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The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review The State-Is It Us? Memoirs, Archives, and Kremlinologists Author(s): Stephen Kotkin Source: Russian Review, Vol. 61, No. 1 (Jan., 2002), pp. 35-51 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2679502 . Accessed: 01/10/2011 16:52 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Blackwell Publishing and The Editors and Board of Trustees of the Russian Review are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Russian Review. http://www.jstor.org The State Is It Us? Memoirs,Archives, andKremlinologists STEPHEN KOTKIN People who are oftenwritten about but rarely heard from have hereleft detailed accountsof their lives.... Even when the respondents are barely literate ... theystill knowthe names and biographies of their neighbors, they know who did what and sometimescan also tellwhy, and they remember trivial details, gossip, and scraps ofconversation. Through these biographies we can observethe application of So- vietpower ... JanGross, Revolution from Abroad Lately,from what Pravda and other newspapers are printing, our chiefs appear to havesupport in highplaces ... PetrDeriabin, functionary in theKremlin GuardsDirectorate, and Kremlinologist iMuch has beenwritten about the nature and import of declassified documents for Soviet history,especially for the Stalin era.' As characteristicof one tendencywe mightcite the editorof a symposiumon "recentrevelations and Cold War historiography," who introduces theessays by remarking that "they tend to showthat the new documentation has donelittle toclarify matters. On thecontrary, ithas fueled the flames of controversy and made it more likelythat ... disagreementon theCold Warwill continue."2 This stance reads like an indi- rectexpression of disappointment. A differentscholar, summarizing the results of yet an- otherjournal symposium as wellas hisown impressions, highlights how the Soviet regime was oftencaught in itsown internal falsifications, and further cautions never to forgethow bureaucraticimperatives and infightingshaped the entiredocumentary record. This My warmestthanks to David Hoffmann,who generously extended an open-endedcommission for an essaysome timeago; Eve Levin,who graciously relaxed the tight word limit; Kurt Schultz, who patiently indulged me in after- the-factadditions and refinements based on furtherreading, right up to theend of July 2001; andto SoyoungLee, FranHirsch, Amir Weiner, Cynthia Hooper, Igal Halfin,Jan Plamper, and James Heinzen, who criticizedearlier drafts,made terrific suggestions, and generally enlightened me in lively, wide-ranging electronic exchanges. 'Fora judiciousassessment of the light new materials have (or have not) shed on variouspreoccupations of the pre-1991 historiography see R. W.Davies, Soviet History in the Yeltsin Era (London,1997). Particularlyilluminat- ingis Davies' remarkthat "throughout the Stalin years, nearly all dissidents,party and nonparty, criticized the regime notbecause it failed to emulateWestern capitalism, but because it failed to liveup to socialistideals" (p. 185). 2"Editor'sNote," Diplomatic History 21 (Spring1997): 215. Nonetheless,one authorin thesymposium takes scholarsto task for ethnocentrism and a lackof multilateral study (Jonathan Haslam, "Russian Archival Revelations andOur Understanding ofthe Cold War,"ibid., 217-28). See also thetrenchant Melvin P. Leffler,"The Cold War: WhatDo 'We Now Know'?"American Historical Review 104 (April 1999): 501-24. TheRussian Review 61 (January2002): 35-51 Copyright2002 TheRussian Review 36 StephenKotkin shrewdertendency mixes awe atthe incontrovertible richness (despite much destruction) of theextant Soviet-era documents with pessimism over ever achieving a deepunderstanding.3 In variedways, it seems, a degreeof disappointed expectations took hold among specialists, notwithstandingthecontinued aggressive marketing by publishers of ongoing "revelations" on fabrications,torture, bureaucratic ineptitude, rare heroism, personal abasement, and per- vasivegriping. Was thiswhat we hadbeen waiting for? Countless documents, very profes- sionallycatalogued, detailing a staggeringtableau of humandepravity and woe?4 Small wonderthat we perhapsmagnify the significance of scattered strikes, and compose beguil- ingnarratives of mice burying the cat. Lapsedcivilizations are painstakingly reconstructed on thebasis of architectural ruins, ceramics,drawings, coins, and a limitednumber of oftenincomplete written texts. Such conditionsof inquiry can elicitremarkable ingenuity. For example, one researcher recently notedthat the various locales of Greekstory-telling contain abundant fossils, and she hy- pothesizesthat the Greeks used thedepictions of speciesnowhere to be foundin natureto supportor create their seemingly fantastic "myths."5 To thesescholars of distant worlds- and letus rememberthat Greece has considerablymore extant texts than most-it might seemodd thatin thecase of a twentieth-centurysociety, such as theSoviet Union, even thoughmillions of publishedand unpublishedsources have longbeen available,sudden accessto new written records could be expectedto revolutionize understanding. Could new documentstransform our view of a sociopoliticalformation that, thanks to lavishfunding, was notonly incessantly studied but also visited?True, millions of documents were hidden fromresearchers, and althoughthe flood of declassifieddocument collections shows little signof abating, many sources remain inaccessible.6 But the writing of Soviet history contin- ues tobe moredeeply conditioned not by the availability or unavailability of sources but by researchers'worldviews and agendas, and the times in whichthey live, not to mentionthe tenureprocess and patterns of patronage. To peruseforeign scholarship on theUSSR over thedecades and at presentis to encountera seriesof de factomemoirs of individualsand theircontexts, to be exposedto implicitor explicit theories of agency and career concerns, to comeup againstinevitably bounded intellectual horizons, and to savorflourishes of re- sourcefulnessand imagination, not to mentionthoroughness and erudition. 3AndreaGraziosi, "The New ArchivalSources: Hypotheses for a CriticalAssessment," Cahiers du Monde Russe 40 (January-June1999): 13-64. See also GdborRittersporn, who in a bookreview in Kritika2 (Winter 2001): 204,observes that "historians should not expect any documents ... to yielddefinitive answers to their ques- tions.Insofar as pastevents engage contemporary passions, they are likely to remain subjects of debate." 4Oneof the conundrums for those inclined to an extremelyheavy emphasis on thestate's chaos is thatthe Soviet- eraarchives were assembled and maintained in relatively good order, making the gathering of evidence on adminis- trativedisorder remarkably easy. 'AdrienneMayor, The First Fossil Hunters: Paleontology in Greekand RomanTimes (Princeton, 2000). 6Fora warningagainst overestimating the still inaccessible documents see theexacting Oleg V. Khlevniuk,In Stalin'sShadow: The Career of "Sergo" Ordzohonikidze(Armonk, NY, 1995),5. RegardingOrdzhonikidze, who clashedwith Stalin (and Molotov) over the scope of mass arrests in industry, the interesting question, for me at least, is notwhether in February 1937 he was murderedor committed suicide (it was evidentlythe latter), but why neither he noranyone else triedto shootStalin. Not onlydid Politburomembers carry guns, but evidently so did the functionariesofthe inner dictatorship who had access to the tyrant. See ValentinBerezehkov, At Stalin 's Side: His Interpreter'sMemoirs from the October Revolution to the Fall ofthe Dictator 's Empire(New York,1994), 203-4. Forthe opportunity, notacted upon, of arresting Stalin in late June 1941 see Anastas Mikoian, Tak bylo: Razniyshleniia o minuvshem(Moscow, 1999), 390-91. (Mikoian,like Khrushchev, soft-pedals his own responsibility for terror and deportations.) TheState-Is It Us? 37 Let us dispensewith any lingering doubts. Recall, for a moment,the case ofthe cap- turedSmolensk party archive, which served as thesource base forboth the best empirical expositionof the totalitarian thesis in MerleFainsod's 1958 monographand several of the antitotalitarianarguments of the 1980s.7 Consider also theemigre Vladimir Bukovskii, who adroitlytook advantage of thedisorientation following August 1991 and managedto scan hundredsof Politburo and KGB documentsdesignated osobaia papka andlichno from the 1970sand 1980s,but whose attempt at analysisof these crown jewels tellsus considerably moreabout the extraordinary Bukovskii's life-long battle with the KGB thanabout the late Sovietsystem.8 Are the revelations about Lenin that have emergedsince 1991 so power- ful-indeed,are they revelations-or has theignominious end of the Soviet system drasti- callyshifted some people's perception of Lenin?9 Has there-recognition of theprofound importanceof WorldWar I and thearmy for the revolutionary process and statebuilding comeabout because of documents?'0 Will the
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