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Re/fashionin2 the Enemy: Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of D 'talinisation, 1953-1964 Miriam Jane Dobson Thesis presented for PhD examination at University College London, July 2003 Abstract This dissertation explores the evolution of Soviet public culture during the decade of destalinisation that followed the great break of 1953. It was a period both of intense political change, as the party sought to create new kinds of legitimacy post-Stalin, and of major social upheaval as millions of prisoners returned from the Gulag to the Soviet mainland. Destalinisation is examined here as a dialogue between three actors: the state, the Soviet public, and the returning masses once regarded as society's outcasts. Recasting the notion of the 'enemy' was central to this re-conceptualisation of public culture. The enemy had long held a powerful place in the Soviet political imagination. In revolutionary cosmogony, the world was locked in a battle between socialism and capitalism in which good would finally triumph yielding a communist paradise on earth. Where loathing of the enemy had prevailed under Stalin, his successors sought to create a more moderate culture, claiming victory was near and the advent of communism imminent. After 1953, the vilification of political opponents waned, calls for vigilance lessened, and the rabid invective cultivated by the Stalinist press began to subside. The binary division of the Soviet realm into two 'zones' - one for Soviet citizens, a second for its demonic outcasts - was eroded. The thesis explores the complex nature of these changes. It examines the contribution of Gulag returnees who sought to recreate themselves as decent Soviet citizens, but who brought with them the culture of this segregated, other world. It also studies the reactions of a broader public, whose interpretation of both political and social change often reflected the ongoing sway of the Manichean beliefs cultivated by Stalinist culture. Table of Contents Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter I 1953: 'The Most Painful Year' 41 Chapter II Roving, Returning, Writing 88 Chapter III Heroes and Enemies in the Secret Speech 129 Chapter IV Crime, Punishment, and Correction 173 Chapter V Destalinisation at its Peak 225 Conclusion 275 Bibliography 282 Acknowled2ments I would first like to thank the funding bodies that enabled me to complete this Phi) thesis. The AHRB offered generous support during the first three years and a Scoloudi Research Fellowship from the Institute of Historical Research allowed me a 'writing- up year'. Grants from the University of London Central Research Funds, University College London, School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, and Royal Historical Society have helped with travel costs. Over the past four years many people have helped me. Susan Morrissey has been an amazing supervisor, pushing me to think without forcing me towards any one conclusion. On a personal level, she has been extraordinarily supportive, seeming to know instinctively when to be demanding, and when to remind me that there's more to life. Whatever the outcome, I have thoroughly enjoyed the process of writing this thesis, and a lot of that is due to the generous help she has given me. During my undergraduate time, Chris Ward was also an inspirational teacher. I am grateful to them both and to everyone who has read and commented on sections of my work - Geoffrey Hosking, Wendy Slater, Bettina Weichert, and Maya Haber. Thanks also to Anna Toumanova and Andrei Kouzmenkov for help with translations, and to Carl Meeweezen, Dave Russell, and Rich Wilson for computers and printers. Support during the research stage was particularly crucial. There are many people in the Moscow, St Petersburg and Vladimir archives who helped me, though special thanks go to Lenia and Lena Weintraub and Galina Kuznetsova, and to my fellow novices Claudia Verhoeven and Laurie Cohen. My biggest debt of gratitude is to Denis Klimov and Natasha Kurdenkova for all the good times shared in our flat, at the dacha, and camping. Without them, my year in Moscow would have been very different. I am also grateful - I think - to Pavel Greenshpun and Dinia Ganovskii for consistently distracting me from the archives. Both Svetlana Zamiiatina and Eduard Kariukhin have been inspiring friends. On the home front, I have enjoyed being part of the academic community at the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies and appreciate the support of my fellow post-grads, especially Nick Sturdee (for the ongoing rivalry about how much hadn 't been done), Maya (for endless debates on Khrushchev in the British Library cafe) and Bettina (for providing music, good food and friendship). The fact that friends and family outside ofademia encouraged me has also been very important. Penny and Kate have been amazing Mends and flat-mates throughout. There is far too much to mention, but more than anything I appreciate the fact they understood how much finishing this thesis meant to me, and patiently put up with some strange behaviour over the last few months. My parents also deserve special thanks for their support and encouragement. I am dedicating this dissertation tomy family - to Heather, Mike, Bunter, Martin, Philippa, and Oscar. Introduction Show no mercy to these enemies of the people, enemies of socialism, enemies of the workers. Death to the rich and to the bourgeois intelligentsia who sponge off them, death to thieves, parasites and hooligans. —V. L Lenin, 'How to Organise Competition', 19171 The death of losif Stalin stands as one of the great breaks in Russian history. For an earlier generation of historians who saw him as the epitome of evil and mastermind of the terror, the year 1953 was a moment of 'fresh air' for a stifled Soviet people? Even if we reject totalitarian models of Soviet history, the death of the nation's leader remains a crucial landmark. In the complex of myths, rituals, and practices that historians see shaping Soviet culture in the 1930s and 1940s, the magical persona of 'Stalin' was central. The cult of the leader was an integral part of Soviet public culture, and his demise inescapably provoked change. The nature of such change, however, is as yet uncharted. Building on recent trends in the historiography of the Stalinist period, this work explores how the political culture and belief systems created under Stalin were to develop in the decade following his death. 'V. L Lenin, 'Kak organizovat' sorevnovanie', Folnoe sobranie sochinenil, 55 vols (Moscow: Gosudarstvenoe izdatel'stvo politicheskoi hteratury, 1962), XXXV, pp. 195-205 (p. 201). 2 lmages of a nation gasping for fresh air are comnn place in the secondary literature. See for example, Merle Fainsod, Khrushchev's Russia. L Internal Developments and Prospects. 11. Foreign Policy, Directions and Problems (Melbourne: The Australian Institute of International Affairs, 1963), 2 Many scholars stress the parlous state of the nation Stalin bequeathed to his heirs. It is argued that agricultural decline, consumer shortages, and the repressive nature of the political system all point to a nation on the brink of crisis. In a disparate range of sources we find depictions of Stalinist society as discontented and desperate, a populace whose anger was only barely contained by l953. A very different picture is offered by Jeffrey Brooks in his recent work on Soviet public culture under Lenin and Stalin. In Thank You, Comrade Stalin!, he traces the state's monopoly of the media, the recasting of politics as a magical and ritualistic 'performance', and the powerful way this new culture promoted Soviet life as 'unique and exceptional'. Without denying that some reform was necessary, he argues that the main task of Stalin's heirs was to 'maintain the system' that their predecessors had created. 4 Following Brooks, I argue that the 1953 watershed is important because Stalin's persona - as an omnipresent, fantastical, prophetic authority - was an absolutely fundamental element in Soviet culture. His disappearance forced the regime to look for new legitimating strategies. p. 240, Martin McCauley (ed), Khrushchev and Khrushchevism (Basingstoke, Hançshire: Macnuifrmn, 1987), p. 3. 3 In the early 1960s, Merle Fainsod wrote of the public's 'aspirations' which 'Stalin bad suppressed and which his successors could Dot ignore'. In 1992, the labour historian Donald Filtzer began his account of destailnisation with the proclaniatioit 'when Stalin died in March 1953, he left behind a country in a deep state of crisis. No sphere of the economy, politics or society was immune.' Vladimir Naumov asserts that 'in 1953 Soviet society found itself on the eve of a social explosion', while Elena Zubkova, the leading Russian historian of the post-war period, clams that the death of the leader merely launched a period of reform that would have been imposed on the Soviet leadership sooner or later by a tide of dissatisfaction that had been climbing steadily from the end of WWIL Fainsod, Khrushchev's Russia, p. 234; Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-Stalinization: The Consolidation of The Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953-64 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.1; Vladimir Naumov, 'Repression and Rehabilitation', in Nikita Khrushchev, ad. by William Taubinan, Sergei Khrushchev, and Abbott Gleason (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 85-112 (p. 102); Elena Zubkova, Russia after the War: Hopes, Illusions and DiNappointments, 1945-1957, trans by Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), pp. 148-153. 4 Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin!: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Prmceton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. xiii-xx, 233. The legitimacy garnered by Stalin's cult did not derive from some kind of primordial Russian longing for another 'tsar' . Emerging from the ideology of a self-consciously Marxist revolution, the images and practices of the cult held together a complex and unique system of beliefs.
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