Working, struggling, becoming: Stalin-era autobiographical texts

Russian Review

Volumn 60, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 340-359

  Hellbeck, Jochen ^a  

^a JUSTUS LIEBIG UNIVERSITY   (Germany)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 4644256348     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0036-0341.00174     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. See Jochen Hellbeck, "Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia," Kritika I/1 (Winter 2000): 71-96
2. For a critique of this essentially liberal conceptualization of the self see Anna Krylova, "The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies," Kritika I/1 (Winter 2000): 119-46
3. Stefan Plaggenborg recently formulated this view from a cultural anthropological standpoint in "Grundprobleme der Kulturgeschichte der sowjetischen Zwischenkriegszeit," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 48 (2000), no. 1:109-18, esp. 115-16
4. See also Moshe Lewin's earlier notion of the Stalinist "'quicksand' society" (The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia [New York, 1985], 221)
5. The loss of the self is also a central theme in Hannah Arendt's analysis of totalitarian regimes, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951, rev. ed New York, 1973)
6. When talking about the self-creating effects of the Russian Revolution, I certainly do not want to imply that selves, as self-conscious beings, did not exist prior to the Revolution. My argument is rather that the Revolution deployed on a massive scale a new thinking about the self as both a problem and a political project. For a model of this approach to the self as a problem see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction (New York, 1978), chap. 1
7. Bibliographic evidence as well as what is known on state-sponsored efforts at autobiographical writing suggest that - both numerically and in terms of sociological breadth - the early Soviet regime engendered the largest collective autobiographical project undertaken in modern history. Only the Chinese Communist case may have rivalled the Soviet autobiographical project in terms of the sheer number of individual autobiographies sponsored by the regime. For a bibliography of published autobiographical material relating to the Soviet period see the ongoing publication project, Sovetskoe obshchestvo v vospominaniiakh i dnevnikakh: Annotirovannyi bibliograficheskii ukazatel' knig, publikatsii v sbornikakh i zhurnalakh, ed. V. Z. Drobizhev, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1987-95)
8. The production of autobiographical literature increased significantly after 1917 ("Memuarnaia literatura," in Literaturnaia entsiklopediia, vol. 7 [Moscow, 1934], cols. 131-49)
9. The popularity of the diary genre in Soviet Russia is underscored by a bibliography of recent journal publications of archival documentations, which lists more than two hundred diaries or diary excerpts. See Otkrytyi arkhiv: Spravochnik opublikovannykh dokumentov po istorii Rossii XX-go veka iz gosudarstvennykh i semeinykh arkhivov (po otechestvennoi periodike 1985-1995 gg.), ed. I. A. Kondakova (Moscow, 1997)
10. See Isaak Babel, Red Cavalry (New York, 1929)
11. and Andrei Platonov, Chevengur (Paris, 1972)
12. Mark Steinberg, "The Language of Popular Revolution in Russia, 1917," draft introduction to Voices of Revolution, 1917 (New Haven, forthcoming, 2001)
13. The humanist theme is strongly expressed in Maxim Gorky's serialized commentary in Untimely Thoughts: Essays on Revolution, Culture, and the Bolsheviks, 1917-1918 (New York, 1968)
14. The ethos of social activation associated here with the Soviet regime was in fact already implemented in the course of World War I. But the Bolsheviks' approach was distinct in that they transposed the spirit of total wartime mobilization to postwar conditions and introduced a much broader set of practices to realize this goal. See Peter Holquist, "'Information is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work': Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context," Journal of Modern History 69 (September 1997): 415-50
15. On the poetics of self-fashioning in Soviet autobiographies see Igal Halfin, "From Darkness to Light: Student Communist Autobiography During NEP," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 45 (1997), no. 2:210-36
16. The genre of the Soviet autobiography bears striking parallels to the Puritan mode of self-constitution, as at least once in their lives all Puritan converts were required to write and publicly recite their own spiritual histories. These autobiographical texts were shaped against the texts of predecessors and fellow believers ("To be a pilgrim was to travel in the 'Way' of such texts within the Puritan culture"; Kathleen M. Swaim, Pilgrim's Progess, Puritan Progress: Discourses and Contexts [Urbana, 1993], 137)
17. S. V. Zhuravlev, Fenomen "Istorii fabrik i zavodov": Gor'kovskoe nachinanie v kontekste epokhi 1930-kh godov (Moscow, 1997)
18. Frederick Corney, "History, Memory, Identity and the Construction of the Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1927" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1997), esp. 273-78, 316-20
19. See the final chapter, "Gorky sums up," in Belomor: An Account of the Construction of the New Canal between the White Sea and the Baltic Sea (New York, 1935)
20. and A. S. Makarenko, The Road to Life: an Epic of Education (Moscow, 1951)
21. The highest form of subjectivity, however, the role of progenitor of the New Soviet Man, was reserved for Stalin himself, who was likened to "a gardener rearing his beloved fruit tree." See "Otchetnyi doklad tov. Molotova o rabote pravitel'stva VII S''ezdu Sovetov SSSR," Pravda, 29 January 1935
22. On the "gardener" and the "gardening state" see also Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, 1989), 13, 71, 91-92
23. Knizhka krasnoarmeitsa (Ekaterinoslav, 1919). I thank Peter Holquist for pointing out this source to me
24. Compare the case of seventeenth-century New England, where prescriptions on diary-keeping were central to the production and dissemination of the revolutionary, Puritan self (Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England [Chapel Hill, 1982]). For the scattered initiatives of Soviet pedagogues, psychologists, and literary activists to mobilize the introspective and self-transformative powers of the diary in their efforts to create the New Man, see chapter two of my forthcoming Revolution of the Soul: Diaries from the Stalin Era
25. Oleg Kharkhordin, "Reveal and Dissimulate: A Genealogy of Private Life in Soviet Russia," in Public and Private in Thought and Practice, ed. Jeff Weintraub and Krishan Kumar (Chicago, 1994)
26. In Ilia Erenburg's novel, Second Day (Den'vtoroi), it is the chief villain, Vasia Safonov, who keeps a diary shielded from the collective, to which he confides his counterrevolutionary thoughts. Transposed to real life, the same scenario could be observed in the case of Kirov's murderer, Leonid Nikolaev, whose diary the state prosecution used to provide evidence for his anti-Soviet disposition (Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, 56)
27. To counter possible individualistic effects of diary-keeping and foster the development of a collectivist consciousness, Soviet pedagogues also assigned collectively kept "brigade diaries" in factories and schools. The Nazi regime in Germany produced a racialized version of the collective diary, with Nazi ideologues calling for the writing of "clan diaries" (Tagebuch der Sippe), from which future generations were to "draw power and knowledge and obtain insights into the character and fate of their blood relatives (Blutsverbundenen)" (Peter Boerner, Tagebuch [Stuttgart 1969])
28. "Memuarnaia literatura," 132
29. Josette Bouvard, "Le moi au miroir de la société nouvelle: Les formes autobiographiques de l'histoire" (unpublished ms.), 85
30. Several of these previously unknown diaries from the 1930s have already been published in the West. See especially Véronique Garros et al., eds., Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York, 1995)
31. and Jochen Hellbeck, ed., Tagebuch aus Moskau 1931-1939 (Munich, 1996)
32. Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, entry of 2 September 1932, in Tagebuch aus Moskau, 92
33. "1933-1936 gg. v griazovetskoi derevne (Dnevnik A. I. Zhelezniakova)," Vologda: Istoriko-kraevedcheskii al'manakh, vyp. 1 (Vologda, 1994), 455, entry of 30 May 1933
34. John Scott, Behind the Urals. An American Worker in Russia's City of Steel (1942; enlarged ed., prepared by Stephen Kotkin [Bloomington, 1989]), 118-19
35. Diary of Nikolai Zhuravlev, entry of 6 January 1936, in Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Kalininskoi oblasti, f. r-652, op. 1, ed. khr. 2
36. On Soviet designs to revolutionize byt see Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997), 185-88
37. Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 242-60
38. Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918-1929 (Ithaca, 1997)
39. and Christina Kiaer, "Boris Arvatov's Socialist Objects," October 81 (Summer 1997): 105-18
40. In his diary, Ivan Sich, a retired schoolteacher of French, also focused on the hardships of everyday life, contrasting them to the ideological proclamations of the Soviet regime. Sich especially made a point of recording the critical views of workers toward Soviet power, to discredit the latter's claims for legitimacy. Unlike Man'kov, however, Sich did not seem to be motivated by a personal vision of a better socialist world. See I. I. Sich, "Fragments du journal inédit d'Ivan Ivanovič Sitč," Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 28 (1987), no. 1:75-94; esp. entries of 7 November 1929 and "First days of June (1930)."
41. Diary of Galina Shtange, in Intimacy and Terror, 167-218, entry of 1 January 1937
42. Diary of Anatolii Ul'ianov, in Otdel rakopisei Rossiiskoi gosudarstvennoi biblioteki (OR RGB), f. 442, op. 1, ed. khr. 10, entries of 20 May and 13 July 1933
43. For references to the extensive body of Western travellers' descriptions of the emerging Soviet state see Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society (New Brunswick, 1998)
44. and Christiane Uhlig, Utopie oder Alptraum? Schweizer Reiseberichte über die Sowjetunion, 1917-1941 (Zurich, 1992)
45. Vsevolod Vishnevskii, Sobranie sochinenii v 5 tomakh, vol. 6, (Dopolnitel'nyi): Vystupleniia i radiorechi. Zapisnye knizhki. Pis'ma (Moscow, 1961), entry of 22 January 1942
46. Tikhon Puzanov, "'Zhatva' 33-go goda," Molodaia gvardiia, 1991, no. 5:207-8, entry of 2 April 1933; see also entry of 1 January 1933)
47. "1933-1936 gg. v griazovetskoi derevne," 454-521, entry of 11 October 1933
48. Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981)
49. Nathan Leites, A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe, IL, 1953)
50. Diary of Vera Shtrom, in Tsentr dokumentatsii "Narodnyi arkhiv" (TsDNA), f. 336, op. 1, ed. khr. 32, entries of 31 July and 14 August 1930
51. Diary of Anatolii Ul'ianov, entry of 23 March 1930. See also entries of 7 March 1936 and 4 May 1938
52. Vera Inber, Stranitsy dnei perebiraia ...: Iz dnevnikov i zapisnykh knizhek, rev. ed. (Moscow, 1977), entry of 9 July 1933
53. Chelovek sredi liudei, 161-91 (entry of 29 November 1930)
54. Diary of Leonid Potemkin, in Intimacy and Terror, 251-92 (undated entry following 31 July 1935; see also entry marked "July 1936")
55. Tagebuch aus Moskau, 147 (entry from 5 January 1938)
56. "1933-1936 gg. v griazovetskoi derevne" (entry of 12 October 1935)
57. RGALI, f. 2172, op. 3, ed. khr. 5
58. Werner Hohmann, Heinrich Vogeler in der Sowjetunion 1931-1942: Daten-Fakten-Dokumente (Fischerhude, 1987), 97
59. Stepan Podlubnyi, diary entry of 25 September 1934, in Tagebuch aus Moskau, 92
60. Marietta Shaginian, Dnevniki 1917-1931 (Leningrad, 1932)
61. Inber, Stranitsy dnei perebiraia
62. Manfred Jurgensen, Das fiktionale Ich: Untersuchungen zum Tagebuch (Bern, 1979), 7-8
63. Andrew Hassam, Writing and Reality: A Study of Modern British Diary Fiction (Westport, 1993), 4, 8, 51
64. Henry J. Koren, Marx and the Authentic Man (Pittsburgh, 1967), 114
65. Diary of Galina Shtange, in Intimacy and Terror, 167-218
66. On the reversal of gender roles in and following the Soviet Revolution see Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade (Bloomington, 1997)
67. Diary of Galina Shtange, in Intimacy and Terror, entry of 2 April 1938
68. This passage, from a speech given by Shtange to the wives of commanders in the Transport Sector, follows her diary entry of 27 December 1936
69. See, for example, the diary of A. Afinogenov, entry of 29 July 1937 (RGALI, f. 2172, op. 3, ed. 5)
70. Iuliia Piatnitskaia, Dnevnik zheny bol'shevika (Benson, VT, 1987), 149 (entry of 26 March 1938)
71. See especially Plaggenborg, "Grundprobleme der Kulturgeschichte. "
72. On the turn toward individuating practices in the 1930s see Vadim Volkov, "The Concept of Kul'turnost': Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process," in Everyday Revolution: Subjects in Formation in Early Soviet Culture, ed. C. Kiaer and E. Naiman (forthcoming)
73. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia (Berkeley, 1999)
74. Vladimir Papernyi, Kul'tura "Dva" (Ann Arbor, 1985)
75. and Raymond A. Bauer, The New Man in Soviet Psychology (1952; reprint ed. Cambridge, MA, 1968)
76. Barbara Engel and A. Posadskaya-Vanderbeck, eds., A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History (Boulder, 1998), 101-16, esp. 102-3
77. Author's interview with L. A. Potemkin, 29 March 1995