Reviews

Tamara Machmut-Jhashi on David King's, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia

Jeffrey Veidlinger on Mark Kupovetsky, Evgenii Starostin, and Marek Web (eds.), Dokumenty istorii i kultury evreev v arkhivakh Moskvy

David G. Rowley on Nikolai Bukharin's How It All Began

Roger E. Chapman on Martin McCauley's Russia, America and the Cold War, 1949-1991

Wayne Bowen on Sally W. Stoecker's Forging Stalin's Army: Marshal Tukhachevsky and the Politics of Military Innovation

Ann E. Healy on Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov's Bitter Waters: Life and Work in Stalin's Russia

Clayton Black on David Shearer's Industry, State, and Society in Stalin's Russia

Laura L. Philips on Kenneth M. Straus's Factory and Community in Stalin's Russia: The Making of an Industrial Working Class

Dietmar Neutatz on Sarah Davies' Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934-1941

Gosudarstvennye khranilishcha dokumentov byvshego arkhivnogo fonda KPSS: Spravochnik. Novosibirsk: Sibirskii Khronograf, 1998. 330 pp.

Reviewed for H-Russia by Leo van Rossum lvr@iisg.nl, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam

A First Survey of all CPSU Archives

This directory provides basic data about all archival repositories throughout the Russian Federation that before 1991 had constituted the privileged network of central and regional archives of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The failure of the communist coup in August 1991 brought an end to the exclusive position of the party archives; documents, buildings and staff were all taken over by the Federal Archive Service of the Russian Federation (Rosarkhiv) and were rather abruptly integrated into its operational services. This did not mean the liquidation of these party archives, but their adjustment to the document processing and availability procedures practised by the Federal Archival Service. The integration policy allowed the former party archives a modest degree of autonomy, for apart from their guardianship of the communist past, the new status of these "centers of documentation of social organizations" also accorded them a second task, namely the documentation of the new political parties and social organizations. [1]

One reason for this apparently liberal attitude on the part of the authorities was the enormous quantity of documents involved. The confiscation of the "Archival fond of the CPSU" had increased the volume of documents held by Rosarkhiv by a third, and certain provincial party archives had more documents - and space! - than did the parallel provincial archive which had control over the newcomer. These aspects precluded the possibility of complete physical incorporation (although in the first weeks after the coup, pleas for this complete integration could be heard).[2] On the other hand, the great majority of the party archives' staff, often including the director, succeeded in retaining their old positions under the aegis of Rosarkhiv. The present guide, then, can be seen both as an important step in the movement towards integration and as a tribute to the communist party archival network that has since formally been closed down.

The directory reviewed here surveys all former communist party archives that had existed until 1991 within the boundaries of the present Russian Federation. The editors have organized the information per individual repository; thus, aside from a short introduction, the directory comprises 78 entries: 5 entries on federal repositories in Moscow and St. Petersburg and 73 entries on repositories in the republics and provinces ("Subjects") of the Russian Federation.[3]

Each entry provides the official name of the repository in question, the address, the telephone number "to make inquiries" (p. 7), the overall number of record groups ("fondy") and files, the years covered by the documents, the number of visual and audiovisual documents, 5 to 10 lines of information about the organizational history of the repository in question, and finally the main body, a characterization of the holdings of the repository in 5-10 pages, for federal repositories, or 3-5 pages for provincial ones. All data reflect the situation as of 1 January 1997 and were edited by an editorial group of VNIIDAD (Vserossiiskii Nauchno-Issledovatel'skii Institut Dokumentovedeniia i Arkhivnogo Dela) in Moscow on the basis of information provided by the repositories.

All this is very elementary information, but most welcome, simply because such a survey has never been published before. The listing alone of all official institutional names, addresses and telephone numbers (without, unfortunately the area code) of all former party archives is a great help for the Russian and foreign researcher. But it is first and foremost the summary of the holdings of each repository that makes the publication so worthwhile. Surveys of holdings of party archives have so far been rare indeed.[4]

Of course, the average space available for each entry does not allow for very detailed descriptions of the holdings. This problem is aggravated by a tendency in many entries to use rather broad and indefinite qualifications; for example, the State Archive of Contemporary History and Social-Political Movements of the Oblast of Perm refers to its documentation of the 1920s as "characterizing the economic restoration, the industrialization and collectivization of the oblast" (p. 200). The Center of Documentation of Contemporary History of the Belgorod Oblast qualifies its documentation between 1954 (when the oblast was formed) and 1991 as mirroring "questions of organizational-party and ideological-educational work, of political leadership, of selection and distribution of cadres and social-economic and cultural development" (p. 71).

In fact, such empty statements are to be found on nearly every page. Worse, some qualifications seem to be taken directly from a more glorious past. The leading role of the communist party in the economy is referred to without reservation (Voronezh, p. 91; Dagestan, p. 94; Samara, p. 219). References to documentation about the Great Purge sometimes suggest that what occurred in those terrible years was in accordance with the established procedures of chistka (Moscow, p. 31, Tver', p. 211).[5]

There is no reference whatsoever in the directory to the problem of declassification, and this is strange indeed. Since 1993/1994 discussions about which documents could be made available to researchers has come to a standstill, or even a retreat. Different repositories apply different policies, and some hints about the actual situation per individual repository might have been in order.[6]

Information about reference aids is incomplete. True, the directory mentions some nine published guides on individual repositories (see note 4), but the (occasionally very elaborate) internal reference systems remain unmentioned.

The question of the destruction of party archives in 1991 is ignored. Information on this vexed problem is of course essential to the evaluation of the relevance of any existing holdings.

The repository has not been promoted very vigorously by Rosarkhiv after it had been passed for printing late March 1998. During my stay in Moscow in October 1998 I was entirely unable to trace the publication. Even the Russian State Library had no copy available. Western distributors have so far overlooked the volume altogether.

With a press run of only 500 copies, a second edition of this useful reference would seem necessary. Might this not be a good occasion to insert some amendments into the text?

Notes

[1] Names and status varied: more often than not, provincial documentation centers had an autonomous status under the oblast' archival administration agency. A minority had the more subordinate status of otdel or arkhivokhranilishche and was incorporated in the state archive of the oblast' in question. The three federal documentation centers in Moscow that cover the former Central Party Archives (Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Records of Modern History), the current administration of the Central Committee (Center for the Preservation of Contemporary Documentation), and the Central Komsomol Archives have the same status as the traditional Federal State Archives. The editors have placed the Communist party archives of the city and oblast' of Moscow and St. Petersburg in the section of federal repositories, because of their volume and historical relevance. The Presidential Archive, which contains many records generated by the Politburo, does not fall under the competence of Rosarkhiv. Its (Communist) holdings are not treated in the directory.

[2] In Eastern Europe, too, no substantial transfer of Communist party archives took place, except in Poland. See Leo van Rossum, The Former Communist Party Archives in Eastern Europe and Russia: A Provisional Assessment. International Institute of Social History Research Papers, number 27. Amsterdam, 1997. This research paper can be downloaded at www.iisg.nl/publications/rossum.pdf

[3] The repository of Magadan oblast' was the only one not to participate in the project.

[4] By January 1997, the closing date of the directory, nine guides had been published by the former party archives (from 1992 onwards). Two guides had been published by the "Russian Center" in Moscow, one guide each by the Central Komsomol Archives and the provincial repositories in Krasnodar, Sakhalin, Sverdlovsk, Tatarstan, Tver' and Tomsk. For titles, see pp. 18, 27, 148, 234, 238, 256, 260, 263.

[5] More appropriate qualifications in the entries on Vladimir (p. 81), Volgograd (p. 83), Rostov-na-donu (p. 211) and Samara (p. 219).

[6] For the most up-to-date treatment of this problem, in fact of any aspect of recent archival developments in Russia, see Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, Archives of Russia Seven Years After: 'Purveyors of Sensations' or 'Shadows of the Past', Cold War International History Project, Working Paper # 20, September 1998. Copies are available through: COLDWAR1@wwic.si.edu

Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu.

David King. The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia. Preface by Stephen F. Cohen. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1997. 192 pp. Photographs, illustrations, bibliography, and index. $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8050-5294-1.

Reviewed for H-Russia by Tamara Machmut-Jhashi machmutj@oakland.edu, Oakland University

The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin's Russia

Although it would seem impossible to imagine a context in which the names Pablo Picasso and Joseph Stalin could be linked, there is one fundamental concept that both men understood and manipulated: art is a lie that helps us understand the truth. Picasso exploited this notion to revolutionize the artistic vocabulary of the twentieth century, while Stalin took this idea to its most sinister and horrific conclusion: to create a visual vocabulary in order to write his own version of Russia's revolutionary history. The British photo historian David King has published an extraordinary collection of photographs falsified during Stalin's time that tell the story of the Soviet Union through the lenses of the Stalin cult. As the book jacket explains, King compiled the images in the book using photographs, posters, and art from his own collection that numbers more than a quarter million images. King began collecting pre-falsified Soviet photographs in 1970 in an effort that Stephen F. Cohen, professor of Russian Studies and History at Princeton University, describes in the preface as "heroic--the product of an immense, one-man archaeology" (p. 7).

Airbrushing has long been a tool of the photographer, for smoothing out complexions or concealing imperfections. But this device placed in the hands of Soviet photographers in the 1930s and 1940s soon surpassed any of the bags of tricks used by Hollywood retouchers. The subject of King's photographic study is made evident even before the reader opens the book; the front jacket illustrates a sequence of three photographs and a painting, based on a photo taken in Leningrad in 1926. At that time a snapshot was taken of Stalin surrounded by three others: Nikolai Antipov, Sergei Kirov, and Nikolai Shvernik. In each subsequent photograph a member of the foursome is omitted from the original until only Kirov and Stalin remain. The final work of the sequence, a painting created by Isaak Brodsky in 1929, is based on Stalin's image in the photograph. Now the leader is depicted alone--the sole and all-powerful hero.

King's photo study brings to light the extensive use of cropping, clipping, and airbrushing techniques in Stalinist Russia to create a "corrected" history of the times. As the author states in the introduction: "The physical eradication of Stalin's political opponents at the hands of the secret police was swiftly followed by their obliteration from all forms of pictorial existence" (p. 7). The basic aims of falsifying photographs in Stalinist Russia were two sides of the same coin: removing any trace of Stalin's political enemies while at the same time creating a visual hagiography of the leader. Not only were photographs part of this process but virtually the entire artistic production in Russia, including painting, sculpture, and the graphic arts beginning in the 1930s, was directed at mythologizing Stalin. Painting is touched upon in the book, but King wisely limits his discussion to a few relevant examples.

The author interestingly points out that only about a dozen photographs existed of Stalin from his birth in 1879 until he was appointed General Secretary in 1922, a situation that made it difficult to create a viable visual history of the leader and his accomplishments (minor and obscure, to be sure, in this period), no matter how skilled the hands of the retoucher. For that reason, paintings and sculptures could compensate for the lack of documentary material and embellish the real nature of Stalin's position. "The bronze Stalin, the marble Stalin, were invulnerable to the bullets of the 'Zinovievite bandits.' The flesh and blood Stalin could safely stay out of the public gaze. Sculpture became the real Stalin-heavy, ponderous, immortal" (p. 13). The entire socialist realist endeavor in painting and sculpture was geared toward facilitating the cult of hero worship in the 1930s.

The Commissar Vanishes is a handsomely designed book, in coffee-table format, and is lavished with hundreds of photographs. With so many reproductions, the book is surprisingly affordable. Altered versions of photographs are shown side by side or on adjacent pages with the originals so that the reader is spared the annoyance of constantly flipping pages. King presents his material chronologically, beginning with the 1917 revolution. Party members come and go, disappearing from photographs, or are sometimes scratched out with heavy pen, especially with the onset of the Great Purges in the 1930s. A photograph taken in March 1919, of twenty delegates to the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, was published in its entirety in the Soviet Union only seventy years later. More than two thirds of the men perished under Stalin. This photograph also pictured Lenin, Stalin, and Kalinin seated side by side. This trio was later cropped from the original, and later Kalinin too was removed.

Eliminating figures from group photos through cropping and clipping was one avenue of falsification. King reproduces the famous photograph taken by G. P. Goldshtein of Lenin addressing the troops outside the Bolshoi Theater on 5 May 1920. One of the most widely published revolutionary photographs, it became an icon of the Russian revolution. The original photograph included the figures of Trotsky and Kamenev, but reproductions of the photo, down through the Gorbachev era, were always cropped to eliminate the two. The legacy of this photograph extended into the realm of painting: it was the basis for a large scale canvas executed by Isaak Brodsky in 1933 that became one of the most recognized examples of socialist realist painting; reproductions of his canvas numbered in the millions and earned Brodsky an exalted position in the pantheon of accepted socialist realist artists.

Another famous photograph, of Lenin and Stalin seated together outdoors in Gorki during Lenin's illness, is unquestionably a fake. Taken from different sources, the two images are crudely joined in an effort to bolster Stalin's position in the critical period during Lenin's illness in 1922. King includes the subsequent works that exploited the image of the two in the photograph. In an aptly titled section, "The Stalin School of Petrification," King reproduces two large scale sculptures based on the falsified photo. One, completed in 1938, depicts the two men seated on a bench engaged in conversation. Lenin seems to offer wise counsel to the future leader, who sits in rapt attention. The other piece, displayed in 1949 at a large exhibition entitled "Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin in the Visual Arts," now depicts Stalin standing, towering over the seated Lenin, clearly in a commanding position. No subtlety in the message here, neither is there evidence of the pockmarked skin, shriveled arm, or Stalin's actual five-foot, four-inch frame.

Many of the photographs in King's book are published for the first time, including a dramatic group portrait of the prosecutor-general of the Supreme Soviet, Andrei Vyshinsky, surrounded by his staff of 228 men and women. Taken in 1934, "these are the faces of the bureaucrats who processed the lies, in the guise of socialist justice, that sent millions of people to be destroyed in the Gulag" (p. 121). It is a remarkable photograph, horrifying in its own way, for it literally injects a real element on all the "faceless bureaucrats" who were the necessary cogs in carrying out Stalin's paranoid directives. Needless to say, part of the horror of this group photo lies in the fact that many of those photographed were themselves purged by the end of the decade.

King's book also includes the tragic story of the little girl who was photographed with Stalin in 1936 at a Kremlin reception. There the six-year old Gelya Markizova presented Stalin with a bouquet of flowers, whereupon Stalin embraced the girl. The photograph became famous, depicting Stalin as the joyous "Friend of the Little Children" (the photo was cropped to eliminate another figure who appeared to the side of Stalin, the first secretary of the Buryat Mongol ASSR, M.I. Erbanov). As repugnant as the scene is in its own right with the trusting young child in the arms of the grinning bogey-man, the fate of those connected with the photograph is also a chilling example of Stalin's atrocities. The parents of the girl, Ardan and Dominica Markizov, were murdered just a year after the photograph was taken. The father, second secretary of the Buryat Mongol ASSR, was charged with spying for Japan and shot; the mother was killed as the wife of an enemy of the people.

One of the most compelling sequences of images in King's book is the reproduction of several pages of a photo album titled "Ten Years in Uzbekistan" created in 1934 by the celebrated avant-garde artist of the 1910s and 1920s, Alexander Rodchenko. King found a copy of the album among Rodchenko's own collection of books and magazines, still in the bookshelves of the artist's apartment-studio in Moscow, which is today occupied by members of the artist's family. King describes the discovery of the album: "Looking inside Rodchenko's copy of 'Ten Years of Uzbekistan' was like opening the door onto the scene of a terrible crime. A major purge of the Uzbek leadership by Stalin in 1937, three years after the book's publication, meant that many of the official portraits of Party functionaries in the album had to be destroyed...The names of those who had been arrested or had 'disappeared' could no longer be mentioned, nor could their pictures be kept without the greatest risk of arrest. Petty informants were everywhere. The walls really did have ears" (p. 10).

Over the span of eight pages, King reproduces the defacement of the album by the artist himself. Faces and names are blocked out ominously in heavy pen and brush marks. The collective fear that poisoned the 1930s is exposed in the violent strokes of the pen that scratched and blotted out faces and figures. Not only did Rodchenko feel compelled to destroy his own work, but, as the author points out, it was the duty of librarians and even school children in the Soviet Union to carry out the necessary task of eliminating traces of those cast in the role of enemy.

The Comissar Vanishes will appeal to a wide spectrum of readers: from experts in the field of Russian history, who will find photographs published for the first time, to those with less scholarly interests. Specialized knowledge is not necessary to appreciate the single most important aspect of King's book: the profound and inexpressible effect that these falsified images make upon our hearts and minds. The Commissar Vanishes is a fascinating and important contribution to our understanding of Stalinist Russia and one that this reviewer recommends to every student of twentieth-century Russian history.

Copyright 1998 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact H-Net @N-Net.MSU.EDU.

Mark Kupovetsky, Evgenii Starostin, and Marek Web (eds.). Dokumenty istorii i kultury evreev v arkhivakh Moskvy. Moscow: Russian State University for the Humanities, 1997. 503 pp. Index.

Reviewed for H-Russia by Jeffrey Veidlinger, Veid@msn.com, Department of History, Georgetown University

Dokumenty po istorii i kulture evreev v arkhivakh Moskvy (Jewish Documentary Sources in Moscow Archives) edited by Mark Kupovetsky, Evgenii Starostin, and Marek Web, is an essential resource for any scholar doing archival work on Jewish issues in Moscow, as well as an invaluable source of information on Moscow Jewish institutions and individuals.

The book is the first in a series of guides to be published jointly by the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. Future volumes will focus on St. Petersburg and provincial archives within Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. The volume under review contains an introduction in both English and Russian, briefly outlining the history of the project, surveying other archival collections relating to Russian-Jewish history, and describing the criteria used to select archival collections for inclusion in the volume. Essentially, all records of Jewish provenance, such as those originating from Jewish communities, Jewish educational institutions, charitable institutions, cultural institutions, commercial institutions, professional institutions, political parties, social movements and individuals were selected, as well as governmental and municipal records, archives of public institutions and associations, and personal papers relating to Jews or Judaism.

The breadth of material covered is exceptional. The book contains descriptions of archival holdings dating from as far back as the sixteenth century (fonds relating to early Jewish settlements in Lithuania and Poland in RGADA) and as recently as 1991 (The Central Committee of the CPSU in RtsKhIDNI). Most archival collections, however, date from 1917-1953. Of particular note are the records of the German Reich seized from Berlin, which can be found in the Center for the Preservation of Historical Documentary Collections. The guide also contains an appendix listing collections that met the criteria, but were, for unstated reasons, not included. Although other editors would, perhaps, have chosen to include many of these entries, their inclusion in an appendix nevertheless provides important information for those seeking simply to verify that a collection exists and to locate it.

The archives surveyed are divided into five sections: 1) Central state archives, including the Russian State Archives of Early Records, the State Archives of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Military-Historical Archives, the Russian State Archives of Economics, the Russian State Archives of Literature and Art, the Russian State Archives of Film and Photo Documentation, the Russian State Archives of Phonographic Documentation, and the Center for the Preservation of Historical and Documentary Collections; 2) former Communist Party archives, including the Russian Center for the Preservation of Documents of Contemporary History, the Center for the Preservation of Documents of Youth Organizations, and the Center for the Preservation of Contemporary Documentation; 3) Institutional archives, including the archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of History at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Russian Imperial Ministry of Foreign Affairs; 4) Moscow municipal archives, including the Moscow Central Historical Archives, the Moscow Central Municipal Archives, and the Moscow Central Archives of Social Movements; and 5) manuscript divisions in libraries and museums, including the Russian National Library, the State Historical Museum, the State Literary Museum, the Glinka State Central Museum of Music, the Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum, and the Museum of the Revolution. The project was unable to gain access to the archives of the President of the Russian Federation, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the KGB.

Each entry contains several paragraphs of explanation. Although the editors could have set more precise guidelines for their contributors giving the entries a more standardized appearance, the individual entries do share some characteristics. They usually outline the history of the archival collection, describe its content, and provide a brief history of the organization or individual under examination. In many cases, the historical sketch of the organization is so informative, that the book can actually be used as an encyclopedic source as well.

Comprehensive indexes organized according to subject, name, and geography in both English and Russian enhance the guide's usability, and allow for extensive cross-referencing.

Not only is this archival guide an essential tool for researchers and a model for future guides to emulate, but it can also serve as a miniature encyclopedia of Russian Jewry. One can only hope that the forthcoming guides in this series will be of equal value.

Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact h-net@h-net.msu.edu

Nikolai Bukharin. How It All Began. Trans. George Shriver. Intro. Stephen F. Cohen. New York/Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 1998. xxxi + 345 pp. Introduction, translator's preface, afterword, Bukharin's Letter to Anna Larina, and glossary. $27.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-231-10730-7.

Reviewed for H-Russia by David G. Rowley drowley@badlands.nodak.edu, University of North Dakota.

N. I. Bukharin: Subversive

On February 27, 1937 Nikolai Bukharin, "golden boy of the revolution" (in Lenin's words), popular Communist leader, and the Soviet Union's most respected Marxist theoretician, was arrested as a "hired murderer, saboteur, and wrecker in the service of fascism."[1] On March 15 of the following year, the Soviet government announced that Bukharin had been executed for his crimes. Bukharin spent the year and sixteen days between his arrest and death in Lubyanka Prison, where he was questioned, threatened, and prepared for what was to be the most spectacular of all Stalin's show trials.

Amazingly, Bukharin found the intellectual energy, under unimaginable mental torment (he knew that his execution was a foregone conclusion and that his wife and child were hostage to his own good behavior), to write four book-length manuscripts: "Socialism and Its Culture," in which he defended the essential humanism of socialism against the threat of fascism; "Philosophical Arabesques," his final interpretation of Marxism; a collection of nearly two hundred poems on history and politics, life and love; and an autobiographical novel. That novel, translated under the title How It All Began, was Bukharin's last work. Indeed, it was unfinished, breaking off in mid-sentence.

We are indebted to Stephen Cohen, author of the classic biography of Bukharin, for the discovery of these four manuscripts. At his trial, Bukharin had hinted that he had left some writings behind, but their existence was the subject only of rumor until an aide of Gorbachev told Cohen that such manuscripts did exist and were preserved in a secret archive. Cohen continued to pursue the matter until an associate of Yeltsin's (whose anonymity Cohen preserves) delivered photocopies of the manuscripts to him, to be given to Bukharin's widow, Anna Larina, and son. They have all since been published in Russia.[2]

All Bukharin's prison manuscripts provide fascinating glimpses of Bukharin's analysis and critique of Soviet society, but his novel is remarkable for its profound, implict rejection of Stalinist culture--in particular for its subversion of the norms of Socialist Realism. Bukharin has often been seen as a leader who could have led the Soviet Union on a more viable economic and political course; How It All Began reveals that he could also have led the Soviet Union on a more creative cultural course.

Curiously (and, of course, unintentionally), the novel is also subversive of the trend in Western historiography that blames Stalinism on the ideological bankruptcy of Bolshevism.

How It All Began is part bildungsroman, part lyrical evocation of the Russia of Bukharin's youth. Although purportedly a novel, it is transparently a memoir of Bukharin's own life--beginning with his first consciousness of the world in the early 1890s and ending when Bukharin was still a student in the gimnaziia just before the 1905 Revolution.

The most striking aspect of the novel is Bukharin's evocation of the Russia of his youth. His attention to detail, his precise and convincing descriptions of countryside and city, and his deft characterizations of personalities are remarkable. Though elaborate and lush, Bukharin's descriptions are never awkward or overblown; one is struck only by their vividness and freshness. This detail is all the more remarkable when one realizes that this is a first draft--and a hurried one, at that.

As a youth Bukharin was a fervent naturalist, and he conveys the excitement he felt at exploring the countryside in search of new varieties of birds, butterflies, beetles, and amphibians. His nature jaunts provide the opportunity for describing the countryside of central Russia (near Moscow where he spent most of his life) and Bessarabia (where he lived briefly as a boy).

Bukharin is adept, as well, at describing people. He was a close observer of classes of people; he describes and characterizes the behavior of various social ranks, from aristocrats, bureaucrats, merchants, and teachers, down to artisans, laborers, and the denizens of Moscow's lower depths. He delights as well in individual personality studies--including pompous officials in Bessarabia, good (and bad) teachers in his schools, and a wide variety of relatives and friends of his family--each relationship happy or unhappy in its unique way.

What gives structure to the story are the vicissitudes of his father's career. When Kolya (Bukharin) "Petrov" is born, his father Ivan "Petrov" is employed as a schoolteacher in Moscow. Petty squabbles of the school became unendurable, and Ivan secures a position as tax assessor in Bessarabia. In the city of Kishinev, he works for the department of revenue, collecting taxes, fees, and duties.

However, Ivan's life turns out to be even more miserable in Kishinev than it had been in Moscow. The local officials are hard-drinking, bribe-taking anti-Semites who don't know what to do with Ivan--who is honest and incorruptible and who treats Jews as equals. His colleagues both stood in awe of Ivan and despised him. He is not fired, but another official is sent from St. Petersburg to take over Ivan's work.

Bukharin's father escapes this anomalous situation by taking his family back to Moscow. Teaching positions are hard to come by, and the Petrov children are parceled out among several relatives while their parents live on charity and the sale of their possessions. Kolya and a younger brother live for a time with an uncle who works as a doctor in a village in central Russia. Finally, by the turn of the century, when it is time for Kolya to enter the gimnaziia, the whole family gathers back in Moscow--first living with yet another of Kolya's uncles, then, after Ivan finally secures work as a teacher, in their own apartment.

The central character, of course, is Bukharin himself--he is most definitely the hero of his own story. Among many curious and interesting episodes through which Kolya learned what the world is like, we are told of how he first learned about sex and how disillusioned he was with the adult world because his parents had lied to him about it. He tells how he gave up religion, how he brought a consecrated host away from mass to show his friends it was not miraculous, and how upset his grandmother was by this.

Bukharin tells about how he was introduced to the literature and ideas of the Russian Revolutionary movement from Tosya, a frail but brilliant son of friends of Bukharin's father. We learn of Bukharin's precocious and voracious reading habits, his talent for art, and his stellar performance as a student. Bukharin marvelously recreates the atmosphere of his school. He describes loved and hated teachers. He recalls songs, Latin jokes, and schoolchild pranks. Bukharin's good humor and irrepressible vivacity prevent his pride at his accomplishments and talents from appearing as pure boastfulness. No wonder Lenin called him "the golden boy."

Both Stephen Cohen and translator George Shriver represent this autobiographical novel as carrying a pointed political message. In their respective introductions, they each suggest that Bukharin used "Aesopian language" to attack Stalin and Stalinism. For example, when Bukharin described his father's difficulties as an official in the corrupt Tsarist regime he could easily have been showing the parallels between the Tsarist and the Stalinist bureaucracy. Bukharin's criticism of anti-Semitism could also be applied to Stalin and the party. Bukharin also criticizes the methods of tsarist police interrogation, says that the "best heads" in Russia were cut off, and asserts that the government killed freedom of criticism. He attributes Stalin's famous phrase "There are no fortresses Bolsheviks cannot storm" to a tsarist military officer talking about the old regime. Bukharin portrays Marxists as opposing terrorism (thereby implicitly defending himself from that charge), and he shows the Tsarist government conspiring in the assassination of its own members (a parallel with Stalin's murder of Kirov?).

It is for these reasons that Cohen chose to title this book How It All Began instead of Times (which is the literal translation of Vremena, the title that Bukharin, himself, chose for his novel). This implies that the book is "about" the beginning of Bukharin's involvement in the revolutionary movement. Cohen gave it this title precisely because he believes that Bukharin intended the novel to have "a political edge" (p. xviii).

I disagree. I believe that such a reading of Bukharin's intentions conceals a far more important message. The most significant aspect of this memoir is Bukharin's own life and feelings, not his connection to the revolutionary movement.

The political edge to this novel is primarily present in four very problematic chapters that he might have been expected to have edited out of later drafts. In Chapter Twelve Bukharin briefly summarizes the social, cultural, and political status of Russia at the turn of the century. Chapter Eighteen is a fictionalized meeting (with dialogue) between Nicholas II and Wilhelm II in which Wilhelm urges Nicholas to strengthen the Russian military presence in Asia. Chapter Twenty describes a debate among Socialist-Revolutionaries and Social Democrats (featuring not Bukharin, himself, but his cousin) which brings out all the differences regarding terrorism, the role of the peasantry, and principles of party organization that divided the SDs and SRs. Chapter Twenty-One recounts a conversation between a liberal government official and the reactionary Minister of the Interior Plehve. Bukharin portrays Plehve as a hypocrite who pretends to be a reformer while implementing reactionary policies. Bukharin also shows the ties between the police and the terrorists and particularly the government's role in allowing the assassination of its own officials.

These four chapters are exceptional for two reasons. First, they are neither about Bukharin's growing up nor are they about his observations of the world; they are not written from Kolya's point of view. Because they are descriptions of events that Bukharin could only have known about indirectly, they lack the immediacy and vividness of the memoir. Second, they are the only overtly political passages. "Aesopian" references to anti-semitism and bureaucratic arrogance in the memoiristic chapters need not be taken as Aesopian at all. They are there because they fit naturally into the narrative of his memoir--because they were significant to understanding Kolya's life and consciousness. This cannot be said of the four non-memoir chapters.

To treat this novel as a polemical attack on Stalin and Stalinism is vastly to underrate and diminish it. I believe that How it All Began is a far more subversive work than a mere attack on the politics of Stalinism. It is, in its very essence and by its example, a rejection of the entire tone of Soviet culture in the 1930s. Bukharin disdains to strike the conventional pose of the veteran revolutionary; he shows sympathy for Russia's poor, but he never expresses trite and expected hatred of capitalism and Tsarism nor childish vows to fight against oppression. Moreover, there is no hint of Socialist Realism in this work; it is profoundly personal and humanistic, dealing, as it does, with the thoughts and feelings of a unique individual. The very non-political nature of the memoiristic chapters of How It All Began makes it a far stronger political statement than any of the merely polemical thrusts at Stalin.

In its Russian context, Bukharin's memoir will, I suspect, be considered to be his greatest work and his lasting legacy to Russian letters. Bukharin's theoretical and political work is unlikely to be much read in the future. His Marxist theorizing does not address contemporary issues. As the Soviet Union recedes into history, Bukharin's role as a one-time leader of a revolutionary regime will diminish in significance. It is as a contributor to Russian belles-lettres--though minor, indeed, compared with the Russian Masters--that I believe Bukharin's name will live on.

In its Western context, Bukharin's memoir is also significant. How It All Began carries a subversive message for Western understanding of Soviet history. The show trials and the executions of Lenin's generation of Bolsheviks are one of the most spectacular, horrifying, and intriguing of all the perversions of the Stalin era. Some observers have found in this bizarre set of events a symbol of the entire totalitarian system; it has been interpreted as not only the work of Stalin's evil genius, but also the logical product of attempting to rebuild the world in the image of an ideal.

Indeed, Arthur Koestler used the example of Bukharin's arrest, trial, and execution to make just that point. In his classic Darkness at Noon, Koestler imagines Bukharin as an ideologue who willingly goes to his death partly in suicide because he realizes that the ideology he believed in had produced a wasteland and partly as his last, inescapable gift to that ideology. Bukharin's prison manuscripts prove Koestler wrong. Socialism and Its Culture and Philosophical Arabesques are not disillusioned recantations of his intellectual past, but logical continuations of his interest in the cultural problems of Soviet society, his alarm at the danger of German Fascism, and his desire to keep Soviet philosophy firmly on Marxist footings.

The same is true of How It All Began. In August 1934, at a meeting of the First Congress of Soviet Writers, Bukharin had denounced ideologically strait-jacketed art and called for "humanism," "powerful, rich, and variegated art" that would express "the entire world of emotions--love, happiness, fear, anguish, anger, and so on to infinity--the entire world of desire and passion." He even praised the lyric poetry of Boris Pasternak. [3] In its relentless refusal to conform to the standards of Socialist Realism, in its profound and non-political humanism, How It All Began exemplifies what Bukharin meant in his address. How It All Began does give us an insight into the psychology of at least one Old Bolshevik, but it is not at all what Koestler imagined. It seems to me that Bukharin's last writings tell us that the people who made October, who won the Civil War, and who attempted to build Socialism without coercion in the 1920s were not ideologically bankrupt moral monsters. Bukharin was a humane and sensitive human being. His complicity in a political system that resulted in the deaths of millions is no different from the complicity of many politicians whom the West admires in sending millions off to die in "good" wars. In our utilitarian age, sacrificing lives has never been controversial--only the purposes for which they have been sacrificed. To see the Old Bolsheviks as ideologues relentlessly driven to destruction by the bankruptcy of their own ideas is put to rest by this novel. It was an evil man who put Bukharin to death and not an evil ideology.

In the face of imminent and certain death, Bukharin wrote a novel in which he re-lived his joy-filled youth. _How It All Began_ is notable not for its incidental barbs directed at Stalin but for its underlying optimism, its spirit of wonder at the beauty of the world, and its sense that life is a great adventure.

Notes

[1]. Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938 (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), p. 370.

[2]. The novel appeared in 1994: Nikolai Bukharin, Vremena (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1994). The other works, Sotsialism i ego kul'tura, Filosofskie arabeski, and Tiuremnye stikhi were published two years later in Nikolai Bukharin, Tiuremnye rukopisi N. I. Bukharina v 2-knigakh, ed. G. A. Bordiugov (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1996).

[3]. How It All Began, p. xxvi

Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu.

Martin McCauley. Russia, America and the Cold War, 1949-1991. Seminar Studies in History. London and New York: Longman, 1998. v + 154 pp. Documents, chart, bibliographical reference, maps, and index. $11.95 (paper), ISBN 0-582-27936-4.

Reviewed for H-Russia by Roger E Chapman rogerc@bgnet.bgsu.edu, Bowling Green State University

Bare Bones and Bones to Pick: The Ideology of Summarizing the Cold War

If people believe that truth is brevity, then Martin McCauley's Russia, America and the Cold War, 1949-1991 has the potential of becoming a classic. A summary of the Cold War in one hundred and three pages--supplemented by excerpts from select primary documents, a chronology chart, before-and-after maps of Europe, and a bibliography listing seventy-three main sources--it is a book almost as beautifully thin as Edmund Wilson's vintage polemic The Cold War and the Income Tax.[1] This latest work by McCauley is a companion piece to his previously published The Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1949.[2] Both books are part of the Seminar Studies in History series and follow a similar approach of sticking to the bare bones. This new offering, however, is better outlined and more organized, but perhaps at the expense of conveying the complexities and ambiguities that characterized the Cold War.

McCauley breaks the Cold War down into four distinctive periods: Cold War I (1949-1953); To the Brink and Back (1953-1969); Detente (1969-1979); and Cold War II (1979-1985). If Cold War I were to have bookends, then they would be the establishment of NATO and the death of Stalin; volumes in the middle would include the Berlin blockade, the Soviet testing of an atomic bomb and the American response of developing a hydrogen bomb, and the Korean War in which the two superpowers represent different sides in the conflict. "To the Brink and Back" covers the Khrushchev tenure and its intense struggles with Eisenhower and Kennedy, including the shooting down of the U-2 spy plane and the Cuban missile crisis, and ends with the election of Nixon. Other episodes marking this time period include the establishment of the Warsaw Pact, the Soviet crackdown on Hungary, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the building of the Berlin Wall, and the U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Detente is characterized by an easing of tensions between the two superpowers and is highlighted by the signing of the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreement in May 1972, but this period of general calm (overlooking the brutal crackdown of "Prague Spring" in 1968) comes to an end when the Soviets invade Afghanistan. Cold War II is about Reagan and his tough posture toward the "evil empire," but McCauley astutely points out that much was prepared beforehand by Carter who had increased the American military budget, established a rapid deployment force, put into operation the MX missile, and negotiated secret military pacts with the Chinese (p. 58). However, it has been noted elsewhere that the dismantling of detente actually began during the short-lived Ford adminstration.[3]

The last two chapters of the book are "New Political Thinking and the Cold War: 1985-1991" and "The Twentieth Century: An Overview." The "new political thinking" which takes place between 1985 and 1991 was largely a Gorbachev initiative which both Reagan and Bush were very slow at recognizing and acknowledging. For Reagan, the Reykjavik conference in 1986 was a missed opportunity on his part. The year 1991 was marked by the formal disbanding of the Warsaw Pact at the end of March and the official dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of December. McCauley's overview of the twentieth century, all explained in fifteen pages, offers his answer to a series of raised questions: What were the sources of hostility between the two superpowers? Why was America the one to guarantee Western Europe's security? Why did the United States become the systematic rival of the Soviet Union? Why did the Cold War end?

The main sources of conflict between the two superpowers, explains McCauley, were the decision of American leaders to play a global role after 1945, the ideological assumptions of both countries (each thinking that its destiny was to shape the world), and the desire for security (p. 92). After World War II the Western European nations desired economic assistance from the United States, but the only way Truman could secure Congressional approval of such loans was "by exaggerating the Soviet threat." The Berlin blockade, a Soviet response to the fear of the introduction of the Deutsche mark, and the establishment of a strong West Germany gave a timely credence to the myth of the Soviet threat.

Some policy makers felt that only the United States, as the sole nuclear power, was capable of standing up against such aggression. And in 1949, after the Soviet test explosion of an atomic bomb brought an end to the American nuclear monopoly, the U.S. government drafted NSC-68. That policy document, approved in 1950, established an American Cold War strategy, one that would be followed for the next forty years. In essence, the strategy was to stay ahead of every Soviet advancement. This led to competition, the spiral of arms production, and what McCauley calls the "spiral of angst." Ideology played a role, in that the Soviets believed in "the kingdom of certainty" while Americans believed that they "had discovered the laws of human existence and ... [needed] to enlighten others" (pp. 95-97).

According to McCauley, "The Cold War came to an end because it was impossible for two powers to divide and rule the world." The Soviet Union "buckled and disintegrated" when the burden became too much. At the same time, the United States was less able to intervene in foreign affairs and was much relieved when its rival ceased to exist (p. 101). McCauley suggests that the arms race exhausted the Soviet Union and led to its demise (p. 103). In the United States this interpretation is popular among the politically conservative.[4] But Robert Strayer in Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse? points out that other factors should be taken into consideration, among them being the social disillusionment caused by the protracted war in Afghanistan and the progress of reforms in China that preceded Gorbachev by six years.[5]

Some experts would choose to disagree with McCauley for using 1949 as the starting point for the Cold War.[6] But pertinent events prior to 1949 McCauley simply classifies as "origins of the Cold War." He points out that some believe the Cold War started in 1917 after the Bolsheviks came to power, but he fails to note that this is an extreme minority viewpoint.[7] It seems that the mentioning of 1917 as a potential demarcation is the author's avoidance of having to explain why events immediately following World War II are not considered part of the Cold War. The truth of the matter is, how one dates the start of the Cold War is an ideological decision. The year 1949 is when the United States established NATO, a resolute action, and this makes a nice beginning point for the grand narrative which ends on the happy note of, "America won the Cold War!" Consider McCauley's Cold War time-line in the back of the book: "NATO is set up in Washington" is how it begins and "The Soviet Union ceases to exist in international law" is the finale (pp. 132, 141). This makes for neat and tidy history, but it also smacks of victory ritual. Ironically, the use of NATO as a beginning point lends support to the argument that the United States started the Cold War.

Also, in 1949 the Soviet Union dared to acquire a nuclear capability, and so the Cold War started because the "good guys" (the West) had to respond to this sudden threat. But I would point to July 25, 1945, the day Truman recorded in his diary, "We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world," adding, "It is certainly a good thing that Hitler's crowd or Stalin's did not discover the atomic bomb."[8] It seems that the Cold War germinated in the mind of a distrusting Truman. (It has been argued that his dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan was partly motivated by a desire to intimidate Russia--as Cold War strategists often said, Russia respects nothing but power and force.[9])

In March 1946, prior to the Soviet nuclear development, Truman introduced Churchill before an assembly at Westminister College in Fulton, Missouri, and sat and listened while the former prime minister of Britain proclaimed, "From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent."[10] Surely Truman had some inkling of what Churchill was going to say and his very purposeful presence signaled an endorsement. Stalin afterwards interpreted Churchill's speech as "a call for war on the U.S.S.R."[11] Many Russian historians suggest that Churchill's speech marks the beginning of the Cold War. McCauley would no doubt respond by pointing out that he covers Churchill's iron curtain speech and Stalin's reply in his previous book, Origins of the Cold War, but even so he classifies these public performances as merely "a turning point."[12] Michael J, Hogan, in his new book on Truman, designates this time period as "early Cold War," a much more accurate description than "origins of."[13]

The twenty-page document, "United States Objectives and Programs for National Security," otherwise known as NSC-68, has the official date of April 14, 1950.[14] But if it could be regarded as the fruition of policy analysis that was taking place in 1949, then it lends some support for McCauley's starting point. (NSC-68, for some unknown reason, is not part of McCauley's Cold War chronology chart in the back of the book.) NSC-68 saw the Soviet Union as "animated by a new fanatic faith, antithetical to our own ... [seeking] to impose its absolute authority on the rest of the world." The only option for the United States, therefore, was to recognize that "the cold war is in fact a real war in which the survival of the free world is at stake." According to McCauley, NSC-68 "had a formative influence on the way America waged the Cold War, until it was superseded by the changed environment of detente" (p. 15).

Yet even if we were to all agree that NSC-68 is the first comprehensive Cold War text produced by American policymakers, it does not prove a beginning point for the Cold War. The essence of NSC-68 can be found in the diary of Eisenhower, in his entry for September 16, 1947. "The main issue is dictatorship versus a form of government only by the consent of the governed," was Eisenhower's assessment of the international situation. Russia was the problem--its "direct conquest" and "infiltration"--and the only solution was "adequate military strength" and the restoration of "broken economies" that otherwise "will almost certainly fall prey to communism." The general who was the commander of the D-Day invasion dramatically ends the day's diary installment with, "Unity is more necessary than it was in Overlord."[15] Such discourse is similar to what one finds in NSC-68. McCauley apparently believes that NSC-68 represented a new direction, and maybe it did, but a counter-argument might suggest that it was simply the consolidation of policies already in existence and manifested by the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, and NATO. Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, in their new book on Eisenhower, offer the thesis, "While the cold war originated under Harry S. Truman, it took its mature form under Eisenhower."[16]

McCauley would have the reader believe that the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, both of 1947, preceded the Cold War. The Truman Doctrine was a response to political and social upheaval taking place in Greece and Turkey. The United States appropriated $400 million to bring stabilization to those two countries in order to prevent "seeds of totalitarianism" from sprouting into plants. In other words, Truman was taking action to beat the Soviets from taking action. The same reasoning was behind the Marshall Plan. In George C. Marshall's June 5 speech at Harvard University, he revealed a tension of denial and reality. On one hand there was the denial that the Marshall Plan was an opposition to the Soviet Union: "Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos." And on the other hand there was the reality that it was, in fact, an anti-Soviet safeguard: "Any government which maneuvers to block the recovery of other countries cannot expect help from us. Furthermore, governments, political parties, or groups which seek to perpetuate human misery in order to profit therefrom politically or otherwise will encounter the opposition of the United States."[17] Charles E. Bohlen, the American diplomat and expert on American-Soviet affairs, felt that the Cold War had its beginning when Marshall took over the State Department in January 1947.[18] But it should be obvious that the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the establishment of NATO, and the drafting of NSC-68 are links in the same Cold War chain.

Near the end of the book the question is raised: Was the United States an imperialistic power? McCauley's answer is yes, but he categorizes it as "benign imperialism" (p. 103). Whether or not the United States continues to be an imperialistic power is not addressed, but any observant reader considering the material McCauley has presented may wonder how the author came up with "benign" as a qualifier. It was not a benign act when the United States threatened nuclear retaliation against China for its dispute with Taiwan (p. 28). Neither was the CIA in 1960 being benign when it considered assasinating Lumumba, the prime minister of Congo (p. 30). Instigating a seccessionist movement in Indonesia, for the hope of creating disunity and overall weakness, was American foreign policy not at its benign best (p. 30).

The Bay of Pigs invasion may have seemed like a slapstick comedy to some observers, but it was certainly not a benign act (p. 36). It was benign that Kennedy removed the Jupiter missiles in Turkey after the Cuban missile crisis, but had the United States not deployed them in the first place there probably would not have been a dangerous standoff (p. 37). The American intervention in Vietnam was not benign, unless something good can be said about B-52 carpet bombings, napalm, Agent Orange, and the war crimes of My Lai 4 (pp. 37-39). Also, McCauley does not consider how it was far from being gracious when the United States refused to help other countries that would not totally endorse its foreign policy. A case in point: American funding for the construction of the Aswan dam in Egypt was withdrawn because Nasser refused to be a U.S. puppet (p. 29). Had the author offered any details about the 1954 Guatemalan coup, another less than benign intrigue of the United States would have been noted. None of this is to imply that the Soviet Union was benign in all of its policies, but McCauley is wrong to be so charitable in evaluating American interventionism.

McCauley also states that America's "benign imperialism" has made the world richer (p. 103). To his credit, he does point out that some of the countries where the United States intervened remain the poorest in the world: Angola, Zaire (Congo), Somalia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Guatemala, and El Salvador (p. 102). Even so, to hail the world as now richer overlooks the great economic imbalances. It is said that 80 percent of the world's trade is now controlled by five hundred multinational companies, half of which are based in the United States, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland. Also, from 1980 to 1990 the net financial transfers from the South to the North were "equal to about ten Marshall Plans." And from 1984 to 1990 transfers from the Third World to commercial banks in the West amounted to about $180 billion.[19]

One writer notes, "The total wealth of fewer than four hundred billionaires is estimated to equal close to the combined incomes of the poorest 45 percent of the world's population."[20] It would probably be more accurate to state that America's "benign imperialism" has made some in the world richer. In making the claim that the world is now richer, McCauley offers no reflection on the monetary costs of waging the Cold War. It is now estimated that the United States spent $5.5 trillion on its nuclear arsenal. At the present moment, the United States reportedly spends $96 million a day on the nuclear system it inherited from the Cold War.[21] It staggers the mind to wonder how the world might be different if such funding could have been invested into more humane undertakings.

The documents section, the best part of the book, has nothing from NSC-68 (although a small portion of that policy statement is quoted in the main text). It is also unfortunate that Kennedy's 1963 American University speech is not included. I would have also added to the collection Reagan's 1983 "evil empire" speech. An omission in the book entirely is the nuclear policy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). Strangely, considering the space limitations, an excerpt from Billy Graham's _Just as I Am_ is one of the documents, revealing a 1961 conversation in which Kennedy professed a belief in the domino theory. The arrangement of the documents is not in chronological order, which can be confusing. On a positive note, documents representing the Soviet Union are included and constitute a significant portion.

McCauley, a senior lecturer in politics for the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at the University of London, has presented a book that can be added to the mountain of volumes on the Cold War that have already been written. Does Russia, America and the Cold War, 1949-1991 offer anything new? The answer is no. Unfortunately, some will be attracted to the book by its slim size. It is easy to envision a class of undergraduates being assigned this work for gaining a quick overview. The documents section provides an illusion that what is being presented is just the facts. However, what the reader gets is a dosage of cultural hegemony, a Cold War tale presented through Western eyewear. A work so small in size should just be the bare bones, but in actuality this book has bones that need to be picked out in order for it to be made safe to swallow. With McCauley's excellent credentials he could have produced an overview of the Cold War with more careful commentary accenting the perceptions of both sides of the conflict. Instead, what we have is a book which, while appearing to be objective, actually has the molecular structure of Western victory culture.

Notes

[1]. Edmund Wilson, The Cold War and the Income Tax (New York: Signet Classics, 1963). Wilson's book of 128 pages is thicker than McCauley's book only because the typeset is larger. Wilson quotes from the U.S. government's The Budget in Brief (for the fiscal year ending July 1, 1964), a primary source too often overlooked by the historian: "The Nation faces unprecedented challenges at home ... In 1964 the Federal Government will continue to build a defensive and retaliatory power designed to deter aggression. At the same time, it will seek to strengthen the foundations of freedom around the world ..." (p. 55, in Wilson's book). Also, in the same federal government brochure on the budget, "The Federal Government's final responsibility is to help safeguard the peace and security of the free world. This is our largest category of expenditures" (p. 56).

[2]. Martin McCauley, The Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1949, Seminar Studies in History (London and New York: Longman, 1983, 1996).

[3]. This is the conclusion reached by Anne Hessing Cahn, Killing Detente: The Right Attacks the CIA (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).

[4]. An example of the conservative view is represented by Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York and London: The Free Press, 1995), pp. 421-429. For a more sophisticated analysis of why the Cold War ended, see H. W. Brands, The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War (New York and Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 187-228. For a treatment which presents multiple perspectives, see Ralph Summy and Michael E. Salla, eds., Why the Cold War Ended: A Range of Interpretations (Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1995). For a viewpoint that suggests nobody won the Cold War, see Richard Ned Lebow and Janice Gross Stein, We All Lost the Cold War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994).

[5]. Robert Strayer, Why Did the Soviet Union Collapse? (Armonk, N.Y. and London: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 127-30.

[6]. See Walter Lippman, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1947). The opening sentence of McCauley's Russia, America and the Cold War states, "The term 'Cold War' was popularized by the US columnist Walter Lippman and entered general usage in 1947." But McCauley maintains that the Cold War started in 1949. It seems odd that the term preceded the occurence. How could this be? Either Lippman was an amazing prophet/psychic or he was simply an observant journalist. Lippman's book was partly a response to George F. Kennan's X-Article ("The Sources of Soviet Conduct"), the American manifesto advocating a U.S. containment policy toward the Soviet Union. Although published in 1947, Kennan's essay is actually based on the February 1946 "Long Telegram" he sent to his superiors at the State Department. In other words, events that Lippmann "popularized" as the Cold War extend back to at least 1946. According to Carl Cavanaugh Hodge, "William Averill Harrison (1891-1986)," in Notable U.S. Ambassadors Since 1775, ed. Cathal J. Donal (Westport, Conn. and London: Greenwood Press, 1997), the American ambassador Harrison judged that the Cold War started during the San Francisco conference (April-June, 1945) over the issue of Poland (p. 140). Harrison, believing that the Cold War was in progress, helped publicize Kennan's "Long Telegram."

[7]. For an analysis of the charge that Woodrow Wilson helped start the Cold War (because of the 1918-1920 Allied interventions in Bolshevik Russia), see Betty Miller Unterberger, "Woodrow Wilson and the Cold War," in The Liberal Persuasion: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and the Challenge of the American Past, ed. John Patrick Diggins (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 199-213.

[8]. Truman quoted in Robert H. Ferrell, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), pp. 55-56. Or see URL: http://www.peak.org/~danneng/decision/hst-jl25.html.

[9]. See William Appleman Williams, "The Cold War Revisionist," The Nation, 13 November 1967, pp. 492-495. In this article Williams challenges Arthur Schlesinger for "nearly ignoring the role of the bomb in the origins of the cold war" (p. 495). Also, see Mitchell Lerner, "Review of Dennis D. Wainstock, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, H-PCAACA, H-Net Reviews, January 1997, URL: . http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=15685859474359

[10]. The complete text of Winston Churchill's "Sinews of Peace" speech (13 March 1946) is available on the internet, URL: http://www.winstonchurchill.org/sinews.htm.

[11]. For the complete text of Stalin's response to Churchill's iron curtain speech, see Walter LaFeber, The Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947: A Historical Problem with Interpretations and Documents (New York and London: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1971), pp. 139-43.

[12]. McCauley, Origins of the Cold War, pp. 55, 73, 132-34.

[13]. Michael J. Hogan, A Cross of Iron: Harry S. Truman and the Origins of the National Security State, 1945-1954 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

[14]. The complete text of document NSC-68 can be found in Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 385-442.

[15]. Dwight D. Eisenhower, The Eisenhower Diaries, ed. Robert H. Ferrell (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1981), pp. 143-44.

[16]. Robert R. Bowie and Richard H. Immerman, Waging Peace: How Eisenhower Shaped an Enduring Cold War Strategy (New York and Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 3.

[17], The text of "The Marshall Plan Speech" can be found on the internet, URL: http://www.usis.usemb.se/topical/pol/marshall/mp-spch.htm.

[18]. Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History, 1929-1969 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1973), p. 260.

[19]. Sherif Hetata, "Dollarization, Fragmentation, and God," in The Cultures of Globalization, eds. Frederic Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, N.C. and London: Duke University Press, 1998), pp. 274-75.

[20]. Rajni Kothari, "Globalization: A World Adrift," Alternatives, 22 (1997), pp. 227-67.

[21]. See Stephen Schwartz, Atomic Audit: The Costs and Consequences of U.S. Nuclear Weapons Since 1940 (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 1998). Portions of the book's findings are on the internet, URL: http://www.brook.edu/fp/projects/nucwcost/weapons.htm.

Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu.

Sally W. Stoecker. Forging Stalin's Army: Marshal Tukhachevsky and the Politics of Military Innovation. Foreword by David Glantz. Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1998. xiv + 207 pp. Photos, figures, tables, and index. $ 59.00 (cloth) ISBN 0-8133-3410-1.

Reviewed for H-Russia by Wayne Bowen bowenw@alpha.obu.edu, Ouachita Baptist University

The Power of One: Marshaling Reform in the Soviet Military

In her introductory chapter, "The Context for Innovation in Stalin's Army," Sally Stoecker presents a counter-intuitive, but compelling, argument that the Soviet Army during the period of the First Five-Year Plan was not a prisoner to Stalin's totalitarian ideology, but instead a relatively "independent institution that was capable of successful innovation" (p. 8). Embracing and coaching their new strategies and tactics in Marxist-Leninist (and later Stalinist) language, "reform-minded military officers" such as Marshal Tukhachevsky promoted innovative military doctrines, doctrines which would survive Stalin's purges of the Red Army and prove their merit in the bitter struggle against Nazi Germany (p. 12).

In the midst of the titanic efforts of the First Five-Year Plan, the Soviet view that war against capitalism was inevitable, and Stalin's emphasis on breaking all links with the Tsarist past, military innovators had a significant amount of freedom to reshape the armed forces of the USSR, in the process modernizing and transforming the revolutionary army of the Bolsheviks into a conventional military power. Looking to the failure of Tsarist armies in World War I for powerful lessons on how not to prepare for war and conduct military operations, Marshals Tukhachevsky and Voroshilov also emphasized the need to give industrial priority to defense industries, and to link industrial production and priorities more explicitly to military preparations (p. 19).

In Chapter Two, "Politics and Military Priorities: Building a Case for More Resources," Stoecker explains the bureaucratic strategies employed by Soviet military leaders to focus more resources on rebuilding the military. Despite the image held today of an unbridled Communist military-industrial complex, which commanded more and more of the Soviet economy, the reality was that military leaders had to plead, cajole, and fight for every increase in their budgets.

The most significant challenge for military leaders was to persuade Stalin and other leading Communists that the Soviet Army could not wait for long-range industrial development to bleed over into defense preparedness: the armed forces needed a near-term infusion of resources to deal with potentially immediate threats to the existence of the Soviet Union (pp. 33-35). War Commissar Voroshilov, in particular, exhorted his fellow Communists at Party and Soviet Congresses to devote more budget consideration to the military, or face increased threats from Poland, Germany and other capitalist countries (pp. 37-39). By 1934, faced with rising instability in the Far East and Central Europe, and the initial successes of the First Five-Year Plan, Stalin finally began to devote to the military sufficient resources to accommodate the recommendations of Voroshilov and Tukhachevsky.

Chapter Three presents the confluence between foreign events, especially in the Far East, and the efforts of Soviet military leaders to improve and enlarge their institutions. With the coming to power of an explicitly anticommunist regime in Germany, and the swift Japanese conquest of Manchuria, Stalin was faced for the first time with evidence of potential encirclement by hostile and expansionist powers. The dramatic seizure by Chinese Nationalists and Japanese of the Chinese Eastern Railroad in 1929, previously controlled by the Soviet Union, acted as a strong stimulant to divert more resources into military spending, particularly in the wake of the clearly inadequate military personnel and equipment available for Soviet counterattacks.

The Soviet military did learn valuable lessons in the use of combined arms, the importance of logistics, and tactics of encirclement from these operations, however (pp. 67-69). More important, however, was the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1931-32, which "rapidly spurred the substantial rearming of the border with China" (p. 69). Indeed, the Soviet military doubled its forces in the region from 1929 to 1932, indicating the rising necessity of military preparedness in a world hostile to the Soviet Union and its interests (p. 70).

Despite its great resources, the Soviet Union was not capable of modernizing its forces without some access to foreign technology and knowledge. Fortunately for Soviet military leaders, another pariah nation, Weimar Germany, was also in need of a covert military partner, as detailed in Chapter Four, "The Clandestine Collaboration between the Reichswehr and the Red Army." Despite the mutual "secrecy and suspicion" which clouded the relationship between German officers and their Soviet counterparts, the Red Army gained significantly from the unlikely partnership (p. 79). The Soviet Union gained invaluable assistance in creating a chemical weapons industry, and also in improving tank and air doctrine.

Chapter Five, "The Acquisition and Adaptation of Foreign Models: The Case of Tank Development," examines the development of an indigenous Soviet tank production infrastructure. Arguing that the Red Army did far more than copy foreign models, Stoecker does admit that Soviet researchers did copy from the West, particularly from tanks purchased from Great Britain and the United States. By the early 1930s, however, Soviet R&D centers had gleaned what they could from foreign sources, and were clearly focused on creating their own prototype tanks. Whatever imitation of components or designs they may have undertaken, Soviet scientists and engineers did far more than produce second-rate copies of foreign tanks; they designed tanks to fit Soviet terrain, tactics and industry. The best example of these developments was the famous T-34, the best example of a military-industrial complex which, by the years immediately preceding Soviet entry into World War II, "was well on its way to designing and producing a formidable arsenal of high-quality indigenous weapons" (p. 128).

Chapter Six, "Marshal Tukhachevsky: Enigmatic Military Entrepreneur," focuses on the man at the center of Soviet military innovation during the late 1920s and early 1930s, convincingly arguing that Mikhail Tukhachevsky was "the chief catalyst" for the culture of reformism in the Red Army, leading the movement for change within his institution as a "public entrepreneur" (pp. 135-36). Comparing Tukhachevsky to Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the modern U.S. nuclear navy, Stoecker makes the case that Tukhachevsky, more than Voroshilov, Stalin, or the general institution of the Soviet military, promoted and encouraged reformism, contributing his own command of detail, brilliant strategic thinking, and mastery of political infighting to gain resources and approval for his improvements. Despite an aristocratic background and service in the Tsarist army, his ideas of the decisive offensive and deep battle became essential elements of Soviet battle doctrine, even after Tukhachevsky himself was purged and executed in 1937.

Chapter Seven, "Postscript: Yezhovshchina and the End of Innovation," details the fall of Tukhachevsky, a victim of the leading edge of Stalin's great purge of the military. Despite the success of his reforms, and his great service to the Soviet state, in May 1937 Tukhachevsky was arrested, charged with treason and conspiracy with fascist powers. His execution soon after, and those of thousands of other officers, left the Soviet military weakened on the eve of World War II. More important, according to Stoecker, was the destruction of "the culture conducive to innovation," which had been shepherded by Tukhachevsky, and the loss of this great strategist and doctrinal innovator (p.182). Dismissing previous claims that Tukhachevsky was framed through an elaborate plot by Nazi leaders, Stoecker attributes Stalin's destruction of the Marshal to an old grudge of Stalin's from the Civil War, as well as, quoting Alec Nove, the General Secretary's well-known "pathological excesses" (pp. 185-86).

In her final chapter, Stoecker again asserts the indispensability of both Tukhachevsky and Voroshilov to the increased resources available to the Soviet armed forces after 1928, as well as the relative autonomy these leaders and like-minded fellow officers had to promote innovative strategies and doctrines during the period of the first Five-Year Plan. Leading us one more step away from the totalitarian model, Stoecker has constructed a persuasive view of an important institution in Soviet society, presenting a coherent analysis of the rebuilding of Soviet armed forces through the force of will of one man, and laying out a case that it was the reforms of Tukhachevsky which enabled the Soviet state to survive its greatest tests: the twin horrors of Stalin's rule and the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany.

Stoecker's study, which relies on recently declassified documents of the former USSR, as well as a thorough and judicious use of the most recent historiography, is a pathbreaking foray into Soviet military history and should be recommended reading for historians, military analysts and other readers interested in the history of military innovation in the twentieth century, Stalinism, World War II, and the rise of the Soviet Union to world power. It would be a useful text for courses on modern military history or the Soviet Union, and is also recommended for upper-division undergraduates and graduate students. The only criticism which might be leveled at this text is its brevity, which does not allow the author an even more thorough examination of this important and interesting topic.

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Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov. Bitter Waters: Life and Work in Stalin's Russia. Translated by Ann E. Healy. Boulder: Westview Press, 1997. xxi + 195 pp. Bibliographical references. $25.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8133-2390-8; $16.00 (paper), ISBN 0-8133-2374-6.

Reviewed for H-Russia by Amy E. Randall, DePaul University

Provincial Russia in the 1930s

Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov's career as a journalist was temporarily suspended in 1927 when the Soviet authorities sentenced the teenager to ten years in a labor camp for "counterrevolutionary activities." He pursued his writing career again only after the war's end as a refugee in West Germany. This newly translated memoir was originally published in 1954 and is one of Andreev-Khomiakov's many writings addressing his experiences in the Soviet Union. It begins with his early discharge from a labor camp in 1935 and ends with his evacuation from Moscow in the fall of 1941. The portrait he provides of daily life, politics, economy, and labor in the second half of the 1930s and the beginning of World War II is invaluable for professional historians and non-specialists alike. It differs from the majority of 1930s memoirs, particularly those intelligentsia memoirs recounting the fear, uncertainty, and drama of the late 1930s Purges. Andreev-Khomiakov's memoir focuses on the less dramatic, if no less authentic, everyday lives of bureaucrats, workers, and peasants as they experienced the realities of "building socialism" in Stalinist Russia. His story is not a simple one.

The tone of the memoir is established at the outset when Andreev-Khomiakov recalls the alienation he experienced the day of his release from a labor camp in Siberia. After boarding a train to set off on his new life, he peered through a window to find himself marveling at two young girls amid others on the platform. Despite his newfound freedom, Andreev was overcome not by a sense of joy, as he had imagined during his years of confinement, but rather by a profound lack of comprehension of the seeming contentment of those around him. He poignantly asked: "How could they [the girls] laugh? How could all these people walk around conversing and laughing as if nothing unusual was happening in the world, as if nothing nightmarish and unforgettable stood in their midst. Did they really know nothing, truly not sense the barbed wire and the man with a rifle at their backs (p. 3)?"

Andreev-Khomiakov addresses this incongruity implicitly throughout his memoir as he illustrates the multiple realities that existed in the 1930s. Although Andreev-Khomiakov himself condemns the Soviet system, his memoir underscores that the individual perceptions of and responses to it were not uniform. Neposedov, Andreev-Khomiakov's boss, supported the regime's emphasis on technology and central planning, and he bustled about in the factory, "constantly fired up and in motion" (p. 11). In contrast, Andreev-Khomiakov's co-worker, Nina Mikhailovna, appeared relatively indifferent to the system and took advantage of the inefficient and wasteful factory work schedule to read the novels she enjoyed (p. 82). The engineer, Kolyshev, did not embrace the system, but did not reject it either. Because he did not believe it could be changed radically, he utilized his position within it to show compassion and to help others preserve an "inner decency" (p. 99).

Andreev-Khomiakov offers a unique perspective on the similarly uneven effects of the Soviet experiment on regions beyond major urban centers. Stigmatized due to his past, he moved in search of work from a steppe town to a regional hub, and finally to a provincial town. In his travels, Andreev-Khomiakov suggests that some people indeed knew very little, or nothing at all, of various policies, campaigns, and the purges. According to Andreev-Khomiakov, "Events far away in the regional capital, in Moscow, and in other big cities seemed to bypass" life in the rural steppe town (p. 9). As a result, the town's inhabitants kept the same basic routine that had existed before the October Revolution. They "worked at their jobs during the day, and in the evenings they visited each other, gossiped good-naturedly, sat over tea, bared their souls in long conversations," and played cards (p. 9).

Although the Party and state campaigns for socialist competition, shock work, and Stakhanovism exerted a presence in the provincial locale three hours away from Moscow, the author observes how little these campaigns affected actual labor practices. He also argues that relatively few Party members were employed in the factory and its central board in Moscow, and that Party members (but not necessarily Komsomol members) exercised "no particular influence" on people's activity (p.130). Nor did the Great Purges directly affect Andreev-Khomiakov and others who lived and worked in the provincial sawmill town or its surrounding countryside. According to him, "The violence was occurring far away somewhere, at some inaccessible height," and no one in his factory of 500 was arrested (p. 42). The memoir illustrates the haphazardness of the Soviet regime's experiment and underscores that the Communist Party and the state were not all encompassing.

Readers interested in central planning will find Andreev-Khomiakov's view of the economy particularly engrossing. As director of two different factory-planning departments in the 1930s, he provides many colorful details of "the Plan" in practice. Andreev-Khomiakov argues that the introduction of planning in the timber industry led to chaos, environmental damage, shortages, and waste. In addition to less overall production, Andreev also discusses the contribution of centralized planning to the persistence and expansion of a dual economy, in which the unplanned sector allowed the planned economy to continue to operate.

He and his factory colleagues, repeatedly resorted to unofficial middlemen to procure essential supplies virtually impossible to obtain through sanctioned channels. Similarly, the sawmill directors provided much-needed timber to organizations and industries, outside of any official plan. In return, they received various food products and manufactured goods, such as women's shoes, which they then disbursed to workers. Although these transactions were not part of the Plan, such barter activity enabled industries to realize some of the Plan's projected goals. Moreover, supply of scarce goods to workers gave them more incentive to fulfill their work duties.

In addition to providing ample evidence of the inadequacies of central planning, Andreev-Khomiakov describes how planners and bookkeepers tried to compensate. He and his coworkers frequently violated the Plan by manipulating accounts and forging vouchers to meet the factory-laborer needs overlooked by the Plan and the trade unions. For instance, Andreev-Khomiakov falsified an account entry that allowed the day-care center at the sawmill to style itself as a "representative." This fiction enabled it to obtain desperately needed provisions under the legitimate rubric of "costs for representation" (p. 91). In Andreev-Khomiakov's words, the myriad problems with the planned economy required that most people operate "not according to the Plan, but according to a freakish 'dialectical combination' of the planned and unplanned, in essence by constant violation of the Plan" (p. 72). Despite recognizing the functional and material benefits of these strategies, he forces the reader to simultaneously confront the possibility that the constant scheming and manipulation of the planned economy led to debilitating effects on people's morale, visibly manifested in outbursts, melancholia and drunken episodes.

Andreev-Khomiakov's observations about planning are mirrored in his remarks about domestic trade. Although he notes a relative improvement in the material conditions of the country from approximately 1935 to 1938, the author emphasizes the existence and importance of the unofficial domestic trade sector. For example, when he and his boss were in danger of running out of fuel, they resorted to buying gas from an unofficial seller--a labor-camp inmate who drove a fuel truck for the NKVD. His memoir also highlights the regional inconsistency of material conditions. Food products and manufactured goods were more plentiful in the cities than in the towns and villages.

This unevenness ironically meant that "pushy wives went to Moscow, bought clothes and shoes there, and sold them in [Andreev'-Khomiakovs] town at speculators' prices" (p. 43). And yet, despite his resentment and frustration with the situation, Andreev-Khomiakov admires the "enterprising women," for they turned a profit and performed an essential service (p. 43). After 1938, when apparently "product shortages became even worse in the provinces," people took even more "trips to Moscow" to procure basic items (p. 100). His descriptions illustrate the paradoxical effects produced by the limited growth of official retail trade combined with persistent scarcity, and the ways in which the comparatively better availability of goods in Moscow may have fostered unofficial and illegal trade in the provinces.

Andreev-Khomiakov's nuanced reflections concerning the contradictions imbedded in common problems extend to his own situation as well. As much as Andreev-Khomiakov suffered from and disliked the Soviet system, he also found himself using it to his advantage. Unfairly fired from his job because of his tainted past, Andreev-Khomiakov nevertheless benefited from the 1936 Stalin Constitution and related labor laws, and managed to overturn his improper discharge. Similarly, when his sawmill was threatened with imminent closure because of a decision by the Council of People's Commissars to reallocate timber supplies, Andreev-Khomiakov's superiors called upon the very same governmental body for a short-term solution--permission for the sawmill to pursue its own logging. Subsequently thwarted in their new logging efforts by actions of the Meat and Milk Production Trust, Andreev-Khomiakov and his boss appealed to the arbitration bureau of the Council of People's Commissars for compensation and won a partial victory. Ironically, the Council of People's Commissars both contributed to the sawmill's problems and helped provide it with temporary recompense. Despite his constant criticism of the Soviet system, Andreev-Khomiakov demonstrates the ways it could simultaneously offer protection and opportunity.

According to the memoir, the contradictions of the Soviet system undermined its credibility and legitimacy. Nonetheless, even though many people were unhappy with the existing state of affairs, the system persisted. Andreev-Khomiakov raises the question that many scholars have sought to answer: Why? His answer enriches our debate. In his opinion, "fear was not the primary obstacle" (p. 131). Rather, people lacked a clear alternative and did not have coherent answers as to how to do things differently. In addition, there was no leader or group around whom people could unite. Without unity, and without a vision for reforming the system, Andreev-Khomiakov proposes that the regime could not be rejected wholesale, especially given the public awareness of the growing German threat as the decade unfolded.

Andreev-Khomiakov's memoir will provoke discussion about the nature of the Soviet system rather than provide facile answers. It joins a growing body of literature that offers a window on ordinary people's experiences of Soviet life in the 1930s, including two recently edited collections, Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s,[1] and A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History.[2] The introduction by Ann E. Healy does a fine job of placing the memoir in historical context and her footnotes provide helpful information for the non-specialist. As a result, readers of this review should find Andreev-Khomiakov's memoir a highly useful, personal, and accessible source with which to introduce students to everyday life in the Stalinist Soviet Union.[3]

Notes

[1]. Ed. Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New Press, 1995).

[2]. Ed. Barbara Alpern Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History (Westview Press, 1998).

[3]. Other texts that depict everyday life and are used in survey classes include: Zara Witkin, An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934, ed. Michael Gelb (University of California Press, 1991); John Scott, Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel (Indiana University Press, 1989); and Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (Transaction Publishers, 1989).

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Edvard Benes was firmly and unmistakably rooted in Czech patriotic tradition. His political enemies dismissed him as a simple deal-maker, but as president of a small country caught between two countries who gave birth to Nazism and Bolshevism he needed to maneuver. Therefore he was often -- although not always -- ready to compromise. But he was also a man of tremendous personal and professional integrity. He was a pragmatist who applied with considerable skill the principles of Western rationalism to advance the Czechoslovakian state interests. (p.117)

1. Milada Polisenska and R. Kvacek. "Benes a 'pripad Tuchacevskij'," Mezinarodni politika 8 (1991), 28-29.
2. In this context, I would like to present the theme of the meaning of Czech history with one recent study: Jaroslav Krejci,. Czechoslovakia at the Crossroads of European History (London, New York: Taurus, 1990). See also Jan Kren, Historicke promeny cesstvi (Prague: Univerzita Karlova, nakladatelstvi Karolinum, 1992). Another work by Kren, Die Konfliktgemeinschaft: Tschechen und Deutsche, 1780-1918 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1996), has been reviewed on HABSBURG, http://h net2.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=24827870870793. As an example of the deep-rootedness of this theme, I would like to add Pavel Tigrid, Kapesni pruvodce inteligentni zeny po vlastnim osudu (Prague: Odeon, 1992), 4th ed.
3. Lukes first published the results of his research on the role of President Benes in the Tukchachevsky affair in German in Vierteljahreshefte fuer Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 44. number 4 (Oktober 1966), 527-549. This article, "Stalin, Benesch und der Fall Tuchatschewski," laid the groundwork for the fourth chapter of his book.
4. Antonin Klimek and E. Kubu, Ceskoslovenska zahranicni politika 1918-1938: Kapitoly z dejin mezinarodnich vztahu (Prague: Institut pro stredoevropskou kulturu a politiku, 1995), 93.

1. The Period of Soviet-German Partnership (with essays on the fate of Poland and the Poles under the Nazi-Soviet pact, consequences for the Baltics and Finland, and economic relations);
2. Operation "Barbarossa": Political Preconditions, Strategic Planning, and Military Consequences (all from the German perspective);
3. Politics and Experience of the War of Annihilation (with essays approaching the issue from "above" as well as from "below");
4. Soviet Politics and War Strategy, 1941;
5. Germany and the Soviet Union in International Politics (primarily concerned with the experience of third countries, ranging from Italy and Turkey to Switzerland and the United States).

Kenneth M. Straus. Factory and Community in Stalin's Russia: The Making of an Industrial Working Class. Series in Russian and East European Studies. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. xiv + 326 pp. Tables, maps, photos, notes, bibliographic essay, and index. $55.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8229-4048-5.

Reviewed for H-Russia by Laura L. Phillips, lphillips@ewu.edu, Eastern Washington University.

The Making of the Russian Working Class

Any scholar who attempts to emulate E.P. Thompson's achievement in The Making of the English Working Class carves out no small task for himself. In his recent monograph, self-proclaimed apprentice Kenneth Straus nonetheless attempts to do just that by reconceptualizing working-class formation in Russia in light of Thompson's methodology--that is, he attempts to understand class formation as a process.

Concentrating on the experience of workers in Moscow's Proletarskii district, especially those of the Hammer and Sickle Steel Plant, Straus draws broader conclusions about class formation in the 1930s. He argues that Russia's traditional labor market had been a dual market. On the one hand, established workers constituted a stable labor force; on the other, a disparate group of subaltern workers (peasants, women, and youth) moved in and out of the labor market according to economic and seasonal imperative. This dual market, characteristic of pre-revolutionary Russia, persisted through the NEP years, when labor surpluses precipitated mass unemployment for subaltern workers.

According to Straus, it was only during Soviet Russia's transition to mass-production industries in the First and Second Five-Year Plans that a labor deficit facilitated the formation of a homogeneous industrial working class. In the 1930s, established workers, peasant migrants, women, and youth became integrated into a more equitable, socially-stabilizing labor market. With opportunity for advancement and stable participation in the industrial workforce now open to "established" and "subaltern" workers alike, working-class consciousness in the 1930s finally coalesced around the idea of inclusiveness, rather than focusing on perceived oppositions between workers and enemy classes, or between workers and the state.

For Straus, the critical years in this process were 1930-32, when the inversion in the labor market created a demand for labor well exceeding supply. In 1931, Joseph Stalin's "Six Conditions" speech further legitimated social leveling among workers by calling for an end to specialist baiting, and by stipulating that henceforth pay for labor was to be based on equity, not on a worker's social origins or job tenure. The dislocation characteristic of the first Five-Year Plan (FYP), says Straus, was followed by steady economic growth from 1933-1940, in part because "new construction was halted, production targets were lowered, and enterprises were instructed to undertake some reduction of staff through layoffs" (p. 134). Still, the first FYP's imprint remained: the dichotomy between "newcomers" and "established workers" had disappeared, and class inclusivity had become a more important theme than class struggle (pp. 204-5).

In the course of his study, Straus discusses the many ways in which he believes disparate groups of workers became integrated into a cohesive industrial working class. For example, the labor demands of the first FYP necessitated fundamental changes in worker training. Training methods inherited from NEP (primarily apprenticeship and the FZUs), had never been a means of mass instruction: they were male-dominated, exclusionary, and allowed established workers to control the acquisition of skill. In contrast, the deficit of labor that arose during the first FYP was addressed by training entire work crews at one time. It suddenly became possible for many subaltern workers--who had been denied jobs or marginalized into seasonal work in the 1920s--to gain qualifications in just a few years. Another source of worker integration in the 1930s was the work brigade. By cooperating in brigades, laborers could regularize their work routine. The work brigade, Straus concludes, allowed Soviet workers to help define what the working class "could legitimately be asked to produce" and it protected them from the regime's forays into "storming," shock work, and Stakhanovism (p. 180).

Straus nicely demonstrates factory directors' early realization that class war disrupted production on the shop floor, and he describes their many efforts to retain a viable workforce. From 1928 to 1932, the task of production was doubly complicated by the labor deficit and by the slow pace of state-sponsored housing construction, which lagged pitifully behind the construction of new factories. Directors who wanted to keep their workers found themselves compelled to provide for their workers' basic needs: the provision of housing, special stores with deficit goods, daycare, heath care, and the like all came to be centered in the factory. In Straus's view, construction of communal homes during the first FYP was particularly important. In replacing the old workers' barracks with communal homes, Red Directors provided housing for the entire working-class family, an important precondition for bringing an end to seasonal peasant migration and with it, an end to Russia's traditional dual labor market.

Straus makes a very thoughtful contribution to historical literature on the working class in the 1930s, but this monograph has its peculiarities. Most obviously, the title of the work asserts its relevance to "Stalin's Russia," while the text itself concentrates overwhelmingly on the first two FYPs. The attention Straus devotes to the 1940s and 1950s is quite sparse and readers should not expect the work to be informative about those years. More significantly, there is an uneasy tension between Straus's effort to make broad generalizations about working-class formation in Soviet Russia and his concentration on a few major factories in Proletarskii district. While there is no inherent harm in combining these two goals, here the effort seems strained and Straus's links between the two levels of analysis do not flow easily.

Most worrisome, the reader may be forgiven for wondering whether Straus's argument was proven before he began. In Chapter One, Straus tells us that "the 'continuity question' ultimately cannot be resolved historically," and that it is his "assumption" that the first FYP "marked the most radical and fundamental of historical discontinuities" (p. 18). In this light, how significant is it when he later asserts that "a mass, urban, proletarian lifestyle or culture" took shape for the "first time in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union" during the first FYP (p. 231)?

To be sure, "proletarian culture" did not mean the same thing to the state or to workers in 1932 that it had meant in the 1890s, in 1917, or in the 1920s. But the history of the Russian working class cries out for more careful, systematic comparison before we throw the baby out with the bath water. For example, as evidence of greater inclusivity in the 1930s, Straus cites the 1936 constitution, which "redefined" peasants and intellectuals as "laboring classes"--in other words, as "insiders" rather than "outsiders" in the Soviet system (p. 241). But if constitutional standing is evidence of inclusiveness, might not Straus have pointed equally well to the 1918 constitution, which counted peasants among "toilers" and women as citizens? Further, since Straus acknowledges that women and peasants continued to be segregated into certain occupations, it is not so clear that there was a fundamental change in the status of these subalterns in the early 1930s, despite their improved chances for employment and upward mobility.

Despite these reservations, Straus's work gives scholars of the Soviet working class much food for thought. The concept of Russia's dual labor market and Straus's contention that its demise led to increased social cohesion in the 1930s-40s provides a very useful framework for further research. Further, his emphasis on the efforts of Red Directors adds to our knowledge about the many mediators sandwiched between state and society in Stalin's Russia. We therefore should not find undue fault if this work does not match the mastery of Thompson.

Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit is given to the author and the list. For other permission, please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu.

Sarah Davies. Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934-1941. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xix + 236 pp. Tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-521-56214-7; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-521-56676-2.

Reviewed for H-Russia by Dietmar Neutatz neutatz@uni-duesseldorf.de, Heinrich-Heine-Universitaet Duesseldorf, Germany

Ordinary People and the Regime

Secret police and party reports from the Soviet Union of the thirties seem to have something fascinating for historians. The letters "NKVD" or "OGPU" appearing on archival files still anticipate sensational revelations and insights fundamentally correcting our prevailing views. Often enough, after a first feverish glimpse into the files, top-secret documents, which had been hidden for sixty years, turn out to contain banalities. Nevertheless, there can be exciting information, too. Let's have a look at what Sarah Davies could extract from NKVD sources about popular opinion in Stalin's Russia.

Davies' book, based on her Oxford doctoral dissertation (1994), focuses on a formative period of Soviet history. The years 1934-41 witnessed both the Great Retreat from the cultural revolution to tradition and stability and the Great Terror, beginning after the murder of Kirov in December 1934. The study seeks to find out how ordinary people responded to the Great Retreat and the Terror. What was the effect of propaganda and repression? Were people keeping silent or was there any significant dissonant popular opinion in Stalin's Russia?

Investigation of such questions has been restricted by a lack of sources. Until a few years ago scholars could consult only memoirs, travel accounts, the emigre Menshevik journal Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, the Smolensk archive, and interviews with emigrants. The proponents of the totalitarian model had stressed propaganda and coercion and implied that the masses were either brain-washed into conformity or were silent opponents of the regime. By contrast, some revisionists attempted to demonstrate the existence of a social basis of support for Stalin. Robert Thurston in his recent study even goes so far to believe that most ordinary people did not feel terrorized, that they exercised freedom of speech and enjoyed the right to criticize and complain.[1]

Davies wants to reevaluate the question of popular opinion to get away from the totalitarian insistence on the atomized, voiceless masses, without moving to the other extreme of painting a picture of satisfied and contented workers and peasants. She argues that there was a wide range of heterogeneous positions along the continuum from active consent to active resistance or dissent. There were few absolute conformists and dissenters. In practice, people's views were far more ambivalent and contradictory.

In contrast to Stephen Kotkin, who claims that the vast majority of people adopted the Bolshevik discourse and found their identity in the Stalinist "civilization," Davies argues that ordinary people were adept at in seeking out alternative sources of information and continued to draw on a variety of rival discourses, including those of nationalism, anti-Semitism, and populism.[2] The main goal of Davies' book is to illuminate the hitherto neglected body of dissonant opinion which distorted, subverted, rejected, or provided an alternative to the official discourse. She wants to recover the thoughts and values, hopes and beliefs of "ordinary people."

The book is structured thematically and, within its chapters, chronologically. Part I focuses on economic and social questions: What did peasants think about the kolkhoz? What did workers think about the economy and labor policy, wages and prices, the poor supply of food and consumer goods, Stakhanovism and labor decrees? What was the popular opinion about the situation of women, family policy and education, religion and the nationalities question? Part II considers politics and examines opinions about international relations, the constitution of 1936 and elections, and the Great Terror. Special emphasis is given to the problem of social identities ("us" and "them") during the terror. Part III concentrates on the leader cult.

Davies found her sources in central and local archives, predominantly from the former party archive of St. Petersburg (TsGAIPD). Among the documents cited are citizens' letters, memoirs, diaries, newspaper articles, and reports prepared by party agitators on the feedback they obtained from their audiences. The main sources are summaries produced by the NKVD, party, and Komsomol information departments on popular responses to particular events or policies (_svodki_). Party and NKVD informants noted down conversations, rumors, jokes, and other evidence of the popular mood which were compiled into summaries. These summaries were classified top secret and addressed only to few recipients.

Davies is well aware of the problems that arise from such sources and discusses them thoroughly: Party, and particularly NKVD informants, wrote their reports under pressure from above to exercise vigilance and expose enemies. We know that they often invented anti-Soviet remarks, reported unverified denunciations, or gave genuine expressions of discontent a more counter-revolutionary gloss. What we do not know is to which degree they manipulated the opinions reported and to which degree these opinions really existed.

However, comparing reports from Leningrad and Novosibirsk, Davies found that there were certain consistent traits of popular opinion, certain discourses which seem to have existed independently of the fantasies of those responsible for the reports. Distortion occurred rather in the manner in which material was selected and analyzed. The selection of material was influenced by considerations of what informants and compilers of reports imagined their superiors wanted to read.

Party reports differed from those of the NKVD in that they included many positive comments, because party officials tended to present their organization as functioning well. NKVD was concerned primarily with detecting "enemies." No statistics were provided so it is almost impossible to establish how widely these opinions were in fact articulated. All party and NKVD reports begin with the standard formula that "the majority of the people" had reacted "in a healthy way." However, alongside this there are certain cases of backward / negative / unhealthy / anti-Soviet / counter-revolutionary statements" (p. 11).

Given this dilemma, Davies avoids quantitative conclusions about the extent of dissenting opinion and focuses instead on typical and recurring themes, indicating whenever an opinion was particularly common or particularly unusual. However, she has to concede that here caution must be exercised, too: e.g. the large number of reports of negative comments in relation to the labor decree of 1940 could be indicative either of widespread complaint, or simply of a more thorough reporting campaign. Comparing the results of Davies' book with those of a recent Russian study on popular opinion and thoughts in the first postwar years, based on similar sources, suggests that lining out typical opinions and themes seems more promising if adopted to a longer period.[3]

Analyzing the svodki and to some extent comparing them with other sources (memoirs, diaries, newspapers), Davies presents a colored picture of various manifestations of popular opinions. One learns that people criticized the poor supply of food and consumer goods, that many workers were hostile to their Stakhanovist colleagues, and that many peasants hated the kolkhoz system. Among the documents cited are impressive letters to the party secretary of Leningrad, in which disappointed workers complained about the high prices for food comparing the cost of living with that in 1913. Others committed suicide, leaving behind notes confessing their distress at being considered criminals for arriving a few minutes late for work. The terror of 1937 enabled people to satisfy their appetite for revenge against at least some of those in power. For a while the regime's image of the enemy and that constructed by the people partially coincided. Discontent reached a peak in 1940/41, after the labor decree of 26 June, 1940. This included open political speeches, the spread of rumors, and calls for strikes. NKVD reported on leaflets titled "Down with the government of oppression, poverty and prisons." Mass riots seemed to be near in the months before the German invasion.

Davies comes to the conclusion that the Stalinist propaganda machine, being far from omnipotent, failed to extinguish an autonomous current of popular opinion. Whole regions and social groups remained excluded from its influence at various times. The propaganda had to compete with a remarkably efficient unofficial parallel network of information and ideas. Religious and nationalist discourse continued to be employed and gender stereotypes persisted. Alternative political ideas--including those associated with the populists, Lenin, the Workers' Opposition, fascism, and czarism--also remained in circulation.

Although Davies stresses that popular opinion was very heterogeneous, she points out certain common currents: frequent complaints aimed at costs and availability of food and consumer goods and the belief that "everything is going backwards." There was an evident feeling of polarization between "us" (the people) and "them" (the new elite). Attitudes towards the state were contradictory: People seemed to expect to receive state benefits, free education, and medicine, but they objected to paying taxes and to compulsory state loans. Peasants hated the kolkhoz system and the state's interference in agriculture. Attitudes towards Stalin and other leaders were also ambivalent: for some they were father-defenders; for others, objects of abuse.

It is a remarkable conclusion that there was in principle a congruence between popular values and the goals the regime pursued. Conflicts emerged as a rule when the regime failed to implement its own values. This and other results resemble those of the Harvard Interview Project conducted after the Second World War amongst Soviet refugees.[4]

Davies emphasizes that the dissonant views expressed in the 1930s cannot be equated with opposition or non-conformity. This would be to repeat the errors of the regime which classified the most trivial criticism as an anti-Soviet subversive act. By relating an anti-Stalin joke, an individual was not necessarily rejecting the Soviet system or Stalin. A critic of one policy could also be an enthusiast of another. Elements of consent and dissent, conformity and resistance, could coexist within the same individual. People moved freely between the two worlds of official culture and a "shadow culture." This shadow culture evidently flourished in the USSR, even during the worst moments of Stalinism. In the long run, it contributed towards the frailty of the Soviet system and later played some role in the decline of the USSR.

These are convincing results which enlarge our knowledge of Soviet society and fit the behavior patterns of partial passive resistance and adaptation described in recent studies by Hoffmann, Filtzer, Straus and others.[5] But they cannot fully satisfy our desire to understand Stalinism. Davies does not put her study in a theoretical concept of Stalinism. She describes the subjects of complaints, rumors, and jokes, and to some extent states what was typical and common, but this rather helps us to explain the final conquest over the Soviet system than the functioning of the Stalinist society.

What Davies describes as common tendencies of popular opinion may be at least in part transferred to any society. In democratic countries, too, people do not like to pay taxes, but expect from the state that it provides education and health services. They express anger about the rise of prices and bottlenecks of supply, make a difference between "us little people" and "them on the top." They tell jokes about their leaders and nevertheless might vote for them in elections. That is all neither surprising nor characteristic for the Soviet Union under Stalin. Characteristic for the Stalinist society is rather the fact that these expressions of discontent were limited to the private sphere, factory meetings, or written complaints, that there were no demonstrations, large strikes or mass protests. On the contrary, on the official festive days hundreds of thousands participated in the jubilant parades organized by the party.

The key to an understanding of Stalinism lies not in the description of expressions of dissent, but in the answer to the question of why widespread discontent did not result in effective mass protest. There are various possible answers: First, as Davies writes, many people were unhappy only in part but not with the system as a whole; second, discontent may not have been as widespread as it seems from the NKVD sources; third, the fear of repression and pressure by fellow citizens devoted to the regime played a more important role than post-totalitarian research is willingly to concede.

The crucial question on the extent of discontent and dissent must remain open. The sources do not allow the author to quantify for how many people the various opinions were typical. Ex post facto opinion research unfortunately has insurmountable limits. The svodki of party and NKVD report single cases of all sorts, but they do not give valid information about the mood of the people as a whole. NKVD informants did not organize an opinion poll, but reported only singular expressions of opinion, whereby it remains unknown, for whom and for how many people they were representative. Maybe in this respect the long-known memoirs and travel accounts are more revealing sources.

Davies is conscious of the limits of her study and calls it herself "preliminary." In her outlook, she formulates questions going beyond her own investigation: How far did the regime take account of and respond to popular opinion? Was the terror itself not, at least in part, the desperate response of a leadership aware of grassroots discontent? Davies herself undertakes only some attempts in this direction: In 1935 the propaganda apparatus reacted to the discontent of workers (rise of food prices after the end of rationing cards) in the way that many critical letters were published in newspapers, but only those not mentioning politically sensitive questions as low wages and hunger. When in 1937 the tide of popular opinion turned against the regime because of continued economic failure, the policy directed popular hostilities away from "Soviet power" and towards individuals, who were purged. On the other hand, despite continued complaints, prices of food and consumer goods were raised several times between 1934 and 1941. These are interesting details, but for further investigations there still remains much to do.

Notes

[1]. Robert W. Thurston, Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia, 1934-1941 (New Haven: 1996).

[2]. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: 1995).

[3]. E. Iu. Zubkova, "Mir mnenii sovetskogo cheloveka. 1945-1948 gody. Po materialam TsK VKP(b)." Otechestvennaia istoriia, 1998, no. 3, pp. 25-39.

[4]. Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer, The Soviet Citizen: Daily Life in a Totalitarian Society (New York: 1959).

[5]. David L. Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis: Migration to Moscow and the Politics of Social Identity, 1929-1941 (Ithaca, NY: 1994) Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928-1941 (London: 1986) Kenneth M. Straus, "The Transformation of the Soviet Working Class, 1929-1935. The Regime in Search of a New Social Stability", Ph Diss. Pennsylvania State University, 1990; Kenneth M. Straus, Factory and Community in Stalin's Russia: The Making of an Industrial Working Class (Pittsburgh: 1997).

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