Death and Redemption – Reforging, Reeducation, Redemption

Posted on May 17, 2012 by Steve Barnes

So many interesting posts in this discussion, I feel like I could write an entire article responding to all  of it. Here, I want to try to address some issues brought up initially by Jeff Hardy and in the comments of Wilson Bell (two of the best and brightest among the young Gulag historians) and then expanded on by others. (I must say, also, that Jeff often explains my book’s argument better than I do.) Each writing independent of the other, they raised similar questions about the book’s argument focused on whether and to what extent the “redemption” of the book’s title really matters in practice at the local level. I believe Jeff’s and Wilson’s comments, amplified by others, represent the most spot-on critiques of my book I have ever read and represent what I hope the next generation of Gulag histories will help us better understand.

What I hoped to do with the book, and what I think I have accomplished judging from the collected comments here, was to change the conversation about the Gulag and the role that it played in the Soviet Union. I wanted us to understand the Gulag was much more complex than Anne Applebaum would have it. I wanted us to think about more than the merely repressive or merely economic elements of the Gulag, while never forgetting the repressive and the economic in our analysis. I wanted us to start thinking about the Gulag as a penal system both similar to other modern detention institutions but with its own Soviet particularities.1 When we learned in the late 1980s and early 1990s that a huge percentage of the Gulag population was released every year and that a minority of Gulag prisoners were politicals, previous explanations for the Gulag’s role in the Soviet Union seemed, if not wrong, certainly incomplete. Understanding what these new facts meant for our understanding of the Gulag has driven my research for more than a decade. Who was released, and when, and why? Who was not released? Did Soviet authorities care what became of the millions who would spend time in the camps but then return to Soviet society? Continue reading →

  1. In this, I stand on the shoulders of giants, following a raft of scholarship from the last twenty years that pushed us to see late imperial Russia and the Soviet Union as part of the broader Euro-American development of a modern political system rather than something sui generis, while maintaining sensitivity to the particularities of the Russian/Soviet version of this modernity. ↩
Posted in Death and Redemption, Gulag, Soviet Era 1917-1991 | 2 Comments

Death and Redemption-More on Reforging

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Deborah Kaple

I am so enjoying this discussion, and I wish I weren’t leaving for a month (to Moscow, of course) in 2 days. I regret that all the business of getting properly packed has kept me away from this wonderful conversation.

In any case, I have read all the great comments, and what I wanted to talk about is Steve’s focus on Bolshevik ideals and his interest in “reforging.” Until this point I had felt that the Bolshevik ideals had melted away as the expediency of work and plans and then the war took over. I had no idea that the Gulag administrators had held on to these earlier ideals, and even took seriously the type of writing we saw in Belomor. To find out that Steve finds evidence of this sort of talk in the Karlag files is very important. It gives us a glimpse at the work of the political officers who were everywhere in the Gulag. Before this, I never had a feel for their real role aside other than preparing propaganda posters and exhibits.

Reading Miriam’s thoughtful comments made me realize that I too totally buy Steve’s argument that the reason for the existence and even endurance of the Gulag had to have been more political than economic. But like Jeff mentions in his excellent posting, I find this a very difficult point to prove. I mean, it’s fascinating to see that within the walls of the Gulag there were attempts at “reforging” going on, but my question is: to what end? And why do we not see mention of it in the memoir literature? Admittedly, we have all thought about the flaws and drawbacks in relying on memoirs, and I have not read that entire literature, but I cannot recall any descriptions of the actual work that the political officers did with the prisoners, or the results of this work. I would be interested to see that.

The reason I’m thinking about this is that I’ve studied the Chinese Gulag (the Laogai), which has its roots in the Soviet system. All I have been able to find out is that the Chinese imported the Gulag “model” in the early 1950s during the famous period of friendship and cooperation. (My favorite slogan from that time is “Let’s Be Modern and Soviet!”) The two systems are shockingly alike in their structure and function. However, there are definitely differences between the Gulag and the Laogai, the most important of which is that the Chinese Laogai is still functioning and actually producing goods that make money for the Chinese economy. The other difference is that still being a functioning Communist government, they successfully keep a lid on any files or data about the Laogai. It is basically a forbidden topic.

But, the most important difference is that there exist Laogai survivor memoirs (and there are not anywhere near as many of  them), in which the survivors write a lot about the “reforging” that took place in the Chinese Gulag. The most well-known writer, the Solzhenitsyn of the Laogai, if you will, is Harry (Hongda) Wu. He was arrested as a “rightist” in kind of a mass craziness sort of like the Great Purges called The Hundred Flowers. In any case, in the middle of a mass meeting to criticize him at his workplace, a uniformed Public Security officer appeared to announce: “I sentence the counterrevolutionary rightist Wu Hongda to reeducation through labor.” (45) He was forced to confess that he was indeed a rightist, and once he was incarcerated in the Laogai, he was told that his entire family had denounced him. The political officer then said to him: “You must study Mao Zedong thought very hard, reform yourself diligently, and become a new socialist person.” (57)

Later, after being worked over constantly “to reform his thoughts,” he thinks about the old Chinese custom of footbinding. “We have switched to headbinding…they bind a person’s thoughts instead. That way ideas all take on the same size and shape, and thinking becomes impossible. That’s why they arrested me. That’s why they want to change me, that’s why they force me to reform.” (88)

Has this sort of blatant recording of actual “reforging” or “thought reform” appeared in the Soviet memoir literature? I’m totally ready to believe that I have missed it. But it would be so great to find some accounts of it. As Steve mentions somewhere in his book, the camps were all different, and they changed over time, too, so it seems to me that if this “reforging” work was being pushed at all by the Central Administration, it would show up in some memoir. Anybody?

Note: Citations from Wu, Harry, Bitter Winds: A Memoir of my Years in China’s Gulag (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1994).

Posted in Death and Redemption, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Death and Redemption

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Cynthia Ruder

All the entries by my colleagues in history have been informative, fascinating, and extremely useful for someone like me who operates outside the fold, as it were, of official Gulag scholarship.  I agree with the eloquent reviews written thusfar of Steve’s book, so my comments will not reflect so much a review, as certain points, themes, and ideas that resonate for me as someone who is, for better or for worse, taking an interdisciplinary approach to the Gulag with a special emphasis on questions of culture and space/place.

For me, what sets Steve’s book apart from Applebaum and Solzhenitsyn is a lack of preachiness or unquestioned moral authority that those works claim.  Rather, Steve uses all his sources to present an argument as to why the Gulag in general, and Karlag in particular operated as they did.  His focus on “re-education” or reforging is vital to my mind to understanding how the Gulag operated especially in the thirties and forties.  I agree with him that it was possible to be reforged/re-educated and that this was a means through which some inmates could be released.  As Jeff, Wilson, and Miriam all point out, the Gulag on paper and the Gulag in reality were often quite different things.  But what had gone unsaid prior to Steve’s book, at least in a historian’s book about the Gulag, is that this re-education could and did occur and that many people–inmates and re-educators alike–believed in it.  How well it worked is a different issue and I would argue that one person’s re-education is another’s capitulation to or manipulation of the system.

The whole process of re-education created both a “culture” of reforging and cultural products.  These products, the quality of which might be questionable, nonetheless lend further credence to the point Steve makes about the redemptive qualities of the camp system and the particular way in which the Gulag sought not to slaughter outright those deemed potentially irredeemable, but rather to return them to Soviet society as a whole.  Indeed, as simplistic as it might sound, the ability to read and write and to have some sort of trade beyond thieving or prostitution could have been adequate “re-education” for those who had neither prior to their time in the camps.

Posted in Death and Redemption | 4 Comments

Death and Redemption

Posted on May 16, 2012 by Miriam Dobson

Over the past eighteen months I have come to realise that I’m not an ideal blogger in the sense that I’m not always very good at checking the internet! I’ve been busily writing my first thoughts about Death and Redemption without realizing that the conversation had already started. So here are my reflections about Steve’s book and its contribution to the field of Gulag studies. Continue reading →

Posted in Death and Redemption, Gulag | 3 Comments

Death and Redemption – On Images

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Steve Barnes

First, I must thank my colleague and co-blogger Andrew Jenks for setting up this blog conversation here at Russian History Blog. As an academic author, I have found the wait for journal reviews of my book to be excruciating. The book came out almost exactly one year ago, and the first two reviews of the book appeared only in the last month. (Only this French review is available on the free web.) Immediacy is definitely something the blog conversation can uniquely provide.

It is a great honor to have this stellar cast gathered for this conversation. I find the praise overwhelming and flattering (“dean of Gulag studies“? wow!) and the critiques painful but also exhilarating and thought-provoking. Most of all, I am excited to see that the argument I tried to make in the book (warts and all) actually came through to the readers.

In an effort to facilitate this as “conversation”, I’ll respond intermittently to the readers’ comments rather than waiting for all to chime in. Here, I want to address the issue of images raised both by Deborah Kaple and Cynthia Ruder. Obviously, I can change nothing about the book now and I acknowledge that the book would have been improved with more images, but I can point now to some visual (and textual) evidence that might be useful to readers and to all of our students. I like Cynthia’s idea of creating auxiliary web material for the book, and it’s something I’ll think about doing. However, I would point out the availability of some freely available auxiliary material that may not be known to all. (For an extended discussion of materials available for teaching the Gulag, look at the posts by Wilson Bell and me at Teach History, Karl Qualls’ blog on teaching Russian history.)

I would point readers and students to the Gulag website created with my colleagues at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media here at George Mason University. In addition to a virtual exhibit, complete with visually-based original mini-documentaries, the site, especially in its archive, contains a wealth of visual evidence.The text search and the “browse by tag” function allows one to find materials by location, subject matter, person, etc.

In particular and in relation to Death and Redemption, I would like to point colleagues, readers, and students with Russian language skills to a selection of documents from the local Karlag archive in Karaganda.

As for a map of Karlag, it is easier said than done. Karlag, like most Gulag camps, did not occupy a single defined (let alone enclosed) space. It was diffuse with many different sub-camps located around the steppe of central Kazakhstan (not to mention the many “de-convoyed” prisoners who were herding animals around the steppe without residing in a particular camp zone and sometime even without the presence of an armed guard.) I try to describe the extent of the camp in the text by pointing out its outermost sub-camps, and I provided a map that located the most important geographic locales in Kazakhstan discussed in the book. To draw lines around the camp would be misleading as to how the camp was actually organized. (Here is a rather poor-quality version with credit to the cartographer Stephanie Hurter Williams.)

 

 

 

Posted in Death and Redemption, Gulag, Soviet Era 1917-1991, Stalinism, Teaching Russian History | 3 Comments

Death and Redemption—Theory and Practice

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Jeff Hardy

Though still a relatively young scholar (nine years since receiving his Ph.D.), Steve Barnes can rightfully be considered the dean of Gulag studies in the United States.  From his provocative 2003 dissertation, to his Gulag: Many Days Many Lives website, from his many public talks to his mentoring of other scholars, Steve has been at the forefront of all things Gulag over the past dozen years.  He organized a conference devoted to new interpretations of the Gulag, he helped facilitate a traveling Gulag exhibition put on by the National Parks Service and Gulag Museum in Perm, he has authored several scholarly articles, and his current slate of projects includes several devoted to Gulag themes.  I therefore consider it a privilege to review his latest and most important work, which is in my mind the most significant book on the Gulag since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago.  On the surface, it has much to recommend it against other works on the Soviet penal system.  It covers the entire Stalin era, plus a little beyond.  It is a detailed study of one location—Karlag—but it employs evidence from across the Gulag.  It is based evenly on archival and memoir sources, both of which are necessary to understand the Gulag phenomenon.  It covers a range of penal institutions.  And it explores both the theory and the practice of punishment in the Soviet Union.

The primary contribution of Death and Redemption is the author’s willingness to ask (and, of course, answer) a seemingly simple question: Why did the Soviet authorities spend enormous amounts of energy and resources “to replicate the Soviet social and cultural system within the Gulag?”  In other words, why not just kill the prisoners either through execution or through penal labor and use the resources on any number of other important priorities, rapid industrialization being chief among them.  Why go to such lengths to try to reform them into good Soviet citizens?  Certainly, millions of Soviet subjects were shot or worked to death in the camps of the Gulag, or left to die in the so-called special settlements.  But several times more survived confinement and returned to Soviet society having supposedly undergone the process of “reforging” or “re-education.”  To some this re-education process was a farce, lip service to Bolshevik identity that prisoners simply ignored or manipulated to their own advantage.  Barnes, while not dismissing such reactions to the re-education process, nonetheless accepts it as real, as tangible evidence that the Gulag represented not just the fears of Soviet socialism but its hopes and dreams as well.  Indeed, he views it as a crucial link for understanding in their full complexity the tensions inherent in the Soviet worldview, and, more narrowly, in their vision of criminal justice in a socialist society.

This understanding of the Gulag as a microcosm of Soviet society, with events, institutions, and relationships in the Gulag mirroring those outside the barbed wire, owes much to Solzhenitsyn, as Barnes readily acknowledges.  Yet Barnes views this not as an exclusively negative, repressive phenomenon as Solzhenitsyn does, but as a positive, constructive one.  It was perhaps not a moral system, but it operated within its own system of ethics that made sense to its practitioners.  From political indoctrination sessions to socialist slogans in the barracks, from literacy classes to musical performances, Gulag life was organized around this new socialist ethos.  And the most important part of this ethos and of Gulag life was labor.  It was the primary method and indicator of re-education, of the inmate’s readiness to return to a productive life outside the barbed wire.  Those who failed this critical test could have no place in Soviet society—they were slated for death.

For Barnes the tension between life and death, between redemption and guilt is summarized in this visual propaganda piece, which is described but unfortunately not included in the book:

Here a mock grave complete with coffin has been constructed for members of a prisoner labor brigade.  The crime, as depicted by several signs, each bearing a prisoner’s surname along with a percent—22%, 30%, 42%—was underperformance of the work quota.  Laziness.  The message is unmistakable: those who do not perform their labor duty are not submitting to re-education.  They will exit the Gulag not by release but by death.  Or as Barnes puts it: “In the harsh conditions of the Gulag, the social body’s filth would either be purified (and returned to the body politic) or cast out (through death).” (14)  What is important here is that both options—death and redemption—are appealing outcomes in the Soviet worldview.  Setting deadly violence alongside correction was not a contradiction, but an ideal.  It was not a perversion of socialism, it was not some sort of Stalinist deviation, it was how socialism was to be built.  This argument is the central tenet of the book and a significant departure from most other works on the Gulag, from Solzhenitsyn’s and Anne Applebaum’s memoir-based studies, to the more archivally-grounded works of Oleg Khlevniuk and Galina Ivanova.  It is also an important theoretical foundation on which younger scholars, including myself, can build.

Continue reading →

Posted in Death and Redemption, Gulag, Soviet Era 1917-1991, Stalinism | 8 Comments

Death and Redemption–

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Cynthia Ruder

I love this book and wanted to second Deborah’s comment about how readable and useful it is.  I’ll comment more on that later.  But for my first post I also wanted to second how much I wished there were illustrations–pictures, of course, but a map of Karlag would have been most useful as well to get a sense not only of the size of the camp, but the location of the various outposts and a relative scale of the distances covered, especially since this was such a geographically large camp.  Forgive me if I have not checked this, but it might be helpful, especially as we use this book in our courses, to have web material posted to which we could send students for further clarification of locations and terrain.

I also had a question for Steve–Why did you decide to use the English translation of the История строительства…rather than the Russian original?  I ask because the English translation is a poor substitute for the original.  While scant information exists (at least that I know of) as to how the English translation came to be, it turns out that the English variant omits significant parts of the Russian original, incorrectly translates some of the sub-headings, if they are included at all, and diminishes the careful construction of the original that the true editorial team–Boris Lapin, Viktor Shklovsky and other writers–had in mind when they produced the work as a literary montage. Just curious!  ( As a basis for reference I talk about this in my book, pp. 192-202.)

Posted in Death and Redemption | 3 Comments

Death and Redemption-Prisons

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Deborah Kaple

Just to start the conversation, I’d like to mention how rich and multi-faceted Steve’s book is, and how useful the various short and long discussions on many aspects of the Gulag are. For instance, the section titled “Hierarchy of Detention: The Institutions of the Gulag” is a thorough and clearly-written several page discussion about all the relevant Gulag institutions. Going along with his idea that prisoners were sorted out according to their presumed redeemability, he lists, from most severe to least: execution, prisons, katorga camp divisions and special camps, corrective labor camps, special settlements and corrective labor colonies. Within each of these categories, he clearly sets out a compact descriptive history. I am so grateful to have this spelled out so brilliantly (for myself) and I can’t wait to have my students in the Soviet Gulag class use this resource.

What I don’t like about Steve’s book is…the lack of photos. Where are they? I so much wanted to see Dolinka that I found this on the internet. I hope it’s the right one. The title is “Karlag Museum, Dolinka, Kazakhstan.” The prose in the book is very descriptive, but I needed a visual.

Karlag Museum, Dolinka, Kazakhstan

 

 

Posted in Death and Redemption | 9 Comments

Death and Redemption – A Blog Conversation

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Andrew Jenks

Welcome to the third of our blog conversations. I encourage readers to join the conversation by commenting our our authors’ posts. The book we are discussing is by fellow blogger Steven A. Barnes (Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society, Princeton University Press, 2012).

Based on meticulous and exhaustive archival research, as well as a thoughtful examination of memoir literature by prisoners, the book examines the Gulag as a penal institution. While acknowledging the brutal and inhumane nature of the Gulag, Barnes also explores those aspects of the institution that made it very different from a Nazi death camp.

The conversation dovetails nicely with our first blog conversation about Deborah Kaple’s translation of a Gulag prison guard memoir (Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir). That conversation prompted a lively exchange on the nature of the Gulag — its function in Soviet society, its distinctiveness versus other internment systems. Barnes’ book forces us to consider the borders that separated the Gulag from the rest of Soviet society. How did the Gulag figure into the larger Soviet political and economic project? Was its function economic, ideological, or rehabilitative — or some combination of all three? What was the relationship between the regular criminal and the political criminal within the Gulag? Continue reading →

Posted in Blog Conversations, Death and Redemption | Leave a comment

The Time of Women

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Miriam Dobson

The Time of WomenOver the weekend I read, and greatly enjoyed, the recent translation of Elena Chizhova’s The Time of Women which won the Russian Booker Prize in 2009.  Set in the early 1960s, the short novel tells the story of a “family” struggling to get by. This is not a regular family, but one brought into being by the vagaries of the Soviet housing system: when Antonina and her daughter are given a room in an apartment, the other inhabitants – three elderly women – become full-time grandmothers to the little girl, who understands everything, but does not yet speak; Antonina goes to work in the factory to provide for them all.

Antonina and the three babushki are desperate to protect Suzanna from the institutionalization they fear will be her fate if the authorities realize her “muteness.” Instead of sending her to nursery, the babushki spend their days reading to her (in Russian and French) and talking about their own unhappy lives under Soviet power. They secretly christen her Sofia and teach her about their Christian faith, despite the crack-down on religious practice in these years.  Continue reading →

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ZATOs In View

Posted on April 20, 2012 by Asif Siddiqi

A few weeks ago, on March 27, I was at a reception at the Harriman Institute (for Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies) at Columbia University for the opening of a new exhibit entitled ZATO: Soviet Secret Cities During the Cold War. The exhibit, which will be on display until May 22, was curated by Dr. Xenia Vytuleva, an architectural historian who did her graduate work at Moscow State University and is now visiting at Columbia. The exhibit includes images, diagrams, maps, and documents, some of it provided by Richard Pare, the English photographer well-known for his work on Soviet modernist architecture. Dr. Vytuleva has done an exemplary job of visually communicating the essence of the “closed cities” and I encourage all in the New York area to come and see her superb work.

My contribution to the project was to provide the historical text (and context) and to help conceptualize an exhibit ostensibly designed to render visible a phenomenon that was largely about invisibility. I provide here a brief summary of some of my thoughts that fed into the ZATO exhibit and the ways in which we might begin to situate the “secret cities” phenomenon on the social and political geography of the former Soviet Union. On a very cursory level, these cities are no mystery. Consider the official designation that created this typology of urban life: the Closed Administrative-Territorial Formation (Zakrytoe administrativno-territorial’noe obrazovanie, ZATO). All of these words hold certain meanings, but they all communicate a sense of boundaries, demarcations, limitations, and circumscriptions on the social and political geography of the Soviet Union. At a deeper level, the language of secret cities is also one of omission, most starkly demonstrated by the fact that the cities themselves were never shown on official maps produced by the Soviet regime. Implicated in the Cold War posture of producing weapons for the Soviet military-industrial complex, these cities were some of the most deeply secret and omitted places in Soviet geography. Those who worked in these places had special passes to live and leave, and were themselves occluded from public view. Most of the scientists and engineers who worked in the ZATOs were not allowed to reveal their place or purpose of employment. Again, this omission.

If the secret cities can be seen as a phenomenon of omission, they can also be understood as spaces of exclusion. Much like other social spaces that were highly exclusionary—such as the Gulag—passage in and out of these urban “formations” was very strictly regulated, even for people who lived within. Yet, what made them different from the Gulag was, of course, the intersection of exclusion and privilege. For Soviet intelligentsia—particularly scientists, engineers, and technicians—secret cities represented aspirational spaces, idealized urban formations where the day-to-day amenities of life were seemingly abundant and plentiful. In these markers—exclusion, omission, and privilege—we see the secret cities functioning as metaphors for the place of knowledge in Soviet civilization. Knowledge—and information—was excluded, omitted, and privileged, according the often arbitrary codes of the Bol’sheviks, creating a system of secrecy at the political, social, and cultural levels that affected every Soviet citizen. Activities from the most anodyne to the most dissident acquired and lost meaning when they were confronted with the boundaries of acceptable discourse.

Much of the discourse surrounding the secret cities has centered on Cold War imperatives and pressures; this was a story of the Soviet military-industrial complex.1 But an obvious touchstone for the ZATO, especially in terms of secrecy, was the Gulag. Everything about the Gulag, its institutional structure, the scope of its camp system, how it operated, how many prisoners labored as part of it, where it was located—all of these were considered secret. The Gulag archives are, in fact, replete with directives whose sole goal was to ensure occlusion from public view. Like the ZATOs, the Gulag camps that dotted the Soviet landscape were also omitted from official Soviet maps.

Once the ZATOs began to emerge on the topography of Soviet maps in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they immediately became the object of study for Western security studies scholars (interested in weapons proliferation) and environmentalists (who were concerned with the effects of nuclear and industrial waste). Their concerns are certainly legitimate but it has been equally exciting to see humanities scholars and social scientists exploring other aspects of the ZATO phenomenon. New work among others by Victoria Donovan (who is studying migration) and Ekaterina Emeliantseva hold much promise to add to what has so far been a relatively straightforward recounting of facts. Much in the mode of this new work, the Van Alen Institute is hosting a discussion on May 15, 2012 on the theme of “ZATO: Secret Soviet Cities During the Cold War.” Present will be Jean-Louis Cohen, the Sheldon H. Solow Professor in the History of Architecture at NYU, Xenia Vytuleva, Richard Pare, and myself. On the same day, the Harriman Review will issue its Spring/Summer issue containing an essay by me proposing a conceptual framework for the study of ZATOs in the context of the history of secrecy in Soviet civilization. We hope that this will be the beginning of further discussion on the history and urban ecology of the phenomenon of closed cities.

  1. For some useful social science and history literature, see Richard H. Rowland, “Russia’s Secret Cities,” Post-Soviet Geography and Economics 37.7 (1996): 426-462; Ira N. Gang and Robert C. Stuart, “Where Mobility is Illegal: Internal Migration and City Growth in the Soviet Union,” Journal of Population Economics 12.1 (1999): 117-134; Cynthia Buckley, “The Myth of Managed Migration: Migration Control and Market in the Soviet Period,” Slavic Review 54.4 (Winter 1995): 896-916; David Shearer, “Elements Near and Alien: Passportization, Policing, and Identity in the Stalinist State, 1932-1953,” Journal of Modern History 76.4 (2004): 835-881 ↩
Posted in Closed Cities, Cold War, Gulag, Soviet Intelligentsia, Soviet Science, Uncategorized | 5 Comments

Stalin Cult

Posted on April 18, 2012 by Richard Wortman

In reply to my question about “going toward Hitler,” Plamper writes “Stalin, like the tsars, ensured himself a freedom one might say capriciousness of decision, which must have infused all of the institutions and officials seeking to please him. But that applied to most decision-making at the pinnacle of power in Stalin’s time—in a way, it is the universal definition of despotism.” I am not sure that that is a definition of despotism, though it certainly is a principal characteristic.  And perhaps it does not relate directly to the question of the Stalin cult.  But I was wondering about the modus operandi of Stalin particularly in regard to his image of modesty, and in comparison with other cults particularly Hitler’s ideologically proclaimed leader principle. (pp. 18-19)  In regard to the strategies of the artists or journalists to determine the images and shifts in imagery that Plamper shows so well, was this the result of a message communicated by figures close to Stalin, and/or a process of approximation awaiting higher approval like “going toward Stalin?”  I raise this question by way of clarification not of disagreement.  It may be that the manner of modesty was not only a way to avoid the ideological difficulties of personal rule in a Marxist framework, but also a means of generalizing uncertainty, the signs of approval even being less obvious than in Hitler’s open dictatorial rule.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

The Stalin Cult—Once More On Weber & Reception

Posted on April 16, 2012 by David Brandenberger

Jan Plamper’s The Stalin Cult has catalyzed a dynamic, wide-ranging set of exchanges in the past week or so on  Russian History Blog.  His responses to the posts—particularly his engagement with Joan Neuberger—have been equally provocative.  Here I’d like to prompt him to spell out his position a bit further on two other issues.

Continue reading →

Posted in The Stalin Cult | 2 Comments

Russia and the Alaskan Tobacco “Mystery”

Posted on April 11, 2012 by Matt

As I’ve been working on the history of Russia’s experience with tobacco, I encountered a surprising development – the domestic production of tobacco in Alaska.  Anyone who’s spent time working on Russian Alaska could not help to notice the colonists’ continuing concerns about food and agriculture.  However, southern Alaska was an agriculturally fertile region, particularly among the Tlingit (on and near Sitka Island) and the nearby Haida.  (I’ve been assuming they just didn’t produce the food the Russians wanted, but I could be wrong).  Among their products was a type of tobacco (Nicotiana quadrivalis).  The mysterious part of the equation is that no one grows N. quadrivalis anymore, and it was native to the southwestern U.S.  No one has come up with an explanation about its migration, much less its extermination.

Sitka

What do we know?  The local indigenous groups grew this type of tobacco, and seemed to have consumed it as “chew” – but a particular recipe of tobacco leaf and lime.  Though the Russian American Company (RAC) seemed to have been successful in replacing domestic production with imported tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum), the mystery for me is why the local population replaced local varieties for an expensive imported variety.  Robert Fortuine suggests that it was because the imported version was stronger, but the evidence in only anecdotal, and the mechanism by which indigenous Alaskans acquired it was rather exploitative, to say the least. Continue reading →

Posted in Imperial Russia, Russia in World History | 1 Comment

The Stalin Cult – More (Clearly, I hope) on Thinking Visually

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Joan Neuberger

I hope I made it clear that I consider The Stalin Cult an excellent work of political and institutional history, from which I learned a great deal about a subject I care about. But my objections to its treatment of the visual culture so central to Stalin’s personality cult do not end with circles. And I do like a good argument. (Can I blame my parents? I grew up in household where arguing about ideas was a sign of love and respect.) Plamper’s discussion of individual works of art may, as he put it, “borrow tools from contemporary visual studies,” but it does so rather unevenly. The result is a book that deserves all the praise it has received from the other bloggers, who largely ignored the visual, but it doesn’t give us a proper sense of the visual culture that made up the cult or the visual experience of living in it. Continue reading →

Posted in Blog Conversations, Russian and Soviet Art, Soviet Era 1917-1991, Soviet Intelligentsia, Stalinism, The Stalin Cult | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The Stalin Cult – Response by Jan Plamper

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Jan Plamper

A huge thanks to all participants for taking the time to engage with my book and thanks to Steven Barnes for arranging this conversation and its stellar cast in the first place.

The conversation so far has broached many important issues, four of which have recurred in more than one post—(1) the genesis of the Stalin cult; (2) the phenomenon I call “immodest modesty” (did Stalin want his cult?); (3) my readings of key Stalin portraits and especially the circle pattern I identify in these; (4) and reception. Let me try to address the issues in this order. Continue reading →

Posted in The Stalin Cult | 3 Comments

The Stalin Cult

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Richard Wortman

Jan Plamper’s study is a commanding work of scholarship that tests many assumptions about the Stalin cult, places it in the context of modern authoritarian rule, and delves into extensive archival sources to examine its workings of the cult.   His analysis of the cult’s evolution through a systematic reading of Pravda discloses the different personas Stalin assumed in the course of his rule as party leader, as father of peoples, as military leader, as generalissimo, and as just a nice man who loved little girls.  Plamper denotes the shift from photographs to oil paintings as his favored genres.  The painting portray him as a wise and noble agent of change, whose eyes look out into the distance and the future.   Plamper’s chapters on the patronage and the process of criticism and approval of these paintings give a sense of the institutional realities and motivations of those involved in seeking his approval, though I share Joan Neuberger’s feelings that the “circular” analysis of the pictures is strained and unconvincing.  His analysis of comment books makes it possible for him to reach interesting conclusions about popular reception, though ones that he admits are quite tentative.  The books created a sense of participation and informed the authorities on technical matters such as how to arrange exhibitions and change guided tours.  The comment book figured in a process of making the audience a “cult producer,” representing a “pseudodemocratic practice.  Its main purpose became to show to the Soviet Union and to the world that Soviet art was produced by the people and for the people, and hence was `popular’ in both senses of the work.   Reception turned into performance.”(213)

Like Polly Jones and Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, I understand why Plamper avoids the problem of the genesis of the cult but also think that this leaves some basic issues unanswered.   He does cite traditions of reverence of the image of the tsar, the influences of icons, and Byzantine roots but argues quite convincingly argues that these are overshadowed by the very modern nature of the cult, which might draw on these sources, but rather sparingly.   He acknowledges the importance of the intelligentsia tradition of the discussion circle, the kruzhok, in the evolution of the intelligentsia, and the dominant images of the leader of the circle.  But as David Brandenberg observes there is little evidence of such cult like worship of leaders in pre-revolutionary socialist organizations or thought.   Indeed, both SRs and SDs were wary of strong assertive leadership as an aspect of despotic rule.

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The Stalin Cult: Painting and Socialist Realism

Posted on March 30, 2012 by Joan Neuberger

As a historian interested in visuality in general and Soviet visual culture in particular, I read Jan Plamper’s book with great interest and benefit, but with some perplexity.  The book offers us an excellent survey of the production of some of the visual components of the Stalin personality cult and an interpretation of some of those products. The chapter on photos of Stalin in Pravda gave me an almost palpable sense of the progression of the cult over time. The chapters devoted to the artists and institutions that produced the Stalin cult contribute an important case study to a developing body of scholarship about socialist realism in the visual realm. Its discussion of those products and of socialist realism as a system of artistic production, however, left me unsatisfied.  I am not trained as an art historian so I want to be careful about making definitive statements here, but I found several of the arguments in the book to have been suggestive but under-developed.

First, I have no doubt that Stalin was understood to be the central point of concentric circles radiating out from his body, his office in the Kremlin, and so on to the borders of the empire, as Plamper argues, but I struggled in vain to see anything circular in the composition and conceptualization of the paintings he singles out for analysis. Both Morning of the Motherland and Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin look to me to be constructed of networks of diagonal lines, making up numerous independent and overlapping triangles.

Morning certainly does place Stalin’s heart in the sun’s spotlight at the center of the painting, but the plows, plow lines, power lines and road all converge at a vanishing point behind Stalin, forming triangles on the horizontal plane of the landscape and a vertical triangle from the right and left edges of the canvas up to Stalin’s head as the apex. The smokestacks in the distance may be on a circular line, as Plamper suggests, but it’s hard for me to see that and it’s more plausible to my eye to see them as another flat line along the horizon making up the base of another triangle with Stalin’s head as the apex again.

Stalin and Voroshilov is even more insistently angular, with diagonals crisscrossing throughout the composition, creating a sense of dynamism underlying the solidity of Stalin’s immobile form (he seems to be both standing still and walking at the same time, a neat trick!) and among the solid, stable architectural elements. One can easily imagine the conceptual circles Plamper proposes, but I can’t see them anywhere in these two paintings. Continue reading →

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The Stalin Cult – Between Reality and Representation

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi

I am grateful to Steven Barnes for inviting me to participate in this conversation on Jan Plamper’s fascinating book, The Stalin Cult.  As an outsider to the field of Russian studies, I hope my comments will add to the liveliness of the debate on a topic that is intellectually puzzling and stimulating.  In the first page of the introduction to The Stalin Cult, Jan Plamper boldly sets the tone for his study by asserting that the person of Stalin was indistinguishable from his portrait.1 In a few striking lines, Plamper draws attention to the way the Soviet people thought of and related to Stalin during his years of reign ‒ a blending of reality and representation that often showed no clear demarcating lines.  This blending, according to Plamper, is key to understanding the Stalin cult.  It indicates the central role portraits played in the production of the cult; in addition, and most importantly, it reveals the constructed nature of the cult itself via the medium of art.  The book’s goal is indeed to delineate the modalities in which the cult was launched beginning in 1929 (and later adapted and modified according to the historical circumstances) by underlining the cult’s orchestration from above, including Stalin’s personal involvement.  The book thus analyzes and dissects the manufacturing of the cult both temporally and stylistically through a semiotic reading of visual representations that reveal even more layers of interpretive complexity in a phenomenon where the line between fake and authentic becomes ever more blurred and trickier to decipher.  Stalin’s “immodest modesty” is a case in point.  Archival sources, generally considered reliable keepers of historical data, were “contaminated” by the regime to hide the constructed nature of Stalin’s modesty, in an endless game of role playing that continuously undermined any mundane notion of reality, at the same time that it made hard any effort at fact-finding on the part of future researchers.

Plamper clearly states that his study focuses on the making of the cult of Stalin as opposed to its genesis or its function.  Indeed, that’s where his book’s originality resides, and I fully embrace Plamper’s approach.  Plamper pays attention to the practices and institutions that made possible the production of the cult, and looks at the relationships between the party and the artists in charge of producing images of Stalin as a way to decipher the artists’ representational choices.  The idea at the heart of the project is that we cannot take the cult of Stalin at face value, as a naturally evolving phenomenon.  Accordingly, the art that sustained the cult was not a spontaneous and free expression of the artists’ outpouring of admiration for the leader.  Indeed, the book proves the intricate ways in which various political protagonists controlled the cult of Stalin through direct influence on and patronage of artists.

However, I have to confess that throughout the book the issue of the cult’s genesis kept lingering in my mind because I could not quite gauge why the regime or/and Stalin himself decided to implement the cult.  What kind of purpose did they think the cult would serve?  Or did they conceive the cult outside of specific goals?  If one focuses on the legitimizing function of the cult, for example, it is clear that the cult failed right when the regime needed it the most.  As Plamper shows, Stalin’s cult was always dimmed in difficult times such as when the regime felt a threat to its power.  What was the regime then thinking when setting up the cult?     In other words, if legitimation was not the regime’s main motivation, what did the cult mean to those who produced it as well as those who were its target?  Who decided to make a cult of Stalin and why?  Was it the result of a power struggle, a competition within the party?  Was it a way to eliminate the competition, or was always something the party wished to pursue for different reasons?  Ultimately, the larger issue that Plamper’s book raises for me is: can one separate the production of culture from the meanings and aims involved in the process of production?  I am operating here within a classic Weberian approach: to understand an action one must know the meanings guiding it. Continue reading →

  1. Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012). ↩
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The Stalin Cult

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Polly Jones

I’d like to thank Steve Barnes for inviting me to take part in this conversation, and to thank and congratulate Jan Plamper for his book.  I should say first of all that I consider The Stalin Cult a remarkable and groundbreaking study, which should quickly become essential reading for all scholars and students of Stalinism and Soviet culture. There is surprisingly little scholarship devoted exclusively to the Stalin cult (David Brandenberger summarises some key works in his earlier post), surprising given the cult’s evident importance for shaping  popular views of the leader and, more broadly, attitudes towards the regime that he headed for three decades. Even less of this scholarship is characterised by the rigour and empirical richness of Plamper’s study.

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