Death and memory in modern Russia

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 42, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 1-18

  Merridale, Catherine ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; ATTITUDE TO DEATH; HISTORY; MEMORY; MORTALITY; RUSSIAN FEDERATION; WAR;

ATTITUDE TO DEATH; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; MEMORY; MORTALITY; RUSSIA; WAR;

EID: 0030236784     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1996.42.1     Document Type: Article

References (63)

1. Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation's Colloquium on War, Victimhood and Remembrance in Pembroke College, Cambridge, in July 1995 and at Bristol University's Critical Theory Seminar in March 1996. I would like to thank the organizers and all the participants for their comments. Special thanks, in addition, arc due to Dori Laub, Emma Rothschild, Emmanuel Sivan and Jay Winter.
2. Dori Laub and Nanette C. Auerhahn, 'Knowing and not knowing massive psychic trauma: forms of traumatic memory', International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 74, 1993, p. 301.
3. Nadine Fresco, 'La Diaspora des Cendres', Nouvelle Revue de Psychoanalyse, 24, 1981, pp. 205-220.
4. Fresco, p. 217. See also Dori Laub and Shoshana Felman (eds), Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, New York, 1992,
5. and Barbara Heimannsberg and Christoph J. Schmidt, The Collective Silence: German Identity and the Legacy of Shame, San Francisco, 1993.
6. The most complete of the current surveys is Alain Blum, Naitre, Vivre et Mourir en URSS, 1917-1991, Paris, 1994.
7. For a survey of the current state of the debate about numbers, see R. W. Davies, Mark Harrison and S. G. Wheatcroft, The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913-1945, Cambridge, 1994.
8. Cited in Davies et al., The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union p. 60.
9. Records of the death rate, week by week, are kept in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (hereafter referred to by its acronym, GARF), fond 482, opis 4, delo 31 (Health Department of the Moscow Soviet).
10. L. A. and L. M. Vasilevskii, Kniga o golode, Petrograd, 1922.
11. Vasilevskii, Kniga o golode pp. 175-8.
12. Vasilevskii, Kniga o golode p. 182.
13. The Committee for dealing with the effects of the famine (Pomgol) was set up only after heated debate within the Party leadership. Among the reasons cited by the organizers was a desire to avoid the exploitation of the crisis by 'enemies' and emigre opposition leaders such as Miliukov and Chernov. The secret letter on this matter is among the Central Committee papers held at the Rossiiskii Tsentr Khraneniya i Izucheniya Dokumentov Noveishei Istorii (hereafter referred to by its acronym, RTsKhIDNI), fond 17, opis 84, delo 178.
14. See Davies et al., The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, pp. 67-70 for a discussion of the current literature.
15. Despatch from Edward Coote to Sir John Simon, 26 August 1933. Cited in Marco Carynnyk, Lubomyr Y. Luciuk and Bohdan S. Kordan (eds), The Foreign Office and the Famine, British Documents on the Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932-33, Kingston, Ontario, 1988 (hereafter Foreign Office), p. 290.
16. Submission from the Ukrainian National Council in Canada, Winnipeg, September 15 1933, Foreign Office, p. 341.
17. The case for genocide is most eloquently made by Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow, London, 1988.
18. The documents have been collected as Kolektivizatsiya i golod na ukraini 1929-1933, zbimik dokumentiv i materially, Kiev, 1992.
19. Figures drawn from data held in the Russian State Archive of the Economy (RCAE), fond 1562, opis 329, delo 107 (report to the Central State Statistical Administration on the calculation of losses in 1932-3).
20. See, in particular, Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Staltnism as a Civilisation, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995.
21. The highest serious figure has been given by V. I. Kozlov (Istoriya SSSR, 2, 1989, p. 133), who calculated that the population deficit in 1945 was between 45 and 48 million, suggesting that approximately 38 million excess deaths occurred between 1939 and 1945. Other Russian calculations are rather lower, and correspond more closely to the estimates of western demographers such as Alain Blum. E. Andreev, L. Darskii and T. Khar'kova, for example, suggest a total of 26 million.
22. 'Otsenka lyudskikh poter'v period velikoi otechestvennoi voiny', Vestnik statistiki, 10 1990.
23. See G. A. Nosova, 'Traditsionnyi obryady russkikh: krestiny, pokhoronny, pominki', Rossiiskii etnograf, 6, 1993, p. 5.
24. Details from D. K. Zelenin, Vostochnoslavyanskaya etnografiya, Moscow, 1926; reprinted 1991.
25. Elaborate ghost-rituals survived in rural Siberia into the twentieth century. See M. M. Gromyko, Dokhristyanskie verovaniya v bytu sibirskikh krest' yan XVIII-XIX vv., Moscow, 1967.
26. My description of the funeral is based on accounts reproduced in A. Abramov, U kremlevskoi steny, Moscow, 1984.
27. Notably at the funerals of the assassinated Bolshevik, Zagorskii, and of Ya. M. Sverdlov, the first general secretary of the Party.
28. The papers relating to Lenin's funeral are in the Lenin fond at RTsKhIDNI, fond 16 opis 1 delo 105.
29. For a lavish account of the building of the Lenin mausoleum, see N. N. Stoyanov, Arkhitektura mavzoleya Lenina, Moscow, 1950.
30. RTsKhIDNI, fond 16, opis 1, delo 91.
31. The death penalty was abolished after the February Revolution. It was formally reinstated in September 1918, but had in practice been revived from as early as March. See Ger P. van den Berg, 'The Soviet Union and the Death Penalty', Soviet Studies, 35:2, April 1983, p. 155.
32. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, fifth edn, vol. 39, pp. 183-4.
33. On this remark, and the literature about it, see van den Berg, 'The Soviet Union and the Death Penalty', pp. 156 and 168.
34. Van den Berg, 'The Soviet Union and the Death Penalty', p. 155.
35. A comparison might be made here between the use of the guillotine in the case of Louis XVI's execution - the deliberate distancing of the crowd from the moment of death - and the more elaborate secrecy, or at least, the absence of publicity or ceremony, in the bulk of Soviet executions. For Louis' execution, see Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, London, 1994.
36. A survey cataloguing some of this damage was published in the Party journal, Bol'shevik, 21:2, 1925, pp. 61-74.
37. A. I. Kvardakov, 'Religioznye perezhitki soznanii i bytu sel'skogo naseleniya i puti ikh preodoleniya', Aftoreferat dissertatsii, Novosibirsk, 1969, p. 12.
38. The first decree on cemeteries was passed on 7 December 1918, and it attempted to control 'private enterprise' and 'small family concerns' in the burial business. GARF, fond 482, opis 4, delo 31, 1.40.
39. For the hygienic arguments, see V. Lazarev's account of the 1923 exhibition of crematoria and cremation in Sotsialisticheskaya gigieniya, 3-4, 1923, p. 175.
40. GARF, fond 5263 opis 1, delo 12, II. 7-8.
41. GARF, fond 5263 opis 1, delo 12, II. 1-5.
42. A petition sent to Kalinin in 1930 complaining about such practices, and noting instances of suicide in the face of repression and uncertainty, met with the reply that 'Comrade Kalinin is not in the least interested in the question of religion in this instance. He merely wants to know what violations of the law took place . . .' GARF 5263/1/7, 72-8.
43. On revivals and survivals from the past, see Nosova, 'Traditsionnyi obryadi russikikh', p. 139,
44. and I. A. Kremleva, Pokhoronno-pominal'nye obychai i obryady, Moscow, 1993, p. 37.
45. Nosova, 'Traditsionnyi obryadi russikikh', p. 137.
46. Cited in Foreign Office, p. 341.
47. See George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, Reshaping the Memory of the World War, Oxford, 1990.
48. Kremleva, Pokhoronno-pominal'nye obychai i obryady, p. 35.
49. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, chapters 1 and 2.
50. Svetlana Alexievich. Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from a Forgotten War, London, 1992, p. 15.
51. On the denial of the famine and suppression of the 1937 census, see Catherine Merridale, 'The 1937 Census and the Limits of Stalinist Rule', Historical Journal, 39:1, March 1996, pp. 225-240.
52. Some of these observations are based on interviews with famine survivors conducted by the author in Moscow in 1995.
53. Many of the observations concerning memory in this essay are to be tested through a formal programme of interviews with survivors in the next two years. Preliminary comments here are based on archival and secondary reading and on memoir sources, together with the results of four pilot interviews held in Moscow in 1995.
54. Comparable examples from other socialist societies are described in Rubie S. Watson (ed.), Memory, History and Opposition Under State Socialism, Santa Fe, 1994.
55. An excellent account of the Lenin cult is given by Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives!, Cambridge, Mass., 1983.
56. Observation based on the author's personal witness and discussions with colleagues in Moscow.
57. For some thoughts on the recent round of trials, see Timothy Carton Ash, '"NeoPagan" Poland', New York Review of Books, 43:1, January 1996, pp. 10-14.
58. Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, New York, 1975.
59. For examples, see Heimannsberg and Schmidt, The Collective Silence.
60. The full explanation for the increase in Russian death rates, including, but not exclusively, death from suicide, remain unclear. Sec Judith Shapiro, 'The Russian Mortality Crisis and Its Causes' in Anders Aslund, ed., Russian Economic Reform at Risk, London, 1995.
61. On the Nolte controversy, see Norbert Kampe, 'Normalising the Holocaust? The Recent Historians' Debate in the Federal Republic of Germany', Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2, 1987.
62. On the social and political marginalization of trauma, see Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, Basic Books, 1992.
63. Heimannsberg and Schmidt, The Collective Silence, p. 6.