Russian History Archives

Road Rage

This article is reposted from Russian History Blog.

This blog post is inspired by petty anger. In this deeply weird and unsettling time, I am, like virtually everyone, staying at home. I am in almost every way lucky—I have a job (though hoo boy do I sometimes wish I had listened to my gut and not said yes to being department chair), I have a comfortable home, our restrictions are not too extreme. I live alone, which on balance right now feels like probably also a lucky thing, though it has its own stresses and sources of sadness. I’ve in particular come to rely on a daily walk to get out into the air, to stretch my legs, to try to turn off from all the stresses of my job right now.

Gatchina Palace (via Flickr)

On these walks, though, I often find myself seething with rage at the pettiest of things—people who do not keep to the right while walking or riding or running. Even in a time of social distancing, my rage feels out of proportion to the offense. But then I remembered a letter of complaint I came across in one of my beloved files of random correspondence from the Gatchina Palace administration [Gatchina Palace was built near St. Petersburg in the 18th century for a favorite of the Russian Empress, Catherine the Great].

To His Excellency, the Director of the Gatchina Palace Administration

Riding yesterday, the 3rd of August [1892], at 9 in the evening, on a bicycle, in the Imperial Priorate Park, I came upon a gentleman unknown to me, driving a white trotter at full speed, who, despite my increasingly ringing my bell, continued to ride on the left side of the road, as a result of which I, at risk of being trampled, was forced to jump down from my bicycle onto the grass; at my comment, made in the most polite form, that one should drive on the right side, the gentleman sitting in the charabanc and driving the horse answered me with unacceptable obscenity. On my way back, about twenty minutes later, I had the misfortune to again come across this same gentleman, continuing as before to drive on the left side of the road; in response to my bell and to my comment that besides the existing rule to drive on the right side, even only politeness demands that one should give way, the gentleman informed me that such a rule does not exist, having added along with this message personally to me insulting expressions so impolite, that repeating them word for word in the present letter I consider impossible; in the end of all of this insulting actions were threatened. Of all of this I immediately gave a report to the duty officer of the Gatchina Police. [Hearing] my description of the characteristics of the horse and the gentleman, the Police officers sitting in the duty room recognized the owner of the horse as Gatchina homeowner Bronislav Liudvigovich Adamovich; in order to definitively establish the identity of the culprit, I gave the Police a detailed description.

Having in mind that a simple monetary penalty such as laying a fine by judicial process will hardly guarantee that the public visiting the Imperial Priorate Park [will not be bothered by] a repetition of such misconduct on the part of the above mentioned gentleman, [misconduct that] violates social morality and order in the Imperial park, and that the insult given by him to me was without any reason on my part, I have the honor to present all above noted to the discretion and resultant decision of Your Excellence, humbly asking that you inform me of what is done about this matter.

Collegiate Secretary

Feodor Feodorovich Rein.

4 August 1892

Someone looked into the matter the day it was sent, and noted down the following report:

Feodor Feodorovich Rein, Collegiate Secretary, works as a Secretary of the Main Military-Sanitary Committee of the Ministry of War. Residence: in the town of Gatchina, on Baggovutovskaia ulitsa, no. 46, the home of engineer Rein.

I have the honor to report … that in the matter of the offenses committed in the Priorate Park by nobleman Bronislav Liudvigovich Adamovich to Collegiate Secretary Fedor Fedorovich Rein, a witness statement by Luga meshchanin Artur Karlov Reikhenberg, residing in the village Bol’shaia Zagvozdka, Gatchina township, explains that it was completely possible for Rein to pass without obstruction along the road on the right side, and beside that it is necessary for all bicyclists to pull over and get off their bicycles when they meet people riding on horses in light of the fact that every horse seeing the unfamiliar sight of a bicycle without fail begins to buck and to shy and in general to sidle, so for Rein to be offended by Adamovich there is no foundation, all the more so because, as Reikhenberg reports, Rein was the first to address Adamovich in rude form, with the comment “you do not know how you should drive, why don’t you keep to the right side,” but all the same from my point of view Adamovich should be given proper warning that he should drive more calmly, and that if there is a second complaint about him driving quickly and not following the general rules of driving, then he will be prohibited from driving in the Priorate Park forever and for reckless driving in general he will face legal liability.

I’m not going to try to spin this out too much—of course, there’s plenty of stuff to say about these figures and who they might be, or of the fact that Mr. Rein was a thoroughly modern man on his bicycle in 1892. Perhaps I’ll come back to them in another post at some point. But I copied this all out because I thought it was sort of funny, and I loved the resonance of the idea of bicyclists and drivers at odds over road usage, because that’s still such a present part of urban discourse.

Image of a bicycle from B. Kaul’fus, Kratkoe rukovodstvo k izucheniiu ezdy na velocipede i obrashcheiiu svelosipedami fabric Adamants Opelia v Riussel’sgeime (Kiev, 1893)

Now, though, I’m struck by the anger. The anger that seemed to motivate Rein—if Reikhenberg was right and he really did have enough space, his action to jump down into the grass feels like a bit of a conscious display of being inconvenienced for the sake of show, rather than anything real—the anger he received in return—although Reikhenberg reported that Rein was the first person to be rude, his reported statement (which, I should note, used the proper vy, not the familiar and potentially offensive ty) hardly seems to be enough to cause someone to respond with obscenity.

In 1892 Gatchina was a bustling place, with Alexander III often in residence (though probably not in August) and its two railway lines making it an increasingly desirable suburban residence for people who worked in St. Petersburg. The park might simply have been busier than normal with summer dacha residents, making the whole exercise of bicycling or driving more frustrating. I suppose one could also make a case that the quickness to anger on the part of these men reflects the internal opposition they might have felt about their own status as modern men—one a nobleman (probably a Polish nobleman) with a fancy horse, one with cutting edge bicycle—in an anti-modern system, an anti-modern system that could not be ignored at that time and in that place because it was centered on the palace next to the park.

And then I think about my own petty anger, and wonder about which of the many background worries we all face right now that is manifesting itself in those feelings of rage.Sources:
RGIA [Russian State Historical Archive) f. 491, op. 3, d. 386, ll. 311-312ob.

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Secrets of the Crypt

by Carolyn Pouncy

Everyone loves to be proven right, but novelists don’t often expect it—especially five hundred years after the period where their books are set. After all, that’s half the fun of writing and reading fiction: filling in the gaps left by the historical record. So to have a set of novels that explore the relationship between Russians and Tatars in the sixteenth century twice intersect with contemporary developments is surprising.

The first conjunction, as I wrote on this blog last summer, involved the publication of my Winged Horse in the same month that Vladimir Putin decided to annex Crimea. That might be considered a historical accident. The second overlap is quite different: as I discovered not long ago, twenty-first-century science supports my imaginary past in a remarkable way.

First, a brief review of the history. After Grand Prince Vasily III died late in 1533, the situation in Russia deteriorated fast. The hand-picked council of guardians Vasily appointed was pushed aside within months by his widow, Elena Glinskaya. Despite threats from without and within, Elena maintained a shaky hold on power until her sudden death in April 1538 left the country under the nominal authority of her seven-year-old son, the future Ivan the Terrible. Several aristocratic clans, most notably the Shuisky and Belsky princely families, battled to control the young grand prince until 1547, when he married and was crowned as Russia’s first tsar.

Grand Prince Vasilii III of Moscow and Elena Glinskaia, 1526. Public domain (created before 1916) via Wikimedia Commons

Grand Prince Vasily III of Moscow and Elena Glinskaya, 1526 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Because Elena was no more than thirty when she died, the gossips had a field day speculating about the cause of her death. Even before that, Elena’s morals, or lack thereof, had attracted considerable attention, inside and outside Muscovy. Rumors included assertions that her chief adviser, Ivan Telepnev, had fathered her two sons during her husband’s lifetime, that he retained his status as her lover after Vasily’s demise, and that she had hired Sami shamans to ensure successful pregnancies with these children of questionable heritage.

Once Elena usurped a role normally reserved for men, the hostile whispers intensified. The campaign that she and Telepnev waged against her two brothers-in-law and her uncle Mikhail fed the flames, especially after the brothers-in-law and uncle died in captivity between August 1536 and December 1537. A mere four months passed between the death, reputedly by starvation, of the younger brother-in-law and Elena’s demise.

The favorite story about her death involved her having been poisoned by the Shuisky clan, whose leader Vasily promptly clapped Telepnev in irons and within three months had married a cousin of the young grand prince, a classic power move that indicated possible self-positioning for a grab at the throne. But there has never been concrete evidence that a murder took place. When a group of twentieth-century scientists excavated the bodies of Elena and other royal figures—including Ivan the Terrible’s first wife, Anastasia, also rumored to have died from poison—they found high levels of dangerous substances such as mercury and arsenic. But because mercury was used in medicines at the time and arsenic in cosmetics, the scientists refused to confirm the poisoning hypothesis.

As a historian, I hesitate to charge actual historical figures with a crime without clear proof of guilt, even in a novel and five centuries after the fact. Nevertheless, in the absence of evidence novelists do get to invent plausible explanations, so long as they confess their sins at the end. And nothing spices up a novel faster than romance and murder. So in The Shattered Drum (Legends of the Five Directions 5: Center) I invented an elaborate plot that played on all the rumors about Elena’s affair with Telepnev, her death, and the clan politics surrounding it, then assigned the implementation to a trio of fictional characters representing the opposing sides. The novel came out last summer, and I chalked it up as complete and moved on to the next, which incorporates another recent discovery: spy chambers in what was then the outermost wall surrounding Moscow.

<Image: Elena Glinskaya: Forensic facial reconstruction by S. Nikitin, 1999. By Shakko CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons>

Elena Glinskaya: Forensic facial reconstruction by S. Nikitin, 1999 (photo credit: Shakko CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons)

Then I learned that the story was not, in fact, over. A group of Kremlin Museum scientists has re-exhumed the bodies of the various grand princesses once buried in the Ascension Cathedral in the Kremlin. They published their results, almost all of which are fascinating when disentangled from the minutiae of archaeological recording—especially in reference to Elena Glinskaya.

Most notably, the plot point that I considered the most outrageous—that Elena not only had an affair with Telepnev but became pregnant with his child, a scandalous development for a woman whose husband had died four years before—turns out to be well within the realm of possibility. The contemporary scientists discovered that, as noted above, Elena’s bones contained high levels of mercury and arsenic. In addition, they found formations in her skull that suggested she had ingested poisonous mushrooms. But her bones also contained unusually low levels of iron, which the scientists attributed to her having suffered a massive hemorrhage not long before her death—probably in childbirth. Indeed, two infant bones were found in her sarcophagus: the tibia of a newborn or infant not more than two months old, and the other an upper jawbone of a six-month-old.

There were other strange objects in the sarcophagus: broken pottery and the bones of pigs and cattle. The scientists didn’t explain these, anymore than they explained the presence of bones from two infants. But they did conclude, quite emphatically, that Elena died of mercury poisoning and that not long before she died she bore a child—fathered, they assume, by Ivan Telepnev. They don’t identify the culprits in her murder, but if we apply the principle of cui bono (who benefits), it doesn’t look good for the Shuisky clan.

It’s a cliché to say that truth is stranger than fiction, but clichés become clichés for a reason. I like to think my solution is a little more elegant, although you’ll have to read the novel to find out what that is. But the astonishing part is to discover that something I’d written off as pure invention has a basis in truth after all.

And oh yes, the scientists think Anastasia died of mercury poisoning as well. Maybe I’ll write that novel, too, one day. But if I do, I’ll be very careful about what I make up.

Originally posted as “Person or Persons Unknown,” on the Blog of the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia (December 19, 2018).

Carolyn Pouncy, the managing editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, writes fiction set in sixteenth-century Russia under the pen name C. P. Lesley.

Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible” in Stalin’s Russia

by Joan Neuberger

At the beginning of 1941, Sergei Eisenstein was feeling defeated. Three years had passed since he had completed a film and, on January 2, the great Russian film maker confided to his diary that he felt like his broken-down car, lethargic and depressed. A few days earlier, tired of waiting for the film administration to approve his latest proposal, he had written directly to Joseph Stalin, requesting him to intercede. When the phone rang on January 11, it was Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Central Committee and member of the Politburo’s Committee on Cinema Affairs, calling to say that no one was interested in his most recent pitch, but that they should meet to discuss the film Stalin wanted him to make. We don’t know exactly what was said at that meeting, but immediately afterward Eisenstein began reading and thinking and jotting down ideas about Ivan the Terrible, the tsar who ruled Russia in the sixteenth century. By January 21, the possibilities for a film on Ivan had captured his imagination and would not let him go. Eventually, he would fill more than a hundred notebooks with ideas related to the film and finish two books of film theory and one 800-page memoir deeply imprinted by his experience of making it. He was writing about Ivan the Terrible when he died, at age fifty, only seven years later.

In commissioning a film about Ivan the Terrible, Stalin expected Eisenstein to celebrate Ivan as the first tsar, a progressive and visionary leader, and the founder of a unified, centralized, modern Russian state. What made it tricky is that Ivan the Terrible, like Stalin himself, was infamous for carrying out a ruthless campaign of terror against the people he ruled. Everyone expected Eisenstein to make a film that justified Ivan’s violence as necessary for defeating those who opposed him in founding and protecting the new state. Stalin, who didn’t like surprises, got much more than he bargained for. Eisenstein’s film ranged far from the official commission and was controversial even before it hit the screen. Ivan the Terrible was not only a shrewd critique of Stalin and Stalinism, it also raised profound questions about the nature of power, violence, and tyranny in contemporary politics, and in the history of state power more broadly. Eisenstein’s film used Ivan’s story to examine the psychology of political ambition, the history of absolute power and recurrent cycles of violence. It explores the inner struggles of the people who achieved power as well as their rivals and victims.

Eisenstein worked on Ivan the Terrible for five years, from January 1941 to February 1946, completing only two-thirds of a projected three-part film. Part I of the trilogy was completed in December 1944 and went into general release in early 1945; Part II was submitted in February 1946; it was banned in March and only released in 1958; Part III remained incomplete at Eisenstein’s death in February 1948, but the screenplay, some footage, and many of his notes have survived.

Ivan the Terrible took so long to make because production was repeatedly postponed by the second World War. A few months after receiving the commission, on June 22, 1941, Eisenstein’s work on the screenplay was interrupted when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. As Artistic Director of the Moscow Film Studio (Mosfilm), he was immediately put in charge of producing morale-lifting films and dealing with supply, personnel, and production problems brought on by the war and the nightly bombing raids that began in July. As German troops moved close enough to threaten Moscow, most of the population of the capital, including its entire film industry, was evacuated to Alma Ata (Almaty) in Kazakhstan. It took another year for negotiations over the screenplay and the casting to conclude, and filming itself didn’t begin until April 1943.

Ivan with Anastasia's corpse in her bedroom surrounded by icons and tapestries. drawing by SM Eisenstein for Ivan the Terrible

“Ivan decides to completely annihilate the feudal landlords” Drawing by S. M.Eisenstein

During the long months of waiting, Eisenstein read hundreds of books, filled dozens of notebooks with ideas, and made thousands of drawings. In addition to the story-boards, he drew his memories of other times and places, illustrations of the books he was reading, caricatures of his colleagues and friends, and sexually explicit fantasies and satires. Despite the often inhuman forms represented in his story boards, Eisenstein insisted that his actors reproduce the poses he envisioned and hold those poses for hours at a time. He was famous for his ability to use pranks and jokes to defuse tension on the set, but not all the actors loved the demanding physical workout Eisenstein required.

Camera operator Andrei Moskvin and Sergei Eisenstein on the set of Ivan the Terrible

Once underway, Eisenstein took his time, as meticulous as he wanted to be and determined to make the film he wanted to make. He worked closely with his brilliant cameraman, Andrei Moskvin, his lead actor, Nikolai Cherkasov, and the renowned composer, Sergei Prokofiev, who wrote the score, all of whom shared his willingness to risk making the transgressive film Eisenstein had in mind.

For many viewers, the result was alienating and difficult to understand. American critic Pauline Kael famously wrote that Ivan the Terrible was “so lacking in human dimensions that you may stare at it in a kind of outrage. True, every frame in it looks great – it’s a brilliant collection of stills – but as a movie, it’s static, grandiose, and frequently ludicrous.” That’s not really what Eisenstein was going for. The Russian critic Sergei Yutkevich came closer; he saw Ivan as “a symphonic film [that] puts all his tremendous culture of cinematographic expression into the service of his theme and, as in no other film of his, he achieves a unity of the different expressive means available to the cinematic art. This is not only a brilliant duel of remarks and glances but a passionate battle of sound and silence, light and dark. Brightness and shadow, color and textures—all influence one’s mind and feelings.”

Ivan’s rivals: Bishop Pimen (L) Efrosinia and Vladimir Staritsky (R)

The strange look and feel, and the difficult narrative were intentional. Not only did Eisenstein have to evade the censor and the wrath of the ruler, but the complexities of Ivan’s biography paralleled his ideas about cinematic method, about how to make a film that would have the greatest emotional and intellectual impact. Eisenstein was the first film theorist to systematically explore the ways films are constructed and the ways viewers perceive what they see on screen. He was also one of the first modern thinkers to explore the ways feeling were as important as thinking in both the production and reception of art. Studying biography and history for the first time when making Ivan the Terrible also convinced him that feelings were as important as ideas in shaping the decisions that historical and political figures make.

The Golden Hall and the Angel of the Apocalypse

To tell the story of Ivan the Terrible, Eisenstein wanted not just show but make us feel Ivan’s hunger for power and the ensuing conflicts that resulted. To draw viewers in and engage our deepest feelings and most complex thinking, Eisenstein devised two parallel strategies. First he believed that viewers respond consciously and unconsciously to even the tiniest of details that we see and hear when watching a film. So he broke down every element of the film image to its constitutive parts, what he called its “essential bone structure,” for the audience to gradually reconstruct for themselves into something meaningful and moving. This is why Eisenstein had his actors hold such inhuman poses: so that viewers would see every single minute gesture that went into conventional movements. This is why the production design exaggerated and distorted familiar images – from religious icons and rituals, for example. And this is why we see a hodge-podge of visual styles juxtaposed — melodrama, tragedy, gothic, grotesque, satire, and comedy. All of these design choices were meant not just to challenge conventional meanings but to let the viewer see from Ivan’s point of view, by compelling us to engage in the same process of making sense of fragmented, contradictory cues.

Ivan at his coronation, deciding to continue executing his enemies, deciding to be “Terrible.”

At the same time, Eisenstein structured the narrative around a set of questions. How does an innocent, vulnerable child become a sadistic, bloody tyrant? To what extent is Ivan like the people around him and, by extension, like us? When is killing justifiable? Do Russian rulers and, by implication, all Russians differ from their contemporaries in the West? When are we responsible for our own actions, and when can we blame circumstances? Each scene raises these questions in some form, so the audience is constantly being invited to wonder, compare, evaluate, and judge. And underlying these moral-political issues is a set of related questions concerning human emotions. In general, Ivan the Terrible asks us to consider what role emotions play—in relation to reason and logic—in motivating us to act. More specifically, Eisenstein asks what happens when love, affection, sexual attraction, grief, loneliness, hate, distrust, and the desire for revenge enter into politics. How are political affections and rivalries gendered? What happens when we are asked to love a ruler like a father? What role does affection play in a political brotherhood?

These are not the typical structuring devices of the Stalinist biopic. Soviet film biographies of this period were supposed to provide clear-cut models of behavior. Individuals in film biographies, whether cult figures or ordinary people, were to undergo some transitional improvement, make a heroic contribution to their community, and offer moments of inspiration and motivation. Eisenstein’s interrogative mode challenged viewers to make up their own minds. The ambiguities of the interrogative deny viewers a neutral vantage point and challenge us to reclaim our authority to make meaning from observation and experience.

Part I of Ivan the Terrible gives us a young and determined ruler, committed to defeating Russia’s external enemies, and the obsolete aristocracy, who opposed his efforts to centralize Russian power and establish The Great Russian State. And apparently the portrait of Ivan was just monumental and triumphalist enough for Part I to win the Stalin Prize and cause American critics to see it as pure Soviet propaganda. But this view of the film required ignoring the paranoia, violence, trauma, vengeance, treason, and betrayal that permeate its story, its characterizations, and its bizarre and murky visual setting. Ivan himself is beset by inner conflicts over his mission and constantly asks if he is on the right path. He repeatedly beseeches himself, his friends and his enemies, God, and the audience, “Am I right in what I am doing?” His own uncertainty cues us to ask if the opposition to the centralization of power is, perhaps, in some ways justified, a question that is, in fact, at the heart of Eisenstein’s conception of the film. In Part II, the questions become darker, revolving insistently around cycles of murder and revenge. Ivan still asks for reassurance but God is silent and no one else gives him the answers he wants, spurring him on to greater, more vicious acts of violence.

Ivan declaring that he is free to act against the country’s enemies (L) Stalin in a widely reproduced photograph by Ivan Shagin (R)

All Eisenstein’s questions had obvious analogues in Stalinist society. But the film maker was after something more than simple critique. He wanted to explain how Ivan became the bloody, manipulative, demagogic tyrant he became. Eisenstein had stated from the beginning that he did not intend to “whitewash” the medieval ruler or justify his violent reign, but rather to explain, as he put it, “the most atrocious things.” The interrogative mode that he used in Ivan the Terrible established a set of standards for judging any ruler. That’s how you make a film about a bloody tyrant for a bloody tyrant.

If Stalin was instrumental in bestowing Part I with the Stalin Prize, he hated Part II and had it immediately banned.

Ivan the Terrible is a difficult film because it continually presents us with contradictions and questions, it forces us to respond to unfamiliar, difficult, and ambiguous cues, and it denies us a hero to identify with or a villain to hate. It is a great film because it creates a portrait of power that resists simplification and provokes us to engage with hard questions, precisely the hard questions the Stalinist artist was supposed to suppress.

This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia
Cornell University Press, 2019

For more on Eisenstein and early Soviet filmmaking, you might like these:

The Eisenstein Reader, edited by Richard Taylor, translated by Richard Taylor and William Powell (1998)

A good selection of Eisenstein’s writing, translated into English.

Maria Belodubrovskaya, Not According to Plan: Filmmaking Under Stalin (2017)

A history of Soviet filmmaking that focuses on film institutions rather than political leadership.

David Bordwell, The Cinema of Eisenstein (2nd edition, 2005)

A comprehensive and insightful survey of Eisenstein’s films by one of the leading film historians in the US.

Lilya Kaganovsky, The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound (2018)

Analyzes the unique ways sound shaped cinema in the the Soviet Union. Kaganovsky shows that sound films made the voice of state power audible, reaching viewers directly for the first time.

Anne Nesbet, Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking (2003)

A study of each of Eisenstein’s films in the context of the director’s unpublished writing, that shows the importance of contradiction, fracture, and wildly imaginative and beguiling strangeness in all his work.

Yuri Tsivian, Ivan the Terrible (2001)

An intertextual study of Ivan the Terrible that provides sharp insights into Eisenstein’s thinking in images.

Emma Widdis, Socialist Senses: Film, Feeling, and the Soviet Subject, 1917-1940 (2018)

With a focus on the depiction of the senses in an extraordinary range of early Soviet films, this book shows how the new Soviet subjectivity was shaped first by a revitalized engagement with the material and natural world and later by an enriched inner emotional world.

Watch: The Wider Arc of Revolution: The Global Impact of 1917 (Part II)

To commemorate the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the UT Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies held an international conference entitled, “The Wider Arc of Revolution: The Global Impact of 1917.”

The second keynote speech was given by Professor Lisa Kirschenbaum, Professor of History at West Chester University. Professor Kirschenbaum has published three books, including: Small Comrades: Revolutionizing Childhood in Soviet Russia, 1917-1932; The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941-1995: Myth, Memories, and Monuments; and International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion.

Watch a recording of Professor Kirschenbaum’s keynote here.

Watch: The Wider Arc of Revolution: The Global Impact of 1917 (Part I)

The first keynote speech was given by Sheila Fitzpatrick, preeminent historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, Professor of History at The University of Sydney and Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago. Professor Fitzpatrick taught at UT Austin from 1980-1989.

Click here to watch a recording of Professor Fitzpatrick’s keynote.

Media and Politics From the Prague Spring Archive

By Ian Goodale

In an unpublished letter to the Soviet daily newspaper Izvestiia, Liudmila Chukovskaya wrote that “muteness has always been the support of despotism.” This quote is cited in the booklet, Czechoslovakia and Soviet Public, compiled by the Radio Liberty Committee in New York in August 1968 to analyze the coverage of the Soviet invasion of Prague. During the Cold War, the media—and radio broadcasts in particular—were used as weapons by the U.S. and the Soviet Union in their battle to define a geopolitical narrative in line with their respective national interests. By examining the ways that both U.S.-backed and Soviet-supported media sources attempted to portray the events of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, this booklet serves as an important resource not just for understanding this specific event, but for how media was used by the two superpowers in their struggle for power and influence.

Soviet invasion of Prague, 1968 (via Mitteleuropa).

The two media sources analyzed by the booklet, Radio Liberty and Radio Moscow, were key propaganda arms of the United States and the USSR, respectively. In addition to the comparison of the coverage of these events by Radio Liberty and Radio Moscow, the booklet contains evaluations of the Czech events by staff members of the Radio Liberty Committee in Munich and New York, utilizing various documents and press clippings unavailable to the general American public. As such, the document provides a comprehensive overview of the events surrounding the Prague Spring as they were depicted by the popular and state-run media. This is not a complete narrative of the invasion, but a direct account of the ways it was portrayed by opposing sides of the conflict.

The front page of the Radio Liberty booklet (via author).

Radio Liberty, a radio station funded by the U.S. government to counter the Soviet-funded Radio Moscow, was a key piece of the U.S.’s propaganda strategy in its fight against the spread of communism in Europe. Founded in 1951 as an anti-communist news service directly targeting the Soviet Union, it began broadcasting in 1953, four days before the death of Stalin. It eventually expanded from its initial broadcasting base in Germany to include transmitters in Portugal, Spain, and Taiwan, the latter of which was used to direct broadcasts to Russia’s eastern provinces. By December of 1954, Radio Liberty was broadcasting in 17 different languages.

Radio Moscow, a state-run station in the Soviet Union, served a similar propagandistic role, broadcasting in German, English, and French in an attempt to reach western European audiences. The U.S. began to be targeted by the broadcasts in the 1950s, during the Cold War, with transmitters situated first in the Moscow region and, later, in Vladivostok and Magdalan. In the early 1960s the station began broadcasting in African languages, further broadening its audience.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty still has an office in Prague and broadcasts in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East (via Wikimedia Commons).

The booklet notes the differing strategies of the two countries in their handling of the invasion. Soviet media, for example, simply refused to acknowledge a host of inconvenient truths regarding Czechoslovakia, remaining, as the booklet notes, “blind and mute” to student demonstrations, the broader democratization of Czech society, and even the replacement of party leader Antonín Novotný with Alexander Dubček. While Radio Liberty broadcast favorable news widely to promote its agenda–such as the fact that Czech citizens missed “no occasion…to let the Soviet troops know they were not welcome…students walked brazenly with flags under the long guns of the tanks”–Radio Moscow remained silent on unfavorable events.

But this silence could not last. The Soviet strategy soon transitioned from this calculated muteness to one of scathing criticism of liberalization in Czechoslovakia. As Izvestiia proclaimed on September 7th, Radio Liberty and other Western media outlets–described as “press and radio working in the service of the monopolies”–were creating “vile anti-communist inventions” to undermine the Soviet Union. “Every day,” the paper proclaimed, “brings new proof of the provocatory role of imperialist propaganda.”

Alexander Dubček attempted to reform socialism in Czechoslovakia, which antagonized hardliners in Moscow and staunch Czech and Slovak anti-socialists (via Wikimedia Commons).

By comparing the reports from Radio Liberty and Radio Moscow side-by-side, these differing strategies become all the clearer. Situated within the broader Prague Spring archive, the document is a source that helps to understand how both the U.S. and Soviet governments strategized their media communications in a cultural and political battle, spinning events to serve their respective narratives. In an era of conflict and confusion over the geopolitical future, portrayal of the present became a battleground of ideologies, the media a weapon to promote each side’s agenda.

Olivia L. Gilliam and Edward P. Pell, August, 1968. Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Public. The University of Texas, Austin, TX. Accessed January 21, 2017. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/38273
doi:10.15781/T2PN8XF39

More by Ian Goodale on Not Even Past:
The Prague Spring Archive Project.

Looking Into the Katyn Massacre

By Volha Dorman

U.S. government officials have often been hesitant to take the Soviet Union to task on their humanitarian crimes. This reluctance to confront Moscow was usually an effort to avoid worsening already poor relations. After World War II, for example, the U.S. was willing to let Soviet war crimes committed during the war go unchallenged despite clear evidence of Soviet guilt. As early as 1943 the United States was aware that the Katyn Forest Massacre had been carried out by the Soviet secret police, or NKVD. Yet, in order to avoid inciting Soviet retaliation, the US remained silent.

Polish officer lapels and banknotes found in the mass grave at Katyn (via Wikimedia Commons).

The Katyn Massacre involved the killing of 4,243 Polish Army officers and intellectual leaders imprisoned by the Soviets after their invasion of Poland in September of 1940. Even though the USSR denied its participation at Katyn and blamed Germany for the massacre, the Germans presented hard evidence in 1943 that proved Soviet involvement. Medical examinations of the corpses of Polish officers exhumed in the Katyn Forest proved that these victims were killed no later than the spring of 1940. The Katyn Forest is located just east of the Belarusian-Russian border, an area Nazi forces did not reach until nearly a year after the massacre, making it impossible for the Germans to be involved.

In 1951 the United States government created a Special Committee responsible for a thorough investigation of the Katyn Forest massacre. Among the goals of this Committee were to discover which country was guilty for the crime against the Polish nation, as well as to disclose the truth about whether any United States government officials could be blamed for concealing information about this event. It did not take long for the members of the Committee to compile a staggering amount of evidence showing the guilt of the NKVD, however, the investigation of United States government officials proved to be far more challenging.

The Katyn Forest today (via Wikimedia Commons).

In some cases, the Committee had to interview the same government officials multiple times, as additional facts were revealed about their knowledge of the massacre that had been left unmentioned during their first testimony. In addition, the investigation revealed that at that time there were officials in the United States government who took it upon themselves to filter out of their reports any unflattering information about the USSR. Nevertheless, the data gathered by the Select Committee from these interviews showed that most government officials distrusted the Soviet authorities and suspected their guilt in Katyn Forest Massacre. However, they felt that they were in no position to denounce the actions of the Soviets, as it may have jeopardized the prospects of the Allied Forces’ victory. Moreover, such condemnation of the USSR would not have been supported by President Franklin Roosevelt, as he believed in the absolute sincerity of the Soviet government and considered recently discovered information by American emissaries to be German propaganda.

The former American Ambassador, Averell Harriman, and former Under Secretary of State, Summer Welles, claimed that the United States government acquiesced because, first, it believed in Stalin’s pledge to cooperate with the Western Democratic countries after the end of the war, and second, the U. S. was trying to secure Soviet participation in the war against Japan. Ultimately, there was a fear within the United States government that if a case against the Soviets was pursued over the Katyn massacre the USSR might seek revenge against the U.S. by making peace with the Nazis.

Letter from Beria, chief of the NKVD, to Stalin proposing the massacre of Polish officers held by Soviet troops, 1940 (via Wikimedia Commons).

As a result, the USSR suffered no penalty for its terrible crime against the Polish victims, which, as was later revealed, had been planned by Stalin to eliminate the potential for a Polish uprising in Soviet territories with strong historical connections to Poland. Stalin had also intended to create a pro-Soviet satellite out of Poland after the war, a process made much easier by the annihilation of Poland’s old guard officers. Many American government officials and organizations had correctly assessed the character of the USSR during the war, but chose not to condemn its actions, since it could have led to unpredictable consequences during World War II.

Sources:

Final report of the Select Committee to conduct an investigation and study of the facts, evidence, and circumstances of the Katyn Forest Massacre pursuant to H. Res. 390 and H. Res. 539. United States, Government printing office, Washington: 1952 (location of the document – LBJA, “World War II, Katyn Forest Massacre, 1952”, Box # 121)

You may also like:

After WWII: A Soviet View of U.S. Intentions.
Everyday Stalinism, by Sheila Fitzpatrick (2000).
The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements by Lynne Viola (2007).

Notes from the Field: The Murder of Boris Nemtsov

Support_of_prisoners_of_the_Bolotnaya_square_case_(21_February_2014)_(Boris_Nemtsov)

Boris Nemtsov, murdered in central Moscow on February 27, 2015, at a demonstration protesting the arrest of anti-Putin protestors

by Andrew Straw

“Really! They have not even buried him yet!” This was my in-laws’ reaction to the two-hour, primetime special on Boris Nemtsov’s love life that aired the Sunday after his assassination. Nemtsov’s reputation as a “ladies man” was never a secret, but tarnishing his name just days after his death was too much, even for some people who disliked his politics.

When investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya was murdered in front of her Moscow building on October 7, 2006, I was shocked. I had read her work, discussed her in classes, and was even familiar with the street where she lived. However, discussions of the crime with Russian students and friends usually required me to explain what her work was about and why people in the West found her criticism of the war in Chechnya so compelling. Dozens of other Russian journalists and political activists have been murdered over the last decade, but the murder of Nemtsov is different.

“HEROES DO NOT DIE.” Demonstration on March 1, 2015 mourning the murder of Boris Nemtsov

When I came upon the news of Nemtsov’s murder two Friday nights ago, I immediately handed the iPad to my wife and her jaw dropped. That Saturday morning there was pervasive shock — on Russian social media and in the state-run and independent media — because everyone knew Nemtsov. His political career in the 1990s included a post as Deputy Prime Minister in 1998 under Boris Yeltsin, and before that as Governor of the Nizhny Novgorod where he led agricultural and economic reforms. However, his liberalism often clashed with the former communist party members who made up much of the Russian government. More importantly, as corruption blossomed in the new Russian economy, he relentlessly attacked the perpetrators. His political career imploded because his idealism and activism had no place in the status-quo Vladimir Putin created between society, the oligarchs and the state after 2000.

800px-Moscow_rally_24_December_2011,_Sakharov_Avenue_-18

“FOR HONEST ELECTIONS.” Boris Nemtsov (far right) at a demonstration in December 2011 protesting widespread corruption in recent elections

This is another reason why the murder shocked many Russians. Many people were perfectly happy to leave behind the idealistic politics and the mobster-political violence of the 1990s for Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which brought relative economic stability after the “wild” 1990s, even if it certainly did not ensure democracy. The fear of losing pensions or homes, as often happened in the 1990s, was and is much greater than the fear of authoritarian government. When Russian TV airs iconic 1990s mob movies such as Aleksei Balabanov’s Brother, people acknowledge the film’s greatness, but they are relieved that period of Russian history is behind them.

Sergei Bodrov in Aleksei Balabanov’s film, “Brother” (2000).

Moreover, perhaps more important than the symbolism of an opposition politician being murdered on the steps of Russian power, is what the public spaces around the Kremlin and in Central Moscow have come to represent for modern Muscovites. The Moscow city government, urban planners, and young activist politicians have spent the better part of the last decade transforming central Moscow into a more pedestrian friendly and livable urban space. Gorky Park has become a hipster paradise with hammocks, yoga, WIFI, and coffee shops. Many of the central streets (including the one Nemtsov strolled down on the night of his death) have been closed to traffic and lined with cafes. Red Square itself and the surrounding new pedestrian zones host numerous festivals and markets. This popular space to unwind has now become the scene of a brutal political murder.

Finally, with the war in Ukraine, Russian TV has been inundated with scenes of terrible and graphic violence, but the violence was quite far from Moscow. Now, with this backdrop, there is a sense that the inter-Slavic bloodletting that has been so far mostly confined to the Donbas could be reaching out to touch the Russian capital.

Even on my Facebook feed there were people who believed he got what he deserved. Still, the most common response I heard over the last week was of a dreaded return to the 1990s, when Russians, both politically important and ordinary citizens, did not feel safe in their homes, finances, jobs or city.

More by Andy Straw on Not Even Past

“The Tatars of Crimea: Ethnic Cleansing and Why History Matters”

“The 1980 Olympics and my Family”

After WWII: A Soviet View of U.S. Intentions

By Mark Atwood Lawrence

In February 1946, George F. Kennan, a senior U.S. diplomat based in Moscow, sent the State Department his famous “long telegram,” an attempt to explain Soviet behavior at a time of quickly worsening relations between the superpowers, as their wartime alliance unraveled. Among the first readers of Kennan’s missive were Soviet leaders, who obtained the top-secret document through intelligence channels. On orders from the Moscow, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, Nikolai Vasilovich Novikov, quickly set to work writing a comparable cable analyzing U.S. motives and behavior. It remains unclear whether the telegram, dispatched on September 27, 1946, reflects Novikov’s sense of what his superiors wished to read or his true understanding of U.S. policy. In any case, the document is a striking expression of mounting Soviet suspicions of Moscow’s erstwhile ally. Excerpts of Kennan’s statement were posted last week on NEP. Excerpt’s of Novikov’s message are posted below. Both come from our featured book this month, America in the World: A History in Documents from the War with Spain to the War on Terror.

Nikolai Novikov, 1946. Via Wikimedia Commons

Reflecting the imperialistic tendency of American monopoly capital, U.S. foreign policy has been characterized in the postwar period by a desire for world domination. This is the real meaning of repeated statements by President Truman and other representatives of American ruling circles that the US has a right to world leadership. All the forces of American diplomacy, the Army, Navy, and Air Force, industry, and science have been placed at the service of this policy. With this objective in mind broad plans for expansion have been developed, to be realized both diplomatically and through the creation of a system of naval and air bases far from the US, an arms race, and the creation of newer and newer weapons….

This situation does not completely match the expectations of those reactionary circles who hoped during the Second World War that they would be able to remain apart from the main battles in Europe and Asia for a long time. Their expectation was that the United States of America, if it was not able to completely avoid participation in the war, would enter it only at the last moment when it might be able to influence its outcome without great effort, completely securing its own interests. It was intended thereby that the main rivals of the US would be crushed in this war or weakened to a great degree and that due to this circumstance the US would be the most powerful factor in deciding the main issues of the postwar world. These expectations also were based on the assumption quite widespread in the US during the first period of the war that the Soviet Union, which had been attacked by German fascism in June 1941, would be weakened as a result of the war or even completely destroyed.

Churchill, Truman, and Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, 1945. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Reality has not borne out all the expectations of the American imperialists….

Europe came out of the war with a thoroughly shattered economy, and the economic devastation which resulted during the war cannot soon be repaired. All the countries of Europe and Asia are feeling an enormous need for consumer goods, industrial and transportation equipment, etc. Such a situation opens up a vista for American monopoly capital of enormous deliveries of goods and the importation of capital to these countries, which would allow it [American monopoly capital] to be introduced into their economies.

Destruction of Dresden, 1945. Via Wikimedia Commons

The realization of this opportunity would mean a serious strengthening of the economic position of the US throughout the entire world and would be one of the stages in the path toward establishing American world supremacy….

On the other hand, the expectations of those American circles have not been justified which were based on the Soviet Union being destroyed during the war or coming out of it so weakened that it was forced to bow to the US for economic aid. In this event it could have dictated such conditions which would provide the US with an opportunity to carry out its expansion in Europe and Asia without hindrance from the USSR.

In reality, in spite of all the economic difficulties of the postwar period associated with the enormous damage caused by the war and the German fascist occupation the Soviet Union continues to remain economically independent from the outside world and is restoring its economy by its own means….

The increase in peacetime military potential and the organization of a large number of naval and air bases both in the US and beyond its borders are clear indicators of the US desire to establish world domination.

For the first time in the country’s history in the summer of 1946 Congress adopted a law to form a peacetime army not of volunteers but on the basis of universal military conscription…. The colossal growth of expenditures for the Army and Navy, comprising $13 billion in the 1946-1947 budget (about 40% of the entire budget of $36 billion) and is more than 10 times the corresponding expenditures in the 1938 budget, when it did not even reach $1 billion.

LTA Steel Hangar, Built by the 80th Seabees, at Carlson Field, Trinidad. Via WIkimedia Commons.

LTA Steel Hangar, Built by the 80th Seabees in 1914, at Carlson Field, Trinidad. Via WIkimedia Commons.

These enormous budget sums are being spent along with the maintenance of a large Army, Navy, and Air Force and also the creation of a vast system of naval and air bases in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. According to available official plans, in the coming years 228 bases, support bases, and radio stations are to be built in the Atlantic Ocean and 258 in the Pacific Ocean. The majority of these bases and support bases are located outside the United States….

The current policy of the American government with respect to the USSR is also directed at limiting or displacing Soviet influence from neighboring countries. While implementing it the US is trying to take steps at various international conferences or directly in these very same countries which, on the one hand, manifest themselves in the support of reactionary forces in former enemy or allied countries bordering the USSR with the object of creating obstacles to the processes of democratizing these countries but, on the other, in providing positions for the penetration of American capital into their economies….

U.S. Navy Douglas R4D and U.S. Air Force C-47 aircraft unload at Tempelhof Airport during the Berlin Airlift. 1948-49

The numerous statements by American government, political, and military leaders about the Soviet Union and its foreign policy in an exceptionally hostile spirit are quite typical of the current attitude of American ruling circles toward the USSR…. The primary goal of this anti-Soviet campaign of American “public opinion” consists of exerting political pressure on the Soviet Union and forcing it to make concessions. Another, no less important goal of the campaign is a desire to create an atmosphere of a fear of war among the broad masses who are tired of war, which would make it easier for the government to take steps to maintain the great military potential in the US.

After WWII: George Kennan’s “Long Telegram”

by Mark A. Lawrence

During the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union formed a powerful partnership to defeat Nazi Germany. Their alliance did not, however, extend to a shared vision of the postwar world order. While U.S. leaders envisioned an open global economic system that would assure American access to markets and resources around the world, leaders in Moscow wanted to clamp down on parts of Europe and Asia in order to prevent the reemergence of hostile nations along the Soviet Union’s borders. In the closing phases of the war and especially in the first tumultuous months following the end of the fighting, U.S. and Soviet leaders increasingly clashed over a range of issues, especially the status of eastern Germany, Poland, and other parts of eastern Europe. The prospect of a new and dangerous geopolitical rivalry so soon after ending the fascist threat caused anger and anxiety among American leaders, who struggled to understand Soviet motives.

The Soviet Union after WWII (via Wikimedia Commons)

In February 1946, officials in Washington asked the U.S. embassy in Moscow why the Soviet government was failing to cooperate with American plans for the postwar international order. On the receiving end was George Kennan, a career foreign service officer who had risen to be the second-ranking American official in Moscow. Kennan replied with an extraordinary 5,300-word cable later dubbed the “long telegram.” Kennan drew on his long experience in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to lay out a distinctive view of Russian history and culture. You can read excerpts of his message below:

George F. Kennan, 1947

At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity. Originally, this was insecurity of a peaceful agricultural people trying to live on vast exposed plain in neighborhood of fierce nomadic peoples. To this was added, as Russia came into contact with economically advanced West, fear of more competent, more powerful, more highly organized societies in that area. But this latter type of insecurity was one which afflicted rather Russian rulers than Russian people; for Russian rulers have invariably sensed that their rule was relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in its psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries. For this reason they have always feared foreign penetration, feared direct contact between Western world and their own, feared what would happen if Russians learned truth about world without or if foreigners learned truth about world within. And they have learned to seek security only in patient but deadly struggle for total destruction of rival power, never in compacts and compromises with it.

Soviet poster “Comrade Lenin cleans the Earth from scum”, November 1920 (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

It was no coincidence that Marxism, which had smoldered ineffectively for half a century in Western Europe, caught hold and blazed for first time in Russia. Only in this land which had never known a friendly neighbor or indeed any tolerant equilibrium of separate powers, either internal or international, could a doctrine thrive which viewed economic conflicts of society as insoluble by peaceful means. After establishment of Bolshevist regime, Marxist dogma, rendered even more truculent and intolerant by Lenin’s interpretation, became a perfect vehicle for sense of insecurity with which Bolsheviks, even more than previous Russian rulers, were afflicted. In this dogma, with its basic altruism of purpose, they found justification for their instinctive fear of outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand. In the name of Marxism they sacrificed every single ethical value in their methods and tactics. Today they cannot dispense with it. It is fig leaf of their moral and intellectual respectability….

Soviet poster titled “American freedom”, 1950 (Via Wikimedia Commons)

In summary, we have here a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with US there can be no permanent modus vivendi, that it is desirable and necessary that the internal harmony of our society be disrupted, our traditional way of life be destroyed, the international authority of our state be broken, if Soviet power is to be secure. This political force has complete power of disposition over energies of one of world’s greatest peoples and resources of world’s richest national territory, and is borne along by deep and powerful currents of Russian nationalism. In addition, it has an elaborate and far flung apparatus for exertion of its influence in other countries, an apparatus of amazing flexibility and versatility, managed by people whose experience and skill in underground methods are presumably without parallel in history. Finally, it is seemingly inaccessible to considerations of reality in its basic reactions. For it, the vast fund of objective fact about human society is not, as with us, the measure against which outlook is constantly being tested and re-formed, but a grab bag from which individual items are selected arbitrarily and tendenciously to bolster an outlook already preconceived. This is admittedly not a pleasant picture. Problem of how to cope with this force [is] undoubtedly greatest task our diplomacy has ever faced and probably greatest it will ever have to face…. I cannot attempt to suggest all answers here. But I would like to record my conviction that problem is within our power to solve – and that without recourse to any general military conflict. And in support of this conviction there are certain observations of a more encouraging nature I should like to make:

(1) Soviet power, unlike that of Hitlerite Germany, is neither schematic nor adventurist. It does not work by fixed plans. It does not take unnecessary risks. Impervious to logic of reason, and it is highly sensitive to logic of force. For this reason it can easily withdraw – and usually does when strong resistance is encountered at any point. Thus, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear his readiness to use it, he rarely has to do so. If situations are properly handled there need be no prestige-engaging showdowns.

(2) Gauged against western world as a whole, Soviets are still by far the weaker force. Thus, their success will really depend on degree of cohesion, firmness and vigor which western world can muster. And this is factor which it is within our power to influence.

(3) Success of Soviet system, as form of internal power, is not yet finally proven. It has yet to be demonstrated that it can survive supreme test of successive transfer of power from one individual or group to another…. We here are convinced that never since termination of civil war have mass of Russian people been emotionally farther removed from doctrines of Communist Party than they are today. In Russia, party has now become a great and – for the moment – highly successful apparatus of dictatorial administration, but it has ceased to be a source of emotional inspiration. Thus, internal soundness and permanence of movement need not yet be regarded as assured.

(4) All Soviet propaganda beyond Soviet security sphere is basically negative and destructive. It should therefore be relatively easy to combat it by any intelligent and really constructive program.

Image of US Embassy in Moscow (Via Wikimedia Commons)

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