Category: Myth, Memory, Trauma

De-Stalinization has often been defined in terms of what it was not: not as complete and aggressive as de-Nazification (though Stephen Cohen has argued that the Soviet Union came close to its own Nuremberg trial in the early 1960s); not as determined as the later German Vergangenheitsbewältigung; not as far-reaching as de-Leninisation (or indeed, the preceding few years of de-Stalinization) in the Soviet Union of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Though these have been the main points of comparison in writing about the ‘thaw’, others might easily be added to the list, especially given the ‘memory boom’ of recent years. De-Stalinization also wasn’t a process of ‘truth and reconciliation’, of the type still unfolding in post-Apartheid South Africa; and it wasn’t a process of lustration, such as occurred in many, though far from all, parts of Eastern Europe in the 1990s.

If we are going to draw these unflattering comparisons, with their emphasis on the ‘bad faith’ of the leadership, their lack of true repentance or commitment to confront the culprits of the past (including their own guilt), we should also pause to consider what else de-Stalinization was not. It was not the decades of uncomfortable near-silence about a difficult past, as explored by many historians of post-war Germany, by Henri Rousso in his classic study of post-Vichy France, by Tony Judt in his masterful overview of dysfunctional post-War European memories, and further afield, in recent studies of the systematic silencing of the ‘dirty war’ in Argentina. Far less was it, at least in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, a complete failure to confront historical wrongs in public, political discourse: for all that ours is an age of ‘memory wars’—to use Alexander Etkind’s term—many battles to expose the truth about the past still never reach the public domain, or remain marginal to it, as is arguably true of the history of empire in my own country.  

In his initial post, Denis Kozlov mentions a number of keywords – key, that is, to public discourse during the Khrushchev era as well as to Polly’s wide-ranging analysis of that discourse – and calls for “closer attention to this language.” The terms he has in mind include “1937,” “sincerity,” “truth,” “Leninism,” “liberalism,” “narodnost’,” and “partiinost’.” In contrast to Polly, I read Denis as asking not for these terms to be defined a priori, but rather for us to pay closer attention to their shifting meanings and usage over time. If I understand him correctly, Denis is calling for a Begriffsgeschichte of the central terms of de-Stalinization. If so, then I would endorse his call while pointing out that, as Karen Petrone noted, Polly’s book focuses on narrative more than on the shifting meaning of individual words. And her attention to narrative produces handsome returns: as Polly shows in one of my favorite chapters of Myth, Memory, and Trauma, Simonov and other authors “reinvented the original master plot of the Soviet novel, seeing the war as an obstacle (albeit on a much larger scale than those of the 1930s production novel), whose overcoming attested to the strength of national character” (210). To write a Begriffsgeschichte would be to write a different book, based on a different kind of research.

Like Ben, I’m inclined to think that, comparatively speaking, the “memory work” of the 1950s and 60s in the Soviet Union was distinctive. I’m struck, however, not by the constancy of the gardener, who’s always tending to memory’s blooms, but by the inconstancy of the gardener, who keeps changing his mind about what needs to be watered and fertilized, what needs to be trimmed back and uprooted. This is very different, I think, from postwar West Germany and united Germany, where after an initial period of reluctance, the state sought very aggressively and successfully to make Holocaust remembering central to a new German identity. That is not to say there were no sacrosanct elements in the Germany’s wartime past, as there were in the Stalinist past. It took longer, for instance, to acknowledge the crimes of the Wehrmacht than the SS, longer to grapple with the Sonderweg conception of the Holocaust than with idea that genocide was the product of a few deranged Nazi leaders. Rather, the trajectory of memory in postwar Germany is characterized by fewer reversals and u-turns, fewer contradictions and ad hoc refinements than in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s. It is simply impossible to imagine Konrad Adenauer denouncing Hitler in the spring of 1956, then emphasizing Hitler’s achievements during the summer and fall. But this sort of schizophrenia was part and parcel of Soviet politics in the 1950s and 60s.

I’ll be curious to hear what Polly makes of the distinctiveness of her study.  Is there a parallel elsewhere, marked by similar vicissitudes, for the “memory work” that occurs in the Soviet Union in the 1950s and 60s? What were the longterm implications of the Soviet Union’s tortured attempts to come to grips with its Stalinist past?

I would like to offer heartfelt thanks to all the participants for taking the time to read my book so carefully and to comment so insightfully. It is a cliché, but in this case a true one, that all of the people involved have inspired me for many years with their own work. In some of the comments, indeed, one can recognise their distinctive approaches to the post-Stalin period, which have shaped and stimulated my own, rather different approach. To Denis Kozlov and Ben Nathans, for example, who ask why the book does not examine questions of intelligentsia and dissident writing and identity respectively, the easy answer would be that your work does, and very well too! However, these questions about coverage raise more substantive issues about the ways in which past and more recent historiography have conceived of the ‘thaw’ and de-Stalinization, which my book aims to rethink. In the following, I explore these issues further, clustering around the two main themes that run through the blog comments so far: narrative and terminology; and subjectivity.

In the discussion so far, I am struck by the number of synonyms and metaphors for de-Stalinization. Not that this should be a surprise: the period, after all, was named (albeit somewhat misleadingly, as Steve Bittner and Miriam Dobson have argued) after an ambiguous literary metaphor. Here, Ben Nathans develops metaphorical thinking furthest in his vivid account of the ‘constant gardening’ of Soviet public memory, while Steve Bittner describes the ‘delicate surgery’ of cutting away the most shameful aspects of the Stalinist past while leaving the body politic intact. Other terms used in the discussion so far include memory ‘management’ and ‘re-packaging’, the latter proposed by Denis Kozlov as a corrective to my title’s broader term, ‘rethinking’. I do not disagree with any of these terms, or their implications, and some in fact capture my intentions at least as well as my own terms: they all imply, correctly, that I am above all interested in the manipulation and control of ‘official’ or ‘public’ memory—and, as Steve Bittner says, with its inevitably only partial success. What motivated me to write this book was a growing impatience with the narrative of de-Stalinization as a spontaneous return of the truth about the past after Stalin’s death, with at most a brief catalytic function assigned to the party’s discourse of de-Stalinization.

When reading Polly Jones’ stimulating book on Soviet memory of the Stalin era, I found myself thinking about two other works that helped establish the memory of collective trauma as a distinct field of humanistic inquiry: Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) and Saul Friedlander’s edited volume, Probing the Limits of Representation: Nazism and the “Final Solution” (1992).  Both explored the challenges of depicting liminal experiences – the First World War and the Holocaust, respectively – in a variety of fictional and non-fictional genres.  Both can help us think comparatively about what Jones calls the “memory work” undertaken by the protagonists of her book.

Seen comparatively, perhaps the most distinctive if unsurprising feature of the Soviet case is the role of the Party-State as constant gardner in the field of memory. Whatever the season – thaw or freeze – the gardner is there, planting, cultivating, pruning, weeding. The gardner has a diagnosis for all the ills that beset the garden: the cult of personality. The gardner has a device to ensure that those ills never reappear: socialist legality. And for those who tell the story of the garden’s ills, the gardner knows the correct idiom: Socialist Realism. True, weeds keep coming up, and it’s increasingly difficult to discern the garden’s layout, but no one can overlook the presence of the gardner. 

I should start by admitting that I read an early version of Polly’s book proposal and manuscript a few summers back while sitting under an umbrella on a Lake Michigan beach. I was enthusiastic then about Polly’s project, so it is a special pleasure to see the final result, even if the locale for doing so–my windowless office on campus–is decidedly less inspiring than where I first encountered Polly’s project.

While I was working my way through Myth, Memory, Trauma, I happened upon Vladimir Sorokin’s recent piece in The New York Review of Books. Sorokin argues that late-Soviet and post-Soviet Russians have been far too passive in confronting the Soviet past: “All those Party functionaries who became instant ‘democrats’ simply shoved the Soviet corpse into a corner and covered it with sawdust. ‘It will rot on its own!’ they said.” The result was the eventual restoration of Soviet and even Stalinist ways under Vladimir Putin: a cult of personality that makes savvy use of digital and popular media, a campaign against “national traitors” that recalls 1937, and a carefully calibrated rejection of Western values that once again presents Russia as an uncorrupted “Third Rome.” At least in Ukraine, Sorokin argues, the recent “Leninfall” (a translation of leninopad, the toppling of statues) indicates a more cathartic and complete reckoning with the Soviet past.

Let me begin by thanking Steve Barnes for inviting me to comment on Polly’s book. I am glad that this blog provides such a valuable opportunity for informative discussions of new scholarship in our field.

The book is based on extensive archival research, and it presents a broad overview of discussions about the Stalinist past in Soviet high politics and public culture, mostly the literary world, between 1956 and 1969-70. Because the concept of the “Stalinist past” is very vast, it is worth delineating first what the book considers under this rubric. Mainly, the Stalinist past is epitomized here by three of its crucial phenomena: Stalin’s cult of personality, the terror (designated in the book by the date ‘1937’ and mostly referring to the peak phase of repression in the late 1930s), and the tragic blunders and losses of human life during the Second World War, which many in the Soviet literary world of the 1960s came to blame on Stalin and the effects of the terror.

It is an honor to be asked to discuss Polly Jones’s Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-1970.  This masterful analysis of the response to de-Stalinization is meticulously researched and powerfully argued.   There are two things in particular that stand out about this important work. The first is the messiness of its tale and the second is the way that Jones uses the idea of narrative to understand the ebb and flow of de-Stalinization.

Jones problematizes  the conventional timeline of two waves of de-Stalinization: the first through the Secret Speech and the second through the removal of Stalin from the mausoleum.  While both of these key moments came “from above,” Jones shows the complexity of the space in between them by examining the reactions of Soviet leaders, Soviet intelligentsia, and ordinary letter-writing citizens to the dilemmas of how to move forward while somehow acknowledging both past traumas and the role of Stalin in the successes and failures of Soviet history.  The diversity of approaches and the range of public opinions that Jones uncovers on this issue is truly stunning.  This outpouring of opinion about what should be remembered and memorialized also stunned leaders at the time who realized that both the powerful de-Stalinizing critiques of the Soviet system and the equally powerful defenses of Stalin were challenges to the current Soviet leadership.  By describing this complexity and messiness, Jones has reshaped our understanding of social dynamics of the Khrushchev era.

The second element of the work that I’d like to emphasize is Jones’s focus on narrative. The leaders and writers of the Khrushchev and early Brezhnev eras were trying to construct a story about Soviet history that would have popular resonance and that would sustain the legitimacy of the Soviet Union going forward.  As a result, trauma that was not narrated within an optimistic frame of heroism or ultimate redemption through the victory in World War II was seen by critics as particularly dangerous to the Soviet project.  Yet a narrative that glorified Stalin while completely ignoring the suffering that he caused was also seen as dangerous because it might offend victims and call forth dissent.  Thus the leaders, writers, editors, and readers engaged in a common project to shape a narrative that would acknowledge victims while celebrating Soviet achievements, that would recognize Stalin as leader while admitting his mistakes.  These negotiations swung back and forth over the time period from 1953 to 1970 resulting in the publication of both powerful anti-Stalinist works and moderate pro-Stalinist tracts. By 1970, the bland, middle of the road “both bad and good Stalin narrative ” had triumphed because by being “on the fence,” this narrative prevented extreme reactions from both sides.  It could then be safely repeated over and over again.  Jones’s insights here are particularly powerful and engaging.

My opening question for the author is this: in the introduction to the book, Professor Jones discusses the debates about Soviet subjectivity, but in the conclusion, she does not return explicitly  to the question of what her findings about complexity and negotiation over Soviet narratives reveal about this debate.  I would like to know more about her thoughts on this issue.