1 Cheliabinsk As a Mirror of Russia in the 20Th Century
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Notes 1 Cheliabinsk As a Mirror of Russia in the 20th Century 1. The conversation – ‘Que dit-on de la guerre?’, ‘On n’est pas prêt. Surtout l’usine de Tcheliabinsk. L’armée est prête, le pays paysan ne l’est pas.’ – is described in Boris Souvarine, Souvenirs sur Isaac Babel, Panaït Istrati, Pierre Pascal, Paris: Gérard Lebovici, 1985, p. 17. Isaak Babel (1894–1940) was born in the Jewish ghetto in Odessa; he grew up in the harbour town of Nikolaev and studied at the university in Kiev. He then moved to St Petersburg, where he published essays criticising Tsarism, antisemitism and the bureaucracy. Babel held a very optimistic view of the prospects for the socialist movement. During the Russian Civil War, he joined Budennyi’s Red Cavalry army. In 1923, he started to publish short stories set during that period, which he later assem- bled in Krasnaya konnitsa (Red Cavalry). Babel was one of the most highly regarded Soviet authors and was privi- leged to travel abroad. On many occasions he visited his wife Eugenia, who had lived in Paris since 1925. Babel made a speech at the International Writers Congress in Paris in 1935. Babel had been living in a Ukrainian village in 1930, at the time of the ‘dekulakization’ and deportation of peasants from their villages to Northern Russia and Siberia. He was deeply shocked by what he had seen, which was a drastic change from the policies of the 1920s. Thereafter, Babel had lived on a kolkhoz in order to gather information for a new book on the peasants’ new lives. Towards the end of the 1930s, Babel was more and more heavily criticised and he was arrested in May 1939. The NKVD secret police accused him of Trotskyism and ‘anti-Soviet activities’. He was executed on 17 March 1940. For a biography, see Reinhard Krumm, Isaak Babel. Schreiben under Stalin. Eine Biographie. (Norderstedt: Books on Demand 2005), idem, Isaak Babel. Biografiia (Moscow: Rosspen, 2008). Compare with Vitalii Shentalinskii, Raby svobody: V literaturnykh archivakh KGB, (Moskow: Parus 1995, p. 26–81) con- cerning the denunciations against Babel, his interrogation and confessions. At the time, his wife was falsely informed that Babel had been sentenced to a Gulag and had died on 17 March 1941. Babel was rehabilitated in 1954. The actual circumstances of his trial and execution were made public only in the late 1980s under glasnost. 2. Boris Souvarine (Lifschitz) (1894–1985) belonged to the Left wing of French socialists that protested against World War I, and was later among the found- ers of the French Communist Party. However, by 1924 he had already been excluded from the party for disciplinary reasons. Thanks to his independent attitude regarding the Soviet experiment, Souvarine was soon considered one of France’s most knowledgeable experts on the Soviet Union. Hist first major work was the third volume of the Panaït Istratis novel Vers l’autre flamme. It was later re-edited under the title La Russie en 1930, a title that 290 Notes 291 referred to the Marquis de Custine’s classical description of Tsarist Russia in 1839. Souvarine eagerly followed what was happening in Soviet Russia by reading the press. Like many ex-communists, he had a special advantage in terms of his ability to analyse Soviet developments, although he was forbid- den to return to the USSR. By the mid-1930s, he had collected materials for a biography on Stalin, entitled Staline: Aperçu historique du bolchevisme (Paris: Plon 1935). At the time, very few people in France appreciated this biogra- phy because the dominant mode in the Popular Front era was pro-Soviet. However, his biography withstood the test of time. Souvarine’s biography of Stalin was re-edited in France and Italy in the 1970s with an afterword by the author. On Souvarine’s struggle to create his own niche in predomi- nantly pro-Soviet France before and after WWII in order to carry on critical research and debates on the USSR, see Jean-Louis Panné, Boris Souvarine: Le premier deçu du communisme, Paris: Robert Laffont 1993, pp. 174–261, 308– 366. 3. V. Bozhe, ‘P. Stolypinu videlas blestiashchaia budushchnost Urala i Sibiri’, Cheliabinsk, 1999, no. 2. On the migration to Siberia, see Donald W. Treadgold, The Great Siberian Migration: Government and Peasant in Resettlement from Emancipation to the First World War, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1957, pp. 90–98, 146–149. 4. On the early history of Cheliabinsk, see Ivan Degtiarëv, Cheliabinskaia sta- rina. Sbornik statei i materialov po istorii Cheliabinska rannego perioda (30-e gody XVIII – seredina XIX veka). Tsentr Istoriko-kultornogo naslediia g. Cheliabinska Cheliabinsk 1996; A.L. Pastukhov, Ot Cheliaba do Cheliabinska: Puteshestvie v proshloe, Cheliabinsk: Vzgliad, 2000. 5. Anatole Kopp, L’Architecture de la période stalinienne, with a foreword by Charles Bettelheim, Grenoble: Presses Universitaires de Grenoble 1978, p. 154. As a pioneering French architect, Kopp made several study trips to the USSR starting in the late 1950s. However, even though he was associated with the French Communist Party he could not visit any other places than the tourist-adapted cities of Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev and a few other towns. To learn about the rest of the country’s architecture, he had to be content with studying books and journals in the libraries. 6. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, Berkeley, CA, & London: University of California Press 1995. It is worth noting that one of the best-selling descriptions of Soviet Russia in the 1940s was Behind the Urals: An American in Russia’s City of Steel (1943) by American engineer John Scott. Scott vividly and with great empathy showed how the steel works at Magnitogorsk had been founded. His book was translated into Swedish in the same year and a German version was edited in Switzerland. Scott worked as engineer in Magnitogorsk from 1931 to 1937. He was then stationed in Moscow until 1941 as a correspondent for British and American newspapers. During the last years of World War II, Scott was stationed in Stockholm as a correspondent for Time-Life and as an undercover agent of the new intelli- gence organ, the Office for Strategic Studies (or OSS). In the meantime, Scott had prepared a massive survey in Washington for US economic intelligence on Soviet heavy industry built during the pre-war five-year plans and situ- ated beyond the Volga river, in the Urals and in Western Siberia. The level of detail included in this intelligence study indicates that Scott might have 292 Notes been engaged in US intelligence work throughout his stay in the Soviet Union from the early 1930s. See also Lennart Samuelson, ‘Making Sense of Stalinist Industrialisation: An Insider’s Approach’, in Markets and Embeddedness: Essays in Honour of Ulf Olsson, Göteborg: Ekonomisk-historiska institutionen vid Handelshögskolan, Göteborgs Universitet 2004, pp. 209–218. 7. William H. Chamberlin, The Russian Enigma. An Interpretation, New York: C. Scribner’s sons, 1943 p. 179. 8. OGAChO, f. P-75, op. 1, d. 686, l. 152–160, Protocol from the Cheliabinsk okrug party conference 25–31 May 1930. 2 From the Civil War to the Five-year Plans 1. For the party system in Cheliabinsk city and the southern Urals before 1917, see Igor Narskii’s PhD dissertation, Politicheskie ob”edineniia na Urale do 1917 g., Cheliabinsk 1995; idem, ‘Politische Parteien in der russischen Provinz (Ural, 1901–1916)’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 1997, No. 45. 2. Elena Pavlovna Turova, ‘God 1914. Voina. Cheliabinsk i cheliabintsy’, Neizvestnyi Cheliabinsk, vol. 1, 1996, pp. 65–83. 3. Ural: Vek dvadtsatyi. Liudi, sobytiia, zhizn, ed. A.D. Kirillov, Ekaterinburg: Ural Politicheskii 2000, p. 34–38. 4. Ivan Kashirin was enrolled with the secret police from July 1920 and took part in the OGPU repression against peasants during the 1930–1931 collec- tivisation in the lower Volga region. He was arrested during the Great Terror and executed in 1937. 5. Nikolai Kashirin was a member of the Military-Revolutionary Council of the Red Army in the 1920s. During the Great Terror he was implicated the one of the fabricated cases against the army. 6. For a survey of the Russian Civil War, see Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, (London: Allen & Unwin 2000); on the battles between Red and White forces in the Urals and in Siberia, pp. 75–111, 132–147. 7. Vladimir Mogilnikov’s memory has been preserved in the form of streets named after him in the small town of Brodokalmak and in Cheliabinsk. 8. The square along the White Barracks was renamed The Fallen Revolutionaries’ Square in 1920 (Ploshchad’ pavshikh revoliutsionerov). 9. For a survey of the Russian Civil War, see Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War, (London: Allen & Unwin 2000); on the battles between Red and White forces in the Urals and in Siberia, pp. 75–111, 132–147. 10. Gulsina D. Selianinova, ‘Intelligentsiia i terror: Opyt grazhdanskoi voiny na Urale, 1918–1919 gg.’, Ural i Sibir’ v stalinskoi politike, Novosibirsk: Sibirskii Khronograf 2002, pp. 5–30. Before 1991, Soviet historians had written considerably more about the repressions perpetrated by the White Armies against workers and others who had supported Soviet power. Similarly one- sided descriptions of the Red Terror dominated in the West, see, e.g., George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1981). Obviously, much research remains to be done in order to establish the extent of summary executions and other repressive measures that are habitually included in the concept of terror. From a post-Soviet perspective, it has become more vital to provide a balanced description of both sides and to explain better the widespread violence outside the direct military Notes 293 confrontations between 1918 and 1921.