Soviet Union Archives - Page 2 of 3

American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream

Until quite recently, tales of Americans’ enchantment with the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s were typically told as prelude to their eventual disenchantment: this “liberal narrative” described immature, naïve, utopian idealism replaced by contrition and mature, rational rejection of radical extremism. So it was that I felt embarrassed by the excitement I found myself experiencing when I read descriptions from the time of exciting developments in the “new Russia.” In addition to the Soviet avant garde’s innovations in visual art, theatre, film, and literature, I found repeated emphasis on the special provisions being made for women and children: eliminating the very idea of an “illegitimate” child; radically democratizing education; simplifying divorce; mandating equal pay in the workplace; legalizing and subsidizing abortion; extending pre-natal and maternal welfare provisions; and creating public dining halls, laundries, and nurseries so that domestic duties would not limit women’s professional capacity (yes, these duties were still understood to be women’s).

I felt in my own gut some of the deep attraction that many people in the West experienced amid and following the Russian Revolution. But as a historian, I had incontrovertible proof that the Soviet state, despite every artist it supported, every cool program it put into effect, every effort it made to raise the level of the masses, was at a very fundamental level dehumanizing, repressive, and often violent, all of which became clear to many outsiders fairly early on. I remember telling a colleague that I was interested in exploring and perhaps making sense of all the hopeful rhetoric in the US vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and her warning me that following this path would get me into a whole lot of mishegas, craziness, a Yiddish word that I’ve always figured needs no translation. But the Soviet thing was like an itch I couldn’t keep myself from scratching. I wondered if I could take on this topic, or some piece of it, without seeming to be an apologist for Stalin or denying the facts of history. I had written about left wingers who wrote children’s books during the McCarthy era, which is to say, I had already spent some time thinking about the inherent contradictions within the communist movement.

British Quakers postcard appealing for funds and supplies to support children suffering from the 1921 famine in Russia. © Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain. Used with permission. This same image was used in a booklet published by the communist Friends of Soviet Russia.

A few scholars who had come of age after the end of the Cold War were writing about Americans and the Soviet Union in more nuanced ways than had been possible in an earlier era. However, I’d seen very little written specifically about attraction to the “new Russia” on the part of women, particularly independent, educated, and liberated “new women”— this despite the fact that, as the title of a breezy syndicated news article published in 1932 would suggest, “American Girls in Red Russia” were, well, a thing.

American Friends Service Committee workers in a Quaker hut in Buzuluk, Christmas Eve, 1922. Bottom left, Robert Dunn and Dorothy North “reading an Irish play.” Bottom right, Ann Herkner. The other two men are Karl Borders and a Russian coworker. (Andree A. Brooks Research Files on Bluet Rabinoff, box 2, Robert Dunn photographs, Tamiment Library, New York University).

Oddly enough, it was continuing research in children’s literature that finally convinced me to go ahead and write a book about “American Girls in Red Russia,” mishegas and all. In the archives of Ruth Epperson Kennell, who, in the 1930s and 1940s, published a number of books and stories about children in the Soviet Union, I found myself intrigued by Kennell’s own story, especially her years as a “pioneer” in Siberia working on an industrial commune founded by several American Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) in the early 1920s. Seeking release from what Lenin had described as the “household drudgery” that confines women in most societies, Kennell was attracted to the idea of living communally—and also working collectively toward the shared goal of creating a better world. Answering a call from the Society for Technical Aid to Soviet Russia, she and her husband Frank signed a two-year contract, packed up their worldly possessions, and left their 18-month-old son back in California with Frank’s mother.

Ruth Kennell in Siberia, wearing a Russian blouse. (Courtesy of Red Hill Museum, Kemerovo, Russia, with help from Marina Potoplyak).

Ruth worked as the colony’s secretary, librarian, and postmistress and was also its most avid chronicler, writing in The Nation about the “new Pennsylvania” they were building. She also wrote, even more revealingly, about her experiences in letters, a diary, and an unpublished memoir/novel. In these private sources Ruth describes the personal awakening she experienced in Siberia, where she fell in love with a Cornell-trained engineer she met in the colony office: a Jew, a Communist, and an avid reader of literature and philosophy. When Frank decided to go back to California amid a dispute between Wobblies and Communists, Ruth insisted that she wanted to fulfill her two-year contract, but actually, she had other reasons for staying: as she noted in her diary, “I want to be free, free!” She was not alone. Ruth noted in an article that she published in H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury, “In the spring of 1925 more than one matrimonial partnership melted, usually on the wife’s initiative. The colony women found in Siberia the freedom their souls craved.”

John Reed Colony, of which Anna Louise Strong was “chief” or, more accurately, patron, in the mid-1920s. (Anna Louise Strong papers, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, UW37340. Used with permission from Tracy Strong.)

Kennell helped me begin to recognize the deeply personal attractions that American women felt to the Soviet Union, as well the moral and ethical compromises they made to rationalize so much that was deeply troubling about the Soviet system. Ruth was well aware of inefficiency, hostility to communism among many Russians, gender and ethnic conflicts, as well as the pettiness, corruption, cruelty, and ineptitude among Bolshevik leaders. But ultimately she still thought the Soviet experiment was worth supporting. Kennell’s friend Milly Bennett, author of the article on “American Girls in Red Russia” from which I took my book title, flippantly but also revealingly told a friend: “the thing you have to do about Russia is what you do about any other ‘faith.’ You set your heart to know they are right. . . . . And then, when you see things that shudder your bones, you close your eyes and say . . . ‘facts are not important.’”

Milly Bennett and other workers from the Moscow News marching in a May Day parade. Bennett is the woman, second from the right, wearing glasses. (Milly Bennett papers, Hoover Library, Stanford University.)

Historians of the Russian empire have used Soviet citizen’s diaries to gain insights into “Stalinist subjectivity,” that is, the ways that individuals actively incorporated the Bolshevik ideal into their very sense of themselves. But diaries and other intimate sources have barely been tapped as a means of exploring ways in which the Soviet system likewise brought meaning to the lives of Americans and other foreigners. American women’s diaries and letters reveal both their genuine excitement—about Soviet schools, theatre, public spectacles, nurseries, workers’ housing, laws supporting maternal and child health, the “new morality,” and the simple fact of women’s visibility in public life.

Kuzbas pilgrims picnicking. (Courtesy of Red Hill Museum, Kemerovo, Russia, with help from Marina Potoplyak.)

“Women do everything here,” Louise Thompson wrote to her mother in the summer of 1932 from Moscow. “Work on building construction, on the streets, in factories of course, and everywhere.” Thompson’s activism on behalf of African-American civil rights had attracted her to the Soviet Union, and she wound up leading a group of 22 African Americans, among them luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance such as Langston Hughes and Dorothy West to act in what was being billed as the first true-to-life film about American race relations. Although the film was never made, group members, several of whom stayed on in the Soviet Union, were treated like the stars they might have been, honored rather than shunned for their blackness. Thompson liked to joke, “It will really be difficult to scramble back to obscurity when we return to the old USA, I suspect.”

Pauline Koner with her students from the Lesgaft Physical Culture Institute. (Pauline Koner papers, Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations.)

The young Jewish dancer Pauline Koner, like Isadora Duncan a generation earlier, was deeply inspired by the very fact of being in the Soviet Union and the opportunity that offered to embody a revolutionary ethos through her movement. “I have to pinch myself to really believe I’m here,” Koner wrote in her diary, in December 1934. “Since arriving on Soviet soil I’ve felt different, the air smelled different and the land looked different. . . . Moscow is the most energizing and invigorating place in the world. It is the place for creative thought and for happiness. Its beauty at times is unbelievable.” As a Jew, Koner had reveled in the experience of visiting Palestine; in the Soviet Union she reveled in the idea of shedding her ethnic particularity and joining the Soviet people.

My book includes suffragists, settlement house workers, “child savers,” journalists, photographers, educators, social reformers, and a range of “new women” who felt drawn to Russia and the Soviet Union from approximately 1905-1945.

Today, as American women continue to struggle for many of the same things as these women of yesteryear—satisfying work that will allow them to balance motherhood and career, romantic relationships that are not bound by economic incentives, and a way to make sense of a society that is exploitative, unjust, racist, and demeaning to women—Russia is once again in the news. Now, ironically, it is mostly right-wing men who see possibility in Russia thanks to its breed of capitalism that puts profit above all else. Like the Communist dictators of old, the new administration in Russia, utterly focused on its own power and gain, shows a callous disregard for individuals and personal freedoms. Meanwhile, American women—like women in many parts of the world—remain as hungry as ever for more just and satisfying social arrangements.

Julia L. Mickenberg, American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing the Soviet Dream (University of Chicago Press, 2017)

Learn more about Americans’ attraction to revolutionary Russia:

Warren Beatty’s classic 1981 film, Reds, captures the romance of the Russian Revolution for many Americans. Beatty plays the journalist John Reed and Diane Keaton plays his wife and fellow journalist Louise Bryant; dramatic reenactment of their relationship with each other and with the Russian revolution is interspersed with interviews from surviving members of their Greenwich Village milieu.

The Patriots, a novel by Sana Krasikov, tells the story of a woman who moves from Brooklyn to the Soviet Union, “in pursuit of economic revolution, a classless society, gender equality — and a strapping engineer she met while working at the Soviet Trade Mission,” as the New York Times’ review puts it. She stays in the Soviet Union much longer than most of the women I write about, at a high cost. The book chronicles not just her life in Russia but also that of her son, who returns to the Russia of his childhood and youth as a Big Oil executive, navigating Putin’s Russia as he tries to learn more about his mother’s past.

Mary Leder’s My Life in Stalinist Russia is the memoir of a woman who, at 16, went with her parents from Los Angeles to Birobidjian, a planned Jewish colony in Soviet Far East, but quickly decided this muddy, disorganized mess in the middle of nowhere was not for her and went on to Moscow. There she found she could not get a job without her passport, but when her father sent that on to her it was mysteriously lost in the mail. Leder felt she had no choice but to take Soviet citizenship—and hence wound up being stuck in the Soviet Union for more than thirty years.

Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (1995) by Wendy Goldman speaks to both the ambitious Bolshevik program vis-à-vis women and children and the material and practical realities that prevented realization of the most utopian visions in realms ranging from social welfare to morality.

Anna Louise Strong’s memoir, I Change Worlds: The Remaking of An American, was a bestseller when it was published in 1935 and it offers an insightful picture into what motivated Strong to be a self-appointed propagandist for the Soviet Union, despite awareness of the system’s many limitations. She wrote the book hoping it would provide her with entry into the Communist Party, but in fact neither the Soviet or American parties would have her, despite having devoted much of her life to serving the Soviet Union.

Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia. This popular history describes the thousands of Americans drawn to the Soviet Union during the First Five Year Plan, and the significant numbers who wound up in the gulag or dead, with far too little protest from the US Embassy.

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.

Tatlin’s Fish: Art and Revolution in Everyday Life

By Peter Worger

Tucked into the pages of Nikolai Punin’s diary is a sliver of silver paper made into the shape of a fish. Its scales have been drawn with what appears to be black marker or charcoal in an Impressionist style on one side and in a Cubist style on the other. The fish has two fins along its underside and a pointed tail, most of which have brightly-colored orange tips, and there is a razor-like saw of a fin on its backside. An orange piece of yarn is tied to its mouth as if the fish had been caught with it, making it easy to hang or pull out of a book. The whole object is about the length of a page and, since it was found in a book, one can assume it was made to be used as a bookmark.

Both sides of the fish are decorated in silver and orange (Punin papers, Harry Ransom Center).

The fish was a gift from the famous Soviet avant-garde artist, Vladimir Tatlin, to his friend, the art historian Nikolai Punin. The two men worked together at The Museum of Painterly Culture in Petrograd in the early 1920s just after the Russian Revolution when the diary was written. Punin worked in the Department of General Ideology and Tatlin was producing an experimental play by the poet Velimer Khlebnikov, another friend and collaborator in the circle of Russian revolutionary, avant-garde artists. For Punin, Tatlin represented a particular quality of Russian art that made it surpass the latest Cubist innovations in painting coming from France. In 1921, Punin had already written a polemic entitled, “Tatlin (Against Cubism).” In this short work, he argued that Tatlin made the same innovations in art as the French Cubists, but surpassed them because the tradition of icon painting in Russia gave the Russian avant-garde a particular appreciation of the paint surface. The lack of a Renaissance tradition of perspectivalism, according to Punin, also gave the Russian avant-garde a much freer relationship to space. Punin referred to The Fishmonger, as one of three paintings that represented Tatlin’s start in this direction. In that painting we can see multiple fish that have the silver and orange coloring as the paper fish found in Punin’s diary. Tatlin’s early experiences with church art, painting icons, and copying wall frescoes, was crucial in the development of his style as well as his ideas about the role of art in revolutionary society. The icon was both a work of art and an object for everyday use. This emphasis on the image as everyday object became important in expanding Tatlin’s creative pursuits to include the construction of utilitarian objects to transform the nature of everyday life in the USSR during the transition to socialism.

The Fishmonger, by Vladimir Tatlin, 1911 (via Wikiart).

In 1923, Tatlin became the Director of the Section for Material Culture at the Museum of Painterly Culture. During his tenure there, he authored several documents outlining his general program for the role of material culture in the USSR. In an article written under his direction called “The New Way of Life,” he described a series of new projects and prototypes, namely a new design for a coat, and one of five new designs for an oven that could cook and keep food warm for 28 to 30 hours and also keep the home heated economically. Tatlin incorporated the text of “The New Way of Life” into a controversial work of the same name, a photo-montage showing images of the designs that were meant to depict that revolutionary new way of life. He created it for display in the showroom of the Section for Material Culture and the designs were also shown at the Exhibition of Petrograd Artists of All Tendencies. Punin wrote a favorable review of Tatlin’s work in the exhibition, but other critics who believed that art should occupy a place “beyond the realm of the everyday” found the designs inappropriate. Tatlin’s work was revolutionary in that it challenged this traditional boundary between art and the everyday.

A New Way of Life, by Vladimir Tatlin (via Russian State Archive of Literature and Art).

The fish is an important indication of a close personal and professional relationship between the artist, Vladimir Tatlin, and his admiring critic, Nikolai Punin, and it represents the ways that Tatlin and Punin tried to outline a new revolutionary program for art. It also is an example of that very revolutionary impulse in that it is an object to be contemplated for its aesthetic beauty and also to be used for a utilitarian purpose as a bookmark. Tatlin’s work paved the way for a new interpretation of art as something that could be figurative as well as useful; art in revolutionary society could have a place in the daily lives of every individual and not only in the lofty realm of the art establishment. This little fish offers a window onto the theories of the period of the Russian Revolution, when people sought to rethink the entire Western European model of not only aesthetics but also society.

Tatlin’s fish can be found in The Punin Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Additional Sources:
Anonymous, “New Way of Life,” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova (1988).
John E. Bowlt, review of O Tatline, by Nikolai Punin, I. N. Punina, V. I. Rakitin, Slavic Review 55, no. 3 (1996).
Christina Kiaer, “Looking at Tatlin’s Stove,” in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, eds (2008).
Jennifer Greene Krupala, review of O Tatline by N. Punin, I. N. Punina, V. I. Rakitin, The Slavic and East European Journal 40, no. 3 (1996).
John Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde (1983).
Nikolai Punin, “Tatlin (Against Cubism),” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova (1988).

Veiled Empire: Gender and Power in Soviet Central Asia, By Douglas Northrup (2003)

By Natalie Cincotta

When the Soviets launched their campaign, known as the hujum, against the veil in Uzbekistan in 1927, their goal was not just to liberate women. Without a class framework or a working class to build socialism in Uzbekistan, Soviet activists instead attempted to transform society through the liberation of women. Northrop argues that a woman’s behavior and dress, expressed namely through the veil, came to symbolize all social values and, as such, became a battleground between Uzbek national identity and the socialist project. According to Northrop, the battle over the veil thus came to represent a process of mutual self-definition.

Northrop’s main aim is to explain the unfolding of Soviet policy in Central Asia through the lens of gender relations and policy. Rooted in a colonial studies framework, Northrop argues that the campaign to unveil women began only after the isolation of Muslim clerics and landowners as class enemies failed to win the rest of the population to their side. Only then did Soviet activists initiate the “liberation” of women as the means to build socialism, through bringing profound changes to Uzbek society, culture, and everyday life. In 1927, these Soviet activists launched a campaign, or hujum, to liberate Muslim women from seclusion and oppression through mass unveiling, which they hoped would dismantle the traditional patriarchal structure of everyday life.

Woman wearing a traditional paranja in Samarkand (present-day Uzbekistan) circa 1910 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Northrop highlights the limits to Soviet power through a thought-provoking consideration of Uzbek responses to this new drive to unveil women. For the most part Uzbeks resisted Soviet policies simply by non-compliance. Others learned to work the system or subvert Soviet language and logic, but wearing the veil became the primary symbolic assertion of anti-Soviet sentiment. Apart from expressing anti-Soviet sentiment, however, exactly how opposition to the hujum fostered Uzbek identity beyond preserving traditional cultural and societal structures remains an elusive aspect of the book.

Northrop’s use of gender as an analytical framework is arguably the most valuable contribution of Veiled Empire. He masterfully considers the way the Uzbek woman’s body became conflated with a social purpose by both Uzbeks and Soviet policy makers, as women’s behavior and dress came to represent practices in everyday life and social values in communities and in the nation as a whole. Northrop shows that unveiling did not necessarily spell out “liberation” for Uzbek women because western notions of feminism, gender, and patriarchy are not universal. For example, veils were not necessarily associated with oppression in Uzbek society, evident in the fact that the Uzbek Zhenotdel (Women’s Bureau) did not make it a chief concern before 1926. Northrop’s consideration of gender relations from both a Soviet and an Uzbek perspective thus allows him to understand the complexity of underlying tensions during the hujum and connect the gender project to broader Soviet goals. It is unfortunate, however, that women’s experiences are largely absent from this account, due to a lack of sources, as their voices would help further illuminate these tensions and complexities.

urging_peasants_to_speed_up_cotton_production_-_russian_and_uzbek_tashkent_1920s_mardjani

Soviet propaganda poster urging Uzbek peasants to speed up cotton production. Islamic clerics are depicted disparagingly (via Wikimedia Commons).

Overall, Veiled Empire is an admirable work that illuminates the limits of Soviet power in Central Asia. Using gender as an analytical framework, Northrop highlights how the Soviets attempted to use the “liberation” of women as a means to meeting a broader goal of building socialism. On both the Soviet and Uzbek sides, the veil was made to represent an entire identity and was conflated with social utility. As such, Northrop highlights the ways “oppression” and “liberation” are not as straightforward as Soviet activists hoped they were.

You may also like:

Janine Jones reviews The Politics of the Veil, by Joan Wallach Scott and Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by Saba Mahmood (2004).
Christopher Rose recalls Exploring the Silk Route in Uzbekistan.

The Enemy Within: Cold War History in FX’s The Americans

By Clay Katsky

Those who watch the television show The Americans share a secret with its protagonists: they are not a quintessential American couple living in the suburbs of D.C.; they are, in fact, spies for the Soviet Union. Set against the backdrop of a resurgent Cold War in the early 1980s, this serialized spy thriller and period drama follows the fictional lives of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, who were born in Russia and trained as KGB officers to be “sleeper” agents in America. Activated when Reagan throws détente out the window, no one suspects that they have two deeply separated lives, one as travel agents who live in Northern Virginia with two young children, and a second filled with spy missions where they don disguises to seduce and assassinate targets and gather intelligence by blackmailing officials and recruiting assets. The dichotomy of their lives is by day marked by their genuine devotion to their children and to each other, and by night by the violent and frequently murderous clandestine missions directed by their Russian handlers. These Americans are not what they seem to be.

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Kerri Russell and Matthew Rhys star in The Americans (via FX).

Ultimately, it is Reagan’s hardline against the U.S.S.R. that gives the show context. The first season begins as Reagan assumes the presidency and the third ends with the Jennings family watching his “evil empire” speech together. During the most recent fourth season, a family viewing of the TV movie The Day After, which is about nuclear Armageddon, adds another dimension to a subplot involving powerful bioweapons. The writers of The Americans do a good job of using 1980s popular culture and history to add contextual drama to the show, but sometimes ignore chronological specifics and the technical aspects of espionage tradecraft for the sake of storytelling. Regardless, the late Cold War works well as a general guide for the narrative arc of the series; the escalating tension between superpowers is directly responsible for the increasing drama in the lives of its main characters.

president_reagan_speaking_in_minneapolis_1982

President Reagan in 1982 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Perversely, The Americans sometimes makes you root for the enemy within. Fueled by terrific performances from Russell and Rhys, the Jennings can come off as sympathetic, and patriotic in their own way. Reminiscent of James Gandolfini in The Sopranos, these are bad people with redeeming qualities. She is an ideologically driven cold-blooded killer who is loyal to her family, while he is more sensitive and compelled by emotion, yet also capable of extreme violence. Both struggle with the conflict between their mission as spies and their duty as parents, which is a major plot device of the show. The tension of the first season is driven by their fear that the FBI will catch them. Right away evading capture is set up as synonymous with protecting their family. The second season expands on the theme of protecting their family from their world – after two other sleeper agents and their young children are murdered the Jennings fear they are next. The danger in the third season comes from within the family, with their daughter suspecting her parents are way more than just travel agents. And in the fourth season an assignment to steal bioweapons puts the whole world in jeopardy, pitting their loyalty to their country against their instinct to protect their children. Making the show about more than just spying and the Cold War, there are strong subplots involving the family’s next door neighbor, the FBI agent who works in the counter-intelligence division, and their daughter’s increasing devotion to Christianity, which comes to a head when she over shares with her pastor. The drama is about the characters, how they develop and how they react to one another in the context of the world around them.

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The images of nuclear destruction in The Day After (1983) were troubling to many American families (via Wikimedia Commons).

In The Americans, history is used as the setting. The show underscores Reagan’s determination to defeat the forces of Communism using clips from his speeches – as Soviet agents, the Jennings find the rhetoric palpable. And at their house, the news always plays in the background at night, helping to give a timeline of events while also highlighting the television culture of the time – pop culture events like David Copperfield making the Statue of Liberty disappear are drawn on to both diffuse the tension and offer social nostalgia. But the headlines are also used to drive the drama. When Reagan gets shot, the Jennings go on high alert because they are not sure if their government was involved; and when Yuri Andropov, their former leader at the KGB, takes power in 1982, they know their lives are about to get busier. The writers incorporate the shift towards renewed hostilities that occurred during the late Cold War in order to give the viewer the sense that the Jennings mission is important. The rivalry between the superpowers could have spun out of control very quickly and at any moment, and the “the Americans” are caught in the middle of it.

The show begins as Reagan kicks the Cold War into high gear in 1981 and it will end with the collapse of the Communist superpower – having been renewed for a final two seasons, the story will be told to its conclusion. The Soviet fear of the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan’s anti-ballistic missile “Star Wars” project, is a centerpiece of the first few episodes. In reality, 1981 is too early for the Russians (or even Reagan) to be thinking seriously about SDI, but it works as an easy set up. At that time, however, it was mostly Reagan’s rhetoric that threatened to turn the Cold War hot. Nicaragua comes to the fore in the second season, again a little early in terms of chronology, but it works well because the Jennings’ sympathy for the Sandinista movement helps humanize them. Oliver North is credited as a technical advisor on an episode where the Jennings infiltrate a Contra training base. Empathy for the Jennings continues to build as they assist the anti-apartheid movement during the third season, while meanwhile the seeds of mistrust in their government are sown with the opening of the war in Afghanistan. In the fourth season, as their government pushes them to recruit their own daughter, the Soviet mismanagement of that war feeds their growing disillusionment and dovetails with a risky mission to acquire an apocalyptic bioweapon. While this past season was it’s least historically based, it was also its best because it dealt with larger, more existential issues.

A Soviet Spetsnaz (special operations) group prepares for a mission in Afghanistan, 1988 (via Wikimedia Commons)

The technical focus of the show is on tradecraft, not history. The thrills come from watching the spies operate; and from making dead drops and cultivating assets to planting listening devices and evading surveillance, the Jennings are very busy. But the show’s most exciting aspect is also its least plausible. It is hard to believe that such well-placed agents would be used as workhorses for the KGB. Especially in the first two seasons, the Jennings juggle multiple assignments at the same time and go on a wide variety of missions – simultaneously they are assassins, saboteurs, master manipulators, and experts in surveillance, counterespionage, and combat. As valuable as they would have been to their government, the Jennings are asked to take too many risks and expose themselves too often. But even in its most exaggerated aspects, The Americans feels realistic due to the expert performances from Russell and Rhys, who are so believable in their roles as skilled spies and as doting parents that one cannot help but trust in their inhuman ability to be an expert in anything they need to be.

Two Soviet era subminiature cams. The one to the left is a Kiev-30 (1974-1983), the other one is a Kiev Vega 2 (1961-1964).

Two miniature Soviet spy cameras form the late Cold War (via Wikimedia Commons).

Overall, The Americans is a highly engaging and richly thought out show set in the waning years of the Cold War. It is very exciting to watch two highly trained KGB operatives as they navigate the complexity of staying ideologically loyal to their cause while raising an American family and living a lie. People who remember the 1980s firsthand will enjoy the references and set pieces, and anyone who likes spy thrillers will be instantly hooked on the slow boiling but constant action and drama. It will be interesting to see how the upcoming fifth season incorporates the Able Archer war scare, when the Soviets mistook NATO war games for the start of real life a nuclear engagement. Will it be the Jennings who witness an increase in late night pizza deliveries to the Pentagon and report back to Moscow that nuclear war is imminent? They seem too savvy to drop the ball like that. But what will happen in the end? Will they survive or be caught by the FBI, or will they get called back to Russia to be punished for some failure or perceived disloyalty?

Read more by Clay Katsky on Not Even Past:
Kissinger’s Shadow, By Greg Grandin (2005)

Policing Art in Early Soviet Russia

by Rebecca Johnston

On August 18, 1921, Anatoly Lunacharsky, the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment, wrote a letter to Jozef Unszlicht, a founding member of the Cheka, the Bolsheviks’ revolution-era secret police that eventually morphed into the KGB. As Commissar of Enlightenment, Lunacharsky was accountable for the educational, artistic, and creative development of all of Soviet Russia. In this capacity, he was responsible for government relations with the creative intelligentsia. The Cheka, on the other hand, was one of the early Soviet artistic community’s most formidable enemies. The letter is a request to Unszlicht for the release of art historian and critic Nikolai Punin, who had just been placed under arrest.

Anatoly Lunacharsky (via Wikipedia)

It was not unusual for Lunacharsky to write pleas such as this one on behalf of members of the intelligentsia who had been arrested or otherwise harassed by the Soviet government. He was known as a relatively liberal Bolshevik, a bleeding heart who advocated for countless artists and writers, many of whom he counted as friends. The commissar was especially close with Punin, whom he put in charge of the visual arts division of the Commissariat of Enlightenment in 1918. Indeed, it would have been rather shocking if Lunacharsky had not written a letter in defense of his own employee. As Punin’s boss, he would have wanted to show his loyalty and support. As a friend and intellectual supporter, he would have wanted to show his genuine desire to see Punin released and cleared of spurious charges. Luckily for Punin, he was in fact released from prison about a month after Lunacharsky sent his letter of appeal. Luckily for us, he kept a copy of that letter, which today can be found at the Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin.

Original letter from Lunacharsky (Marked “Copy” in the top right).

For a document so seemingly obscure, Lunacharsky’s letter allows us to peer into both the tumultuous intellectual environment of the early 1920s and the broader story of the Communist Party’s persecution of the intellectual class. Punin’s arrest was not an isolated incident – he was one of more than 800 intellectuals picked up as part of the so-called Tagantsev conspiracy. This conspiracy was one of the earliest experiments in mass terror orchestrated by the Soviet secret police. It was intended to intimidate the intelligentsia, who, lacking peasant or working class backgrounds, were widely suspected of disloyalty to the revolutionary government. In this unnerving environment, the commissar had to strike a tone that was at once professional, personal, and, most importantly, ideologically correct, as the Bolsheviks understood that to be. Impressively, he manages to check of all of these boxes in his short letter.

It begins with the personal – noting contact with Punin’s wife and his long acquaintance with the arrested poet. Lunacharsky goes on to characterize Punin as possessing one of the most ideologically necessary personal traits: “[he] has worked with extraordinary loyalty and productivity, attracting the hatred of bourgeois artistic circles.” To be praised as a loyal and productive communist actively despised by the bourgeoisie was the best defense one could hope for when arrested for supposed counterrevolutionary activity. Lunacharsky concludes his appeal by putting his entire life and career on the table: “For my part, I ask the V.Ch.K. [Cheka] to immediately deal with Comrade Punin’s case and I personally give you my every guarantee, both in the name of the Commissariat of Enlightenment and in my own name.”

Of particular interest is what he omits. Punin was an easy target for arrest because he had worked to preserve Western artwork from destruction at the hands of radicals seeking to purge the new Soviet state of all “bourgeois” art. However, Lunacharsky’s only reference to the charges against the critic is: “there can definitively not be any talk of any sort of treason on his part,” and that the whole affair is obviously a “misunderstanding.” Lunacharsky does not even mention the art. He denies the Cheka the legitimacy of acknowledging that the preservation of Western art could be an offense that would merit arrest.

Der bekannte Sowjet-Kriegskommissar Unschlicht gestürzt ! Der bekannte Sowjet-Kriegskommissar Unschlicht wurde plötzlich seines Amtes enthoben

Józef Unszlicht in June 1930 (via Bundesarchiv. Bild 102-09893)

The fact that Lunacharsky addresses Unszlicht gives us a chance to consider this curious but relatively lesser known historical figure. The Cheka is typically associated with its infamous founder and director, Felix Dzerzhinsky. Unszlicht, however, is of particular interest to cultural historians because of his profound personal paranoia concerning the creative intelligentsia. In response to another of Lunacharsky’s interventions, Unszlicht admonished the Commissariat’s “utterly impermissible attitude toward foreign travel by our artistic forces,” many of whom, he claimed “are waging an overt or covert campaign against us abroad.” Coming from someone in charge of military intelligence, as Unszlicht was, this assessment was a far cry from reality. There was a peculiar logic to Bolshevik repression that still puzzles historians nearly a century later. It would be interesting to see Unszlicht’s response to this letter (if one exists), whether or not he tried to justify the arrest, and if so, on what basis. A mention of the preserved Western art would have indicated some degree of internal logic; citing trumped-up charges of “sabotage” or something similar would indicate a different motivation altogether.

Nikolay Punin and Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad, 1927. Photo by Pavel Lukhnitsky via Monoskop.

Perhaps most intriguing, though, is the journey of the letter itself from revolutionary Russia to Austin, Texas. It sits in the Ransom Center among Punin’s diaries and select correspondence with his common law wife, the fearless poet Anna Akhmatova, who eventually attracted far more attention from the secret police than Punin. According to a note in the Ransom Center’s records, Punin separated these documents from the rest of his papers precisely to keep them away from Akhmatova. The poet’s works had been subject to censorship for years and Punin feared that his papers would also be censored if she found and kept them. Punin apparently decided that the most prudent course was to give these love letters and other documents to his more recent wife, Martha Golubeva. The documents passed through a few more hands within the family until 1974, when they were sold to the Ransom Center to fund Golubeva’s daughter’s ex-husband’s escape from the Soviet Union. The emotional gymnastics involved in these exchanges testifies to both the fraught nature of intellectual life over five decades of Soviet history and the value placed on intellectual property. Tragically, although that value began as an emotional and intellectual product, it was ultimately recast as a monetary one – one of the many ironies of life in this anti-capitalist state.

Read more by Rebecca Johnston at Behind the Tower.

Documents referred to in this article can be found in

The N.N. Punin collection at the Harry Ransom Center, RLIN# TXRC-99-A9.

Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953, eds. Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko with Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007), pg. 11.

Document Translation

(handwritten) COPY

To V.V.Ch.K. Comrade Unszlicht

Copy to P.Ch.K. Comrade Semenov

[From] R.S.F.S.R.

People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment

18 August 1921

No. 6002

Moscow

On August 3rd IZO Director Comrade N.N. Punin was arrested in Petrograd. The circumstances that led to his arrest are known to me not only from the words of his wife but from the words of your colleague, Comrade M. O. Brik, highly valued by both you and I. Personally I’ve known N.N. for a long time. He entered into Soviet service immediately after the revolution and since that time has worked with extraordinary loyalty and productivity, attracting the hatred of bourgeois artistic circles. During his tenure, Nikolai Nikolaevich [Punin] has become closer and closer to the communists and has become one of the main proponents of communism in Petrograd’s artistic community. There can definitively not be any talk of any sort of treason on his part. Here we have a clear and entirely regrettable misunderstanding. For my part, I ask the V.Ch.K. [Cheka] to immediately deal with Comrade Punin’s case and I personally give you my every guarantee in this regard, both in the name of the Commissariat of Enlightenment and in my own name.

People’s Commissar of Enlightenment A. Lunacharsky

(handwritten) Corresponds with original: Russian Museum Head of Affairs N. Mankof

The Tatars of Crimea: Ethnic Cleansing and Why History Matters

During the last two weeks, while researching my dissertation on Crimean Tatars in the National Archives of the Russian Federation, some of the people in my documents, such as Tatar leader Mustafa Dzmeliev, started appearing in news stories. Many historical accounts of events in the Crimea simply mention that Nikita Khrushchev “gifted” the Crimea to Ukraine in 1954. This does little to explain Crimea’s current demographic makeup or what happened to put the strategic peninsula in the position to be “given” by Moscow to Ukraine in 1954.

In fact, the transfer was the last in a series of actions concerning the peninsula carried out over several centuries by the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union. While Crimea has a long independent history going back to Greek times, it was ruled by Crimean Tatars as members of the Golden Horde beginning in the 13th century and then the Crimean Khanate beginning in the early 15th century. The Khanate maintained a diverse merchant population, but this trade included raiding Russian villages and declaring sovereignty to the Ottoman Sultan. In 1774, Catherine the Great invaded Crimea to deter Ottoman control and, in 1783, annexed the peninsula and encouraged Russian and Ukrainian settlers to migrate to the Crimean coast. At the same time, tens of thousands of Crimean Tatars were deported to the Ottoman Empire.

Crimean Tatars by Jean Raoult, 1860s-80s.
Source: New York Public Library

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Crimean War (1853-56) brought another round of ethnic cleansing of Crimean Tatars, and many fled to Tatar communities in Turkey. Despite repressions, throughout Russian imperial history, most Crimean Tatars remained in Crimea. One consequence of state coercion against Tatars was that a Crimean Tatar, Ismail Bey Gasprinskii, began the Jadid Muslim reform movement that sought more modern schooling and the use of local languages written in Arabic script. Jadids such as Gasprinskii did not reject everything Russian but concluded that only a modernized and educated Tatar population in Crimea could protect itself from total Russification. Russian central government allowed Crimean Tatars to staff local positions in the imperial Islamic bureaucracy giving them control over education, religious instruction, and some policing and legal functions.

When the Tsarist regime collapsed in 1917, many Jadids helped form a short-lived revolutionary government, but the anti-Bolshevik White General Wrangel and his army ended Tatar’s attempts at governance by occupying Crimea. Some Jadids joined the Bolsheviks to defeat the Whites, as some Muslims did in the Lower Volga and Central Asia. The new Soviet government compromised with these Crimean Tatars and declared the formation of the Crimean ASSR, where both Russian and Tatar were official languages and local national Soviets oversaw the needs of Russians, Tatars, Ukrainians, and smaller minorities. Radical Jadids now became the direct beneficiaries of a Soviet nationalities policy that promoted indigenous ethnic nationalities, and they formed the political core of the Crimean ASSR during its “golden years” from 1923 to 1928. Even after the Stalinist terror in the 1930s, Crimean Tatars controlled much of the Republic’s government.

*Percentage of Crimean Tatar population by region*

After the Nazi occupation and Soviet liberation of Crimea in 1944, however, Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars to Central Asia for allegedly collaborating with the Nazis. Although it is true that some Crimean Tatars did collaborate, recent scholarship has shown that Tatar treason was no more prevalent than that of any other nationality, including Ukrainians and Russians. Most of the male deportees had fought against the Nazis. More likely, Stalin’s motive in deporting the Crimean Tatars mirrored the fears of his Tsarist predecessors during the Crimean War: the Crimean Tatars were a “fifth column” due to the large diaspora in Turkey, and Sevastopol’s Black Sea Fleet was too important to Soviet strategy to risk.

*Memorial to Mass Deportation of 1944 in Sudak*.
*Source: Wikimedia*

This mass deportation of Crimean Tatars, and not Khrushchev’s gift of the Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954, was the most important action taken by Moscow in determining the current demographic and geopolitical situation in Crimea. KGB officials quickly deported the entire population of Crimean Tatars (over 200,000 people) to Central Asia in May 1944. During the process, over 40% of Crimean Tatars perished as a result of horrible transit conditions and starvation once they arrived in Central Asia. On June 30, 1945, another order from Moscow liquidated the Crimean ASSR, and the territory became the Crimean Oblast, which is officially now part of the Russian RSFSR. At the same time, KGB and non-Tatar Crimean authorities removed all signs of Tatar life, while state media painted the Tatars as traitors. So when Khrushchev “gave” the Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR, just a year after Stalin died, on February 19, 1954, historical documents show that the demographic situation and the autonomy of local populations had already been greatly altered.

More orders concerning the Crimea following Stalin’s death are equally relevant. Crimean Tatars were one of dozens of Soviet nationalities deported during World War II, but many of the other deported nationalities such as Chechens and Ingushetians saw their autonomous republics reestablished by order of the Kremlin on January 9, 1957. The only large nationalities prohibited from rehabilitation were Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans. An order by Kliment Voroshilov on April 28, 1956 did absolve Crimean Tatars of being traitors and did allow Tatars to move outside of Central Asia, but did not allow them to return to the Crimea or reclaim confiscated property. While the refusal of the Soviet state to reestablish the Crimean ASSR may seem like a technicality, it is very important today. In other autonomous or Soviet Socialist Republics where indigenous ethnic groups remained in control of some governance, national groups have either gained independence from Russia or, as is the case with Volga Tatars, have their own autonomous republic.

Crimea + Ukraine (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)

Although Soviet authorities officially allowed Crimean Tatars to return to the Crimea — on September 5, 1967, an order by Mikhail Georgadze gave Crimea Tatars the right to live “anywhere” in the USSR — Moscow refused to organize a return effort with logistical support, was lackadaisical in disputing earlier Stalinist propaganda, placed the legal residency status of Tatars in the hands of Crimean officials, and made discriminatory residency laws. In fact, using the Soviet internal passport system that determined all Soviet citizens’ legal residency status, local police, and KGB in Crimea denied individual Tatar’s residency registration. Through the registration system, Moscow banned former criminals from residing in big cities and resort areas such as Sevastopol, Feodosia, and Yalta. Despite all the obstacles, some Tatars did register throughout especially the 1970s and 1980s, while many thousands more squatted in rural and urban areas and fought prolonged battles for residential registration and reclaiming confiscated land. In response to the difficulties in returning, during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Crimean Tatars developed a human rights movement that established connections with other Soviet dissidents and the international human rights movement.

As the Soviet Union collapsed, what had been an intermittent flow of thousands of Tatars returning to the Crimea became a flood of tens of thousands from 1989 to 1991. However, the internal passport and registration laws remained a factor, and Tatars had a hard time establishing themselves in larger cities, although the establishment of a Tatar representative body known as the Mejlis has provided Tatars a voice in Kyiv and on the Crimean peninsula.

But the Russian presence and the attempt to eradicate the Tatar population has had crucial impact. The Black Sea Fleet, whose base in Crimea is guaranteed until 2042, remains the symbol of Russian naval power. The tourist industry and resort culture of the Crimea has remained vital to Russian culture. Many Russians have Crimean summer homes and Russian sailors often retire in the pleasant Black Sea climate.

When the subject of the “gift” of the Crimea to Ukraine comes up, this conversation must include a basic understanding of Crimean Tatar history and the history of the relative autonomy of Russians and Ukrainians in the Crimea from Moscow. Tatars have little reason to trust Moscow after centuries of being on the receiving end of the worst of Russian Imperial and Soviet policies. At the same time, local Crimean officials who are ethnic Russians and Ukrainians have maintained their post-1944 control over the peninsula partly with Moscow’s blessing, and partly with a form of control that gives local officials a large degree of autonomy. This is helpful in understanding why the pro-Russian rhetoric right now has been in favor of a new Autonomous Crimean Republic. The big question is how will any new republic compromise with Tatars and how much autonomy it will have from Kyiv or Moscow.

Andrew Straw is a historian of Soviet Crimea. He has taught courses on Russian and Soviet history at the University of Texas and Huston-Tillotson University. At the moment, he teaches high school world history and is an instructor for the University of Texas OnRamps history program. He continues research as an independent scholar and is preparing a book proposal that will focus on Stalin’s Crimea policy and Crimean Tatars in the immediate postwar period. He can be reached at astraw@utexas.edu or on Twitter at @astrawism1.

Banner Image: Crimean Tatar family, 1925. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Soviet Baby Boomers: An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation by Donald Raleigh (2013)

by Andrew Straw

Recalling his formative years as an American baby boomer and the influence the Cold War and the Soviet Union had on his worldview, Donald Raleigh asks what life was like for people his age in the Soviet Union? What were their concerns about the future? How did they spend their time and what did Cold War ideological battles mean for their daily lives? As historians exhaust the biographies and psychological studies of leaders to gain insight into authoritarian societies, scholars such as Raleigh are increasingly turning to evidence from everyday life to complete our understanding of non-democratic states. These new efforts are important because there is no denying that authoritarian governments were common in the twentieth century, lasted for several generations, and some, like the authoritarian government of North Korea, continue to affect global affairs in the new millennium. It is also increasingly evident that popular participation, and not just dictators’ decrees, helped build and dismantle authoritarian regimes.

In Soviet Baby Boomers, Raleigh borrows the US term referring to children born after World War II to examine the Soviet Union. This Soviet cohort was born leading up to Stalin’s death in 1953 and during the transfer of power to a more reform-minded leader, Nikita Khrushchev. Unlike their parents and grandparents who experienced the horrors of revolution, two world wars, Stalin’s terror and disastrous modernization policies, this new Soviet generation grew up in the “normalized” Soviet Union. The secret police, one-party dictatorship, and communism remained, but surviving the Soviet system now meant finishing university dissertations, pursuing various personal goals, and using the black market economy to improve personal fortunes. In fact, Raleigh makes the important argument that “the Soviet System’s very success at effecting social change” caused the post-Stalin generation to become cynical about the system. The Soviet welfare state provided the foundation for an educated and urbanized professional class who supported reforms in the 1980s. By that time, the enthusiasm for a normal Soviet life had withered away as Soviet citizens were increasingly able to compare their standard of living to more robust Western economies, thus highlighting the absurdities of Soviet communism. And yet, most people were not active in the dissident movement throughout the 1960s and 1970s despite widespread sympathy for it. It was not until Mikhail Gorbachev initiated the policies of “glasnost” (openness) and perestroika (economic liberalization) that the baby boomers expressed their revolutionary ideas in public, elected officials that took reforms farther than Gorbachev imagined, and prepared as best they good for the positive and negative consequences of the market economy and democracy.

Raleigh’s research centers on students who graduated in 1967 from two magnet secondary schools that specialized in English in Moscow and Saratov. Through interviews, the author examines how these students experienced events in post-Stalin Russia such as Khrushchev’s liberalization after 1956, the Cold War, the Brezhnev “stagnation,” the Soviet-Afghan War, and Gorbachev’s reforms. Many of Raleigh’s discoveries might surprise American readers. For example the interviews reveal an almost total lack of “true communist believers.” Many respondents simply claimed that by the 1970’s any sensible person could see the economic absurdities in the communist system. Simultaneously, Western popular culture, from the Beatles to consumer goods, strongly influenced Soviet knowledge of the outside world and conflicted with negative portrayals of the West. Yes, students still had classes on Marxism, but the attempt to “brainwash” Soviet baby boomers failed. Official decrees and the aging Politburo were the target of popular humor that exposed Soviet absurdities; Westerners were not the only ones to poke fun at Brezhnev. The Communist Party continued to play a role, but several interviewees claimed that they joined the Party only because of career opportunities and the residual fear of the state police and prison camps. At the same time, many admitted that they probably could have had successful careers if the hadn’t joined the Party.

Street life in the Soviet Union, 1955 (Image courtesy of flickr/Malmo Museer)

Many of the interviewees are nostalgic about the past. A majority fondly remembers the good aspects of the Soviet welfare state (free education, medicine, housing, summer camps), especially when compared with the economic and social disasters of the 1990’s. Raleigh does an excellent job displaying how nostalgia is tied to the reasonable expectations of any modern welfare state and does not indicate that baby boomers would like to return to the Soviet-style governing. However, when asked about Vladimir Putin’s presidency, most interviewees spoke positively about the ex-KGB officer’s stabilizing effect on Russia since 2000. Raleigh also examines some of the darker memories of this period, such as the prevalence of Soviet anti-Semitism in society. For example, Soviet Jews were often overrepresented in the top primary schools when compared to other ethnic groups, but then experienced discrimination when applying for university or searching for a job.

The limit of Raleigh’s study is clear from the beginning: the group of students he selected to interview comes from the well-educated Soviet elite in two central cities. This limits Raleigh’s ability to draw larger conclusions about Soviet society and the reader is left wondering how commonplace such experiences and sentiments were for other Soviet citizens. The late 1940s, 50s and 60s were years of massive migration to the urban centers, but the book focuses on well-established urban families and does not offer any contrasting experiences of first generation urbanites. At other points, Raleigh highlights interesting facts, such as the underrepresentation of Tatars in Saratov schools, but then provides no explanation.

Muscovites street dancing in 1991 (Image courtesy of Abbeville Press)

In his defense, Raleigh readily admits the limitations of his sample of interviewees, and does an excellent job showing the differences between life in Moscow (the Soviet capital) and Saratov (a large, provincial city that was purposely closed to the outside world). Furthermore, the author argues that this elite cohort of students had a privileged place in Soviet society that made their actions key to giving Gorbachev’s reforms momentum. Another issue that oral histories inevitably invoke is the fact that interviewees’ memories of events change over time and people often lie. Raleigh responds to this point by asserting that he is not only interested in the facts of Soviet life, but in what the Soviet Union represents in the baby boomers’ memories today. He carefully interrogates suspicious responses to draw out misrepresentations of certain events or topics.

In sum, for Soviet historians the author provides a vital starting point for further research and comparison on Soviet life after Stalin. For the casual reader, Raleigh demonstrates how people lived their lives under an authoritarian state by maneuvering within the bureaucracy, sustaining their families, enjoying the comforts not available to earlier Soviet generations, and placing themselves in the position to help dismantle their authoritarian state.

The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements by Lynne Viola (2007)

by Andrew Straw

Lynne Viola’s The Unknown Gulag argues that the first and most heinous of Stalin’s notorious purges was the attack on wealthy or successful peasants known as kulaks, and their exile to desolate special settlements in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This account of “dekulakization,” is vital in understanding how the Bolshevik experiment with the New Economic Policy, or NEP (a limited market economy with communist party control), abruptly ended in the late 1920s when Stalin launched the radical industrialization and collectivization goals of the Five Year Plans. The NEP economy had allowed peasants to maintain their key prize of the revolution, land ownership, but this concession was seen by many Bolsheviks as undesirable and temporary and was ended by Stalin’s breakneck drive towards rapid industrialization, which required total state control of agriculture. The internal “colonial” settlements that housed the supposed “enemy” elements of the peasant population, were the foundation of what Solzhenitsyn later called the “Gulag Archipelago.” They set the precedent for the processes of political repression in the Stalinist Soviet Union, but among Stalinist crimes they are relatively “unknown” or understudied by historians. Viola asserts that the attempted elimination of the kulaks as “class enemies” was a disaster. The project was unrealistic, based on ideology rather than realistic planning; it was fiercely resisted, and only exacerbated the socio-economic problems of the USSR it was meant to solve.

Viola guides the reader through the full chronology of the dekulakization campaign by exploring the thinking of officials who organized a war against the peasantry, the construction of kulak identity, transport to exile, and the settlement conditions. Concurrently, Viola’s narrative humanizes the victims by unearthing grim accounts of the horrific deportation process and internment conditions, as families were loaded into trains and subjected to unspeakable conditions in settlements and by contrasting that reality with the deceptive propaganda used to disparage the kulaks in public. Victims’ testimonies are further supported by the first hand accounts of Soviet officials who confirmed the nightmarish conditions, particularly during the famine of 1932-33. By outlining the conditions in the countryside, initial orders from above, the “classifications” of peasants as kulaks, and the workings of the OGPU (Secret Police), Viola allows the reader to understand the archival evidence of kulak repression in the context of the inter-war USSR.

Max Alpert, “Seizing grain hidden by kulaks,” November 1930 (Wikimedia)

According to the author, the kulak identity was a form of “internal colonization” similar to western European ideas about the need to “civilize” the colonized races, but focused on the transformation of the peasants through “socialist reeducation.” However, Soviet attempts to apply progressive reasoning to dekulakization is exposed as almost entirely superficial and Viola stresses that the real effect was the creation of a kulak identity defined as an exploited class of peasants that was treated as resource for economic and state development. The haphazard building of special settlements and the authorities’ lack of preparation for the surviving deportees confirms the hypocrisy of a Soviet policy that hoped to exploit labor, only to have many able-bodied people die because they had no shelter or food. This kulak identity was internalized by all the victims, even the ones who came back into the Soviet mainstream through service during World War Two or repatriation after the death of Stalin. Equally important was the fact that this system of gulags did nothing to ameliorate the Russian and Soviet problems of rural underdevelopment, but merely created a Soviet superpower as a “Leviathan” built on the backs of the peasantry.

“Exclude the kulak from the collective farm” (LSE Digital Archive)

In sum, Viola convincingly argues that the “unknown gulag” provided the slave labor crucial to sustaining an otherwise unsustainable planned-economy and constructed a social distinction between those peasants moving up through the Soviet system and those enslaved as counter-revolutionaries. Anyone interested in Stalin’s Soviet Union will benefit from reading the Unknown Gulag because Viola successfully humanizes the victims of Stalin’s first attempt at reshaping the economic and social structure of the Soviet Union, while thoroughly examining the people and ideology that brought such plans to fruition. The “other Gulag’ of dekulakized peasants and the settlements where they suffered as “state enemies” now has a fitting account that will preserve their memory.

Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum (2004)

by Yana Skorobogatov

“Through Labor – Freedom!” read a sign above the entrance to Solovetsky, just one of the 476 camps that comprised the Soviet gulag system. This prison network – what Alexander Solzhenitsyn famously termed “the gulag archipelago” – is the subject of Gulag: A History, Anne Applebaum’s excellent Pulitzer Prize winning book. It is an impressive compendium of firsthand accounts taken from countless memoirs, archives, and oral histories conducted by both Applebaum and the organization Memorial, which was founded in 1987 to preserve the memory of those who died in the gulag. Written in a journalist’s engaging style with a historian’s attention to detail, Gulag offers readers unprecedented access to the inner workings of the Soviet prison labor camp system and the lives of the people who survived it.

Applebaum is wise to structure her book thematically in order to maximize her reader’s immersion into each facet of gulag life. Chapters devoted to the individual characters one would encounter in a gulag camp – corrupt guards, tattoo artists, women and children – animate otherwise gruesome descriptions of the processes – arrest, transport, labor, and punishment – that gulag inhabitants were forced to undergo. Several nuanced discussions of the complex power structures formed inside the gulag zona will surprise even those readers familiar with Stalinist terror. For example, a camp boss’ order that identifies the prison brigadier as “the most significant person on the construction site,” shows how the system’s industrial imperatives presented average prisoners with opportunities for upward mobility. Other details, like one man’s account of his terminally ill wife being pushed to the floor by a prison guard, underscore the brutality upon which the gulag regime was founded.

The author supplements her detailed narrative with refreshing insight on the origins of Stalinist terror, a topic that has inspired heavy debate among Soviet historians. She joins the likes of J. Arch Getty, James Harris, and Michael Jakobson to argue that the gulags were a product of on the spot improvisation rather than a premeditated master plan. In the early 1930s, the Soviet leadership in general, and Stalin in particular, constantly changed course. Neither the OGPU nor the secret police made clear their ultimate goals about the future of the gulag system. It became common, for example, for the OGPU to labor over the issue of overcrowding in prison camps and declare amnesties for prisoners as a solution, only to issue another wave of repression and new plans for camp construction shortly thereafter. Cycles like these indicate that despite Stalin’s political, economic, and even personal investment in the gulag system, its origins were haphazard and the policies that shaped it inconsistent.

Readers will notice Applebaum’s penchant for infusing her own moral insight into her narrative, a tactic that will appeal to her non-academic audience but may disquiet a few historians. She portrays the novelist Maxim Gorky as morally corrupt and opportunistic, someone who made a career out of serving the Soviet regime by praising gulag prisons (“it is excellent,” he wrote of the Solovetsky camp) and convict labor projects like the White Sea Canal. Jean-Paul Sartre is criticized for supporting Stalinism throughout the postwar years, while Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill are condemned for smiling in photographs taken with Stalin during the Yalta Conference. Applebaum expresses disdain for most leftist intellectuals and politicians who excuse Stalin’s crimes and denounce Hitler’s in a single breath. The issue of unintended consequences makes it difficult to identify and condemn immorality in retrospect, which is why most academic historians tend to keep their moral judgments at bay when writing histories of even the most reprehensible of regimes. That Applebaum – a journalist by profession – chose to stray from the facts in her introduction and closing chapters betrays an otherwise impeccable book, whose subject – the history and legacy of Stalinist injustice – is capable of commanding a reader’s moral compass all on its own.

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