green troops which was captured to a man. When some were subsequently rescued, Stalin wanted the ‘traitors’ executed. Assessing Stalin’s performance, Lenin observed: ‘It is permissible to sacrifice 60,000 men [sic] but ... can we just throw 60,000 away! I am perfectly aware that you killed many of the enemy. But had there been specialists, had it been a regular [not a guerilla] army we would not have had to

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throw away 60,000 men’. Lenin recalled Stalin in October 1918, but not wanting Stalin to consider his recall a disgrace, gave him several appointments, including membership in the Revolutionary War Council, and of the Council of Workers’ and Peasant Defence (STO). Early in 1919, Stalin and the head of the Cheka, Feliks Dzerzhinskii were sent to the Ural front, where they immediately started summary executions. From there he was sent to the Southern Front before being recalled to Moscow by Trotsky.61 Pravda published an account in 1963 of how Stalin issued a directive in Tsaritsyn in which he demanded that villages in areas of resistance to Soviet rule should be burnt to the ground.62 Party History scathingly points out that the ‘reverses on the Polish front in August 1920 (reverses on which Short Course is resoundingly silent) were largely due to the mistakes made by the Soviet command. The rapid Soviet offensive was not fully provided for, contrary to the relevant directive of the Soviet government; reinforcements lagged behind and munitions were not brought up. The hasty retreat of the Polish Whites was mistaken for a defeat, whereas the enemy was simply seeking to save his manpower and material .... The command, particularly of the South-western Front (J.V. Stalin, A.I. Yegorov) was slow in moving the First Cavalry Army to the Western Front and this had an adverse effect on the advance on Warsaw’.63 There is another Civil War tale and one that, too, weighs heavily and ignobly on Stalin’s reputation as a military commander. By the autumn of 1919, the White forces had been trounced on every front. Mikhail Tukhachevskii, aged 26, Commander of the Fifth Red Army, had pushed deep into Siberia occupying Omsk and driving Kolchak 61Stalin’s bodyguard later wrote of how Stalin said ‘I shall ruthlessly sacrifice 49 per cent, if by doing so I can save the 51 per cent, that, is, save the Revolution’ during the defence of the city of Tsaritsyn. Richard Overy, Russia’s War, London, 1999, 16, quoting A. Amba, I Was Stalin’s Bodyguard, London, 1952, 69; Service, Stalin, 163– 8; Alex de Jonge, Stalin, 127–30; Hyde, Stalin, 155–8, 161–2; Stalin, Sochineniia, 4: 120–1; K. Voroshilov, Stalin and the Armed Forces, Moscow, 1951, 19; R. Medvedev, Let History Judge, 13–14; A. Antonov-Ovseenko, The Time of Stalin, New York, 1982, 11; Brackman, The Secret File, 162. 62Pravda, 20 September 1963; quoted in Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge, 15. One of his biographers, Roman Brackman pointed out that in this context, ‘the power entrusted to Stalin by the Politburo in the area under his control made it possible for the first time in his life to arrange a mass murder’. Brackman, The Secret File, 157. 63Party History, 328–9. The relevant section includes Lenin’s autopsy: ‘During our offensive, advancing too fast as we were, almost all the way to Warsaw, we undoubtedly made a mistake ... and that mistake was due to our overrating the superiority of our forces’. Lenin, Collected Works, edition unstated, Moscow, 32:149.

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to Irkutsk. Stalin was present on other fronts. Poland loomed large as a threat in 1920. Although the country had been reconstituted as an independent state by the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, her eastern frontier had been left ill-defined. The Poles wished to recover formerly Polish territory in western Russia and the Ukraine, especially between the river Bug (the so-called Curzon Line, the de facto frontier, followed this river) and the frontier as it had been drawn at the time of the First Partition of Poland in 1772. They also wanted a large cash indemnity and the occupation of the Russian town of Smolensk as a guarantee. When the Soviet government rejected these demands, the Poles reacted by advancing eastwards through the Ukraine to Kiev, which they captured early in May 1920. Tukhachevskii, the recent victor over Denikin in the Crimea, was asked to command the Soviet offensive. He decided to execute a feint through the Ukraine into southern Poland, while reserving his main blow for Central Poland. His strategy was brilliant and it worked. Kiev was retaken by Budenny’s First Cavalry Army, Tukhachevskii’s main troops advanced with little resistance from Smolensk through Minsk and Vilna to Brest-Litovsk on the Bug. By the middle of August Tukhachevskii was within thirteen miles of Warsaw. France, responding to an appeal for military assistance from the Polish President, Marshal Pilsudskii, sent General Weygand and a military mission to Warsaw. Weygand swiftly mounted an attack on Tukhachevskii’s exposed left flank. The latter sought reinforcements from Budennii. On Stalin’s insistence, however, Yegorov, the commander of the South-western Front, disregarded Trotsky’s order to attack the Polish army near Warsaw and led his cavalry in the direction of Lvov. When Stalin agreed to move Yegorov’s cavalry to Warsaw on 15 August 1920, on the insistent urging of Lenin and Trotsky, it was too late because Tukhachevskii’s forces had reached Warsaw by 10 August 1920. Tukhachevskii’s army was defeated, it retreated from Polish territory and the Poles held 70,000 Russian soldiers captive. In the peace settlement that followed, Poland was able to regain most of the territory west of the 1792 frontier together with a portion of the Ukraine.64 The Short Course chronicles Stalin’s activity between the Tenth and the Seventeenth Party Congresses, from 1921–34 in a manner 64Brackman, The

Secret File, 163; Hyde, Stalin, 175–6; Trotsky, Stalin, 467. Party History mentions M.N. Tukhachevskii (who is also mentioned as leading the ‘valiant Soviet warriors’ in taking Kronstadt, March 1921, p. 349), I.P. Uborevich and I.E. Iakir (all purged in 1936) as Civil War ‘heroes and leaders’. Party History, 297.

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that invokes the recency of the period and the decency of Stalin’s leadership. His report on the national question, to the Tenth Party Congress, is summarized. He is the only leader mentioned, besides Lenin, as authors of the proposal for the formation of a voluntary union of nations, the USSR, in December 1922 at the First AllUnion Congress of Soviets, ‘a Leninist-Stalinist policy on the national question’.65 In its reference to the adoption of a declaration on the formation of the USSR and a Treaty of the Union by the First Congress of Soviets of the USSR on 30 December 1922, Party History names the four elected Chairmen of its Central Executive Committee (M.I. Kalinin, G.I. Petrovskii, A.G. Cherviakov, and N.N. Narimanov) but makes no mention of Stalin in connection with this event.66 The Short Course mentions Stalin’s report on the national question at the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1922; his report summing up the proceedings of the Thirteenth Party Conference in January 1924 is included; and The Short Course quotes extensively from his speech just after Lenin’s death at the Second All-Union Congress of Soviets, that laid the coping-stone for the creation of a cult of Lenin that Lenin would have abhorred: ‘We vow to you Comrade Lenin that we will fulfill your behest with credit ...’,67 a speech whose fawning tenor Party History leaves unattended; choosing instead to cite a few lines from the Central Committee’s appeal on the occasion ‘To the Party, To All Working People’.68 The Short Course summarizes Stalin’s Political Report to the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925; the report on behalf the Central Committee delivered by him to the Fifteenth Party Congress in December 1927; Stalin’s analysis of the reasons for the victory of fascism in Germany offered to delegates to the Seventeenth ‘Congress of Victors’ in December 1934.The Short Course uncritically presents Stalin’s article, entitled ‘Dizzy with Success’, on 2 March 1930.69 Party History points out that in this article, Stalin, who had urged collectivization from above, blamed local officials entirely for the mistakes in collectivization.70 The Short Course carries excerpts from his exhortatory utterances to delegates at the First Conference 65Short

Course, 274–5, 278. History, 364. 67Short Course, 280, 284, 285–6. 68Party History, 381. 69Short Course, 293–4, 306–7, 321, 327–8. 70Party History, 445–6. 66Party

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of Industrial Managers in February 1931, amidst the appalling turmoil and turbulence visited upon the country by dekulakization, collectivization and over-ambitious industrial planning: ‘We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this difference in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us ....’ The Short Course quotes generously from his speech to the graduates from the Red Army Academies in May 1935, commenting with fervid adulation on the Stakhanovite phenomenon, of compelling workers, mainly in industry, to constantly and heroically strive to exceed their production quotas, as the coal miner Alexis Stakhonov had incredibly done in the Ukraine in 1934.71 A fateful and momentous debate wracked the Party and state apparatuses after the Civil War had ended. The trade union and Party-state debates, as they came to be known, established longstanding balances between trade unions and the state, on the one hand, and proscribed the existence of ‘factions independent of the Central Committee’ of the Communist Party, until 1988, when the Party’s monopoly was rescinded, on the other. These developments are conspicuously absent from the Short Course, in which the proposals of a number of leaders who were to perish in the Terror of the 1930s, but who were, nevertheless, the authors of crucial alternative and feasible agendas for the further development of the Soviet Union, are distorted and given short shrift. The air-brushing in prose is best conveyed by quotation: ‘The NEP was resisted by the unstable elements in the party, from two quarters alien to Marxism and Leninism: the ‘Left’ shouters, political freaks like Lominadze, Shatskin and others, who from ‘political illiteracy and ignorance of the laws of economic development’, argued that it meant a renunciation of the gains of the October Revolution and a return to capitalism; and the ‘downright capitulators like Trotsky, Radek, Zinoviev, Sokolnikov, Kamenev, Shliapnikov, Bukharin, Rykov who did not believe that socialist development was possible and demanded far-reaching concessions to [domestic and foreign] private capital’.72 This section contains the first instances of a recurrent vituperative invective that prefixes the ideas of leaders who, even as they fell foul of the regime, had offered visions that could not be revealed in the 1930s, to the Soviet citizenry. The facts that are glibly passed over are that opposition to the legalization of private trade was widespread 71Short 72Short

Course, 333–4, 356–9. Course, 275.

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and born of a genuinely ideological apprehension that this might ease the return of capitalist activity. The breadth of unease on this issue prompted Lenin himself to lead discussion on the matter, when the hall of the Congress had been substantially emptied of delegates who had gone to assist in crushing the naval revolt in Kronstadt. He couched his arguments in a manner that was meant to be logically unassailable and yet allay raw emotion at what was felt to be a transgression of canonical tenets by socialist revolutionaries in power.73 When Trotsky suggested subsuming the trade unions within the state in the summer of 1920, the principle of the autonomy of unions was jeopardized. Backed by trade union leaders and many Party leaders, the proposal was censured. The banning of factions within the Party was prompted by the perception of the threat posed by the Workers’ Opposition, who grouped together to defend the unions and resist ‘bureaucratism in the party’, and by the Democratic Centralists, who pointed to the same two problems and gave voice to an alarm at the decline of the popularly-elected Soviets and the privileges garnered by Party leaders and industrial managers. Party History, in contrast, does describe the discussions on these issues (at the Fifth All-Russian Conference of Trade Unions in November 1920 and Central Committee plenary meeting in January 1921), and this Party history explains the rise of groups and platforms within the Party, like the Workers’ Opposition and the Democratic Centralists, groups it names, in terms of a palpably felt anxiety about the dilution of the proletarian core of a proletarian party that had morphed into ruling a bureaucratized state: it attributes the programme of the two groups to ‘the influence exerted by the petty-bourgeois element on unstable Party members. In the 600,000 strong Party, by the end of 1920, workers were less than half of all members, peasants about one-fourth, and the remainder were professionals, office workers and handicraftsmen, so the social composition was not homogenous. Many Party members had not yet been tempered as Bolsheviks, the party had been infiltrated by ex-Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and Bundists, who were more affected by petty-bourgeois vacillations than anyone else’.74 73For the arguments that Lenin advanced to defend the ‘new economic policy’ of decriminalizing private trade, see my Merchants and Markets in Revolutionary Russia, 42. 74Party History, 342.

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Party History offers its readers a more accurate idea of the alternative proposals. On the Workers’ Opposition, ‘an anarcho-syndicalist group because it denied the need for a proletarian state in the transition to communism, because it demanded that the administration of the economy be transferred to the unions—to an “all-Russian producers’ congress”; that the machinery of VSNKh (the Supreme Council of the National Economy) be split among the respective unions, and that the state be subordinated to the trade unions’. And, the Democratic Centralists ‘advocated that the Presidium of the Supreme Council of the National Economy should be nominated by the trade unions, that there should be freedom for factions and groups in the party, and that candidates nominated by factions and groups should be elected to leading party and government bodies. They opposed one-man management, strict discipline in the factories and administrative centralization. Lenin called them the “loudest shouters” and their platform, an SR-Menshevik one’.75 The economic problems associated with winning the peace, in 1921, were severely compounded by a famine. The cereal and fodder harvest of 1921 was the lowest one since 1916. By 1921, the excessively high target for requisition of agricultural products, principally cereals and potatoes, by state agencies had converted a natural calamity of drought into the social catastrophe of famine in the chief grainproducing provinces of the Volga basin, the south-east and the Ukraine. Although the contraction in the grain harvest (seven million metric tons) and the deficit to per capita requirement (fifteen per cent) was nationally less than with earlier famines, the human suffering in the bread-basket regions was immense, and one that the government was unwilling to mitigate by recourse to western assistance.76 There was no mention of the 1921 famine in the Short Course, but Party History traced its root causes to economic, particularly agricultural backwardness, and the ‘ruin wrought on the national economy by the interventionists and the Whites’. Even as it explained that ‘the food shortage was greatly aggravated by the drought of 1920, followed by an even more severe one in 1921’, and added that ‘thirty-four provinces, with a population of thirty million people, were affected by the crop failure’ it ignored the depredations of 75Party

History, 342–3. Merchants and Markets, 126–7.

76Banerji,

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Bolshevik agricultural procurement as fundamentally responsible for its occurrence.77 By its very nature, written at the time that it was and for the selfserving objectives it sought to further, the Short Course was necessarily oblivious to the Terror and the Purges, both on the wane by the time of its appearance in 1938. The readers of Party History in the form of the Soviet population at large, were in the dark about the contents of Khrushchev’s assault on the ‘cult of personality’ in 1956, when Party History was placed in their hands, six years later. The authors of Party History felt that a sanitized explanation of the tragedy experienced by virtually every Soviet family had to be proffered. After dating the ‘beginning of wholesale repressive measures and the most flagrant violations of socialist legality’ to Stalin ‘using the assassination of S.M. Kirov’, characterized as ‘an outstanding leader of the Communist Party and the Soviet state’ on 1 December 1934, its authors write that ‘It was in those conditions that the verification and exchange of Party documents were carried out in 1935–1936. A verification of the records of Party members and of the procedure of the registration and safekeeping and of the issuance of Party cards had been proposed in October 1934 to eliminate problems like the misappropriation or forging or altering cards and other Party documents. The measures were of value generally, as members who infringed Party rules were weeded out, but it also led to the withdrawal of Party membership from innocent persons. The rectification procedures moved slowly and lacked consistency because of the Stalin personality cult’.78 Party History supplies a context for the infliction of state terrorism on a scale that no major nation has been subjected to. This was the first time that the Soviet public was allowed an officially sponsored and published glimpse (not, of course, to complement memory) into the sweep of the Terror and was provided with the identities of perpetrators, institutional and individual, other than Stalin; the Soviet population learnt the full contents of the Secret Speech only in 1989. The process was attributed to Stalin’s thesis of 1937 that the class struggle would grow in intensity as the ‘positions of socialism were strengthened and the Soviet state made further progress’. This thesis was ‘harmful and erroneous’ because the class struggle ‘was sharpest in the early years of Soviet history. This was when the foundations of socialism were being laid; by the mid-1930s, after the elimination 77Party 78Party

History, 355. History, 486–8.

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of the exploiting classes and the creation of social unity, socialism had won. The thesis served as a justification for mass repressions against prominent officials of the Party and state, members and alternate members of the Central Committee, noted Soviet military leaders and many other completely innocent people—both Communists and non-Party people. By getting rid of leading Party and government officials who did not suit him, Stalin grossly violated Party rules and Soviet laws. Responsibility for this also falls on Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov (by then, the so-called ‘AntiParty Group’). The false charges which the People’s Commissariat of the Interior (NKVD) leveled at members and alternate members of the Central Committee were not examined at plenary meetings of the Central Committee’.79 After attending a reception of the Bolshoi Theatre on the thirtyfifth anniversary of the October Revolution on 7 November 1952, the Indian Ambassador K.P.S. Menon wondered by what means Stalin, ‘grown grey in the service of his people and exuding an almost avuncular benevolence’, yet ‘wielded greater, and more concentrated power, than any mortal ever had’.80 In his Koba the Dread, the British novelist and essayist Martin Amis quoted Dmitri Volkogonov on Stalin, thus: ‘No other man in the world has ever accomplished so fantastic a success as he; to exterminate millions of his own countrymen and receive in exchange the whole country’s blind adulation’. In Party History Stalin’s personality cult is condemned as being the expression of a form of political leadership at complete variance with that of Lenin: Lenin personified a new, superior type of political leader and teacher of the working people. His versatile Party and government activity equips the Party cadres with tested methods of leadership. Lenin thought highly of the practical experience of the masses, seeing it as a focus of the collective mind of the people. His 79Party

History, 505.

80Brackman, The Secret File, 385, K.P.S. Menon, The Flying Troika, London, 1963,

7. K.P.S. Menon was the last foreigner to see Stalin alive, when Stalin had a conversation with him on 17 February 1953. Menon, The Flying Troika, 29. See also Hyde, Stalin, 587, 591. At different times, Stalin held eleven official positions: Chairman of the Council of Ministers, Secretary of the Central Committee, member of the Politburo (and of the Presidium, as the Politburo was renamed at the 19th Party Congress in October 1952, by which date Stalin was the only surviving member of the original Politburo set up by Lenin in may 1917), deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and of the Russian Republic (RSFSR), deputy of the Moscow Soviet, member of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet (as the Politburo was known from 1952 to 1966), Supreme Commander-in-Chief, member of the Central Committee, Marshall of the Soviet Union (6 March 1943; Stalin bestowed the title of Generalissimo himself on 9 May 1945) and, until 1947, Minister of Defence.

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activity was a solid combination of revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice. He made a constant effort to strengthen the ties with the masses and draw the masses into the making of history. He not only taught the masses but also learned from them. The fire of creative effort never died down in Lenin, who had an excellent ability to discern the new, to which the future belonged. He gave his all, and his very life, in the struggle to emancipate the working class and all working people, to bring about the triumph of communism. Lenin was always a far-sighted, realistic political leader who saw life in its true colours. Lenin combined revolutionary scope with efficiency, with concrete leadership, with painstaking organizing and educational work.81

In addition, ‘Lenin regarded collectivism in deciding the main questions of policy and practice as the highest principle of party leadership. Lenin never decided questions of principle by himself, without consulting the Party’s collective bodies. Lenin would have no exaltation or glorification of his person or services, and detested toadyism and servility. He forbade the Commission for the History of the Communist Party and the October Revolution from collecting material for a future Museum of Lenin ... Lenin was positively against all show, all political blather and “speechifying”, and ruthlessly combated bureaucratic practices. Lenin acted openly. Lenin set an example of respecting the laws and insisted on others strictly observing revolutionary legality. Lenin combined an exacting approach to people with great tact’.82 Party History carried the note that Lenin dictated to his secretary, Maria Volodicheva, about Stalin in his Letter to the (Thirteenth) Congress on 23 and 25 December 1922, which became known as Lenin’s ‘Testament’. The note was part of a series of suggestions on Party reorganization, in which Lenin recorded his judgements of his colleagues. He thought that the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky would affect the stability of the Party most strongly. ‘Comrade Stalin, having become General Secretary, has concentrated boundless authority in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be able to exercise that authority with sufficient discretion.’ On 4 January 1923, Lenin dictated a postscript in which he suggested ‘thinking over a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing someone else, differing in all other respects from Comrade Stalin by one single advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite 81Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twentieth Century, London, 2002, 214; Party History, Chapter 10.4, 365–74. Emphases in the original. 82Party History, 374, 373. Emphases in the original.

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and considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.This circumstance may appear to be a negligible trifle [but] it is not a trifle, or it is a trifle which can acquire decisive importance’.83 By the end of 1921 Lenin had been forced to abandon full-time work, and in May 1922 he suffered his first stroke. After that, barring a few months in late 1922, he was a total invalid until his death on 21 January 1924. He continued to dictate articles and diverse memoranda when his health allowed him to do so. On hearing of Stalin’s rude treatment of his wife Krupskaia, Lenin dictated a ‘highly secret, personal’ letter to Stalin, with ‘copies to Comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev’ on 5 March 1923.The letter read ‘You had the effrontery to call my wife on the phone and to swear at her .... I do not intend to forget it so easily. What is done against my wife I consider done against myself.’ Lenin asked Stalin to apologize or ‘break all relations between us’.84 At a Central Committee meeting on 22 May 1923, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had formed a triumvirate with Stalin in the Politburo, against Trotsky, persuaded the delegates to allow Stalin to remain as General Secretary since they had all witnessed his sincere efforts to mend his ways; Trotsky remained silent on the issue and explained this, in his Attempt at an Autobiography, by the argument that ‘Independent action on my part would have been interpreted, or, to be more exact, represented as my personal fight for Lenin’s place in 83Party

History, 385. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, XIV: 329f, cited by Brackman, The Secret File, 171. Against Lenin’s wife, Nadezhna Konstantinovna Krupskaia’s protest, the Central Committee voted by an overwhelming majority to suppress the testament. Krupskaia’s request that Lenin’s letter be read to the delegates at the Thirteenth Party Congress was rejected, but she had given copies of the ‘Testament’ to all Politburo members. Agreeing to a ‘rotten compromise’ with Stalin, Zinoviev and Kamenev,Trotsky agreed to have the Testament read by Kamenev at the special closed session of the Central Committee on 22 May 1924. When Stalin’s desk in his country residence in Kuntsevo (the blizhnaia dacha) was being removed from his former study in 1955, five letters addressed to him, that he had hidden under a layer of newspapers in one of the drawers, were found. One of them was dictated by Lenin on 5 March 1923, in which Lenin demanded that Stalin apologize for his abusive manner towards Krupskaia. The second letter was from Bukharin, awaiting death, written shortly before he was shot in March 1938: ‘Koba, why do you need my death?’ Another was from Tito: ‘Stalin, Stop sending assassins to murder me. We have already caught five, one with a bomb, another with a rifle .... If this doesn’t stop, I will send one man to Moscow and there will be no need to send another’. Zhores A. Medvedev and Roy A. Medvedev. The Unknown Stalin, translated by Ellen Dahrendorf, London & New York, 2003, 2006, 61–2. 84V.I.

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the party and the state. The very thought of this made me shudder’. The testament was never brought up at the Thirteenth Party Congress. At the Fourteenth Congress in 1925, however, Zinoviev and Kamenev called for its publication in Pravda but it was never placed in the Soviet public domain until Party History.85 The causes, manifestations and consequences of the personality cult were adumbrated in decisions of the Twentieth Congress as well in a Central Committee resolution of 30 June 1956, entitled ‘On Overcoming the Personality Cult and its Consequences’. The cult arose in the difficult conditions that had prevailed in the early years after the revolution, where a largely agricultural economy had been thrust into reversal by wars and a nascent socialist system surrounded by hostile capitalist states. These circumstances called for iron discipline, a high degree of vigilance against external attack and the strictest centralization of leadership. Soviet society had to make temporary restrictions of democracy, which were gradually reduced.86 Almost immediately after Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Congress, the Party leadership sought to rein in de-Stalinization, an effort that reflected the resilience of Stalinism, personified by Molotov, Kaganovich and Malenkov, behind the façade of ‘collective leadership’. The revelations of Stalinist infamy by Khrushchev were assimilated only as ‘Stalin’s crimes’; rather than as crimes of the entire regime, the Politburo, the Orgburo, the Secretariat and, most critically, the state security organs.The leadership was not receptive to the actuality that they had been perpetrated collectively. The 5 March 1956 resolution endorsing Khrushchev’s report did not mention Stalin by name. The ‘heated discussions’ about the Stalin period which subsequently took place both publicly and privately, encouraged by the millions who had returned from the GULAG and the posthumous 85The

‘Testament’ was suppressed in the Soviet Union and first appeared in full on 18 October 1926 in the NewYork Times, arranged by the ‘Trotskyist’ Max Eastman. See Geoffrey Hosking, The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union From Within, Cambridge, MA, 1992, 131–2; and the Appendix entitled ‘The Eastman Affair’, in Lars T. Lih, Oleg V. Naumov and Oleg V Khlebniuk, eds., Stalin’s Letters to Molotov, 1925–1936, New Haven, 1995, 241–9, for the text of the testament. See also Leon Trotsky, My Life; 479–82; Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed.Trotsky: 1921–1929, New York, 1965, 69–70, 137, 295; Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography, Harmondsworth, 1968, 250–4; and Brackman, The Secret File, 168–71, 182–3 for the context of the testament. 86Party History, 650.

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rehabilitation of millions of victims of the terror, were denounced in the Party press as pretexts for ‘scandalous calumnies’ against the overall course pursued by the Party.87 Khrushchev referred glowingly to Stalin in a number of public speeches in the summer of 1956 as that ‘great revolutionary’ and ‘great Marxist-Leninist’; the Party, he said, ‘would not allow the name of Stalin to be given up to the enemies of Communism’. The Central Committee resolution in June 1956 was a retreat from the Secret Speech in form and content. It balked at outright condemnation of Stalin and acknowledged his contribution to the Party, the nation and the international revolutionary movement. Further, it was argued that the perseverance of a basic ‘Leninist core’ within the Central Committee had acted as a brake on his excesses. The accent, nevertheless, remained on Stalin’s ‘mistakes’.The resolution repudiated any systemic explanation for Stalinism, a term that was not to enter the Soviet political lexicon for another three decades. As the decade closed, Khrushchev publicly reiterated that the Soviet people and the Communist Party would remember Stalin and do him justice. He asserted that the term ‘Stalinism’ had been invented by the enemies of socialism. There was no mention of Stalin’s crimes at the TwentyFirst Party Congress in 1959.88 The Twenty-Second Congress of the Party (1961) was the last one before the completion of Party History, and its closing pages state that delegates to the Congress ‘completely exposed the evils of the Stalin personality cult and carried out the final tearing down of the personality cult’. On the basis of the decisions of the Twentieth Congress, the Central Committee fully disclosed the grave mistakes made by Stalin, gross violations of socialist legality, abuses of power and arbitrary acts and repressive measures against many honest people. The Congress unanimously adopted the resolution ‘On the Mausoleum of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin’. It found the further presence in the Mausoleum of the sarcophagus containing Stalin’s coffin inadvisable. ‘The grave violations by Stalin of Lenin’s behests ... 87Markwick, Rewriting History, 47; Roy A. Medvedev, ‘The Stalin Question’, in Stephen E. Cohen, Alexander Rabinowitch and Robert Sharlet, eds., The Soviet Union since Stalin, Bloomington, Indiana, 1980, 39. 88Markwick, Rewriting History, 47–8; Roy A. Medvedev and Zhores A. Medvedev, Khrushchev:TheYears in Power, translated by Andrew R. Durkin, NewYork and London, 1978, 106–7, 111, 71.

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make it impossible to leave the coffin with his body in the Lenin Mausoleum’.89 The question of guilt and retribution for Stalin’s crimes was the dominant theme in the debates at the Twenty-Second Congress. Although Stalin’s coffin was removed from the Lenin Mausoleum, the deliberations at this Congress were lenient to the living. It was not prepared to follow the lead of Khrushchev and exact Party, let alone criminal, penalties from those denounced for their complicity in Stalin’s crimes. The debate was cautious and the terms used were veiled. Criticism of Stalin and his age was severely restricted and even completely halted after Brezhnev and Kosygin took over in 1964. Khrushchev had personally authorized the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s searing portrayal of a labour camp, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch in 1962, but the new regime prevented any further publication of books by Solzhenitsyn (which were published abroad however). If the Party, not the KGB, had kept intellectuals in check under Khrushchev, the powers of the KGB and of the militia were steadily buttressed after his overthrow, and they were charged with actively persecuting ‘dissenting’ intellectuals. Brezhnev was sympathetic to Stalin, but was nervous about effecting a substantial restitution. He was fully aware that sponsoring any radical review of attitudes to Stalin’s role in the country’s history would arouse intellectual ferment and protest; that he definitely wished to avoid. In the end, he compromised. Stalin would no longer be criticized in the press, but would barely be mentioned in terms of his ‘service to the people’ either. Brezhnev had no stomach for reviewing the decisions of the Twentieth and Twenty-Second ‘antiStalin’ Congresses. An anger must have moved his fingers as he heard and jotted his reactions to Khrushchev’s speech at the Twentieth Party Congress: ‘The report is unbalanced. It’s a wrong definition and incorrect approach showing the consequences of the cult of personality— and therefore the material has been selected to show how the cult of personality came about and its harm—yet everything about Stalin that used to be preached and talked about was positive’.90 89Party History, 714–15. The pertinent resolution passed by the Twenty-Second Party Congress in October 1961 read, ‘The continued preservation of I.V. Stalin’s sarcophagus in the mausoleum is inappropriate, as Stalin’s serious infringements of Lenin’s tenets, his abuse of power, his mass arrests of honest Soviet people and other actions in the period of the personality cult make it impossible to leave his body in V.I. Lenin’s mausoleum’. Materialy XXII s”ezda KPSS, Moscow, 1961, 449. 90Schapiro, The Communist Party, 574; Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire, 312, 263–4.

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After Brezhnev’s death, his successors renewed attempts to rehabilitate Stalin. Months before Gorbachev’s ascendancy, the Minister of Defence D.F. Ustinov told the Politburo on 12 July 1984 that ‘In general there would not be that outrageous infamy that Khrushchev permitted in relation to Stalin. Stalin, whatever you might, say, is our history. Not one foe brought us as much grief as Khrushchev with his policy in relation to the history of our Party and state, and in relation to Stalin.’ The Chairman of the Council of Ministers, N. Tikhonov, concurred, proclaiming that Khrushchev ‘dirtied us and our policies and blackened them before the whole world’. The Chairman of the KGB, V.M. Chebrikov, added: ‘Apart from that, under Khrushchev a whole series of people were rehabilitated illegally.The fact of the matter is that they were punished entirely justly.Take, for example, Solzhenitsyn’. An integrated and authentic reconstruction of the history of the Soviet Union had to await the advent of glasnost’, after Gorbachev’s assumption of the General Secretary’s position in March 1985.91 For more than 20 years, the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences had been preparing the fifth volume of Essays on the History of Historical Science in the USSR, and it was published in 1985. Although the book was devoted exclusively to the decades between the 1930s and the 1960s, the text not only emasculated the mildest criticism of what had gone on in the historiography of the time, but actually had words of praise for the Short Course. A.N. Iakovlev, the most liberal member of Gorbachev’s Politburo, headed a team that was charged with producing a new Party History, called Sketches. Its two volumes, taking history up to 1921, were ready for publication in 1990 but they were never published. After the attempted coup of August 1991, President Yeltsin of Russian issued decrees banning the CPSU and dissolving its organizations.The Constitutional Court sat in judgement on the former ruling party. But its proceedings soon turned into a farce. The CPSU was not convicted and prohibited. None of its leaders had to stand trial; and former Communist functionaries easily managed to recreate their party under a new name, the KPRF. We do not yet have a scholarly history of the CPSU by a post-Soviet historian.92 91Blackman,

The Secret File, 415; The New York Times, 8 February 1993.

92M.V. Nechkina, ed., Ocherki istorii istoricheskoi nauki v SSSR, V, Moscow, 1985,

372–3; Nekrich, Survey, June 1989, 27–28 and n. 27, 28; Alter L. Litvin, Writing History in Twentieth-Century Russia: A View from Within, 32, citing the Communist Party Central Committee journal Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 7/1990, 137; Alter Litvin and John Keep, Stalinism. Russian and Western views at the turn of the millennium, London and New York, 2005, 71.

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The burden of this chapter has been to delineate the construction of particular versions of the past for the education of not only members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, but of society at large. The histories that resulted dominated available reading matter on the history of the country for the lay public and its practitioners enjoyed superior, and larger professional status than colleagues who delved into other areas of Soviet history. For Soviet historians, history at the service of the Party’s organizational and educational tasks remained an uncontestable shibboleth even after 1956, notwithstanding the devaluation of the Short Course.With more than one-fourth of all chairs in history faculties held by historians of the Communist Party in 1959 (41 out of 154), teaching the subject overshadowed other themes in the domain of history. Little changed over the decades until the demise, when, in 1989, it was found that Party historians comprised almost half the historians in the country. Although some of them disputed fundamental propositions about Party history, they had not carried the day. Party historians, as a group, were less bold than historians in other fields and much less bold than creative writers, and Party historiography had changed much more slowly than attacks on the traditional understanding of the Soviet past by playwrights or historians like Iurii Afanas’ev. At the demise, the basic paradigm for histories of the Party remained largely intact, even if certain assumptions had been challenged, although this matter was scoffed at by society. Party history remained the largely unmodified story of the construction of a non-exploitative society—despite mistakes—by overcoming enemies within and without the Party.93

93Konstantin Shteppa, Russian Historians and the State, 395; Hans Rogger, ‘Politics, Ideology and History in the USSR: The Search for Coexistence’, Soviet Studies, 16: 3, January 1965, 254, 275. The estimate on the number of Party historians is based on information published in Voprosy istorii, no. 9, 1959, 36–43 and cited by Enteen, Problems of Communism, September-October 1989, 72, 79–80.

4

Depictions and Revisions: The Russian Revolution in History

Soviet historical works are sadly depopulated. Everything you might want in a historical narrative is there—laws, logical development ... except individual human beings .... There are certain names there, but there aren’t any people ... individual people are only mentioned by way of examples in our histories; they do not appear as real historical actors. —Pavel Vasilevich Volobuev (Historian)

THERE IS AGREEMENT IN THE ACADEMY AND THE ‘STREET’ ALIKE ON THE TRIPLE

significance of the Russian Revolutions, especially that of October, as pivot, hammer and force-field. Isaac Deutscher started his George Macaulay Trevelyan Lectures in the University of Cambridge in January-March 1967 with these words: ‘The Russian Revolution has raised issues far deeper, has stirred conflicts more violent and has unleashed forces far larger than those that had been involved in the greatest social upheavals of the past.’1 At a Roundtable in Moscow in January 1989, that brought together fifteen Soviet and American historians, the Russian historian Pavel Volobuev insisted that for his country, and in their Marxist historiography, 1917 was of universal significance, it had a huge effect on world development and altered the course of the historical process; this was a frequent Soviet refrain in 1967 as the revolution turned 50. There are resemblances in the manner of resonance evoked in the Soviet Union by Great October, and that experienced in France, China or America by their respective revolutions (if the American candidate can be so designated). In the Soviet Union, the cadence maintained a largely unaltered score for decades, possibly until the mid-1950s, the decade recognized as a 1Isaac Deutscher, The Unfinished Revolution. Russia 1917–1967, NewYork, 1967, 3.

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fault-line in the body-historic of that country. As a gentle corrective on the temptation of over-determining the importance of revolutions, the Australian historian Sheila Fitzpatrick, a founding ‘revisionist’ historian,2 told Volobuev that Americans too might have tended to exaggerate the universal significance of the American Revolution.3 The question that has agitated historians ever since 1917 has been about how the Bolsheviks, an insignificant minority in February, won power eight months later. Aligned with this query is the story of the shift of the urban lower classes from support of the moderate socialists in the soviets, the liberal-socialist government, and their foreign policy of ‘revolutionary defensism’ to the idea of lower-class government embodied in Soviet power, radical opposition to the ‘bourgeoisie’, the liberals and their sympathizers, and a desperate desire to withdraw from the war.4 Within the Marxist view of history, revolution played the role of overcoming dialectical antitheses within an inexorable teleology.Thus Soviet history decreed first, that the Soviet state must be qualitatively different from everything that had preceded it, although it had developed out of the contradictions of the former society and regime, and second, that after 1917, the new state should progress through a series of preordained stages towards communism: the period of reconstruction, of the construction of socialism, of real socialism and finally of developed socialism.5 Traditional Soviet historiography has explained the headlong acceleration of revolutionary activity between February and October 1917 by two sets of circumstances: on the one hand, by the unwillingness and inability of the ruling circles to address the most pressing problems (of withdrawal from the war, 2For her ‘credo’ underlining the need for, and the bases of a new revisionist history of the USSR, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘New Perspectives on Stalinism’, The Russian Review, 45, 1986, 357–73. 3John W. Boyer and Julius Kirshner, ‘Perestroika, History and Historians’, The Journal of Modern History, No. 62, December 1990, 810. 4This, at least, is how it was posed by the author of an article on the historiography that surrounds the event. See Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Revision and Retreat in the Historiography of 1917: Social History and Its Critics’, The Russian Review, 53: 2, April 1994, 174. 5Nick Baron, ‘History, Politics and Political Culture: Thoughts on the Role of Historiography in Contemporary Russia’, Cromohs, 5, 2000, section 20, p. 13, based on a presentation given at the annual BASEES Conference, Cambridge, March 1996.

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seizure of land by peasants, the plummeting economic indicators), and on the other, by the political effectiveness of the Bolshevik Party.6 History writing in the Soviet Union traditionally concentrated on the actions of the leadership and Party faithful. In the orthodox Soviet account, the Bolshevik Party was placed at the very centre of events, in 1917 and in the ‘dress rehearsal’ of 1905. The ‘history of the common people’ beloved of left-wing historians, was transformed by Soviet Marxism-Leninism into societal aggregations and statistical indicators. Stalinist dogma held that the popular masses could take no steps without the guiding directives of the vanguard Party. The prominent and embattled historian Anna Pankratova had pointed out in April 1953 that only three out of 34 monographs prepared by the Institute of History of the Soviet Academy of Sciences were on the history of Soviet society, and even these works were primarily descriptive, with the facts presented superficially. At the Roundtable in Moscow, Pavel Vasilevich Volobuev, a specialist on the history of the Russian Revolution, made the statement that opens this chapter and one that echoed a quote by Pankratova: ‘Soviet historical works are sadly depopulated. Everything you might want in a historical narrative is there—laws, logical development ... except individual human beings .... There are certain names there, but there aren’t any people ... individual people are only mentioned by way of examples in our histories; they do not appear as real historical actors.’ Later in the proceedings,Volobuev’s colleague Vladimir Alexandrovich Kozlov, then serving as Head of Sector, Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and a specialist on Soviet social and political history, pointed out that they used to have a history of bosses written for bosses, but now had a history of bosses that was being written for the people, but still lacked a history of the people and society. 7 Soviet history writing was also necessarily historicist. This was discernible in many forms: grafting a particular present onto the past, 6For such a view, see Vladimir I. Shishkin, ‘The October Revolution and Perestroika: A Critical Analysis of Recent Soviet Historiography’, European History Quarterly, 22: 4, 1992, 524. 7Konstantin F. Shteppa, Russian Historians and the Soviet State, New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1962, 181, citing A.M. Pankratova, ‘Naushchennye voprosy sovetskoi istoricheskoi nauki’, Kommunist, No. 6, April 1953, 56–9. Pankratova’s area of expertise was the pre-revolutionary labour movement. For the statement by Volobuev, see Boyer and Kirshner, The Journal of Modern History, December 1990, 788, 821.

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or exalting one current of history to the near-exclusion of others. The former was apparent in the insistence that the prerequisites for a socialist revolution did exist in 1917, and indeed had done for some prior period (the view, for instance, that the revolutionary overthrow of the old order was inevitable and that the war only accelerated a crisis manifest at its outbreak); and that the Bolsheviks had correctly turned this ‘maturity’, denied by other socialists, to revolutionary change. Since the pronouncements of the Short Course in 1938, the subject of Chapter 3, for decades Soviet historiography refused to entertain the possibility for any resolution of the crisis of the autocracy or that posed by the war, in terms other than those of Bolshevik victory. That victory was, in the view perpetuated in the Short Course, attained by a Bolshevik Party that had maintained an unremitting control of the process in the entire period between the two revolutions in February and October. This view discounted several alternative conjunctures, like the destabilizing effect of a world war that might have affected Russian development differently if it had occurred at another time, or the nature of tsarist leadership (its real absence), or of policies pursued by the Provisional Governments that might have realistically addressed the issues of the war, food supplies and the land, and of workers’ control. Presumably these alternatives were considered counter-factual. In a draft chapter of the official Party history in 1990, the historian Startsev argued that ‘in the autumn of 1917 socioeconomic and political realities in Russia favoured the Bolshevik seizure of power over all other options’.8 The principle of partiinost’ (being led by the Party line rather than the evidence) dictated that the historian could only achieve true objectivity (as distinct from ‘bourgeois objectivism’) in explicating the law-governed (zakonomernie) processes of history by identifying himself with the Communist Party as the embodiment of history’s progressive force. A well-known principle of Leninism, when applied to historical writing, the principle is defined in two orthodox senses: first, that all scholarship justifies a particular class interest and second, 8The completion of this Party history was interrupted by the failed coup of August

1991 and the subsequent proscription of its subject, the Communist Party; it was never published. The draft chapter by Startsev in the theoretical journal Kommunist, Vol. 12, 1990, 1, is cited by Alter L. Litvin, Writing History in Twentieth-Century Russia: AView fromWithin, translated and edited by John L.H. Keep, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2001, 49.

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Marxism is distinctive in its explicit acknowledgement of this fact and its overt willingness to place historical writing in the service of the proletariat and its conscious vanguard, the Communist Party. Partiinost’ is said to encompass the concept of objectivity: the open adherence to Party-mindedness is the road to objectivity, because the Party’s intervention in the historical process influences the objective regularities of that process, and because the defence of proletarian interests, the building of socialism, represents what is best for all mankind and thus constitutes the highest possible objectivity. It was noted, however, that the law-governed character of the historical process, zakonomernost’, had lost its erstwhile magisterial ring since 1956. Many historians used the term ritualistically.9 Loyalty to the dictates of partiinost’ tended to blur sensitivity to alternative outcomes of, and in 1917, within the Soviet academy. The first Soviet historians of the revolution on the whole showed no interest in the question of leadership in February 1917. Those who did, usually referred to it obliquely, and took it for granted that the revolution was spontaneous. This should not surprise us since they were merely following the earliest accounts of the February Revolution, the contemporary Okhrana reports, which all agreed that the revolution was spontaneous, leaderless, primarily caused by the shortage of food in the cities and was something they (the Okhrana) had been predicting since at least the middle of 1916. In 1922/23 a spate of memoirs appeared, written ostensibly by ‘ordinary workers’, the general message of which was that, although the intellectual leaders of the Party, and in particular Shliapnikov, had proved bankrupt during the war and the February Revolution, 9For this politically correct Soviet definition of partiinost’, consult Sovetskaia istoricheskaia entsiklopediia, vol. 9, Moscow, 1966, cols. 396–8 cited by George M. Enteen, ‘Problems of CPSU Historiography’, Problems of Communism, 38:5, SeptemberOctober 1989, 74; John L.H. Keep, ‘The Rehabilitation of M.N. Pokrovskii’, in Alexander and Janet Rabinowitch with Ladis K. D. Kristof, eds., Revolution and Politics in Russia: Essays in Memory of B.I. Nikolaevsky, Bloomington and London, 1972, 306–7. In 1960, Voprosy istorii had issued a similar shibboleth: historiography ‘remains a class, party branch of scholarship’. Voprosy istorii, no. 8, 1960, 3–8, translated in Current Digest of the Soviet Press, XII: 40, 2 November 1960, 6–13 and reprinted in Shteppa, Russian Historians and the Soviet State, 391. For the comment on the diminished hold of the ‘law-governed character of the process’ see Samuel H. Baron and Nancy W. Heer, eds., Windows on the Russian Past: Essays on Soviet Historiography since Stalin, Columbus, Ohio, 1977, viii.

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the Party tradition had been maintained by its worker cadres. According to these ‘worker’ memoirists, the February Revolution may have begun spontaneously, but the political alertness of the worker Bolsheviks enabled them to take over the leadership and ensure its victory. For Trotsky, in his history of The Russian Revolution of the early 1930s, the central problem of the February Revolution was why ‘those socialists who stood at the head of the soviet took it for granted that the power ought to pass to the bourgeoisie’.10 The ‘revolutionary chronicle’ was the first medium chosen for recording official histories of the revolution. A six-volume chronicle was started in 1922 by N. Avdeev and completed in 1930 by I.N. Liubimov. It remained the principal reference source on the subject until it was superseded by a four-volume work that appeared between 1957–61. The term ‘chronicle’ is completely apt, if it is prefixed with Bolshevik: there are entries for each day, arranged in an order that gives pride of place, in order, to the actions and statements by Lenin, issues related to the Party, and finally to Bolshevik-controlled organizations. The affairs of non-Bolshevik organizations are given short shrift; the more right-wing the group, the less the notice. Votes in soviet plenums and executive committees are supplied in terms of numbers when they passed pro-Bolshevik resolutions, but in a more abstract form, if mentioned at all, when they passed other resolutions. While addressing the Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956, Mikoian had called for a short and comprehensive text on October; not only was he lamenting the absence of one, he was also seeking a credible history to replace the discredited Short Course. Many hundreds of documentary collections on the revolution have appeared since 1956, some thematic in scope, others geographic.11 On the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution ten years later, the historian I. I. Mints (1896–1991) 10D.A. Longley, ‘Iakovlev’s Question, or the Historiography of the Problem of Spontaneity and Leadership in the Russian Revolution of February 1917’, in Edith Rogovin Frankel, Jonathan Frankel and Baruch Knei-Paz, eds., Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917, Cambridge, 1992, 366, 369; Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution:The Overthrow of Tzarism and The Triumph of the Soviets, selected and edited by F.W. Dupee and translated by Max Eastman, New York, 1959, 154. For the early Soviet view on the February revolution, Longley draws on O.N. Znamenskii, ‘Sovetskie istoriki o sootnoshenii stikhiinosti i organizovannosti v fevral’skoi revoliutsii’, in Sverzhenie samoderzhaviia, Moscow, 1970, 284. 11John Keep, ‘The Great October Socialist Revolution’, in Baron and Heer, eds., Windows on the Russian Past, 142, 141.

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was awarded the only Lenin Prize ever won by a historian for his three-volume study of The History of Great October.12 A gentle zephyr of de-Stalinization wafted over Soviet historiography on the revolution in 1958. The Academy of Sciences established a Scientific Council on the Prerequisites of the Great October Socialist Revolution, (not the revolution itself) and large numbers of professional historians mingled with ideologists at the conferences it organized from 1958. John Keep made a broad distinction between the ‘mainstream revisionists’, motivated by an urge to forge a viable consensus, and the critics or innovators, who sought the ‘truth’ that was concealed by ideological imperatives. To strengthen their argument that Russia possessed the attributes of a developed capitalist economy, and hence displayed a ‘maturity’, the ‘revisionists’ pointed to the industrial cartels and trusts, which, in their view, had dominated the pre-war economy, and to a numerically substantial industrial proletariat concentrated in large plants. Describing the pre-war socio-economic system in Russia as distinguished by its ‘multiformity (a rough rendering of mnogoukladnost’, the term used by Lenin to describe the tsarist economy as structured in several layers, or modes of production, at unequal levels of development), rather than dominantly capitalist, and drawing attention to the co-existence of peasant farms and large estates, the critics made the case that the extent of capitalist development in the country—and the ‘maturity’ that hinged upon this identification— had been overdrawn. M. N. Pokrovskii wrote two volumes of Essays on the History of the October Revolution, and he visited the subject on numerous occasions. In one characterization, in 1933, he argued that the co-existence of modern industry and primitive peasant huts testified to ‘catastrophically fast’ growth in Russia rather than to backwardness. Marxist historians of the ‘New Directions’ group in the 1960s and early 1970s, like A.M. Anfimov and P.V. Volobuev in fact, drew on a much earlier strain of analysis; the ‘father of Russian Marxism’ G.V. Plekhanov, had eloquently summed up the Menshevik position in June 1917 when he said that ‘Russian history has yet to thresh the grain from which the socialist pie will one day be baked’. Perhaps because many of the critical historians, or the innovators, 12Litvin,

Writing History, 49–50; James H. Billington, ‘Six Views of the Russian Revolution’, World Politics, 18: 3, April 1966, 460; I. I. Mints, IstoriiaVelikogo Oktiabria, 2 vols., Moscow, 1967–73.

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were ‘provincials’ who started their career by examining the local records at hand, their work is textured by a receptivity to regional specificity and variation in determining the revolutionary pattern. Their recognition of the relative ‘under-development’ of prerevolutionary Russia inclines them toward interpretations that posit the revolution as a struggle of national liberation, of emancipation from western imperialism.13 Volobuev had argued that despite its significant large-scale, industrial capitalist sector, Russia in 1917 was a ‘backward, predominantly agrarian country’, a contention which placed him in the group which relies on mnogoukladnost’ as a primary factor of explanation for the Russian Revolution. An authoritative History of the Three Russian Revolutions, under the editorship of a collective headed by S.P. Trapeznikov, was prepared for publication in the mid-1960s with the aim of settling the issue definitively.14 Much of this was too arcane for lay audiences. At a conference in 1974, to recount one instance, one of those present called for more discussion articles, another urged historians to vault over the barriers that divided socio-economic formations and compare, for example, the condition of the working class before and after the revolution, a third wished for more attention to be paid to Russia in the world, while another wistfully called for the publication of more memoirs. With memoirs, more may not necessarily have meant better; the new editions of those first published during the 1920s lack credibility because unacceptable views were sometimes edited. Notwithstanding these reservations, new material, particularly monographs, steadily appeared through the 1950s and 1960s, prompting one Western scholar of the revolution to wonder in 1977 whether ‘the western 13Litvin, Writing History, 49. See Keep, ‘Great October’, in Baron and Heer, eds., Windows on the Russian Past, 144; for an account of this debate in 1929, when Vanag’s contention that Russia’s capitalist development in the period before the War had been that of a ‘semi-colony’ had been countered by Gindin and Granovskii. See also John Barber, ‘Stalin’s Letter to The Editors of Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya’, Soviet Studies, 28: 1, January 1976, 38. Pokrovskii’s comments on Russia before the revolution are in his Istoricheskaia nauka i bor’ba klassov, Moscow, 1933, 1: 148–9 and are quoted by Roman Szporluk, ‘Pokrovsky and Russian History’, Survey, no. 53, October 1964, 114. His Essays is Ocherki po istorii oktiabr’skoi revoliutsii, 2 vols., Moscow and Leningrad, 1927. 14Keep, ‘Great October’, in Baron and Heer, eds., Windows on the Russian Past, 140, 152. See the first chapter in this book for details on Trapeznikov and the havoc his policies wrought on Soviet historians after 1965.

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student is likely to feel somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer mass of new material’.15 Official initiatives from the institutional apex to reappraise methodologies related to the study of the October Revolution commenced early in the history of glasnost’. In December 1986 and in April 1988 the Scientific Council of the Academy of Sciences organized two Round Tables to work out goals and tasks related to studying the revolution. The ensuing deliberations considerably extended the extant boundaries. Chronologically, the revolution was set in a twenty-year matrix that took in the revolution of 1905 as well as the troubles in establishing Soviet power during the early NEP. Thematically, the discussions suggested the elucidation of a framework that combined proletarian, peasant, anti-war, and national liberation revolutions, and that interacted with and influenced each other in complex and contradictory ways. The new research has questioned the wisdom of bestowing both prime responsibility and credit for revolutionizing the army (the ‘disintegration of the Army’) on the Bolsheviks, and suggested, first, that this process may have been more spontaneous than assumed hitherto and, second, that all the socialist parties contributed to the involvement of the army in politics. Terminologically, the participants interrogated its regnant ‘socialist’ appellation, by suggesting the usefulness of alternative terms like ‘proletarian-Jacobin’ revolution. The non-Bolshevik alternatives during 1917 were explored and their frailties diagnosed.16

Western Depictions The vast majority of people outside Russia who disapproved of the revolution when it occurred were moved to indignation, not by stories of community of goods or community of women, but by the hard fact that the Bolsheviks had taken Russia out of the war, and deserted her allies at the most critical moment of their fortunes.17 15Keep, ‘Great October’, Ibid., 140, 142. The conference was between the editors of Istoriia SSSR (History of the USSR) and some of its readers. 16P.V.Volobuev, ‘Perestroika and the October Revolution in Soviet Historiography’, translated from the Russian by Kurt S. Schultz, The Russian Review, 51: 4, October 1992, 566–76. The proceedings of the First Round Table were published in Voprosy istorii, No. 6, 1987, and those of the second in Rossiia 1917 god:Vybor istoricheskogo puti, Moscow, 1989. 17E.H. Carr, ‘The Russian Revolution and the West’, New Left Review, No. 111, September-October 1978, 29.

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Among the earliest non-Soviet literature on the revolutions was that produced by Allied diplomatic and military personnel. The preoccupation of the Allied Powers with winning the war in 1917– 18 gave rise to a flood of printed matter denouncing the Bolsheviks as German dupes or agents and displaying little understanding of the historical roots of Bolshevism or the circumstances which allowed the Bolshevik Party to make the revolution with such apparent ease. But such accounts do have the merit of providing first-hand material otherwise unavailable.18 Perhaps the most useful of the Ambassadorial accounts is that by the doyen of the diplomatic corps, the British envoy, Sir George Buchanan. By contrast, the memoirs of the American representative, David R. Francis, are painfully superficial and typify the perils of amateurism (and of political appointments) in the Foreign Service: he was an ex-Governor of Missouri whose tastes ran to cigars, whiskey and poker, and who had a distinct distaste for radicals. Wanting to find out more about the dangerous socialist John Reed, he arranged to have his pocket picked by an agent on Nevsky Prospekt in Petrograd. The French Ambassador, Maurice Paleologue’s diary, is a florid literary composition which conveys the mood and flavour of the old regime in St. Petersburg, but is frequently uninformed and misguided by the turn of revolutionary events in the first three months. Paleologue was replaced in May 1917 by Joseph Noulens, an expert on financial and agricultural affairs in the French Senate. Alexander Kerenskii, Premier in the PG, thought that the Allied diplomats’ animus against the PG grew as the formal diplomatic etiquette was allowed to fall into abeyance after the February Revolution: ‘Up to the moment that the Tsar was deposed, all the foreign diplomatic representatives in Russia behaved with the greatest decorum and in strict conformity with protocol. None of them ventured, certainly, to interfere in Russia’s internal affairs. But no sooner had the upheaval begun than the situation took a drastic turn. Diplomatic practice was thrown to the winds ... every one of them was free to go anywhere, attend any council, and sit in on any meeting’. Fifty years later, he berates them for their hostility towards the government he served: ‘Most of the Allied diplomats were critical of and even opposed to 18Robert D. Warth, ‘On the Historiography of the Russian Revolution’, Slavic Review, June 1967, 248.

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the Provisional Government. We were accused of weakness, spinelessness, indecision, and various other sins.’ 19 The only substantial recollections by Allied military officers are almost parodies of the proverbial ‘military mind’: opinionated, ultraconservative and politically ingenious. Major-General Alfred Knox, the British military attaché, displays a stubborn incomprehension of the difficulties confronting the PG. But he is more informative than General Henri Niessel, head of the French military mission, who deals with the Civil War.20 The trio of unofficial representatives—R.H. Bruce Lockhart of Great Britain, Raymond Robins of the USA and Jacques Sadoul of France—were men of initiative, intelligence and goodwill, far more flexible and knowledgeable than their nominal superiors. Lockhart’s British Agent does some justice to the vivid kaleidoscope of revolutionary Russia. Raymond Robins’ Own Story lacks depth and subtlety and oversimplifies the Russian situation, but it does possess important documentary significance for its portraits of the parties and personalities. Robins worked for the American Red Cross Mission, was interested in keeping Russia friendly to the US, especially American business firms keen on entering the Russian market, and to this end, employed John Reed when Reed first arrived in Petrograd. Jacques Sadoul, the Socialist, provides an astute commentary that is helpful in assembling the intricate story of Allied-Bolshevik contacts in the winter of 1917–18.21 John Reed’s, Ten Days That Shook the World is in a class apart. It resembles the shooting script for a film, rich with the reverberation 19Sir George Buchanan, My Mission to Russia and Other Diplomatic Memories, 2 vols., Boston, 1923; David R. Francis, An Ambassador’s Memoirs, 3 vols., London, 1923–5; and his Russia from the American Embassy, New York, 1921, reveals the shortsighted anti-Bolshevism of American officials; Maurice Paleologue, An Ambassador’s Memoirs. 3 vols., London, 1923–5; Joseph Noulens, Mon ambassade en Russie sovietique 1917–1919, two volumes, Paris, 1933; Alexander Kerensky, The Kerensky Memoirs: Russia and History’s Turning Point, London, 1965, 387. See also Robert A. Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed, New York, 1981, 289–90. 20Major General Sir Alfred Knox, With the Russian Army, 1914–1917. 2 vols., London, 1921; General Henri Niessel, Le triomphe des bolcheviks et la paix de Brest-Litovsk, Paris, 1940. 21R.H. Bruce Lockhart, British Agent, New York, 1933; and The Two Revolutions, London, 1957; Jacques Sadoul, Notes sur la revolution bolchevique, Paris, 1919. See also Warth, Slavic Review, June 1967, 249. On Raymond Robins, see Rosenstone, Reed, 309.

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of conversations and declarations, proclamations and resolutions. A sensitive writer, John Reed had proved in Insurgent Mexico that reporting could be raised to an art, and his whole life seems to have been a special preparation for describing the Russian Revolution. His pages crackle with more vitality, drama and power than can be found in any other accounts by eye-witnesses or historians. A growing social awareness had changed his world-view and provided new heroes. He had seen American workers on strike and Mexican revolutionaries, but their heroism had been in defeat, or in victories soon dissipated by stronger forces.22 Reed makes his position as an eye-witness clear at the outset: ‘I must confine myself to a chronicle of those events which I myself observed and experienced, and those supported by reliable evidence.’ In his The Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky described an ubiquitous John Reed as ‘observer and participant, chronicler and poet of the insurrection ... who did not miss one of the dramatic episodes of the revolution’.23 Evocations of the street add to the immediacy of Reed’s narrative and a few are provided to illustrate their colour: ‘I have listened to the breadlines, hearing the bitter acrid note of discontent which from time to time burst up through the miraculous good nature of the Russian crowd’. And, contrastingly, ‘the ladies of the minor bureaucratic set carried their own sugar and bread to their afternoon tea sessions’. Or, ‘The daughter of a friend of mine came home one afternoon in hysterics because the woman street-car conductor had called her ‘Comrade!’ Russia was bearing a new world: The servants one used to treat like animals were getting independent ... they refused to stand in queues and wear out their shoes, that now cost three months wages (hundred rubles; the Bolshevik paper Dien, costs fifty kopeks). Waiters and hotel servants put up signs saying ‘Just because a man has to make his living waiting on table is no reason to insult him by offering him a tip’. ‘All Russia was learning to read, and reading—because the people wanted to know ... Russia absorbed reading matter like hot sand absorbs water, insatiable’. Then the Talk, ‘beside which Carlyle’s ‘flood of French speech’ was a mere 22John Reed also wrote Kornilov to Brest-Litovsk, NewYork, 1919. In a section entitled

‘Discovering John Reed’, Howard Zinn wrote how John Reed ‘rushed into the center of wars and revolutions, strikes and demonstrations, with the eye of a movie camera, before there was one, and the memory of a tape recorder, before that existed’. See an online excerpt from Howard Zinn on History, Seven Stories Press, 2000, 2. 23Reed, Ten Days, 9; Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, 462, 406.

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trickle ... every street corner was a tribune’. At every meeting attempts to limit the time of speakers were voted down. ‘Gaunt and bootless men of the Twelfth Army sickened in the mud of desperate trenches’ eagerly demanded “Did you bring anything to read?”24 But the ‘Talk’ was also bewildering, as when the doorman at the Smolny told Reed ‘I don’t know what is becoming of poor Russia. All these Mensheviki and Bolsheviki and Trudoviki ... This Ukraine and this Finland and the German imperialists and the English imperialists. I am forty-five years old, and in all my life I never heard so many words as in this place ...’ At ‘a bloody Italian film of passion and intrigue’, probably just days before the revolution, Reed overheard soldiers and sailors down front, ‘staring at the screen in child-like wonder, totally unable to comprehend why there should be so much violent running about and so much homicide’.25 The second, third and fourth chapters describe, respectively, the September and October developments; the last days before the revolution; and, the fall of the PG and Petrograd on ‘the day after’, 7 November. There is a graphic account in the fourth chapter of the looting inside the Winter Palace: ‘As Army soldiers entered, they were searched by two Red Guards. Everything that was plainly not his property was taken away, the man at the table noted it on his paper, and it was carried into a little room ... The culprits either surrendered or pleaded like children ... they were told that “stealing was not worthy of the people’s champions”; often those who had been caught turned around and began to help go through the rest of the comrades’. After Reed entered the Winter Palace, just vacated by members of the PG, he found that the great state apartments were unharmed (in terms of what remained after the most important art treasures of the Palace had been transferred to Moscow in September 1917), but every desk and cabinet in the offices had been ransacked, as had been the living quarters. The most highly prized loot was clothing. Two soldiers explained that they were ripping the elaborate Spanish leather upholstery from chairs to make boots with.26 Chapters 5 to 9 frame the days, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 13 November. We get a sense of the swirl of rumour: That the Bolsheviks were led by 24Reed, Ten

Days, 38, 39, 40. 74, 76. 26Ibid. 109–10. This was confirmed by Trotsky in his The Russian Revolution, where he wrote that ‘attempts at looting were actually made, possibly by robbers disguised as soldiers, as was frequent at the time. Trotsky, op. cit., 406. 25Ibid.,

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German and Austrian officers as they took the Winter Palace; that the Red Guards had thoroughly looted the Winter Palace after massacring its guards; that soldiers of the Women’s Battalion guarding the Palace inside had been tortured, violated and had committed suicide. A commission appointed by the City Duma reported on 16 November, that three women had been violated and one had committed suicide, leaving a note which said that she had been ‘disappointed in her ideals’.27 The Women’s Battalion featured in sensational stories and propaganda after the fall of the Winter Palace. Many people in Petrograd—and around the world—believed they had been raped and slaughtered by the Red Guards. A careful investigation carried out in November 1917, in which the Bolsheviks permitted an independent commission of Mensheviks and Kadets to participate, found no basis for the stories. One woman had committed suicide for personal reasons. Trotsky had laid the rumours to rest in his History, when he pointed out that ‘immediately after the capture of the Winter Palace, rumours went round in bourgeois circles about the execution of Junkers, the raping of the Women’s Battalion, the looting of the riches of the palace. All these fables had long ago been refuted when Miliukov wrote in his History: ‘Those of the Women’s Battalion who had not died under fire were seized by the Bolsheviks, subjected during that evening and night to the frightful attentions of the soldiers, to violence and execution. As a matter of fact there were no shootings. Still less thinkable were acts of violence, especially within the palace where alongside of various accidental elements from the streets, hundreds of revolutionary workers came in with rifles in their hands’.28 The insurrection in Moscow tended to be neglected in many early chronicles of the Russian Revolution. John Keep has reminded us that the seizure of power was accomplished in Moscow after considerable bloodshed with as many as 1000 casualties. Reed’s tenth chapter deals with the event, as does Trotsky. Reed recounts ‘the bloody six day battle which had rent Moscow in two’; he writes about participating in the burial of ‘500 proletarians who had died for the Revolution in the Brotherhood Grave’ by the Kremlin wall where Reed himself was put to rest. ‘For the first time since Napoleon was 27Reed,

Ten Days, 124, Appendix 29, p. 306.

28Harrison E. Salisbury, Black Night,White Snow: Russia’s Revolutions 1905–1917,

London, 1978, 549, citing Kh. M. Astrakhan, Istoriia SSSR, 1965, No. 5, 93–6;Trotsky, op. cit., 406.

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in Moscow, the candles were out in all the street chapels’. Trotsky had placed the insurrection in a broader context by explaining that the textile and leatherworkers in Moscow had been less militantly conscious than the Petrograd proletariat, owing to which an insurrection had not been necessary in Moscow in February; Moscow had remained peaceful in July too. But in October,Trotsky continues, the insurrection took the form of extended battles lasting in intervals for eight days. He quotes Muralov, one of the chief leaders of the Moscow insurrection, to explain why this happened in Moscow, where the correlation of forces had been considered so favourable that Lenin had wanted to begin there and not in Petrograd: ‘In this hot work we were not always and in everything firm and determined Having an overwhelming numerical advantage, ten to one, we dragged the fight out for a whole week ... owing to a lack of ability to direct fighting masses, to the undiscipline [sic] of the latter, and to a complete ignorance of the tactics of the street fight, both on the part of the commanders and on the part of the soldiers’.Trotsky sardonically adds that ‘Muralov has a habit of naming things with their real names: no wonder he is now in Siberian exile’.29 The eleventh chapter, ‘The Conquest of Power’, relates to the first two months after the revolution when the Bolsheviks sought to consolidate political power. Reed describes how ‘the opposition, which still controlled the economic life of the country, settled down to organize disorganization, with all the Russian genius for co-operative action—to obstruct, cripple, and discredit the Soviets’. Trotsky had to force open the locks of the Foreign Ministry archives, only to find that Neratov, former assistant Foreign Minister had disappeared with the Secret Treaties, but he returned a few days later and surrendered the Secret Treaties to Trotsky. The officers of the Credit Chancery destroyed their books so that all record of the financial relations of Russia with foreign countries was lost. Nobody would show Shliapnikov, Minister of Labour, where his office was. Kollontai, Commissar of Public Welfare, had to arrest strikers to obtain the 29John L.H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization, New York, 1976, 353; Reed, Ten Days, 227–8; Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, 435. An excellent study of the events in Moscow is given in S. P. Melgunov, Kak bol’sheviki zakhvatili vlast:oktiabr’skyi perevorot 1917 g., Paris, 1953, 277–382. Unfortunately this section was omitted from the English translation, The Bolshevik Seizure of Power, edited and abridged by S.P. Pushkarev in collaboration with B.S. Pushkarev, translated by J.S. Beaver, Santa Barbara, CA and Oxford, 1972.

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keys for her office and safe and she discovered that her predecessor, Countess Panina, had gone off with all the funds, which she refused to surrender except on the order of the Constituent Assembly.30 Reed provides an early intimation of an important moment. Tsarist state officials were bitterly opposed to the Bolsheviks almost to a person. On 27 October, civil servants in Petrograd decided on strike action when the Bolshevik Commissars appeared to take possession of their new offices.When Trotsky turned up in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the staff refused to acknowledge him as their chief, locked themselves in their rooms, and when the doors were forced, resigned en masse. Trotsky was handed the keys to the diplomatic archive only after he threatened to have the locks destroyed. Shliapnikov had a similar experience when he tried to take possession of the Ministry of Labour. It was bitterly cold and no one would light any fires, while not a single one of the hundreds of civil servants in the building would show him where the Commissar’s room was. By a mixture of threats and blandishments the Bolshevik Commissars succeeded in breaking resistance by the staff of the Central Bank in permitting the new government access to funds. The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly deprived the strikes among public servants of much of their raison d‘etre since they had been largely designed to demonstrate support for that body.31 Reed’s biographer affords us a glimpse of Reed gathering his thoughts before he set them down in Ten Days, from an unpublished ‘Introduction’ he penned in March 1918: ‘If I were asked what I consider most characteristic of the Russian Revolution, I should say, the vast simplicity of its processes. Like Russian life, as described by Tolstoy and Chekhov, like the course of Russian history itself, the Revolution seemed to be endowed with the patient inevitability of mounting sap in spring, of the tides of the sea.The French Revolution, in its causes and architecture, has always seemed to me essentially a human affair, the creature of intellect, theatrical; the Russian Revolution on the other hand, is like a force of nature ....’ 32 Even within the small but growing tribe of activist-journalists, John Reed stood out as a maverick. One of the highest paid 30Reed, Ten

Days, 232–3. Montgomery Hyde, Stalin: The History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, 145; Keep, The Russian Revolution, 295–6. 32Rosenstone, Reed, 279, n.1, p. 405 where he informs us that this ‘Introduction’ was Reed’s first attempt to begin a book on the revolution. None of the material in it appeared in Ten Days. 31H.

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correspondents in the USA in 1916, he could not find an editor ready to hire an anti-war radical after the USA had entered the war in April 1917. Eventually Max Eastman and his friend Eugen Boissevain convinced a wealthy socialite to donate 2000 dollars toward the journey, and this enabled Reed to stay in Russia from September 1917 to February 1918. Reed approached Trotsky for a safe way to arrange to get his papers—documents, posters, newspapers and pamphlets, his copious notes—home and suggested that the Russian government grant him the status of a diplomatic courier.Trotsky went one better and suggested that he would appoint Reed as Soviet Consul in NewYork. On arriving in New York he was accosted by two customs officers and an Army Lieutenant who confiscated all his papers.This was at a time, in 1918, when in a report to Congress, the Attorney General proudly declared: “Never in its history has this country been so thoroughly policed.” As weeks passed, Reed despaired of ever getting his papers back: ‘As long as I am accused of no crime in connection with the papers, why aren’t they given to me? .... Each day carries me further away from the time I knew in Russia, and makes my story less valuable.’ His papers were eventually returned to him in November 1918.33 Ten Days was written in two months. One morning, when he stumbled out for a cup of coffee, Reed ran into Max Eastman who was startled by his appearance, ‘gaunt, unshaven, greasy-skinned, a stark sleepless half crazy look’. The book was well reviewed not only in radical journals but also by conservative newspapers like the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Public Ledger and the New York American. Reviews in publications hostile to the Bolsheviks generally recognized it as the most effective, accurate account of its subject. In his Foreword, Lenin, with whom Reed had had several late night conversations, praised it fulsomely: ‘Unreservedly do I recommend it to the workers of the world. Here is a book which I should like to see published in millions of copies and translated into all languages. It gives a truthful and vivid exposition of the events ....’ and it was thereafter adopted by the Soviet regime as an unofficial textbook.34 Investigating Bolshevism in February 1919, senators on the Judiciary Subcommittee listened to a series of witnesses almost wholly opposed to the Soviet regime and treated the most unlikely tales of Communist horror as fact—that the Bolsheviks killed white33Ibid., 34Ibid.,

282, 314, 317, 321, 324, 335. 300–1, 335–6, 362–3.

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collar workers and educated men, that they had nationalized women and established free-love bureaus. Reed asked to testify before it, although he had not been summoned. Patiently answering questions, he provided a wealth of information about the revolution that the senators silently absorbed. John Reed’s second book on Russia, From Kornilov to Brest-Litovsk was postponed because he had to return to Russia. Both the (American) Communist Party (CP) and the Communist Labor Party (CLP) sought recognition from the Communist International in 1919. Since the Comintern would only allow one American party to affiliate, both sent representatives to Russia. Reed went on behalf of the CLP. The Executive Committee of the Comintern accepted his report on the American situation and plea for recognition of the CLP, and promised to study the situation.While waiting in Russia for the formal decision, he traveled all over the country, went to Baku, and then was jailed in Finland. He knew he would be arrested if he returned to the USA. He fell ill in jail, contracted typhus and died in Moscow on 17 October 1920. His body lay in state, and Nikolai Bukharin and Alexandra Kollontai were among those who spoke at his funeral and he was buried beside the Kremlin.35 Among the earliest eyewitness accounts by Russians are those by Alexander Kerenskii, Minister of Justice, War Minister and finally Prime Minister in the Provisional Government and Pavel Miliukov, the Liberal leader of the Kadets (Constitutional Democrats) and first Foreign Minister in the PG. These accounts exemplify what the American historian and former Librarian of the Library of Congress, James Billington terms the ‘accidental-pathetic’ view: ‘Seeing no deep meaning in the revolution, its protagonists view its outcome with the same sense of bewilderment and helpless outrage one feels at the interjection of a senseless natural calamity into human affairs’. Billington shows how terms like ‘catastrophe’ and ‘disaster’, or metaphors like ‘flood’ and ‘storm’ recur. Another hallmark of their work is the repeated search for ‘turning points’ at which events might have gone the other way—if stronger human wills had prevailed’.36 Alexander Kerenskii’s The Catastrophe and The Crucifixion,37 the major works of his early exile, are loosely organized and apparently 35Ibid.,

343–5, 359, 361. Politics, April 1966, 456; Warth, Slavic Review, June 1967, 252. 37Alexander Kerensky, The Catastrophe: Kerensky’s Own Story of the Russian Revolution, New York, 1927; The Crucifixion of Liberty, New York, 1934. 36Billington, World

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intended as memoirs. He displays a complete lack of understanding of the circumstances that brought the Bolsheviks to power. In the prefatory chapter to The Kerensky Memoirs: Russia and History’s Turning Point, called ‘Historical Prelude’, the 84-year-old Kerenskii affirms that he had not intended to write ‘objective history’, ‘because that would have been premature’ (nearly five decades after 1917); he attributes the ‘enduring value’ of the book to his having ‘arrived at these conclusions, not as a historian, but as an eye-witness’, and the book is shot through with a vivid and personalized immediacy. He rarely, however, lets the reader forget how history fused one life and a revolution together: ‘From the moment of the collapse of the Monarchy in February, 1917, until the downfall, in October of the same year, of the free Russia that briefly succeeded it, I found myself in the center of events. I was, in fact, their focal point, the center of the vortex of human passions and conflictive ambitions which raged around me in the titanic struggle ....’; the monomania continues a few pages later with the assertion that ‘Because circumstances had put me at the apex of power during the Revolution and because my name had become a kind of symbol to the people of the new life of freedom, it fell chiefly to me to wage this verbal battle among the masses of the population’. Even as Kerenskii aligns his stance on the popularity of the Bolsheviks with later historiography, that ‘The secret of Bolshevik propaganda among the working classes and the soldiers was that the Bolsheviks spoke to them in simple language and played on the deeprooted instinct of self-preservation’. He shifts his stance 150 pages later, when he explains the overthrow of his government in the following terms, ‘I can still say, just as I did 48 years ago, that despite three years of war and blockade, despite Lenin’s alliance with Ludendorff [sic] and the help given to Kornilov’s supporters by our allies, the democratic government ... would never have been overthrown if the struggle against had been waged by fair means and not by lies and slander’.This rumination acquires a mystic overtone a few pages later, when Kerenskii preaches that ‘Some foreigners might think that only politically immature, ignorant Russian soldiers, sailors, and workers could be taken in by Lenin’s utter perversion of the truth. Nothing of the sort! There is a certain higher degree of falsehood which, by its very enormity, exercises a peculiar fascination for all human beings, whatever their intellectual level. There is a kind of psychological law according to which the more outrageous a lie is,

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the more likely it is to be believed. It was on this human failing that Lenin based his strategy for seizing power’. Collecting the strands of a famous life, 20 years after the end of the Third Reich, Kerenskii does not limit gullibility in the face of The Big and Repeated Lie to only the Germans: ‘Another powerful factor working in Lenin’s favor was the mystic belief of many Socialist democrats, not to mention Kantian and Christian idealists, that a new age would arise from the boundless suffering and bloodshed of the “imperialist war” and that man would be “born anew”. Many people saw Lenin as the midwife of this spiritual rebirth.’ The uprising in Petrograd, presumably Russia and History’s Turning Point, is briskly disposed of in a few sentences: ‘On the night of October 23 Trotsky’s “military-revolutionary committee” came out into the open and began to issue orders for the seizure of government offices and strategic points in the city’, and, three pages on, ‘[By October 25] the central telephone exchange, post office, and most of the government offices were occupied by detachments of Red Guards. The building that housed the Council of the Republic ... had also been occupied by Red sentries’.38 Apart from being a politician, Miliukov was also one of the most distinguished late-Imperial historians and his lengthy treatment of the revolution should have carried the dual imprint of trained scholarship and inside knowledge. It is instead, special pleading, of the specifically Kadet cause within the broader currents of Liberalism, and this, indeed, is its value, for the Kadets have not systematically recorded their version of the revolution. This undoubtedly pioneering work, that breaks off in the summer of 1917 is a candid appraisal of the February Revolution, but then trails off sharply from a penetrating and ranging introduction and first section into a verbose chronicle of events lacking a broader context.39 Almost uniquely among anti-Bolshevik historians and contemporary eye-witnesses, Viktor Chernov, a Socialist Revolutionary (SR) and Minister of Agriculture, understands the play of social and economic 38Kerensky, The

Kerensky Memoirs, xiv, 217, 229, 277, 423, 430–1, 471, 434, 437.

39Paul N. Miliukov, Istorii vtoroi russkoi revoliutsii. 3 parts, Sofia, 1921; Warth, Slavic

Review, June 1967, 252–3; Billington, World Politics, April 1966, 457. Kerensky writes of Miliukov with patronizing condescension, thus: ‘By nature Milyukov was a scholar rather than a politician. Had it not been for his combative temperament, he would probably have had a distinguished career as a scholar. Because of his natural bent as a historian, Milyukov tended to look at political events in rather too much perspective, as one looks at them through books or historical documents’. Kerensky, The Kerensky Memoirs, 242.

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forces and their resolution in the October Revolution.While Miliukov blames Kerenskii and his colleagues of the moderate left for weakness and irresolution in the face of the Bolshevik alternative, Chernov finds that successive coalitions were too far to the right to meet the basic demands of the masses. The memoirs of another eyewitness, Iraklii Tseretelli, a Menshevik leader of the Petrograd Soviet who served briefly as Minister of Posts and Telegraphs, are the most detailed of any government official on the first months of the revolution, to the end of July, and constitute a valuable official primary source.40 Nikolai Sukhanov was a left-wing socialist nominally associated with the Menshevik Internationalists, a member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, a talented political and economic journalist, and an authority on agrarian problems. Sukhanov almost completely fails to provide any reasoned explanation for why tsarism ‘had crumbled away in an instant. Three centuries to build up, and three days for it to vanish’. Sukhanov devotes almost all his attention to Petrograd, and within the city, to the Executive Committee of the soviets; Alexander Rabinowitch points out that Sukhanov had somehow managed to turn up at almost every political meeting since the February Revolution,41 but there are only two compressed and distanced descriptions of revolutions elsewhere: ‘There were many excesses, perhaps more than before (in the May to July period). Lynch-law, the destruction of houses and shops, jeering at and attacks on officers, provincial authorities, or private persons, unauthorized arrests, seizures, and beatings-up—were recorded every day by tens and hundreds. In the country, burnings and destruction of country-houses became more frequent. The peasants were beginning to regulate land-tenure according to their own ideas, forbidding the illegal felling of trees, driving off the landlords’ stock, taking the stocks of grain under their own control, and refusing to permit them to be taken to stations and wharves .... Quite a few excesses were also observed amongst the workers—against factory administration, owners and foremen. But more than anything else of course it was the unbridled rioting soldiers who were destroying law and order’. Or, ‘Disorders’ were taking on absolutely unendurable, really 40Viktor Chernov, The Great Russian Revolution, translated by Philip E. Mosely, New Haven, 1936; Iraklii G. Tseretelli, Vospominaniia o fevral’skoi revoliutsii, two volumes, Paris-la-Haye, 1963; Warth, Slavic Review, June 1967, 253. 41Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, London, 1979, 202.

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menacing proportions in Russia (after July). Anarchy was really getting under way. The city and the countryside were both in revolt. The first was demanding bread, the second land.’ In The Russian Revolution,Trotsky was venomous about Sukhanov: ‘A man who hardly ever left the Tauride Palace; a semi-Narodnik, semiMarxist, a conscientious observer rather than a statesman, a journalist rather than a revolutionist, a rationaliser rather than a journalist’. Lenin described Sukhanov as ‘one of the best representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, and that is the most flattering thing that can be said of him. This was no ordinary Philistine, but on the contrary a professional man-of-politics, sufficiently expert in his small trade. He could never look intelligent, because one saw too plainly the continual contrast between what he wanted, and what he arrived at. But he intellectualized and blundered and bored’.42 Sukhanov assures us that the volumes are his personal reminiscences, not a history. Like John Reed’s Ten Days, Sukhanov’s The Russian Revolution was also keenly studied in the USSR in the 1920s. It had been praised by Lenin, it was required reading for Party cadre and considered an indispensable source-book for the study of the revolution. Sukhanov’s caustic description of Stalin’s activity in the Executive Committee of the soviets in February and March 1917, where the latter ‘gave me an impression—and not only me—of a gray spot which would sometimes give out a dim and inconsequential light. There is really nothing more to be said about him’, may have contributed to his conviction for treason in March 1931 at the trial of the Mensheviks and dispatch to the GULAG. Nothing more was heard of Sukhanov after 1934. His book was reissued in 1992.43 By an ironic twist of fate, the meeting of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party on 10 October, that discussed plans for the uprising, was held in Sukhanov’s apartment, but in his absence. His wife, Galina Flakserman, had been a Bolshevik activist since 1905 and in 1917, she was a member of the staff of Izvestiia and an aide in the Central Committee Secretariat. She had ensured that her meddlesome husband would remain away on that historic night. ‘The weather is wretched, and you must promise not to try and make 42Trotsky,

The Russian Revolution, 150, 160, 183–4. Sukhanov, Zapiski o revoliutsii, seven volumes, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Moscow, 1922–23. Joel Carmichael edited, abridged and translated it as The Russian Revolution, 1917, London and New York, 1955. References are to the English version. See pp. 99, 368, 533, v, vii. See also Hyde, Stalin, 283. 43Nikolai

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it all the way back home tonight’, she had counseled solicitously as he departed for work early that morning.44 The Bolshevik Party has been represented very differently by Trotsky in The Russian Revolution. Far from being the inexorably advancing and single-willed formation of Soviet histories, Trotsky describes a party that wavered, retreated, was internally disunited and racked by debate. As with later western accounts, Trotsky singles out two ‘inner crises’ of the year for the Party, namely Lenin’s efforts to unite the Party around The April Theses of opposition to the PG around a radically new socialist, Bolshevik agenda, and, secondly, October, when there is open conflict between Lenin and the Central Committee, whose members are on the point of burning the letter in which he insists that preparations for the insurrection commence. Lenin’s indispensability, as the Bolshevik leader for October, is unambiguous: ‘Is it possible to say confidently that the party without him would have found its road? We would by no means make bold to say that’, and in a letter to Preobrazhenskii from Alma Ata, he wrote that ‘You know better than I do that had Lenin not managed to come to Petrograd in April 1917, the October Revolution would not have taken place’. With the hypocrisies of Stalin’s personality cult assailing his senses as he wrote, Trotsky pitted the authentically ‘irreplaceable’ Lenin and even the arguably ‘irreplaceable’Trotsky, as the moral leader of the opposition to the deceptively ‘irreplaceable’ Stalin.45 As a biographer par excellence, and of Trotsky in particular, Isaac Deutscher suggests that no other Bolshevik has or could have produced so great and splendid an account of the events of 1917. As a historian, Trotsky stands above himself as actor; there is only one sentence on his Presidency of the Petrograd Soviet. Deutscher affirms that ‘Trotsky looms incomparably larger, in 1917, on every page of Pravda, in every anti-Bolshevik newspaper, and in the records of the Soviets and the party than he does in his own pages’. When the History was published, and for many years thereafter, most anti-Bolshevik leaders, 44Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, 202, citing P.V. Volobuev, ‘Iz istorii bor’by Vremennogo pravitel’stva s revoliutsiei’, Istoricheskii arkhiv, no. 5, 1960, 83–5. 45For Trotsky’s letter to Preobrazhenskii, see Isaac Deutscher,The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky: 1929–1940, New York, 1965, III: 241, 252; 246.Trotsky managed to complete only a few opening chapters of a biography of Lenin, but he had written several biographical sketches in the early 1920s, especially about the periods 1902–3 and 1917–18. See Deutscher, op. cit., 248.

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Miliukov, Kerenskii, Tseretelli, Chernov, Dan, Abramovich and others, were alive and active as émigrés. Yet none of them exposed a single significant flaw in the fabric of fact which he presented; and none, with the partial exception of Miliukov, has seriously attempted an alternative account.46 Trotsky covers the eight-month period between the revolutions in three volumes, written in exile in Prinkipo between 1930–2.The first one, completed by 14 November 1930, deals with ‘the peculiarities of Russia’s development’, the crises produced by the war, the proletariat and peasantry, the monarchy and why the historically belated democratic regime which replaced tsarism proved wholly unviable. The next two volumes are related to the coming to power of the Bolsheviks; volume two being entirely devoted to the events of July and August 1917; volume three, in Trotsky’s own summation deals with ‘the sharpening discontent of the worker masses, the coming over of the soviets to the Bolshevik banners, the indignation of the army, the campaign of the peasants against the landlords, the floodtide of the national movement, the growing fear and distraction of the possessing and ruling classes, and, finally, the struggle for the insurrection within the Bolshevik party’. He explains why the work has such a large scale by suggesting two analogies: Although ‘the critics, as a general rule, have not accused us of prolixity’, he prefers the methods of the microscope to those of the camera, and he points out that ‘if thousands of books are thrown on the market every year presenting some new variant of the personal romance, some tale of the vacillations of the melancholic or the career of the ambitious ... a series of collective historic dramas which lifted hundreds of millions of human beings out of non-existence, transforming the character of nations and intruding forever into the life of all mankind’ demands attention too.47 46Deutscher, The Prophet Outcast, III: 218, 251, 230, 235; P.N. Miliukov, Istoriia Vtoroi Russkoi Revoliutsii, three parts, Sofia, 1921–3. In his The Russian Revolution, Trotsky praises Miliukov as a historian, who ‘took his profession (of historian) very seriously and that alone distinguished him’, but less than 20 pages later he is acerbic about Miliukov’s Istoriia (History), which he thought was ‘false from the beginning to end’. Trotsky, op. cit. 181,197. 47Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, Introduction to Volumes two and three, Prinkipo, 13 May 1932, 245–7, 367. On the translator of his History, Trotsky wrote that ‘Max Eastman has brought to his work not only a creative gift of style, but also the carefulness of a friend. I subscribe with warm gratitude to the unanimous voice of the critics’. Ibid., 253. For an appraisal of Trotsky’s History, see Robert D. Warth, ‘Leon Trotsky: Writer and Historian’, The Journal of Modern History, 20: 1, March 1948, 27–41.

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In seeking to understand why an anachronistic autocracy and a recent but concentrated capitalism were overthrown in one year, Trotsky delves into many centuries that saw the ‘Peculiarities of Russia’s Development’ enfold in a series of circumstances that emboldened peasants and workers to accomplish a revolution. While there is consensus on the nature of the forces that bred the first popular revolution of the twentieth century in the unlikely setting of a backward and autocratic Russia, Trotsky’s encapsulation of Russian history predated and influenced much of the historical wisdom. Within a problematic that fused originality and virtuosity in about the year 1905, and in 1905, Trotsky first predicted and then explicated the Russian Revolution in an optic all his own. Trotsky maintained that economic backwardness, primitive social forms and low levels of culture had been the core features of Russia’s history, and had been responsible for the slow pace of development. Under pressure from richer Europe, the Russian state had always been compelled to extract a relatively greater part of the social product than in the west and invest it in territorial expansion rather than in promoting social development and differentiation. Handicrafts had remained tied to agriculture for inordinately long. Born late, Russian cities were commercial, administrative, military and manorial— centres of consumption, not of production. The emergence of the proletariat had been sudden, ‘in leaps involving sharp changes of environment, ties, relations, and a sharp break with the past’. This was a critical Russian peculiarity: Russian workers were susceptible to revolutionary ideas from early in their own history, owing to the ‘concentrated oppressions of Tsarism’, and their own concentrated employment in large enterprises. The nub of the analysis, the heart of the diagnosis of why Russia was anomalously prepared for a socialist revolution, was his insistence on the idea of the ‘priviledge of historic backwardness’. This ‘permits, or rather, compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages. Savages throw away their bows and arrows for rifles all at once, without traveling the road which lay between those two weapons in the past’. In 1917, the road between Russia’s 1640s or 1789 and October 1917 was traversed at an astonishing pace.48 Trotsky set out certain similarities between the two revolutions. In Petrograd, where social groups like the proletariat and garrison 48Chapter

1, ‘Peculiarities of Russia’s Development’, Ibid., 1–9.

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had remained largely constant in their composition, victory in February and October was attained ‘by the going over of a majority of the reserve regiments to the side of the workers’. Although the commanding summits of the state remained in the hands of the government in February and October, the material foundation had been removed from under them by October: ‘the ministries and the headquarters were hanging over an empty space. The government no longer had the military force—having irrevocably lost the soul of the soldier—to retain possession of institutions like the telephones, telegraph or the State Bank.’ But the differences lay principally in the February Revolution being spontaneous, in the sense that ‘nobody laid out the road in advance, nobody voted in the factories and barracks on the question of revolution, nobody summoned the masses from above to insurrection’. In February the workers had thought, not of seizing the banks and the Winter Palace, but of breaking the resistance of the army. ‘They were fighting not for individual commanding summits, but for the soul of the soldier.The indignation, accumulated for years broke to the surface unexpectedly, to a considerable degree, even to the masses themselves.’ By October ‘the masses had been living an intense political life, creating events, learning to understand their connections, critically weighing the results of actions. The fraternization of workers and soldiers in October did not grow out of open street encounters as in February, but preceded the insurrection. The Military Revolutionary Committee already felt itself to be the master of the situation before the uprising; it knew every part of the garrison, its mood, its inner groupings’. Trotsky identifies changes in mass psychology, rather than in the social and economic structures of Russia in 1917 as the principal factor in both revolutions: ‘The most indubitable feature of a revolution is the direct intervention of the masses in historic events. The revolution is there in their nerves before it comes out onto the street’; Russian society had been rotten well before 1917.49 Harrison Salisbury approached the two revolutions from the vantage point of contrasts in ambience, of the public mood: ‘In the spring the city (Petrograd) had been buoyant, excited, everyone went into the streets—workers, soldiers, citizens of all classes. There had been true Russian sobornost, togetherness, a feeling that the old had been smashed and an exciting path to the future had been broken 49Ibid.,

415, 426–7.

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through .... And on this bleak and gusty October day only a handful of Petrograd citizens knew or cared what was going on. By best estimates there were perhaps 1,500 or 2,000 in the force at the command of the besieged Ministers in the Winter Palace’.50 There is a plethora of biographies of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, mostly caricaturing his various ineptitudes, but Trotsky’s asides retain a pungency, both humorous and vitriolic: ‘Nicholas II inherited from his ancestors not only a giant empire, but also a revolution. And they did not bequeath him one quality which would have made him capable of governing an empire or even a province or a country.To that historic flood which was rolling its billows each one closer to the gates of his palace, the last Romanov opposed only a dumb indifference. It seemed as though between his consciousness and his epoch there stood some transparent but absolutely impenetrable medium’; Or, ‘... the essence (‘of the breeding of the tzar’) was an inner indifference, a poverty of spiritual forces, a weakness of the impulses of the will’; Or, ‘Nicholas recoiled in hostility before everything gifted and significant. He felt at ease only among completely mediocre and brainless people, saintly fakirs, holy men, to whom he did not have to look up. He selected his ministers on a principle of continual deterioration. Men of brain and character he summoned only in extreme situations ... just as we call in a surgeon to save our lives’.51 Kerenskii came away with a similar opinion on first meeting the Tsar: ‘It seemed incredible that this slow-moving modest man, who looked as if he were dressed in someone else’s clothes, had been the Tsar of all Russia ... and had ruled over an immense empire for 25 years! ... I found that he did not care for anything or anyone, except, perhaps his daughters. This indifference to all things external was almost unnatural. As I studied his face, I seemed to see behind his smile and his charming eyes a stiff, frozen mask of utter loneliness and desolation. He did not wish to fight for power, and it simply fell from his hands. He shed his authority as formerly he might have thrown off a dress uniform and put on a simpler one .... His retirement into private life brought him nothing but relief ’.52 Trotsky drew analogies between three doomed monarchs, Nicholas II, Louis XVI, and Charles I, and between their consorts. 50Harrison E. Salisbury, Black Night,White Snow: Russia’s Revolutions 1905–1917, London, 1978, 503. 51Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, 49, 50, 52–3. 52Kerensky, The Kerensky Memoirs, 330–1.

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He showed that at the decisive moments, when the three sovereigns were overtaken by their fate, they look so much like each other that their distinctive features seem to vanish, because ‘to a tickle people react differently, but to red hot iron alike’. He found that the French and Russian monarchs, in 1789 and 1917, resembled ‘two actors playing the same role; a passive, patient, but vindictive treachery was the distinctive trait of both and both make the impression of being overburdened by their jobs but yet unwilling to yield even those rights they cannot make any use of; moral castrates, absolutely deprived of imaginative and creative force; both shared a spiritual emptiness’. Trotsky concurs with Montague’s judgement on Charles I, as a monarch who ‘remained passive ... yielded where he could not resist, betrayed how unwillingly he did so, and reaped no popularity, no confidence’.53 This history is studded with acid and quotable cameos. ‘Lvov was a prince, a rich man and a liberal, not built for revolutionary excitement. The head of the government of the February revolution was an illustrious but notoriously empty spot’. ‘Kerensky was not a revolutionist; he merely hung around the revolution ... the president of a gray and characterless faction, the Trudoviks, anemic fruit of a cross-breeding between liberalism and Narodnikism’. ‘The portfolio of finance was given to Tereshchenko, worth some eighty million rubles in gold, president of the Military-Industrial Committee of Kiev, possessed of a good French pronunciation, and on top of it all a connoisseur of the ballet’.54 Having been compelled by Stalin to find refuge in a ‘planet without a visa’, armed with a passport that did not list ‘war-monger’ as occupation, and for numerous other reasons, Stalin drew persistent vitriol. For instance, ‘He was a totally different type of Bolshevik to the others, both in his psychological makeup and in the character of his party work: a strong but theoretically and politically primitive, organizer, a so-called “practical”, without theoretical viewpoint, without broad political interests, and without a knowledge of foreign languages’. Or, ‘This publicist without decision, and this organizer without intellectual horizon, carried Bolshevism in March 1917 to the very boundaries of Menshevism’. This was in the context of the fact that 53Trotsky, 54Ibid.,

The Russian Revolution, 88, 90, 95. 187, 177, 185.

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at the end of March Stalin had spoken in favour of military defence, and of extending conditional support to the Provisional Government.55 In the west, systematic investigation lagged behind the task of recording the surface phenomena of Soviet communism for the outside world. In the early Soviet years, the only secondary work that recreated the events of 1917 with accuracy, understanding and consistency of interpretation was by Edward Alsworth Ross. A liberal Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Ross had traveled to Russia in late 1917. His book provided the first clear account of events and presented the then startling thesis (to most Americans) that the October Revolution was not a bizarre accident of history but something that had been determined by the needs and aspirations of the Russian masses. During the 1920s, little was done to advance beyond the useful but still inadequate pioneering contribution that the non-historian Ross had made. The only major exception was James Mavor, a reputable Canadian authority on economic history. His The Russian Revolution may have been overambitious in intent—a survey of the political and economic history of Russia from World War One to the early 1920s—and based on poorly assimilated source material, but it was reasonably objective and was the only documented study then available in the west. The appearance of William Henry Chamberlin’s two volumes in 1935 met some of the need for a scholarly history. He was the Christian Science Monitor correspondent in Russia (1922–33) and had a unique opportunity to consult research material that was subsequently withdrawn from public use.56 The only conspicuous lacuna in Chamberlin’s work, the cursory treatment of the February Revolution, is somewhat rectified by Michael T. Florinsky. He was a Russian émigré who joined the Faculty of Columbia University and was the first to attempt a serious historical work on the revolutions. A topical rather than a chronological analysis, he dealt mostly with politics and the wartime economy. Bernard Pares, for many years the dean of British authorities on Russia, confined himself to personalities, political intrigue and military history during 55Ibid., 215, 216, 279, 233. ‘The Planet without a Visa’ is the title of the last chapter

of Leon Trotsky, My Life. An Attempt at an Autobiography, New York, 1970. 56Warth, Slavic Review, June 1967, 257–9; Edward Allsworth Ross, The Russian Bolshevik Revolution, New York, 1921; James Mavor, The Russian Revolution, New York, 1929; William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921. 2 vols., New York, 1935; reprinted, 1952, 1965.

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the reign of Nicholas II. The gravest defect, the failure to touch upon social and economic problems, gave a strangely warped effect to this story of high politics.57 The early 1950s witnessed the appearance of an extremely stimulating treatment of the October Revolution by Sergei Petrovich Melgunov. John Keep considers him to have been among the first participants in the Russian Revolution to submit it to scholarly investigation. For him, ‘October’ was not the realization of ‘February’; he distanced himself from the Marxist approach that stressed inevitability, social determinism and the idea that revolutions, like societies, proceed through a series of succeeding stages. Melgunov emphasized instead that the power and persuasiveness of Lenin and his treatment of the Bolshevik seizure of power appears to have been a matter of competing wills: the determined will of Lenin to seize power before the convening of the Second Congress of Soviets on 25 October (OS) and the misguided will of Kerenskii to allow the Bolsheviks to make a move so that they could be exposed and crushed, and the vacillating wills of cabinet officers and the military who did not take resolute action in time. Melgunov was among the first Russian eyewitnesses to suggest that the Bolsheviks lacked mass support in October. Mass backing for them consisted of a few strategically placed armed units of soldiers, sailors and workers but workers and their Red Guard units participated in the uprising only sporadically: ‘The Russian public was almost completely absent on that tragic day.’58 Robert Daniels’s view, a decade and a half later in 1967, echoes that of Melgunov: the people in power were indecisive, and only one party, the Bolsheviks, was able and willing to take decisive action. In Red October, published on the fiftieth anniversary of the revolution, October is a historic accident contingent upon just the right, somewhat arbitrary, elements, present at just the right moment. Barring a few sentences, there is very little sense of the elemental social and economic 57Michael T. Florinsky, The End of the Russian Empire, New York, 1931; Bernard Pares, My Russian Memoirs, London, 1931, and The Fall of the Russian Monarchy, New York, 1939; Warth, Slavic Review, June 1967, 259–60. 58Ronald Grigor Suny, ‘Toward a Social History of the October Revolution’, The American Historical Review, 88: 1, 1983, 39; S.P. Melgunov, Kak Bol’sheviki zakhvatili vlast’: Oktiabr’skoi perevorot 1917 goda, Paris, 1953, translated, abridged, and edited by Sergei G. Pushkarev as The Bolshevik Seizure of Power, Santa Barbara, 1972. John L.H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization, New York, 1976, xvi.

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forces at play, the movements of workers and soldiers, that ensured the Bolshevik victory.59 The work of Alexander Rabinowitch is a useful antidote to the approach of Melgunov and Daniels. His principal intention is to meticulously construct the development of the ‘revolution from below’ from the outlook, activity and situation of all the tiers of the Bolshevik Party in Petrograd between the two revolutions by letting ‘the facts speak for themselves’. He investigated the ‘radicalization’ of the mass movement by studying ‘the aspirations of factory workers, soldiers and sailors as expressed in contemporary documents’. This history by Rabinowitch is political history, but of a party, the Bolsheviks, rather than of the state and it is political history with much of the chronological minutiae left out. His major concern is to understand the factors that ensured victory for the Bolshevik organization. Critical to their effectiveness was their being more unified than any of their major rivals for power. They combined a relative flexibility within with a solid external front. ‘All the lively and spirited give-andtake’ that pulsated among Bolsheviks revolved around establishing and maintaining responsiveness to the prevailing mass mood. Rabinowitch links this responsiveness to revolutionary discipline, organizational unity and obedience to Lenin. Although Rabinowitch acknowledges Lenin’s strategic brilliance and ‘the sometimes decisive role of an individual in historical events’, he balances this with providing details of disagreements as well, that occasionally left Lenin in a minority. By 1917, Rabinowitch divulges a Bolshevik Party ‘in striking contrast to the traditional Leninist mode’, possessed of the hallmarks of an ‘internally relatively democratic, tolerant and decentralized structure and method of operation [and an] essentially open and mass character’. Among other reasons he suggests to the central question of why the Bolsheviks won ‘the struggle for power in Petrograd’ in 1917 was the magnetic attraction of their platform as embodied in the slogans ‘Peace, Land, and Bread’, and ‘All Power to the Soviets’. They conducted an extraordinarily energetic and resourceful campaign for the support of Petrograd workers and soldiers and Kronstadt sailors. Circumstances coalesced to their advantage from spring 1917: The economy plunged, soldiers feared being sent 59Robert Daniels, Red October:The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, New York, 1967; Suny, The American Historical Review, 1983, 39–40.

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to serve a doomed cause at the front, popular expectations of an early peace and the durability of reforms under the PG wilted. Concomitantly, all the other major political groups lost credibility because of their association with the government and their insistence on patience and sacrifice in the interest of the war effort.60 Donald Raleigh’s study of Saratov in 1917 expounds a similar portrayal of the Bolsheviks. Although riddled with problems, the Bolshevik Party offered a consistently plebeian programme to the Russian people, he averred, and they rode to power atop self-legitimized popular organs, like soviets, factory committees, trade unions, Red Guard detachments, and soldiers’ committees. The Bolshevik tactical platform of land, peace and bread, and the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’ had an irresistible appeal for common people whose expectations had soared to unreasonable levels while their livelihood deteriorated. The Bolshevik combination of tactical flexibility with a militant class interpretation of Russian political life (in the inclusive Russian sense of the upper and middle classes pitted against the rest) proved successful in a fluid setting characterized by economic ruin, growing anarchism and a tottering structure of voluntary authority relationships. The October Revolution, Raleigh reasoned, was a triumph of all those radical groups that had broken with the camp supporting continued coalition with the bourgeoisie.61 John Keep’s The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization, seeks to show how and why an elemental popular movement like October, inspired by the most egalitarian and libertarian ideals, engendered the most durable dictatorship of the twentieth century. The study broadly covers the year from March 1917 to March 1918; and its focus is on European Russia rather than Petrograd, which, Keep rightly claims, has received a disparate share of historians’ attention. In his Introduction, Keep issues a strong disclaimer to the revolutionary mythology that consecrated October as a proletarian revolution. If the Bolsheviks rightly claimed the most proletarian support of all the socialist parties then the use of the nomenclature ‘proletarian revolution’ implies a neglect of the soldiers, sailors or peasants who ‘played a role as important as that of the industrial workers’. He added that ‘We still lack a comprehensive account of 60Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, London, 1979, xvii, xxi, 208, 310–11. 61Donald J. Raleigh, ‘Political Power in the Russian Revolution: A Case Study of Saratov’, in Frankel, et al., eds., Revolution in Russia, 50.

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the events of 1917, only possible if Soviet archives were opened to non-Communist investigators.This book is not a complete or definitive history of the revolution’. Keep aims to fill the gap left by the lack of a study of the ‘lower depths’ in 1917; he asserts that Soviet scholarship on the subject is ‘diminished by its ideological restrictions.The canons of orthodoxy demand that the common people be portrayed as inherently revolutionary and devoted to the party; all too often they are reduced to mere stereotypes, and it requires an effort of will to remember that we are dealing with real individuals. If this volume has any heroes, they are the ordinary men and women caught up in great events over which they had no control, to whom the revolution brought only intoxicating political opportunities, but also difficulties and danger’. For Keep, ‘chaos and anarchy are the words which best describe the state of Russia in 1917’. From this disorderly welter, he singles out organizations of mass mobilization like the soviets of workers’ and soldiers’ deputies in the towns and their rural counterparts, as well as the trade unions, factory committees and militia bands for enquiry. This was where the pulse of revolution beat most strongly. ‘At the lowest level these organs gave a modest element of structure to the inchoate and disorderly mass movement. These organizations were crucial because the most important factor for Bolshevik victory was their ability to capture the energies contained in the most important of these bodies; to deploy the organizational weapon to deadly effect’. Keep is unhappy with the ‘stereotyped’ explanation of the Bolsheviks’ success, that their ideas had an irresistible appeal.Without popular support in the lower echelon bodies, and particularly among the troops, the Bolsheviks could not have won control of so many soviets in such a short time. He insists that any explanation of this nature has to make a case for the infallibility of actual Bolshevik practices: That ‘only the Bolsheviks possessed the will and the experience to turn vague and transient mass attitudes into firm political commitments; only they had a coherent theory of organization and the machinery to carry it into effect; only they were prepared to act ruthlessly and systematically in imposing their own conceptions upon the whole of the soviet movement; only they were willing to use coercion on a massive scale to suppress minority opinions, regardless of the democratic principles to which all leftwing groups paid lip service’. Keep collides with another regnant contention, that ‘the October overturn was a ‘proletarian revolution’. The Bolshevik claim to be

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the party of the proletariat was inaccurate and rested on ideological not social criteria; they also benefited from the support of soldiers and sailors, peasants, artisans, tradesmen and intellectuals. These groups, Keep polemicises, ‘played a role as important as that of the industrial workers. As a historical fact, therefore, the ‘proletarian revolution’ may be consigned to the realm of revolutionary mythology’.62 The first professional research agenda for the study of Soviet history, particularly of the Stalin era, developed in the aftermath of the Second World War around the so-called totalitarian model. Soviet studies in the USA was directly spawned by the Cold War. The Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) helped to establish the main academic research institutions and historians moved easily between the academy and government. A historian who looked back on them much later, James Cracraft, wrote about how ‘the founding generation of Cold Warriors, all honorable men no doubt, but grimly determined to get Soviet history right as a matter of national security. They tended to wear grey suits and military haircuts, and usually came from deeply provincial backgrounds’. The totalitarian model or paradigm had been originally conceived to understand the dynamics of the Third Reich, and after the war, its components were found to be useful in observing the Soviet Union as well. It’s concentrated focus on the primary importance of central politics and ideology, and the personalities of the Party-state leadership, was a consequence of the dire politicization of ‘Sovietology’. This was the term for academic activity which sought to accentuate the abnormality and the illegitimacy of the Communist government, and it contained within it a powerful argument for political opposition to the Soviet regime. As Martin Malia argued in 1991, these historians ignored the possibility that questions like ‘What went wrong?’ or ‘When did it go wrong?’ or ‘How can it be set right?’ were false questions. In identifying Stalinism with Totalitarianism and its genesis in Leninism, they argued that nothing went wrong with the revolution, the whole enterprise, quite simply, was wrong from its inception.63 62John

L.H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization, New York, 1976, vii-xv, 380–1, 213–14. His emphases. 63James Cracraft, ‘Reclaiming Peter the Great’ in Samuel H. Baron and Cathy A. Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historical Research: Reminiscences of American Scholars from the ColdWar to the Present, Armonk, NY and London, 2003, 104; Martin Malia, ‘The Hunt for the True October’, Commentary, No. 92, October 1991, 21–2.

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With few exceptions, Soviet authorities were unwilling to open their borders to foreign scholars and their archives to all scholars. The American exchange scholar and historian, Frederick Starr, wrote of how nearly everything he experienced as a humble graduate student in 1967 ‘caused me to question the[ir] generalizations about a totalitarian government ruling over a passive society. True, the government did aspire to a totalitarian control, but there was a huge distance between the cup and the lip’. He wrote of how it was increasingly difficult for him ‘to take seriously most of the pompous generalizations about the nature of the Soviet Union that had been concocted by political scientists in the West, who based their theories on Soviet publications which were by definition official and filled with the Soviet government’s preferred image of itself rather than objective information. If the older American ‘Sovietologists’ had visited the USSR at all, it was to attend conferences, travel along the few approved routes that the government had opened to foreigners, and stay at Intourist’s carefully monitored hotels. Unless they were the sons or daughters of émigrés, they generally spoke atrocious Russian. Is it any wonder that they missed most of what was going on?’64 Totalitarianism, the dominant intellectual paradigm in postwar western scholarship on the Soviet Union before the 1970s, may also have discouraged study of the Soviet periphery since it placed so much emphasis on Moscow’s ability to discipline and manipulate the population. In this regard, western views of a monochromatic Soviet political and social landscape ironically had an uneasy correspondence with Soviet narratives of the country’s history, which were equally wooden and one-dimensional, albeit for different reasons. Local history developed late in Soviet historiography because the closed nature of Soviet society had rendered the country’s heartland invisible. The publication of Merle Fainsod’s Smolensk under Soviet Rule, based on the Smolensk Archive, which was captured by the German armies in 1941 and later fell into American hands, inaugurated serious study of Soviet local history in the US. But Raleigh thinks this book may have actually discouraged further local histories because Fainsod described Smolensk as a ‘typical’ Soviet 64S. Frederick Starr, ‘Leningrad, 1966–1967: Irrelevant Insights in an Era of Relevance’, in Baron and Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historical Research, 75, 86.

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city and he claimed to have exhaustive use of the archive, the only one of its kind then available in the west.65 From the early 1950s until the early 1970s, during the height of the first Cold War, western historiography of 1917 had been concerned primarily with political explanations, emphasizing the importance of governmental forms and ideas—an important sub-field was ‘kremlinology’, the study of power relationships at the top—but underestimating the more fundamental social and economic structures and conflicts in Russian society. Politology, to mint a term, might be more apt than historiography. Approaching the revolution from top down, scholars like George Katkov on the February Revolution, John Shelton Curtiss on both the revolutions or Adam B. Ulam on the Bolsheviks, were concerned with the politics of the tsarist and Provisional governments, with parties and revolutionary organizations, and with the personalities of Lenin,Trotsky or Kerenskii; the most articulate political actors.66 And this myopia was not confined to the tropes of just western ‘Sovietolology’: Until the 1980s too, as the Soviet historian Vladimir Buldakov wrote in 1992, the ‘inescapable emphasis on the role of the state’ was ‘possibly the greatest fault in the whole course of [Soviet] historiography’.67 ‘History from below’ was advertised as a redressal to histories that dwelt preponderantly on the ‘state’ not ‘society’, that elevated the ‘centre’ above the ‘periphery’, and whose focus on ‘intentions’ provided a picture void of structural constraints and autonomous forces. The self-confessedly ‘revisionist’ historians generally belonged to a younger generation. They were seeking to launch their careers and secure faculty tenure. The approach of this generation was profoundly shaped by the political and intellectual conjuncture of 1968. They shared a common rejection of Cold War assumptions about the Bolshevik revolution, a determination to set aside shrill 65Although the term ‘totalitarian’ came into general use in the 1940s and 1950s, its genesis lay in the pre-war literature on Mussolini’s Italy and Franco’s Spain The theory was shaped by influential works by Hannah Arendt (1951) and Carl J. Friedrich/ Zbigniew Brzezinski (1956). Donald J. Raleigh, ‘A Journey from St. Petersburg to Saratov’, Ibid., 143, 142; Merle Fainsod Smolensk under Soviet Rule, Cambridge, Mass., 1958. 66Suny, The American Historical Review, October 1983, 32; George Katkov, Russia 1917: The February Revolution, New York, 1967; John Shelton Curtiss, The Russian Revolutions of 1917, Princeton, 1957; Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks:The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia, New York, 1965. 67Vladimir P. Buldakov, ‘The October Revolution: Seventy–Five Years On’, European History Quarterly, 22: 4, 1992, 457.

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polemic and a commitment to approaching Soviet society as a ‘normal’ society. They were influenced by increasing anti-Vietnam radicalism in the United States, by a new climate of détente in international relations and by the apparent stability of Soviet politics and society (this was the so-called era of Brezhnevite stagnation). A British historian whose career was shaped by the new ambience and the novel theoretical frames, Steve Smith, delineated the circumstances. Using the opportunities which emerged for limited work in Soviet archives and libraries, he wrote, scholars turned to writing the history of social groups, especially the working class (like himself), the history of the revolution in specific localities and the history of political organizations and parties in their social context. Though diverse in subject matter and approach, he found that these works evinced a common desire to explore aspects of the Russian Revolution that had been deemed unworthy of attention by advocates of a totalitarian model and to get way from ideologically driven generalities.68 Many of Smith’s disclosures chimed with those of the British historian Robert Service. He was of the view, just around the time of the demise, that the most interesting recent development in the historiography of the Russian revolutions has been the emergence of studies of institutions, social groups and the non-metropolitan regions. Enquiry of an economic history bent awaited equal attention and he hoped that perhaps this will be the new topic for intensive investigation.69 Service has drawn attention to the emergence of nuanced study of the Bolsheviks in 1917 that revealed internal delicate fissures that had escaped attention. Until the 1960s, Service argued, most western historians had assumed that the Bolsheviks came to power by means of both superior political organization and comprehensive political manipulation; the ‘masses’ were hoodwinked into voting for the Bolsheviks. He elaborated that in the 1970s several studies appeared which indicated that mass political action was not exclusively or even mainly Bolshevik-directed; and that the Bolsheviks in many ways reflected popular aspirations. ‘But to draw a rigid dichotomy between ‘manipulation’ and ‘reflection’ is mistaken. For the Bolsheviks 68Steve Smith, ‘Writing the History of the Russian Revolution after the Fall of Communism’, Europe-Asia Studies, 46:4, 1994, 563–4. 69Robert Service, ‘The Bolsheviks on Political Campaign in 1917: A Case Study of the War Question’, in Frankel, et al., eds., Revolution in Russia: Reassessments of 1917, 304.

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both manipulated and reflected popular opinion. Even this connection is too crude. There were Bolsheviks and Bolsheviks’.70 Revisionist history is strongest on the field of 1917 and it occupied much of the field by the mid-1980s. The greatest area of consensus among these ‘revisionists’ was the view that 1917 was a popular revolution made by conscious and rational workers and peasants. In many cases the Bolsheviks were seen as giving voice to mass aspirations rather than directing, let alone, manipulating them.71 ‘Revisionists’ have produced a number of social historical studies—of workers (by Mark David Mandel, Robert Devlin, Diane Koenker, Stephen A. Smith), of the peasants (Graeme J. Gill), of the revolution in the provinces (by Donald A. Raleigh, Roger Pethybridge, Ronald Grigor Suny), of the soldiers (by Allan K.Wildman), of the sailors (by Norman E. Saul, Evan Mawdsley), and the whole array of spontaneous mass organizations (by Marc Ferro, Oskar Anweiler, Rex A. Wade, John L.H. Keep).72 70Service, ‘The

Bolsheviks’, Ibid., 321–2.

71Dominic Lieven, ‘Western Scholarship on the Rise and Fall of the Soviet Regime:

The View from 1993’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29: 2, April 1994, 197. 72David Mandel, The Petrograd Workers and the Fall of the Old Regime: From the February Revolution to the July Days, 1917, London, 1983; and Petrograd Workers and the Soviet Seizure of Power (July 1917–June 1918), London, 1984; Robert Devlin, ‘Petrograd Workers and Workers’ Factory Committees in 1917: An Aspect of the Social History of the Russian Revolution,’ Ph.D. Dissertation, State University of New York, Binghampton, 1976; Diane Koenker, MoscowWorkers and the 1917 Revolution, Princeton, 1981; and ‘The Evolution of Party Consciousness in 1917: The Case of the Moscow Workers’, Soviet Studies, 30, 1978, 38–62; Stephen A. Smith, ‘Craft Consciousness, Class Consciousness: Petrograd 1917’, History Workshop Journal, 11, 1981, 35–56; and Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917–18, Cambridge, 1983; Graeme J. Gill, ‘The Failure of Rural Policy on Russia, February to October 1917’, Slavic Review, 37:2, June 1978, 241–58; and ‘The Mainsprings of Peasant Action’ Soviet Studies, XXX: 1, 1978, 38–62; and Peasants and Government in the Russian Revolution, London, 1979; Donald Raleigh, ‘Revolutionary Politics in Provincial Russia: The Tsaritsyn Republic in 1917’ Slavic Review, 40, 1981, 194–209; and Revolution on the Volga: 1917 in Saratov, Ithaca, 1985; Roger Pethybridge, The Spread of the Russian Revolution: Essays on 1917, London, 1972; Ronald Grigor Suny, The Baku Commune, 1917–1918: Class and Nationality in the Russian Revolution, Princeton, 1972; Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army:The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt (March-April 1917), Vol. 1, Princeton, 1980; and The Road to Soviet Power and Peace, Vol. 2, Princeton, 1980, 1987; Norman Saul, Sailors in Revolt:The Russian Baltic Fleet in 1917. Lawrence, Kans., 1978; Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Revolution and the Baltic Fleet:War and Politics, February 1917–April 1918, London, 1978; Marc Ferro, ‘The Russian Soldier in 1917: Undisciplined, Patriotic and Revolutionary’, Slavic Review, 30:3, September 1971,

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The work of Smith, Koenker and Rosenberg, among others, offers convincing arguments against an important current in Western historiography that preferred to regard the October Revolution as a coup.What emerges from their investigations is a depiction of October as part of a vast social upheaval over which the Bolsheviks had, in fact, very little control. Additionally, they insist on the validity of the fact that October represented very real social aspirations, shared too widely in Russian society to be capable of encapsulation or direction by any single party. Another assumption that the work of these historians has substantially undermined is that the workers, soldiers and peasants played an essentially destructive, anarchistic and elemental role in the revolution. Western liberal historiography had often sought to encapsulate the Russian working class and/or the peasantry as a single aggregate entity or as two unstratified blocs.This tended to elide over the issues of intrastratifications, conflicts and differential forms of behaviour, around a welter of axes, social, economic and insurgent alike. If it is doubtful that the social dynamics of any society in the twentieth century is capable of unsubtle analysis in this vein, Russian society, in flux from the 1860s to 1917 was certainly too complex to lend itself to such characterizations. ‘Revisionist’ historiography has supplied insights drawn, for instance, from fault lines within the proletariat marked by generation, length of industrial and/or urban experience, gender, literacy and the industrial sector at issue (say, metallurgy versus textiles). In the classic western interpretation of the Bolshevik victory and the subsequent authoritarian strain in Soviet history, the deux ex machina has been regarded as the Bolsheviks’ secret weapons of party organization and discipline. But by 1917, this Party was very different from the theoretical model proposed by Lenin in 1902 in What Is To Be Done? A rapid influx of new members made it an open, mass Party. Neither the Party as a whole nor its leadership were at one on the essential policy issues of 1917—hardly surprising if one recalls that 94 per cent of delegates to the Sixth Party Congress in 1917 had joined the Party in or after 1914. 483–512; Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets:The RussianWorkers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers Councils, NewYork, 1974; Rex A.Wade, Red Guards andWorkers’ Militias: Spontaneity and Leadership in The Russian Revolution, Stanford, 1984; John L.H. Keep, The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization, New York, 1976; Suny, The Russian Review, 167; Idem., American Historical Review, 33.

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In October 1917: A Social History of the Russian Revolution, the French Annaliste historian Marc Ferro mounts a series of methodological charges on what he calls La Grande Histoire: on Soviet historians who see the revolution in terms of legitimacy and historical inevitability, or of those of the Daniels ilk who view it as an unfortunate accident. Ferro seeks to hew a line that separates his work from other studies, devoted to leading personalities or institutions, principally the Bolshevik Party. For this purpose, Ferro used sources like scrawled texts, private images not even intended to be reproduced, utilized or preserved to penetrate and witness change and decay within what he terms ‘the body of society’. Such evidence by its very nature, prompts Ferro to caution readers against taking such sources too literally, to remember that what has been left out is more important than what is put in and to value the implicit more than the explicit. He had the then singularly fortunate opportunity of consulting detailed contemporary Soviet archives like the Leningrad Regional Archive (GAORSS), Leningrad Party Archives, Central Archives of the October Revolution (TsGAOR SSSR), Leningrad Historical Archives (TsGIAL), Central Military Archives (TsGVIA), and the Censorship Archives at Nanterre BDIC. Ferro significantly relies on contemporary film footage to communicate the different moods and members of ‘the street’, throughout 1917, and especially from February to July. For Ferro, October was the product of the collapse of an entire system of traditional authority and rigid mores that had preserved a brittle political acquiescence by the populace in government since the 1860s. This went beyond mistaken priorities by PG cabinets, erroneous analyses by Party leaders or even the frustration of popular aspiration(s) in 1917.This collapse engendered ‘first, an extraordinary growth in multifarious centers of power (a dispersal of power rather than its bifurcation between PG and Soviets) ... Each of these stood for the different identities a citizen could have ... This defined the core of the revolution—that not one citizen could fail to feel quite free, free to determine at any time what he might do ... Since everyone had his own notion of how to achieve this freedom, the revolution was a myriad-faceted entity’. The year 1917 bred a ‘great cry of hope’, in which everyone experienced, dream-like, unique events: workers who forced their employers to learn their (workers’) future rights or students at Odessa University teaching universal history to their professors or actors, rather than directors and managers, putting on

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plays in Petrograd, or, remarkably, soldiers who summoned the chaplain to ‘get some real meaning in his life’, or children under fourteen learning to box ‘to make the older children have some respect’. Ferro relates the failure of the leaders thrown up by February, to govern, foresee or lead to the creation of two temporal spaces, in which the leaders did not imagine the past and the present in the same sense as the masses; he counterposes the near-inevitability of a revolution born out of an inherited past urgently in need of mutation, for the leaders, to that of the creation of a new state for a complete overhaul, for the masses. The first two chapters are a tightly told tale of dual power and the twists and turns of the revolutionary process, through April, July, Kornilov, and the various plans hatched by Russia’s allies to stall the revolution; the strictly political narrative is resumed in the final chapter with the ‘October rising’. In the third chapter, Ferro addresses the failure of the traditional institutions and authorities, rural, church, university and army. He tracks the birth of a new society in four chapters that weave the processes of disintegration, reunion and fusion in the non-Slav rim-lands of the former empire, in the countryside and factories and the evisceration of the popular soviets into instruments of a procrustean bureaucracy. The sub-chapter on women’s emancipation, the feminist movement and the family is notable for the fact that Marc Ferro is one of the first western students of the revolution to weave these themes into a history of 1917; his reconstruction relies upon both earlier Russian studies by Klara Zetkin, Alexandra Kollontai and Leon Trotsky and western investigations produced by E. Elnett, Kent Geiger and F. Halle. The text is peppered with useful tabular and figurative depictions of themes related to the parties, organizations and newspapers during 1917, of the concepts and slogans deployed by the Cadets and the three socialist parties, of the rates of compensation factory workers could expect in the event of injury; of the external links of a factory committee to the Ministry of Labour, parties and trade unions, and a very useful flow-chart explaining the mutual relationships among all the prime institutions of 1917.73 73Marc Ferro, October 1917: A Social History of the Russian Revolution, trans. by Norman Stone, London, 1980, viii, 2, 4, table 1, p. 11, table 2, p. 12; table 7, p. 141; figure 1, p. 150; figure 2, p. 198. See E.H. Carr, ‘The Revolution from Below’, Times Literary Supplement, 3 June 1977, 683 for a review of October; and Marc Ferro, Cinema et Histoire, Paris, 1976, for his study of Soviet cinema.

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Richard Pipes’ anti-Communism is passionate, well known, and long standing. He is a man of great reputation, Emeritus Professor of Russian History at Harvard, the author of a dozen books on Russian history, and has served on President Reagan’s National Security Council as Adviser for Soviet and East European Affairs. In 1981 he proclaimed that if the Soviets did not soon ‘improve their behavior’, a third world war was a distinct possibility. He personified, if not incarnated, the orthodox interpretation dominant in the west for the first 50 years of Soviet power, that implied the illegitimacy of the communist government. In 1970, Richard Pipes had written that ‘The elite that rules Soviet Russia lacks a legitimate claim to authority ... [they] seized power by force, overthrowing an ineffective but democratic government. The government they founded, in other words, derives from a violent act carried out by a tiny minority.’74 Pipes expatiated on this theme in 1992, of the myth of the Bolsheviks’ rise to power in the wake of an explosion of popular fury. He avers that no such explosion is apparent in contemporary sources. He asks why there are no photographs of the Great October Revolution, given the abundance of pictorial materials of the February Revolution which show joyous crowds celebrating the downfall of the monarchy by tearing down its emblems and carousing on the snow-covered streets of Petrograd. His answer is that October was not a revolution but a classic coup d’etat planned in the dead of night of October 10 and executed two weeks later, also at night. When he examined the Protocols of the Central Committee for 1917 (1927), he failed to find any clear directives in the Minutes for the October 10 meeting for the putsch. Pipes ignores the October 10 resolution on ‘the current moment’ that made the seizure of power ‘the order of the day’. Pipes concludes that the October coup was carried out by a band of fanatical 74Suny, The Russian Review, 168. On Richard Pipes’ statement about a third world

war in 1981, see Hugh Ragsdale, ‘Adventures and Misadventures: Russian Foreign Policy in European and Russian Archives’ in Baron and Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historical Research, 94. Richard Pipes, ‘Why Russians Act like Russians’, Air Force Magazine, June 1970, 51–5, quoted by Suny, The Russian Review, 168. When his graduate student, Cathy Frierson arrived as an IREX exchangee in Moscow in March 1985 she found that every archive she had applied to work in was closed to her; she had listed Pipes as her dissertation adviser on the exchange forms. But, fortunately, when she returned in 1989, she could work freely in the personal files of major figures from her dissertation in TsGALI, Moscow (Central State Archive of Literature and Art) that had been closed to her. See Cathy A. Frierson, ‘Mysteries in the Realms of History and Memory’ Ibid., 203.

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intellectuals who were determined to fundamentally, transform man and society throughout the world, and who to this end exploited the anxieties and hopes of a politically inexperienced population.75 The official published account of the debate following Lenin’s appeal is brief and incomplete.The remarks of Kamenev and Zinoviev, Lenin’s main opponents, are not reflected in the official record at all.76 Iakovleva, who was responsible for taking notes, subsequently indicated she was instructed to be cryptic for security reasons. Fortunately for the historian, Zinoviev and Kamenev prepared a detailed resume of their arguments for broad circulation immediately following the October 10 meeting: as an alternative to the immediate uprising favoured by Lenin, Kamenev and Zinoviev urged that the party adhere to a nonviolent political course, ‘a defensive posture’ aimed at acquiring the strongest possible representation for the masses at the Constituent Assembly.77 In 1990, Richard Pipes published an almost 1000-page study of The Russian Revolution. In effect, he ignored the work of the whole generation engaged in social history through the 1970s and 1980s, the voluminous studies by western scholars of the working classes and soldiers in 1917. He spearheaded the assault on the social historical interpretation and made a retreat to the terrain of high politics, personalities and ideology, as if the intervening historiography had never been written. He disregards this not because he did not know it—he has reviewed some of these books—but because he does not consider the issues they raised as significant. As he wrote of them, ‘Hordes of graduate students steered by their professors in the Soviet Union as well as the West, especially the United States, have assiduously combed historical sources in the hope of unearthing evidence of worker radicalism in pre-revolutionary Russia.The results are weighty tomes, filled with mostly meaningless events and statistics, that prove only that while history is always interesting, history books can be both vacuous and dull’. 75Richard Pipes, ‘Seventy Five Years On: The Great October Revolution as a clandestine coup d’etat’, Times Literary Supplement, 6 November 1992, 3–4; Peter Kenez, ‘The Prosecution of Soviet History: A Critique of Richard Pipes’ The Russian Revolution’, Review Article, The Russian Review, vol. 50, 1991, 345. 76Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power; 203, Institut marksizma-leninizma pri TsK KPSS, Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta RSDRP(b): Avgust 1917-fevral’ 1918, Moscow, 1958, 83–6. 77The complete resume is contained in Protokoly Tsentral’nogo komiteta, pp. 87– 92, cited by Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power, notes, 26, 27, p. 346.

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An approach to the history of the revolution that sees every event as a consequence of sinister manipulation by revolutionaries implies that there is little to be gained by examining the views and desires of ordinary people. At the conclusion of the second volume of his Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, Pipes offers the following on the intelligentsia and, indeed, on the redundancy and illegitimacy of the revolution: ‘The intelligentsia, which we have defined as intellectuals craving power, stood in total and uncompromising hostility to the existing order: nothing the Tsarist regime could do short of committing suicide would have satisfied it. They were revolutionaries not for the sake of improving the condition of the people, but for the sake of gaining domination over the people and remaking them in their own image .... Whatever grievances they may have harbored—real and fancied—the masses neither needed nor desired a revolution: the only group interested in it was the intelligentsia. Stress on alleged popular discontent and class conflict derives more from ideological preconceptions than from the facts at hand, namely from the discredited idea that political developments are always and everywhere driven by socioeconomic conflicts; they are mere ‘foam’ on the surface of currents that really guide human destiny’. Like other conservative writers, he attributes great power to propaganda; he believes that people do not want what they seemed to want, for their views and therefore their actions have been manipulated by others. In his mind the Bolsheviks were uniquely evil. He has nothing to say about their emancipatory goals and legislation or about their cultural policies. ‘The peasantry’, he declared, ‘held “freedom” of no account’; he portrayed workers as a wild mob creating ‘that peculiar Russian air of generalized, unfocused violence—the urge to beat and destroy’ and they were manipulated ‘like a school of fish’ by socialist leaders. For him the revolution ‘was the result not of insufferable conditions but of irreconcilable attitudes ... attitudes rather than institutions or “objective” economic and social realities determine the course of politics’. In his Introduction to The Russian Revolution he makes his point of view crystal clear: ‘The Russian Revolution was made neither by the forces of nature nor by anonymous masses but by identifiable men pursuing their own advantages. As such it is very properly subject to value judgement’.78 78Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, New York, 1993, II: 494, 495, 497. For critical readings of Pipes in this vein, see, for instance, Suny, The Russian Review, 171; Edward Acton, Vladimir Iu. Cherniaev and William G. Rosenberg, eds., Critical Companion to the Russian Revolution, London, 2001, 12–13.

5

The Historical Archive

Versions are released for the people from above and can be altered the very next day.There is no reliable criterion of truth apart from what is the declared truth at any moment.Thus, the lie in fact becomes the truth, or at any rate the distinction between truth and lies, in the ordinary sense of these words, disappears. This is the great triumph of socialism in the sphere of knowledge: to the extent that it succeeds in demolishing the notion of truth, it cannot be accused of lying. —Polish thinker, Leszek Kolakowski1

THE HISTORICAL ARCHIVE, GOVERNMENTAL AND PARTY ALIKE, REMAINED A

cardinal and constrictive bastion that aimed at nurturing an official ideology that would rest on selective history(ies). Access to its holdings and the rules of research within were stringently regulated by the secret police, rather than an academic institution. In the principles that governed perusal of its contents, historiography that buttressed the official version of history and discursively lauded the advance toward socialism retained an uninterrupted primacy. In the quest for permission for academic investigation within the archive the aspirant’s political status usually outweighed the criterion of scholarly potential or accomplishment. One of the few accounts of how the archives fared during the tumultuous years of war and revolution was provided by the historian of medieval Russia, A. Presniakov, two years into the Soviet peace. The entire contents of some archives were sent to the paper mills to recycle, while others were left untended. The administrative 1Dmitri Volkogonov, Autopsy

for an Empire: The Seven LeadersWho Built the Soviet Regime, edited and translated by Harold Shukman, New York, 1998, 393, citing Kolakowski in Russkaia mysl’, 21 March 1986, Paris, 9.

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restructuring entailed the abolition of many imperial archives, the creation of new ones, and the hasty reorganization and relocation of others.2 One of the most prominent figures in the organization of the archives from the earliest months of Soviet rule, despite being a Menshevik since 1906, was the historian Boris Ivanovich Nikolaevskii (1887–1966). Several western scholars of Russian history and politics benefited from material in Nikolaevskii’s renowned personal library and archive of the Russian Revolution, which he shepherded through Nazi-occupied Europe and safely lodged in California during the war. Nikolaevskii was the representative of the All-Russian Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies on a commission, headed by the well-known historian P.E. Shchegolev, to investigate the Tsarist Okhrana (secret police) archives. During the Menshevik Party Congress in August 1917, Nikolaevskii became so impatient with the inability of his fellow Mensheviks to set forth a clear new policy and vigorously put it to work, that he turned his primary attention to organizing archives. He was closely associated with the main Soviet archive administration at the beginning of 1918 and later, from 1919–21, he was director of the Historical Revolutionary Archive in Moscow. His peregrinations in search of archives took him twice to the Caucasus and once as far as Vladivostok between 1917–19. During this period, he remained an active Menshevik leader, a member of its Central Committee from 1920.3 The transfer of Tsarist archives from Petrograd (St. Petersburg) to Moscow began in June 1918. The centralizing sweep of Bolshevik state building drew the archives into its embrace eight months after the revolution and just as the Civil War commenced. That month the Soviet government created Glavarkhiv (Glavnoe arkhivnoe upravlenie or the Main Archive Administration, hereafter MAA), which shifted to Moscow from Petrograd as the former city was named the Soviet capital. The MAA was charged with housing and administering all 2A. Presniakov, ‘Historical Research in Russia During the Revolutionary Crisis’, The American Historical Review, 28: 2, January 1923, 249. By the second year of the NEP, the Archaeographical Commission had published his ObrazovanieVelikorusskogo Gosudarstva on the Great Russian State and Moskovskoe Tsarstvo on the Muscovite state. Presniakov, loc. cit., 256. 3Alexander Rabinowitch, ‘Forward’, Alexander and Janet Rabinowitch with Ladis K.D. Kristof, eds., Revolution and Politics in Russia: Essays in Memory of B.I. Nicolaevsky, Bloomington, Ind., and London, 1972, vi-viii; Ladis K.D. Kristof, ‘B.I. Nicolaevsky: The Formative Years’, Ibid., 25, 31.

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the archives in Moscow as well, including the Central Archives of the USSR, the Central Archives of the RSFSR and the Archive of the October Revolution. David Riazanov (Goldendach), the well-known editor of the posthumous works of Marx and Engels, was the head of its administration in Petrograd, but after he left to devote himself fully to work in the Socialist Academy (see Chapter 1), the medieval historian Sergius Platonov was entrusted with heading MAA in Petrograd. M.N. Pokrovskii and Matvei Liubavskii administered the MAA in Moscow. The decree that created MAA also recognized the archives of all government and public institutions as integral parts of one Consolidated Government Archive (Edinyi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhivnyi Fond). The MAA in Moscow, its branch in Petrograd, as well as all provincial archives were subordinated to the Consolidated Archive. In 1922 Pokrovskii founded the first Soviet archival periodical Krasnyi arkiv (‘The Red Archive’) and, as its editor, determined policy on access to the archives and the republication of archival material. Pokrovskii edited several collections of archival material related to the Pugachev rebellion (1773–5), the Decembrist movement (1825), the revolution and Russian foreign policy since 1878.4 Pokrovskii’s attitude towards archival research was fully in keeping with the openness of the NEP. In a speech at the First Congress of archive workers of the Russian Republic in 1926, he opposed efforts “to reshape historical documents. I must state as a Communist and as an historian that we must dissociate ourselves from this approach. We have no right to put falsified documents, not containing what was actually written, into the hands of the peasant and workers. Our first duty to the proletariat and the peasant is to be truthful.” The files from the prerevolutionary archives were shipped in boxes or bags and stored in different locations. They could not be studied, indexed or catalogued until early in 1925, when the collegium of MAA decided to move them all to a specially equipped building in Moscow.5 4Anatole G. Mazour, ‘Modern Russian Historiography’, The Journal of Modern History, 9: 2, June 1937, 201; Roman Szporluk, ‘Pokrovsky and Russian History’, Survey, No. 53, October 1964, 116. 5Until its demise in 1941, Krasnyi arkhiv published 106 volumes of documentary materials. Roman Brackman, The Secret File of Joseph Stalin: A Hidden Life, London and Portland, Oregon, 2002, 189, citing V. Maksakov, ‘Arkhiv revoliutsii i vneshnei politiki XIX-XX vekov’, Arkhivnoe delo, vol. XIII, 1927, 32, 41; Paul H. Aron, ‘M.N. Pokrovskii and the Impact of the First Five-Year Plan on Soviet Historiography’, in John Shelton Curtiss., ed., Essays in Russian and Soviet History in Honor of Geroid Tanquary Robinson, New York, 1963, 286; C. E. Black, ‘History and Politics in the Soviet Union’, in Cyril

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In 1938 MAA was transferred from the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, whose members were (nominally) elected, to the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the NKVD, that notoriously also controlled the secret police and forced labour in the GULAG or the archipelago of prison camps throughout the country. The archives remained under this jurisdiction until 1961, when they were transferred to the Council of Ministers as the Main Archival Directorate. From that year, until 1991, MAA was responsible for both the central state archives and several thousand regional and local Archives. The Communist Party managed its own archives and kept them tightly classified; 90 per cent of the documents in the Party archives were considered secret or were otherwise subject to restrictions at the time of the demise. When the Russian Federation state authorities assumed control of the Party archives in 1992–3, 78 million files were declassified.6 The Institute of Marxism-Leninism looked after the Central Party Archive, while the Central Committee of the Party administered 140 archives of its own as well those of the Party Secretariat. Documents of the Politburo—all material, including transcripts and notes from its meetings—were stored in the so-called Kremlin Archive (Fond Number 3), under the direct control of the General Secretary. President Gorbachev oversaw a reorganization and expansion (by, for instance, transferring documents from the Party archives to this archive) of the Kremlin Archive, and then had it renamed the Presidential Archive (Arkhiv’ apparata Prezidenta SSSR) in July 1990. The MAA was abolished after the abortive coup in August 1991 and almost all its staff and bureaucratic apparatus were transferred to the newly created Russian State Committee on Archival Affairs, or Roskomarkhiv’, which was also officially subordinate to President Yeltsin.7 E. Black, ed., Rewriting Russian History: Soviet Interpretations of Russia’s Past, second edition, revised, New York, 1962, 6; Bernard W. Eisenstat, ‘M.N. Pokrovsky and Soviet Historiography: Some Reconsiderations’, Slavic Review, 28:4, December 1969, 612– 13, citing a quotation from this speech in V.P. Danilov and S.I. Iakubovskaia, ‘Istochnikovedenie i izuchenie istorii sovetskogo obshchestva’, Voprosy istorii, no. 5, 1961, 18. My emphases. See also Harvey Asher, ‘The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of M.N. Pokrovsky’, Russian Review, 31:1, January 1972, 50. 6Alter Litvin and John Keep, Stalinism. Russian and Western Views at the Turn of the Millennium, London and New York, 3. 7Mark Kramer, ‘Archival Research in Moscow: Progress and Pitfalls’, Cold War International History Project Bulletin, No. 3, Fall 1993, online edition, 6, 8. Hereafter, Kramer, CWIHP.

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In 1935 P.P. Postyshev, a Politburo member, echoed Stalin’s fulminatory wrath against ‘archival rats’ who ‘dig out accidentally selected documents’, and against whom ‘archival institutions must exercise special vigilance ... in utilizing the historical documents .... We know that wicked double dealers and contrabandists do not shrink from committing fraud and falsification ....’ Postyshev’s diatribe set the tone for policies that endured through all of Soviet history and that linked access to the archives with the political vigilance of the scholar: ‘Archival work, after all, is the sector of the sharpest class struggle. A Trotskyite or a Nationalist, no doubt, will try to use and to interpret this or that archival material not in the interests of, but to harm the cause of socialism’.8 In a secret circular ‘On the Procedure for Publishing Information in the Open Press [sic] Concerning the Structure, Activity, Composition and Current Content of State Archives’ on 21 June 1952, Major General V. Styrov, head of the MAA, strongly criticized ‘archival agencies [who] have turned the writing of articles about the state archives over to people who are not employed by the agencies, so that these people have become familiar with official internal affairs of the archival agencies and with the composition and content of archival holdings. This is totally wrong’.9 On 20 March 1953, the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences decided to create a section within its Institute of History for the publication of sources on Soviet History and the next month A.L. Sidorov, the acting director of the Institute, announced the forthcoming appearance of a new journal devoted to the publication of archival materials. This last project must have met with opposition because it was not, in fact, started until 1955. Complaints about the inaccessibility of primary sources continued to mount until in February 1956, by a decision of the Council of Ministers, a few of the rules concerning the use of archives were relaxed. But through the next three decades historians complained that the ‘reconsideration’ of 8Krasnyi

archiv, no. 68, 1935, 12; quoted by Brackman, The Secret File, 240. Pikhoia, ‘O nekotorykh aspektakh ‘istorigraficheskogo krizisa’, ili o ‘nepredskazuemosti proshlogo’, Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, No. 4, 2000 (15–28), translated and published as ‘Certain Aspects of the “Historiographical Crisis,” or the “Unpredictability of the Past”’, Russian Social Science Review, 43:2, March-April 2002, 12. The English version was also published in Russian Studies in History, 40:2, Fall 2002, 10–31.The emphases are the author’s. Professor Rudol’f Germanovich Pikhoia, Doctor of History, was then Head of the Department of History of the Russian State at the Russian Academy of State Service under the President of the Russian Federation. 9R.G.

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what should have been made available, from 1956, was proceeding too slowly.10 On 7 February 1956, weeks before the fateful Twentieth Party Congress, the USSR Council of Ministers had passed a resolution easing access to state archives by scholars. The MAA, TASS and all other ministries or departments having archives were specifically directed to release all pre-revolutionary materials and those materials of the Soviet period that were not classified as secret for research, and to organize the publication of inventories of their unclassified holdings. That same month, however, an editorial in the leading archival journal, Istoricheskii arkhiv, reported a massive shortage of documentary publications from the archives concerning the long period 1921– 41, and the post-war years; it pointed out that the result was that these periods were least studied by Soviet historians.11 The debate over access to primary historical sources set in motion by the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961 reached a dramatic point with the publication of a damning indictment of policies that blocked access to the archives, in the Party’s leading journal Kommunist, in February 1962. I. Smirnov, the author, was then preparing the official Kratkaia istoriia SSSR (‘Short History of the USSR’), published in 1963–4. He pointed out that there was still no single system for the classification of sources in Soviet archives; that the minimal doctoral requirements in Party and Soviet history did not mandate any reading of archival sources. No dissertations on source studies on the history of the Party or the USSR had yet been defended in the universities or the History Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The History Institute’s current seven-year publication plan showed neither works on source studies for the Soviet period nor a catalogue of the central archives; the historical journals did not give enough attention to the problems of courses for the Soviet period; memoirs were generally neglected as historical sources; and finally, many authors and editors did not yet understand the importance of fully citing their sources.12 10S.V. Utechin, ‘Soviet Historiography after Stalin’, in John L. H. Keep and Liliana Brisby, eds., Contemporary History in the Soviet Mirror, London, 1964, 118, 121; Litvin, op. cit., 11. 11Nancy Heer, Politics and History in the Soviet Union, Cambridge, MA., and London, 1971, 78–9, n. 37, p. 78. 12See Heer, Politics and History, 12, for a summary of the findings of I. Smirnov, ‘Dostovernye fakty—osnova istoricheskogo issledovaniia’, Kommunist, no. 3, 1962, 75–83.

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The Institute of Marxism-Leninism provided details of who could consult what in its ‘Basic Rules of Operation of Party Archives’ in 1970: research in Party archives was restricted to full and candidate Party andYoung Communist (Komsomol) members and to non-Party members only if they had been given assignments by certain agencies. Scholars were to be denied perusal of files that, for example, held unpublished documents by Lenin, the resolutions of central Party and Soviet bodies, minutes of commissions on Party purges, documents on acceptance into the Party, personal dossiers, national defence material, documents that reveal the methods and conspiratorial activities of Party and Komsomol groups during the Great Patriotic War, and sweepingly, ‘any other documents that are still, secret, so that making them public might damage the interests of the Party and the state’.13 In 1950, G.A. Belov, the head of MAA, listed certain prior and essential obligations for those seeking to back their findings in primary attribution: ‘Soviet archivists who are an integral part of the workers on the historical front, are called upon to help our party and our people to solve successfully the problems of communist construction; they are called upon to do everything possible in order to use the documentary material in the fund of the USSR State Archives in the interests of the Soviet nation.’ Belov and others interpreted the resolution of the Twenty-first Party Congress in 1961, ‘On the Tasks of Party Propaganda in Present-Day Conditions’ as calling for the strengthening of control by central institutes over historical and archaeological research so as to facilitate the fulfillment of the political task entrusted by the Party to Soviet historians. In fact, the introduction to the plan of publication of archival material issued by MAA quotes this resolution and adds that ‘a wide and comprehensive use of the documentary fund of the USSR state archives in the interests of the building of communism has become an urgent task, to the solution of which all the other work of archive institutions should be subordinated. Soviet archivists have great opportunities to help our party and people in a practical way to fulfill the task of communist construction’.14 The predominantly political concerns that permitted or hampered the publication of archive material were expressed from time to time in the various collections of ‘rules for the publication of historical 13Pikhoia,

Russian Social Science Review, 2002, 13. Katkov, ‘Soviet Historical Sources in the Post-Stalin Era’, in Keep, ed., Contemporary History, 130, 134–5, 146. My emphases. 14George

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documents’ both for scholarly circulation and popular distribution: the theme should have a direct bearing on the political, economic and cultural tasks undertaken in the course of communist construction, and demonstrate the active participation of the working people in the process and the leading role of the Party.Two conflicting tendencies may be discerned.While matters of selection of the theme, documentary support and modes of presentation must strictly adhere to MarxistLeninist interpretations of the revolution and the subsequent movement of the Soviet Union towards Communism, all publications of archival material must conform to the most rigid standards of scholarship, lest the editors be criticized for taking liberties with their material on ideological or other grounds. Three criteria governed the selection of material intended for mass agitation: the widest circles of readers, the exclusion of all material from the ‘enemy camp’, and books of up to 50 to 150 pages.15

The Terms and Conditions of Archival Research This section draws upon Adventures in Russian Historical Research: Reminiscences of American Scholars from the ColdWar to the Present. The only collection to deal with the subject of non-Soviet scholars working in Soviet archives from the 1960s onwards, to the best of my knowledge, its pages record shifts in official policy toward the archives, working conditions in them and personal accounts of triumphs and trials experienced by fifteen American scholars.16 The official exchange of scholars occurred between the US Department of State and the Soviet Ministry of Higher and Specialized Education. The exchange was administered by the American International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX, the successor to the Inter-University Grant Committee on Travel Grants, IUCTG), an umbrella organization for American academic institutions sponsoring reciprocal scholarly research visits between the USA and nations of the Soviet bloc. It was the only way American scholars could gain access to Soviet archives. Scholars from ‘capitalist countries’ (kapstrany) were required to submit in advance, their theme (tema) in a research plan, that had to 15Katkov, ‘Soviet

Historical Sources’, Ibid, 134, 138. H. Baron and Cathy A. Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historical Research: Reminiscences of American Scholars from the Cold War to the Present, Armonk, NY and London, 2003. 16Samuel

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list the archival sources the scholar wished to consult; archives could then use these items to limit the scope of the scholar’s research. Archives could, and often did, refuse admission or deny access to catalogues and finding aids. Steven A. Barnes, who worked in the Kazakhstan archives in 2000 writes: ‘I will never understand why archivists thought I would travel thousands of miles to waste my time reading and taking notes on material unrelated to my dissertation. After reading a short one-page summary research plan, the archival employees acted as if they understood the boundaries of my topic better than I.’17 Graduate students were assigned to appropriate Soviet specialists who were to supervise their research. Faculty members received help from ‘companions’ or ‘facilitators’, usually scholars in the same or an adjacent field. Contacts between foreign scholars and their Soviet counterparts were limited and strictly regulated.These Soviet arbiters ultimately decided on whether the research topics chosen by the graduate student could be pursued. Those who chose such Sovietsanctioned topics such as popular movements in the revolution or subaltern groups in the imperial period could expect and receive more generous treatment. For their part, Soviet historians had to apply for permission to the ‘Special Department’ (spetschast’) of the institution where they worked. They too were not allowed to see the archive registers and could only mention the name of the archive, and no other details, in foot/end notes to their published work.18 Archival regulations had the potential to limit inquiry to both acceptable topics and interpretations sanctioned by the Soviet establishment. Before 1985, no American scholars (and precious few Soviet ones) were permitted to see the catalogues of archives’ holdings, and even until 1989 this was rare. Yet the scholar’s archival request had to include precise data on the fund (fond), inventory (opis), file (delo), and sheet (list) numbers. All such requests had to relate to the topic as each had defined it on her or his research application to IREX. Soviet archivists could, and regularly did, refuse requests on the grounds that they did not match the approved topic. Most scholars relied on bibliographic references in previous (usually Soviet) scholarship as their guide to archival files, a process that accentuated their dependence on published Soviet scholarship. But, as James Cracraft 17Stephen A. Barnes, ‘Hits

and Misses in the Archives of Kazakhstan’, Ibid., 257–8. Riasanovsky, ‘My Historical Research in the Soviet Union: HalfEmpty or Half-Full?’, Ibid., 9; Samuel H. Baron and Cathy A. Frierson, ‘Introduction’, Ibid., xvi, xvii. 18Nicholas V.

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found in 1979, at the Central State Archive of Ancient Documents (TsGADA) in Moscow, access to records could be denied even if based on citations in Soviet documents, on the ground that the particular records were not relevant to the stated research topic.19 Scholars could request only a limited number of files a day. Because they had no access to the archive registers (opisi), they ordered without knowing the size of each file, which could range from one paragraph to thousands of pages. The difficulty was in determining which files to select within the limits of time available and the daily archive quota without actually seeing the items. Until the late 1980s, photo-reproduction of archival materials was generally out of the question, and when permitted, if the photo-copiers worked at all, was subject to government restrictions concerning the hours of operation, times when orders could be placed and the number of copies.20 There were separate rules for different categories of files: for one category, notes could be made, but the source not divulged; for another, notes could be made but the information could not be published even without attribution; for a third, the notes had to be permanently retained within the archive, and, no notes whatsoever were permitted on the contents of particularly secret files. Professor R. W. Davies noted that until the late 1970s, foreign researchers were denied access to any archive related to history after 1920.21 Americans like Nancy Shields Kollman, from the kapstrany, felt that they enjoyed less ready access to archives and were stymied in 19James Cracraft, ‘Reclaiming Peter the Great’, Ibid., 107. Each fond or collection of documents is divided into files, and files into numbered sheets. A reference to archival materials could take the form: Fond No. 1, Collection No. 2, File No. 3 and Sheet No. 4. 20For the experiences of a Soviet historian, see Alter L. Litvin, Writing History in Twentieth-Century Russia: AView fromWithin, translated and edited by John L.H. Keep, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York, 2001, 17. Paul R. Josephson, ‘A Historian of Science Works from the Bottom Up’, in Baron and Frierson, eds., Adventures, 223; Baron and Frierson, ‘Introduction’, Ibid., xvii-xviii. Working in TsGAOR in 1986 (The Central State Archive of the October Revolution and the Building of Socialism, later GA RF), Donald J. Raleigh found that he could be shown a mere twenty archival files (dela) a day; could not consult the inventories (opisi) or catalogues, discuss his research with archivists willing to help, or inspect files in the same building in which his Soviet colleagues conducted their research. Donald J. Raleigh, ‘A Journey from St. Petersburg to Saratov’, Ibid., 144–5. 21R.W. Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era, Basingstoke and London, 1997, 84–8.

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research more often than students from the sotstrany (socialist countries). Working in TsGADA (The Central State Archive of Ancient Documents, later the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents, RGADA), Moscow, in 1976–7, she found that kapstrany scholars were not permitted to work in the main Reading Room, but allocated a separate room. By the early 1990s, however, the old foreigner’s reading room in TsGADA was crammed with microfilm readers and Kollmann could work in the main Reading Room. Volumes of opisi lined the walls, others could be summoned from the stacks, and typewritten registers describing the organization of the collections could be obtained as well.22

The Archives, 1985–91 In December 1986 the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences and the State Archives Administration promised to ease problems in gaining access to archives. Izvestiia announced in July 1987 that 767,000 of 1,109,000 documents in the central archives would be declassified. This measure was complemented by a transfer of books in the ‘special reserves’ section in libraries into their open stacks. All Ph.D. researchers were given the right to work in the special reserves section.23 Lenin’s archive is housed in thousands of special document cases containing the manuscripts of handwritten resolutions, notes, letters and articles as well as a huge collection of documents that he signed, including various orders, instructions, drafts and decrees.24 Documents are also available on microfilm and historians have access to the entire archive. Since a significant part of Stalin’s papers were deliberately 22Nancy Shields Kollman, ‘Romancing the Sources’, in Baron and Frierson, eds., Adventures, 157–60. Kollman was an IREX exchangee in 1976–7. 23Thomas Sherlock, ‘Politics and History under Gorbachev’, Problems of Communism, 38: 3, May–August 1988, 32; R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution, Basingstoke and London, 1989, 178. 24A large part of this body of material has been published in the Collected Works of Lenin (Polnoe sobranie socheneniia, fifth edition, Moscow 1958–65) and in various editions of Collected Lenin (Leninskii sbornik), Moscow-Leningrad, 1931, Moscow 1933. A sixth edition of Lenin’s Collected Works was prevented from appearing by the failed coup of August 1991. Dmitri Volkogonov irreverently writes that the first edition had 20 volumes, and each successive edition had seen an increase of ten volumes. Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire, 80, 443

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destroyed by his political heirs, including a large number of documents and a considerable part of his personal archive it will never be possible to reconstruct a comparable archive for Stalin.25 What remained of Stalin’s archive was unequally bifurcated. Some of it went to RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Social and Political History); this was formerly the Communist Party’s central archive (officially known as the Central Party Archive of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism attached to the Central Committee of the CPSU, or TsPA IML) The bulk of Stalin’s personal papers is lodged in the Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii (Archive of the President of the Russian President, APRF). So long as Stalin was alive, and for some time thereafter, his fond bore the number 3 (number 1 was reserved for Marx and Engels, and number 2, for Lenin). Today the number given to the Stalin fond in RGASPI is 558. In 1996 it was said to hold 16,174 files, in Russian and Georgian.26 Although Stalin, as ‘a natural conspirator, did not hold forth in the presence of a stenographer’, the published source material for Stalin’s life is voluminous. In his comprehensive, annotated bibliography, Stalin’sWorks, Robert H. McNeal listed more than 1000 articles, speeches, interviews, letters and telegrams. The preparation and publication of Stalin’s Collected Works was undertaken on a massive scale and in close consultation with Stalin, permitting him to delete or denigrate his enemies, by a special Sector of the Works of I.V. Stalin of the Central Committee established in 1936. Stalin’s first private secretary, Ivan V.Tovstukha, had started to gather together his speeches and articles in 1935. At the time of his death in March 1953, thirteen volumes of Stalin’s Sochineniia (Collected Works), minutely revised by himself, had been published in Moscow, but extending only until January 1934. On 12 January 1956, the Soviet news agency TASS announced the forthcoming publication of the fourteenth volume, which would have covered the years of the Terror. But Khrushchev’s Secret Speech delayed its publication. The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University, 25Zhores and Roy Medvedev, ‘Stalin’s Personal Archive: Hidden or Destroyed? Facts and Theories’, in Zhores A. Medvedev and Roy A. Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, translated by Ellen Dahrendorf, London and New York, 2006, 57. 26Litvin and Keep, Stalinism, 4. The first major documentary publication from Stalin’s personal archive was Lubianka: Stalin i VChK-GPU-OGPU-NKVD: sbornik dokumentatov, ianvar’ 1922—dekabr’ 1936, Moscow, 2003.

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California brought out an unofficial Russian language edition of Volumes XIV to XVI in 1966 under Robert McNeil’s editorship.27 Dmitri Antonovich Volkogonov was born in March 1928 in Chita, Eastern Siberia to a collective-farm manager father and a schoolteacher mother. In the archive, Volkogonov discovered that his father was arrested and shot in 1937 for being found in possession of a pamphlet by Bukharin. After that, the family was exiled to Krasnoiarsk in Western Siberia. His mother died during World War Two, and he joined the army in 1945, going on to become a three-star Colonel-General. He was sacked from heading the Main Political Administration of the Army and Navy and then forced to resign from the post of Director of the Institute of Military History in June 1991 because the draft of a new history of World War Two, prepared under his editorship, came under savage attack from the military top brass as ‘un-Soviet’. He then became President Yeltsin’s special adviser on defence after the failed coup in August 1991. His military functions were mostly confined to stripping down the Political Section of the Armed Forces to a minimum: political indoctrination was no longer required, and he was advising officers to seek employment as psychological consultants.28 Volkogonov was the first professional historian to report the disappearance of Stalin’s personal Kremlin archive while working in the Central Committee archives. He made this discovery in 1988 when he was writing the first detailed biography of Stalin to be published in the USSR under the auspices of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee. As he entered Stalin’s Kremlin office, he found that ‘Stalin’s safe was empty, aside from his party card and a small packet of unimportant papers, and despite many attempts, I was never able to discover what it had contained or what had happened to his personal papers.’29 27Robert H. McNeal, ed., Stalin’s Works: An Annotated Bibliography, Stanford, CA, 1967; I. V. Stalin, Sochineniia, 13 volumes, Moscow, 1946–52; J.V. Stalin, Sochineniia, volumes XIV-XVI, Stanford, 1966; Stephen Kotkin, ‘1991 and the Russian Revolution: Sources, Conceptual Categories, Analytical Frameworks’, The Journal of Modern History, 70: 2, June 1998, 415; Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Stalin, Man of the Borderlands’, The American Historical Review, 106: 5, December 2001, n.5, p. 1652; Robert Conquest, Power and Policy in the U.S.S.R., London, 1961, 277. 28Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire, ix, xii, xiv-xv, 528. 29Medvedev and Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, 62, citing Dmitry Volkogonov, Triumf i tragediya. I.V. Stalin. Politicheskii portret. Kniga vtoraia, Moscow: APN, 1989, part 2, p. 45. Volkogonov in 1996: ‘After his death, Stalin’s personal archive was

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During the seven years between the first and second versions of his biography of Stalin,Volkogonov, who was a key figure on theYeltsin Presidential Commission to declassify Party archives, says that he was only able to find a few ‘insignificant’ Stalin papers, such as notebooks containing preparatory thoughts for ‘buro meetings’ but only for the period from 1932–4. This small collection of notebooks was placed in the APRF. If Stalin prepared for every Politburo meeting in this way, as he undoubtedly must have, then his personal archive must have contained several hundred notebooks of this kind. In the course of the 1930s alone, there were approximately 500 sessions of the Politburo at which tens of thousands of issues were decided.30 Particularly sensitive material was sent to the Politburo archive, or to the ‘Special Files’, a top-secret archive where papers were kept in sealed packets (Osobaia papka). Not even members of the Politburo or the Central Committee could have access to a sealed packet in the ‘Special Files’ without the permission of the General Secretary. Even in the 1980s the documents in this archive were considered to be so ‘hot’ for the Party that declassification only took place when the Communist Party itself was proscribed after the demise. The ‘Special Files’ contained the originals of documents the very existence of which had been denied for decades: the secret protocols attached to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 concerning the division of Poland and outlining future ‘spheres of influence’; material on the liquidation of Polish prisoners, including army officers, police, priests and government officials carried out by the NKVD in Katyn forest in the autumn of 1940; the decision by the State Defence Committee (GKO) to exile the Muslim peoples of the North Caucasus and the Crimea in 1943–4.31 combed out repeatedly’. Dmitri Volkogonov, Vozhd vtoroi: Iosif Stalin. Sem vozhdei. Kniga I, Moscow, Novosti, 1996, 260. 30Medvedev and Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, 62, 63, 79: Stalinskoe Politburo v 30-e gody. Sbornik dokumentov. Seriia Dokumenty sovetskoi istorii, Moscow: AIROXX, 1995. See also ‘The Politburo Protocols, 1919–40’, The Russian Review, vol. 55, 1996, 99–103. A survey of the collection of the Politburo is held in the Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Most Recent Party History (RTsKhIDNI), fond 17, op. 3. 31Ibid., 64. See also ‘Stalin’s ‘Special Files’, Archive of Contemporary Russian History. Vol. 1, University of Pittsburg: The Center for the Study of Russia and the Soviet Union, 1994. Between the German invasion in June 1941 and the end of 1944, nearly 1.8 million people from twelve major ethnic groups were forcibly relocated. Archival research after the Soviet demise has revealed that 90,000 Finns and 750,000 Germans were relocated in summer 1941 to Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Siberia; 70,000 Karachai

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In December 1991, Volkogonov was appointed Chairman of the Russian Supreme Soviet Commission for the transfer of Party and KGB documents to the public domain, in other words for the opening of the archives. In nearly two years, the members of the commission declassified some 78 million files. Acting on the orders of President Yeltsin, towards the end of 1992, three members of the commission— Professors Rudol’f Pikhoia, A. Korotkov and Volkogonov—were in the process of opening the ‘Special Files’. As they proceeded, they found that the contents of the envelopes were not indicated on the outside, and only a set of numbers indicated some identification. As they had no code-book to decipher the numbers, they simply opened one envelope after another to discover what secrets it held.32 In 1990, the document collection of the ‘Special Files’ was transferred out of the Central Committee building to the Kremlin, where it had been housed in Stalin’s former apartment. Returning to Moscow after the collapse of the coup, President Gorbachev ordered the main buildings of the KGB and Communist Party ‘sealed’ on 23 August 1991. He had already removed the Politburo archives to the Kremlin in late 1990 and renamed them the USSR Presidential Archives. But the next day PresidentYeltsin of the Russian Federation (RF) decreed that all archives on the territory of Russia were to be ‘transferred’ to RF jurisdiction and they were. Following Gorbachev’s resignation in December 1991, all these documents exposing the whole secret history of the Party and hidden aspects of the Stalin era were returned to the Kremlin and became part of the newly created Archive of the President of the Russian Federation (APRF).The APRF held the originals of all Politburo documents, reams of high-level correspondence and the bulk of the personal files of all the Communist Party General Secretaries.The special Stalin Fond in the APRF included more than 1700 files.33 In August 1987, Le Monde reported, on the basis of information published by ex-political prisoners, (the veracity of whose testimony therefore, invited suspicion), in the Soviet periodical Glasnost’, that in November 1943 and 90,000 Kalmyks in December 1943 to Kazakhstan, Kirghizia and Siberia; 390,000 Chechens in February 1944 to Kazakhstan and Kirghizia and 185,000 Crimean Tartars in May 1944, mainly to Uzbekistan. See Table 1.1 Major National Deportations under Stalin, 1937–1944, in J. Otto Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing the USSR, 1937–1949, Westport, CT, 1999. 32Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire, 528–9. 33Kotkin, ‘1991 and the Russian Revolution’, The Journal of Modern History, 70: 2, June 1998, 389–90; Medvedev and Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, 64, 65.

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‘the legal archives of the thirties, forties and fifties were actually being destroyed at the rate of five thousand dossiers a month under the pretext that there is a “lack of space” to preserve them’. When smoke from the burnt documents caused a problem within Moscow (ironically from the furnace of the Supreme Court building!), the process of destruction was shifted outside the city.34 Throughout the Soviet decades, documents that the authorities regarded as unnecessary, unimportant, or dangerous were destroyed, particularly about people who had disappeared. Whenever a political figure, writer or scholar was arrested, all personal papers were routinely confiscated. After the investigation was over, documents that turned out to be irrelevant to the case were never returned to relatives— whether novels, manuscripts, diaries, photograph albums, marginal notes and letters—instead they were destroyed, usually burned, in accordance with authorized rules of procedure.35 In 1940, Lavrentii Beria, the head of NKVD, ordered certain materials from the 1920s and 1930s to be shredded.36 Stalin had the most important Central Committee papers, about five million files, evacuated from Moscow to Chkalov (formerly and now again Orenberg) and Saratov, an operation involving 200 railway wagons, in July 1941. After the war he ordered the transfer of a huge Russian emigre archive from Prague to Moscow. At the beginning of 1946 the NKVD arranged for the transport of nine wagon-loads of these 34Ernest Mandel, Beyond Perestroika: The Future of Gorbachev’s USSR, London, 1989, 93. 35Medvedev and Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, 59. 36The Vecheka (the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Sabotage and Speculation) was established in December 1917. It was replaced by the GPU (the State Political Directorate of the People’s Commissariat of the Interior, the NKVD) in February 1922. The GPU gave way to the OGPU (the Unified State Political Administration) in November 1923.The OGPU was independent of the NKVD. From July 1934, the OGPU was absorbed in a reorganized NKVD, which now took over all the functions of police and security, including the administration of the labour camps. In 1941 a separate NKVD (People’s Commissariat of State Security) was established, while police duties not directly involving ‘state security’ were left to the NKVD. In 1943 the security service was separated from the NKVD and renamed NKGB. In 1946, following the transformation of the commissariats into ministries, the NKVD became the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) and the NKGB became the MGB (Ministry of State Security). In March 1954, after Stalin’s death, sections of the MGB were reorganized as the KGB (Committee of State Security) under the Council of Ministers; that is, the MVD was reduced in status from a ministry to a ‘committee’ while still remaining very powerful. In 1962 Khrushchev abolished the MVD. The KGB remained until 1991.

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documents, and its chief archives department was charged with their ‘sorting and use’. Since most of it vanished en route, the contents might have been too sensitive even for classified storage.37 In the early post-Stalin years, particularly after the Twentieth Congress of the Party in 1956, senior officials who wanted to conceal past misdemeanours ensured that incriminating files were either destroyed or transferred to remote areas. In the late-1940s and the 1950s, the archival agencies reintroduced ‘scrap paper campaigns’ that resembled similar campaigns of the NEP and the 1930s. In January and February 1953 Komsomol and Party members were asked to sift through newspapers and magazines and remove articles containing negative references to Stalin or positive statements about ‘enemies of the people’.38 One estimate found that 8.7 million files were slated for destruction in 1945, 30.7 million in 1950, 68.1 in 1955, 87.1 in 1957 and 87.8 million in 1959. In the 1960s and 1970s, more than a total of 25 million files were destroyed. In terms of the magnitude of the destruction, the combined archives under the jurisdiction of MAA contained somewhat more than 90 million files at the end of the 1980s.39 Khrushchev appointed General Ivan Serov (1905–90) Chairman of the KGB in 1954 and Serov remained there until 1958. Serov enjoyed Khrushchev’s total confidence. A.N. Shelepin, a former head of the KGB, told Dmitri Volkogonov that Khrushchev ordered Serov to execute a ‘big purge’ of Stalin’s archives and to “look through all the papers with death sentence lists, where there is more than just Stalin’s signature. Find them and report to me”. Serov was instructed to destroy any archive materials containing information about Khrushchev’s role in the repressive campaigns of the Stalin period. Serov delivered several fat files to Khrushchev a few months later. On being asked where they now were, Shelepin told Volkogonov that “I don’t think they exist any more”. In his testimony in 1988, Shelepin stated that Serov had been responsible for burning 261 pages of Khrushchev’s death-lists between 2 and 9 July 1954. Serov was also responsible for destroying Lavrentii Beria’s archives in July 1954 on Khrushchev’s orders. Khrushchev was not even a member of the Party Central Committee when the Seventeenth Party Congress met 37Volkogonov,

Autopsy for an Empire, 141. Brackman, The Secret File, 387, for his interview with Yakov and Diana Vinkovetsky in New York in 1975. They took part in this censoring operation. 39R.G. Pikhoia, Russian Social Science Review, March–April 2002, 12, 15 citing T. Khorkhordina, Istorii Otechestva i arkhivy, 1917–1980–e gg., Moscow, 1994, 296–7; Mark Kramer, CWIHP. 38See

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in 1934, and his subsequent rise was meteoric and unique. Stalin rewarded him with full membership of the Politburo after barely twelve months as a candidate member, probably because he was an exceptionally effective purger. The Moscow Party organization was thoroughly purged while he was its Secretary. As First Secretary of the Ukrainian Party since January 1938, Khrushchev directed the purge there, aided by Leonid Brezhnev, against the intelligentsia and in a bid to destroy Ukrainian nationalism. All the members of the Ukrainian Politburo were executed and only three of the 102 members of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party remained alive; all the members of the Ukrainian government were arrested. Since Serov had been a leading purger in Moscow (1936– 7) as well as in the northern Caucasus, the Crimea and the Ukraine (1938–41), there can be little doubt that he did the job of destroying history as thoroughly as possible. Just after the death sentence had been passed on Piatakov and twelve other defendants, including respected and distinguished Old Bolsheviks like Sokolnikov, Serebriakov and Radek, on 30 January 1937, in one of the three big trials of the period, Khrushchev addressed a workers’ gathering, as First Secretary of the Moscow Party organization, and declared, in tones so resonant with the dominant chants of the time, that it merits lengthy citation. He said that the purpose of the gathering was “to raise our proletarian voice in complete support of the sentences passed by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court against the enemies of the people, the traitors of the motherland, the betrayers of the workers’ cause, the spies, the diversionists, agents of fascism, the vile despicable Trotskyites ....They raised their evil hand against Comrade Stalin .... Raising their hand against Comrade Stalin, they raised it against all that is best, all that is human, because Stalin is hope, aspiration, the beacon of all advanced and progressive humanity. Stalin is our banner! Stalin is our will! Stalin is our victory!” At the Twentieth Party Congress Khrushchev, ironically, attempted to demonstrate that he and Bulganin had opposed Stalin’s methods and policies and that the blame for the Purges had to be laid squarely at the doors of Stalin and Yezhov.40 40Serov joined the NKVD in 1939. He was one of those who organized the Katyn massacre in 1940 (see Chapter 2) as well as the deportation of the Chechens and Ingush in 1944 and of the Baltic peoples after the war. In 1945 Serov was the deputy of the supreme commander of the occupation forces in Germany and was also in charge of NKVD units there He was responsible for the disposition of looted valuables

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In August 1990, an article in Izvestiia on the closed sections (spetskhrany) of the Lenin Library in Moscow reported that inaccessible publications were divided into four categories, namely, anti-communist books or newspapers published in Russia during the civil war (1917– 21); material legally published in the country from 1918–36 which referred to leaders who had been arrested during the Terror and the Purges in the 1930s; Russian-language books and newspapers published abroad; and, foreign books and newspapers.The spetskhrany contained over 300,000 book titles, more than 560,000 periodicals and at least a million newspapers.41 The Central Committee Secretariat initiated proceedings on 23 March 1991 to destroy more archival files by its peculiarly titled circular ‘On Certain Issues in Safeguarding the Archival Holdings of the CPSU’, which actually called for the ‘efficient destruction of documents in the Party archives covering 1946 to 1985 that should not be kept’ in the interest of [improving] ‘the conditions of storage, safekeeping, inventorying and use of documents’. The documents related to files on the admission of candidates for membership, leadership rosters, personal files of Party members who had been disciplined and documents from state and economic bodies and organizations that were sent to Party committees as information. A process was initiated, in which 2,324,213 files were destroyed out of 6,569,062 that were from Germany by senior Soviet officials (‘trophy property’). Serov was removed as Chairman of the KGB in 1958 when it was discovered that he had stolen the crown of the Belgian monarch, and he then became the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU). The destruction of material that may have compromised Khrushchev continued until the Twentieth Party Congress. The literature on Serov grows. See, for instance, Alter Litvin and John Keep, Stalinism: Russian and Western Views at the turn of the Millennium, London and New York, 2005, 68; Volkogonov, Autopsy for an Empire, 141, 194; Medvedev and Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, 86, 74; Litvin, Writing History, 83; Brackman, The Secret File, 320, citing Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, New York, 1973, 348–50; H. Montgomery Hyde, Stalin:The History of a Dictator, New York, 1971, 348, 362–3; R.H. McNeal, Lenin Stalin Khrushchev: Voices of Bolshevism, New Jersey, 1957, 141–2; Merle Fainsod, ‘What Happened to “Collective Leadership”?’ in Abraham Brumberg, ed., Russia under Khrushchev. An Anthology from Problems of Communism, New York, 1962, 106. See Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, London, 2003, 222, for an account of how Khrushchev ordered the murder of 55,741 individuals in Moscow. All Soviet leaders since Khrushchev have carried out purges: Chernenko in the Far East in the 1930s and then in the Ukraine and Moldavia. See Brackman, The Secret File, 420. 41David Wedgwood Benn, From Glasnost to Freedom of Speech: Russian Openness and International Relations, London, 1992, 9.

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marked for destruction, and it was halted only by President Yeltsin, immediately after the coup, on 24 August 1991.Yeltsin’s decree, ‘On Party Archives’, preceding the end of the Party itself, required the dispersed Party archives to be centrally kept within the jurisdiction of the Russian Archive Service.42 The Soviet archives had yielded little of the dead they held when the demise came.Would-be toilers found their path strewn with archaic rules and authoritarian guardians. Only a fraction of the ‘secret files’ had been declassified by 1990 and few historians had been granted access to the NKVD files, essential for any honest representation of the ‘dark continent’ of the Stalinist past. In addition, officials from the Ministry of Internal Affairs had tried, without success, to remove this Ministry’s documents pertaining to the 1934–60 period. But there were positive indicators as well. An unofficial ‘initiative group’ of archivists and lawyers prepared a Draft Law ‘On Archival Affairs and the Archive’ before the failed coup which proposed that all documents in Party and state archives, barring personal files, should be subject to a 30-year rule (with 75 years for the latter). These provisions were included in archival legislation in June 1992 and July 1993.43 The central KGB Archives, so vast that they are spread out in numerous locations besides Moscow, managed to escape legislation concerning the archives, as did the contents of the Archive of the USSR Presidential Apparatus. It contains the personal collections of 51 major Soviet leaders and political personalities. On 2 August 1992,Yeltsin confirmed a document listing which categories of files were henceforth to be kept by the state. Among those listed was Stalin’s personal fond. About a year later, in October 1999, 1,445 files from this fond, of very unequal quality, were transferred from APRF to RGASPI, along with 20 inventories (opisi) relating to 1000 collections (fondy) of the Politburo. Further transfers were made over the next three years. From July 1994, the bimonthly periodical Istochnik (‘Source’) published a supplement entitled ‘Herald of the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation’. A number of documents from Stalin’s personal fond appeared for the first time 42Pikhoia,

Russian Social Science Review, March-April 2002, 16–17. History in theYeltsin Era, 92, 107; Alter L. Litvin, Writing History in Twentieth-Century Russia: AView fromWithin, translated and edited by J.L.H. Keep, London and Basingstoke, 2001, 34. 43Davies, Soviet

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in its pages. Istochnik had to cease publication in 2004 because of financial problems.44

The Archives after the Demise of the USSR in 1991–93 When some Party and state archives began to give up their dead and declassify material in 1989 (the process rapidly accelerated after the demise of the USSR in 1991), Russian and foreign historians were immediately attracted by the chance to examine them. Several British and American universities and libraries actively participated in the process of sorting out and systematizing the archives, putting them on microfilm and creating catalogues. During the first years of this work, separate fonds were created to house material relating to the most important aspects of Soviet history, and the protocols of all sessions of the Politburo between 1919–40 were made available to scholars. A part of the archives of the NKVD-MVD, along with several other People’s Commissariats and Ministries, were declassified and put in order. Separate archive fonds were allocated to former leaders. Microfilm versions of the archives of prominent non-Bolsheviks like Iuli Martov, Pavel Akselrod, Vera Zasulich and Georgy Plekhanov, were made available for purchase by libraries or individual scholars. Archives were also established for victims of the terror. The entire process of a reassessment of Soviet history, which in the past had not been merely distorted but often entirely falsified, was spurred by the elimination of censorship.45 By the mid-1990s, fairly unrestricted access to central and regional archives was noted. Cathy Frierson gushed about how research conditions in Russia were coming to resemble those in Western Europe or the USA in the sense of being ‘a more controllable, individual and predictable experience’. The narrowing of the international gap in working conditions in the archives that Frierson noted was reflected ‘in the likelihood of open access; the elimination of internal 44Litvin

and Keep. Stalinism, 4–5. Istochnik emerged as a supplement to the conservative Rodina (‘Motherland’), and its offerings included discredited tsarist personalities, Russian symbols and local lore. Kotkin points out that it used the word ‘tragedy’ as a synonym for ‘revolution’. Kotkin, The Journal of Modern History, June 1998, 391 and n. 26, p. 391. 45Medvedev and Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, 58–9.

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visas and obstacles to travel around Russia; the ability to develop a working knowledge of the kinds of materials contained and the patterns of filing in an archive; the ease of ordering photocopies of texts and photographs of graphic materials; and the nonchalant receptivity of local archive directors to Western scholars’ requests now place responsibility on the individual scholar. Success now depends on the same skills that historians of Germany or France develop.We historians of Russia are now distinguished largely by the visas we have to procure, our stamina and our willingness to live in Third World conditions while we do our research’. The demise had given most institutes the ability to decide on their own whether to receive a scholar and how much access to give her or him, even as libraries and archives remain under-funded. Writing in a similar vein, Paul Josephson considered that the demise of the Soviet Union ‘has altered research experience from the mundane to the significant, from how scholars gain access and make copies to the kinds of materials they see’.46 To recapitulate, until late-1991 the central state archives of the Soviet Union, as well as thousands of regional and local archives, were administered by the MAA. The Institute of Marxism-Leninism was responsible for the central Communist Party Archive, while the Central Committee of the Party supervised 140 Party archives in addition to the archive of the Party Secretariat. Documents from the Politburo of the Party were stored in the Kremlin Presidential Archive.47 There were two principal Party archives, namely, the Russian Centre for the Storage and Study of Documents of Recent History, that houses documents from 1917 to October 1952 (RTsKhIDNI or Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii) and the Centre for the Storage of Contemporary Documentation, holding Party documents from 1952 to December 1991 (TsKhSD or Tsentr khraneniia sovremennoi dokumentatsii). The private papers of A.I. Mikoian, who, as a member of the Politburo from 1926–66 was at the pinnacle of power through the Stalin and Khrushchev regimes, are not, however, housed in TsKhSD, but in RTsKhIDNI. TsKhSD, the repository for the working files of the Central Committee, 46Cathy A. Frierson, ‘Mysteries in the Realms of History and Memory’ in Baron and Frierson, eds. Adventures in Russian Historical Research, 214–15. Frierson worked in St. Petersburg, in 1985, Smolensk in 1989 and in Novgorod and Vologda through the 1990s on educated and peasant cultures. Josephson, ‘A Historian of Science Works from the Bottom Up’, Ibid., 225, 226, Josephson was an IREX exchangee in 1991–2. 47Kramer, CWIHP, 3.

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holds the extremely important files of V.N. Malin, the head of the General Department of the Central Committee under Khrushchev; Khrushchev scholars have benefited from his detailed notes of Presidium discussions and decisions from 1953–64. The Foreign Ministry (MID) had its own archive, the AVP RF (Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii). After the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo initiated a declassification programme of the AVP RF holdings for the years between 1917–27 and 1945–55 a considerable part of these have been made available to scholars. Declassification at the Central State Archive of the Soviet Army which holds the papers of the General Staff (TsGASA or Tsentral’nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Sovetskoi Armii) at Podolsk was proceeding at a steady pace in the early 1990s.48 Following the failed coup in August 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December, the archives in Moscow were extensively reorganized. After the abolition of Glavarkhiv’ (MAA), almost all of its staff, as well as its specialized archival research institute, and the fourteen central state archives it had formerly administered, were transferred to the newly created Russian State Committee on Archival Affairs, or Roskomarkhiv’. Most of the 2,200 other state archives in the country (including 47 republican archives, 170 regional ones and 1,981 provincial and local ones) came under its indirect control. Importantly, the dismantling of Glavarkhiv’, and the establishment of a successor agency implied more real freedom to researchers. In early 1993, Roskomarkhiv’ was reorganized and given a new name, the Russian State Archival Service or Rosarkhiv’. Rudol’f Pikhoia was appointed its director. The fourteen federal archives as well as the 48Wolff, ‘Coming in from the Cold’, 2; Jim Hershberg, ‘Russian Archives Review’, Cold War International History Project Virtual archive, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfn, 3. During the process of the declassification of the MID holdings, Russian security officials were worried that data pertaining to codes would be revealed as deciphered telegrams were declassified; foreign scholars responded by pointing out that the codes in question were either obsolete or, if sensitive, could be excised.Vladimir G. Sokolov and Sven G. Holtsmark, ‘Note on the Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation’, ColdWar International History Project Bulletin, 3, Fall 1993, 26, 52. Hugh Ragsdale found in 1981 that only the protokoly (decisions), not the records, of Politburo discussions were kept in RTsKhIDNI and that decisions on police affairs and defence were still classified for the period after 1934. Hugh Ragsdale, ‘Adventures and Misadventures: Russian Foreign Policy in European and Russian Archives’, Baron and Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historian Research, 98.

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RTsKhIDNI and TsKhSD archives, with more than 30 million file units, were transferred to Rosarkhiv’. The voluminous files of the Communist International (the Comintern, 1919–43) are housed in RTsKhIDNI.49 Rudol’f Pikhoia, who headed the Russian Federal archive system from 1990–6, listed files from the following APRF holdings that were transferred to Roskomarkhiv in 1993: Documents of Central Committee and Party commissions; of the State Committee on Defense of the USSR (1941–5); certain minutes of Politburo meetings and the personal holdings of leaders including Stalin, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Khrushchev, Andropov and Gorbachev. The archival law of July 1993 did not mandate a transfer of the bulk of the Presidential archive to Rosarkhiv’; and most of the files from the former were declassified for political rather than scholarly reasons. This involved documents that might have assisted in diplomatic matters—among the documents released to foreign governments were material related to the downing of a Korean aircraft in 1983, the Katyn Forest massacre during the Second World War (see Chapter 2), the invasion of Hungary in 1956; documents on the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968; and, documents concerning Soviet discussions of the Polish crisis in 1980–1; or others that may have been useful as evidence for the trial of the erstwhile Communist Party of the Soviet Union before the Constitutional Court. By the end of the year, this meant that the 17 federal archives under the direct control of Roskomarkhiv’ contained more than 65 million files, while the republic, regional and provincial level archives held nearly 140 million files. Rosarkhiv’ did not, however, possess control over some of the Party’s Politburo records.50 The State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi archiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, hereafter GA RF) was established in 1992 on the basis of the combined holdings of the former Central Archive of the October Revolution (TsGAOR SSSR, 1961–92), High Organs of State Power, and Organs of State Administration of the USSRTsGAOR SSSR (1941–61) and the Central State Archive of the RSFSR (TsGA RSFSR (1957–92). By 1994, it had accumulated over 3000 fonds (with over five million file units), dating from 1800 to 1993. Its most substantial holdings are from the Soviet period, 49Kramer, CWIHP, 6–7. The decree by which Glavarkhiv’ was disbanded became law on 22 January 1992. 50Pikhoia, Russian Social Science Review, 18; Kramer, CWIHP, 7,9.

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including records of commissariats and ministries, both of the USSR and the Russian Republic in the USSR, from the revolution to the demise of the USSR in 1991.The pre-revolutionary holdings comprise records of the apex central judicial, penal, political and criminal investigative agencies of the former empire, and personal papers of the imperial family and members of the court. All the prerevolutionary holdings had been made accessible by 1993. Holdings of the Soviet period before the beginning of the Second World War (1941) had also been declassified. Some files related to the working of the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom, up to 1946) and of its successor, Council of Ministers, (Sovmin SSSR), remained under restricted access. By the mid-1990s, projects had been launched with the University of Pittsburg to publish detailed guides under the Russian Publications Project’s Russian Archive Series. Guides to the special secret files of the Interior Ministry and of the secret police have been published.51 Even as the holdings in GA RF were released for scholarly perusal, access to the so-called Presidential or Kremlin Archive remained limited. This archive passed from Gorbachev’s control to that of Yeltsin after the failed coup and was named the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation (AP RF). Since then, Russian archival officials have repeatedly vowed to transfer AP RF fonds to repositories under the authority of the Russian State Archival Service (Rosarkhiv’), but by the mid-1990s the volume of transfers had not been significant. Ella Maksimovna reported in 1999 that 1445 fonds had been transferred out of the AP RF, the Politburo material, the ‘Special Files’ and much of the former KGB archive still remained within its portal.52 A comprehensive Law on Archival Collections to regulate all the far-flung repositories in Moscow, St. Petersburg and elsewhere in the Russian Federation was adopted in July 1993. Earlier that month, the Russian legislature had approved a new Law on State Secrets after 51Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GA RF), ArcheoBiblioBase: Archives in Russia: B1, www.iisg.nl~abb/abb, 2; Jim Hershberg, ‘Russian Archives Review’, Cold War International History Project Virtual archive, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfn, 4. 52Jim Hershberg, ‘Russian Archives Review’, Cold War International History Project Virtual archive, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfn. Medvedev and Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, 65, citing Ella Maksimovna, ‘Lichny fond Stalina stanovitsya obshchedostupnym. No pochemu lish chastichno?’ Izvestiia, 30 October 1999.

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a second reading, but President Yeltsin refused to sign the bill; if he had done so, significant collections would have been removed from access. By the end of 1993, several of the most important Soviet period archives had been opened, albeit on a limited and sporadic basis for scholarly access. But the most important archives in Moscow were still beyond the reach of scholars and access to the Central Committee and Foreign Ministry collections remained difficult.53 President Yeltsin established the Bulletin of the Presidential Archive in 1994. It was to publish annotated material from the AP RF, which was then going through a process of gradual declassification. The Bulletin came out as a supplement to Istochnik which published material from other archives, including those of the Secret Services. The Bulletin of the Presidential Archive ceased publication in 1999.54 Protesting against what appeared to be an unjustified delay in the process, the journalist Ella Maksimova wrote in Izvestiia in July 1994 that ‘the Presidential Archive (the former Politburo Archive) works according to the same super-secret regime, inaccessible to the mass of researchers [and] even [its] very existence ... is not advertised’. She added that in 1992 highly senior persons such as Roskomarkhiv’ (which became Rosarkhiv’) Chairman, R.G. Pikhoia, the head of the Presidential administration, S. Filatov, the renowned historian Dmitri Volkogonov and the Director of AP RF itself, A.V. Korotkov, had appealed to PresidentYeltsin to transfer about 12,000 of the rumoured 100–150,000 files in the AP RF to archives where researchers could work on their contents. Yeltsin had agreed, but in the relevant communication he had added ‘No’ in his own hand alongside the transfer of files in Fond No. 1 (Party Congresses from 1947–86) and in Fond No. 2 (Plenums of the Central Committee of the AllUnion Communist Party (Bolshevik) and those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1941–90). Maksimova wrote that it was almost as if someone had stood at Yeltsin’s ‘elbow whispering that it is dangerous, it is not worth it’. She concluded that in the given circumstances, access to AP RF depended on proximity to the President’s circle, and the individual’s political weight and connections. Maksimova had named scholars like Dmitri Volkogonov and Stephen Cohen as examples of such individuals and they swiftly and 53Kramer, CWIHP, 1, 3. The text of this was law was published in the official Rossiiskaia gazeta on 14 August 1993, p. 3. 54Medvedev and Medvedev thought that publishable material in the AP RF had been exhausted. The Unknown Stalin, 67–8.

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emphatically denied her allegations in letters to the same newspaper. The ensuing controversy did, however, prompt a reconsideration of the status of AP RF.55 President Yeltsin issued a directive in September 1994 about expediting the declassification of documents created until 1953 and lodged in the AP RF. While paragraphs 1 and 2, which established a Commission on the Declassification of Documents created by the CPSU, as an integral sub-division of the Inter-Departmental Commission on the Protection of State Secrets, pertained only to ‘documents created by the CPSU’, paragraphs 3 and 4 broadened the scope of the directive to include documents preserved in the Foreign Ministry, Defence and KGB archives. Paragraph 4 provided for the transfer of these departmental documents to archives under the direct jurisdiction of Rosarkhiv’ after their storage period had expired; the length of the storage period was not, however, either specified or made uniform in duration, although the directors of archives under Rosarkhiv’ jurisdiction were given the power to declassify documents stored on their premises. Paragraph 5 fulfilled a long-held scholarly wish, as it called for a phased transfer of ‘original’ documents from the Presidential Archive (AP RF) to archives under the jurisdiction of Rosarkhiv’. The documents that could be transferred included ‘documents from the former archive of the CPSU CC Politburo’ but not the personal files of certain Soviet politicians, which are important non-Politburo documents. In addition, as for the latter category of documents, transfer to Rosarkhiv’ relates only to documents ‘created in or before 1963’, thereby imposing the 30-year rule. The Directive did not ensure that the records transferred from AP RF to Rosarkhiv’ will be made more accessible.56 In addition to the Presidential Archive, the archives of the former KGB, with over ten million file units, and of the Defence Ministry, were mostly off-limits for research access in 1993. Few had access 55Hershberg, www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfn, 2–3; Ella Maksimova, ‘Merchants of Sensation from the Presidential Archive’, Izvestiia, no. 131, 13 July 1994. The letters from Volkogonov and Cohen were published in Izvestiia on 19 July and 17 August 1994, respectively. Bruce W. Menning found that invoking Volkogonov’s name could both assist and hinder an individual’s effort to gain access to an otherwise inaccessible archive. See Bruce W. Menning, ‘Of Outcomes Happy and Unhappy’, in Baron and Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historical Research, 133–4. 56The directive no. 489, was signed into law by President Yeltsin on 22 September 1994 and its text was published in Rossiiskaia gazeta on 27 September 1994. Hershberg, www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfn, 10–12.

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to the impregnable KGB archives in the Lubianka during the Soviet period and Gorbachev did not exactly rush into liberalizing the conditions for scholarly perusal of these papers. The Russian (Federation) Ministry of Security (FSB), the successor to the Soviet KGB, reasserted tight control over the former KGB archives immediately after the Soviet demise, despite a decree by Yeltsin in August 1991 transferring jurisdiction over the KGB archives to Roskomarkhiv’. Rudol’f Pikhoia was hesitant about bringing these archives under the roof of Rosarkhiv’. By 1993, in fact, most of the KGB archives were less accessible than they had been in the Soviet period, because most of the files were sealed off completely for 50 to 75 years. Although Russian laws formally grant access to documents 30 years after their creation, barring documents relating to individuals, even this access is stymied by bureaucratic hurdles like declassification action by special commissions whose decisions and pace of work can and do delay access to beyond 30 years. In September 1995, V. P. Danilov, the leading agrarian historian in the Institute of History, Russian Academy of Sciences, noted that one of the main peculiarities of the KGB archives was a tendency that combined diligent documentation with disorderly storage. Mentioning one of the most significant document formats, the svodki, or reports on the political mood of different social groups written by the OGPU (1922–34), that actually constitute a major part of the archival collection and can provide historians with valuable and, in his view, reliable information, he pointed out these sources still lay beyond access. Danilov stressed that although more people can now use the depositories of the former KGB archives, access is often limited to the materials of those purged during the late-1920s and early-1930s. The materials on the KGB as an institution, its executive and operational documents, are not yet available to the ‘average’ scholar.57 By the year 2000 all of the central GULAG administration’s files in Moscow had been declassified with the exception of individual staff files and the internal surveillance section. Furthermore, portions of the central administrative files of the Soviet internal exile system had been reclassified after initially being available to scholars for a short period. The reclassified material in this collection also deals with the system of internal surveillance.Two large and important fonds were to be transferred from AP RF to the Russian State Archive for 57Stalin-Era Research and Archives Project (SERAP), Bulletin, No. 1, Fall 1995, Toronto, 5. For Danilov’s record as a historian of collectivization, see Chapter 2.

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Political and Social History (RGASPI, the Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv’ Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii, formerly RTsKhIDNI) in 2000. Fond 71 contained documents for the period from 1921–82 and fond 558, dealing with the period from 1966–86.58 The archives pertaining to the Soviet military were never housed in any centralized manner but scattered in several locations, in or near Moscow and St. Petersburg: the General Staff Archives (IATsGSVS) in southern Moscow, the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence (TsAMO) in Podolsk just outside Moscow, the Archive of the Main Intelligence Directorate (AGRU) in southern Moscow, the Central Naval Archive of the Ministry of Defence (TsVMAMO) in Gatchina near St. Petersburg—the four of which held highly classified material from the Second World War and were beyond the ambit of Rosarkhiv’. On the other hand, the Russian State Military Archive (RGVA later renamed TsGASA), the Russian State MilitaryHistorical Archive (RGVIA), both in central Moscow, and the Russian State Archive of the Navy (RGAVMF) in St. Petersburg, came under Rosarkhiv’ supervision by 1993, perhaps because they held less sensitive information, from before the Soviet Union’s entry into the war in 1941. In 1987 an annotated list of about 34,000 fondy containing 3.34 million file units stored in TsGASA, on the years between the revolution and the world war, was declassified and published in five volumes. The files were selected by a joint team from TsGASA itself, the All-Union Scholarly-Research Institute for Documentation Studies and Archival Affairs and Glavarkhiv’.59 In late 1990, Bruce W. Menning, a historian of the imperial and Red Armies, found the pre-1917 collection in the military-historical archive (TsGVIA) in Moscow completely open, along with free access to documentary indexes and in spring 1991, he reported that foreign 58Steven A. Barnes, ‘Hits and Misses in the Archives of Kazakhstan’, Baron and Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historical Research, 263; Alfred J. Rieber, ‘Stalin, Man of the Borderlands’, The American Historical Review, December 2001, n.2, p. 1651. 59Kramer, CWIHP, 8–11, n. 52 and 50, p. 32. The publication was Annotirovannyi perechen’ fondov Tsentral’nogo Gosudarstvennogo Arkhiva Sovetskoi Armii, five volumes, Moscow: Glavarkhiv’, 1987. The full names of the archives mentioned above are Istoriko-arkhivni tsentr’ General’nogo ShtabnaVooruzhenykh sil’ (IATsGSVS) Tsentral’nyi Arkhiv Ministerstva Oborony (TsAMO) Arkhiv Glavnogo Razvedyvatel’nogo Upravleniia (AGRU) Tsentral’nyiVoenno-Morskoi Arkhiv Ministerstva Oborony (TsVAMO) Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Voenno-Istoricheskii Arkhiv (RGVIA) and Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Voenno-Morskogo Flota (RGAVMF).

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scholars could work in TsGASA. From the spring of 1991 to mid1994, he observed that ‘a new and heady atmosphere of freedom prevailed in the military archives. At first, following the demise, it appeared that the entire RGVA collection would be thrown open to systematic scholarly scrutiny. The limits of access seemed bounded only by the speed of the declassification effort’. However, some jurisdictions, including the latter-day inheritors of the Soviet military tradition, soon moved to limit and discipline access to materials from the inter-war period, especially those related to military intelligence and war planning; although, for some reason, RGVA was not the main repository for the war plans of the interwar period. By 1993 researchers gained limited but indirect access to TsAMO. This favourable situation persisted for about three years, after which a growing political conservatism, coupled with archival reorganization and resurrected obstacles to access, again imposed almost Soviet-like restrictions on materials related to 1941 and the Cold War. By the mid-1990s restrictions grew to encompass other supposedly sensitive materials related to military-industrial development, the Purges, and developments leading up to the debacle of 1941. Researchers were barred from material to which they had previously gained access. While researching Russia’s War in the mid-1990s for ten eponymous BBC documentaries (1995), Richard Overy found that the wartime Foreign Ministry archives and the records of the main political and administrative organs were closed, as were the archives of the security services’ apparatus. When Menning returned to RGVA in 2000, restrictions had grown more numerous and intense with the result that many collections were simply off-limits, while some archivists themselves abruptly left their positions, evidently for greener and less troubled pastures. But scholars still retained access to perhaps the majority of RGVA’s incredibly rich collection on the inter-war period. While some material on the inter-war period was completely accessible by 2001, other files on the same period had been reclassified and made inaccessible. During spring 2001, while conducting research with pre-1941 documents in the Naval Archive (RGAVMF) in St. Petersburg, he found a new category of materials under the rubric, ‘limited access’.60 The six main archives in Moscow are the State Archives of the Russian Federation (GA RF), the State Russian Archives of the 60Bruce W. Menning, ‘Of Outcomes Happy and Unhappy’ in Baron and Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historical Research, 130–5; Richard Overy, Russia’s War, London, 1999, xi-xiv.

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Economy (RGAE) where documents pertaining to the Soviet economy are stored, the Russian State Archives for Political and Social History (RGASPI), the Russian State Archives for Contemporary History (RGANI) holding Party documents after 1952, and the Russian State Military Archives (RGVA). Access to the RGANI still presents great difficulties but certain fonds were microfilmed and are available in the universities of Stanford and Harvard: fond 1 (Party Congresses), fond 2 (Central Committee plenums), fond 6 (Party Control Committee documents) and Fond 89 (declassified documents from the Presidential Archive).61 As in the late years of the Gorbachev regime, so too after the demise the possibilities of access to state and party archives depended greatly on the director in charge, and could vary markedly from day to day and from place to place. The IREX exchangee Golfo Alexopoulos, who worked in Siberia, and Steven Barnes, who was dogged by ‘Hits and Misses in the Archives of Kazakhstan’, found that by early-2002, generalizations about the former Soviet archives could be hazardous. They were neither more open the further they were from Moscow, or necessarily more closed. Both discovered that it was the individual archive directors and archivists who made the difference because the absence of significant monitoring from Moscow has left most practical decisions in the hands of these individuals.62 The first issue of the former archival periodical, Istoricheskii arkhiv’, appeared in early 1993; the former version of this journal was published from 1955–62, and then abruptly forced to cease publication. The 61Patricia Kennedy Grimsted’s books remain the best sources of information on Russian (as well as other formerly Soviet republic) archives today. See, in particular, her Archives of Russia: A Directory and Bibliography Guide to Holdings in Moscow and St. Petersburg, two volumes, Armonk, NY, 2000; Idem., Handbook for Archival Research in the USSR, Princeton, 1989. See D.J. Raleigh, ‘The Russian Archive Series’, Russian Review, no. 55, 1996 for a discussion of guides to the Russian archives.The best available history of Soviet archives by a Russian is by T. Khokhordina, Istorii otechestva i arkhivy, 1917–1980-e gg., Moscow 1994. Otechestvennye arkhivy is the professional journal for news about Russian archives. The web-site for Rosarkhiv’ is http://www.rusarchives.ru, in Russian, while ArcheoBiblioBase: Archives in Russia (ABB), at http://www.iisg.nl/ ~abb/abb.about.html is the data bank developed by Patricia Kennedy Grimsted with the assistance of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. 62Golfo Alexopoulos, ‘Post-Soviet Improvisations: Life and Work in Rural Siberia’, in Baron and Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historical Research, 253; Steven A. Barnes, ‘Hits and Misses in the Archives of Kazakhstan’, Ibid., 264. Alexopoulos worked on the lishentsy (the legally disenfranchised categories of Soviet society) in 1992 in the Central Party Archive in Moscow and the Centre for the Preservation of a Reserve Record (Tsentr’ khraneniia strakhovogo fonda, or TsKhSF) in Ialutorovsk in Western

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contents of the new (rather than merely revived) journal were substantially more valuable than those of Izvestiia TsK KPSS (‘News of the CPSU Central Committee’), when it was published between 1989 and August 1991. Istoricheskii arkhiv offered its readers more than 200 densely-printed pages of recently declassified documents, with introductions and annotations. Most of these documents, were from TsKhSD, RTsKhIDNI and other state archives under the direct supervision of Rosarkhiv’. The published primary sources included material from the Terror and the Purges, Soviet preparations for World War Two (including evidence of the lack of proper preparation), the persecution of writers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the attempts by hard-line Party officials to stave off the demise of the Soviet Union. Documents revealing senior Party interference in the closure of Istoricheskii arkhiv in 1962 were published in the first issue as ‘The Fate of the journal Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1955–1962’. The visitors’ books from Stalin’s Kremlin office (1924–53), in which junior secretaries sitting in the reception room outside the office made entries of every person going to see Stalin, was published in chronological order with commentaries and explanatory notes in several issues of Istoricheskii arkhiv from the end of 1994 to the beginning of 1997.63 There was a considerably larger volume of papers going in and out of Stalin’s office than visitors and the registration of documents reaching Stalin’s desk was naturally regarded as a much more important task than recording visitors (which was done in school exercise books with mis-spelt surnames and no initials). The task of recording the flow of paper had been performed since 1929 by one of Stalin’s most loyal subordinates and closest assistant, Aleksandr Poskrebyshev; those who had to deal with him described him most invariably as ‘vile’ and ‘loathsome’; at theTwentieth Party Congress, Khrushchev dismissed him as ‘Stalin’s loyal shield-bearer’. These papers have vanished. Until 1952 Poskrebyshev headed the Central Committee Secretariat’s ‘Special Secret Political Section of State Security’ (known as the Special Section from 1934) through which Stalin’s network Siberia, and published his findings as Stalin’s Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936, Ithaca, 2002. Steven Barnes studied the GULAG in the Karaganda region of Kazakhstan from the 1930s to the 1950s, as an IREX exchangee in 2000 and worked in Moscow, Almaty (in the Archive of the President of the Republic of Kazakhstan, AP RK) and Karaganda (The State Archive of the Karaganda Region, or GAKO). 63Istoricheskii arkhiv, No. 6, 1994, nos. 2–6, 1995, no. 1, 1997, no. 4, 1998; Litvin and Keep, Stalinism, 16.

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of informers was also administered; he was ‘the eyes, ears and hands of Stalin’. Twice awarded the highest Soviet decoration, the Order of Lenin, a Lieutenant-General in the Red Army, he possessed a cardindex memory, was an excellent organizer, totally self-effacing, and he prepared the agenda for Politburo meetings. Little is known of how the Special Section functioned, and Soviet printed sources never mentioned it.64 The second issue of Istoricheskii archiv included material related to early Bolshevik campaigns against the Church, the persecution of Comintern activists, the stenographic report of the Central Committee plenum that ousted Khrushchev in October 1964 as well as KGB reports on the strikes and massacre of workers in Novocherkassk in June 1962. Istoricheskii arkhiv’ was a collaborative venture between Rosarkhiv’ and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. The journal was edited by A. A.Chernobaev, the editorial board was chaired by Rudol’f Pikhoia and included distinguished Russian, American, British and German officials.65

64Medvedev

and Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, 45, 68, 79, 232, 71, 87. A little about the working of this Section can be gleaned from works by reliable refugees like Boris Nicolaevsky, Power and the Soviet Elite, New York, 1965, 28–30, 93ff, who characterized the Section as ‘the eyes ....’ Hyde, Stalin, 238–42. In April 1940, Stalin had ordered Beria to poison Poskrebyshev’s wife, Bronislava (Bronka), because one of her sisters had been married to Trotsky’s son, Lev Sedov. She was arrested in 1939 and executed in 1941. Stalin responded to her husband’s many pleas for clemency on her behalf by saying: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll find you another wife.’ Poskrebyshev never remarried, remained in his post until 1952 and died in 1965. Brackman, taped interview with I.P. Itskov, Bronislava’s husband, whom she divorced to marry Poskrebyshev, in New York in 1989. The Secret File, 327. In his biography of Stalin, Simon Sebag Montefiore believes that Poskrebysheva was arrested because she resisted advances by the criminally promiscuous Lavrenti Beria. Montefiore, Stalin:The Court of the Red Tsar, 283. 65Kramer, CWIHP, 3, 9–10. On the closure of Istoricheskii arkhiv’ in 1962, see V.D. Esakov, ‘O zakrytii zhurnala ‘Istoricheskii arkhiv’ v 1962 g.’, in Otechestvennye arkhivy, 70:4, July-August 1992, 32–42, and for some of the documents that revealed senior Party interference in this closure, see ‘Sud’ba zhurnala ‘Istoricheskii arkhiv’ v 1955–1962 gg.’, in Istoricheskii arkhiv, No. 1, 1992, 194–211. The article on the Novocherkassk tragedy was the first installment of a two-part collection of top-secret KGB documents produced simultaneously with the events, based upon round-theclock observations of KGB agents and addressed to the Party Central Committee and the Council of Ministers. For more information on how the repression at Novocherkassk in 1962 was gradually revealed to the Russian public, see Samuel H. Baron, ‘A Tale of Two Inquiries’, in Baron and Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian History, 27–35, and Idem., Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union: Novocherkassk, Stanford, 1999.

6

History in Russian Schools

‘History textbooks should provide historical truths and they must cultivate in young people a feeling of pride for one’s history and one’s country.’ —President Vladimir Putin, November 2003

I WAS STRUCK BY A SERIES OF EPISODES CONCERNING OFFICIAL AND PUBLIC

reactions to history textbooks by Igor Dolutskii and Nikita Zagladin for senior grades in Russian schools in late 2003. The matter drew comment from the Cabinet, inspired discussion on the radio and television, and kindled extensive coverage in the press, the Internet Russian and others. This curiosity prompted me to relate and foreground the issue to proximate vectors: the agendas of the new Putinite ruling group, the siloviki; Party political views on acceptable history; the processes for the selection of textbooks; and the sharp poverty of resources under which pupils, teachers and schools work in the Russian Federation to introduce or impede new ideas.1 President Vladimir Putin visited the Russian State Library in Moscow on 27 November 2003.This visit was momentous for reasons 1For a general sense of the coverage, see, for instance, Alex Rodriguez, ‘Omitting the past’s darker chapters’, Chicago Tribune, reprinted in The Chechen Times, 30 May 2005; Masha Lipman, ‘Rewriting History for Putin’, The Washington Post, 22 March 2004; Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, Kremlin Rising:Vladimir Putin’s Russia and the End of Revolution, New York, 2005, 362–7; ‘Putin Objects to Politicized History Textbooks’, Interfax, 27 November 2003; Natalia Konygina, ‘Education Minister Blasted ‘Pseudo-liberalism’ in History Schoolbooks’, Izvestiia, 27 January 2004; Maria Danilova, ‘Critics: Books Skewing History’, The Moscow Times, 8 August 2004; Maria Danilova, ‘Russian History Books Accused of Bias’, Associated Press, 9 August 2003.

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other than the fact that he may have been, improbably but not apocryphally, only the second Russian head of state to visit this library since Tsar Alexander II (1855–81). His intention was to discuss the situation concerning history textbooks used in the senior grades of schools with scholars of the Russian Academy of Sciences (AN–RF). He told them that history textbooks should not become battlegrounds for the airing of divisive political issues but ‘provide historical truths and they must cultivate in young people a feeling of pride for one’s history and one’s country’. Shortly after this meeting, the President asked the AN–RF to scrutinize the country’s history textbooks by 1 February 2004 and rid them of what he termed ‘waste and froth’.2 This direct intervention from the pinnacle of the edifice of power in the textual content of history in Russia’s schools was not the first instance of its kind. A history textbook edited by Vladimir Petrovich Dmitrenko was criticized by Prime Minister Mikhail Kasianov in a Cabinet meeting in August 2001 allegedly because the book barely mentioned Putin and entirely overlooked Kasianov himself. The interest of the siloviki (the term used to describe the leading officials of the Putin regime), in teaching history reflects critical changes in the nature of the current state apparatus. Such an analysis must begin with underlining the reversal of the democratic changes introduced since 1992 by President BorisYeltsin and his government. The enormous increase in energy prices has allowed the siloviki to forge a semi-coercive system that has given the new middle class outlets for consumption but not much access to political power. Public opinion is kept quiescent by the state’s control of television, and to lesser extent, over the print media. Control that has been tightening since President Putin came to power in 2000. National television was by far the most important target, but rather than harassing journalists and editors, the Kremlin opted for controlling the owners. The government campaign against the biggest privately owned media group was launched within days of Putin’s inauguration. By 2001, a year later, by a combination of business litigations and intimidation techniques used against the owner, media tycoon Vladimir Gusinskii, and his associates, the Media-MOST group, and most importantly, its crown jewel, the country’s best television news channel NTV, was taken over by the natural gas monopoly Gazprom 2Ria Novosti, Number 228, online edition, http://dailyrianovosti.com, 28 November

2003; Anna Badkhen, ‘Putin gives Russians Another Stab at Feeling Superior’, San Francisco Chronicle, 12 March 2004.

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whose ties to the Kremlin are so close that the two are basically inseparable. Gazprom is now worth over 70 billion (US) dollars, controls about a fifth of the known natural gas reserves on the planet, has media, banking, oil and agricultural interests, and its Chairman is Dmitri Medvedev, the United Russia Party nominee for the Presidential election in 2008. By mid-2003 all three national television channels with political and news coverage were under tight Kremlin control. By mid-2004 the last live talk shows as well as those with uncensored political satire were taken off the air and some of the recalcitrant journalists were forced to go. Today political and news coverage on national television is thoroughly filtered, measured and orchestrated so that nothing unexpected or unpleasant for the Kremlin may appear on the screen. National networks reach almost 100 per cent of Russian households, and to many, this is the only source of information about national politics, policy-making and developments elsewhere on the sprawling territory of the Russian Federation. The difference between television and print audiences is truly dramatic: while national television networks reach almost all of Russia’s 140 million citizens, Kommersant, the best mainstream daily, has a circulation of about 120,000 in 16 cities of the Federation. In a move to apply the same restrictive policies to the print media as are at play with television, namely, altering ownership, Kommersant was recently sold by Boris Berezovskii to Alisher Usmanov, a businessman with close ties to Gazprom. The profession of print journalism is fraught with risk to life: Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaia of Novaia Gazeta, who was killed on 7 October 2006, was the thirteenth newspaper journalist to have been killed since 2000, and the fortythird since the demise of the Soviet Union. Putin’s idea of the relationship between state power and the individual is one of dependency, not reciprocity. Initiatives from below—whether in the form of reportage, fiction, strikes and demonstrations, even integral probes into history—are all viewed as akin to dealing with the ‘overmighty subject’.3 In fact, a poll in November 2001 found that 70 per 3Robert Service, Russia: Experiment with a People. From 1991 to the Present, Basingstoke and Oxford, 2002, 196, cites two articles in Izvestiia, of 30 and 31 August 2001 that reported this Cabinet meeting. The book that aroused ire by V.P. Dmitrenko was entitled Istoriia Rossii. XX vek, Moscow 2000;Vladimir Ryaduhin, ‘Russia as Energy Superpower’ The Hindu, 29 July 2006. See also Janet Vaillant, ‘Revised ... Again: The Politics of History’, http://www.bu.edu/iscip/vol14/Vailant.html. The poll in question was conducted for the Russian Academy of State Service of the Russian Federation and reported in ‘Round Table’, Otechestvennaia istoriia, No. 3 May 2002. See also

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cent of all Russians draw their knowledge of history from school textbooks, so here official vigilance might find its defenders! A poll conducted by the All-Russian Public Opinion Centre (VTsIOM) in March 2000, revealed that 66 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement, ‘Russia was always perceived as adversary by other countries and even today nobody wishes us well’. When respondents were questioned on the issue of the preferred ‘historical path of Russia’, 60 per cent advocated a ‘special Russian destiny’, 18 per cent, a ‘return to the path of the Soviet Union’ and 15 per cent, plumped for a future ‘common [with] the contemporary world path of Western civilization’.4 As suggested earlier, there was a change in the career background of the country’s ruling group with President Putin’s coming to power; the new group, the siloviki, differed with the ‘Family’,Yeltsin’s ruling group.The ‘family’ had united around the President’s daughter,Tatiana Diachenko, the banker Boris Berezovskii, the oil magnate Roman Abramovich and the apparatus of the presidential administration. Its members were elected for their loyalty to the first family over their ability. The siloviki, a term that began to be widely used in the mid1990s, included those who had served or were currently serving in the armed forces, state security, law enforcement, or one of the other ‘force ministries’, hence, literally the ‘power-holders’: the Federal Security Bureau (FSB), Defence, Interior, foreign intelligence, the Procuracy, Emergencies, Justice and the Security Council. According to Olga Kryshtanovskaia, who has studied the Russian elite for decades, the FSB, police and the military have become the dominant force under the Putin presidency. By early 2005, they comprised 24.7 per cent of the top leadership, defined as members of the Security Council; up to 34.2 per cent in the national government George Schupflin, ‘Putin’s Anti-globalisation Strategy’, Russia Profile, 10 July 2006, www.openDemocracy.net; Ivan Krastev, ‘The Energy Route to Russian Democracy’, 13 June 2006, www.openDemocracy.net. For information on state control over television and the print media, see Masha Lipman, ‘The Alliance of TV Moguls and Kremlin Elite’, Russia Profile.org, 28 September 2006 and John Lloyd, ‘The Closing of the Russian Mind’, Russia Profile.org, 11 October 2006. 4Lev Gudkov and Boris Dubin, Itogy, 23 January 2001. In 2003, the government changed VTsIOM from a state unitary enterprise into a joint stock company and at the same time, restructured its board. This provoked the resignation of its veteran head, Iurii Levada, who went on to found his own agency, initially called VTsIOM-A and then the Iurii Levada Centre for Public Opinion (Levada Centre), funded largely by Anatolii Chubais.

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and about 18 per cent in both houses of the Russian Parliament. Five out of seven presidential representatives in the regions of the Federation were former KGB or military men. Krishtanovskaia analysed the official biographies of 1,016 leading political figures in December 2006 and discovered that 26 per cent had reported serving in the KGB or its successor agencies like the Federal Security Bureau (FSB), the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) or the Federal Protection Service (FSO). Closer scrutiny, to explain unlikely gaps in resumes, raised the proportion to 78 per cent in November 2006. The KGB was never officially condemned for its crimes while the Soviet Union lasted, and this made the transition to other jobs easier for its officials. Apart from politics, many found congenial entrepreneurial opportunities in private security companies or by entering the service of oligarchs, who employed hundreds of ex-Chekisty (KGB officials) to provide both security and intelligence.The Russian Interior Ministry and Gazprom, the country’s largest company and known humorously by Russians, as not just ‘a state within a state’ but the state itself, announced five new appointments, all men who had worked in the KGB with President Putin: Oleg Safonov, as deputy head of the Interior Ministry;Yevgenii Shkolov, as head of that ministry’s economic security department; Valerii Golubev, as deputy chief executive at Gazprom; Konstantin Chuichenko, to head Gazprom’s legal department; and Sergei Ushakov, to head its security services. Ideologically and in terms of a preferred agenda, the siloviki are best known for their illiberalism.5 They are ardent advocates of the ‘managed democracy’, and the ‘single vertical’ of executive authority. Among their declared priorities are the instigation of national pride; a greater emphasis on patriotic education in schools; suppression of the independent media and restrictions on the freedom of scholarly enquiry. These goals have been furthered and fostered by a growing, corrupt and pliant bureaucracy, that has been repeatedly criticized by the President on the first two counts. Earlier in 2006, the State Statistical Committee 5Ol’ga Kryshtanovskaya and Stephen White, ‘Inside the Putin Court: A Research Note’, Europe-Asia Studies, 57:7, November 2005, 1065, 1093–4; Anna Penketh, ‘All the President’s Men: The KGB’s Great Power-grab’, The Independent, 22 December 2006; ‘Russia: Expert Eyes Security Ties Among Siloviki’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, http://rferl.org/, 20 December 2006; Victor Yasmann, ‘Russia: The KGB’s PostSoviet Commercialization’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, http://rferl.org/, 20 December 2006; Russophobe.blogspot.com, 15 December 2006.

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revealed that the number of civil servants (excluding the power agencies) grew by ten per cent during Putin’s second term (since 2004) to 143,000, to total 1.46 million, or one bureaucrat for every 100 Russian citizens. Observers pointed out that the bureaucracy was growing because sound people were taking advantage of Putin’s campaign to create a stronger state.6

The History Textbooks by Igor Dolutskii and Nikita Zagladin Half a million tenth and eleventh grade high school students had used a history textbook written by Igor Dolutskii, National History, 20th Century, for ten years since 1993. There were several reasons why it found favour among teachers: its accessible language, his own belief that ‘in history there are no right answers—only different interpretations’, the constant stretching of pupils’ analytical skills, the use of dialogues between the subjects dealt with in the chapters, the ‘populating’ of history, and a frank discussion of charged subjects like the Purges, the GULAG, Moscow’s war against Chechnya and anti-Semitism in Russia. Dolutskii asser ted that ‘Stalin’s responsibility in all the repressions is proved’, including issuing an order for the murder of Sergei Mironovich Kirov in December 1934, which was then blamed on Trotsky and used to spark the Great Terror from 1937. Dolutskii advises his readers that the Great Terror itself can be better understood by reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, which has been available in a complete Russian edition since 1990, than from other extant texts.7 6Boris Kagarlitsky, Russia under Yeltsin and Putin, London, 2002, 213, 223; GosKomStat Report, The Moscow Times, 10 April 2006, p. 3; Simon Saradzhyan, ‘Firing Deals a Powerful Blow to Siloviki Clan’ The Moscow Times, 5 June 2006; Zygmunt Dziecolowski, ‘Russia’s Corruption Dance’, Russia Profile, opendemocracy.net, 15 June 2006. 7Igor Dolutskii, Otechestvennaia Istoriiia XXVek, Moscow: Mnemozina Publishing, 2003. Dolutskii had elaborated on his method of using the dialogue as an intrinsic part of subject presentations in a brochure he had written in the mid-1980s, and the dialogue method featured in subsequent textbooks. He admitted that many teachers would not be at ease with his methodological aversion to ‘right answers’, and he explained this point as follows: ‘There are no ready-made answers as our President would like ... I propose searching for the answer to questions I pose. This is what we call an ‘open textbook’. See Alexander Shevyrev, ‘The History Textbooks in Contemporary Russia:

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Dolutskii added a new chapter, the forty-fifth, in the seventh edition of 2001, which happened to mention that the destruction of Chechen villages with multiple rocket launchers coincided with a rise in President Putin’s ratings. He asked students to ‘disprove or prove’ remarks by a journalist, Iurii Burtin, and by theYabloko leader, Grigory Yavlinskii, that President Putin had established an ‘authoritarian rule’ (Burtin) and a ‘police state’ (Yavlinskii), in the light of two propositions: that President Vladimir Putin is an authoritarian ruler bent on establishing a new dictatorship in Russia, and, alternately, that he is a democrat at heart whose structural reforms are paving the way for Russia to emerge as a liberal democracy. This edition was approved by the Ministry of Education in June 2001. Dolutskii later cited the Ministry’s 2001 statement which said that the last chapter, has ‘material provided in a tactful way’. An aide to the Minister of Education, Vladimir Filippov, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Filippov had actually objected to school-children being asked to examine the possibility of a Putinite dictatorship. But since the parliamentary elections were then just around the corner, Filippov did not need to conceal a larger objection, to wit, ‘Who will voters cast ballots for after reading this? ....We do not need such a pre-election gift.’ Dolutskii countered: ‘The book is written for high school students who are under the voting age, so I don’t understand the drama .... I agreed with my publisher that I wouldn’t touch upon the most recent years, because it was obvious that nobody would let us publish that. That is why the book covers recent Russian history only until early 2001. But even that is too much for them to take.’8 In a radio interview to Echo Moskvy on 2 December 2003, Dolutskii commented on his detractors: ‘Critics consider my book to be Russo-phobic, that it undercuts the collectivist values of the Russian people, that it inculcates individualist, Western values that are alien to the Russian people, that it blackens the history of a great country, that [World War II]—as I show it—is painted in too dark a A New Generation’, www.Schools History.org.uk/russiabooks.htm; Jeremy Bransten, ‘Russia: Education Ministry Doesn’t Like What it Learned About Free-Thinking Textbook’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, http://www.rferl.org/features/2003/12/ 051220031730043.asp, 5 December 2003. 8Nick Paton Walsh, ‘Putin Angry at History Book Slur’, The Guardian, 14 January 2004. Jeremy Bransten, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 5 December 2003; German Prokhorov and Alexander Smirnov, ‘Minister to go down in Russia’s Modern History’, www.gazeta.ru.com, 3 December 2003; Maria Danilova, ‘Textbook’s Putin Pages Too Hot for Schools’, The St. Petersburg Times, Issue No. 23 (91), 28 November 2003.

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colour. Critics were especially vexed that the second front is constantly mentioned, that the allies who fought against Hitler from 1939 are mentioned’. Dolutskii’s publisher mentioned other unwelcome themes: Stalin’s Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in 1939; the Soviet ‘occupation’ of the Baltic states; the massacre of 4,000 Polish officers in the forests near Katyn to the west of Smolensk by the NKVD; and, the deportation of members of twelve major ethnic groups, numbering about 1.8 million people, between June 1941 and the end of 1944, among whom the Chechens deported to Kazakhstan in 1944 were the most numerous ethnic group.9 The book was probably brought to the Kremlin’s attention after two senior officials, Alexander Voloshin, Kremlin Chief of Staff, and Mikhail Lesin, Media Minister, noticed it on a visit to the Moscow Book Fair and obtained copies from the publisher in September 2003. The Russian Ministry of Education’s Council of Experts (on which more follows) recommended the removal of the book from classrooms in state schools on 27 November.Yelena Zinina, head of the Education Ministry’s textbook publishing department said Dolutskii’s book ‘elicits contempt, natural contempt for our past and for the Russian people’, that it was unbalanced and inappropriate on several subjects ranging from its treatment of World War Two to that of the Purges and of the Chechen war. On 30 November, the Ministry confirmed the decision and formally withdrew its stamp of approval from National History, 20th Century.The text was not banned, it should be noted. Since it was taken off the Education Ministry’s list of approved textbooks (the Federal komplekt), state schools could not distribute it free but could use it only after purchasing copies. This was tantamount to the kiss of death and by May 2006, it was reported from Moscow that the book was no longer published even as an alternative source of information and might be found only by diligently scouring street kiosks and bukinisti (second-hand book shops).10 A salient principle of the Law on Education of 1992 was the removal of state control from education policy. In regions with non9Bransten, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 5 December 2003. For the story of how the truth about the Katyn massacre emerged only after 1990, see R.W. Davies, Soviet History in theYeltsin Era, Basingstoke and London, 1997, 18–19. For details on ethnic national deportations, see J. Otto Pohl, Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937– 1947, Wesport, CT, 1999. 10Sergei Borisov, ‘Russia: A History in Dispute’, Russia Profile, www.tol.cz, 16 May 2005.

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Russian populations that meant that educational institutions could base their curricula and teaching methods on ethnic historical traditions. In all regions, enactment of the law meant significant autonomy for local authorities to choose the most locally suitable education strategies. This law also stressed the humanistic nature of education, common values, freedom of human development, citizenship and teaching objectively.These principles remained largely unmodified when a new law was introduced in 1996. A decree of December 2001 called the ‘Conception for Modernization of Russian Education for the period until 2010’ was designed to redirect the goal of secondary school education away from the inculcation of knowledge as such to the development of ‘competence’.The Ministry defines competence as the ability to find, analyse and use knowledge, solve problems and adapt to changing circumstances in the real world. Dolutskii’s text, in a word, was one of the few set up to develop the critical thinking skills given priority by the new modernization policy.11 The book that found favour with the Ministry of Education was The History of Russia and theWorld in the 20th Century by Nikita Zagladin. Its cover nostalgically beckoned readers to a largely non-conflicted past. Three of the four photographic images are powerfully redolent of sovok, ‘Soviet-speak’: Moscow’s soaring ‘Worker and Collective Farm Girl’ statue, created by Vera Mukhina in 1936 to stand atop the Soviet pavilion at the Paris World Fair of 1937, a poster reading ‘The Motherland is Calling’ and the Soiuz–Apollo space docking. The fourth, a picture of the United Nations Headquarters, seems curiously out of place. Overall, the book combines an archaic content with a perverse moral calculus. Zagladin, a professional historian writing more than a decade after the demise of the Soviet Union, seems quite unaffected by the critical assessments of planned industrialization of the GULAG and the Terror produced after 1985 or after 1991 in the Russian Federation itself. Among many examples of his burnishing the past, there is his statement that ‘It is necessary to show Russian youths that industrial development during the Stalin era was successful, and that the repressions and terror (which he limits to the 1937–8 period) did not touch upon all of the population’. 11Vaillant, ‘Revised ... Again’, p. 4. For the decree, No. 1756-r of the Government of the Russian Federation, 29 December 2001, O kontseptsiii modernizatsii Rossiiskogo obrazovaniia na period do 2010 goda, see http://www.ed.gov.ru/ministry/pravo/ rp393.html.

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In her recent study GULAG: A History, Anne Applebaum portrays the Terror as a series of repressive waves stretching from the 1920s until Stalin’s death in 1953. Zagladin, it should be added, follows the conventional dating for the Terror, by limiting it to the mass arrests under NikolaiYezhov (the ‘Yezhovschina’) in 1937–8; indeed, those were the years when 35 per cent of all convictions between 1930–53, and 88 per cent of all executions, a total of 681,692 victims, occurred. But the Great Terror of those two years was only one of many waves of terror and purge (the purging of 1933–4, 1935, 1936 and others in, 1929–31, 1944–8, 1951–2), each one sweeping millions of victims into the labour camps. From 1942, a network of camps was established near the front where anyone the NKVD deemed to be suspect could be detained, even former soldiers whose skills were urgently required in the Red Army. The 872–day siege of Leningrad (September 1941 to January 1944), earned four words, ‘German troops blockaded Leningrad’. Zagladin pleaded a lack of space, but admitted that an omission of this magnitude had been a mistake. Leningrad underwent ‘the greatest and longest siege ever endured by a modern city’, as Alexander Werth, arguably the best contemporary war correspondent, wrote. Zagladin’s silence had an ugly ancestry that stretched back six decades. The war-time Soviet government itself had draped a coercive blanket of censorship over the fate of the millions caught in the German siege of that city: a soldier who mentioned ‘starvation’ in 1943 was arrested because he had used that word, for ‘That wasn’t something we were supposed to hear about’, his commanding officer said.12 Leningrad was where the worst hunger episode of the Second World War actually occurred; the Germans, in a word, were trying to starve its population into submission. When the Germans closed their siege in September 1941, there was barely more than one month’s reserves of food in the city. By the end of 1941, most of the pets, rats, birds and mice had disappeared, and Leningraders were scraping the flour paste from wallpaper and the glue from book bindings to make soup, melting lipsticks to fry bread, using face powder for flour, and linseed oil for frying pancakes. As the regular food supplies ran out, 12‘History texts edit Russia’s troubled past’, Columbia Daily Tribune, 19 August 2004; Anne Applebaum, GULAG: A History, New York, 2003; Catherine Merridale, Ivan’sWar.The Red Army, 1939–1945, London, 2005, 217, 165, 252, citing the officially sponsored Velikaya otechestvennaya voyna, 1941–1945, voenno-istoricheskie ocherki, 4 volumes, various authors, Moscow, 1998–9, 4:191, 289.

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all animals, horses, and then dogs and cats were eaten. Cannibalism, a sensitive subject that would brook no mention as long as the Soviet Union existed, and which was illegal and severely punished if discovered, became common. In his classic study of The 900 Days Harrison Salisbury reported that although nobody admitted to actually seeing human flesh being consumed, many claimed to have seen corpses with limbs cut away. The numbers of deaths during the course of the siege of Leningrad, as recorded by an official Soviet source, was 632,523. More than one million persons were evacuated, leaving a total population of 639,000 in Leningrad by March 1943, from a pre-siege population of over three million. The pre-war population was not regained until 1965.13 The conflict with Chechnya was allowed seven paragraphs; overall, the Putin presidency is sketched in laudatory terms. The Holocaust was passed over, partly because of the lack of space and partly because it was not really unique, relative to other ‘repressions’. According to even the officially sponsored compilation on the Great Patriotic War, nearly 7.5 million Soviet citizens were believed to have been killed under the Nazi occupation, the bulk in Ukraine (3.2 million) and large numbers in Russia (1.8 million) and Belorussia (1.5 million) as well. 57 per cent of Soviet prisoners of war in German captivity were killed, as compared to four per cent of British and American prisoners-of-war.14 Zagladin seemed unaware of the debate in 1986 between three Germans, the historians Joachim Fest and Ernst Nolte and the philosopher Jurgen Habermas about the implications of ignoring the Holocaust by citing either comparable precedent or extenuating context. In 1986, Joachim Fest published an article by Ernest Nolte in the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, of which he was an editor, in which Nolte had argued that Auschwitz was only a reaction ‘to the 13Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945, New York, 1964, 297; W. Bruce Lincoln, ‘Nine Hundred Days’, chapter ten in his Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia, New York, 2000, 270–1, 277–82, 286–98; Harrison Salisbury, The 900 Days: the Siege of Leningrad, London, 1969, 515–17, 550; Walter Gratzer, Terrors of the Table:The Curious History of Nutrition, Oxford, 2005, 157–9; Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin:The court of the Red Tsar, London, 2003, 343. See also John Barber and Andrei Dzeniskevich, trans, and ed., Death in Besieged Leningrad, London, 2001; Leon Goure, The Siege of Leningrad, New York, 1964 and Dmitri V. Pavlov, Leningrad 1941:The Blockade, Chicago and London, 1965. 14Richard Overy, The Dictators. Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, London, 2005, 194; Overy, Russia’sWar, London, 1999, 112; Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge, 2005.

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acts of annihilation that took place during the Russian Revolution’. Joachim Fest went even further in an article in the same issue and asserted, without any evidence, that Hitler’s genocidal policies were rooted in a deep German-Austrian fear of atrocities overwhelming them from ‘the east’. He did not see any distinction between Nazi or Soviet crimes: the victims were ‘here a race, there a class’. Habermas pointed out that Nazism and the Holocaust possessed absolute exceptionality, one that necessitated unconditional proscription, and any attempt at all to relativize or exonerate it was unacceptable: its crimes were unique.15 The gravity of this raging silence about the Stalin period has been recognized by the state itself. In 2000 the Presidential Commission on Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression found that efforts to incorporate the history of the Great Terror in school and university textbooks were insufficient or absent. Memorial’s founding chairman, the historian Arseny Roginskii, berated its labours because its members had not understood that ‘only when the communist regime is recognized as criminal, will those who were criminalized for opposing it be exonerated’. This characterization harked back to the subversive inversions of acronyms in the 1930s: the USSR (CCCP– SSSR) in Russian became ‘Stalin’s death will save Russia’ (Smert Stalina, Spaset Rossiiu), the OGPU was spelt as ‘O Lord! Help us to flee’ (O, Gospodi! Pomogi Ubezhat’) and, back to front as ‘If you flee, they’ll catch you and cut off your head’ (Ubezhish’—Poimaiut, Golovu Otrubiat).16 Semen Vilenskii, the only member of this Commission who had been a prisoner, wondered why a ninth-grade history text, The History of the Fatherland in the Twentieth Century, included maps depicting industrial development and war fronts but none of the GULAG. Alexander Danilov, the head of the History Faculty at Moscow State Pedagogical University, and a textbook author who served on the Expert Council of the Ministry of Education, pointed out in February 2004, that not a single textbook published in 2003, and no political or social group had complained that school texts did not fully discuss the scale, purposes and practices of the GULAG or other repressive 15See Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London, 2005, 811–12; David Cesarani, ‘This historian was a German nationalist who distorted history’, The Guardian, 15 September 2006. 16Adler, Europe-Asia Studies, December 2005, 1102; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism. Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s, New York, 2000, 184.

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manifestations of the Stalin regime. For a dwindling generation of Russian survivors, who represent millions of victims of the Stalin era, the GULAG was the defining institution and experience of the USSR. Ironically, it is precisely the losers (as against the victims, of the time) of the Stalin regime’s policies—war veterans, survivors of political repression, dispossessed peasants and the aged—who have stood to lose the most since the demise of the Soviet Union and they mourn its passing with the greatest fervour now.Yet the terror imposed by the state is little noted in the post-Soviet version of Russia’s history.17 At a ceremony in November 2003 Putin denounced the Nazi terror, condemned the Holocaust but failed to mention the GULAG. The argument has been voiced that the Great Patriotic War was fought against an offensive by Hitler’s fascist state, a formation that simultaneously sought the extermination of minorities and of entire ethnicities. Revisiting the Nazi terror and celebrating the defeat over fascism serves to consolidate Soviet national unity and national pride. Bringing the GULAG back into focus, conversely, not only validates, in the eyes of the regime at least, a small and frail constituency, but has a divisive potential in Russian society at large.The point is, however, that far more people were affected by the domestic repressions than the Nazi Holocaust. Alexander Iakovlev estimated that during the Soviet period 20 to 25 million politically motivated killings or deaths took place in prisons and camps, but this count may have been at the upper end of the spectrum. A survey commissioned by Iurii Samodurov, the Director of the Andrei Sakharov Museum, revealed that ‘In the majority of textbooks, this [Stalinist] period and the aspect of violence as the main method of implementing Soviet ideals is either addressed extremely briefly, or even if in greater detail, it is completely void of any historical, political and ethical judgement’. The few textbooks that did probe Stalinism competently, like one by V.P. Dmitrenko and others enjoyed a circulation of only a few thousand.18 But counter-indicative tendencies prevail. The sheer number of recently published works on the GULAG and activity by the justly 17Adler,

Europe-Asia Studies, December 2005, 1103.

18Adler, Europe-Asia Studies, December 2005, 1102. For the comparison between

the victims of the Stalin era repressions and of the Holocaust, see Orlando Figes, ‘Reconstructing Hell’, The NewYork Review of Books, 12 June 2003, 48;V.P. Dmitrenko, et al., eds., Istoriia otechestva xx vek (History of the Fatherland, Twentieth Century), second edition, Moscow, 1998.

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renowned human rights group, Memorial, staffed by some of the sharpest history minds in the land, confirms the real possibilities of defying censorship as well as returning the Stalin period to Russian school classrooms. Published in the decades since Khrushchev’s ‘Thaw’ of the 1960s, and then held back during the Brezhnev-era, more than 700 memoirs of camp survivors had been published in Russia by 2002.The Moscow City administration provided a building for a state museum on the GULAG in August 2001, and it has been run by Anton Antonov-Ovseenko, son of the executed Bolshevik military leader. A permanent exhibition, ‘Comrade Stalin ... thank you’ opened in the St. Petersburg Museum of the Political History of Russia in September 2003. Photographs, newspaper reports, memorabilia and other exhibits documented political repression from 1917–53. Memorial released a CD-Rom in 2002 for distribution to schools and libraries, Victims of Political Terror in the USSR, which listed 640,000 victims along with short biographies, maps and textual information on the GULAG and the location of monuments to its victims. In November 2004, another CD-Rom by Memorial, The Virtual Museum of Gulags, distributed information from 29 of the more than 300 museums in Russia that have exhibitions, displays or projects on the GULAG.19 Memorial has been sponsoring annual ‘People in Twentieth Century Russian History’ contests, explicitly aimed to ‘dispel myths that have flourished during the Putin regime, particularly those related to glorifying Stalin and sanitizing World War Two’. Speaking on the fiftieth anniversary of Stalin’s death in March 2003, the Memorial historian Nikita Okhotin argued that the ability of Russians to deal 19Memoir literature is, however, flawed in certain respects: many of the authors had political reasons for writing their stories, most did their writing after their release, in the last years of their lives, amid dimming memories, and so they often borrowed stories from one another; and, all the best-known memoirists—Evgeniia Ginzburg, Lev Razgon,Varlam Shalamov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—were ‘trusties’; Solzhenitsyn even claimed that 90 per cent of memoir writers had been ‘trusties’. Orlando Figes, The New York Review of Books, 12 June 2003, 49. The CD-Rom on the victims of the Terror was issued as Zhertvy politicheskogo terrora v SSSR, Moscow: Zven’ia, 2002. The same year a huge volume was published about the children of the GULAG, the millions who grew up in the camps and orphanages in the Stalin period, Deti GULAGa, 1918– 1956, edited by S.S. Vilenskii et al., Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond Demokratiia, 2002. For Memorial see also Nanci Adler, Victims of Soviet Terror: The Story of the Memorial Movement, Westport, CT, 1993 and my ‘Notes on the Histories of History in the Soviet Union’, Economic and Political Weekly, XLI: 9, 4–10 March 2006, 830.

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objectively with historical realities was dependent on the state’s ability to officially declare Stalin a criminal. His own work lent great force to the claim, for Okhotin’s archival research attested to arrest and execution quotas personally sanctioned by Stalin, his personal role in the 1944 deportations of Caucasian peoples, and the massacre of Polish officers at Katyn. Broadly, Memorial contests are organized to nurture a critical vision and an approach absent from classrooms in schools, where children ‘don’t know how to discuss things, argue, dispute’.Irina Scherbakova, Memorial’s Director of Youth Programmes and the author of the last remark, said her organization shared Putin’s wish that school pupils learn about the positive aspects of their past, but she pointedly added, ‘we want them to know what really happened. A lie never contributes to bringing up kids (sic) in the spirit of patriotism and morality’. One of the prizes in 2006 was awarded to three senior secondary school girls who had spent the previous three years researching stacks of declassified archival files to reconstruct the life and persecution of Vasilii Ivanovich Kashin, an Orthodox Christian priest from their village ofYelniki, 370 miles east of Moscow, who died in exile in 1931.The British historian, Catherine Merridale, suggests two reasons for a more energetic curiosity in provincial towns: the past continues there, and coming to terms with the Soviet/ Russian past forcefully implies reassessing one’s own past: ‘... the populations are more stable. Former prison guards still live next door to former convicts, and even teenagers often know who they are’.20 Perhaps the continuance of these counter-indicative tendencies are jeopardized by what Nanci Adler has termed a ‘national amnesia’ regarding the Stalinist repression. She charted several shifts in the public attitude towards the period, ‘from acceptable to fashionable to taboo to irrelevant’, a shift paralleled by both the official and popular discussions of Stalinism, which have alternately swung between acknowledgement of its crimes, until about 1990, and to valorization of its achievements, after that. It is equally clear that public support is behind the regime’s efforts to cultivate a current loyalty and a pride in a usable past by investing in the mobilizing currency of ‘national 20Janet Vaillant, ‘Revised Again’; Brian Bonner, ‘Contest encourages Russian youths to take a critical look at the past’, Knight-Ridden Newspapers, on-line edition, 5 July 2006; Adler, Europe-Asia Studies, December 2005, 1101–02; Catherine Merridale, ‘The Time that a Land Forgot: History Ekes out a Tenuous Existence in Russia’, Index on Censorship, ‘Time to Move On?’, Issue 2/05, 2005.

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restoration’.These include the first post-Soviet national anthem (signed into decree on 3 January 2001), the replacement of ceremonies marking the Day of the Revolution (7 November) by a National Unity Day commemorating a victory by Russian troops over Polish ones in Moscow on 4 November 1612 (that foreshadowed the Romanov ascendancy in 1613) in early 2005. From the very beginning, official sources projected the new holiday as an important step in creating a new sovereign ideology for Russia. It commemorates the popular resistance that led to Moscow’s liberation from occupying Polish-Lithuanian forces, marking the end of what later became known as Russia’s Time of Troubles (Smutnoe vremia, or the years between the death of Boris Godunov and the accession of Mikhail Romanov, (1605–13). Following the death of Boris Godunov in 1598, violent dynastic and social conflicts erupted. Polish intervention in 1609–12 and the Polish king’s ambition to promote Catholicism provoked a national rising. The idea behind the holiday is that people from a diverse group of ethnic and religious backgrounds banded together in a popular insurrection, which succeeded in ejecting foreign occupiers who had brought nothing but destruction and despair to Russia. The Poles and Lithuanians were not, strictly, aggressors. They came to Russia as mercenaries hired by various Russian groups vying for power. Kuzma Minin and Dmitri Pozharskii fought against foreigners as well as against Cossacks and peasants in rebellion. The date is supposed to mark the seizure of Moscow’s Kitaigorod quarter by Prince Dmitri Pozharskii and Kuzma Minin. But nothing of fundamental importance happened on 4 November regarding the unity of the Russian ‘nation’ (sic) liberation. Moscow’s liberation did not take properly place until 7 November. So the date of the November holiday could have been left untouched. And most historians date the end of the Time of Troubles to the coronation of the first Romanov Tsar, Mikhail, on 11 July 1613, a day that was celebrated as a major holiday in imperial Russia. The cynical-minded had it that the current regime chose the day to signify its rescue of Russia from a more recent ‘time of troubles’ the years of the Yeltsin administration (1991–99). Moscow was actually liberated in three stages, from 1611, when the Poles, who had occupied the city and were worried about popular unrest, decided to fortify the towers of Kitai-Gorod in the centre of the city, with heavy cannons. The labourers employed by the Poles

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demanded high wages upon which the Germans, fearing a riot, slaughtered many Muscovites and drove others to the Lubianka. It was there that Pozharskii made his stand and drove the Germans back to the Kitai-Gorod. At about the same time, Moscow was cleared of Poles, Lithuanians, and Cossacks who had switched sides. For more than three centuries, 4 November has been celebrated as a day of veneration for the wonder-working icon of the Madonna. According to one legend, the icon itself was discovered in Kazan in 1579 after a church fire, and was taken to Moscow in 1612 to bless the Russian’s victory over the Poles that year and in the belief that its protective powers would aid the popular insurrection mounted by Pozharskii. Peter the Great ordered it to be moved to St. Petersburg and it was installed in the two-ton silver iconostasis of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan by the serf architect Andrei Voronikhin at the beginning of the eighteenth century and it has remained there ever since.21 A tale hangs on the return of an anthem, one that speaks to Putin’s view of the Stalin period and of how he would like the new Russia to be limned. In September 1943, Stalin invited composers from all over the Soviet Union to offer their compositions for a Soviet anthem to replace the Internationale, since it was considered to be insufficiently patriotic and was not in keeping with the Save Russia/Save the Socialist Fatherland credo during the War. The winner was Aleksandr Aleksandrov, who scored the song, Hymn of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, while the words were added by the poet Sergei Mikhalkov and the journalist Garold El-Registan. After 1956, two lines in a particular stanza became too embarrassing to retain: ‘Stalin brought us up—he inspired us towards loyalty to the people/Towards labour and towards heroic feats!’ Stalin’s name was expunged but the melody and most of the words remained. In 1990, the Russian government keenly searched for an anthem that would presage Russia’s passage out of the Soviet Union. A composition without lyrics, known since 21Yeltsin

had reduced both financial support and import for 7 November by announcing a new nomenclature for the day, Accord and Reconciliation Day, which was never accepted. Service, Russia, 206, 211–12; Adler, Europe-Asia Studies, 57:8, December 2005, 1093, 1101, 1102, 1097, 1094. For reporting on National Unity Day, see Adam Fuss, ‘In Search of National Unity’, Russia Profile.org, 4 November 2006; Georgy Bovt, ‘Re-Interpreting for the Masses’, Russia Profile.org, 4 November 2006; Nabi Abdullaaev, ‘Unity Day Generating Division and Defiance’, The Moscow Times, 3 November 2006. For the story of the Kazan icon, see Bruce Lincoln, Sunlight at Midnight, 109–10.

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the Second World War as ‘The Patriotic Song’, and based on a sketch found posthumously in the papers of the Russian composer Mikhail Glinka (1804–57), was first played at the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic on 23 November 1990. It never became a national anthem, however, partly because the Russian Communist Party wanted the restoration of the Stalin anthem, (even after 1991!), and also because the Russian Duma failed to legislate it. At the 2000 Olympic Games, victorious Russian athletes had nothing to sing when they stood on the podium, in contrast to their rivals from every other nation, and felt very embarrassed at their loud silence. Wishing to restore the Soviet national anthem, in 2001, Putin invited Sergei Mikhalkov, who co-wrote the Soviet-era lyrics (’Party of Lenin, the strength of the people/To Communism’s triumph, lead us on!’ to write some new verses to suit the modern era, with the following opening and closing stanzas: Russia, our sacred land of might, Russia, our beloved country, Your powerful will and your great glory Are your possession for all time.

From the southern seas to the polar region Spread our forests and fields. You are unique in the world, inimitable. Native land protected by God!

This anthem, the ‘Stalin hymn’ for camp returnees, was taken as an affront by many in the country. The Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich (1927–2007) declared that he would never honour it by standing while it was sung; Alexander Iakovlev, a close adviser to both Gorbachev and Yeltsin, agreed with Rostropovich that the new anthem was a symbol for totalitarianism: ‘we can’t live [with the anthem] if we recall that under its sounds, awful crimes were committed and millions executed.’22 In June 2005, the Programme for the Patriotic Education of Russian 22For a web page dedicated to the anthem, see http;//www.funet.fi/pub/culture/ Russian/html_pages/soviet.html. See also Robert Service, Russia, 198; Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography, Basingstoke, 2004, 442; Rossiiskaia gazeta, 30 December 2000; Adler, Europe-Asia Studies, December 2005; 1099; The Moscow Times, 5 May 2006; I. Ehrenberg, Men–Years–Life,Volume 5: The War Years 1941–1945, London, 1964, 123; Rosalind Marsh, Images of Dictatorship: Portraits of Stalin in literature, London and New York, 1989, 28; David Remnick, ‘Post-Imperial Blues’, The New Yorker, 13 October 2003, 82; and Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, 406–8, for details of the competition. See The Times, London, 1 January 2001, for information on the long search for appropriate words for the Soviet and Russian national anthems.

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Citizens was signed into law. It aims to instill patriotic values through portraying national symbols in the media and arts as well as develop sports clubs and summer camps. The idea behind the programme is that Russian patriotism can no longer be taken for granted but must be reinforced by all segments of society that touch upon the lives of young people. The military needed particular nurturing: At the Second All-Army Officer’s Conference in March 2006, it was reported that 12,000 serving personnel had left the forces before reaching retirement age. The assembly adopted an appeal to ‘incorporate examples from the history of the Fatherland’ in their training but failed to address any of the other debilities that affect the Russian military.23

Representations of the Great Patriotic War For the Soviet Union, the Great Patriotic War served as synecdoche in three crucial senses: valorising, formative and in the recesses of remembrance. Soviet success legitimized the industrializationcollectivization-cultural revolution triad of the previous decade as the creations of Soviet man, or, homo Sovieticus to the satirical-minded. As the war shifted decisively in favour of the Red Army, Stalin drew this link, of lasting perseverance, on the twenty-sixth anniversary of the revolution, 6 November 1943: ‘The lessons of the war teach us that Soviet power is not only the best form of organization for the economic and cultural development of a country in years of peace, but also for mobilizing all the resources of the people for repelling an enemy in time of war’. In 1941, the Red Army faced the most professional fighting force the continent had ever seen. By 1945, they had defeated it. The triumph over Nazism and the creation of a peaceful, if divided Europe, was the zenith of Russian—more than Soviet—history for never had the Tsars dominated central and eastern Europe in any comparable sense and this was formative for subsequent Soviet history until 1989. Whether captured in the creative domains of literature and the plastic and filmic arts, or retrieved from deep recesses as a staple of inter-generational transfers of memory, the War remains without peer. Dolutskii and Zagladin offer their readers divergent interpretations of The Great Patriotic War, 1941–5, as the World War was known in the Soviet Union. Dolutskii would have understood why in 2004 a 23Alexander Golts, ‘An Exercise in Hypocrisy’, The Moscow Times, 11 April 2006.

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history pupil of Aleksandr Litvinov in Labinsk (Krasnodar region) went home after a history lesson and told his grand-father that “You said you had won, but in fact Stalin used you as cannon-fodder.” The triumph over the fascists was achieved at the cost of the death, in captivity or in combat, of about a third of all those mobilized into the Red Army (8.6 million personnel), and that force itself was destroyed and renewed at least twice during the course of the war. A textbook by Andrei Levandovskii and Iurii Schetinov, in current use, emphasizes the mammoth martyrdom of Soviet citizens—Stalin gave the figure as 7 million, Khrushchev inflated it to about 20 million, after having famously remarked that “No one was keeping count”. Current Russian estimates for Soviet military and civilian deaths, based on findings in the post-Soviet archives, suggest that the figure may have been as high as 43 to 47 million persons. By the end of the war with Japan in Manchuria, casualties in all the armed forces were over 29 million, of which 6.2 million had been killed, and the rest captured, missing or incapacitated by illness or frostbite. Of the 34.5 million men and women who were mobilized, 84 per cent were killed, wounded or captured. In the three years from 1937– 9, a little over 35,000 army officers were removed from their jobs and this turnover of officers left recruitment, training, supply and the co-ordination of troop movements in turmoil on the very eve of war and tragically underscored the early Soviet defeats, examined below.24 Putin skirted around Soviet soldiers’ deaths in the GULAG after they were forcibly repatriated in 1945 by Allied armies. The hopes of thousands of Red Army soldiers caught across the European border after peace were dashed when Stalin ordered the establishment of a network of camps in Central Europe on 11 May 1945 (two days after the Soviet Victory Day), each camp designed to hold up to 10,000 men. By June 1945, there were 69 camps for special prisoners suspected 24Merridale, Ivan’s War, 191, citing Velikaya otechestvennaya voyna, 4:191. For estimates of Russian deaths in the War, see Catherine Merridale, Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia, London, 2001, 274; Richard Overy, Russia’sWar, London, 1999, xvi, 287–8, citing references to the Russian discussion in B.V. Sokolov, ‘The Cost of War: Human Losses of the USSR and Germany, 1939–1945’, Journal of Slavic Military Studies, no. 9, 1996, 156–71 and V.E, Korol, ‘The Price of Victory: Myths and Realities’, Ibid., 417–24; Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead:The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, New York, 1994,134–6; Michael Ellman and S. Maksudov, ‘Soviet Deaths in the Great Patriotic War: A Note’, Europe-Asia Studies, 46:4, 1994, 671–80.

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of espionage, cowardice or treason on Soviet territory, and another 74 camps in Europe. Dolutskii found his students were bored during a discussion about Soviet deaths in the war; ‘Let it be one hundred million, we don’t care about that’. But he found that they sat up when he told them about the numbers of tanks and fighter aircraft that were destroyed: “That’s what really impressed them. They don’t care about human life, but they cared about equipment.” His book underlines the crimes the Soviet state committed against its own citizens and reflects the lively debate in the mid-1990s, between those who saw the war as an essentially and criminally ‘mal-administered’ war (bezdarnaia voina), because of the unnecessarily high number of deaths, and those who drew solace and pride from the Soviet vanquishing of the Nazi beast. Commemoration ceremonies in 2004 and 2005 revealed an internationalization of remembrance of the war within a framework of national memorial cultures. In Germany, the traditional trope, which posits the crimes of National Socialism as the negative touchstone for every form of politics, has been discarded. In Russia, there is concern that the internationalization of commemoration could diminish the monumentality of the Soviet sacrifice and the significance of the Soviet contribution to the victory over Nazi Germany. The latter view would, understandably give short shrift to the bezdarnaia voina thesis in the debate, within which Dolutskii asserted that an undemocratic system was crucial to Soviet victory: ‘No democracy could have endured our war, because it could not have paid our price.’25 Proponents of the ‘maladministered war’ thesis argue that avoidable unpreparedness before the war produced the massive defeats of the first eight months. The bare facts are that the Red Army collapsed in the first weeks of the war and that high proportions of Soviet citizens and industry had fallen into the hands of the Wehrmacht by October 1941. The Red Army had fielded about five million troops at the start of the German invasion in June 1941. By the end of the 25See

also Geoffrey Hosking, ‘Russians in the Soviet Union: rulers and victims’, www.openDemocracy.net, 22 June 2006. For an example of the maladministered war thesis, see Viktor Fersobin, ‘Zametki byvshego serzhanta gvardii o voyne’ (Notes on the War by a former Sergeant of the Guards), Voprosy istorii, nos. 5–6, 1995, 121–30.

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year, at a conservative estimate, about three million were in German captivity and by February 1942, 2,663,000 had been killed in action, engendering the oft-cited statistic that 20 Soviet soldiers had died for every German one. Since nearly three-quarters of the country’s 23,000 tanks were thought to need rebuilding or repair in 1941, it is not surprising that more Soviet tanks (and artillery) were lost that year, through breakdown than through German fire; overall, in 1941, despite having better tanks, the Red Army lost six tanks to every German tank. Meanwhile, the Baltic, Belorussia and most of the Ukraine had fallen to the Germans in five weeks, by the end of August, and by October 1941, 45 per cent of the pre-war population (90 million people) lived in German-held territory and the Wehrmacht was within a hundred miles of Stalin in the Kremlin. The tide turned in December, as the Germans were driven back from Moscow (5 December), but it took the Red Army more than three and a half years, from that night in June 1941, to make good its threat to carry the war on to fascist soil. In the run-up to the sixtieth anniversary of Victory in Europe (VE) day in May 2005, speaking to Le Figaro, Putin had called for ‘objective histories of the war (that should) inform our citizens about the indisputable truth of the events of those years’. Putin lent a sympathetic ear to World War Two veterans who were offended by Dolutskii’s ‘unpatriotic’ treatment of the war. Zagladin, whose views track those of the President so closely that there is little daylight between the two, was adamant that a history textbook should make a pupil feel proud about Russia. It should not depress, and it should not shame. ‘If a young person finishes school and feels everything that happened in this country was bad, he’ll get ready to emigrate. A textbook should provide a patriotic education.’ The war remains an epic capable of rendition without adaptation and so is the most powerful master narrative for the confection of histories that privilege patriotism ahead of bristling issues like multiethnicity. Its monumental commemoration—in the 1960s and 1970s, this included giant statues on the Volga and above the Dnieper Rivers, the creation of the complex at Piskarevskoe and the opening of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Moscow—bear witness to the folies de grandeur of Soviet planning. The last great monument to the war, Moscow’s Victory Park on Poklonnaia Hill, was so extravagant, and

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took so long to complete, that the Soviet Union had fallen by the time it finally opened.26

History in Russian Schools, 1991–2002 Histories during the Yeltsin Period (1991–99) The Yeltsin government was, from the outset, committed to perspectives on history that were at diametric variance with those of the just departed Soviet past: de-communization in place of the dialectic, plurality instead of the deadening hand of uniform interpretation. There was the exhilaration generated by the passing away of the malign compound of ‘the Soviet state, the Communist Party and Marxism-Leninism’. The Soviet period was distanced— some have argued, repudiated—as a largely negative interlude between the Russian empire and the new Russia. Lenin was turned into a villain, and the Communist Party and Marxism-Leninism were vilified. Simultaneously, the last years of the Romanov dynasty were recast as a period of advance towards a liberal order and a prosperous economy, a phase that was rudely interrupted by the war. This view draws upon a distinguished ancestry, from Sir Donald Mackenzie Wallace’s sanguinity about the liberal institutions created after 1905 to Nicholas Timasheff’s view that ‘if undisturbed’, by 1940 Russia would have reached levels of industrialization, income and education, similar to if not higher than those reached under Soviet rule, and upon the arguments of those who have pointed to the need to tilt assessments of the agrarian crisis away from peasant poverty to the post-Stolypin advances. The reputation of Stolypin soared. Church, peasantry and rural customs were re-envisaged as having had much potential to aid social progress. White Armies were rehabilitated as patriotic forces seeking to destroy the Bolshevik terror-regime. Doubts were cast upon the educational and economic achievements of the Five-Year Plans. Conversely, few bright spots were sighted for the Soviet decades, among them the victory in the Great Patriotic War; the scientific 26Merridale, Ivan’s War, 128, 143, 97, 102–3; Catherine Merridale, ‘Redesigning History in Contemporary Russia’, Journal of Contemporary History, 38:1, December 2003, 17; Idem., Night of Stone, 348. See also Michael Ignatieff, ‘Soviet War Memorials’, HistoryWorkshop Journal, Issue 17, Spring 1984, 157–63 and Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, New York, 1994.

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discoveries and technological breakthroughs of the 1960s; the cultural splendour of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and the writers Boris Pasternak and Andrei Platonov; or the endurance and resourcefulness of the Russian people.27 In a move that simultaneously sought a galvanizing notion to counter popular disaffection with an unpopular regime and ideas from the public for a substantive new rendition of Russian history, Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin announced a competition in the newspaper of the Russian government, Rossiiskaia gazeta on 30 July 1996 for a new ‘Idea for Russia’. The competition—‘Konkurs “Ideia dlia Rossii” ’—set a concise subject for readers to write about: ‘The Idea of Russia’.The winner would receive a prize of five million rubles, (nearly 1000 US dollars). Each entry had to stay below five to seven typed pages (why not five or seven, was never stated). There was no prescription of content except that the competitors were to be people ‘believing in a resurrected Russia, in the talent, hard work and patriotism of Russian citizens (rossiiane)’. The entries appeared week after week until the end of the year. Patriotism was a chord that was frequently struck. Pride in the military victory in the war and in the moral and social values of the Russian people over several centuries was often reiterated. There was confidence in Russia’s science, technology and culture. Pleasure was taken in her natural environment and contributors lauded the tolerance, endurance and intelligence of Russians. Competitors added that Russians had contributed more to the world’s highest achievements in literature and music than any other nation in the twentieth century. Some expressed regret at the decline in Russia’s military and economic prowess, others at the fall in living standards. Many contributors identified a rise in national morale as the key to the country’s recovery. The winner, announced on 31 December 1996, was a certain Guri Sudakov from Vologda in the Russian North. He was a 56-year-old philologist who had entered local politics. Interested in ‘the Russian soul’, he had always asked himself: ‘Who are we? Where are we going?’ His winning entry, published on 17 September, and entitled ‘The Six Principles of Russianness’, conceded that Russians had their faults but their virtues shone through sharply. Russians were described as unusually tolerant towards the people of other nations who lived among 27Service: Russia, 3–4, 190; D. Mendeloff, ‘Demystifying Textbooks in Post-Soviet Russia’, International Society for Russian Education Newsletter, No. 2, Fall 1996, 16–20.

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them. He defined the difference between the Russian and the west European national character and spiritual make-up in a single word: non-marketeer. ‘For the Russian, relatively greater importance is attached to society, Motherland, glory and power, than the banal attractions of the market-place.’28

History and the Putin Regime Putin rejected Yeltsin’s repudiation of the Soviet historical legacy and the denigration of the USSR’s achievements; continuity, not rupture, was to become the guiding principle in official ideas about history. This was revealed even before Putin’s end-of-millennium ascent to the presidency. In November 1999 Rossiiskaia gazeta published an article by Yu. Vasil’ev that reflected the sharp turn in the official stance about the Soviet past: ‘Let’s stop humbling the overthrown shadows of the past. Let’s call things by their real names. And for a start let’s stop feeling ashamed and referring to what happened eighty-two years ago in the city on the river Neva as ‘the October coup’. Coups last for days, weeks or months. Yet we lived under the sign of that event for almost a century’. Putin told journalists that “without any exaggeration I could be considered the successful product of a Soviet person’s patriotic education.” He accepted that Stalin’s rule had been abusive and that the Soviet Union had been ‘a totalitarian state’, but he wanted to strike a balance, expressed in pronouncements like ‘Anyone who does not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union has no heart, but anyone who wants it restored has no brain’. In a speech on 14 December 2001, he said “And is there nothing good to remember about the Soviet period of our country? Was there nothing but Stalin’s prison camps and repression? In that case what are we going to do about (the SocialistRealist lyricist I. O.) Dunaevskii, (the author of the Don trilogy of novels, Mikhail) Sholokhov, (the father of the Soviet space 28Service, Russia; 183–5; Merridale, Journal of Contemporary History, December 2003, 23; Andrew Meier, Black Earth: A Journey through Russia After the Fall, NewYork, 2003; Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear of the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia, Princeton and Oxford, 2005, 314. Meier was the Moscow correspondent of Time from 1996 to 2001.The widely respected cultural historian, Dmitry Likachev, scoffed at the idea of one Russian Idea: ‘In Russia one ideology cannot suffice to unify the country. Ours is a rich culture, but a culture of many peoples. Reality must dictate any political doctrine; a country so vast cannot be bound by a single idea.’ Cited by Orlando Figes, ‘In Search of Russia’, The NewYork Review of Books, 23 October 2003, 39.

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programme, Sergei) Korolev and our achievements in space? What are we going to do about Yuri Gagarin’s flight?” Pride in the state was not enough. When he ordered that compulsory military training should be re-instated in the school curriculum for boys between the ages of 15 and 16, he wanted every young male to have the capacity to fight in the armed forces if and when the need should arise.29 Two of the country’s most influential historians, Professors Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Chubarian, directors of the Institute of Russian History and the Institute of World History respectively, were called to give account at a cabinet meeting in August 2001. Both were prolific writers and editors of textbooks. The cabinet charged them to help in setting up a competition for the preparation of fresh works for use in schools and universities. The evident intention was that such material would be more congruent with the ‘patriotic’ orientation announced by Putin since 1999. Professors Sakharov and Chubarian, under official pressure, promised that the winning textbooks would be available by September 2002.30

The Context for New History Textbooks Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, concepts such as capitalism, economic entrepreneurship, political freedom and the rights of individuals have found their way into textbooks. Diverse ideological groups, from neo-Stalinists to conservative nationalists, have attacked these changes. In their study of textbooks in Russian schools in the late 1990s, Elena Lisovskaia and Viacheslav Karpov concluded that their content has shifted from support for the key ideas of MarxismLeninism towards support for a combination of nationalism, modernization and a reinterpretation of communism. During the election campaign of 1996, both the Communist Genadii Ziuganov and the nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovskii, complained that school textbooks were not sufficiently patriotic. The return of a large number of Communists to power in the Duma in the elections of 1996 and their promise of a retreat to a former time of perceived prosperity suggested a generally conservative mood and a rise in nationalism and patriotism. In April 1998, the 29Service, Russia, 194–5, citing Yu. Vasil’ev, Rossiiskaia gazeta, 6 November 1999. 30Service,

2003, 23.

Russia, 195–6; Merridale, Journal of Contemporary History, December

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Duma Education Committee, then controlled by the Communists, persuaded the Duma Chairman to write to the Ministry of Education about too many ‘dark spots’ in school history textbooks. Dolutskii noted that opposition to his book came from the Communists until 1996, and after that from experts in the Ministry of Education, ‘who espoused a state ideology filled with pseudo-Orthodox, pseudonationalist content’.31 In the first years of glasnost’, reformers often said that they were looking for ‘a new textbook’, not for several. But plurality won the day: large numbers of textbooks, in all subjects, were published without state control until 1997, and schools were free to choose from among them. In 2003 the Ministry of Education planned to review all 107 history school texts in use and ensure that by 2004, all over the country, the teacher’s choice was reduced to no more than three books for each grade. In a move that violated the spirit of the federal komplekt, these new textbooks would be written by members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, or by those responsible for review. Opposition came from various quarters, pedagogical and political alike, against the growing force of corruption, the bureaucratization of textbook writing and the issue of an appropriate balance between inculcating patriotism and teaching history critically. Speculation had it in 2006 that moves were afoot to distribute a single textbook by the state to all schools, bereft of both ‘a lot of nonsense’ (Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov) and the ‘competitive pseudoliberalism aimed at misinterpreting our history’ that Education Minister Vladimir Fillipov had found objectionable in 2004, possibly spelling redundancy for the komplekt process. To set the record straight, however, Ivanov disclaimed any desire for a single textbook but vaguely added that ‘playing with historical facts is not possible’.32 The British historian Catherine Merridale taught history classes in Russian schools in the early 2000s and discovered a good deal of 31Elena

Lisovkskaya and Vyacheslav Karpov, ‘New Ideologies in Postcommunist Russian Textbooks’, Comparative Education Review, 43: 4 November 1999, 522–3. A few months earlier, S. Pirani had accused the authors of Russian history textbooks of being crudely patriotic, nationalistic and anti-Semitic. See S. Pirani, ‘Teachers Confront Rise in Extremism’, Times Educational Supplement, 2 April 1999; Janet Vaillant, ‘Revised ... Again’; Raymond G. Taylor, ‘Current State of Education in Russia’, Education, Fall 1997; Jeremy Bransten, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 5 December 2003. 32Merridale, Journal of Contemporary History, 38:1, 2003; Borisov, Russia Profile, 16 May 2005; Vaillant, ‘Revised Again’; Pravda, 28 January 2004.

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ignorance about the Soviet past (on problems like Civil War heroes, the NEP of the 1920s, the collectivization of agriculture, or the Terror of the 1930s), but great enthusiasm about the Second World War. Georgy Bovt, a Moscow-based journalist, who studied history at Moscow University before 1991, found that his school-going daughter did not know ‘what a ‘deficit good’ is, or what ‘taking a place in a line’ for a television or sausages meant. Bovt wrote about how ‘The younger generation knows virtually nothing about even the most basic aspects of the Soviet universe. It’s just that much of daily Soviet life has disappeared into oblivion’. Merridale noted that this retreat of ‘Stalinism into a grey oblivion’ was in contrast to the situation fifteen years ago, the beginnings of glasnost’, when both history curricula and student interest in the Soviet, particularly Stalinist past, was lively. In the last few years, late imperial Russia, bereft of purges, arrests and the lack of all individual freedom, attracts the most fascination and classroom time.33 Since history is a crucial preparatory subject for university study of allied disciplines in the humanities, competition for which has intensified, the easiest recourse was to test aspirants on ‘who’ or ‘when’ or ‘where’. The Russian government had been attempting to introduced a ‘single state exam’ (edinii gosudarstvenii eksamen or the EGE), a graduation-cum-entrance exam, as it were, to be taken in core subjects, including history, by all secondary school students in their final year.The introduction of the EGE was supposed to help in placing higher education on a sounder financial footing as well as contribute to wiping out evaluative corruption in admission to universities by serving as an anonymous and objective instrument. It was also intended to reduce the arbitrariness of individual entrance exams for tertiary education institutions and to make it possible to regulate local examining bodies by using clear, universal and formal criteria. University fees were to depend on the grades earned in the EGE. Professional historians have criticized the proposal to replace separate university entrance exams in history with a standardized test, on the grounds that it assesses little more than an applicant’s knowledge of important names and dates, and does not even do this very well. Boris Kagarlitskii argued that under the guise of purging ‘subjectivity’ from the social sciences, the government’s reform 33Merridale, Index on Censorship:Time to Move On?, Issue 2/05, 2005; Georgy Bovt, ‘Playing on Old Myths’, The Moscow Times, 6 April 2006.

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programme in fact aims to root out non-conformism and, more broadly, independent thought. For each question, there would be one correct answer: no nuances, no considering both sides of an issue, no personal conclusions. Books like the one by Dolutskii would be counterproductive in this context. The government justifies the EGE as a measure to fight corruption in the universities, specifically bribery in the admissions process, which includes indirect bribes in the form of payments to secondary school teachers for extra tuition and exam coaching. In the last week of October 2006, the Duma approved a bill establishing the EGE and the bill was adopted into law on 25 January 2007. It will replace admission tests by individual institutions and serve, simultaneously, as a graduating requirement for secondary schools and a qualifying exam for admission to higher education. A key proviso in the bill, that the EGE would be ‘one of ’ a range of assessment tools’, was dropped in the adoption of the act. The EGE has become the basic form of assessment for entry into higher educational institutions. Only a few universities have managed to defend their right to assess applications on the basis of their own examination systems; the rest have been instructed to use data garnered from the EGE.34 All universities and institutes reserve a certain number of seats in the entry class for fee-paying students, which they sell in full accordance with the law. The number of fee-paying seats will rise steadily under the government’s current policy; in fact that is the main goal of the on-going reform programme. Reforming education is a feature of the current administration’s four National Projects announced in September 2005. These projects are intended to confront the roots of the demographic crisis—the population is falling by 0.7 million annually—by improving housing, health care, education and food. Education figures as a National Project in the following manner: in 2006, the government plans to give 5000 individual grants of 60,000 rubles ($2,250) each to students studying to become high-school teachers, and to ensure that all secondary schools in the country, particularly those located in remote rural 34‘How

Much Does Russia Cost?’, MosNews.com Special Report, 4 June 2004; Boris Kagarlitsky, ‘Standardizing of Education?, The Moscow Times, 20 April 2006; Mark H. Teeter, ‘A New Test to End All Tests’, The Moscow Times, 30 October 2006; Alexander Arkhangelsky, ‘A USEd Broom Sweeps Clean’, Russia Profile, 29 January 2007, online edition, http://www.russiaprofile.org/culture/2007/1/29/5109.wbp. The EGE has also been referred to as the Unitary State Examination, or USE.

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areas, are connected to the Internet by 2008, which would enable them to prepare better for the EGE.35 Boris Kagarlitskii and Iulia Kharlamova (see fn. 36) have argued that the introduction of the EGE, like many other recent innovations including the entire National Project for Education, has little to do with combating corruption in schools and universities, and even less with ensuring that the brightest gain university admission because it is far from clear how test results will reflect real intelligence levels. The Law on Education of 1992 reduced the years of compulsory schooling from the Soviet eleven to nine. One consequence was a rise in juvenile delinquency. Another negative phenomenon, and of greater import but still in the making, is dividing schools into those ‘for the masses’ and those ‘for the elite’, a system in which access to vital knowledge will be restricted for the majority of young people who cannot afford to buy their way into the system. Schools will offer different curricula, use different textbooks, some of the traditional classes will be replaced by learning games and the teacher will be recast as a ‘provider of educational services’. Another proposal is to increase the scope of home-schooling, or paying parents to educate their children at home. Not only does a government rich enough to expand education abrogate its own public responsibility, but the proposal encourages parents to accept tutorial fees from the state for their wards and refuse to send their children to school. Kagarlitskii points out that the new education is not aimed at shaping free men and women and responsible citizens who are capable of independent thought, but specialists capable of carrying out specific and clearly defined orders from their superiors.36 An Oil Stabilization Fund (‘Stabfond’) was established in 2004 to balance the budget over the business cycle and to restrain inflation by sterilizing inflows of oil money: all oil tax proceeds above the base price of $27 per barrel flow into this fund. As oil prices go on 35Kagarlitsky, The Moscow Times, 20 April 2006. The goals of the other National Projects are to provide an apartment to one third of Russia’s citizens by 2010; to reduce mortality rates and encourage greater fertility; and, to subsidize the interest on the loans that farms take from banks. Dmitry Babich, ‘The National Projects Could Rejuvenate Russia—If They Succeed’, Russia Profile, 5 June 2006. 36Kagarlitsky, The Moscow Times, 20 April 2006, p. 9; Yulia Kharlamova, ‘Some Questionable Innovations: Why the National Project on Education is Dangerous for the Country’, Special to Russia Profile, 1 June 2006. Iulia’s Kharlamova’s history Ph.D thesis, ‘Conservatism as a Modern Russian Ideology’, won an ‘Ideas for Russia’ prize in 2005. She teaches Political Science at Stavropol State University.

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rising, the resources in the Oil Stabilization Fund, now worth over $110 billion (7 per cent of GDP) already substantially exceeds the $18 billion that was thought to be sufficient for stabilization purposes in 2004.37 It scarcely requires mention, however, that it is the Federal Budget, rather than the Oil Stabilization Fund, that must be the prime source for revitalizing Russian secondary education. This sector is short of resources, pedagogical, financial and infra-structural, and this has an impact on all teaching. Russian education, and especially the humanities, is in financial crisis, a situation compounded by falling birth rates, internal migration (which leaves some rural schools without viable numbers of pupils) and the pressure on salaries and resources that dogs the whole sector. According to a report by the Audit Chamber of the Russian Parliament in 2006, there has been a dramatic reduction in the shares of GDP spent in the former Soviet Union to fund education and the amount devoted to this head today. Because the Soviet Union had not built enough schools to accommodate increasing enrolment, Russia inherited a system of very large, overcrowded schools with a decaying infrastructure and as early as 1993 the government was forced to close about 20,000 schools because of physical inadequacy; by then, too, about one in every three schools needed large-scale repair. Until 1996 the number of schools continued to grow. Thereafter schools started closing, mainly due to a demographical downturn but also because they were in under-populated areas.38 A study sponsored by the independent television channel RenTV, the audit and consulting company, FBK, and Russia’s business daily, Vedemosti in 2004, concluded that the education sector receives less than 3 per cent of GDP: the cost of the Russian educational system is estimated at 19.6 trillion rubles ($675 million), considered to be inadequate in both relative and absolute terms, by the authors of the study. About 20 of the 30 million people in Russia receiving 37Robert Skidelsky and Pavel Erochkine, ‘It’s Time to Break the Bank’, The Moscow

Times, 12 May 2006. Since the summer of 2006, most of the Stabfond resources have been used to purchase dollars, euros and sterling and relatively much less spent on public goods like health, education and pension arrears. See Tony Wood, ‘Contours of the Putin Era: A Response to Vladimir Popov’, New Left Review, No. 44, MarchApril 2007, 58. 38Sergei Blagov, ‘Education Suffers All-Round Decline in Post-Soviet Years in Russia’, Inter Press Service, March 2006. Although the precise percentage figures related to budgetary outlays vary, the trend is unmistakable.

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an education are in 66,000 schools and about 12 million were in the tertiary sector receiving higher education. Less than one-quarter of the necessary funds for schools came from the Federal Budget; the remainder being supplied by regional and municipal budgets. The Federal Budget principally finances higher and professional education. The State Statistical Committee (GosKomStat) revealed that almost 40 per cent of all schools required capital repair, while 5 per cent of all schools are in an emergency condition in this respect. Almost half of all schools have no indoor plumbing, and one-quarter of them have no central heating.39 The Soviet Union suffered a shortage of teachers for decades before its demise. Although society held the profession in high regard, teachers’ salaries were among the lowest of all professions, at least partly because women dominated the field at the primary and secondary levels. The emerging market economy of the 1990s improved the pay and career opportunities outside teaching for many who would have remained in education under the Soviet system, and this exacerbated the shortage. The pages of the various teachers’ newspapers, Pervoe sentiabria, Pedagogicheskii kaleidoskop, or Uchitel’skaia gazeta, are regularly filled with complaints and pleas from teachers individually, by schools, and sometimes by entire cities or regions, regarding the non-payment of their salaries for two, three, sometimes four months. Some teachers said they had not been paid for months, even as the authorities urged them to accept payment in kind, like organic fertilizers, rat poison and even coffins. Schools in rural areas, which comprise some twothirds of all schools, work under a constant threat of redundancy as schools are forced to close. Uchitel’skaia Gazeta (‘The Teachers’ Gazette’) mentioned some of the concerns of educators in Russia: stemming the attrition of qualified teachers by improving conditions and eliminating salary arrears; establishing a working balance among federal, regional and municipal authorities; devising measures to monitor quality in individual schools in a more decentralized environment and setting standards and devising curricula that allow students to freely transfer from one school, municipality or region to another; encouraging experimentation and innovation both with and without the official state system of schools; protecting the rights of children with special 39‘How Much Does Russia Cost?’, Mosnews.com Special Report, 4 June 2004; Stephen T. Kerr, ‘The Re-Centering of Russian Education’, Khronika, 5:2, Fall 1996.

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needs or with behavioral problems; a concern for the health of the nation’s children had led to the promulgation of new and tough ‘hygienic standards’.40 Draft proposals for reform from the Ministry of Education met stiff resistance from school teachers: Uchitel’skaia Gazeta reported that at the end of 1997, more than 70 per cent of teachers surveyed were opposed to reform. An editorial in Uchitel’skaia gazeta conveyed the multifarious anxieties of Russian school teachers thus: ‘We are being swamped by a tidal wave of catastrophes, accidents, explosions, wrecks ... is this just the calamitous end of the millennium ... [and in education we have] crushing debts, salaries unpaid for months on end, work stoppages and hunger strikes ... the same kind of chaos, only here the chaos is brought on by humans, not nature. And what have we here ... yet more reform? Our teachers would rather walk through fire; to reform them is synonymous with torture. And what are they to expect from reform? What direction will a hurricane take? Will reform bring the school its long-lost revenue, or take away it’s remaining kopeks? Will reform help them cope with the deception they have experienced; will they take yet more empty promises seriously?’ 41

The Selection of Textbooks In the Soviet period, the Expert Council of the Ministry of Education approved a single history textbook for each grade and distributed it to all schools in the country after it had been reviewed by multiple boards and panels of experts and teachers and then tested in special schools before being mass produced by state publishers. After the Soviet era, the Russian Ministry decided to encourage a competitive multiplicity into the production of textbooks. By the mid-1990s, a great diversity of textbooks and educational materials were available: ‘workbooks’, of facts and documents selected to reflect a ‘historiographical’ diversity of views (rabochie tetriady), 40‘Editor’s

Note’, Institute for the Study of Russian Education Newsletter, 6:2, 1997; see http://www.indiana.edu/~isre/NEWSLETTER/vol6no2/editorial.htm. 41Uchitel’skaia gazeta, No. 51, 23 December 1997; Stephen T. Kerr, ‘Teachers’ Continuing Education and Russian School Reform’, Paper presented at the Conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), Washington D.C., 28 October 1995, http://faculty.washington.edu/stkerr/concrut.htm; ‘Editor’s Note’, ISRE Newsletter, 6:2, 1997.

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‘source books’ (khrestomatii), study aids (posobiia), even ‘crib notes’ (shpargalki, like the Indian kunjis).The textbooks were more attractive and better illustrated than their Soviet predecessors. They fostered a more critical approach to history, and sought to remove stereotypes, especially concerning Russia’s European neighbours and her Eurasian non-Slav ethnic minorities. Regions were granted more freedom to develop and use texts germane to their needs within a framework that combines local histories/regional histories with Russian (Soviet Republic and Federation) history. Russians, working with experts from Austria, Denmark, Holland and Scotland, within Project Uroki Klio, combined narrative segments in textbooks with excerpts from primary and literary sources and with illustrations.42 Virtually all textbooks and educational materials written for the ‘federal component’ of education were reviewed by the Federal Expert Council on General Education, a quasi-independent body with more than 30 sections. Each section had between 50 and 20 specialist members who would base their decisions on reports submitted by three reviewers: a methodologist; a teacher of the particular subject; and a senior academic, usually from one of the research institutes of the Russian Academy of Sciences, with expertise in that area. The original conception of the Council included a much larger group of reviewers—a psychologist, a ‘cultural specialist’ and a textbook designer—but this was discarded as impractical. To be placed on the Federal list for use in schools (the komplekt) books must meet two criteria, namely, they must previously have been used on an experimental basis; and been evaluated positively by teachers who had used them. But in the context of a shortage of decommunized, up-to-date history books in the face of growing demand for them, these criteria have often been ignored in the fields of history and the social sciences generally. Alexander Orlov, the author of several history textbooks, believed the problem of selection of 42‘Annals of the Neo-Soviet Union: Textbook Censorship is Renewed’, http:// russophobe.blogspot.com/2006/09, 7 September 2006. The federal component is related to compulsory subjects across the entire country, accounting for 60 per cent of the curriculum in the early 1990s: 30 per cent was regional, and the selection of the remaining 10 per cent was left to individual schools. David Mendeloff, ‘Demystifying Textbooks in Post-Soviet Russia’, ISRE Newsletter, 5:2, Fall 1996; Alexander Shevyrev, ‘The Histor y Textbooks in Contemporar y Russia: A New Generation’, www.SchoolsHistory.org.uk/russiabooks.htm; Janet Vaillant, ‘Current Challenges for Russian Civics Education’, Khronika, 7:1, Spring 1998, www.indiana.edu/~isre/ NEWSLETTER/vil7no1/vaillant/htm.

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textbooks did not so much lie in their content as in the selection procedure, one that was not ‘transparent, democratic and independent from the state. Instead, however, organs responsible for certification are subject to permanent pressure from various directions. As a result, every now and then there emerges a new textbook, then another. They give their approval, and then withdraw it’. Books that the publisher or the author did not submit for approval, or those that were submitted but failed to gain a griffe (the term used for enabling the publisher to print official approval on the title page thus, ‘Recommended by the Main Directorate for the Development of Secondary Education of the Russian Federation Ministry of Education’), are used in schools. Lacking Ministry endorsement, however, usually translates into smaller print-runs, of a few thousand, compared to the significantly greater circulation of titles on the Federal komplekt. Ministry approval itself is only the first stage. A listing in the komplekt also implies that the textbook must be made available to all students free of charge (where the cost of purchase is borne by the federal or regional authority). In the Federal komplekt for 1996–7, to convey an idea of magnitude, there were 280 titles, represented by at least 24 publishers. Given the safe guarantees of bulk purchases, copies included in the komplekt are produced in large print-runs. Moreover, if an educational institution plans to supply its students with books, rather than have students buying their own, komplekt list purchases are mandatory. The science subjects are represented by a greater choice of textbooks for any grade. How independent of the Ministry of Education is the Expert Council? Although it is funded by that Ministry, neither its head (Secretary/Uchenyi sekretar’) nor section chairpersons are Ministry employees. They are often highly regarded academics working in institutes under the Ministry’s purview and budgetary control. Most books are judged on a purely professional basis and many books that were written by people who lived and worked far from Moscow gained entry on the list of sanctioned titles. This does not exclude the intrusion of personal elements, nepotism. The same individual may have been involved in the assessment process at different times, as both a reviewer and an author; or there are negative reviews of competing manuscripts by authors intent on pushing their own work. Publishers have to pay a ‘fee’ to have their books even considered let alone endorsed by the griffe. Intervention

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in the komplekt process can come from outside the Expert Council and from senior functionaries: a Deputy Minister who happened to be a college friend of an author, over-ruled the decision of the Expert Council and approved a history textbook for inclusion on the Federal komplekt. The final word on the Federal komplekt is reserved for the Ministry of Education.43

*** Although the British historian Eric Hobsbawm once famously remarked that ‘historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market’, his alternate reasoning that no true historian can be a politically committed nationalist, even if historians were often among the pioneers of nationalism in the nineteenth century, is more germane to his richly erudite meditations on nationalism. President Putin would probably have been on the same page with Ernest Renan in his rumination on the inverse relationship between remembering and forging histories: ‘Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation: thus the progress of historical studies is often a danger for national identity .... The essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things’. In March 2004, Igor Dolutskii pointed out that ‘You shouldn’t confuse patriotism and concealing the truth. I want my country to be well, so I point out its ills. Putin wants to glorify and falsify history’. Milan Kundera’s counter-avowal, ‘The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’ is likely to thud off a hard Russian surface today.44 This is partly because evidence suggests that Putin’s view of how history should be recast, particularly by suppression of knowledge about Stalinist repression, has wide popular support. In the decade and a half since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the sharpness 43Mendeloff,

ISRE Newsletter, No. 2, Fall 1996; Prokhorov and Smirnov, www.gazeta.ru.com. 44Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Ethnicity and Nationalism in Europe’, Anthropology Today, 8:3, 1992, 3–8. Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, in S. Woolf, ed., Nationalism in Europe—1815 to the Present, London, 1996, p. 50; Dolutskii is quoted by Anna Badkhen, San Francisco Chronicle, 12 March 2004; Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, 1980; Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, 803.

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of a jibe by a former school graduate to his former teacher, “I would hang you, Semion Moishevich, and all the history teachers too! You painted a fairy-tale about a bright future and now we have to pay for that”, has lost its edge. Comment on a widespread disillusionment with politics and the cut and thrust of debate, is widely heard today. During the celebrations marking the end of World War Two in May 2005, Roy Medvedev noted that Russians had little to celebrate in the first 15 years after the demise, and this may have ignited nostalgia for a time of great deeds and even greater sacrifices, notions that universally underline patriotism.45 This chapter has tried to suggest why the Soviet past, and emphatically the colossal straddling of its historic space by Stalinism, is the cynosure of focus for many, but not yet a beleaguered battleground. I have used the two history textbooks as a point d’appui to explore the terrain of school history in the Russian Federation. Between them, Dolutskii and Zagladin, offer divergent understandings of landmark events, the rites of passage of an entire society, as it were. Given the interest of the Russian government in the content of history textbooks for schools, there is a link between the classroom and the diffusion of patriotism. This link was most explicitly made by no less than the head of the textbook division at the Education and Science Ministry, Svetlana Teterina: ‘History books are very important in bringing up Russian citizens. They receive our special attention and interest’. After a new review process was adopted in 2006, only 18 per cent of the books passed muster. Teterina singled out history textbook books when she said that four of the ‘most responsible publishers’ had sent in their history books for early review, without mentioning books for any other discipline. Platon Manotskov, who has been teaching history in St. Petersburg schools for 37 years, said that “I would not want, as a teacher, to be strictly told to inculcate civic pride or to teach within a certain ideological framework, and I’m afraid that might happen.” But the official endeavour to fortify patriotism is complicated by numerous cleavages: there are many Russias, and deep fault lines are 45The jibe by the former student was made in the early 1990s and recounted by Tatiana Volodina, ‘Teaching History in Russia After the Collapse of the USSR’, The History Teacher, 38:2, February 2005, 185, citing Uchitel’skaia gazeta, 10 October 2000. Dr Volodina is a Professor of History at Tula State Pedagogical University in the Russian Federation. Nanci Adler, Europe-Asia Studies, December 2005, 1100, 1112–13. For the statements by Teterina and Manotskov, see http://russophobe.blogspot.com/2006/ 09, 27 September 2006.

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being drawn between the russkie Russians, the term for ethnic Slavic Russians living in the Federation, and the rossiiane, a more inclusive term for ethnic non-Russians living in the same country. In sharp contrast to his predecessor, President Boris Yeltsin, President Vladimir Putin has given a newly emergent political space to both ethnic nationalists and those desirous of enabling the Russian Federation to cast its shadow over the former inner Soviet empire, the USSR.Yeltsin always gave primacy to Rossiia, or Russia for all its ethnicities, over Rus’, the lands of the ethnic Russians, to rossiiskie, not russkie, state interests. The policy perspectives of the Yeltsin administrations, from 1991–9, consistently emphasized the multinational character of the Russian Federation, and as George W. Breslauer correctly affirms, the successive Yeltsin governments were alert to the perils of inter-ethnic strife. As for the relations between the Russian Republic and other republics of the still extant Soviet Union, Yeltsin stated in September 1991, that “Russian statehood, which has chosen democracy and freedom, will never be an empire, or a big or small brother, it will be an equal among equals.”46 Sub-nationalism is on the rise, in and north of the Caucasus. The Russian sociologist, Dmitry Shlapentokh, recently lamented the emergence of a race-based nationalism that goes to the core of the russkie-rossiiane divide. He identifies two incarnations of a rampant Russian nationalism. The first implies that Russia is preeminently and desirably a nation for the russkie, in which the rossiiane should properly accept subalternity; if they demonstrate any sort of volatility, especially in the direction of sub-nationalism, then force should be deployed, a force capability that the proponents of this theory believe the state does possess.They differ from the proponents of an alternative russkie-centric nationalism on the issue of handling rossiiane, especially the Muslim minorities. If russkie dominance cannot be assured, then the Federation ought to shed itself of these intractable citizens.47 Slavs comprise about 80 per cent of the population of the Russian Federation today. Non-Slavic communities from regions like the North Caucasus, the Volga region or Siberia, as well as about ten million ‘guest workers’ from the former Soviet Central Asian and Caucasus countries make up the rest of the Federation’s populace. Georgians represent a large non-Slavic group: one million Georgians, 46George W. Breslauer, Gorbachev

andYeltsin as Leaders, Cambridge, 2002, 147–8. Dmitry Shlapentokh, ‘Looking for Other Options’, Russia Profile.org, 30 October 2006. 47See

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out of a Georgian population of 4.4 million, work in the Federation and their annual remittances of two billion dollars are a major component of Georgia’s GDP. The racist and fascist Movement against Illegal Immigration (DPNI) led by Aleksandr Belov has been widely identified as the fastest growing grassroots organization in Russia. Belov stridently proclaims that ‘Russians are the most discriminated-against group in Russia and we help them to find their voices’. A poll in September 2006 by the Levada Centre found that 52 per cent of respondents agreed with the main slogan of DPNI, ‘Russia for the Russians’ (Rossiia dlia rossiian) Two incidents in autumn 2006, in Kondopoga, (a town in Karelia, near Finland) and involving Georgia, have fuelled xenophobia and multiplied the popular appeal of Russia’s rising neo-fascist movement. Six days of rioting in late August 2006, which left three dead and forced hundreds of Caucasians to flee from Kondopoga and the reactions by the Russian government to Georgia in September 2006 illustrate the vigour of Russian ethnic nationalism today. Aleksandr Belov told his audience in Kondopoga that “The local people want them to go back to where they came from. That’s democracy. The rights of the majority should be respected.” Similar upheavals, often instigated by the DPNI, against non-Slavs have been reported from the Saratov, Chita, Rostov, Astrakhan and Irkutsk regions. In late September 2006, Georgian police arrested four Russian military officers and charged them with spying. After a furious reaction from the Kremlin, the men were released to European mediators. Russia imposed a transport and postal blockade on Georgia, a complete embargo on trade and the Russian Black Sea Fleet was ordered to hold war games off the coast of Georgia. On 5 October President Putin personally kindled an anti-Georgian frenzy by complaining on television that non-Slavs from the Caucasus dominate food markets in most Russian cities and that “the indignation of citizens [against them] is right. We must protect the interests of Russian manufacturers and Russia’s native population.” In mid-November 2006, Prime Minister Mikhail Fradkin announced that measures to ban “foreigners” [even if they are Russian citizens, a demand also voiced by DPNI] from street stalls and markets throughout the Federation would come into effect from January 2007. In conclusion, even as teachers are constrained to offer a homogenized curricular fare about different pasts in classrooms,

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murmurs of unease about a profoundly conflicted past cannot be muted permanently. Efforts to construct more accurate alternate histories, whether around the poles of ethnicity or the Stalinist past, are, however, imperiled by the feeble and stilled voices of its proponents. Since this, in turn, is enfolded within the authoritarian imperatives of a silovik run apparatus, the prospect can only remain bleak.

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307

Grossman,Vasily. Life and Fate, translated by Robert Chandler, London, 1985. . Forever Flowing, translated by Thomas P. Whitney, London, 1988. Goure, Leon. The Siege of Leningrad, New York, 1964. Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi. The February Revolution: Petrograd 1917, Seattle and London, 1981. Heer, Nancy Whittier. Politics and History in the Soviet Union, Cambridge, MA and London, 1971. History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, edited by a Commission of the CC, the CPSU(B), Bombay, 1943. History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, second, revised edition, translated and edited by Andrew Rothstein and Clemens Dutt, Moscow, n.d. Hosking, Geoffrey. A History of the Soviet Union, London, 1984. . The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union From Within, Cambridge, MA, 1992. Hough, Jerry F. Democratization and Revolution in the USSR, 1985–1991, Washington DC, 1997. Hutchings, Raymond. Soviet Secrecy and Non-Secrecy, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1987. Hyde, Montgomery H. Stalin. The History of a Dictator, New York, 1971. Jonge, Alex de. Stalin and the Shaping of the Soviet Union, Glasgow, 1987. Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, London, 2005. Kaiser, Daniel H. ed. The Workers’ Revolution in Russia, 1917. The View from Below, Cambridge, 1987. Kagarlitsky, Boris. The Thinking Reed: Intellectuals and the Soviet State from 1917 to the Present, translated by Brian Pearce, London and New York, 1988. . Russia under Yeltsin and Putin, London, 2002. Keep, John L.H. The Russian Revolution: A Study in Mass Mobilization, New York, 1976. Kenez, Peter. A History of the Soviet Union from the Beginning to the End, Cambridge, 1999. Kerensky, Alexander. The Kerensky Memoirs: Russia and History’s Turning Point, London, 1965. Khr ushchev Remembers, translated and edited by Strobe Talbott, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1977. Koenker, Diane. Moscow Workers and the 1917 Revolution, Princeton, 1981. Lightfoot, Bradley. The Second World War:Ambitions to Nemesis, London, 2004. Lincoln, W. Bruce. Sunlight at Midnight: St. Petersburg and the Rise of Modern Russia, New York, 2000. Linz, Susan. The Impact ofWorldWar II on the Soviet Union, Totowa, NJ, 1985. Litvin, Alter. Writing History in Twentieth-Century Russia. AView fromWithin, translated and edited by John L.H. Keep, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York, 2001.

308

A Select Bibliography

and John Keep. Stalinism. Russian and Western Views at the Turn of the Millennium, London and New York, 2005. Lukin, Alexander. The Political Culture of the Russian ‘Democrats’, Oxford, 2000. Mandel, David. The PetrogradWorkers and the Fall of the Old Regime: From the February Revolution to the July Days, 1917, London, 1983. Mandel, Ernest. Beyond Perestroika:The Future of Gorbachev’s USSR, London, 1989. Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, Cambridge, 2005. Markwick, Roger D. Rewriting History in Soviet Russia:The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956–1974, Basingstoke and London, 2001. Marsh, Rosalind. Images of Dictatorship: Portraits of Stalin in Literature, London and New York, 1989. . History and Literature in Contemporary Russia, Basingstoke and London, 1995. Matthews, M. Soviet Government: A Selection of Official Documents on Internal Affairs, London, 1974. Mavor, James. The Russian Revolution, New York, 1929. Mazour, Anatole G. Modern Russian Historiography, New York, Toronto and London, 1958. . The Writing of History in the Soviet Union, Stanford, 1971. Medvedev, Zhores, A. and Roy A. The Unknown Stalin, translated by Ellen Dahrendorf, London and New York, 2006. Meier, Andrew. Black Earth: A Journey through Russia After the Fall, New York, 2003. Mendelson, Sarah E. Changing Course: Ideas, Politics and the SovietWithdrawal from Afghanistan, Princeton, NJ, 1998. Menon, K.P.S. The Flying Troika, London, 1963. Merridale, Catherine. Night of Stone. Death and Memory in Russia, London, 2001. . Ivan’s War. The Red Army 1939–1945, London, 2005. Montefiore, Simon Sebag. Stalin. The Court of the Red Tsar. London, 2003. Murarka, Dev. Gorbachov: The Limits of Power, London, 1988. Nekrich, Alexander. Forsake Fear: Memoirs of a Historian, Boston, 1991. Nove, Alec. Glasnost’ in Action: Cultural Renaissance in Russia, Boston, 1989. Overy, Richard. Russia’ s War, London, 1999. . The Dictators. Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, London, 2005 Pavlov, Dmitri V. Leningrad 1941:The Blockade, Chicago and London, 1965. Paxton, John. Companion to Russian History, London, 1983. . Imperial Russia. A Reference Handbook. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York, 2001. Pei, Minxin. From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union, Cambridge, MA., 1994.

A Select Bibliography

309

Perrie, Maureen. The Cult of Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia, New York, 2001. Pipes, Richard. The Russian Revolution, New York, 1990. . Russia under the Bolshevik Regime, Volume II, New York, 1993. Pohl, J. Otto. Ethnic Cleansing in the USSR, 1937–1949, Westport, CT, 1999. Pokrovsky, M.N. History of Russia from the Earliest Times to the Rise of Commercial Capitalism, translated and edited by J.D. Clarkson and M.R.M. Griffiths, New York, London, 1931. . Brief History of Russia, translated by D.S. Mirsky, two volumes, New York, 1933. Pryce-Jones, David. The War That Never Was: The Fall of the Soviet Empire 1985–1991, London, 1995. Rabinowitch, Alexander and Janet with Ladis K.D. Kristof, eds. Revolution and Politics in Russia. Essays in Memory of B.I. Nicolaevsky, Bloomington and London, 1972. . The Bolsheviks Come to Power, London, 1979. Radzinsky, E. Stalin, London, 1996. Reed, John. Ten Days That Shook theWorld, NewYork, 1919; Harmondsworth, 1966. Rosenstone, Robert A. Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed, New York, 1981. Ross, Edward Allsworth. The Russian Bolshevik Revolution, New York, 1921. Salisbury, Harrison. The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, London, 1969. . Black Night,White Snow: Russia’s Revolutions 1905–1917, London, 1978. Sanders, Thomas, ed. Historiography of Imperial Russia. The Profession and Writing of History in a Multinational State, Armonk, NewYork and London, 1999. Schapiro, Leonard. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, second edition, revised and enlarged, London, 1970. Service, Robert. Russia: Experiment with a People. From 1991 to the Present, Basingstoke and Oxford, 2002. . A History of Modern Russia from Nicholas II to Putin, London, 2003. . Stalin: A Biography, London, 2005. Shteppa, Konstantin F. Russian Historians and the Soviet State, New Brunswick, NJ, 1962. Smith, Edward Ellis. TheYoung Stalin:The EarlyYears of an Elusive Revolutionary, London, 1968. Smith, Stephen A. Red Petrograd: Revolution in the Factories 1917–18, Cambridge, 1983. Slovo, Gillian. Ice Road, London, 2005. Sukhanov, N.N. The Russian Revolution, 1917, edited, abridged and translated by Joel Carmichael, London, 1955. Trotsky, Leon. The Russian Revolution. The Overthrow of Tzarism and the

310

A Select Bibliography

Triumph of the Soviets, selected and edited by F.W. Dupee, translated by Max Eastward, New York, 1959. . My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, New York, 1970. . 1905, translated by Anya Bostock, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1973. Tucker, Robert. Stalin in Power:The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941, New York, 1990. Tumarkin, Nina. The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, New York, 1994. Viola, Lynn. Peasant Rebels under Stalin: Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance, New York, 1996. Volkogonov, Dmitri. Autopsy for an Empire. The Seven Leaders Who Built the Soviet Regime, edited and translated by Harold Shukman, New York, 1998. . Stalin, Triumph and Tragedy, London, 1991. Walker, Martin. TheWaking Giant:The Soviet Union under Gorbachev, London, 1988. Werth, Alexander. Russia at War, 1941–1945, New York, 1964. Wolfe, Bertram D. Three Who Made a Revolution: A Biographical History, Harmondsworth, 1966.

Index

Abramovich, R., and Yeltsin’s ruling group, the ‘family’, 261 Abuladze, T., 103 Academic Affair, Case No. 1803, 4, 35 Academic titles after the revolution, 27 Academy of Sciences, Russian Federation, 259, 291 Academy of Sciences, USSR, 35, 37 Adler, N., on amnesia about Stalinist period, 272–3 Afanas’ev, Iu., 98–99, 101, 102, 180 Aganbegian, A., 95 Aganbegian Centre, 95 Aleksandrov, A., and Soviet national anthem, 274 Alisher, U., and Kommersant, Gazprom, 260 All-Russian Democratic Conference, 158 All-Russian Public Opinion Centre (VTsIOM), 261

Anthem (s), Soviet and Russian national, 273, 274–5 Arbatov, G., advisor to M. S. Gorbachev, 95 Archives, Russian, Soviet: 225, 213; after the demise, 245–57; destruction of material in, 239–44; main repositories, 228, 246–7, 254–5; military, 253–4; official policies towards, 229–32, 244, 249–50, 251; working conditions in, for Soviet citizens, 231–2; for non-Soviet citizens, 232–5; conditions in 1960s, 90, postdemise, 255 Argumenty i fakty, 100 Berezovskii, B., and Kommersant, 260; andYeltsin’s ruling group, the ‘family’, 261 Beria, L. P., and destruction of archival material, 240, 241

312

Index

Billington, J., characterizations of writing on 1917, 198 Black, C.E., viii Black Repartition group, 137 Brandenberger, D.L., 69, 70 Brezhnev, L., 90, 178, 179, 242; regime, aspects of, 91 Bogdanov, A.A., and Pokrovskii, 39 Bolshevik, 60 Bolshevik historians before 1917, 26 Boltin, I.N., eighteenth-century historian, 6 Bor’ba klassov, 36–37, 42, 81 Bubnov, A.S., posts held, 143; party history, 143; 57, 65, 70, 142, 159, 161 Bukharin, N.I.: 169, 198; and Short Course in the History of the USSR, 1937, 66 Bulletin of the Presidential Archive, 250 Burdzhalov, E.N., 85, 89, 156 Burganov, A., and ban on factions in the Communist Party, 1921, 106 Burtin, Iu., and Dolutskii, National History:Twentieth Century, 264 Byloie, 136 Censorship, 101–103 Central State Archive of Ancient Documents (TsGADA— RGADA), 234, 235 Chebrikov, V.M., Chairman, KGB, 179 Chechens, Chechnya, 263, 264, 265, 268 Chernomyrdin, V., and competition for a new Idea of Russia, 1996, 281–2 Chernov, V., The Great Russian Revolution, 200–01 Chernyi peredel, 137 Chicherin, B.N., imperial Russian histrorian, xiii, 8, 9

Civil War, Russia, 105, 106 Cold War, x, xvi, 124 Collectivization, agriculture, Archival documents on, publication of, 1989, 115 features and aims, 106 fictional literature about, 115–6 Group on the History of the Soviet Peasantry: Ivnitskii, N., Zelenin, I., 113; The Collectivization of Agriculture in the Soviet Union 1927–1932, 1964, 113; withdrawal of draft manuscript of, 1964, 115 peasant resistance to, 109 treatment in Party History, 107–10 treatment in the Short Course, 107–10 Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros SSSR), 28, 29; Narkompros RSFSR, 57 Commission on the History of the October Revolution and the History of the Communist Party (Istpart), 27, 135–6, 174 Communist Academy, 31, 35, 37 Conferences, Communist Party: Seventh, 157; Thirteenth, 168 Congresses, Communist Party: Fifteenth, 168; Fourteenth, 168, 176; Seventeenth, 168, 241–2; Sixth, 157, 158; Tenth, 168; Thirteenth, 174, 176; Twelfth, 168; Twentieth, xv, 143, 46–8, 172, 178, 230, 241, 242; Twenty-First, 231; Twenty-Fourth, 90; TwentySecond, 51, 152, 177, 178, 230; Twenty-Seventh, 105; Twenty-Third, 88, 91 Conquest R., and Stalin, representation of, 1958, 86;

Index

Daniels, R.V., Red October: The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, 210–11; 220 Danilov, A., historian, textbook author, 269 Danilov,V.P., historian of agriculture, 85, 89, 103, 115; and archives, 252; career, 114; as head of Group on the History of the Soviet Peasantry..,, 1958, 113; kandidat thesis, 1954, 114; works on collectivization, 1956, 1957, 114; 1970s, 115; 1988, 116 Davies, R. W., vii; and rules of work in Soviet archives, 234; and Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution, 1989, ix; and Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era, ix Debates, trade union and partystate, 1920–21, 170; in party histories, 169 Deich, L., Social Democrat, 137 Democratic Centralist group, 170, 171 DeStalinization: in 1950s, 176–7, 187; in 1960s, 87, 178; in 1970s, 88, 178; in 1980s, 91, 98, 179; and Memorial Society, 104 Deutscher, I.: awareness of Party’s history among members, and falsification of Party history, 139; on the Russian Revolution, 181; on the Short Course, 146; on Trotsky’s interpretation of party’s history, 1917, 139; on Trotsky, The Russian Revolution, 203–4 Diachenko, T., and Yeltsin’s ruling group, the ‘family’, 261 Dmitrenko, V.P., and school history textbook, 259, 270 Dolutskii, I., and National History: Twentieth Century, xvii, 258,

313

263–266, 276, 278, 279, 294; on patriotism, 293 Drabkin, I.S., Soviet historian, 83– 84; n. 93, p. 84 Drobyzhev,V.Z., Soviet historian, 100 Druzhba narodov, 100 Dubrovskii, S.M., Soviet historian, and Pokrovskii, 49, 51–52 Dubrovsky, A.M., 69, 70 Dunaevskii, V.A., Soviet historian, and criticism of Stalin’s letter of 1931, 87 Dzerzhinskii, F.E., founder, Cheka, 159, 161, 166 Education, Russian Federation, Conception for Modernization of, 2001, 266; Law on, 1992, features, 265–6, 287; problems in, Russian Federation, 288– 90; Federal Expert Council on, 291, 292–3; Programme for the Patriotic Education of, 2005, 275–6 Ehrenberg, I., writer and journalist, 76, 125 Eisenstat, B., and Pokrovskii, 50–51 El-Registan, G., and Soviet national anthem, 274 Émigré historians, after 1917, 25 Fainsod, M., Smolensk under Soviet Rule, 215 Famines: 1921, 171; 1932–33, 110– 113; kept secret from Soviet population, 112; and reporting by Soviet historians, from 1964, 114; and Zelenin, I., 113 Ferro, M., October 1917, 220–21 Fest, J., and the Holocaust, 268–9 Fifteenth Congress of the Party, 168 Fitzpatrick, S., 182 Fourteenth Congress of the Party, 168, 176

314

Index

Fradkin, M., Prime Minister, Russian Federation, 296 Gazprom, 259–60, 262 Gefter, M., and Sector of Methodology, 87 Glasnost’: historical fiction, 105–6; and literary journals, 100; new editors of journals, 101; exploration of historical themes, 103; revolution, studies of, 189; Trotsky studies, 130 Glavarkhiv’ (Main Archive Administration, MAA), 26, 226–8, 229, 231, 235, 246, 247, 253 Glavlit, see Censorship. Gorbachev, M.S., 275 and agenda for history, xv, 96–98 and archives, 228, 249, 252 (see also Presidential Archive) and NEP, 105–6 and reform proposals, 95; and reform reports, 1980s, 95 and whitewashing the crimes of Stalin, xviii Gorky, M. P., 160 Graham, L., 35 Granin, D., writer, 103 Grimsted, P., 26–27 Grossman,V., The Black Book, 124–5; Vse techet, (Forever Flowing), 106; Zhizn’ i sud’ba (Life and Fate), 121–4; other works of and on, 129 Group for the Emancipation of Labour, 137, 138 GULAG, 228, 252, 263, 266, 267, 269, 270, 277; state museum on, 271 Gusinskii, V., and Media-MOST group, 259

Habermas, J., and the Holocaust, 268 Historians, and the Purges, 35, 36 Historical Institute of the Academy of Sciences, 37 Historical materialism, x Historical Revolutionary Archive, 137 History, as subject for university entrance examination, EGE, 285–6 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1959, 148, 149– 151 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1962, xv History in schools, during the early NEP, 33; reintroduction of, in late NEP, 57; in 1980s, 130– 33; after 2003, 284; new textbooks for, 1934, 58–59; decrees of May and August 1934, 59 History textbooks, schools, 1930s, 70; 1980s, 131–33; 1990s, 283–4, 290–91; after 2000, 281, 294 Hobsbawm, E., on historians and nationalism, 293 Holocaust, xiii, 268; German debate on, 268–9, 270 Hyde, M., and Stalin, role in Pravda, 155 Iakovlev, A., advisor to M.S. Gorbachev, 95, 100, 105, 118, 179, 270, 275 Iakovlev, E., editor, 95 Iaroslavskii, Em., 142; career of, 142–3; and Istpart, and author of party histories, 135; co-author of the Short Course, 145 Ilyichov, L.F., and Pokrovskii, 51

Index

Institute of Economics and Industrial Organization, 95 Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 37, 82, 85, 87, 179, 229, 235, 252 Institute of Marxism-Leninism, 231, 246 Institute of Red Professors (IRP), xiv, 29–30, 35, 37, 43, 55 Institute for Trade Union History, 27 Istochnik, 244 Istoricheskii arkhiv’, 230, 255, 256, 257 Istoricheskii zapiski, 86 Istoricheskii zhurnal’, 81, 82, 116 Istoricheskii zhurnal’ Istparta, 136 Istorik Marksist, 32, 37, 41, 56 Iunost’, and the Civil War, 105 Ivan IV, Eisenstein, and film on, 61; historical treatment of, 63–64, 68; refurbishment of record of , 60; reign of , 62–63; Shostakovich, D., and opera on, 61; Tolstoy, A., and novel on, 61; and Vipper, R. Iu., 61. Ivanov, S., on Soviet historians, 89– 90 Ivnitskii, N., historian, 113–4, 115 Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 115, 256 Kagarlitskii, B., 285, 287 Kamenev, L.B., Old Bolshevik, 57, 158, 160, 161, 169, 175, 176, 223 Kasianov, M., Prime Minister, Russian Federation, 259 Kavelin, K.D., imperial Russian historian, xiii, 8, 63 Karamzin, N.K., imperial Russian historian, xiii, 63; historical works, 6–8 Katyn Forest, killing of Poles in, 1940, 126–8, 238, 265, 272

315

Kautsky, K., German Marxist, 52– 53 Keep. J.L.H.: The Russian Revolution, 212–4; 210; on Soviet histories of 1917, 187. Kerenskii, A., 190, 198; works on 1917, 198–200; on Tsar Nicholas, 207 Khataevich, M.M., 145 Khrushchev, N.S., and archives, purge of, 241–2; on historians, 149; and monument to victims of Terror, 87; and the Purges, 242; and the Short Course, 146–7; and speech, Twentieth Party Congress, 143, 172, 178, 242; and Stalin’s crimes, 94 Kirov, S.M., 35, 59, 172, 263 Kizevetter, A., Russian historian, 13 Klimov, E., and Union of Film Makers, 101 Kliuchevskii, V.O., imperial Russian historian, xiii, 3, 36, 39, 63, 81; historical works, 10–13; Kliuchevskii school, 16; and Miliukov, 16–17; and Semevskii, 15 Knorin, V., Old Bolshevik, 142, 145 Kolchak, Admiral A.V., 166 Kollontai, A., Bolshevik leader, 195– 6, 198, 221 Kommersant, 260 Kommunist, 230 Korotich, V., editor, 95, 100 Kotkin, S., on Soviet censorship, 102 Kozlov, V.A., historian, 183 Krasnyi arkhiv’, 227 Krupskaia, N., Bolshevik leader, 175 Kryshtanovskaia, O., and analysis of Russian Federation elite, 261– 2 Kultura i zhizn’, 82

316

Index

Kundera, M., 293 Kuraev, M., and novella Kapitan Dikshtein, 1987, 105 Lenin, V.I.: 160, 199, 200, 211 April Theses, 158; Collected Works, 136, 160 Archive of, 235 Lenin Institute (LI), 27, 31, 37 Lenin Library, 31 mnogoukladnost’, (multiformity), 187, 188 and private trade, legalization of, 170 Testament, 174, n. 85, p. 176 Leningrad, siege of, 267–8 Lesser Evil, theory of, 74–76, 86 Lessons of October, 139, 140 Lomakin, A., and Pokrovskii, 49–50 Literaturnaia gazeta, 99, 100 Liubavskii, M.K., Russian historian, xiv, 13, 227; and emergence of feudalism in Russia, 17, 18; historical works, 18 Loginov, V., historian, 100 Lunacharskii, A., Bolshevik leader, 33, 39 Luxemburg, R., 52–53; and Stalin, 54 Markwick, R.D., 83, 85, 88, 114 Marsh, R., and Grossman, Vse techet, 106 Marx-Engels Institute (MEI), 30– 31, 37 Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, 37, 56 Marxist theory as propaganda, x Mazour, A.G., TheWriting of History in the Soviet Union, 1971, 93 Media, state control of, Russian Federation, 259–60 Medvedev, D., Russian politician, 260

Medvedev, R., 118, 294; and Medvedev, Z., 124 Medvedev, V., 118 Melgunov, S.P., The Bolshevik Seizure of Power, 210 Memorial Society, xviii, 104, 269; activity in Russian Federation after 2000, 271–2 Menon, K.P.S., and meeting Stalin, 1952, 173 Merridale, C., and famine of 1932– 33, 112–13; Ivan’s War, 128; and Second World War, 125– 6; on historical memory in Russian Federation, after 2000, 272; on histor y in Russian schools, after 2000, 284–5 Manotskov, P., on teaching history in schools, 294 Mikhalkov, S., and Soviet national anthem, 274 Mikoian, A.I., Communist leader147, 186, 246 Miliukov, P., Russian historian and political leader, 13, 25, 194, 198; historical works, xiv, 16–17; 200, 201 Milonov, Iu. K., and Institute for Trade Union History, 27 Mints, I.I., 55–56; The History of Great October, 187 Mongait, A.L., New Directions group, 88 Mozhaev, B., writer, 103 Muller, G.F., German historian, 5–6 Museum of the Revolution, 31 Narochnitskii, A., historian, 89 Narodnaia volia, 137 National Projects, Russian Federation, 2005, 286–7

Index

National Unity Day, see Revolution, commemoration of, Day of Nechkina, M.V. historian, and Ivan IV, 60; and Kliuchevskii, 2; lesser evil, theory of, 75; Nekrich, A.M., xiv; and career of, 79–80; and June 22, 1941, 78– 79; Nekrich Affair, 80 Nevskii, V., career and historical works, 136–7 New Directions group of historians, 187 Nikolaevskii, B., 30; organization of Soviet archives, 226 Nolte, E., and the Holocaust, 268 Nove, A., and famine of 1932–33, 111 Novy mir, 100 Oil Stabilization Fund, Russian Federation, 287–88 Okhotin, N., historian, 271–2 Oktiabr’, 100 Olminskii, M.S., 27; and Istpart, 135 Orlov, A., and school histor y textbooks, 291–2 Orwell, G., on history, 73 Owen, W., on the ‘pity of war’, 105 Pamyat, 104 Pankratova, A.M., historian, 32, 43; 59–60, 183; and History of the U.S.S.R., 1948, 65; and prerevolutionary historians, 81; Partiinost’, 93, 184–5 Party histories, 134, 180, 142; titles of, n. 11, p. 141 Party members, education of, 144 Pasternak, B., and Doctor Zhivago, 105, 123 Peasantry and Imperial Russian historians, 14 Perrie, M., and Ivan IV, 60–61

317

Peter the Great, and historical treatment of, 61, 64–65, 68 Pikhoia, R.F., administration of archives, 239, 247–8, 250, 252; 257 Pipes, R., xvi; works on 1917, 222–4 Platonov, S.F., historian, 3, 25, 63, and MAA, 227 Plekhanov, G.V., 137, 148; historical views, 19, 20, 21, 22–23; on 1917, 187 Pogodin, M.P., imperial Russian historian, 8 Pokrovskii, M.N., xiv, 137 and archives, administration of 227 and career, 38–43 and commercial capitalism, 46– 48, 60; attack on, 48–51, 74; reinstatement of, 51–52 and Essays on the History of the October Revolution, and on 1917, 187 and Essays on the History of Russian Culture, 40 and historical methodologies, 44– 45, 57; attack on, 50–51 and importance of, before the revolution, 23 and Institute of Red Professors, 29 and lesser evil, theory of, 76 and Plekhanov, G.V., 19–20 and pre-revolutionary historians, 2, 20–22 and posts held, 27, 41 and the Purge of historians, 1929, 3, 34 and the Pokrovskii school, 35, 43–44 and Russian Histor y from the Earliest Times, 39, 46 and Russian History in Briefest Outline, 40–41

318

Index

and Russo-centrism, 71–72 and Trotsky, L.D.,48–49 Poland, campaign of 1920, 167 Polevoi, N.A., imperial Russian historian, 8 Politburo Archive, Special Files, 238, 239 Politkovskaia, A.S., journalist, 260 Ponomarev, B.N., Communist leader, 2, 85, 142, 148 Poskrebyshev, A., Stalin’s aide, 256– 7 Pospelov, P.N., Party historian, 145 Postyshev, P.P., on access to archives, 229 Preobrazhenskii, Ye., A.., Bolshevik leader, 158 Presidential Archive, 228, 236, 238, 239, 244, 246, 249, 250, 252 Presniakov, A.E., historian, xiv, 3; and archives after 1917, 225; and emergence of feudalism in Russia, 17–18 Primakov, E., adviser to M. S. Gorbachev, 95 Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 52, 56, 136 Purges, Terror, 172, 263, 265, 266, 267; Presidential Commission on Rehabilitation of victims of Political Repression, 269; 270 Putin, V. V., xiii, attitudes to Soviet histor y, 282–3; speech to scholars, 2003, 258–9; 263, 264; on historical memory, 293; on the Holocaust and the GULAG, 2003, 270, 277; and national anthem, 2001, 275; world war two, call for objective histories of, 2005, 279 Rabinowitch, A., The Bolsheviks Come To Power, 211–2 Raeff, M., and Kliuchevskii, 13 Rakhmetov, V., historian, 49

RANION, (Russian Association of Scientific Research Institutions in the Social Sciences), xiv, 28–29, 35, 37, 43 Revisionist historians, xvi, 216–9, n. 72, pp. 218–9 Reed, John: activity in Russia, 1919– 20, 198; Ten Days That Shook the World, 191–2, 192–7; and Lenin, xvi, 197; and Stalin, 1917, 161; and Trotsky, 197 Revolution, commemoration of, Day of, after the demise of the USSR, 273–4 Revolution, Russian, xii, October 1917 (OS): early Soviet histories of, 185–6; early Western understanding of, 190 191, 209–10; Marxist/ Soviet understanding of, 182– 4; significance of, 181; in the Short Course, 159 Riazanov, D., historian, archivist, 30, 227 Roginskii, A., historian, Memorial Society, 104, 269 Roskomarkhiv’ (Russian State Committee on Archival Affairs), 228, 247, 252; as Rosarkhiv’, 247–8, 251, 253 Rostropovich, M., cellist, and ‘Stalin hymn’, 275 Rozhkov, N.A., xiv, 26; historical works, 18–19 Russia, competition for a new Idea of Russia, 1996, 281–2; diverse ethnicities in, 295–6 Russian feudalism, idea of, 22, 45– 46, 60 and Marx and Engels, 45 and Pavlov-Sil’vanskii, N.P., 22 and Pokrovskii, M.N., 48 and Syromiatnikov, B.I., 22 and Vladimirskii-Budanov, 45

Index

Russo-centric themes in historical literature, 71–73 Rybakov, A., writer, 103 Sakharov, A., Andrei Sakharov Museum, 270 Salisbury, H., 1917, in Black Night, White Snow, 207; Siege of Leningrad, in The 900 Days, 268 Samodurov, Iu., Andrei Sakharov Museum, 270 Schapiro, L., on the Short Course, 144=5; on the value of party histories, 141; on their value for Stalin, 134. Scherbakova, I. Memorial society, xviii, 272 Schlapentokh, D., on the rise of Russian sub-nationalism, 295 Schlozer, A-L., German histo0rian, 5–6 Schools of History/ historiography, St. Petersburg and Moscow, xiii, 2–4, Secret Police: institutional history, n. 36, p, 240; NKVD, xvii, 173, 228, 240, 245, 267; OGPU, 4, 109, 252, 269; Okhrana, 185, 226 Sector of Methodology, 1964–8, 87– 88 Seliunin, V., and collectivization, agriculture, 116; and War Communism, 105 Semevskii, V.I., xiii-xiv; historical works, 14–16 Sergievskii, N., position and historical works, 137 Serov, I., Chairman, KGB, 241, 242 Service, R., on need for a party history, 143 Seton-Watson, H., and Russian expansion, 74–75

319

Seventeenth Congress of the Party, 168, 241–2 Shatrov, M., 103; and This is HowWe Conquer, 106 Shchegolev, P.E., historian, 136, 226 Shelepin, A.N., Chairman, KGB, 241 Sherlock, T., and Gorbachev’s agenda for history, 97 Shestakov, A.V., and A Short History of the U.S.S.R., 1938, 64–65, 67 Shestidesiatniki, 85 Shliapnikov, A., Bolshevik leader, 156, 164, 169, 185, 195, 196 Shmelev, G.I., and collectivization, dekulakisation, 1988, 116 Short Course (Short Course on the History of the Communist Party (Bolshevik), 1938, 146, xv, 88, 89, 90, 138, 144, 141, 179, 180, 184, 186; critique of, in Voprosy istor ii, 148–9; descriptions of, in Stalin’s Short Biography, in Voprosy istorii, 145; enabling decree, 143–4; repudiation of, 148 Short Course in the History of the USSR, for Schools, 1937, 65–70 Shteppa, K., and Lesser Evil Formula, viii Sidorov, A.L., and collectivization studies, 113; and Pokrovskii, 51 Siloviki, 258, 259, 261–2, 297. See also Kryshtanovskaia, O. Silver Age, 1 Simonov, K., writer, 76–77, 118–9, 121 Sixth Congress of the Party, 157 Slutskii, A.G., historian, and Proletarskaia revoliutsiia article, 52–53 Smirnov, I., and Soviet archives, 1960s, 230

320

Index

Smolensk Archive, 215–6 Snesarev, A., Red Army commander, 165 Social Democracy, 136 Socialism In One Country, 72 Socialist Academy for the Social Sciences, later Communist Academy, 27–28 Society of Former Political Prisoners and Penal Exiles, 31 Society of Marxist Historians (SMH), xiv, 31–32, 36–37, 43, 55, 143 Solov’ev, S.M., imperial Russian historian, xiii, 8, 36, 63, 81; historical works, 9–10 Solzhenitsyn, A.: 179; One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, 178; The Gulag Archipelago, 263 Soviet archive, xii Soviets, First All-Russian Congress of, 157, 168; First All-Union Congress of, 168; Second, 168 Stakhanov, A., miner, 169 Stalin, I, I., and capture and execution by Germans, 120 Stalin, J.V., and activity in 1917, 158; in Civil War, 164–7 and archive of, 236, 237, 238, 239, 244 and attack on school history textbooks, 1934, 57–58 and coffin in Lenin Mausoleum, 177–8 and collectivization, agriculture, 113 and Eisenstein, S., film director, 61 and famine of 1932–33, 113 and Foundations of Leninism, 140 in Lenin’s Testament, 174 and national anthem, 1943, 274

and Problems of Leninism, 140 and letter to Proletarskaia revoliutsiia, 36, 53–56; criticism of, 87 and rejection of Marxist historical categories, xiv, 57–58 and personality cult of, 173–4, 176, 177 and Peter the Great, 64 and positions held, n. 80, p. 173 and Short Course, chapter in, 145, 152 and socialism in one country, theory of, 138, 140, 158–159 and stand in early 1917, 156 and Trotskyism, 55 and Works (and Sochineniia, Collected Works), 236–7 and World War Two, significance for Soviet power, 1943, 276; camps for returnee Soviet troops, 277–8 and Za Leninizm, contribution in, and regarding Trotsky’s role in October revolution, 138–9, 140 State Archive of the Russian Federation (GA RF), 248–9 State school of historiography, 8–9 Stetskii, A.I., historian, 57, 65 Sukhanov, N., Social Democrat, 160, 161; The Russian Revolution, 201–2 Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh), 171 Surkov, V., Presidential adviser, V.V. Putin, xiii Suslov, M., Communist leader, career, aspects of, 124–5; and Life and Fate, 121, 123 Sverdlov Communist University, 37, 43 Sverdlov, Ye, M., Bolshevik leader, 159, 161

Index

Tatischev, V.N., xiii; historical works, 4–5 Teterina, S., on school histor y textbooks, 2006, 294 Thirteenth Party Congress, 174, 176 Tikhonov, N., Communist leader, 179 Time of Troubles, 1605–13, 273 Tomsinskii, S., and Pokrovskii, 49 Totalitarian model, xvi, 214, 215 Trapeznikov, S.P., historian, 87, 89, 90, 101, 102, 188 Trotsky, L.D.: 138, 164, 165, 169, 195, 196, 197, 200, 221, 263 and activity in 1917, Military Revolutionary Committee, 160 and advocacies in 1918, 1920, 138 and Lenin’s Testament, 174, 175– 6 and long – term view of Russian history, 23 and Moscow, revolution in, 1917, 195 and permanent revolution, theory of, 138, 140, 205 on Reed, John The Russian Revolution, 203–9; 186, 194 and socialism in one country, theory of, 140 on Stalin, 208–9 and studies of, glasnost’, 130 on Sukhanov, N., and his The Russian Revolution, 202 on trade unions, 1920–21, 170 Works, 1924, 139 and Zinoviev and Kamenev, 1917, depiction of, in Lessons of October, 140 Tseretelli. I., history of 1917, 201 Tsiurupa, A., Bolshevik leader, 164 Tucker, R., and Ivan IV and Peter the Great, 61

321

Tukhahevskii, M. N., Soviet military commander, 166 Tutiukhin, S.V., historian, 102–3 Tvardovskii, A., writer – poet, 128 Tenth Congress of the Party, 168 Twelfth Congress of the Party, 168 Twentieth Congress of the Party, xv, 143, 146–8, 172, 186, 230, 241, 242 Twenty-First Congress of the Party, 231 Twenty-Fourth Congress of the Party, 90 Twenty-Second Congress of the Party, 51, 152, 177, 230 Twenty-Seventh Congress of the Party, 105 Twenty-Third Congress of the Party, 88, 91 Ustinov, D.F., Communist leader, 179 Uritskii, M.S., Old Bolshevik, 159, 161 Vestnik drevnei istorii, 86 Voprosy istorii KPSS, 86 Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii 49 Vilenskii, S., historian, 269 Vinogradov, P., historian, 39 Vipper, R. Iu., historian, 61, 64 Volkogonov, D., General and historian, 237, 241; and Russian archives, 250; and Soviet archives, 239; on Stalin, 173; and history of World War Two, 237; and Triumph andTragedy, 1988, 119 Volobuev, P.V., historian, 89, 103, 181, 183, 187, 188 Voprosy istorii, 51, 75, 82, 86, 89, 90, 103, 116, 145, 148

322

Index

Voprosy istorii KPSS, 79 Walker, M., on lifting of censorship, 102 War Communism, 105 Wolfe, B., on party histories, 142 Workers’ Opposition group, 170, 171 World War Two Significance of, 276, 279–80; Archives on, 253–4; deaths in, 277; in Soviet schools, 125, 276–7; early Soviet reverses, 278–9; and Soviet historians, 77–78, 80, 116, 268; and Soviet writers, during the war, 76; in 1980s and later, 121, 129–30; Order Numbers 227 and 270, 119–20; SovietGerman Pacts, 1939, secret protocols of, 238; terms of and debate on, 116–8, 120; treatment in Dolutskii’s history textbook, 265, 276, 278

Yavlinskii, G., Russian politician, 264 Yeltsin, B.N.: 179, 237, 259, 261; and archives, 228, 238 (Presidential Commission, Archives), 239, 244, 249, 250; history in schools, 280–1 Zagladin, N., and The History of Russian and the World in the Twentieth Century, xvii, 258, 266–8, 276, 279, 294 Za Leninizm, 138, 140 Zaslavskaia, T., sociologist, 95, 99 Zelenin, I., historian, 113–4 Zhdanov, A.A., Soviet leader.57, 59, 65, 67; and lesser evil, theory of, 75; and Zhdanovshchina, 124 Zinina, Y., and Dolutskii, National History:Twentieth Century, 265 Zinoviev, G. Ye., Old Bolshevik, lectures on party history, 1923, 139; 158, 160, 161, 169, 175, 176, 223