Portrait of a con artist as a Soviet man

Slavic Review

Volumn 57, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 774-790

  Alexopoulos, Golfo ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34248115743     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2501046     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. Gromov's case file can be found in the USSR Procuracy collection (fond) of Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10. The file contains this handwritten play with its detailed drawings and stage directions, tens of Gromov's petitions, and more than fifty densely typed pages from Soviet authorities. The official record of the case and Gromov's petitions from detention at the Taganka cover the period from December 1934 to March 1935; a long period of silence ensues and then there are several petitions from January and February 1937 while Gromov was in forced labor in Murmansk. Due to the secrecy accorded NKVD and Procuracy records, especially individual case files, I could not gain access to other documents on Gromov, but I believe they must exist since the indictment refers to as many as six volumes of material on his case, with each volume in the hundreds of pages. The legal journal, Sovetskaia iustitsiia, does not mention his case and neither, apparently, does the general press. Finally, I was not able to find any record of Gromov in the amnesty and clemency files currently available at GARF for the 1930s-1950s, that is, ff. 3917, 7521, and 7863.
2. See, for example, Oleg V. Khlevniuk, 1937-i: Stalin, NKVD i Sovetskoe obshchestvo (Moscow, 1992), 153, on how conservative behavior was common among party members who felt vulnerable to purge or denunciation;
3. Loren R. Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 67-68, on how a feeling of vulnerability prompted engineers in the early 1930s to remain silent and act discreetly;
4. and "Diary of Andrei Stepanovich Arzhilovsky," in Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds., Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York, 1995), 114, on why it is safer "just to stand on the sidelines."
5. Golfo Alexopoulos, "Rights and Passage: Marking Outcasts and Making Citizens, 1926-1936" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1996);
6. Sheila Fitzpatrick, "Ascribing Class: The Construction of Social Identity in Soviet Russia," Journal of Modern History 65 (December 1993): 745-70;
7. Fitzpatrick, "The Problem of Class Identity in NEP Society," in Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch, and Richard Stites, eds., Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington, 1991), 12-33;
8. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995);
9. Lewis Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (Cambridge, Eng., 1988).
10. Gromov's behavior reflected what David Joravsky calls "the new Stalinist mentality" in which realistic practicality was replaced by extreme willfulness. See his The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 40.
11. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879-1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York, 1973), 462-87;
12. Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism (New York, 1989), 313-19.
13. Giovanni Levi, "On Microhistory," in Peter Burke, ed., New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park, Penn., 1992), 93-113.
14. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 36 (the indictment [obvinitel'noe zakliuchenie] of the Moscow City Prosecutor, 20 December 1934).
15. The average annual monetary wage for workers was 1,427 rubles in 1932 and 1,566 rubles in 1933. Eugene Zaleski, Stalinist Planning for Economic Growth, 1933-1952 (Chapel Hill, 1980), 136-37.
16. Peter H. Solomon, Jr., Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin (Cambridge, Eng., 1996), 49-77.
17. During this period of rapid industrialization, the Soviet Union faced a problem with false specialists. The undersupply of and high demand for skilled personnel led to employment invitations, not only for underqualified Russians, but for foreign "specialists." Exacerbating the problem of false specialists was that those hiring them were also unqualified to judge their credentials. Thus, once false specialists were discovered, factories were reluctant to admit that they had hired them. A case from the early 1930s illustrates this point. A metal factory in the Moscow region hired a so-called specialist from America who claimed to be highly experienced in stamp production. After six months, the company discovered that the American had very little knowledge in this area. The false specialist was then fired, but he was also given a recommendation and transferred elsewhere, apparently in order to conceal the fact that the company had failed to adequately assess the man's credentials. Tsentral'nyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Moskovskoi oblasti, f. 807, op. 1, d. 2431, l. 5.
18. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l.15 (sentence [prigovor] of the Moscow City Court, 27 January 1935). Gromov was granted amnesty in accordance with the decree of 2 November 1927 issued by the Tsentral'nyi Ispolnitel'nyi Komitet USSR. Under the provisions of this decree, he would have had to serve at least half of his two-year sentence before being eligible for amnesty. See P. S. Romashkin, Amnistiia i pomilovanie v SSSR (Moscow, 1959), 61-62. His father-in-law testified that he was sentenced to three years in 1928 but "somehow maneuvered things and never served any time." GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 36. Gromov claimed that he was sentenced in 1928 and 1930 according to articles 77 and 120 of the 1926 RSFSR Criminal Code. Article 77 carried a punishment of up to two years incarceration (lishenie svobody) for "deliberately appropriating the title or authority of someone in a position of responsibility as well as discrediting Soviet power or taking some kind of socially dangerous actions." Article 120 similarly punished with up to two years incarceration crimes described as "forgery at work, that is, while on official duty and for the purpose of profit, deliberately inserting into official documents false information, forgeries, erasing or changing the date, including or removing false documents or inserting false signatures."
19. Ugolovnyi kodeks RSFSR: Redaktsii 1926 goda (Moscow, 1927), 197, 304-5.
20. As Rosamond McKitterick has written, "a society which can produce a forgery . . . is one essentially appreciative of literacy and the power of the written word." Rosamond McKitterick, The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge, Eng., 1990), 325.
21. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 100-104; David Hoffmann notes "the ease with which [peasants] acquired and used false passports" when moving to Moscow, at the same time that Gromov moved to Moscow on a bogus passport.
22. See his Peasant Metropolis: Social Identities in Moscow, 1929-1941 (Ithaca, 1994), 53.
23. On the production of false party cards in the 1930s, see J. Arch Getty, Origins of the Great Purges: The Soviet Communist Party Reconsidered, 1933-1938 (Cambridge, Eng., 1985), 32-34.
24. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 16 (sentence of the Moscow City Court, 27 January 1935).
25. In the late 1920s, the average Russian worker changed jobs about once a year. In 1930, labor turnover sharply increased to 152.4 percent overall and 177.6 percent in Gromov's producer goods industry. See Hiroaki Kuromiya, Stalin's Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932 (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), 209-10. In construction, also Gromov's sector, labor turnover was nearly 300 percent in the early 1930s.
26. See Hoffmann, Peasant Metropolis, 207.
27. Gromov was not alone in his con. A German visitor to the Taganka prison in 1932 noted the following in her study of the Soviet penal system: "In Taganka, I heard a Russian engineer being tried. He was serving a three-year sentence because he had undertaken the management of some works in Siberia, had been given three months' pay in advance and had squandered it in Moscow instead of going to his post." Lenka Von Koerber, Soviet Russia Fights Crime (New York, 1935), 56.
28. Richard Stites, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 64-66, 73.
29. See also Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites, eds., Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington, 1985).
30. Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Stalin i Ordzhonikidze: Konflikty v Politburo v 30-e gody (Moscow, 1993), 29-41;
31. Khlevniuk, 1937-i, 41-42.
32. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 48 (the indictment of the Moscow City Prosecutor, 20 December 1934).
33. Ibid., l. 38 (the indictment of the Moscow City Prosecutor, 20 December 1934).
34. Katerina Clark, "Engineers of Human Souls in the Age of Industrialization: Changing Cultural Models, 1929-1941," in William G. Rosenberg and Lewis H. Siegelbaum, eds., Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialization (Bloomington, 1993), 248-64.
35. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 17 (sentence of the Moscow City Court, 27 January 1935); Katerina Clark, Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialization ibid., l. 35 (the indictment of the Moscow City Prosecutor, 20 December 1934).
36. Khlevniuk, 1937-i, 12.
37. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, ll. 48-49 (the indictment of the Moscow City Prosecutor, 20 December 1934).
38. Joravsky, Lysenko Affair, 13.
39. Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 40-41, 60.
40. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 50 (the indictment of the Moscow City Prosecutor, 20 December 1934).
41. I quote Peter Solomon in his description of most legal officials and local politicians in the USSR. Specifically, he notes that from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s most Soviet legal officials were uneducated and inexperienced. Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin, 51. John Scott also noted that in the 1930s "the Bolsheviks were forced to organize and run industry, finance, transport, and commerce with untrained, inexperienced executives and administrators."
42. See his Behind the Urals (Bloomington, 1989), 174.
43. Gromov took his cues from the state's obsession with subversion, wrecking, and plots in the 1930s, which is described in Gabor Rittersporn, "The Omnipresent Conspiracy: On Soviet Imagery of Politics and Social Relations in the 1930s," in Nick Lampert and Gabor Rittersporn, eds., Stalinism: Its Nature and Aftermath. Essays in Honor of Moshe Lewin (London, 1992), 101-20.
44. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 49 (the indictment of the Moscow City Prosecutor, 20 December 1934).
45. "Ob okhrane imushchestva gosudarstvennykh predpriiatii, kolkhozov i kooperatsii i ukreplenii obshchestvennoi (sotsialisticheskoi) sobstvennosti," Sobranie zakonov i rasporiazhenii raboche-krest'ianskogo pravitel'stva SSSR, 1932, no. 62, art. 360, p. 584. Over 100,000 people were sentenced under this law in 1933, the year in which it was most frequently applied. When Gromov was sentenced in 1935, however, the law's use had declined by roughly one-tenth.
46. For an extensive discussion of this important law, see Solomon, Soviet Criminal Justice under Stalin, 112-29;
47. Khlevniuk, 1937-i, 23.
48. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 18 (sentence of the Moscow City Court, 27 January 1935).
49. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 25 (letter to Akulov, 27 January 1935).
50. Gromov explored many possible rhetorical avenues of self-defense common in the 1930s, but he avoided confession and relied heavily upon denunciation and boasts regarding his usefulness and corrigibility. See Graham, Ghost of the Executed Engineer, 106, on confession during the Industrial Party trial. See Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniia i izucheniia dokumentov noveishei istorii (RTsKhIDNI), f. 613, op. 3, d. 170, for how confession or the acknowledgement of errors and mistakes was common among party members who had been purged in the early 1930s and were petitioning for reinstatement into the party.
51. For other styles of appeal that were current in the 1930s and similar to Gromov's, see Golfo Alexopoulos, "The Ritual Lament: A Narrative of Appeal in the 1920s and 1930s," Russian History/Histoire Russe 24, nos. 1-2 (Spring-Summer 1997): 117-29,
52. and Alexopoulos, "Rights and Passage," chaps. 4-5. Like Gromov, younger de-kulakized and disenfranchised people who petitioned for rights often claimed that they lacked a defective nature, were corrigible, and could be potentially useful to Soviet power.
53. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 11 (petition to Vyshinskii, 24 February 1935).
54. Ibid., l. 23 (petition to Akulov, 11 February 1935).
55. Ibid., l. 27 (petition to Vyshinskii, 27 February 1935).
56. Ibid., l. 18 (sentence of the Moscow City Court, 27 January 1935); ibid., l. 33 (petition to the Moscow City Court, 3 January 1935).
57. Ibid., l. 18 (sentence of the Moscow City Court, 27 January 1935).
58. Ibid., l. 11 (petition to Vyshinskii, 24 February 1935). Gromov was not the only one who found himself in this predicament in the 1930s. On how those who wrote denunciations often became the victims of reprisals, see Golfo Alexopoulos, "Exposing Illegality and Oneself: Complaint and Risk in Stalin's Russia," in Peter Solomon, ed., Reforming Justice in Russia, 1864-1994: Power, Culture, and the Limits of Legal Order (Armonk, N.Y., 1997).
59. Leonid Brezhnev continued the Stalinist practice of constructing a grand persona but took it to a higher level. He had a "passion for honors and awards" and accumulated in his lifetime more than Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev combined. Most of all, Brezhnev worked at forging a grand identity as a war hero, and he appropriated titles that were only awarded to military leaders who were responsible for major victories in battle. Roy Medvedev, Lichnost' i epokha: Politicheskii portret L. I. Brezhneva (Moscow, 1991), 292-93. Brezhnev also appropriated the status of a Soviet writer by having a book ghost-written for him; Little Land described his role in a 1943 campaign.
60. See Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 148.
61. Abram Terts, "Grafomany," in his Fantasticheskie povesti (Paris, 1961), 33.
62. On Soviet graphomania, see Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 168-214.
63. Boym, Common Places, 200.
64. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 5 (letter to Vyshinskii, 27 January 1935).
65. All citations from the play can be found in GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, ll. 101-206.
66. Gromov's play has certain elements of socialist realist literature, but it does not focus on such standard themes as Soviet industrialization, the struggle to control the elemental forces of nature, or heroic martyrdom in the service of building socialism. On these official literary conventions of the 1930s, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981);
67. Hans Gunther, "Education and Conversion: The Road to the New Man in the Totalitarian Bildungsroman," in Hans Gunther, ed., The Culture of the Stalin Period (New York, 1990), 193-210;
68. Frank J. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk, N.Y., 1990);
69. Xenia Gasiorowska, Women in Soviet Fiction 1917-1964 (Madison, 1968).
70. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 3 (memo from the Moscow oblast NKVD at the Taganka prison to Vyshinskii, 14 March 1935). In the corner of this memo, Vyshinskii scribbled the note to Sheinin.
71. After a successful career as an investigator, Lev R. Sheinin became a prose writer and playwright. He co-authored the screenplay of the 1947 film, Vstrecha na Elbe (Meeting at the Elbe), for which he won the Stalin prize in 1949. His years in legal work informed his writings, and he made detectives the focus of many novels, short stories, plays, and films.
72. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, ll. 1-2 (letter from Gaidovskii of the USSR Writers' Union to Sheinin, 31 March 1935).
73. Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 56.
74. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, ll. 2-3 (letter from Gaidovskii of the USSR Writers' Union to Sheinin, 31 March 1935). Sheila Fitzpatrick describes how the privileges of . the new elite were rarely mentioned in the newspapers of the 1930s because it was an awkward subject, as Gaidovskii's commentary demonstrates. See her "Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and Taste," The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992), 216-37.
75. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 17 (sentence of the Moscow City Court, 27 January 1935).
76. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 84. Gromov asserts in this letter to Molotov of 22 January 1937, that two days after he wrote a letter to Stalin pleading for his life "our beloved and just leader, our dear I. V. Stalin, issued a personal instruction and my life was spared." However, in a letter to the USSR Procuracy, he claimed that Vyshinskii initiated a protest before the RSFSR Supreme Court, which then commuted his death sentence to ten years' deprivation of freedom. See ibid., 1. 89.
77. Nadezhda Mandel'shtam is quoted in "Lying as a Way of Life: The Soviet Union (A Conversation with Viktoria and Mikhail Schweitzer)," Berkshire Review 15 (1980): 62-83. In this transcript, Viktoria Schweitzer attributes to Vasilii Grossman the claim that "All Soviet life is a huge theatrical scene. Everyone is playing a role."
78. Eugenia Semionova Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (New York, 1967), 31.
79. GARF, f. 8131, op. 12, d. 10, l. 95 (letter to Stalin, 14 January 1937).
80. Ibid., l. 92 (letter to Stalin, 14 January 1937).
81. Ibid., ll. 98-99 (memos of 26 February and 25 March 1937).
82. Rosalinde Sartorti, "Stalinism and Carnival: Organization and Aesthetics of Political Holidays," in Gunther, ed., Culture of the Stalin Period, 41-77.