Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70
Myth, Memory, Trauma: Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953-70
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300187212 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/27/2013 |
| Series: | Eurasia Past and Present |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 541 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Myth, Memory, Trauma
RETHINKING THE STALINIST PAST IN THE SOVIET UNION, 1953â?"70
By POLLY JONES
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2013 Yale UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-18512-6
CHAPTER 1
The Secret Speech
For nearly three years after Stalin's death, the power struggle among the supposedly "collective" leadership was not resolved, nor was the question of how to deal with the memory of their towering predecessor. Indeed, Khrushchev did not emerge as the winner of this power struggle until he performed his "Secret Speech" about Stalin in February 1956. Before that, from 1953 to late 1955, Central Committee (CC) discussions of post-Stalinist domestic and foreign policy had often expressed or implied a desire to break with Stalinist precedent, and some changes implemented, especially during Lavrentii Beria's dramatic "100 Days" of reform, in fact did so quite dramatically (including the massive Gulag amnesties, the recalibration of the balance between heavy and light industry in the planned economy, and the rethinking of Soviet attitudes toward the Eastern bloc and the West). However, even in confidential discussion, Stalin's successors refrained from criticizing him directly, in contrast to the vitriol that Beria attracted (notably for his role in Stalinist terror) after his defeat and death in summer 1953. In this respect, private elite discussions during this interregnum were not much more frank about Stalin than the public discussion in the Soviet press, which condemned the cult of personality from the earliest days after Stalin's death but never before 1956 linked it directly to Stalin.
The CC investigation of the cult of personality, which began in late 1955 and ultimately led to Khrushchev's speech "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences" in February 1956, was a different matter altogether. From the start, this investigation foregrounded its historical and moral credentials in claiming to resurrect the truth about Stalin's destruction of the Leninist Old Guard in 1937–38. While Khrushchev had many motives for "exposing the cult of personality," including the "logic" of the power struggle, his advocacy of it to colleagues and then to Soviet citizens emphasized the necessity of historical truth and moral reckoning with past crimes. The majority elite consensus around these ideas made the Secret Speech an unprecedented intervention in Soviet memory: an attempt to reveal and judge the complex truth about a (indeed, the) leading Bolshevik, without entirely forgetting or demonizing him.
The idea of raising the cult of personality at the 20th Congress arose less than four months before the congress, and the speech was finalized less than four days before Khrushchev performed it, to a closed session after the congress' end, on 25 February 1956. At every stage of this short but complex gestation, the Secret Speech provoked contestation and controversy. CC discussions of the content, form, and performance of the speech anticipated several key arguments about the memory of Stalin(ism), later voiced by audiences as it was disseminated across the Soviet Union. In its final draft, by now the work of many hands, the speech contained multiple views of the Stalinist past and of the discussions of Stalinism that it should generate among its listeners. When the Secret Speech's audience engaged in all these forms of discussion, as well as others unanticipated by the party leadership, the regulation of memories of Stalinism became both urgent and uniquely challenging.
In dispatching the Short Course's co-author, Petr Pospelov, to excavate the truth about the late 1930s terror, the party leadership signaled a rupture with the form and content of the canonical Stalinist narrative. This historical research into terror was supplemented by attempts to recover select victims' memories. Indeed, the creation of the Pospelov commission in December 1955 had been partly a response to appeals from rehabilitated Old Bolshevik victims of the terror, who lobbied Khrushchev and Mikoian to acknowledge the terror at the first major post-Stalin gathering of the party. The party leadership responded by inviting several well-known victims and perpetrators to send or perform detailed testimony of the Great Terror to the CC. These memories, together with the historical data collected by the Pospelov commission, were initially the object of historical and moral judgment within the party elite. Together with other material, they were then woven into a statement on the Stalinist past, performed to the party, and eventually to the majority of the Soviet population.
This statement was written in a hurry. Though the initial research into the truth about the cult of personality was commissioned at the end of 1955, most discussion of it took place mere weeks before the 20th Congress. The decision for Khrushchev to give a speech on the topic was only finalized on the day before the congress opened, and revisions of the speech continued throughout the congress' first week. That the speech was finalized so soon before its performance was largely due to a debate within the party elite concerning different approaches to the memory of Stalinism, which continued almost until Khrushchev took to the tribune.
In the weeks leading up to that moment, Khrushchev and his colleagues had read and heard a remarkable, and remarkably shocking body of evidence. Pospelov's report, intended as a focused investigation of the fate of the delegates of the 1934 17th Party Congress, in fact revealed a depth of suffering, and a breadth of complicity in the "sickly" practices of terror, that was truly staggering in scale: these were "scandalous infractions of Soviet law, mass arrests of absolutely innocent people, cruel beatings and torture." Radiating outward from elite victims' harrowing case histories, the terror of 1937–38 was revealed to have caused "enormous," irreparable "damage" and "harm" to the party and its cause, not least to the war effort a few years later. The report concluded that in the party's history "there was no more difficult or bitter page than the mass repressions of 1937–38, which cannot be justified in any way," thus casting the terror as deeply traumatic as well as utterly immoral. Despite the strictly empirical brief issued to the authors, their report thus intermingled objective historical and statistical analysis and condemnation of the "shameful" actions of Stalin, producing a narrative of terror very likely to evoke outrage. Nonetheless, Pospelov's report did not evoke a unanimous response among its elite readers, nor could they agree on whether and how these revelations about the cult of personality should be shared with a wider audience.
The majority of the presidium did share the report's sense of outrage about the terror, partly driven by a desire for self-exculpation, but also by a belief that the cultic commemoration of Stalin, which had continued since his death, was now grotesquely incongruous with the new information. "What sort of leader [vozhd'] is it," asked one member, "who destroys everyone"? For Aristov, one of the authors of the first draft of the speech, the revelations about the "fearsome years" of the terror had entirely reversed Stalin's reputation: "we wanted to make a God, but he turned out a devil," he lamented. Such judgments insisted that the terror was a "crime," incommensurate with Stalin's other actions, an irredeemable sin. For Khrushchev, for example, Stalin's "barbaric means" of dealing with his enemies transgressed both the party code of conduct ("he's not a Marxist") and general moral standards ("he erased all that is holy in man"). To that end, Khrushchev advocated a "definitive dethroning," while Pervukhin wanted the speech to "tell it like it is," excising all positive references and concentrating instead on Stalin's multiple crimes: his usurpation of power, his liquidation of the Leninist Central Committee and his obstruction of industrial growth. Although some other members of the presidium suggested that Stalin's actions before the terror might be praised, the majority agreed that the terror had irreparably damaged Stalin's reputation, leaving it in tatters after 1937, or even 1934.15 Such judgments of Stalin at these pre-congress meetings helped to ensure that the speech also passed moral judgment on Stalin (albeit initially to a highly restricted audience, and with some praise for Stalin's early career).
Many CC members also agreed that the terror was a uniquely traumatic event, which now had to be worked through in Soviet memory: as Ponomarenko argued, "the death of millions of people leaves an ineradicable trace." Moreover, by remaining "ineradicable" but also unconfronted, the memory had become a recurrent "nightmare," which "tortures communists." The congress therefore had to orchestrate the public exposure of the party's shameful, previously repressed, past. In this sense, the Secret Speech originated in a belief, familiar from other countries' attempts to come to terms with the past, that repressed memories had dysfunctional, unhealthy effects on the present. Presidium members argued for exposure, however, not primarily in psychoanalytical terms, but according to the principle of collective leadership, dictating that "Leninist documents" must be shared at least with the party's leading cadres, though not necessarily the population at large. The collective exposure of the whole truth was also imagined as useful, helping to cleanse the party, and resurrect Lenin, though it is important that party leaders did not specify how long or what forms this purification and re-Leninization would take. These "framings" of the exposure of the cult of personality in terms of moral necessity and the restoration of the health and integrity of the Soviet order, made in elite arguments about the Secret Speech, shaped the final "framing" of the speech for its dissemination to the public. In turn, popular responses to the speech echoed, but also often intensified, both the moral judgment and the trauma discourse present in the party elite's discussions.
At the same time, the lack of unanimity in popular responses to de-Stalinization was also partly foreshadowed by these debates, which did not merely enact a power struggle, but also staged a clash of perspectives on the Stalinist past and on Soviet memory itself. Although in a distinct minority, and forced into a minimal acknowledgement of the "shameful" new revelations, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov repeatedly argued for a more positive view of the Stalinist past. Their simplest, and least effective, strategy of resistance to their colleagues' iconoclastic attacks was simply to reiterate the claims of the cult, as in Molotov's insistence that the speech must still commemorate Stalin as "a great continuer of Lenin's cause" and a "great leader." These cultic claims were easily dismissed in light of the copious historical sources now at hand. Nevertheless, this tenacious attachment to cult rhetoric was not limited to these few "Stalinists" in the leadership, as popular, pro-Stalinist reactions to the Secret Speech would soon reveal.
Some other arguments against de-Stalinization were more substantive, such as these presidium members' prescient claim that the party's philosophy of history might be incompatible with revelations of its shameful past. By drawing attention to the inherently celebratory nature of party history, they highlighted the threat posed by this proposed shift to a memory politics of shame and repentance. All three figures argued that Stalin's overall contribution to party and state history still ought to be celebrated because the overall outcome of the Stalin era had been positive. Thus Molotov, while admitting that "shameful things" happened under Stalin's leadership, highlighted the key achievement of his thirty-year tenure: "under Stalin's leadership, socialism triumphed," he insisted. Refusing to accept his colleagues' allegations that the terror was an ineradicable stain on Stalin's reputation, Voroshilov likewise claimed that Stalin deserved his "share" of praise, because the nation under his leadership had progressed along the path of Marxism-Leninism. In fact, this teleology had been present even in the Pospelov report, which dramatized the devastating effects of terror but also insisted that they had been overcome (albeit despite Stalin, not because of him). The narrative proposed by Voroshilov and Molotov was more logical, but their assumption that Stalin's ends justified his means clashed with the dominant mood of moral indignation at these elite discussions. Instead, therefore, the Secret Speech retained Pospelov's twin, contradictory emphases on the outrage and trauma of terror and on the progress of Soviet history, a tension that many listeners would be quick to highlight.
Indeed, Kaganovich in these pre-congress discussions urged his colleagues to foresee that the speech would "unleash the elements" (razvi-azat' stikhiiu), and might result in the "rethinking" and even "erasure" of a "thirty-year period." Criticism of Stalin's role in terror could easily snowball into outright condemnation of Stalin, and then into dismissal of the Stalin era: thus, Voroshilov likewise urged his colleagues not "to throw the baby out with the bathwater." Such arguments remained in a distinct minority before the congress, and were even explicitly mocked within the speech itself. However, they were resurrected soon after the Secret Speech, when the party's attempts to regulate popular memories of Stalin(ism) increasingly appealed for historical "objectivity" in assessing Stalin's role, and delineated a more optimistic trajectory of Soviet history.
The speech, its editing and performance authorized within days of these meetings, did not just reflect the evidence submitted and debated at the CC presidium. The most significant subsequent addition was the personal testimony, and individual moral judgment, of the speech's strongest advocate, Khrushchev. While the majority of the Pospelov report was imported wholesale into the speech, providing its empirical backbone and theoretical heft, nearly half of the final draft consisted of additions from Khrushchev himself: less than a week before he performed the speech, Khrushchev dictated a report on Stalin almost equal in length, but quite different in genre, to the Pospelov report, and much of it survived into the performed version. Drawing mostly on anecdotes, rather than the historical sources referenced by Pospelov, and deepening the report's judgments into emphatic denunciations, Khrushchev transformed the original text. Of Khrushchev's many personal memories and savage judgments, the most consequential concerned Stalin's role in World War II. Though toned down in the final version, the shocking picture of Stalin's military incompetence still provoked some of the strongest reactions among listeners when the speech reached them a few weeks later.
The final round of editing in the run-up to performance sought to soften some of the harshest criticisms. Crucially, however, even these final edits to the speech assumed that it would remain within the closed elite community present at the first performance. Even at the congress, in fact, it stunned and shocked its listeners. When the speech became considerably less "secret" a week after this first performance, after a CC decision to disseminate it to every party organization in the Soviet Union, and to large numbers of non-members too, no supplementary guidance was provided for this new mass audience.
What the Soviet leadership hoped to achieve with the Secret Speech—and what it did in fact achieve—has long been debated. Although the Secret Speech was clearly a weapon in the power struggle between Khrushchev and his rivals, and played an important role in reforming the Soviet political and economic system, it was primarily debated within the leadership and presented to the party and public as a reckoning with the past. As the title itself made clear, the speech aimed above all to "expose" the "cult," and thereby to change how Stalin was remembered. Deconstructing the cult would—and did—allow Stalin's authority to be questioned more profoundly in a range of policy domains, facilitating deeper reform. Before that could happen, though, the cult had to be exposed, and a new memory of Stalin and Stalinism imposed in its place.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Myth, Memory, Trauma by POLLY JONES. Copyright © 2013 Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 The Secret Speech 17
2 From Thaw to Freeze: Party History and Soviet literature, 1956-57 57
3 Forgetting within Limits: Censorship and Preservation of the Stalin Cult 97
4 Trauma and Redemption: Narratives of 1937 in Soviet Culture 129
5 Between Myth and Memory: War, Terror, and Stalin in Popular Memory 173
6 The "Cult of Personality" in the Early Brezhnev Era 212
Conclusion 258
Notes 263
Bibliography 331
Index 357