The Individual After Stalin: Fedor Abramov, Russian Intellectuals, and the Revitalization of Soviet Socialism, 1953-1962
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Columbia University Academic Commons The Individual after Stalin: Fedor Abramov, Russian Intellectuals, and the Revitalization of Soviet Socialism, 1953-1962 Anatoly Pinsky Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Columbia University 2011 © 2011 Anatoly Pinsky All rights reserved ABSTRACT The Individual after Stalin: Fedor Abramov, Russian Intellectuals, and the Revitalization of Soviet Socialism, 1953-1962 Anatoly Pinsky This dissertation examines the effort of Russian writers to reform Soviet socialism in the first decade after Joseph Stalin’s death. My departure point is the idea that the Soviet experiment was about the creation not only of a new socio-economic system, but also of a New Man. According to the logic of Soviet socialism, it was the New Man who would usher in the new socio-economic order by living out philosophical ideas in his everyday life. Under Khrushchev, Russian writers bestowed the New Man with even more power to build Communism. Stalin, the superhuman engine of historical progress, had died, giving ordinary citizens more agency, according to the contemporary discourse, to shape the future and overcome the consequences of his cult of personality. A new emphasis was placed on sincerity and the individual; and not only on fashioning the future, but also on understanding the details of the past and present. Among writers, a new importance was allotted to the diary, which was conceptualized as a space of sincerity, and as a genre that helped one grasp the facts of everyday existence and pen realistic representations of Soviet life. This dissertation investigates this discourse of sincerity, realism, and the diary among the literary intelligentsia. It features a number of intellectuals, Aleksandr Iashin, Valentin Ovechkin, Aleksandr Tvardovskii, and several others, many of whom kept diaries in, or employed the diaristic genre in their works of, the Khrushchev years. Based on a reading of their unpublished and published writings, my project locates not a single personality ideal, but several, united by an emphasis on sincerity and realism. I examine Khrushchev’s Secret Speech about Stalin’s cult of personality in this context, and demonstrate that the speech, commonly considered a discursive departure in Soviet history, in fact echoed earlier narrative conventions. For the purpose of close reading, I center the project around Fedor Abramov (1920-1983), a leading writer of the post-Stalin era, and how he used his diary and personal notebooks to fashion himself into a New Man. I analyze Abramov’s effort to transform not only his thoughts and actions, but also his emotions and diaristic grammar in keeping with his version of the new personality ideal. The conventional interpretation of the Khrushchev era is of a period of uneven cultural liberalization during which the leadership pursued socio-economic goals incompatible with its desire to maintain a monopoly on power. My focus on self- transformation builds a bridge between the cultural and social, economic, and political histories. In the contemporaneous literature, I locate a discourse that describes personal transformation as the catalyst of socio-economic and political change. Personal transformation, I conclude, was the primary imperative of the age. I thus situate the Khrushchev era in a century-long Russian tradition of living out philosophical ideas in everyday life in an effort to move History forward, and of writers conceptualizing themselves as leading forces of change. Finally, I demonstrate that the version of the New Man into which Russian intellectuals aimed to fashion themselves and their fellow citizens under Khrushchev marked a crucial break in the understanding of the individual in Russian and Soviet history. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 – The Inheritance: The New Soviet Man between Revolution and Late Stalinism 24 Chapter 2 – The Empirical Imperative: Literature and the Soviet Countryside after Stalin 63 Chapter 3 – The Agents of De-Stalinization: The Role of Personality after the Cults of Personality 113 Chapter 4 – In a Glass Case: The Life of an Aspiring Soviet Writer 164 Conclusion 223 Bibliography 230 i Acknowledgments The generous support of many institutions made this dissertation possible. Teaching fellowships from the Columbia University History and English departments funded my graduate training and early work on the project. Harriman Institute Pepsico Research/Travel Fellowships provided support for exploratory research trips to Moscow, St. Petersburg, Arkhangel’sk, and Fedor Abramov’s native Verkola. The Title VIII Research Scholar Program, which is funded by the U.S. State Department, Title VIII Program for Research and Training on Eastern Europe and Eurasia (Independent States of the Former Soviet Union) and administered by American Councils for International Education (ACTR/ACCELS), financed the bulk of my archival research, in 2005-2006, in Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Harriman Institute Philip Moseley/John H. Backer Fellowship and Harriman Institute Junior Fellowships sponsored the writing of the dissertation. All of the views expressed in this dissertation, however, are entirely my own. My work has benefited from an abundance of advice, encouragement, and generosity. Bradley Abrams and Yitzhak Brudny shared helpful words in the project’s early stages. Gilda Baikovitch, David Gillespie, John Givens, and Kathleen Parthe generously replied to queries about archival sources. In Moscow, Nadezhda Azhgikhina spoke with me about her own work on Fedor Abramov. Svetlana Boiko, my advisor at the Russian State University for the Humanities, listened patiently as I expressed my sometimes peculiar opinions about Soviet literature. Lena Kaminskaia was a veritable encyclopedia on the history of Soviet literature and cultural happenings in the Russian ii capital. The staff of the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI) were extremely welcoming and shared their immense knowledge of Soviet cultural institutions and their archive’s holdings. Sasha Shutaia, Zhenia Anisimova, and Styopa Boykewich offered their friendship and enthusiasm for their great city. In Moscow and later in New York and elsewhere, Joshua First, Marko Dumancic, and Andrew Janco listened to my ideas and enriched them with their own. In St. Petersburg, Ryan Jones and Marc Hoffman opened their homes and became good friends. In St. Petersburg, too, the hospitality of Ol’ga Makashova, a college friend of my mother, was more than I could have asked for. At Columbia, I have learned from the academic rigor and erudition of Volker Berghahn, Jay Winter, Mark von Hagen, and my committee members Tarik Amar, Catharine Nepomnyashchy, Michael Stanislawski, and Richard Wortman. I am thankful for the kindness and hard work of the staff and librarians at Butler and Avery libraries and the New York Public Library, which have become second homes. I am grateful to Alla Rachkova of the Harriman Institute for logistical support and for making the twelfth floor of IAB a happier place. Friends at Columbia – Sergei Antonov, Ian Beilin, Natasha Ermolaev, Anna Fishzon, Doug Greenfield, Erin McBurney, Kate Pickering, Jonathan Platt, Harel Shapira, and Benno Weiner – have made a trying experience less so. Parts of this dissertation were presented at the following conferences: “Place, Space, and Power in Modern Russian History: A Conference in Honor of Abbott Gleason,” the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, organized by Mark Bassin, Christopher Ely, and Melissa Stockdale; “The Relaunch of the Soviet Project, 1945-1964,” University College London School of Slavonic and East European iii Studies, convened by Miriam Dobson, Juliane Furst, Geoffrey Hosking, Polly Jones, and Susan Morrissey; and “History and Subjectivity in Russia,” the European University at St. Petersburg, organized by Jochen Hellbeck and Nikolai Mikhailov. I would like to thank the members of the organizing committees for giving me the opportunity to participate in these conferences, each of which proved immensely useful for the development of my work. Two people deserve special mention. I am profoundly indebted to Liudmila Krutikova-Abramova, the widow of Fedor Abramov, who gave me unrestricted access to the diaries and personal notebooks of her late husband. Krutikova’s trust and openness are, quite simply, a researcher’s dream. I am also beyond grateful to my outside reader Jochen Hellbeck, whose guidance and friendship have been indispensable. He believed in this project from the beginning, and reassembled my shattered confidence in it on, let us say, more than one occasion. He, together with my other mentors, are quite probably responsible for whatever strengths this dissertation may have. The weaknesses, without a doubt, are my own. Finally, I would like to thank a number of people who, for the most part, have nothing to do with academia, but so much to do with the completion of this thesis. I am lucky to have the friends that I do: Alex K., Dan, Dave G., Jamie, Jeff, Josh, Lloyd, Owen, Noah, Sasha, and Shomit. My brother, Dave, fed and often clothed me. Graduate school began on his couch in the East Village; when it seemed it would never end, we found solace at various establishments in his neighborhood and elsewhere. I thank him for his company and his dime. My grandfather had an uncanny knack for putting my dissertation in (his) perspective. I cherish him and his sense of humor. My parents have iv given me their support, patience, and so much more. I am truly lucky to have them. I doubt they ever thought the child they raised in Columbus, Ohio, would want to return, again and again, to the former Soviet Union. Ohio, though, can do strange things to a person. Which brings me to Gitta Zomorodi, who was educated in a sparsely populated corner of that fine state. What she learned there and elsewhere she brought to bear, gentle pencil in hand, in copy-editing the pages that follow.