Review Article-Critique Exhaustif

REVIEW ARTICLE-CRITIQUE EXHAUSTIF

MARSHALL S. SHATZ

Soviet Society and the Purges of the Thirties in the Mirror of Memoir Literature

What particularly surprised [Burke] was there was no one anywhere who could stand surety for the smallest group of his fellow citizens or even for a single man, the consequence being that anyone could be arrested in his home without pro- test or redress, whether the offense alleged against him were royalism, "modera- tism," or any other political deviation. Alexis de Tocqueville*

In the last few years a growing number of first-hand accounts of Stalin's purges of the 1930's have been appearing in the West, some of them translations of unpub- lishable manuscripts smuggled out of the Soviet Union. The English reader now has available a number of memoirs that provide him with a direct personal insight into "what it was like" for the victims of the purges.2 Taken separately, each of these works adds a vital element of real experience to the historical facts and figures of the period that are increasingly becoming available.3 But taken as a group the memoirs are of even greater value, for they have been written by a remarkable assortment of Soviet

1. The Old Regime and the French Revolution, trans. by Stuart Gilbert (Garden City, N.Y., 1955), p..206. 2. The principal books discussed here are A. V. Gorbatov, Years Off My Life: The Memoirs of General of the Soviet Army A. V. Gorbatov, trans. by Gordon Clough and Anthony Cash (London, 1964); The Memoirs of Ivanov-Razumnik, trans. by P. S. Squire (London, 1965); Eugenia Semyonovna Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. by Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (New York, 1967); Marie Avinov, Rlgrimage Through Hell, an autobiography told by Paul Chavchavadze (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1968); and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope Against Hope: A Memoir, trans. by Max Hayward (New York, 1970). Of these, Ginzburg and Mandel'shtam deal exclusively, and Ivanov-Razumnik largely, with the 1930's, while the works of Gorbatov and Avinov are autobiographies containing extensive sections on the purges. All except Avinov are available in the original Russian, but of these books, to the best of my knowledge, only Gorbatov's memoirs have been published in the Soviet Union to date. Reference will also be made to an older English-language memoir, It Happens in Russia (London, 1951), by Vladimir Petrov, who, like Ivanov-Razumnik and Avinov, made his way to the West during the Second World War; and to Lydia Chukovskaya's The Deserted House, trans. by Aline B. Werth (New York, 1967; also available in the original but unpublished in the Soviet Union). The latter is a novel rather than a memoir but was written under the immediate impact of the author's experiences in the thirties. It is autobiographical in inspiration if not in content and is therefore relevant to the discussion here. 3. Two comprehensive recent works on the purges of the thirties, one Western and one Soviet, are Robert Conquest, The Great Tenor: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties (New York, 1968); and Roy A. Medvedev, Let History judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, trans. by Colleen Taylor (New York, 1971). citizens and former citizens. Their authors constitute a broad cross-section of Soviet society, ranging from the well-known Narodnik literary critic Ivanov-Razumnik, the former aristocrat Marie Avinov, and the widow of the poet Mandel'shtam, to Eugenia Ginzburg, a loyal Communist Party member, and A. V. Gorbatov, a peasant boy who rose to become a Red Army general. These works are engrossing case histories of individuals, but they also tell how representatives of a wide range of social groups con- fronted the events of the thirties. The recurrent patterns of behavior they describe, therefore, shed light on the important, and frequently neglected, question of just how Soviet society as a whole reacted to the challenge of the purges. Memoirs of the purges can already be considered a distinct genre of Soviet let- ters, one which is certain to grow as contemporary critics and protesters probe for a deeper understanding of the Soviet past.4 On one level, painful and frequently horrify- ing though their contents are, these works can be read as absorbing tales of courage and endurance, filled with unexpected turns of fortune and quick-witted feats of survi- val. Simply as narratives they are as engrossing as any novel. On an entirely different plane, they are distinguished by their tone of moral nobility. The preservation qf human dignity in the face of brutal humiliation, the spontaneous generosity and kind- ness of perfect strangers, the human compassion shown by fellow-sufferers, are recurrent and intensely moving themes of these works. The memoirs of the victims of Stalin's purges are reminiscent of another group of works, the large number of Decem- brists' memoirs written more than a hundred years earlier. Like the Decembrist memoirists, the purge victims strike a distinctive note of moral triumph over physical torment and degradation; they achieve an affirmation of the human spirit through their very helplessness and submission to their fate. It is the moral intensity of these works that lends them their special quality and at the same time links them firmly to the great tradition of Russian literature. The returning prison-camp inmate, and the moral significance of his position in Soviet society, have now become familiar themes in Russian fiction.55 But it is precisely that moral intensity that raises certain questions in the mind of a Western reader of the purge memoirs. What was its relationship to the actual social behavior of people caught up in the purges? More specifically, how could a society capable of generating the moral courage, the depth of human understanding, and the sense of justice that pervade these memoirs have remained so passive in the face of the purges? One of the most striking features of these accounts is the conspicuous absence of collective acts of resistance to the terror on the part of Soviet citizens. Individuals met their own fate with submission and that of their fellow-citizens with indifference. Even the top echelons of Soviet society went to their doom quietly, in seeming helplessness. The memoirists themselves occasionally ponder this lack of group resistance without attempting to explain it. Ivanov-Razumnik, who survived two terms of im-

4. The large number of unpublished manuscripts cited by Medvedev in his book provides some measure of the extent of this literature. 5. The novels of Solzhenitsyn, especially Cancer Ward-as well as the person of Solzhenitsyn himself-are the best-known examples. Another is the recently translated novel For- ever Flowing, by the late Vasily Grossman.