Bulletin No. 3, Fall 1998
The conference opened with papers presented by Peter Konecny (Carleton University), "Purges, Political Culture and the New Generation of Soviet Students, 1933-1938" and Lesley A. Rimmel (Oklahoma State University), "A Microcosm of Terror, or Class Warfare in Leningrad: The Exile of Alien Elements,' March-April 1935." Konecny examined the new political culture of the student body of Leningrad State University, and outlined the impact of the severe push from the Party for both intensive study and the time consuming ritual of political business. Konecny concluded that the political culture of the 1930s produced a cadre that was conditioned to accept a "formulaic and convenient means of categorizing the errors of Stalin's opponents and, with semantic rigidity, an effective and convincing way of building a faulty edifice of historico-political truth on which the Stalinist Party line stood." Students were required to give up their "personal autonomy for the opportunity to endure this complex process of academic and political training." In return, students were given access to the benefits of this convoluted social contract.
Lesley Rimmel's work focused on the dynamics of everyday life during this part of the terror. Rimmel
showed how the NKVD exile campaign provided an opportunity for common people to use denunciation to
attempt to alleviate the severe housing shortage and poverty in Leningrad. Rimmel concluded that Stalinist
political culture created the "moral context, political rationale, and the economic incentives" for citizens to
denounce their neighbours, which was a key element in the Stalinist terror machine.
--Kari Bronaugh
The second day of the conference opened with presentations by Sarah Davies (Durham University), "Popular Opinion in Soviet Russia, 1935-1941," and Jeffrey W. Jones (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), " What Sort of Democracy is This?' Political Rhetoric and Elections in Rostov, 1945-1947." Both papers dealt with aspects of popular resistance to state policies and practices. Davies used the example of response in Leningrad to the 1940 edict on worker discipline, while Jones focused on post-World War II elections in Rostov to the Supreme, republic-level, and local soviets.
Davies's project was to illustrate how popular opinion (which she defined as the values, attitudes, and beliefs of ordinary people workers, peasants, low-level sluzhashchie, and rank-and-file Party members as opposed to those of the intelli-gentsia) "distorted, subverted, rejected, or provided an alternative to the official discourse." The alternative means of communication were either oral, in the form of rumours, jokes, songs, or poems, or written personal letters, leaflets, or graffiti. Her sources were citizens' letters, memoirs, diaries, newspaper reports, agitators' reports, and, primarily, NKVD and Party svodki. The purpose of her examination of popular opinion was to offer a corrective to the models of Soviet society proposed by adherents to the totalitarian and revi-sionist schools. It should be noted that her criticism of revisionism was aimed at its more extreme tendencies, in particular Robert Thurston's works. Similarly, she noted that the totalitarian school tends to ignore society, thus acknowledging indirectly that not all proponents of this school are equally "dismissive" of society.
Davies found that the workers of Leningrad were hostile to the 1940 edict, equating it with serfdom and de-crying it as a throwback to tsarism, as something more appropriate to fascism or capitalism. Workers used the official discourse, employing the rhetoric of dignity and rights of workers; the right to a seven-hour workday, enshrined in the Stalin Constitution, was also invoked. Evidently, this segment of society was not terrorized into inaction. And the theory that workers were satisfied with the regime and its policies (Thurston's position) appeared to be overstated.
Jones focused on regime response to popular resistance and used discourse analysis, defining socialist democracy as a master narrative that "wrote social and political problems out of the picture, implicitly denying the possibility of opposition and operating in a hegemonic fashion to eliminate discordant values." His discoveries in the archives revealed that this metanarrative was not unassailable and that popular opposition to Party rule gave rise to "a separate intra-party discourse on the local level that sought to comprehend problems obscured by public rhetoric."
Public rhetoric obscured the
extremely difficult living and
working conditions of the
post-war years. Citizens registered
their opposition to the elections by
complaining about these
conditions. On a practical level,
the regime took measures to
address these problems on both
macro (e.g., ending rationing,
combatting crime by increasing the
size of the police force) and micro
(e.g., finding apart-ments for
families, hooking up electricity)
levels. Jones found that the
intra-party discourse
acknowledged the overwhelming
significance of material hardship.
Nonetheless, this discourse was
filtered through the master
narrative and could not directly
blame material conditions for
worker opposition. Instead, blame
was placed on the failure of
political workers to solve the
material problems or on "enemy
elements" who were leading
"backward" workers astray. In
the absence of "dualing"
discourses, Jones's interpretation
was more nuanced: within the
context of Stalinism, the public
rhetoric of socialist democracy
largely determined the terms of
other dis-courses; yet these other
discourses were elastic enough to
acknowledge social realities.
--Janet Hyer
In the next session, Paula Michaels (University of Iowa) and Cassandra Cavanaugh (Columbia University) pre-sented chapters from dissertations in progress, both focusing on aspects of the export of Western, biological medicine to Soviet Central Asian republics where tradi-tional healing practices prevailed into the 1930s. In both larger projects, Soviet medicine's "bitter-sweet" triumph in this region (to use Cavanaugh's apt characterization) was a conduit for the fostering of a pan-Soviet conscious-ness (naturally urban and Russian in its values) in Kazakh and Uzbek life.
In her paper, "Medical Education and Cultural Revolution in Kazakhstan," Michaels examined the record of medical education and professional placement in Kazakhstan, 1928-1941, and found a contrast between Slavs' crowding into the more lucrative and urban special-izations and the channelling of Asians into general practice and rural postings, where their language skills made them bearers of biomedicine and Soviet values to remote areas. Traditional healers were displaced, along with the leadership with which they were associated, as a result of the demographic tragedy of collectivization in the region. (Documents on the catastrophe are held in the closed Archive of the President of Kazakhstan, Michaels reported.)
In "Biology or Byt? Racial Medicine in Stalinist Central Asia," Cavanaugh reviewed the fate of two Uzbek research institutes, of Social Hygiene and of Experimental Medicine, as windows into the way local conditions affected all-Union projects and pretensions. She concluded that medical research in the region followed similar priorities to those of the centre, with occasional significant lags associated with nationality policy goals on the peri-phery. Cavanaugh advised that Uzbek Party Archives remain indefinitely inaccessible to researchers.
Both speakers brought to the fore the
comparison of local with central institutions as a
means of measuring the valences of Stalinist rule,
a comparison now more avail-able to historians as
a result of access to regional records; and in their
papers offered strong arguments that the history of
medicine provides some of the most interesting
new prisms for evaluating state-society relations.
--Dan Healey
For the last session of the day Douglas Northrop (Pitzer College) and Michael Thurman (Indiana University) re-freshened participants' interest by taking us to the archives of Central Asia. Northrop's paper, "Stalin's Central Asia? Archival Records of Uzbek Family Life in the 1930s," examined the Soviet campaign to transform Uzbek customary traditions by ending the wearing of the veil. Northrop credits both the Party's refusal to ban the veil outright and Uzbek resistance for the Soviet campaign's failure. In "State and Dehqan in the Cotton Economy: Modes of Organization in Central Asian Irrigation in the late 1920s and 1930s," Thurman explained how central-ized control of irrigation in the Ferghana Valley decreased farmer participation and increased wastage of water. Both speakers emphasized the colonial nature of relations with local women and farmers whose voices went unheard in the decision-making processes that affected their lives.
Discussion revolved around two issues: the usefulness of local archives in the study of colonial relations, and the problem of measuring resistance. Both speakers remarked that the closed Party archive in Tashkent forced them to rely on documents from the central Party and local state archives. In order to augment reports from Soviet organs which left the voices of Muslim women and local farmers relatively mute, the researchers considered oral history and the experience of stationary research. Conference partici-pants raised questions as to the reliability of local sources and stressed the potentially unique effect of local environ-ment on state-society relations.
Discussion of resistance to Soviet
campaigns pointed to the existence of multiple
layers of co-optation. Central Asian women faced
several colonialisms from behind the veil. Fear of
violent attacks made by Uzbek men on the
temporal and spiritual lives of women who
unveiled moti-vated many to return to the veil.
Although the Party never codified a ban, fear of
men from outside of family and community may
have motivated women to retain the veil. Knowing
the Soviets considered unveiling to be a political
marker, women who joined the Party and those
whose hus-bands were members manipulated
urban-traditional and male-female colonial
discourses by sometimes unveiling in meetings and
veiling at home.
--Eileen Consey
The final panel of the SERAP symposium played host to two interesting papers on Eastern Europe in the immediate post-war period. Jeffrey Burds (Northeastern University) began the day's proceedings with a discussion of his paper "The Origins of the Cold War in Soviet Eastern Europe." In this paper, which focused on "Soviet responses to the US recruitment of an anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist guerrilla force," Burds maintained that American inter-vention in Eastern Europe began much earlier than has traditionally been acknowledged. Basing his findings on newly declassified Soviet police records, Burds demon-strated that US intelligence services had begun to support indigenous anti-Communist movements in Eastern Europe even before the end of World War II. While warning that one should not exaggerate the significance of American support for anti-communist movements in Eastern Europe in the period 1944-1947, Burds concluded that American espionage, of which the Soviet Union was very much aware, helped to escalate tensions in the early Cold War period.
The second presenter was Marta Dyczok
(University of Western Ontario) who discussed her
two papers on Ukrainian refugees and Soviet
repatriation at the end of World War II. Focusing
on the changing Soviet attitude toward displaced
nationals (particularly Ukrainians) after 1943 and
the manner in which the repatriation process was
carried out, Dyczok chronicled the logistical
difficulties which plagued the Soviet Repatriation
Commission as well as the lifelong discrimination
to which repatriates were subjected. While
admitting that her conclusions were of a
preliminary nature (owing to the lack of
corroboratory archival material), Dyczok raised the
interesting possi-bility that fewer repatriated
Ukrainians were executed or sent to the GULAG
than previously thought.
--Trevor Smith
[In the course of the Symposium, papers were also presented by Jonathan Bone (University of Chicago), "Regional Archival Holdings in the Soviet Far East and Their Implications for the Study of Stalinist Governance"; David Lewis (London School of Economics), "Stalinism in the Periphery: The Sovietization of Tuva, 1929-1953"; Steven Merritt (University of California, Riverside), "Accidents, Wrecking, Zasorenie: Stalinist Repression and the Far Eastern Railroad, 1936-1938"; and David J. Nordlander (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), "From Idealism to Repression: Magadan before the Gulag, 1929-32."]
After the final presentation of papers, a vigorous round table brought the lively and rewarding SERAP symposium to a close. In his introduction, Peter Solomon responded to a continuous theme of the conference concern and criti-cism over the kinds of sources, especially svodki, that researchers have access to for the study of state and society in the 1930s. He encouraged scholars to be rigor-ous and critical with the sources we have at our disposal but not to become discouraged or to discard them. He suggested that one of the main themes to emerge from a focus on the periphery is the key role of the "civilizing mission" in Russian and Soviet history and of the role of the state/cen- tre in this mission. Solomon warned that political history seems to be pushed aside in recent work on Stalinism and called for a "new political history" governed by new questions, such as: Did the Soviet Union ever have a strong government? What was the degree of "social penetration" in the Soviet government at various times? Can we replace the term "totalitarianism" with a concept like "state feudalism"?
Susan Solomon emphasized that ours is a young field and that we need to define our terms, a point emphasized by Yuri Slezkine in his commentary, and be self-conscious about our sources, providing fuller and more detailed descriptions of sources within footnotes. Robert Johnson added that researchers need to ask systematic questions of their documents: how are they generated, by whom, and for whom?
Christine Worobec continued with the focus on sources, advocating a critical and careful use of oral history. She emphasized that colonialism, another major theme of the symposium, is a two-way process and that we need to understand how the locality changed and shaped the centre. She stressed that we need to understand "modernization" in a Soviet context. Worobec drew atten-tion to the gaps in Soviet history, such as a lack of institutional history, and of a gender history which deals with notions of masculinity as well as femininity.
Nikolai Krementsov reiterated the need for historians of the Soviet period to "step back" and look at the whole picture; to consider the numerous agencies, for example, involved in any local event; to broaden the source base as much as possible; and most importantly to "contextualize" the work presented. Picking up on this theme Robert Johnson emphasized that scholars need to contextualize rather than generalize and that the line between anecdote and data must be defined and drawn.
Susan Solomon directed the discussion
and asked the commentators and the participants
what the conference papers had contributed,
changed, or challenged about the way that we look
at the Soviet experience. Perhaps it is still early to
say. Much of the material and the feedback must
still be processed, analysed, and reflected upon by
all of the participants, but the conference certainly
pushed us in new directions, raised important
questions, and initiated a much needed exchange
among scholars working in regional archives.
--Tracy McDonald
"All the world's a stage," quipped Nikolai Krementsov, as he introduced the dramatis personae in the strange tale of a cancer cure and the Cold War morality play it spawned. Krementsov is a Senior Researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute for the History of Science and Technology (Russian Academy of Sciences) who was a visitor to the University of Toronto in the past term as a Hannah Professor in the History of Medicine.Not suspecting that their lives' work would become the basis for a Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT) production, and later a Mosfilm Studios motion picture, in the summer of 1946 microbiologist Nina Kliueva and her husband, cytologist Grigorii Roskin, announced the discovery of "preparation KR," a biological medication said to have an inhibiting effect on malignant tumours.
Krementsov, author of Stalinist Science (Princeton University Press, 1996), led the workshop through the fascinating tale of ambition, acclaim, and disgrace which enveloped Kliueva and Roskin. In the immediate postwar months, when the transition from wartime allies to Cold War foes was not yet a certainty, American interest in "preparation KR" was high and contacts between Soviet and US health officials resulted in the fateful handover of a copy of the manuscript of Kliueva and Roskin's mono-graph explaining the drug. In January 1947, Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov called Kliueva on the carpet to account for this release of scientific information by then regarded as damaging to state interests.
What followed, Krementsov explained, was a novel method of disciplining scientists and intellectuals. The "KR affair" resulted in the extension of the tsarist tradition of "courts of honour" (revived in the Red Army in 1939) to the Government bureaucracy. Zhdanov wrote, rehearsed, and directed such a court, held to "try" Kliueva and Roskin before 1,500 selected spectators, in Moscow in June 1947. The verdict: a reprimand. Yet the pair continued to receive lavish funding for their new research facility, until they were unseated by rival scientists in 1951. In late 1947, MKhAT produced Konstantin Simonov's play, "The Alien Shadow," based on the KR affair, and Mosfilm released "The Honour Court," a film treatment of the play, a year later. Both artistic works dealt with Soviet intellectuals whose research fell prey to scheming American spies, and depicted the intellectuals submitting to a court of honour to atone for their breach of loyalty.
Krementsov's reconstruction of the KR affair from materials in ex-Soviet archives formed the subject of the second half of this workshop. The pieces of this puzzle were assembled painstakingly from a broad range of collections. Zhdanov's personal fond at the former Central Party Archive (RTsKhDNI, Moscow) yielded rich notes on the honour court he staged in 1947. The same archive's holdings for the Technical Department of the Central Committee preserved a copy of a closed letter circulated to Communist Party cells on the KR affair; those cir-culated were normally destroyed once read. The State Archives of the Russian Federation (GARF, Moscow), yielded a full transcript of the honour court itself vital since the proceedings were never publicized.
Family archives provided personal viewpoints from several actors in this drama of science and politics. Records at the US National Archives and National Medical Archive of the 1946 scientific exchanges round out the tale of contacts made in good faith, later construed as treacherous. MKhAT's fond in Moscow's RGALI the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art contained a full transcript of rehearsals conducted from May to December 1947 for "The Alien Shadow." The transcript of "The Honour Court's" production meetings at Mosfilm is also held here. Both documents record in detail the way artists were explicitly directed to incorporate the political lessons of the KR affair into the plot and characterization of their stories. As one workshop participant observed, Stalin was a "great editor."
Participants posed many questions about research strategies which Krementsov answered with a modesty belying the long hours he has put into this project. He emphasized the need to understand Soviet bureaucratic structures and the relationships of power and antagonism between them as an essential first step in designing a research plan. The current Western interest in previously off-limits institutions such as RTsKhIDNI should not blind us, Krementsov warned, to the riches that are available in more prosaic collections such as GARF, nor to what may be found in smaller institutional archives (he cited the archives of the USSR Medical Academy) and non-govern-mental collections. Archives outside Russia are also worthy of greater attention. Taking the time to absorb and assess his finds, Krementsov emphasized, enabled him to decide on the next steps in his strategy.
And what of the "preparation KR"? Did it actually work?
The drug, found to slow malignant growths, was un-successful in holding the attention of Politburo sponsors, Krementsov noted. The advent of penicillin had led the lay public including "the ignoramuses who managed scien-tific institutions" to expect a single miracle cancer cure. Yet the reality was that cancer is a complex cluster of diseases not susceptible to a single therapeutic agent. Kliueva and Roskin lost their research facility in 1951, when rivals caught the attention of their political masters with sweeping promises. Today in Russia, research into the KR formula is being revived, using techniques of molecular biology and genetics. We may not have heard the last of this therapy which fell foul of the Cold War's appetite for domestic ideological rigidity.
--Dan Healey
Thomas Lahusen on Real socialism and socialist realism: An Archival Journey
On October 30, 1997, Professor Thomas Lahusen of Duke University delivered a talk on his latest work, How Life Writes the Book: Social Realism and Real Socialism in Stalin's Russia (Cornell University Press, 1997).In his newest work, Professor Lahusen continues to wrestle with the issues posed in his earlier Intimacy and Terror, the Stalinist cultural system and the role of human agency within it. This study unearths a forgotten classic of high socialist realism, Vasilii Azhaev's Far From Mos-cow, winner of the 1949 Stalin prize.
Azhaev's novel chronicles the construction of an oil pipeline in the Soviet Far East during World War II. Far From Moscow, infamous for its plodding, monotonous style, is transfigured by Lahusen's treatment into inval-uable material for historical investigation. Lahusen's analysis reveals the text as a distorted mirror of reality. From the mundane (in Azhaev's book the river and the pipeline are depicted as flowing in the opposite direction as in reality) to the monstrous (the pipeline was built by the enslaved inmates of labour camps, not "heroes of socialist labour"), virtually every representation in the novel is reversed, backward, inside-out, or upside-down.
Through a contrastive analysis of various editions of the text, an examination of Azhaev's personal archive, and interviews with survivors of that era, Lahusen reconstructs the "production" of socialist realist fiction from start to finish. At the same time, through an investigation of this process the writing, reworking, and reception of Azhaev's novel he managed to recreate the picture of the individual's life and through it the experience of an entire generation.
Lahusen's fascinating research transcends the limits of any one discipline (he calls himself "an archaeologist of culture"). Lahusen's study leads him to conclude that even the most doctrinal, ideological system possesses an inner dynamism, as it can never wholly eliminate the human dimension (chelovecheskii faktor) which reveals itself through the creative impulse.
--Violetta Davoliute
Nikolai A. Ivnitskii on The Materials of the Presidential and FSB Archives on the History of the Peasantry
After years of being guarded behind a cloak of state secrecy, most government archives from the Soviet period have been opened to Russian and Western historians. But not all. Now, more than seven years after the demise of the Soviet state, there are two key archival collections that remain closed to all but the most ingenious (and connected) of historians: the Presidential Archive and the FSB (KGB) archive. Nikolai Ivnitskii, of the Institute of Rus-sian History, Russian Academy of Sciences, has worked in both. In his talk at the SERAP workshop on November 27, 1997, Ivnitskii described how he managed to get access, and what he found.Unfortunately, he could not offer any advice that would allow us to follow in his footsteps. Ivnitskii gained access to the Presidential Archive in the Khrushchev era in his role as an (assistant) editor of a multi-volume history of the Soviet Union. At the time, the archive was run by officials who had been close to Stalin himself. While his fellow editors made the mistake of making their sympathy to the "destalinization" line known, Ivnitskii did not reveal himself, and was given free access for a period of several months. His work in this period contributed to his celebrated (in the West) book, Class Struggle and the Liquidation of the Kulak as a Class. The book was so well received in the West, in fact, that Ivnitskii got into a great deal of trouble for it.
In his talk, Ivnitskii described the sorts of materials he had seen, particularly on his subject of dekulakization. He demonstrated his unique knowledge of the composition and activities of the various Politburo commissions and sub-commissions which set state policy toward the "kulak" and the personalities that staffed them. In this sense, he provided his audience with a detailed "snapshot" of the policy-making process in the highest echelons of power. It was as satisfying as it was frustrating. Ivnitskii remarked that the Archive contained "tens of thousands of files" covering the activity of the Party leadership from the late imperial period to the present day. All remain closed except to a handful of carefully selected scholars.
The situation in the FSB archive would appear to be somewhat less bleak. Ivnitskii was recently working in this archive by means of access granted to the "Tragedy of the Soviet Countryside" series. In particular, he described the OGPU summary reports on the mood in the countryside which he was collecting for the second volume of the series. The news is not all good. "Operational" files are still closed, and archivists still give out what they see fit rather than what researchers request. Nevertheless, the FSB materials promise to make the second volume a fascinating collection of documents and Ivnitskii's experi-enced eye should ensure that the promise is realized.
--James R. Harris
Jeffrey Rossman on Worker Resistance under Stalin
Our next guest at the Stalin-Era Research and Archives Project workshop series was Jeffrey Rossman, who had recently completed his doctoral dissertation, "Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Gender in the Textile Mills of the Ivanovo Industrial Region, 1928-1932" (University of California, Berkeley). Rossman has carried out extensive research on workers' resistance in the Ivanovo region, a subject he dealt with in his recent publication, "The Teikovo Cotton Workers' Strike of April 1932," Russian Review, Vol. 56, no. 1 (January 1997).In his talk delivered at SERAP on January 29, 1998, Rossman shared his insights on inter-worker and worker-management relations. As he discussed worker resistance to industrial and wage policies in the Ivanovo region in the late 1920s, Rossman highlighted the continuity in worker behaviour and in worker-management relations from the pre-Revolutionary era into the Stalin years. He noted the persistence of male-female tensions and the abuse of eco-nomic power by overseers, as well as the appeal to central authorities against local power abuses (with petitions styled in the manner of the appeal to a father-tsar). Yet, Rossman also drew attention to one essential change derived from the Revolution: the formation of a workers' state in which the workers appealed for their rights as workers in a socialist state. On this basis, Rossman called for the "normalization" of historiography, insisting that the emphasis upon only the continuity or the discontinuity between pre- and post-Revolutionary years fails to do justice to the nuanced combination of pre- and post-Revolutionary social behaviour. Along the same lines, Rossman noted that although workers were developing a genuine "class consciousness" (and thus were not the "atomized" masses often referred to by Soviet historians), they maintained their traditional identities as women, national or religious minorities, and youths.
Rossman devoted significant attention to the value of svodki (OGPU reports) and svidetel'nye dela (evidence at judicial proceedings). He pointed out that these sources, especially as found in regional archives, offer a detailed portrait of popular Russian culture, especially resistance. The secret police gathered data on popular attitudes and behaviour, the socio-economic background of "deviants," as well as problems in industrial relations. In court evi-dence, the testimonies of defendants and witnesses were meticulously transcribed. With the proper contextualiza-tion and with full awareness of their bias as reports by police with their own agenda for data-accumulation, Rossman made a claim for the value of these new archival sources for cultural, economic, political, and social historians.
--Heather DeHaan
Hope M. Harrison on Conflicting External Influences on East German Politics in 1956: Khrushchev's Secret Speech and the Hungarian Uprising
On February 5, 1998, Professor Hope Harrison (Department of Government and Law, Lafayette College) reported on her research to a SERAP workshop. The primary sources for her research were interviews with former diplomats in Moscow and Berlin and archival materials. Harrison was one of the first (1991) to use the Central Committee archives in Moscow (TsKhSD) and was able to read documents of the International Department (access is restricted); she was also one of the first in the archives of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in East Berlin in contrast to its Russian counterpart, this archive has remained easily accessible.Harrison's main archival discovery concerning the events in Germany in the aftermath of Khrushchev's speech against Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in Febru-ary 1956 was that a changing of the guard in the leadership in the SED to a liberal group was interrupted by the Hungarian uprising in October. As a consequence, any serious liberal alternative was foreclosed until the Gorbachev years, and East Germany did not deal openly with its ongoing refugee crisis, remaining satisfied with the Berlin Wall.
Khrushchev's speech created disagreement in the satellite countries over how to respond: were the mistakes just applicable to the Soviet Union and Stalin, or were they systemic?; what degree of openness and critical reflection was required? The liberal opposition, organized around Karl Schirdewan, argued for the need to examine the cult of personality that existed in East Germany and to raise the question of democratizing the leadership. Further, just as Stalin was accused of not having a very close relationship with the masses, so did the refugee problem in East Ger-many speak to a similar chasm. The liberal opposition also argued that the economic policy was too hard on the people. With regard to foreign policy, the concepts of peaceful coexistence and non-inevitability of war between East and West introduced by Khrushchev were anathema to Walter Ulbricht because he used the threat of Western aggression as a foundation of his foreign policy. The idea of peaceful coexistence with West Germany was compli-cated by the refugee crisis.
The liberal opposition had been gaining ground on these issues when the Hungarian Uprising broke on October 23, 1956. According to Harrison's findings, they amassed significant Soviet backing, in the form of the Soviet ambassador and, seemingly, Khrushchev. However, the events of that autumn put a different cast on things from the Soviet perspective. When the East German lead-ership split along predictable lines with regard to the uprising (liberals: this is what happens when problems are not dealt with openly; conservatives: Khrushchev went too far), the conservatives seized the opportunity and sent a delegation to Moscow. In the final analysis, the Soviet leadership was not prepared to take a chance with East Germany because of its proximity to West Germany and gave its permission to oust Schirdewan.
--Janet Hyer
D'Ann Penner on Archival Ports of Entrance into the Worlds of Don Farmers in the 1920s
SERAP's final guest of the term was Professor D'Ann Penner (Department of History, University of Memphis), who spoke on March 5, 1998, on the subject of Don farmers. The presentation was based on her dissertation, "Pride, Power, and Pitchforks" (University of California, Berkeley, 1995), an analysis of village-party relations in the lower Don region in the 1920s. In order to gather material for her dissertation, Penner worked in many regional archives in addition to the usual central roster in Moscow. Indeed, the purpose of Penner's talk was not so much to provide a history of the Don peasants during collectivization as to make a strong case for the use of regional archives.Top of pagePenner outlined several biases that Western researchers hold against the provinces, serving up in all cases a necessary corrective: the conviction that the sources in Moscow are more important (there is a real wealth of documents in the provinces); the blithe assump-tion that whatever is in the provinces can also be had in Moscow (emphatically not); and, more fundamentally, the Western identity with Moscow (in order to understand Russia, it is necessary to understand the provinces).
Penner noted that OGPU, Procuracy, and Rabkrin archives are located in both the centre and provinces but that the more vivid sources are in the provinces: central sources are more generalized, while in the provinces full transcripts are to be found. Among other things, full transcripts allow the researcher to trace distinctive person-alities for example, it is possible to gauge the response of a crowd to someone's speech at a meeting and to trace the fate of the orators. Apart from questions of texture, Penner also argued that the provincial sources are more reliable for a number of reasons: a single OGPU officer could not make up the wide range of personalities found in the sources; the documents afford a greater degree of precision and discussion; the closer to home, the more confidence there was in speaking out (partly a function of levels of literacy even among party members, the less literate members were laughed at by their peers).
Ultimately the value of the documents resides in their contribution to our understanding of the period. Penner found that these sources challenge our assumptions with regard to the provinces and the peasants, e.g., the pro-vinces were quite interested in international affairs and peasants held cogent views on the efficacy of socialism. They can also be used to strengthen our interpretations by providing greater context. For example, the inspectors' reports are normally criticized because they are not written by farmers. But the saving grace of these reports is that they reconstruct the history of the villages before, during, and after the revolution. Further, they provide an exception to the rule of worker bias as some were sympathetic to the farmers and, indeed, in 1925-26 even showed respect. Peasant letters are also invaluable for providing context. Used alone they are a vulnerable source because they may have been written for publication or to get some kind of reward. Penner advised reading different varieties of letters in tandem: newspaper letters, intercepted letters, letters written by soldiers to relatives, and letters in emigre publications.
In light of the treasures that she unearthed in the provinces and the contribution they can make to our understanding of Russian history, Penner cautioned against what she defined as the prevailing arrogance of Western historians towards the countryside: the older generation prided itself in the fact that it did not understand the peasants, and the new generation has adopted a sense of noblesse oblige. She argued that we would be better served by bringing a sense of humility to both the people and the project and be prepared to be challenged.
Penner noted that provincial archives are not set up to facilitate a quick strike, and procedure and organization vary from archive to archive. Archivists may not know what is there and files are often mis-labeled. She advised researchers to browse widely and go beyond the obvious.
--Janet Hyer
Dr. Lawrence Clifford of Boston College discussed Smolensk-born M. Tukhachevskii's experiences in the war with Poland. Two of the most dramatic presentations came from Roberta Manning of Boston College and author of the recently published Bel'skii raion. 1937 god, and V. P. Danilov of the Institute of History, RAN, in Moscow. Professor Manning offered a descriptive analysis of the Great Purges in Smolensk, while Dr. Danilov presented a brilliant analysis of Stalinism and the Soviet peasantry. I presented a paper on peasant meetings during collectivization.
Excursions during the conference included a visit to the home of Ivan Trofimovich Tvardovskii, the brother of Aleksandr Tvardovskii. The eighty-four-year-old Ivan Trofimovich discussed his experiences as a "kulak" exile in the early 1930s. Living in the Urals after his release from exile in the second half of the 1930s, he met and married his wife of sixty years who was also a "kulak" exile and also present. Ivan Trofimovich served in the Russo-Finnish War, was taken prisoner, escaped from his POW camp, and lived in Sweden for the duration of World War Two. After WWII, he responded to a Soviet "welcome call" for ex-patriots to return to the fatherland. He returned and at the first port of entry was taken prisoner once again. He spent the next ten years in the Gulag. Sometime around 1947 or 1948, his wife finally received word that he was alive from her estranged brother-in-law, Aleksandr Tvardovskii.
The Smolensk Pedagogical University also arranged a visit to the forest of Katyn, the grave site of both Russian victims of Stalinist repression and thousands of executed Polish officers. In the lush, green woods of Katyn, there are now several monuments, both Polish and Russian, to those who were shot in the forest.
The conference was exceptional both for the high level of the scholarly presentations and the balanced nature of the discussion. And the hospitality could never be matched in North America!
--Lynne Viola
Caught in the Middle: East
Central Europe and the Early Cold War, 1943-1962:
Progress Report on an International Collaborative Project
SERAP's Ron Pruessen has continued to serve as coorganizer of this large-scale collaborative project—working with Oliver Rathkolb, director of the Stiftung Bruno Kreisky in Vienna. (See SERAP's Bulletin of Fall 1996 for a report on the project's initial, exploratory con-ference.)
Detailed plans for ongoing efforts have now been set and more than a dozen institutional partners and associates have joined the overall project. Core participants will in-clude the Stalin-Era Research and Archives Project; the Institut für Zeitgeschichte, University of Vienna, and the Stiftung Bruno Kreisky, Vienna, the Institute of Slavonic and Balkan Studies, Moscow; the Kulturwissenschaft-liches Institut, Wissenschaftszentrum Nordrhein-West-falen, Essen, Germany; the Institute of Political Studies, Warsaw; the Institute of Contemporary History, Prague, and the Institute of International Relations, Charles University, Prague; and the Institute for the History of the 1956 Revolution, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Buda-pest. (Representatives of each of these centres will serve as a Coordinating Board and an Editorial Board for the overall project.)
Other institutional associates and collaborators include the Institute of World History, Moscow; the Institut Pierre Renouvin, Sorbonne; the Dipartimento di Studi Sullo Statol; University of Florence; the Institute on East Central Europe and the Harriman Institute, Columbia University.
As with the program of its original conference, the ongoing "Caught in the Middle" research project will seek to explore two broad themes: the nature of "Great Power" influence in the East Central Europe region and the rele-vance of local dynamics. Comparisons of country-by-country experiences will be emphasized in a series of workshops, conferences, and publications over a three- year period.
The remainder of 1998 will continue to see a wide variety of activities for the project. A volume of papers from the original conference will be co-published by the University of Toronto Press and Studien Verlag (Innsbruck). As well, there will be at least four confer-ences and workshops sponsored by the "Caught in the Middle" project or involving a substantial number of its participants:
Stalin and the Cold War:
Budapest, October 1997
SERAP co-sponsored a conference surveying East and West European archival sources relevant to an understanding of Stalin's role in the early years of the Cold War. The Cold War International History Project (Washington) and Hungary's Institute for the History of the 1956 Revolution were co-organizers of the event.
The conference covered a great deal of ground, with particular emphasis placed on gathering together any and all available records of meetings and conversations with Stalin himself. Budapest speakers included the following:
Stalin and the Cold War:
Moscow, September 1997
The Institute of World History's "Cold War History Project" held a conference on "Stalin and the Cold War" on September 22-23, 1997. One of the main purposes of the meeting was to appraise the relevance of more recent work in major Russian archives.
Attention was focused on several broad themes—the interplay of "ideology" and "geopolitics" in Stalin's approach to the post-1945 settlement in Europe, for example, and the role which Stalin's policies played in the process of estrangement among former World War II allies. Within these parameters, many specific topics received consideration: the decision-making process during the Stalin period and the role of various government agencies; Soviet intelligence operations; the role of public opinion in the USSR; the impact of the Cold War on the internal life of the country; and the first years of the Cold War in Eastern Europe, among others.
Historians who participated in the seminar represented the Russian Academy of Sciences and its Institutes of World History, Slavonic and Balkan Studies, and the USA and Canada. Russian archives and the "Memorial" Society were also involved. A number of foreign scholars attended as well (Helge Pharo of the University of Oslo, for ex-ample). Other meetings of the Moscow "Cold War History Project" are being planned—and it is hoped that this first workshop on "Stalin and the Cold War" will lead to co-operation with related efforts in other countries.
--Natalia I. Yegorova (Institute of World History) and Ilya V. Gaiduk (Coordinator, Cold War History Project)
Symposium on
Sino-Soviet Relations and the Cold War:
Beijing, October 22-25, 1997
A Beijing symposium on Sino-Soviet relations during the Cold War was jointly sponsored by the Cold War International History Project (Woodrow Wilson Center), the Institute of Contemporary China (Beijing), and the Centre for Oriental History Research in the Association of Chinese Historians (Beijing). More than thirty historians and political scientists from China, Germany, Russia, Norway, Canada, and the US attended the meeting. As well, some Russian and Chinese policy-makers of the 1950 and 1960s joined the scholars for discussions and debates concerning the Sino-Soviet alliance and later conflicts.
Utilizing new archival materials and other primary sources from Russia, China, and other "brotherly coun-tries" in Eastern Europe and Asia, participants focused on such topics as the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1950; Soviet-Chinese-North Korean triangular relations and the Korean War; the role of the personalities of Stalin, Mao, and Khrushchev; Sino-Soviet split and its impact; Sino-Soviet economic cooperation and its collapse; the Russian-Chinese border clash and refugee problem; and more.
The conference was very successful. Dialogue between scholars and the policy-makers of the 1950s and 1960s was interesting and rewarding. Analysis of new archival materials was also valuable: particularly inter-esting, for example, were Chinese materials regarding Kim Il Sung's pressure on China to withdraw its volunteers from North Korea in 1958 and East German documents which demonstrate Ulbricht's readiness to take advantage of the Sino-Soviet dispute to serve his own ends during the Berlin Crisis.
The text consists of an introduction, two chapters, an appendix, and selected bibliography. The introduction underscores the importance of pre-departure preparation for archival research as well as the need to analyse both the outward aspects and the textological features of archival documents. The first chapter presents two methods of reading documents: graphical and logical. A general survey of the evolution of the Russian alphabet and hand-writing is followed by a more elaborate exposition of the graphical characteristics of modern hands. The logical approach links the common principles of producing documents in Russia with data unearthed by auxiliary historical disciplines such as paleography, chronology, metrology, toponymy, and sphragistics. In the second chapter the author subjects four sample documents to detailed analysis to demonstrate how to apply the author's own simple techniques to deciphering illegible hands. Throughout the book, 85 illustrations present archival documents of various types. The texts are deciphered in the appendix and supplied with Dr. Glagoleva's commen-tary. These features make this guide ideal for classroom use and for individual practice in reading Russian hand-written archival documents.
Copies can be ordered on a prepaid basis from the SERAP office. Please send a cheque or money order payable to SERAP, Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Toronto, in the amount of $15.00 to cover postage and handling charges, for addresses in North America, or $20.00 for addresses outside North America.
The volume consists of three background chapters and a four-part selection of primary materials from the Riazan oblast archives. The first introductory chapter focuses on the significance of the volume for specialists and general readers and the special nature of the documents themselves. The second is an introduction to the process and legislation of collectivization in general and in Riazan oblast in particular. Finally, the third introductory piece provides historical background on peasant agriculture in Riazan before collectivization.
Many of the primary documents in this collection are OGPU svodki, secret police reports, on the situation across Riazan province between February 1929 and July 1930. Part one of the collection is devoted to documents which cover the immediate buildup to the first drive for the wholesale collectivization of agriculture in the region up to the end of 1929. Part two covers the chaos and violence of the initial stages of the first collectivization drive in January and February of 1930. By mid-February a signifi-cant number of regions (raiony) within Riazan oblast had been declared 100% collectivized. This initial thrust came to a temporary halt with the publication of Stalin's article of March 2, 1930, on local cadres who were "Dizzy with Success." Parts three and four capture the temporary retreat associated with the reaction to "Dizzy with Success," the confusion of local cadres, the massive withdrawal from the new collective farms by the peasantry, and the escalation of peasant resistance to the system and its representatives.
In addition to secret police reports, the collection includes documents from the Communist party apparatus as well as the state and the judiciary, which broaden the scope of the work and provide a context for the OGPU reports themselves.
The volume is significant in a number of ways. Riazan oblast is an interesting locale situated between the central industrial region and the central black earth region, bordering on Moscow oblast to the northwest and sharing shifting borders with the turbulent Tambov oblast to the southeast. The kinds of documents included in the volume have recently been declassified and therefore have not appeared in the existing document volumes on collec-tivization. The secret police reports found in local archives are very different from the compiled reports found in RTsKhIDNI. Many more scholars have seen these central reports and the provincial documents provide a fascinating comparison and serve to greatly enrich the more familiar svodki. The volume provides a virtual day-by-day account of the first major thrust for collectivization, its initial implementation, its reception and its violent excesses at the local level.
The publication is available for purchase for US$50.00 (cheque must be drawn on a US bank)
from:
Russian Publications Project
Center for Russian and East European Studies
4G12FQ
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260 U.S.A.
Tel: (412) 648-7403 / Fax: (412) 648-2199
bchase+@pitt.edu
For information on ordering Kollektivizatsiia i krest'ianskoe soprotivelenie na
Ukraine/Kolektivizatsiia i selians'kii opir na Ukraini, please contact:
Carmine Storella
Russian Publications Project
Centre for Russian and East European Studies
4G12FQ
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
USA
Tel: (412) 648-7403 / Fax: (412) 648-2199
bchase+@pitt.edu
For details on other SERAP publications, please visit our web site www.utoronto.ca/serap/
Current holdings in journals:
Reference materials:
Genrikh M. Deich, Putevoditel'. Arkhivnye dokumenty po istorii evreev v
Rossii v XIX-nachale XX vv. (Moscow: Blagovest, 1995) [Vol IV in the
Russian Archive Series].
Dokumenty po istorii i kul'ture evreev v arkhivakh Moskvy. Putevoditel'
(Moscow: RGGU, ETSA, IVO, 1997).
Fondy Rossiiskogo gosudarstvennogo istoricheskogo arkhiva: Kratkii
spravochnik (Saint Petersburg: RGIA, 1994).
Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, Sankt-Peterburgskii filial, Fondy i kollektsii
Arkhiv: Kratkii spravochnik (Sankt-Peterburg: BLITs, 1995).
Institut russkoi literatury (Pushkinskii Dom) RAN, Fondy i kollektsii
Rukopisnogo otdela: Kratkii spravochnik (Sankt-Peterburg: BLITs,
1996).
I. A. Kondakova, comp., Otkrytyi arkhiv: Spravochnik opublikovannykh
dokumentov po istorii Rossii XX-veka iz gosudarstvennykh i semeinykh
arkhivov (po otechestvennoi periodike 1985-1995 gg.) (Moscow: Izd-vo ZAO Print-Servis, 1997).
Kratkii spravochnik po fondam Tsentral'nogo gosu-darstvennogo arkhiva:
Arkhiv literatury i iskusstva Leningrada (Leningrad: Oblik, 1991).
Pravila pol'zovaniia Gosudarstvennoi ordena Lenina bibliotekoi SSSR imeni
V. I. Lenina (Moscow, 1986) [photocopy].
Pravila raboty issledovatelei v chital'nykh zalakh gosudarstvennykh arkhivov
SSSR (Moscow, 1990) [photocopy].
Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki, Putevoditel'. Vypusk 2.
Spravochnik fondov RGAE (Moscow: Reform-Press, 1996).
Vremennoe polozhenie "O poriadke dostypa k arkhivnym dokumentam i
pravilakh ikh ispol'zovaniia" (Moscow, 1992) [photocopy].
Collections:
Arkhivy Kremlia. Vol. 1: Politbiuro i tserkov'. 1922-1925 gg. (Moscow;
Novosibirsk: ROSSPEN; Sibirskii khronograf, 1997).
Marie Bulinova , Milena Janisova and Karel Kaplan, eds., Cirkevni komise
UV KSC 1949-1951: Edice dokumentu . I. Cirkevni komise UV KSC
("Cirkevni sestka"): Duben 1949-B ezen 1950 (Doplnek Brno, 1994).
CSR a SSSR 1945-1948: Dokumenty mezivladnich jednani (Doplnek Brno,
1996).
G. F. Dobronozhenko (comp.), VChK-OGPU o politi-cheskikh nastroeniiakh
severnogo krest'ianstva 1921-1927 (Po materialam informatsionnykh
svodok VChK-OGPU) (Sytyvkar: Sytyvkarskii universitet, 1995).
Filipp Mironov. (Tikhii Don v 1917-1921 gg.). Dokumenty i materialy
(Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond "Demo-kratiia", 1997).
Gulag v Karelii. Sbornik dokumentov i materialov. 1930-1941
(Petrozavodsk: Karel'skii nauchnyi tsentr RAN, 1992).
Anna Hyndrakova, Helena Krejcova and Jana Svobodova , eds., Prominenti v
ghettu Terezin 1942-1945: Dokumenty (Prague: USD, 1996). [The
'Prominenten' Classification in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, 1942-45.]
Istoriia sovetskoi politicheskoi tsenzury. Dokumenty i kommentarii (Moscow:
ROSSPEN, 1997).
Milena Janisova and Karel Kaplan, eds., Katolicka cirkev a pozemkova
reforma 1945-1948: Dokumentace (Doplnek Brno, 1995). [Catholic
Church and the Land Reform, 1945-1948.]
Katyn'. Plenniki neob"iavlennoi voiny. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow:
Mezhdunarodnyi Fond "Demokratiia", 1997).
Kronshtadt 1921. Dokumenty o sobytiiakh v Kronshtadte vestnoi 1921 g.
(Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi Fond "Demokratiia", 1997).
V. N. Maksheev (comp.), Narymskaia khronika, 1930-1945 (Moscow:
Russkii put', 1997).
Materialy "Osoboi papki" Politbiuro TsK RKP(b)-VKP(b) po voprosu sovetsko-pol'skikh
otnoshenii 1923-1944 gg. (Moscow: ISB RAN, 1997).
Andrea Romano and Nonna Tarchova (comps.), Krasnaia armiia I kollektivizatsiia derevni v
SSSR (1928-1933 gg.) (Naples, 1996).
Spetspereselentsy v Zapadnoi Sibiri. Vesna 1931-nachalo 1933 gg. (Novosibirsk: EKOR, 1993).
Spetspereselentsy v Zapadnoi Sibiri. 1933-1938 gg. (Novosibirsk: EKOR, 1994). [Map]
Spetspereselentsy v Zapadnoi Sibiri. 1939-1945 gg. (Novosibirsk: EKOR, 1996).
Valerii Vasil'ev and Linn Viola (eds. & contributors), Kollektivizatsiia i krest'ianskoe
suprotivlenie na Ukraine (noiabr' 1929-mart 1930 g.g.) (Vinnytsya: Logos, 1997).
Linn Viola [Lynne Viola], et al. (eds.), Riazanskaia derevnia v 1929-1930 gg. Khronika
golovokruzheniia. Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 1998).
Secondary sources:
Dvizhenie soprotivleniia v stranakh tsentral'noi i iugo-vostochnoi Evropy 1939-1945 (Moscow:
RADIKS, 1995).
T. Khorkhordina, Korni i krona: Shtrikhi k portretu Istoriko-arkhivnogo instituta (1930-1991)
(Moscow: RGGU, 1997).
Korni travy: Sbornik statei molodykh istorikov (Moscow: Zven'ia, 1996).
D'Ann Penner, "The Agrarian Strike' of 1932-33," Occasional Paper #269, Kennan Institute
for Advanced Russian Studies, 1998.
I. Reznikova, Pravoslavie na Solovkakh. Materialy po istorii Solovetskogo lageria (Saint
Petersburg: Nauchno-informatsionnyi tsentr "Memorial", 1994).
Jeffrey J. Rossman, "The Teikovo Cotton Workers' Strike of April 1932: Class, Gender and
Identity Politics in Stalin's Russia," The Russian Review 56 (January 1997), pp. 44-69.
Offprint.
Jeffrey J. Rossman, "Worker Resistance under Stalin: Class and Gender in the Textile Mills of
the Ivanovo Industrial Region, 1928-1932" (PhD dissertation, University of California,
Berkeley, 1997).
Soudobe Dejiny No. 3-4 (1997). Contains three papers from an April 1997 symposium on "The
Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, February 1948."