Cahiers Du Monde Russe, 54/1-2

Cahiers du monde russe Russie - Empire russe - Union soviétique et États indépendants

54/1-2 | 2013 L’expérience soviétique à son apogée - Culture et société des années Brežnev / Volume I Le socialisme réel en trois dimensions Passé, futur, ailleurs

Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/7916 DOI : 10.4000/monderusse.7916 ISSN : 1777-5388

Éditeur Éditions de l’EHESS

Édition imprimée Date de publication : 1 janvier 2013 ISBN : 9782713224386 ISSN : 1252-6576

Référence électronique Cahiers du monde russe, 54/1-2 | 2013, « L’expérience soviétique à son apogée - Culture et société des années Brežnev / Volume I » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2016, Consulté le 28 septembre 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/7916 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/monderusse. 7916

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 28 septembre 2020.

SOMMAIRE

Introduction Marc Elie et Isabelle Ohayon

Foreword Marc Elie et Isabelle Ohayon

Mobiliser le passé : encadrement de la mémoire collective vs. pratiques sociales de conservation

Iurii Trifonov’s fireglow and the “mnemonic communities” of the brezhnev era Polly Jones

Dans la matrice discursive du socialisme tardif Les « Mémoires » de Leonid Il´ič Brežnev Nikolaus Katzer

Time and Tide The Remembrance Ritual of “Beskozyrka” in Novorossiisk Vicky Davis

From “counter‑revolutionary monuments” to “national heritage” The Preservation of Leningrad Churches, 1964‑1982 Catriona Kelly

V.V. Pokhlëbkin and the search for culinary roots in late soviet Russia Adrianne K. Jacobs

De nouveaux fronts pour la mission civilisatrice

Faites tomber les murs ! La politique civilisatrice de l’ère Brežnev dans les villages kirghiz Moritz Florin

À fleurets mouchetés L’architecture soviétique sous le glacis brejnévien Fabien Bellat

Science, development and modernization in the brezhnev time The Water Development in the Lake Balkhash Basin Tetsuro Chida

« Марафон гостеприимства» Олимпиада‑80 и попытка модернизации советского сервиса Aleksej D. Popov

Rencontres avec les mondes étrangers : l’impact des expériences vécues

“Academic Détente” IREX Files, Academic Reports, and “American” Adventures of Soviet Americanists during the Brezhnev Era Sergei I. Zhuk

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Mежду советской гордостью, политической бдительностью и культурным шоком Американские гастроли народного ансамбля танцев « Самоцветы» в 1979 году Igor´ Narskij

Au‑delà des étoiles Stars Wars et l’histoire culturelle du socialisme tardif en Bulgarie Nadège Ragaru

Livres reçus

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Introduction Foreword

Marc Elie et Isabelle Ohayon

1 Si, il y a une dizaine d’années encore, on pouvait s’étonner du désintérêt des historiens pour le socialisme tardif1, aujourd’hui, on assiste à une profonde reconfiguration du paysage historique. Comme au début des années 2000 avec le « dégel », les années Brežnev deviennent un terrain d’exploration privilégié pour les chercheurs et donnent lieu à de nombreux colloques et publications collectives2. Longue de vingt ans (1964‑1985), la période comprise entre dégel et perestroïka est formatrice pour la « dernière génération soviétique », qui représente une part significative de la population actuelle des anciennes républiques de l’URSS3. L’image dominante positive du passé soviétique pris comme un tout est très largement fondée sur ses souvenirs de jeunesse4. Âge d’or pour nombre de citoyens des républiques ex-soviétiques, cette période reste mal connue des historiens : ils ont du mal à la désigner, car son profil ne se révèle immédiatement qu’en creux, par contraste avec les deux périodes de profondes transformations politiques qui l’encadrent. « Stagnation », le mot de Gorbačev, est depuis longtemps décrié ; « socialisme développé » ou « réel », idéologème du régime, n’est employé que mis à distance par des guillemets. Les propositions d’appliquer les découpages et conceptualisations pensées pour l’Europe occidentale et l’Amérique du nord – parler de « sixties » ou « seventies » – ne permettent pas de restituer l’unité de la période brejnévienne, et surtout, malgré leur utilité heuristique, ces transferts de périodisation se heurtent rapidement à des limites : les « sixties » de Brežnev prolongent l’optimisme réformateur des « fifties » soviétiques, plus qu’elles ne participent au triomphe de la société consumériste telle qu’elle s’affiche dans les pays à économie de marché5. Si les années 1970 sont vues comme le début d’une ère nouvelle dans les pays capitalistes, c’est parce que la crise pétrolière et les mouvements sociaux et écologiques ont forcé le modèle économique à s’adapter, alors qu’en URSS, la transformation du modèle fordiste n’eut lieu qu’à partir de 19866. Bref, les découpages couramment utilisés pour l’histoire des États‑Unis ou de l’Europe de l’Ouest s’ajustent mal à l’histoire du socialisme tardif. Ce numéro des Cahiers du Monde russe s’inscrit dans la récente dynamique exploratrice des années

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Brežnev en proposant à ses lecteurs une série de vingt-deux articles ordonnés en deux volumes qui entrent en discussion avec l’historiographie actuelle7.

2 Les études qui ont renouvelé le paysage historiographique de la société, de la culture et de la consommation des années Brežnev ont pour point commun d’avoir interrogé le décalage croissant entre une gérontocratie au conservatisme autoritaire et une société en pleines mutation et émancipation8. Jusqu’alors, dans l’historiographie, l’opposition entre structures étatiques pétrifiées et dynamisme social produisait, au niveau individuel, l’image d’un homo sovieticus écartelé entre l’adhésion de façade à l’idéologie officielle – réitérée dans les rituels – et le refuge dans la sphère privée de la famille, du cercle d’amis et du groupe d’intérêts.

3 C’est contre ces supposés cynisme et (dis)simulation attribués aux Soviétiques du socialisme tardif qu’Alexei Yurchak et Sergei Zhuk ont tourné leurs travaux, afin d’échapper au système binaire opposant apparences extérieures et convictions intimes, simulation de l’adhésion dans les rituels publics et dissimulation des opinions dans la sphère privée9. Cette dichotomie s’infiltre dans tous les domaines : on oppose ainsi dynamisme des transactions informelles et blocage de l’économie planifiée, art dissident et commandes officielles, nationalités socialistes dans la forme et nationalistes dans le contenu (et non plus l’inverse). Yurchak a su montrer que la réitération de rituels autoréférencés et la circularité du discours d’autorité n’excluaient pas l’adhésion sincère aux idéaux du socialisme – levant par là‑même le reproche d’hypocrisie. De même, la participation aux activités des structures d’encadrement social officielles (le komsomol) n’empêchait pas la poursuite de désirs et d’entreprises personnels dont la signification contredisait apparemment la doctrine ; elle autorisait au contraire à mettre en place ces activités, tels les groupes de pop‑rock à couverture komsomole. Zhuk, tout en reprenant dans les grandes lignes cette critique de la duplicité de l’homo sovieticus, lui a apporté une importante réserve : les déplacements de sens permis par le retrait sémantique du discours officiel ne se faisaient pas sans alarmer considérablement les responsables idéologiques et policiers. Les gardiens de l’idéologie de Dnepropetrovsk n’entendaient pas laisser à leurs ouailles la liberté de se distraire dans des aventures non validées, et ils recouraient à un attirail gradué de mesures répressives efficaces pour mater les récalcitrants (jusqu’à la peine de camp), même s’ils durent reconnaître à la fin de la décennie qu’ils avaient perdu le combat contre l’influence de la culture populaire occidentale. À leur suite, Sonja Luehrmann montre dans ce numéro que la promotion par l’idéologie officielle de « valeurs spirituelles » et du « développement personnel » était prise au sérieux par des acteurs engagés dans l’appareil idéologique au niveau de simples agitateurs. Cette spiritualité encouragée, loin de signifier la « renaissance du religieux » que Luehrmann conteste, était pensée comme « antidote à la religion ». Pourtant, ceux qui se fiaient à ces propositions développaient des aspirations qu’ils relient avec leur engagement religieux postérieur à la fin du système soviétique.

L’âge d’or du siècle soviétique

4 La mandature de Brežnev correspond à l’apogée de l’ère soviétique : l’URSS, superpuissance enfin incontestée grâce à la parité des arsenaux nucléaires soviétique et états‑unien, réalise les promesses d’ordre public, de sécurité des trajectoires sociales et d’une certaine aisance matérielle. Croyant y voir une garantie de cette stabilité, le

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régime pratique une cruelle répression contre les classes marginales et contre les mécontents.

5 On a pris coutume de partager cette ère en deux phases, une phase d’évolutions positives, correspondant à un Brežnev encore en bonne santé, capable d’envisager des réformes énergiques ; et une phase de « stagnation » dans laquelle Brežnev, de plus en plus amoindri physiquement et intellectuellement après un accident vasculaire cérébral survenu en 1974, est maintenu à son poste par la gérontocratie comme figure symbolique10. Les chronologies diffèrent selon les domaines : en économie, on distingue ainsi les taux de croissance élevés de la première décennie Brežnev, parallèlement à un certain esprit réformateur ; et, à partir de 1973, une décennie de croissance ralentie qui coïncide avec le refus de toute réforme d’envergure11. Dans le domaine culturel, l’ouverture dans le prolongement du dégel se termine avec l’invasion de l’allié tchécoslovaque en 1968 : la déstalinisation est arrêtée et le mouvement dissident libéral, muselé12. En politique étrangère, on discerne une période de détente qui culmine avec la signature de l’Acte final d’Helsinki en 1975 et une phase de guerre fraîche à partir de l’invasion de l’Afghanistan13.

6 Pourtant, les dix‑huit années du règne de Brežnev ont une unité qui leur donne un fort relief dans le siècle : les Soviétiques connaissent enfin une modeste prospérité matérielle et des trajectoires socioprofessionnelles prévisibles et ascendantes. Bien que déjà amorcée par Hruščev, la politique de stabilisation des carrières des dirigeants petits et grands prend tout son essor avec la « confiance » accordée par Brežnev à ses « cadres »14. Par contraste avec le reste du XXe siècle russe et soviétique, les années de 1964 à 1985 se détachent nettement par leur modération et leur sérénité : ni trouble intérieur majeur, ni affrontements armés dans les frontières de l’URSS15, ni « révolution par le haut », ni terreur étatique contre la population. Après une décennie khrouchtchévienne très agitée, qui s’achève par le massacre des ouvriers manifestant à Novočerkassk en 1962, le baromètre de la colère populaire est bas sous Brežnev16. La séquence des « troubles de masse » (massovye besporjadki) contre les autorités politiques et policières est provisoirement terminée, une nouvelle ne se mettra en place qu’à partir du milieu des années 198017. Autre signe de l’apaisement, les établissements pénitentiaires renferment un nombre historiquement faible de détenus politiques : on est passé d’un millier de condamnés par an dans la seconde moitié des années 1950 à quelques centaines dans les années 1961‑198518. Ainsi, la société apparaît largement apaisée si on la considère à l’aune des bouleversements du dégel et de la perestroika, qui encadrent les décennies brejnéviennes. Et plus encore si on la compare aux mouvements contestataires qui agitent au même moment les pays capitalistes : heurts violents de la jeunesse étudiante avec la police en 1968, protestation contre la guerre du Vietnam, terrorisme d’extrême droite et d’extrême gauche en Allemagne et en Italie. Certes, l’URSS est plus touchée par le terrorisme que ce qu’on imagine d’habitude, mais elle ne connaît pas l’agitation politique typique des sociétés capitalistes au tournant des années 1960-197019.

7 Cette tranquillité était pour beaucoup celle des cachots, pour paraphraser Jean‑Jacques Rousseau. « Conversations prophylactiques » dans les locaux du KGB et « traitement » des récalcitrants dans les établissements de la psychiatrie punitive montrent que la nouvelle direction politique a renouvelé son arsenal de mesures légales et illégales dans la seconde moitié des années 1960 pour bâillonner les voix dissidentes. Les articles de Sergei Zhuk, Susanne Schattenberg, et Amanda Swain montrent le poids considérable de la

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police politique dans la vie sociale : c’est le KGB qui autorisait ou interdisait les voyages des scientifiques à l’étranger, à l’heure où ces échanges étaient de plus en plus importants dans les carrières. C’est le KGB qui organisait la surveillance de personnalités soupçonnées de dériver de la ligne officielle, et qui instruisait les affaires pénales qui avait fait suite à des rassemblements non‑autorisés d’adolescents. Le discours idéologique officiel restait très rigide. Nikolaj Mitrohin radiographie la matrice des contenus de la propagande officielle, le département idéologique du Comité central. Porteurs de convictions essentiellement conservatrices, les gardiens de l’idéologie jouaient les intermédiaires entre le KGB et les milieux médiatiques (éditeurs, écrivains, journalistes etc.). Schattenberg documente comment Andrej Saharov, physicien renommé et Soviétique loyal, a cherché à faire évoluer la frontière de l’expression libre à travers un dialogue avec les autorités. De leur côté, certains membres du Bureau politique dont le directeur du KGB, Jurij Andropov, recherchaient le dialogue avec Saharov pour lui signifier qu’il était allé trop loin et le faire revenir sur ses positions. Pourtant, ces efforts de part et d’autre échouèrent sur le refus du Bureau politique de poursuivre la politique d’ouverture à l’expertise promue sous Hruščev. Dans son étude du traitement de la manifestation du 18 mai 1972 à Kaunas (Lituanie), Swain montre comment les acteurs ont cherché à définir les fâcheux événements de manière à échapper à la qualification de « nationalisme » dont le coût aurait été exorbitant pour tous, les jeunes, bien sûr, mais aussi les policiers et responsables politiques. Tous se sont donc rangés à une version qui permettait de limiter les dégâts en faisant porter le chapeau à l’instinct grégaire de jeunes « peu conscients politiquement », aveuglés par de mystérieux « hippies » influencés par la culture occidentale.

8 Malgré cette répression, l’acceptation du régime semble bien avoir atteint son apogée sous Brežnev20. Un large consensus conservateur n’y est pas étranger : le régime d’ordre imposé par la nouvelle équipe vise surtout les groupes marginaux, via des mesures drastiques contre les « hooligans », afin de rassurer la population échaudée par l’insécurité des années 1940-195021. Larissa Zakharova livre un exemple poignant d’une trajectoire sociale d’exclusion au Goulag. Si les détenus politiques sont peu nombreux, la population du Goulag croît régulièrement pour atteindre plus d’un million en 1979, soit un taux d’incarcération record dans le monde de 420 détenus pour 100 000 habitants22.

Le « socialisme supportable »

9 Toutefois, si les années Brežnev furent une phase unique de « socialisme supportable » selon le mot de Vladimir Kusin23, c’est avant tout parce que la majorité des Soviétiques jouissait désormais d’un niveau de vie historiquement haut. Dès les années 1950, la consommation a facilité l’adhésion au régime et à ses valeurs, sinon à un putatif « little deal »24. Le ralentissement économique des années 1970 n’est pas allé de pair avec une diminution équivalente de la croissance de la consommation : celle-ci continue de croître annuellement de 1,9 %, alors que le produit intérieur brut stagne à 0,9 % sur la période 1973‑198225. Ce maintien ne fut possible que grâce à l’afflux de pétrodollars que l’URSS engrangea à partir de la forte montée du prix du baril de pétrole en 1973 : alors que le pays s’enfonçait dans ses difficultés structurelles, l’exportation d’hydrocarbures à des prix très hauts permit au pays, pendant une douzaine d’années, de soutenir la

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consommation, d’investir dans l’agriculture, de poursuivre la course aux armements et de financer de coûteuses interventions militaires (Afghanistan, Angola, Érythrée).

10 Quand les pays de l’OPEP décident d’augmenter fortement les prix des hydrocarbures, les champs de Sibérie occidentale, découverts dans les années 1950, produisent à plein régime. Des pipelines acheminent désormais directement vers l’Europe occidentale le gaz d’Orenburg contre des devises sonnantes et trébuchantes. La crise économique, mais aussi la détente et l’ostpolitik des socio-démocrates ouest‑allemands favorisent la signature de juteux contrats : Allemands, Tchécoslovaques et Soviétiques collaborent à la construction des gazoducs Sojuz, Bratstvo, Družba et Transgas. D’importateur net d’hydrocarbures, l’URSS est devenu en deux décennies l’un des tout premiers producteurs et exportateurs. Cette conjoncture de prix hauts qui dure jusqu’en 1986 a permis non seulement de masquer les faiblesses structurelles de l’outil industriel soviétique, mais aussi de mettre au placard les réformes économiques pensées dans les années 1960. La chute fut d’autant plus dure sous Gorbačev26. Ainsi, le terme « crise », même dans la tournure « crise économique » nous semble lui aussi inapte à caractériser l’époque brejnévienne27. Il est fort possible que se fasse jour ici une assez nette différence au sein du monde communiste entre l’URSS et les pays socialistes d’Europe centrale et sud‑orientale : les seconds sont pris à la gorge par une grave crise financière qui les pousse, via l’endettement, dans une dépendance de plus en plus forte à l’égard des bailleurs occidentaux28. Le choc de 1973 les touche du fait de leurs liens économiques plus forts avec l’Europe occidentale, alors que l’URSS, qui les fournit en hydrocarbures, prospère sur les cours du pétrole. Leur plus grande exposition à la culture jeune des « sixties » y affaiblit le contre‑modèle de développement soviétique, d’ailleurs installé depuis moins longtemps et moins solidement. Au final, ce sont les forces centrifuges qui frappent dans les évolutions du monde communiste : non seulement la rupture politique avec la Chine, l’Albanie et dans une moindre mesure la Roumanie et la Yougoslavie, mais surtout le lent éloignement économique des « démocraties populaires » de l’URSS dont le modèle d’intégration perd son autorité face à une CEE capable désormais d’inclure les anciennes dictatures d’Europe du Sud29.

11 Loisirs et consommation se développent au tournant des années 1950-1960, et prennent un important essor dans les années Brežnev30. Le passage à la semaine de cinq jours, l’allongement des vacances, la diffusion de l’automobile individuelle, l’augmentation des revenus, tout cela contribue au développement de la sphère privée ; en milieu urbain, l’appartement familial et la datcha périurbaine s’équipent en électroménager. L’essor de la consommation et une plus grande facilité des déplacements touchent même le village : les kolkhoziens perçoivent désormais retraites et salaires (en lieu et place des trudodni) et, enfin munis d’un passeport intérieur, peuvent se déplacer sans entrave. Des activités encadrées ou non par les « organisations sociales », mais généralement encouragées officiellement, occupent davantage le temps libre : jardinage, bricolage, randonnées et voyages, culture physique, recherche du bien‑être personnel etc.31 Olga Smolyak et Aleksey Golubev en livrent un cas saisissant dans le développement du bricolage et des savoir‑faire manuels, qui pallient souvent la rareté de certains biens, tout en constituant des espaces de réalisation de soi. Les illustrés façonnent les nouveaux canons du Soviétique moderne et confirment la répartition genrée du quotidien – les femmes à l’aménagement de l’intérieur, au jardinage et à la mode ; les hommes tout à leur passion pour la fabrication artisanale de petits équipements (modélisme, radio amateur etc.). Cet épanouissement de la sphère

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personnelle trouve un écho très fort dans la presse de divertissement et plus globalement dans les représentations véhiculées par la production culturelle et médiatique.

12 L’univers de la consommation se montre particulièrement perméable aux biens et à la production culturelle venant de l’étranger, socialiste ou capitaliste, dont les standards contribuent à la formation du goût soviétique : l’Europe occidentale et les États-Unis sont toujours vus comme étalons en URSS, qui doit démontrer la supériorité d’un modèle de consommation socialiste, satisfaisant les désirs de confort sans les excès consuméristes32. Les biens de consommation et la production culturelle venant des pays capitalistes prennent une place de plus en plus importante, d’une part parce que l’État soviétique utilise ses pétrodollars pour stimuler la consommation ; d’autre part parce que vêtements, livres et disques circulent sous le manteau entre Est et Ouest.

13 Autre aspect de l’ouverture sur l’étranger, les voyages – surtout vers les démocraties populaires, mais aussi vers les pays capitalistes – sont des moments intenses d’interaction dont la portée ne se compte pas en quantité de biens acquis. Igor´ Narskij et Sergei Zhuk évaluent l’impact du séjour aux États-Unis sur des Soviétiques triés sur le volet. Narskij montre que les danseurs d’une troupe amateur de Čeljabinsk sont pris dans les contraintes de la culture de guerre froide. Les objectifs diplomatiques et idéologiques tout comme le contrôle tatillon et infantilisant sur les agissements et rencontres des danseurs dans leurs tournées à l’étranger surdéterminent l’organisation des voyages et même les programmes et les chorégraphies. Si les danseurs intériorisaient effectivement une partie au moins des clichés sur l’étranger, ils subirent néanmoins un choc culturel lors de leur voyage aux États‑Unis en 1979. Pour Zhuk les experts sur l’Amérique du nord, les « américanistes » qui étaient autorisés à voyager aux États-Unis et formaient l’élite des chercheurs, adoptaient diverses stratégies narratives dans leur travaux pour partager les avancées interprétatives auxquelles ils étaient parvenus dans leurs recherches, leurs lectures et surtout leurs rencontres avec des collègues américains.

14 Ainsi, l’exposition aux pays étrangers concernait les pratiques autant que les représentations. Comme le montre Aleksej Popov, la comparaison avec l’étranger socialiste ou capitaliste incitait les autorités à faire des efforts dans l’organisation du secteur des services, surtout autour d’événements internationaux prestigieux comme les Jeux olympiques : il fallait offrir aux hôtes étrangers le même niveau d’accueil que celui proposé par les standards de l’hôtellerie internationale. L’URSS accusait un retard colossal dans ce domaine si bien que pour la première fois de son histoire, elle mobilisa son économie en faveur d’un secteur étranger à des préoccupations industrielles et agricoles. Elle ouvrait ainsi la voie à une économie postindustrielle dominée par le secteur tertiaire. Pourtant, en dépit des moyens déployés pour mettre les entreprises soviétiques au niveau requis, le refus d’introduire des mécanismes d’initiative privée et de marché réduisit ces efforts à une expérience quasiment sans lendemain.

15 Le « socialisme supportable » est aussi permis par un relâchement de certains contrôles dans le cadre de la réforme économique de Kosygin. Simon Huxtable analyse comment l’alignement du tirage et de la diffusion sur la demande (et non plus sur des quotas fixes) remet en cause le caractère propagandiste des contenus éditoriaux et la vocation d’éducation des masses dévolus classiquement aux journaux depuis l’avènement du pouvoir soviétique. Le rôle nouveau de la popularité et du jugement du public incite les journalistes de Komsomol´skaja pravda à définir les goûts d’un

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hypothétique lecteur moyen. Ils mettent l’accent sur les activités et les penchants ordinaires qui subsument l’identité d’une classe médiane. Un mouvement similaire s’observe au cinéma : le « Studio artistique expérimental de cinéma » étudié par Irina Tcherneva dispose d’une certaine liberté organisationnelle en échange du respect de l’impératif d’une rentabilité minimale. Même si l’expérience est limitée, le studio doit prendre en compte une multiplicité de publics et s’émanciper partiellement de la fonction éducative assignée jusqu’alors au cinéma soviétique.

16 Dans le monde du théâtre, la période brejnévienne signe l’émergence d’une autonomie créative de plus en plus affirmée, notamment en marge des places dominantes et des sphères professionnelles légitimes. Comme Susan Constanzo le démontre dans son article sur le théâtre amateur dans les villes de province de la RSFSR, cette liberté se fait au prix de négociations et de relations de complicité avec les tutelles sous lesquelles sont placées localement les troupes, qu’il s’agisse des maisons de la culture, des clubs, des départements culturels des régions ou du komsomol. Le soutien accordé aux groupes amateurs est une manière de compenser l’absence criante de théâtres professionnels en province et d’animer la vie culturelle à moindre frais. L’éloignement du centre, l’interdépendance entre les troupes et les structures dirigeantes locales autorisent la mise en scène de pièces controversées et, créant des précédents, permettent même de les sortir du répertoire censuré. Le cas du théâtre Ilhom à Taškent, présenté par Lucille Lisack met lui aussi en évidence le rapport entre éloignement du centre, audace politique et artistique et innovation formelle. Il trouve vite son public en introduisant un langage théâtral nouveau et en adaptant des pièces d’un répertoire controversé ou carrément interdit, tout en voulant se faire le miroir d’un temps et d’une génération, celle d’un conformisme soviétique mité par la routine. Le théâtre Ilhom est ainsi devenu une institution centrale de la contreculture à Taškent et, idéalisé, s’est construit comme une expérience d’exception dans la mémoire collective de la ville.

Désenchantement et retraite idéologique ?

17 On place d’habitude les années Brežnev sous le signe du désenchantement du projet soviétique et de la crise idéologique. Au sommet, la nouvelle direction politique se garde bien de promesses concrètes sur l’avènement du communisme, c’est‑à‑dire d’une société sans classes, sans État ni monnaie, ayant aboli la propriété privée. Individualisme, consumérisme, cynisme paraissent l’emporter sur les valeurs communistes telle que la direction khrouchtchévienne les avaient exposées dans le « Code moral des bâtisseurs du communisme » de 1961. Que la société communiste annoncée par Hruščev en 1961 ne soit pas là en 1980 ni même à portée de main n’étonne personne. À l’épuisement idéologique, on associe la priorité donnée par la direction politique à l’augmentation du bien‑être, qui a placé le régime en concurrence directe avec les pays étrangers. Les Soviétiques pouvaient se faire par eux‑mêmes une idée des différentiels de développement lors de séjours de plus en plus fréquents à l’étranger, surtout dans les « démocraties populaires », dont certaines, comme la Hongrie, avaient adopté des voies de développement socialiste différentes du modèle soviétique. L’importation légale et illégale de biens de consommation courante des pays capitalistes révélait que le fossé industriel et commercial avait tendance à se creuser. L’économie dirigée que le gouvernement se refusait à réformer perdait ainsi en crédit

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aux yeux des citoyens soviétiques. Or, à quoi bon le socialisme s’il n’est pas supérieur au capitalisme ?33

18 Néanmoins, la disparition de l’idéal d’une société communiste et l’expansion des tendances consuméristes et individualistes n’aboutissent pas à déligitimer le régime soviétique, à désacraliser les idéaux socialistes ni à discréditer le progrès scientifique et technique dans la société34. Premièrement, la satisfaction des besoins de la vie matérielle par les importations est un facteur de diminution du mécontentement, donc de renforcement du régime, et non pas de son épuisement, d’autant que cette satisfaction elle‑même répond au projet socialiste de bien‑être matériel35. Deuxièmement, l’État soviétique n’a pas abdiqué ses desseins de transformer nature et société36, même s’il avance plus prudemment qu’avant. Dans le cadre d’une politique de grands travaux marquée par la construction de villes nouvelles (Tol´jatti37) et de grandes infrastructures de transports (pipelines, BAM38), la direction avance le projet du siècle : le détournement des fleuves septentrionaux et sibériens vers les déserts de l’Asie centrale. Dans ce contexte, la construction du réservoir de Kapčagaj, au Kazakhstan, nourrit des rêves gigantistes de la part des dirigeants politiques régionaux, républicains et centraux. Mais Tetsuro Chida montre que les experts vont dans le sens, comme en Europe, d’une modernité réflexive qui met en question sa propre dynamique et fait de l’anticipation des dangers le cœur de sa réflexion, au contraire de ce qui prévalait sous Stalin et sous Hruščev. Finalement, le projet est réalisé a minima, avec un faible impact sur la nature et l’activité industrielle dépendante et révèle, d’après Chida, une indécision politique caractéristique des années Brežnev.

19 Fabien Bellat suit Chida sur l’indécision des dirigeants caractéristique de la période en matière de politique infrastructurelle. Dans son article sur l’architecture brejnévienne, il remet en cause la vision d’un bâti uniforme et analyse pour ce faire l’agencement de nombreux facteurs expliquant la diversité des pratiques d’architectes et de leurs réalisations. Émerge ainsi une architecture monotone ou au contraire inventive, que l’on pense aux formes adoptées dans les républiques du Caucase et d’Asie centrale culturellement connotées ou aux plans d’urbanisme très ambitieux tel celui conçu pour la ville de Tol´jatti.

20 Sur le front social, alors qu’on crédite d’ordinaire Brežnev d’avoir renoncé à l’utopie khrouchtchévienne d’un contrôle sur la sphère intime via les tribunaux de camarades et la politique du byt39, Moritz Florin montre que Moscou employait des méthodes autoritaires pour transformer l’organisation du foyer dans les villages kirghiz en remplaçant les murs (duval) par des clôtures ajourées pour ouvrir l’espace privé au contrôle social. Surtout, « pour le parti, la consommation restait un formidable facteur de modernisation » : les meubles (tables, chaises, lits), les couverts ainsi que les appareils électroménagers, introduits dans les foyers, sont autant d’instruments de l’européanisation‑russification qui n’avaient pas encore pénétré l’univers domestique des Kirghiz. Ils s’accompagnent d’un modèle familial, soviétique mais non moins conservateur, qui fait la part belle à la responsabilité féminine dans la tenue du foyer. Cette « modernisation sélective », qui épargnait sous Brežnev les yourtes traditionnelles et les pratiques religieuses, exerçait une réelle attirance sur les populations rurales, malgré le scepticisme amer des élites culturelles contre la civilisation consumériste. La focale ici portée sur la Kirghizie laisse entrevoir un déséquilibre des études brejnéviennes au profit quasi‑exclusif des grandes villes de

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l’URSS européenne, lequel incite probablement à surestimer et généraliser le relâchement des efforts en matière d’ingénierie sociale.

21 Enfin, la disparition de l’utopie communiste n’entraîna pas la fin des idéaux socialistes d’égalité, de développement personnel, de collectivisme, de progrès technique et social. Les valeurs socialistes, largement partagées, se consolidèrent, hors de l’appareil de propagande, dans les relations interpersonnelles. Larissa Zakharova montre comment la correspondance nourrie entre un détenu et une écrivain célèbre est un moyen de transformation personnelle : la naissance d’une amitié lettrée édifie le prisonnier, « récidiviste particulièrement dangereux », exclu du corps social et détenu dans les conditions les plus dures, en personne soviétique capable de réinsertion. Sa correspondante, qui intervient comme tutrice, médiatrice et garante, est en retour transformée par l’échange épistolaire dans ses pratiques d’écriture et d’intercession. Ainsi, les articles publiés ici ne donnent pas à voir un affaiblissement des idéaux socialistes, mais plutôt leur renforcement dans les pratiques sociales. Néanmoins, s’il n’y a ni débâcle économique, ni remise en cause de la légitimité du régime, est‑ce à dire qu’il n’y a nulle crise ? Pas tout à fait...

Crise du temps et basculement de régime d’historicité

22 Dans les années 1970, le temps soviétique entre en crise. L’horizon communiste s’abolit dans un indéfini « socialisme avancé » : la grande échelle proposée par la doctrine marxiste‑léniniste laisse place à une pragmatique, mais mesquine gradation dénuée de but et de sauts qualitatifs. L’idée communiste ne commande plus l’ordonnancement du temps. À la crise de l’avenir s’ajoute une crise du passé : les récits staliniens hérités du Kratkij kurs sont mis en doute à partir de 1956 par des historiens, des écrivains et des intellectuels, des représentants de courants nationalistes40. Le passé traumatisant, celui des répressions staliniennes et de la guerre, n’est plus effaçable dans un mouvement optimiste qui porte vers le futur : le temps passé connaît donc de profondes crevasses qu’on ne peut plus justifier en les agençant à la perspective d’un progrès linéaire conduisant à la réalisation d’une société meilleure.

23 Pourtant, la définition du temps historique a toujours été un domaine d’intervention majeur du pouvoir soviétique. L’histoire et la mémoire furent des instruments pour l’idéologie bolchevique puis stalinienne qui a appuyé son programme politique sur la construction d’un récit des origines peuplé de mythes et de figures fondatrices (Lenin, la guerre civile, etc.), point de départ et point de vue pour un projet supérieur, tout en déployant des moyens considérables pour sa propagande. Pendant le dégel, le modelage du rapport au temps s’est poursuivi : d’un côté, les succès de la conquête spatiale et leur valorisation projettent les Soviétiques dans un avenir qui correspond à la vision propre aux modernes d’un sens unidirectionnel de l’histoire marchant vers le progrès (social et technique). De l’autre, le régime soviétique brejnévien redessine une vision héroïsée du passé en construisant le culte de la Seconde Guerre mondiale41. Mais le pouvoir doit désormais composer avec le déploiement difficilement contrôlable de pratiques sociales du temps qui n’entrent pas dans ces cadres.

24 On peut faire l’hypothèse que l’URSS du socialisme brejnévien amorce un basculement vers un régime d’historicité présentiste, marqué par la crise des grands récits, le désenchantement et la perte de la foi en l’avenir, rejoignant en cela le processus engagé en Europe occidentale au cours du second XXe siècle42. L’hypertrophie du patrimoine et

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du rétrospectivisme en est à la fois une réponse et un symptôme, tandis qu’à la construction d’un passé hyper-cohérent s’oppose le présent complexe, torturé, réflexif43.

25 Denis Kozlov a qualifié de « tournant historique » dans la culture soviétique tardive la nouvelle conscience historique des franges cultivées de la société soviétique à partir de la déstalinisation. L’une des stratégies permettant de subvertir les clichés officiels passe par la quête minutieuse de faits historiques et le goût pour les explorations biographiques et les reconstitutions détaillées. La fébrilité avec laquelle sont accueillies les publications historiques « factographiques » traduit le caractère de plus en plus inacceptable des représentations officielles du passé, dans une société traversée par les doutes et engagée dans un réexamen progressif des valeurs sociales conventionnelles et des interprétations historiques44. Bien que porteurs de simplifications grossières, et ne remettant jamais en cause l’arsenal conceptuel soviétique, les écrits concernés et leurs lecteurs font du débat sur l’histoire factuelle un moyen de discuter les questions sociales et culturelles contemporaines, voire les interrogations identitaires45. L’investigation du passé occupe le présent et se fait à son service. Polly Jones, dans l’article publié ici, montre comment le processus de rédaction de la biographie d’un général de la guerre civile, Trifonov, par son fils mobilise intensément les témoins de l’époque, les lecteurs et les responsables éditoriaux. Par leur contestation des faits ou au contraire par l’apport d’éléments nouveaux, leurs réactions esquissent un retour sur les mythes déstalinisés et les controverses autour de figures éliminées physiquement et évacuées du récit soviétique pendant la Grande Terreur. Ces réactions donnent à voir aussi l’importance des enjeux de mémoire autour de la période de constitution de l’URSS pour la première et la deuxième génération de Soviétiques.

26 Un autre aspect de cette rétrospection est illustré par la naissance et l’essor de la patrimonialisation. La Société panrusse de protection des monuments historiques et culturels (VOOPIiK), créée en 1965 marque le même « tournant historique » dont l’objet est l’héritage matériel prérévolutionnaire. Le mouvement pour la préservation du patrimoine architectural, fût‑il religieux, fait écho à une large demande publique et s’adosse à une volonté de réconcilier l’expérience historique avec la réalité contemporaine : ce n’est pas par nostalgie qu’il faut protéger et réhabiliter les traces tangibles du passé, mais pour l’intégrer à la connaissance et à la vie contemporaine, et donner du sens à ces dernières46. Amateurs et professionnels sont impliqués dans les mobilisations patrimoniales, brouillant les frontières entre histoire et patrimoine, dans un exercice souvent à forte dimension locale mais ayant vocation à alimenter une quête « nationale » plus large. Catriona Kelly montre qu’à partir des années 1960, les principes idéologiques consistant à détruire ou minorer les traces de la culture prérévolutionnaire se sont effilochés, il devient envisageable de défendre les églises comme partie prenante du patrimoine, de demander à les restaurer ou les reconstruire ex nihilo, mais plus encore de les placer au centre de projets d’aménagement du centre historique de Leningrad. Ces initiatives ne relèvent plus d’une décision politique top‑down mais d’une dynamique locale prépondérante. Elle révèle une lame de fond de la société soviétique cultivée, qui se retranche sur des valeurs et des symboles nationaux puisés dans l’histoire.

27 Ce mouvement « préservationniste » énonce des arguments pour une pensée nationaliste et préfigure cette dernière47 dans un processus très classique d’invention‑réinvention de la tradition qui trouve à s’exprimer dans d’autres

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« monuments » patrimoniaux tel que la cuisine, sujet de l’étude d’Adrianne Jacobs. Le prolifique auteur de livres culinaires V.V. Pohlëbkin promeut la primauté d’une cuisine nationale authentique sur les injonctions nutritionnelles de l’hygiénisme soviétique puis de l’impérialisme occidental. Cet historicisme gastronomique revendique un retour au passé, à la tradition et affiche sa volonté de rééduquer les Russes aux vrais goûts de leur cuisine, dont la convivialité et le plaisir, supérieurs à tout régime normatif, sont garants d’une bonne santé. Le phénomène patrimonial, qui fait l’objet d’une politique publique à l’échelle de l’URSS, ne se cantonne pas à la Russie d’Europe. Rénovation architecturale et patrimonialisation s’observent concomitamment à Samarkand, décrétée « ville la plus ancienne d’URSS »48, à Erevan, où les recherches archéologiques sont mises au service des élaborations mémorielles des défenseurs de l’héritage culturel49, ou encore à Tbilissi qui voit se développer, dans des cadres institutionnels aussi bien qu’informels, les initiatives en faveur de la restauration des édifices cultuels notamment50.

28 Enfin, on observe un hiatus générationnel dans les pratiques sociales du temps. Parmi les plus jeunes générations, on peut différencier deux types d’attitude. Une partie de la jeunesse adhère aux schémas proposés par le pouvoir, ce qui s’exprime notamment par l’appropriation du culte de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, dans des conditions d’encadrement politique et institutionnel volontariste : alors que Brežnev instaure la fête de la victoire du 9 mai, en 1965, le komsomol, suivi des médias, est en charge de la promotion de la mémoire de la guerre, de ses héros et des exploits de l’Armée rouge. Cette construction patriotique rencontre un certain suffrage. C’est le cas dans le rituel de la beskozyrka que décrit Vicky Davis, où à Novorossijsk depuis 1968, les jeunes hommes célèbrent la libération du port de la mer Noire par le régiment soviétique agissant depuis la place d’armes de Malaja zemlja, titre justement donné au premier opus des Mémoires de Brežnev. Bien qu’ayant eu un rôle mineur dans cette opération, Brežnev entreprend avec les autorités locales un exercice d’auto‑promotion mutuel en gratifiant la ville de l’ordre de la Grande Guerre patriotique. Le culte de ce fait d’armes, qui deviendra très populaire dans la longue durée, sera ensuite porté localement par la jeunesse encadrée qui en fera un acte viril, romantique et hautement patriotique. Les « Mémoires » de Brežnev, dont Nikolaus Katzer retrace l’invraisemblable généalogie, constituent également un effort pour présenter à la jeunesse une trajectoire soviétique modèle mais cette fois sans prétention. Dans une trilogie, correspondant respectivement à trois épisodes formateurs de la vie de Brežnev, les rédacteurs mandatés par le pouvoir brossent le portrait d’un Soviétique moyen auquel chacun peut s’identifier car incarnant la synthèse de toutes les figures populaires de la société : ouvrier, fils de paysan, combattant, technicien, le Secrétaire général personnifie l’ascension sociale et le consensus a minima.

29 Mais l’identification aux héros du passé proche et à Brežnev lui‑même ne suffit pas à nourrir les représentations de soi des dernières générations de Soviétiques. L’absence d’horizon d’attente, qui résulte grandement de la standardisation des codes de la période brejnévienne (assimilation des valeurs socialistes, rôle routinisé du parti et des structures d’encadrement très intégratrices) et de la stabilité socio-économique, fait obstacle, pour beaucoup, à une perception tangible, positive du futur. L’impression d’un régime immuable prévaut chez les Soviétiques de la « dernière génération » et laisse place, chez certains, à des projections chimériques que les produits culturels de la science‑fiction cristallisent51. L’URSS fabrique ses propres créations littéraires et cinématographiques science‑fictionnelles, des romans des frères Strugackij au film

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Stalker de Tarkovskij. En Bulgarie socialiste voisine, on diffuse même le film américain culte La guerre des étoiles, dont Nadège Ragaru décortique la réception aux multiples facettes. Rejetant l’interprétation « dissidente », « en creux » du film qui montre les spectateurs avides d’alternatives au modèle socialiste, Ragaru fait la démonstration que l’engouement pour le conte science‑fictionnel de George Lucas est moins fascination pour un Occident imaginé qu’interrogation des défis communs d’un monde technologique. Ce « rêve d’un monde au‑delà des blocs » traduit une sorte de « nostalgie pour le futur » : l’Union soviétique, après l’enthousiasme national des prouesses spatiales du dégel, voit les héros du cosmos décéder (Gagarin et Korolev) et s’inquiète du coût de la conquête spatiale sur fond de stagnation politique52.

30 Comme dans d’autres pays industrialisés, la société soviétique s’enferme de plus en plus à la fin des années 1970 dans un présent qui ne porte nulle promesse d’un avenir meilleur, et qu’on ne peut plus unanimement rattacher au passé, sinon à la Seconde Guerre mondiale comme nouveau moment fondateur supplantant la révolution53. La vision de l’histoire dans la doctrine officielle est attaquée par les deux bouts : la culture factographique et mémorielle fait du passé non pas l’origine du futur, mais un réservoir d’observations pour une consommation immédiate. L’abolition de l’horizon communiste renvoie chacun à ses contingences. C’est aussi dans le sens d’un présentisme infini typique des sociétés industrielles qu’on peut comprendre l’expression de Yurchak « Everything was for ever... ».

Conclusion

31 Il reste que l’impossibilité de travailler sur les documents politiques (que ce soit au niveau du parti ou du gouvernement, en haut ou en bas de l’échelle administrative), la fermeture totale des archives centrales du KGB, de l’armée, du MVD, du complexe militaro‑industriel, et l’accès très limité aux papiers des ministères industriels, des statistiques, des finances, du budget et du plan rendent très difficile une étude historienne sereine de la période brejnévienne, bien plus que celle des années 1920-195054. Ce paramètre justifie largement le moindre intérêt historiographique pour la période brejnévienne, tant les travaux sur ces années sont affectés par le déficit documentaire55. La difficulté d’accéder à des documents mettant en lumière les questions douloureuses et difficiles – surveillance par le KGB, poids du pénitentiaire dans la société et l’économie, vie dans les casernes, clochardisation des campagnes russes – tait les aspérités du quotidien des marges. Partant, on peut craindre une tendance consistant à accentuer la normalité de la vie soviétique en se focalisant sur les milieux citadins cultivés, et non pas sur les déclassés urbains comme ruraux. Les études fondées sur les entretiens conduits au sein d’un milieu assez homogène – l’élite cultivée et socialement privilégiée des grandes villes – vont ici dans ce sens. A contrario, les contributions de Florin, Swain et Chida introduisent de la diversité sociale, géographique et nationale qui fait largement défaut à l’étude des années Brežnev56. Par ailleurs, l’impossibilité de s’appuyer sur les documents de la prise de décision politique, économique, extérieure et militaire, qui risque de perdurer encore, pousse à innover et à chercher des sources alternatives. C’est ce que les auteurs réunis ici expérimentent, pour lesquels les entretiens constituent un corpus majeur ou qui mobilisent des massifs documentaires originaux.

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32 En dépit des manques de l’historiographie et des nuances nécessaires à toute peinture d’une époque, osons opposer à la qualification de « stagnation » celle d’apogée à la période brejnévienne. Certes, le décalage entre les grandes évolutions sociales (urbanisation, féminisation, élévation du niveau d’études, consommation) et l’immobilisme politique justifia que Mihail Gorbačev introduisît le terme de stagnation dans le discours politique pour conspuer ses prédécesseurs et leur répondre par la dynamique de « l’accélération » (uskorenie). Il fustigeait légitimement l’incapacité de la direction politique à prendre en compte le mécontentement grandissant des classes cultivées et des experts qui pointaient du doigt les problèmes structurels et proposaient des solutions57.

33 Mais au regard de l’expérience vécue par la majorité des citoyens soviétiques, en synchronie comme en diachronie, les années Brežnev sont celles d’un bonheur familial et personnel enfin prévisible, où les ruptures des guerres et des révolutions ne précipitent ni ne catapultent plus les trajectoires, et qui apparaît d’autant plus atteignable que l’horizon communiste, dans son acception la plus dogmatique, est aboli. Cette stabilité des biographies cristallise les regrets formulés par nombre de Postsoviétiques aujourd’hui envers le « socialisme avancé », surtout en comparaison des misérables vies qui sont le quotidien de dizaines de millions d’individus à l’est de l’Europe. Au‑delà de cette appréciation rétrospective, l’URSS connaît bien sous Brežnev une forme de pacification sociale, au prix d’une répression visant principalement la petite criminalité, mais aussi grâce aux accommodements négociables aux échelles locales de l’activité sociale, économique et professionnelle. Malgré les dysfonctionnements structurels de l’économie et l’incapacité du régime à se réformer, la popularisation de la culture consumériste, qui intervient après des décennies de pénuries sévères et chroniques, participe d’une civilisation des loisirs où les vacances, les voyages, les activités sportives et créatives, les divertissements élargissent le champ des possibilités d’épanouissement personnel. Ils constituent bien souvent des terreaux d’autonomisation pour de nouvelles niches sociales et de nouvelles subjectivités qui connaîtront leur pleine expansion à la fin de l’ère soviétique.

NOTES

1. Edwin Bacon, Mark Sandle, « Brezhnev Reconsidered », in Edwin Bacon, Mark Sandle, éds., Brezhnev Reconsidered, Basingstoke : Palgrave (Studies in Russian and East European History and Society), 2002, p. 1‑21. 2. Boris Belge, Martin Deuerlein, éds., Goldenes Zeitalter Der Stagnation ? Perspektiven Auf Die Sowjetische Ordnung Der Breznev‑Ära, Tübingen, 2014 ; Marie‑Janine Calic, Dietmar Neutatz, Julia Obertreis, éds., The Crisis of Socialist Modernity : The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1970s, Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011 ; David Crowley, Susan E. Reid, Pleasures in Socialism : Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc, Northwestern University Press, 2010 ; Neringa Klumbyte, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, éds., Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964‑1985, Lanham : Lexington Books, 2013 ; Anne E. Gorsuch, Diane P. Koenker, éds., The Socialist Sixties : Crossing Borders in the Second World, Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, 2013.

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3. Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers : An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation, Oxford – New York : Oxford University Press (Oxford Oral History Series), 2012 ; Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More : The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2006. 4. D’après les sondages d’opinion, les Russes tiennent Brežnev pour le meilleur dirigeant de l’histoire du pays, devant Stalin, et le temps de sa mandature pour une excellente période. Les répondants de Russie ont tendance à projeter les relatives prospérité et stabilité des années Brežnev sur les périodes précédentes. Center Levada, « Epohi v Âizni strany : El´cin, Gorbačev, Brežnev [Epoques dans la vie du pays : El´cin, Gorbačev, Brežnev] », site consulté le 15 février 2014, http://www.levada.ru/press/2011012601.html. 5. Contra Gorsuch, Koenker, « Introduction : The Socialist Sixties in Global Perspective », in Gorsuch, Koenker, éds., The Socialist Sixties, p. 1‑21. 6. Calic, Neutatz, Obertreis, éds., « Introduction », in The Crisis of Socialist Modernity, p. 7‑27 ; Niall Ferguson et al., eds., The Shock of the Global : The 1970s in Perspective, Cambridge, MA : The Belknap Press of Harvard university press, 2010. 7. Cahiers du Monde russe, « Au‑delà du brejnévisme », Cahiers du Monde russe, 11 avril 2012, http://monderusse.revues.org/7495. 8. Parmi les ouvrages récents : Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era, New York : Routledge (BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies 90), 2013 ; Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers ; Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More ; Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City : The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960‑1985, Washington, DC – Baltimore, MD : Woodrow Wilson Center Press Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 9. Généralisé à l’ensemble de l’histoire soviétique : Anna Krylova, « The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies », Kritika : Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1 (1), 2000, p. 119‑146. 10. Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted : The Soviet Collapse, 1970‑2000, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 48‑49. 11. Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy : An Economic History of the USSR from 1945, Postwar World, London – New York : Longman, 2003, p. 98‑99 ; Nicolas Werth, Histoire de l’Union Soviétique de Khrouchtchev à Gorbatchev (1953‑1991), P. : PUF (3e éd.), 2007, p. 463‑464. 12. Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma : Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953‑70, New Haven : Yale University Press (Eurasia Past and Present), 2013, p. 212‑257 ; Denis Kozlov, The Readers of Novyi Mir : Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2013, p. 429‑432. 13. Andreï Kozovoï, Par‑delà le mur : La culture de guerre froide soviétique entre deux détentes, P. : Complexe, 2009 ; Ragna Boden, « Soviet World Policy in the 1970s : A Three‑Level Game », in Calic, Neutatz, Obertreis, éds., The Crisis of Socialist Modernity, p. 184‑203. 14. Yoram Gorlizki, « Too Much Trust : Regional Party Leaders and Local Political Networks under Brezhnev », Slavic Review 69 (3), Octobre 2010, p. 676‑700. 15. Si on excepte les sévères accrochages sino‑soviétiques sur le fleuve Ussuri en 1969. Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino‑Soviet Split : Cold War in the Communist World, Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 340‑342. 16. Samuel H. Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union : Novocherkassk, 1962, Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 2001. 17. Vladimir Kozlov, Massovye besporjadki v SSSR pri Hruščeve. 1953‑ načalo 1980‑h gg [Troubles de masse en URSS sous Hruščev. 1953‑début des années 1980], M. : ROSSPEN, 2010 (3e éd.), p. 421. 18. V. Kozlov, « Kramola : Inokamyslie v SSSR vo vremena N. Hruščeva, I.L. Brežneva (Po materialam Verhovnova Suda i Prokuratury SSSR) [Sédition : les anticonformistes en URSS au

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temps de N. Hruščev et de L.I. Brežnev (d’après les documents de la Cour suprême et du parquet de l’URSS)] », Obščestvennye nauki i sovremennosti, no. 3, 2002, p. 84. 19. Triple attentat de nationalistes arméniens à Moscou en 1977, nombreuses tentatives de détournement d’avions à partir de 1970, souvent pour fuir à l’étranger. Kozlov, Massovye besporjadki, p. 435. 20. Kotkin, Armageddon, p. 44, parle de « courte symbiose entre la population et le pouvoir ». 21. Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer : Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin, Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2009 ; Brian LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia : Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw, Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. 22. Contre moins de 200 encore aux États‑Unis à la même époque, avant que les « succès » de la « guerre contre la drogue » propulsent en quelques années les États‑Unis au rang de leader incontesté de l’utopie pénitentiaire, avec des taux d’incarcération tout à fait comparables à ceux du Goulag stalinien. 23. Cité par Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy, p. 99. 24. James R. Millar, « The Little Deal : Brezhnev’s Contribution to Acquisitive Socialism », Slavic Review 44 (4), 1985, p. 694‑706. 25. Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy, p. 99. 26. Kotkin, Armageddon, 15‑16 ; Frank Bösch, « 1973 : Energiewende Nach Osten », Die Zeit, 18 octobre 2013, sec. Geschichte, http://www.zeit.de/2013/42/1973‑gas‑pipeline‑sowjetunion‑ gazprom 27. Contra Calic, Neutatz, and Obertreis, « Introduction ». 28. Stephen Kotkin, “The Kiss of Debt. The East Bloc Goes Borrowing,” in Ferguson et al., éds., The Shock of the Global, p. 80‑93. 29. Poul Villaume, Odd Arne Westad, eds., Perforating the Iron Curtain : European Détente, Transatlantic Relations, and the Cold War, 1965‑1985, Copenhagen : Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2010. 30. Nadège Ragaru, Antonela Capelle‑Pogacean, éds., Vie quotidienne et pouvoirs sous le communisme : la consommation revisitée, P. : Karthala (Recherches Internationales), 2010 ; Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era. 31. Christian Noack, « Songs from the Wood, Love from the Fields : The Soviet Tourist Song Movement », in Gorsuch, Koenker, éds., The Socialist Sixties, p. 167‑192. 32. Susan Reid, David Crowley, éds., Pleasures in Socialism : Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc, Northwestern University Press, 2010, p. 21 et suiv. 33. Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy, p. 129‑130 ; Kotkin, Armageddon, p. 19. 34. Nous suivons sur ce plan les analyses de Calic, Neutatz, and Obertreis, « Introduction », p. 19. 35. Ragaru, Capelle‑Pogacean, Vie quotidienne et pouvoirs sous le communisme, p. 18, 22. 36. Marc Elie, « Coping with the “Black Dragon” : Mudflow Hazards and the Controversy over the Medeo Dam in Kazakhstan, 1958‑66 », Kritika : Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 14 (2), 2013, p. 313‑342. 37. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, « Modernity Unbound : The New Soviet City of the Sixties », in Gorsuch, Koenker, éds., The Socialist Sixties, p. 66‑83. 38. Christopher Ward, Brezhnev’s Folly : The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism, Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009 ; Johannes Grützmacher, Die Baikal‑Amur‑Magistrale : vom stalinistischen Lager zum Mobilisierungsprojekt unter Breznev, München : Oldenbourg, 2012. 39. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia : A Study of Practices, Berkeley, CA : University of California Press (Studies on the History of Society and Culture 32), 1999 ; Deborah A. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia, Peter Lang, 2007.

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40. Sergei I. Zhuk, « “Cultural Wars” in the Closed City of Soviet Ukraine, 1959‑1982 », in Klumbyte, Sharafutdinova, éds., Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, p. 67‑90 ; Yitzhak Brudny, Reinventing Russia : Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953‑1991, Cambridge, UK – New York : Harvard University Press, 2000 ; Nikolaj Mitrohin, Russkaja partija : Dviženie Russkih nacionalistov v SSSR 1953‑1985 [Le parti russe : le mouvement des nationalistes russes en URSS, 1953‑1985] М. : NLO, 2003. 41. Nina Tumarkin, The Living & the Dead : The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia, New York NY : Basic Books, 1994 ; Jonathan Brunstedt, « Building a Pan‑Soviet Past : The Soviet War Cult and the Turn Away from Ethnic Particularism », The Soviet and Post‑Soviet Review 38 (2), Septembre 2011, p. 149‑171, DOI :10.1163/187633211X589114. 42. Nikolaj Koposov, Pamjat´ strogogo režima : istorija i politika v Rossii [Mémoire d’un régime sévère : histoire et politique en Russie], M. : NLO, 2011. 43. François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité : Présentisme et expériences du temps, P. : Éditions du Seuil, 2012. 44. Denis Kozlov, « The Historical Turn in Late Soviet Culture : Retrospectivism, Factography, Doubt, 1953‑1991 », Kritika : Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2 (3), Summer 2001, p. 577‑600, p. 578‑581 : terme venant du russe faktografija traduisant l’accumulation de faits sans analyse ni montée en généralité. 45. Voir aussi l’analyse que Zhuk fait dans ce numéro de l’approche factographique comme moyen pour les historiens des États‑Unis d’échapper à la censure. 46. Sur les zig‑zags de la conservation des monuments religieux dans les années 1950‑1960, Anne Kropotkine, « Les ambiguïtés du Dégel », Cahiers du Monde russe, 47 (1–2), Janvier‑juin 2006, p. 269‑302, DOI :10.4000/monderusse.3802. 47. Brudny, Reinventing Russia qui voit dans la VOOPIik un creuset pour le nationalisme russe, ou Silvia Serrano, « Religion, pouvoir, identités en Géorgie post‑soviétique », HDR, sous la direction de Patrick Michel, EHESS, 2014, qui identifie des groupes d’étudiants nationalistes géorgiens qui prennent l’initiative de restaurer des églises au nom de l’héritage et de l’identité nationale géorgienne. 48. Drevnejshij gorod SSSR. 49. Svetlana Gorshenina, Claude Rapin, De Kaboul à Samarcande : les archéologues en Asie centrale, P. : Gallimard, 2001 ; Taline Ter Minassian, Erevan : La construction d’une capitale à l’époque soviétique, Rennes : PUR, 2007. 50. Serrano, « Religion, pouvoir, identités en Géorgie post‑soviétique », p. 45‑46. 51. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More. 52. Asif A. Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare : Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857‑1957, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 300‑301. 53. Koposov, Pamjat´ strogogo režima. 54. Même si les conditions d’accès sont certainement différentes dans les pays Baltes, et dans une moindre mesure en Ukraine et en Géorgie. 55. Cette circonstance n’est pas mentionnée dans les ouvrages suivants : Bacon, Sandle, « Brezhnev Reconsidered » ; Gorsuch, Koenker, « Introduction : The Socialist Sixties in Global Perspective » ; Klumbytė, Sharafutdinova, « What Was Late Socialism ? », p. 1‑14. 56. Voir néanmoins Stéphane A. Dudoignon and Christian Noack, éds., Allah’s Kolkhozes : Migration, de‑Stalinisation, Privatisation, and the New Muslim Congregations in the Soviet Realm (1950s‑2000s), Berlin : KS, Klaus Schwarz Verlag (Islamkundliche Untersuchungen Band 314), 2014. 57. M.S. Gorbačev, « Političeskij doklad centralńogo komiteta KPSS XXVII s´ézdu kommunističeskoj partii Sovetskogo sojuza » [Rapport politique du comité central du PCUS au XXVIIe Congrès du PCUS], in M.S. Gorbačev, Izbrannye reči u statí [Discours et articles choisis], M. : Politizdat, 1987, t. 3. http://lib.ru/MEMUARY/GORBACHEV/doklad_xxvi.txt

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AUTEURS

MARC ELIE CERCEC, EHESS-CNRS, Paris

ISABELLE OHAYON CERCEC, EHESS-CNRS, Paris

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Foreword

Marc Elie and Isabelle Ohayon

1 A decade ago, it was still possible to be surprised by historians’ lack of interest in late Socialism.1 Since then, the world of historiography has greatly changed. That period is the object of a frenzy of research, with frequent seminars and edited volumes.2 As happened with the Khrushchev Thaw in the early 2000s, the Brezhnev years have become a happy hunting ground for researchers. The twenty years (1964-1985) between the Thaw and perestroika were a formative period for the “last Soviet generation,” which is still a sizeable proportion of the current population of the former republics of the USSR.3 The predominantly positive image of the Soviet past as a whole is largely based on people’s memories of their youth.4 A golden age for many citizens in the ex‑Soviet republics, the period is less well known among historians : they find it hard to find a name for it, because its image is only revealed in contrast to the two periods of radical political change that came before and after it. “Stagnation,” Gorbachev’s term, has long been rejected ; “developed” or “real socialism,” the regime’s own favoured label, can only now be used with scare quotes. The idea of applying the period names and concepts used in Western Europe and North America — the Sixties and Seventies — not only fails to reflect the wholeness of the Brezhnev period, but, not least, for all their practical use, these terms rapidly come up against limitations : Brezhnev’s Sixties were a continuation of the reforming optimism of the Soviet Fifties, rather than belonging to the triumph of consumer society as paraded by the market‑economy countries.5 The reason the 1970s are seen as the beginning of a new era in the capitalist countries is that the oil crisis and the labour and ecological movements forced the economic model to adapt, while in the USSR, the Fordist production model was not changed until after 1986.6 In other words, the divisions of time habitually used for the history of the United States and Western Europe do not really fit the history of late Socialism. This issue of Cahiers joins the recent boom in studies of the Brezhnev years with a series of 22 articles in two volumes debating trends in current historiography.7

2 The studies that have given new life to the historiographical approach to the society, culture and consumption of the Brezhnev years8 share the characteristic of examining the growing mismatch between an authoritarian, conservative gerontocracy and a society undergoing change and emancipation. Earlier historiography interpreted the

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contrast between ossified state structures and social dynamics at the individual level with the image of a homo sovieticus torn between lip‑service to the official ideology, ritually repeated, and escape into the private world of family, friends and hobbies.

3 To belie this supposed cynicism and pretence attributed to Soviet citizens under late socialism, Alexei Yurchak and Sergei Zhuk have sought to escape the binary contrast between external appearance and private convictions, simulated agreement in public rituals and dissimulated opinions in private.9 This dichotomy can be found everywhere : authors contrast the dynamism of informal trade with the sclerosis of the planned economy, dissident art with official commissions, and nationalities that were Socialist in form and nationalist in substance (rather than the reverse). Yurchak shows that the repetition of self‑referential rituals and the circularity of the authorities’ discourse did not exclude sincere belief in the ideals of Socialism, thereby refuting the reproach of hypocrisy. Similarly, participation in the activities of the official social structures (komsomol) did not prevent the pursuit of personal desires and ambitions whose meaning apparently contradicted the doctrine ; on the contrary, it made it licit to set up new activities, such as pop and rock groups within the komsomol. Zhuk joins in the major points of this criticism of the duplicity of homo sovieticus, but with one considerable reservation : the displacements of meaning made possible by semantic withdrawal from the official discourse could not occur without causing considerable alarm among ideological and police functionaries. The guardians of ideology in the closed city of Dnepropetrovsk had no intention of allowing their flock the freedom to gambol in unapproved ways, and used a graduated armoury of effective punitive measures to deal with the recalcitrant (including the Gulag), even though by the end of the decade they had to admit that they had lost the battle against the influence of Western popular culture. Similarly, Sonja Luehrmann shows that the official ideology’s promotion of “spiritual values” and “personal development” was taken seriously by people working within the ideological apparatus as mere agitators. This encouragement of spirituality, far from involving a “revival of religious feelings,” which Luehrmann disputes, was seen as an “antidote to religion.” However, those who believed in these ideas developed aspirations that they now connect to their religious commitment following the collapse of the Soviet system.

The golden age of the Soviet century

4 The decades of Brezhnev’s rule correspond to the peak of the Soviet period : the USSR, at last an uncontested super‑power thanks to a Soviet nuclear arsenal the equal of the United States’, fulfilled its promises of public order, secure social mobility and a degree of material well‑being. In the belief that this would guarantee stability, the regime carried out a cruel repression of members of the marginal classes and malcontents.

5 It is usual to split this period into two phases, with positive developments while Brezhnev still enjoyed good health and could envisage energetic reform ; and “stagnation” during which Brezhnev, physically and mentally diminished after his 1974 stroke, was kept at his post as a symbolic figure by the gerontocracy.10 The exact chronology depends on the sector : in economics, the divide is between the high growth rates of Brezhnev’s first decade, in line with a certain reforming spirit, and, from 1973, a decade of slower growth coinciding with the refusal of any extensive reform.11 In the arts, the opening up that extended the Thaw was ended by the invasion of

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Czechoslovakia in 1968 : de-Stalinisation stopped and the liberal dissident movement was muzzled.12 In foreign policy, the division is between détente culminating in the 1975 Helsinki Accords and a new “tepid” war following the invasion of Afghanistan.13

6 And yet, the eighteen years of Brezhnev’s rule do have a unity that makes them stand out in the century : Soviet citizens at last achieved some modest material prosperity and predictable upward socio‑occupational mobility. Although it had begun under Khrushchev, the policy of stabilising the careers of junior and senior officials was enshrined in Brezhnev’s “trust in cadres” slogan.14 In contrast with the rest of Russia’s 20th century, the 1960s to 1980s stand out for their moderation and serenity : no major domestic upheavals, no armed confrontations on the borders of the USSR,15 no “top‑down revolution”, no state terror against the general population. After a tumultuous Khrushchev decade ending with the massacre of demonstrating workers in Novocherkassk in 1962, the barometer of popular anger was set fair under Brezhnev.16 The series of “mass disturbances” (massovye besporiadki) against the political and police authorities came to a temporary end, and only resumed in the mid-1980s.17 Further evidence of this pacification is that the prison camps held a historically low number of political prisoners : offenders sentenced per year fell from a thousand in the latter half of the 1950s to a few hundred in 1961‑1985.18 Society appeared therefore to be generally peaceful compared with the upheavals of the Thaw and perestroika that occurred before and after the Brezhnev years. And even more so when compared with the dissident movements occurring in the capitalist countries at that time : violent clashes between students and police in 1968, protests against the Vietnam War, extreme right‑ and left‑wing terrorism in Germany and Italy. Admittedly, the USSR suffered more from terrorism than is generally thought, but it did not see the political agitation typical of capitalist societies as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s.19

7 This was largely the tranquillity of dungeons, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau would have put it. The “preventive conversations” held on KGB premises and the “treatment” of the recalcitrant in punitive psychiatric establishments showed that by the latter half of the 1960s the new political leadership had overhauled its arsenal of legal and illegal measures for silencing dissident voices. The papers by Sergei Zhuk, Susanne Schattenberg and Amanda Swain demonstrate the considerable clout of the political police in social life : it was the KGB that allowed or prevented scientists’ travel abroad, at a time when such exchanges were increasingly important for their careers. The KGB arranged the surveillance of personalities suspected of diverging from the official line and initiated the prosecution of teenagers who had taken part in unauthorised assemblies. The official ideological discourse remained inflexible. Nikolai Mitrokhin examines the fountainhead of content for official propaganda, the ideology department of the Central Committee. Basically conservative in their convictions, the guardians of ideology acted as intermediaries between the KGB and the media (publishers, writers, journalists, etc.). Schattenberg describes how Andrei Sakharov, the famous physicist and loyal Soviet citizen, attempted to push the limits of free speech via dialogue with the authorities. On the other side, some Politburo members, such as the head of the KGB, Yuri Andropov, sought this dialogue with Sakharov in order to point out that he had gone too far and to get him to backtrack. However, these attempts foundered on the Politburo’s refusal to pursue the policy of opening up to expertise that had been promoted under Khrushchev. In her study of the coverage of the 18 May 1972 demonstration in Kaunas, Lithuania, Swain shows how those involved sought to define these embarrassing events in such a way as to escape being described as “nationalist,”

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which would have had disastrous consequences for both the young demonstrators and the police and local politicians. They all stood behind a damage-limitation version whereby the fault belonged to the gregarious instincts of “politically unaware” youths led astray by mysterious “hippies” influenced by Western culture.

8 Despite the repression, acceptance of the regime does seem to have had its heyday under Brezhnev.20 Much of this was due to a wide conservative consensus : the law and order regime imposed by the new leaders was directed mainly at marginal groups, with drastic measures taken against “hooligans”, in order to reassure a population unsettled by the insecurity of the 1940s and 1950s.21 Larissa Zakharova gives the poignant example of a social trajectory of exclusion in the Gulag. Although there were fewer political prisoners, the Gulag population eventually peaked at over a million in 1979, one of the highest incarceration rates in the world at that time : 420 prisoners per 100,000 population.22

“Bearable” Socialism

9 However, the main reason the Brezhnev years were a unique period of “bearable” Socialism, as Vladimir Kusin puts it,23 was that most Soviet citizens were now enjoying a historically high standard of living. Starting in the 1950s, consumption made it easier to support the regime and its values, or at least come to a tacit “little deal.”24 The economic slowdown in the 1970s did not involve an equivalent slowdown in consumption, which continued to grow at an annual rate of 1.9 % while GDP growth stagnated at 0.9 % during the 1973‑1982 period.25 This was only possible because of the flow of petrodollars the USSR earned after the sharp rise in the oil price in 1973 : even as the country was bogged down in its structural difficulties, high‑cost gas and oil exports enabled it for twelve or so years to sustain consumption, invest in agriculture, continue the arms race and fund costly military incursions (Afghanistan, Angola, Eritrea).

10 When the OPEC countries decided to sharply raise the cost of gas and oil, the deposits in Western Siberia, discovered in the 1950s, were pumping at full capacity. Pipelines now brought Orenburg gas directly to Western Europe for hard cash. Economic crisis, détente and the West German Social Democrats’ Ostpolitik led to profitable contracts : Germans, Czechoslovaks and Soviets worked together to build the Soiuz, Bratstvo, Druzhba and Transgas pipelines. From being a net gas and oil importer, the USSR had in two decades become one of the world’s largest producers and exporters. This high price regime until 1986 made it possible not only to mask the structural weaknesses of the Soviet industrial apparatus but also to shelve the economic reforms that had been designed in the 1960s. The rude awakening only occurred on Gorbachev’s watch.26 Consequently, the term “crisis,” even within the phrase “economic crisis” also appears to us to be inappropriate to describe the Brezhnev period.27 It may well be that this reflects a fairly clear difference within the Communist bloc between the USSR and the Socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe : the latter were indeed caught up in a serious financial crisis that forced them into debt and increasing dependence on Western finance.28 The 1973 oil shock hit them via their economic links with Western Europe, whereas the USSR, providing them with gas and oil, prospered from the high prices. The satellites’ greater exposure to the Sixties’ youth culture undermined the alternative model of Soviet development, which was anyway more recent for them and

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less ingrained. Ultimately, the striking characteristic of the development of the Communist bloc was its centrifugal forces : not only the political split with China, Albania, and, to a lesser extent, Romania and Yugoslavia, but not least the gradual economic drift of the “popular democracies” away from the USSR, whose integration model had lost its authority when compared with an EEC now able to include the former dictatorships of Southern Europe.29

11 Leisure and consumption increased in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and really took off in the Brezhnev years.30 The introduction of the five‑day week, longer holidays, more private cars and rising wages all helped develop a private sphere ; in urban areas, family flats and individual dachas in the nearby countryside were being fitted out with domestic appliances. Rising consumption and easier travel even affected villages : kolkhoz workers now received pensions and salaries (instead of trudodni), and with their new internal passports could travel freely. Leisure time was increasingly filled with activities often officially encouraged, whether or not they were run by the “social organisations” : gardening, do‑it‑yourself, hill‑walking and travel, physical exercise, personal well‑being, etc.31 Olga Smolyak and Aleksey Golubev give the striking example of the development of do‑it‑yourself and manual skills, which both made up for the scarcity of certain goods and carved out areas for personal satisfaction. Illustrated magazines set the tone for the new standards of the modern Soviet citizen and reinforced the gendered division of daily life — women involved in interior decorating, gardening and fashion ; men devoted to their hobbies of building models, amateur radios, etc. This development of the personal sphere was clearly reflected in the popular press and more generally in the representations shown in the arts and media.

12 The world of consumption was particularly open to goods and cultural products from abroad, whether Socialist or capitalist countries, whose standards helped form Soviet taste : Western Europe and the United States were still seen as a benchmark in the USSR, which was going to demonstrate the superiority of the Socialist consumer model by meeting material desires without the excesses of consumerism.32 Consumer and cultural goods from capitalist countries occupied an increasingly large place, because the Soviet state used its petrodollars to stimulate consumption, and also because clothes, books and records were smuggled in from west to east.

13 Another aspect of opening up to foreign countries, travel — mainly to the popular democracies, but also the capitalist countries — provided intensely felt interactions not to be measured in the quantity of goods acquired. Igor´ Narskii and Zhuk assess the impact on carefully selected Soviet citizens of travelling to the United States. Narsky shows how the dancers of an amateur troupe from Cheliabinsk were caught up in the constraints of Cold War culture. Diplomatic and ideological objectives and officious control of the dancers’ behaviour and contacts during their foreign tours weighed heavily on the arrangement of the trips and even their programmes and choreography. Although the dancers had taken on board at least some of the official clichés about foreign countries, they still underwent a culture shock when they travelled to the United States in 1979. Zhuk reports that the experts on North America, the “Americanists” who were allowed to travel to the USA formed an elite among researchers. They adopted various narrative strategies in their writing to share the interpretative advances they had made during their investigations, reading and, not least, meeting American colleagues.

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14 This exposure to foreign countries affected behaviour as much as ideas. As Alexei Popov shows, comparison with other Socialist or capitalist countries obliged the authorities to improve the organisation of the service sector, particularly for major international events such as the Olympics 1980 : foreign guests had to be offered facilities up to the standards of the international hotel sector. The USSR lagged far behind in this area, with the result that for the first time in its history it mobilised its economy for a sector other than industry and agriculture. This opened the way for a post‑industrial economy led by the tertiary sector. However, for all the resources deployed to update Soviet enterprises, the refusal to introduce private initiative or market mechanisms reduced these efforts to a virtually unrepeated experiment.

15 “Bearable” Socialism was also made possible by the relaxation of some controls under Kosygin’s economic reform. Simon Huxtable analyses how aligning print runs and distribution with demand (rather than according to fixed quotas) challenged the propaganda nature of editorial content and the vocation of educating the masses that had habitually been attributed to newspapers since the birth of the Soviet system. The new role played by popularity and readers’ opinions forced the journalists on Komsomol´ skaia Pravda to define the tastes of their assumed average reader. They emphasised the ordinary activities and preferences that underpinned the identity of a middling class. A similar trend can be noted in films : the “experimental artistic studio of the cinema” examined by Irina Tcherneva was allowed a certain organisational freedom in exchange for compliance with the requirement of a minimum level of profitability. Although this experiment was limited, the studio had to take account of a wide range of audiences and to some extent move away from the educational function the Soviet cinema had been given until then.

16 In the world of theatre, the Brezhnev period marked the emergence of an increasingly asserted creative autonomy, particularly on the fringe of the dominant locations and legitimate professional spheres. As Susan Constanzo demonstrates in her article on amateur theatricals in the provincial towns of the RSFSR, this freedom was achieved by negotiation and connivance with the local authorities supervising the troupes, whether houses of culture, clubs, or regional or komsomol cultural departments. Support for amateur groups was a way of making up for the crying lack of professional theatres in the provinces and having a cultural life on the cheap. Distance from the centre and interdependence between the troupes and local authority structures made it possible to put on controversial plays and, by creating a precedent, helped remove the plays from the banned list. The Ilkhom Theatre in Tashkent, described by Lucille Lisack, also demonstrates the relationship between distance from Moscow and political and artistic audacity and formal innovation. It quickly gained a wide audience by introducing a new theatrical discourse and adapting plays that were controversial or even actually banned, while attempting to mirror an age and a generation of Soviet conformity ground down by routine. The Ilkhom Theatre became in this way a central institution for the counterculture in Tashkent, and is now idealised as an exceptional moment in the city’s collective memory.

Disenchantment or ideological withdrawal ?

17 The Brezhnev years are usually described as being a time of disenchantment with the Soviet dream and of ideological crisis. At the top, the new political leadership was

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careful not to make any specific promises about the date of arrival of Communism, i.e., a society without classes, with no State and no currency, after the abolition of private property. Individualism, consumerism and cynicism seemed to have won out over Communist values as the Khrushchev leadership had defined them in its 1961 “Moral Code of the Builder of Communism.” That the Communist society announced by Khrushchev in 1961 had not arrived by 1980, and was not even in sight, surprised no one. In addition to ideological exhaustion there was the priority the political leadership had given to enhancing well‑being, placing the regime in direct competition with foreign countries. Soviet citizens could see for themselves the contrast in development during their increasingly frequent trips abroad, especially to the “popular democracies,” some of which, like Hungary, had adopted forms of Socialist development that differed from the Soviet model. Legal and illegal imports of consumer goods from capitalist countries showed that the industrial and commercial gap was widening. The command economy that the government refused to reform was losing all credit in the eyes of Soviet citizens. After all, what was the point of Socialism if it wasn’t better than capitalism ?33

18 However, the disappearance of the ideal of a Communist society and the expansion of consumerist and individualist behaviour did not result in undermining the legitimacy of the Soviet regime, desacralising Socialist ideals or discrediting the scientific and technical progress their society had achieved.34 First, the satisfaction of material needs by imports was a factor in reducing discontent, and therefore strengthening the regime rather than weakening it, especially since that satisfaction was in line with the Socialist project of material well‑being.35 Second, the Soviet state had not given up its plans for transforming nature and society,36 even if it now advanced more cautiously than before. As part of a major investment policy of building new towns (Tol´iatti37) and huge transport infrastructure (pipelines, BAM38) the leadership was also pushing ahead with the project of the century : to divert the northern and Siberian rivers to flow towards the deserts of Central Asia. The building of the Kapchagay reservoir in Kazakhstan encouraged the megalomaniac dreams of politicians in the regions, the republics and Moscow. However, Tetsuro Chida shows that technical experts, like those in Europe, were already moving towards a more “reflective modernity” that questioned its own impetus and focused on anticipating danger, unlike the thinking under Stalin and Khrushchev. Ultimately, the dam was built on a less grand scale with less impact on nature and dependant industrial activity, revealing a political indecisiveness Chida sees as characteristic of the Brezhnev years.

19 Fabien Bellat agrees with Chida that the indecisiveness of leaders about infrastructure policy was characteristic of the period. In his paper on the architecture of the Brezhnev years, he challenges the usual vision of uniform buildings by analysing the effect of many factors leading to diversity in architects’ practice and achievements. The result was an architecture that might be monotonous or inventive, as we look at the culturally marked designs adopted in the republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia, or the vastly ambitious town planning schemes devised for the city of Tol´iatti.

20 On the front of social relations, although Brezhnev is generally described as having given up the Khrushchev era’s utopian dream of controlling private space by comrades’ courts and “byt” policy,39 Moritz Florin shows that Moscow used authoritarian methods to completely alter household life in Kyrgyz villages by replacing compound walls

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(duval) with openwork fences that exposed private life to social control. Not least, “for the Party, consumption was an excellent factor of modernisation” : furniture (tables, chairs, beds), cutlery and domestic appliances introduced into these homes were all instruments of Europeanisation/Russification that had reached Kyrgyz home life. Along with them went a family model, Soviet but still conservative, whereby women had most responsibility for the home. This “selective modernisation” under Brezhnev, sparing the traditional yurts and religious rites, had a real attraction for the rural population, despite the embittered scepticism of the cultural elites about consumer civilisation. The paper’s focus on the Kyrgyz republic suggests that there is an imbalance in Brezhnev‑era research, which concentrates almost entirely on the major cities of the European USSR, leading probably to an over‑estimation and generalisation of the relaxation of social engineering in the attempts to transform society.

21 The disappearance of the Communist utopia did not put an end to the Socialist ideals of equality, personal development, collectivism and technical and social progress. These widely shared Socialist values were consolidated, outside the propaganda apparatus, in interpersonal relations. Zakhkarova shows how the long correspondence between a prisoner and a famous writer was a form of personal transformation : the emergence of a literate friendship turned this “particularly dangerous recidivist,” excluded from society and held in the harshest of conditions, into a Soviet citizen capable of re‑integration. His correspondent, acting as a tutor, mediator and guarantor, was in turn changed by this exchange of letters in her ways of writing and helping people. The papers we are publishing therefore do not reveal a weakening of Socialist ideals, but rather their reinforcement in social practices. Nevertheless, although there was no economic collapse or challenge to the regime’s legitimacy, does that mean there was no crisis ? Not quite.

Crisis of time and new regime of historicity

22 In the 1970s, Soviet time entered a crisis. The future horizon of Communism was replaced by an undefined “advanced Socialism” : the vast scale proposed by Marxist‑Leninist doctrine gave way to a paltry, purposeless pragmatism offering no step‑changes in quality. This crisis of future dreams came with a crisis of past dreams : starting in 1956, the Stalinist discourse inherited from the Short course (Kratkii kurs) was being challenged by historians, writers, intellectuals and representatives of nationalist opinions.40 The country’s traumatic past of Stalin’s purges and war could no longer be covered up by an optimistic drive towards the future : this past contained deep wounds that could no longer be justified by placing them against the prospects of linear progress leading to the achievement of a better society.

23 And yet, defining historical time was always a major preoccupation of the Soviet power structure. History and memory were instruments of Bolshevik and then Stalinist ideology, which based its political programme on the construction of a narrative of mythical origins and founding figures (Lenin, the Civil War, etc.), the starting point and viewpoint for a projected higher purpose, with the application of considerable propaganda resources. During the Thaw, the manipulation of people’s relationship with time continued : the present successes of the conquest of space and its applications enabled Soviet citizens to look forward to a future in a typically modern vision of history marching in a single direction towards progress (both social and technical).

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Looking back, the Soviet regime under Brezhnev painted a heroicised vision of the past with the cult of the Second World War.41 But now the authorities were being forced to face the less controllable deployment of social practices of time that did not fit into this framework.

24 We may hypothesise that the USSR of Brezhnev’s Socialism began to shift into a presentist regime of historicity, marked by a crisis in the heroic narrative, disenchantment and loss of faith in the future, in parallel with the process occurring in Western Europe in the latter half of the 20th century.42 The excessive focus on heritage and retrospection was both a response to and a symptom of this shift, and the construction of a painstakingly consistent past contrasted with a present that was complex, tortured and reflective.43

25 Denis Kozlov has described as a “historical turn” in late Soviet culture the new historical awareness of the educated fringe of Soviet society after de‑Stalinisation. One of the strategies for undermining the official clichés was meticulous research into historical facts fired by biographical exploration and detailed reconstruction. The feverish enthusiasm that greeted “factographic”44 historical publications revealed the increasingly unacceptable nature of official representations of the past for a society wracked with doubt and engaged in a gradual re‑examination of conventional social values and historical interpretations. Although these texts contained gross simplifications and never challenged the Soviet conceptual armoury, they and their readers turned the debate about factual history into a way of discussing contemporary social and cultural questions, and even issues of identity.45 Investigation of the past occupied the present and served it. In her paper, Polly Jones shows how the process whereby the son of the Civil War general Trifonov wrote his biography deeply involved witnesses of the period, readers and senior publishers. By disputing his facts or providing new evidence, their reactions were the first signs of a new look at the de‑Stalinised myths and the controversies around figures who had been physically eliminated and removed from the Soviet narrative during the Great Terror. These reactions also revealed the importance of memory issues for Soviet citizens of the first and second generations concerning the period when the USSR was set up.

26 Another aspect of this retrospection can be seen in the emergence and expansion of the heritage movement. The All‑Russia Society for Protection of Monuments of History and Culture (VOOPIiK), founded in 1965, marks this same “historical turn” since it focused on the physical remains of pre‑Revolutionary heritage. The drive to preserve architectural heritage, even religious buildings, met a general public demand and was based on the desire to reconcile historical experience with contemporary reality : protecting and rehabilitating the physical traces of the past not out of nostalgia but in order to integrate them into contemporary knowledge and life, and so make sense of the present.46 Amateurs and professionals were involved in this heritage movement, breaking down the barriers between history and heritage, often at a purely local level that could still contribute to a wider “national” search. Catriona Kelly shows that, starting in the 1960s, the ideological principles that required destroying or downplaying any traces of pre‑Revolutionary culture were breaking down, and it was no longer unthinkable to defend churches as an integral part of heritage, to ask for them to be restored or even rebuilt from scratch, and indeed to place them in the centre of rehabilitation plans for Leningrad’s historic city centre. These initiatives did not come from a top‑down political decision but from overwhelmingly local pressure.

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This revealed a groundswell in educated Soviet society, retreating to national values and symbols taken from history.

27 This “conservationist” movement produced arguments that tended towards nationalist thinking and foreshadowed the actual arrival of that thinking47 in a well‑known process of inventing/re‑inventing tradition that was also expressed in other heritage “monuments” such as food, the subject of Adrianne Jacobs’s paper. The prolific cookbook author V.V. Pokhlebkin stressed the prime importance of an authentic national cuisine over the nutritional recommendations of Soviet hygienism and Western imperialism. This gastronomic historicism was an overt return to the past and tradition, a clear desire to re‑educate Russians in the real tastes of their own cuisine, convivial and pleasurable in nature, better than any set of imposed standards for guaranteeing good health. The heritage phenomenon, part of public policy at All‑Union level, was not restricted to European Russia. Architectural renovation and heritage conservation could also be seen in Samarkand, declared “oldest city in the USSR,”48 Yerevan, where archaeological research was made use of by the proponents of cultural heritage to construct memories49, and Tbilisi, where initiatives both institutional and informal developed to restore places of worship in particular.50

28 A generation gap can be seen in the social practice of time. The youngest generations display two types of attitude. Some of them complied with the ideas put forward by the authorities, appropriating the cult of the Second World War within specifically designed political and institutional organisations : when Brezhnev introduced the public holiday commemorating the victory of 9 May in 1965, the komsomol, covered by the media, was in charge of promoting the memory of the War, its heroes and the exploits of the Red Army. This patriotic construction encountered a degree of support. One example is the beskozyrka (sailor’s cap) ritual described by Vicky Davis, in which since 1968 young men in Novorossiisk have celebrated the liberation of the Black Sea port by the Soviet regiment working from the stronghold of Malaya Zemlya, whose name happened to be chosen for the first volume of Brezhnev’s memoirs. Although he had only played a minor part in this operation, Brezhnev got the local authorities to indulge in an exercise of mutual self‑congratulation by awarding the city the Order of the Great Patriotic War. The cult of this feat, which kept its popularity for many years, was then adopted locally by the official youth movement, who turned it into an act of romantic and highly patriotic virility. Brezhnev’s “memoirs,” whose origins are entertainingly traced by Nikolaus Katzer, were also an attempt to give young people a model Soviet trajectory with fewer pretentions. In the three volumes, corresponding to three formative episodes in Brezhnev’s life, the official ghost‑writers paint the portrait of an average Soviet citizen that anyone could identify with, since he embodied a combination of all the popular figures in society : worker, son of a peasant, combatant, technician, the General Secretary personified upward social mobility and undemanding consensus.

29 But identification with past heroes and Brezhnev himself was hardly enough to constitute the self‑representations of the last generations of Soviet citizens. The lack of any horizon of expectancy, largely due to the standardisation of codes during the Brezhnev years (assimilation of socialist values, routine role of the Party and highly conventional organisation structures) and to socio‑economic stability, prevented many having a tangible, positive perception of the future. The impression of an unchanging regime was the most frequent one among the Soviet citizens of the “last generation”

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and some of them slipped away into chimerical visions exemplified in works of science fiction.51 The USSR produced its own science fiction books and films, from the novels of the Strugatskii brothers to Tarkovskii’s Stalker. In nearby socialist Bulgaria, they even showed the cult American film Star Wars, whose reception Nadège Ragaru details with its many facets. She rejects the implicitly “dissident” interpretation of audiences thirsting for alternatives to the Socialist model, and demonstrates that the enthusiasm for George Lucas’s science fiction narrative was not so much a fascination with an imagined West as an expression of doubt about the common challenges of a world of technology. This dream of a world beyond blocs was a sort of nostalgia for the future : after national enthusiasm at the space exploits of the Thaw, the Soviet Union’s heroes were dying (Gagarin and Korolev) and worries were growing about the cost of space exploration at a time of political stagnation.52

30 As in other industrialised countries, Soviet society in the late 1970s was increasingly confining itself within a present that offered no hope of a better future and was no longer unanimously agreed on its connections to the past, except to the Second World War, a new foundation period replacing that of the Revolution.53 The vision of history contained in official history was being attacked from both sides : the culture of factographic memory made the past not the origin of the future but rather a repository of observations for immediate consumption. And the disappearance of a Communism on the horizon sent each individual back to their own contingent circumstances. This sense of infinite presentism typical of industrial societies may explain Yurchak’s line, “Everything was forever.”

Conclusion

31 The fact remains, however, that our inability to examine policy documents (from Party or government, at all levels of the administration), the total closure of the central archives of the KGB, army, MVD, and the military‑industrial complex, and our severely restricted access to the papers of the ministries of industry, statistics, finance, budget and planning make it hard for historians to undertake a straightforward study of the Brezhnev years, much harder than for the 1920s to 1950s.54 This largely explains the relative lack of historiographical interest in the period, since research is hampered by the lack of written evidence.55 The difficulty of accessing documents dealing with painful and embarrassing issues — KGB surveillance, the shadow cast by the penitentiary system over society and the economy, army barracks life, poverty in rural Russia — throws a veil over the daily life of those on the margins. As a result, there is the risk of emphasising the normality of Soviet life by focusing on the educated urban classes rather than outsiders both urban and rural. The research based on interviews of people from a fairly homogenous background — the educated and socially privileged elite in major cities — tends to do just that. Conversely, the papers by Florin, Swain and Chida introduce a degree of social, geographical and national diversity that is often lacking in studies of the Brezhnev years.56 However, this inability to use documentary evidence of political, economic, foreign policy and military decision‑making, which is likely to continue, does provide an incentive to innovate and seek alternative sources. And that is what the authors we have brought together have attempted, by either taking interviews as a major corpus or mobilising previously unused collections of documents.

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32 Despite these failings of historiography and the nuances required to portray any period, we may make so bold as to replace the term “stagnation” for the Brezhnev years by that of “apogee” or “heyday.” True, the gap between major social changes (urbanisation, feminisation, more education, consumption) and political immobility did justify Mikhail Gorbachev’s introduction of the term “stagnation” into political discourse to censure his predecessors and contrast with his own movement of “acceleration” (uskorenie). He rightly attacked the inability of the political leadership to respond to the growing discontent of the educated classes and the experts who pointed out structural problems and suggested solutions.57

33 But seen through the experience of most Soviet citizens, whether synchronously or diachronously, the Brezhnev period meant years of family and personal happiness that was at last predictable, lives no longer tossed back and forth by war and revolution, happiness that seemed all the more achievable now that the Communist horizon in the most dogmatic sense had disappeared. This stability in people’s life‑stories accounts for the nostalgia for “advanced socialism” expressed by many post‑Soviet citizens today, especially when compared with what they see as the wretched daily lives of tens of millions in Eastern Europe. Aside from this hindsight assessment, the USSR under Brezhnev did indeed experience a sort of social pacification, at the cost of strict law enforcement mainly against petty crime, but also because of negotiable arrangements at local level for social, economic and professional activities. For all the structural malfunctions of the economy and the regime’s inability to reform itself, the popularisation of consumer culture after decades of severe, chronic shortages, led to a civilisation of leisure in which holidays, travel, sport, creation and entertainment were extending the possibilities for personal fulfilment. These activities often sowed the seeds of autonomous action in new social settings and new subjective awarenesses that would blossom at the end of the Soviet era.

NOTES

1. Edwin Bacon, Mark Sandle, “Brezhnev Reconsidered,” in Edwin Bacon, Mark Sandle, eds., Brezhnev Reconsidered, (Basingstoke : Palgrave [Studies in Russian and East European History and Society], 2002), 1‑21. 2. Boris Belge, Martin Deuerlein, eds., Goldenes Zeitalter Der Stagnation ? Perspektiven Auf Die Sowjetische Ordnung Der Breznev‑Ära (Tübingen, 2014) ; Marie‑Janine Calic, Dietmar Neutatz, and Julia Obertreis, eds., The Crisis of Socialist Modernity : The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1970s (Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011) ; David Crowley, Susan E. Reid, Pleasures in Socialism : Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc (Northwestern University Press, 2010) ; Neringa Klumbyte, Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, eds., Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964‑1985 (Lanham : Lexington Boks, 2013) ; The Socialist Sixties : Crossing Borders in the Second World (Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2013). 3. Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers : An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation, (Oxford – New York : Oxford University Press [Oxford Oral History Series], 2012) ; Alexei Yurchak,

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Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More : The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2006). 4. According to opinion polls, Russians consider Brezhnev to have been the best leader in the country’s history, ahead of Stalin ; and his term of office to have been an excellent time. Survey respondents in Russia tend to project the relative prosperity and stability of the Brezhnev years onto the earlier periods. “Epokhi v zhizni strany : El´tsyn, Gorbachev, Brezhnev,” accessed February 15, 2014, http://www.levada.ru/press/2011012601.html. 5. Contra Anne E. Gorsuch, Diane Koenker, “Introduction : The Socialist Sixties in Global Perspective,” in Anne E. Gorsuch, Diane Koenker, eds. The Socialist Sixties : Crossing Borders in the Second World, (Bloomington, Indiana : Indiana University Press, 2013), 1‑21. 6. On the 1970s : Niall Ferguson, et al., eds., The Shock of the Global : The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA : The Belknap Press of Harvard university press, 2010) ; Calic, Neutatz, Obertreis, éds., « Introduction », in The Crisis of Socialist Modernity, 7‑27. 7. Cahiers du Monde russe, CFP “Beyond Brezhnevism” available at http:// monderusse.revues.org/7499 8. Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era, (New York : Routledge [BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies 90], 2013) ; Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers ; Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More ; Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City : The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960‑1985 (Washington, D.C. – Baltimore, MD : Woodrow Wilson Center Press Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 9. Generalised to Soviet history as a whole : Anna Krylova, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,” Kritika : Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, 1 (2000) : 119‑146. 10. Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted : The Soviet Collapse, 1970‑2000 (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2001), 48‑49. 11. Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy : An Economic History of the USSR from 1945, Postwar World (London – New York : Longman, 2003), 98‑99 ; Nicolas Werth, Histoire de l’Union Soviétique de Khrouchtchev À Gorbatchev (1953‑1991), 3rd ed. (PUF, 2007), 463‑464. 12. Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma : Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953‑70, Eurasia Past and Present (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2013), 212‑257 ; Denis Kozlov, The Readers of Novyi Mir : Coming to Terms with the Stalinist Past (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2013), 429‑432. 13. Andreï Kozovoï, Par‑Delà Le Mur : La Culture de Guerre Froide Soviétique Entre Deux Détentes (P. : Complexe, 2009) ; Ragna Boden, “Soviet World Policy in the 1970s : A Three‑Level Game,” in The Crisis of Socialist Modernity : The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1970s, in Calic, Neutatz, and Obertreis, eds., 184‑203. 14. Yoram Gorlizki, “Too Much Trust : Regional Party Leaders and Local Political Networks under Brezhnev,” Slavic Review 69, 3 (October 1, 2010) : 676‑700. 15. With the exception of the violent Sino‑Soviet clashes on the River Ussuri in 1969, Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino‑Soviet Split : Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton, NJ : Princeton university press, 2008), 340‑342. 16. Samuel H. Baron, Bloody Saturday in the Soviet Union : Novocherkassk, 1962 (Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press, 2001). 17. Vladimir Kozlov, Massovye besporiadki v SSSR pri Hrushcheve. 1953‑ nachalo 1980‑kh gg [Mass disturbances in the USSR under Khruschev. From 1953 to the beginning of the 1980’s], 3rd ed. (М. : ROSSPEN, 2010), 421. 18. V. Kozlov, « Kramola : Inokamyslie v SSSR vo vremena N. Hrushcheva, I.L. Brezhneva (Po materialam Verkhovnova Suda i Prokuratury SSSR),” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennosti, no. 3 (2002) : 84.

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19. Three Moscow bombings in 1977 attributed to Armenian nationalists (Kozlov, 435), frequent aircraft hijack attempts from 1970, often intended for escapes abroad. 20. Kotkin, Armageddon, 44, speaks of a brief symbiosis between the population and the authorities. 21. Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer : Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2009) ; Brian LaPierre, Hooligans in Khrushchev’s Russia : Defining, Policing, and Producing Deviance during the Thaw (Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 2012). 22. Compared with fewer than 200 in the United States, before the “successes” of the “war against drugs” shot that country in a few short years to the rank of uncontested leader of the penitentiary utopia, with imprisonment rates comparable to those of Stalin’s Gulag. 23. Quoted by Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy, 99. 24. James R. Millar, “The Little Deal : Brezhnev’s Contribution to Acquisitive Socialism,” Slavic Review 44, 4 (1985) : 694‑706. 25. Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy, 99. 26. Kotkin, Armageddon, 15‑16 ; Frank Bösch, “1973 : Energiewende Nach Osten,” Die Zeit, October 18, 2013, sec. Geschichte, http://www.zeit.de/2013/42/1973‑gas‑pipeline‑ sowjetunion‑gazprom.. 27. Contra Calic, Neutatz, and Obertreis, “Introduction.” 28. Stephen Kotkin, “The Kiss of Debt. The East Bloc Goes Borrowing,” in Ferguson et al., eds., The Shock of the Global, 80‑93. 29. Poul Villaume, Odd Arne Westad, eds., Perforating the Iron Curtain : European Détente, Transatlantic Relations, and the Cold War, 1965‑1985 (Copenhagen, Denmark : Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2010). 30. Nadège Ragaru, Antonela Capelle‑Pogacean, eds., Vie Quotidienne et Pouvoirs Sous Le Communisme : La Consommation Revisitée, (Paris : Karthala [Recherches Internationales], 2010) ; Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era. 31. Christian Noack, “Songs from the Wood, Love from the Fields : The Soviet Tourist Song Movement,” in Gorsuch, Koenker, eds., The Socialist Sixties, 167‑192. 32. Susan Reid, David Crowley, eds., Pleasures in Socialism : Leisure and Luxury in the Eastern Bloc, (Northwestern University Press, 2010), 21 et seq. 33. Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy,129‑130 ; Kotkin, Armageddon, 19. 34. Agreeing with Calic, Neutatz, Obertreis, “Introduction,” 19. 35. Ragaru, Capelle‑Pogacean, Vie Quotidienne et Pouvoirs Sous Le Communisme, 18, 22 36. Marc Elie, « Coping with the “Black Dragon” : Mudflow Hazards and the Controversy over the Medeo Dam in Kazakhstan, 1958‑66 », Kritika : Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 14, 2 (2013) : 313‑342. 37. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, “Modernity Unbound : The New Soviet City of the Sixties,” in Gorsuch, Koenker, eds., The Socialist Sixties, 66‑83. 38. Christopher Ward, Brezhnev’s Folly : The Building of BAM and Late Soviet Socialism (Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009) ; Johannes Grützmacher, Die Baikal‑Amur‑Magistrale : vom stalinistischen Lager zum Mobilisierungsprojekt unter Breznev (München : Oldenbourg, 2012). 39. Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia : A Study of Practices, (Berkeley, Calif : University of California Press [Studies on the History of Society and Culture 32], 1999) ; Deborah A. Field, Private Life and Communist Morality in Khrushchev’s Russia (Peter Lang, 2007). 40. Sergei I. Zhuk, “‘Cultural Wars’ in the Closed City of Soviet Ukraine, 1959‑1982,” in Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964‑1985, in Klumbyte, Sharafutdinova, eds., Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism 67-90 ; Yitzhak Brudny, Reinventing Russia. Russian Nationalism and

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the Soviet State, 1953‑1991 (Cambridge [UK] – New York : Harvard University Press, 2000) ; Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia : Dvizhenie Russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR 1953‑1985 [Le parti russe : Le mouvement des nationalistes russes en URSS 1953‑1985] (М. : NLO, 2003). 41. Nina Tumarkin, The Living & the Dead : The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York NY : Basic Books, 1994) ; Jonathan Brunstedt, “Building a Pan‑Soviet Past : The Soviet War Cult and the Turn Away from Ethnic Particularism,” The Soviet and Post‑Soviet Review 38, 2 (September 1, 2011) : 149‑171, doi :10.1163/187633211X589114. 42. Nikolai Koposov, Pamiat´ strogogo rezhima : istoriia i politika v Rossii (M. : NLO, 2011). 43. François Hartog, Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps (P. : Éditions du Seuil, 2012). 44. Denis Kozlov, “The Historical Turn in Late Soviet Culture : Retrospectivism, Factography, Doubt, 1953‑1991,” Kritika : Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2, 3 (Summer 2001) : 577‑600, 578‑581. Taken from the Russian “faktografiia”, the accumulation of facts with no analysis or generalisation. 45. See also Zhuk’s analysis in this volume of the factographic approach as a way for United States historians to escape censorship. 46. Concerning the twists and turns of religious monument conservation in the 1950s and 1960s, see Anne Kropotkine, “Les ambiguïtés du Dégel,” Cahiers du Monde russe. 47, 1‑2 (January‑June, 2006) : 269‑302, doi :10.4000/monderusse.3802. 47. Brudny, Reinventing Russia, sees VOOPIiK as a cradle for Russian nationalism ; Silvia Serrano identifies groups of nationalist Georgian students who took the initiative to restore churches in the name of Georgian heritage and national identity, in “Religion, pouvoir, identités en Géorgie post‑soviétique,” HDR, directed by Patrick Michel, EHESS, 2014. 48. Drevneishii gorod SSSR. 49. Svetlana Gorshenina and Claude Rapin, De Kaboul à Samarcande : les archéologues en Asie centrale (P. : Gallimard, 2001) ; Taline Ter Minassian, Erevan : La Construction D’une Capitale À L’époque Soviétique (Rennes : PUR, 2007). 50. Serrano, “Religion, pouvoir, identités en Géorgie post‑soviétique,” 45‑46. 51. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, until It Was No More. 52. Asif A. Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare : Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857‑1957 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2014), 300‑301. 53. Koposov, Pamiat´ strogogo rezhima. 54. Although conditions of access are certainly different in the Baltic countries and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine and Georgia. 55. It is surprising to note that this tendency is not even mentioned in Bacon and Sandle, “Brezhnev Reconsidered” ; Gorsuch, Koenker, “Introduction : The Socialist Sixties in Global Perspective” ; Klumbytė, Sharafutdinova, “What Was Late Socialism ?,” in Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964‑1985, 1‑14. 56. However, see Stéphane A. Dudoignon, Christian Noack, eds., Allah’s kolkhozes : Migration, de‑Stalinisation, Privatisation and the New Muslim Congregations in the Soviet Realm (1950s‑2000s) (Berlin : Klaus Schwarz Verlag [Islamkundliche Untersuchungen Band 314], 2014). 57. M.S. Gorbachev, « Politicheskij doklad centralńogo komiteta KPSS XXVII s´ézdu kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo soiuza », in M.S. Gorba©ev, Izbrannye rechi u statí, M. : Politizdat, 1987, t. 3. http://lib.ru/MEMUARY/GORBACHEV/doklad_xxvi.txt

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AUTHORS

MARC ELIE CERCEC, EHESS-CNRS, Paris

ISABELLE OHAYON CERCEC, EHESS-CNRS, Paris

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Mobiliser le passé : encadrement de la mémoire collective vs. pratiques sociales de conservation

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Iurii Trifonov’s fireglow and the “mnemonic communities” of the brezhnev era Otblesk kostra [Le Reflet du brasier] de Jurij Trifonov et les communautés mnémoniques de l’ère brejnévienne

Polly Jones

The author thanks Miriam Dobson, Dan Healey, Simon Huxtable, Mike Nicholson, Robert Service, Andrei Zorin and the anonymous reviewers for Cahiers and the special issue editors for their help with this article. Versions were presented at the University of Cambridge, University of Amsterdam and University of Oxford, and the author is grateful for the feedback received on each occasion.

1 “I want terribly to write something—maybe not a book, maybe a story or a sketch— about the days of revolution, about my father. For some reason, I’m afraid to take on this theme.”1 With this diary entry of late January 1957, the writer Iurii Trifonov first signalled his intent to write the work that he published, nearly a decade later, as Fireglow : a biography of his Old Bolshevik father, Valentin Trifonov and uncle Evgenii Trifonov, which evolved into a prosopography of many repressed Old Bolsheviks as well as the controversial (and only very recently rehabilitated) Cossack military leaders, Filipp Mironov and Boris Dumenko, Valentin’s colleagues during the Civil War in the Don.2 This earliest mention of the work proved prescient about the difficulties of researching and writing it, and of defining its genre : when Fireglow first came out in Znamia in early 1965, this “documentary tale” took up fewer than 50 pages of the journal.3 When published as a book in 1966 by Sovetskii pisatel´, it had grown to nearly twice its original size, by incorporating the first publication’s enormous response from readers, especially contemporaries of Trifonov’s father and uncle and of Mironov and Dumenko.4

2 The hybrid documentary‑literary genre of this text and the text’s expansion through incorporation of readers’ memories and historical data (as well as the author’s “fear” about this research’s publication prospects) places it in a long tradition of collaborative

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and open‑ended historical texts, dating back at least as far as Aleksandr Pushkin’s research into Pugachev.5 However, this article will focus on the specific forms of collaborative, public‑private historical writing engendered by the shifting norms of Brezhnev‑era Soviet literature, historiography and public memory. The second half of the 1960s was characterised by post‑thaw uncertainty about the boundaries between publishable and unpublishable historical narrative, by ongoing official restrictions on empirical research into the revolution and Stalinism, and by a burgeoning “historical turn” in the Soviet population, especially amongst the ageing Old Bolshevik community with whom Trifonov formed extensive links.6 This left texts published during this juncture, such as Fireglow, both open‑ended and open to question with regard to their Soviet credentials.

3 For over a decade of the Brezhnev era, Fireglow hovered at the boundary between official and unofficial historical narrative : its initial journal version was republished as a much longer book and then adapted into Trifonov’s much later novel The Old Man (1978), but the text also fell victim to the tightening state constraints on empirical research and on rethinking the Leninist and Stalinist past. In contrast to analogous, contemporary collaborative historical projects such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago—a parallel explored further in the conclusion—Trifonov’s text, and the “mnemonic communities” that it both created and illuminated, never conceived of themselves as dissident, even though much of their discussion had to take place in unofficial fora such as letter‑writing and domestic interviews.

4 In this sense, not only Trifonov’s published writings—often viewed as only marginally Soviet—but also his unpublished discussions with his readers complicate the apparent binary division between Soviet and dissident history‑writing, and between this period’s cultural and communicative memory of the Soviet past.7 Indeed, Fireglow’s long afterlife in both unpublished discussion and published “rewritings” suggests that this blurring of boundaries extended well beyond the transitional flux of the immediate post‑Khrushchev years, lasting until the end of Trifonov’s life (in 1981) and possibly to the end of the Brezhnev era, a year later.

“Archive Monts Blancs”8 : Researching and Writing Fireglow

5 Iurii Trifonov’s father, arrested and killed in the Great Terror of 1937‑1938 when his son was only 11 years old, haunted his son’s literary career from the start.9 However, it was not until the 1960s that Trifonov’s works paid sustained attention to his father’s role in Leninism and his death under Stalinism. Towards the end of the Khrushchev era, his production novel The Slaking of Thirst featured a sub‑plot about a traumatized son of a victim of 1937.10 With the first publication of Fireglow in 1965, though, Trifonov’s oeuvre took a turn towards the personal, the factual and the historical, with a corresponding shift in genre and form.11 Yet the text remained unstable, fraught with anxiety about establishing and revealing truth, and thus open to correction and supplementation by its readers.

6 The Trifonov brothers had been rehabilitated, after nearly two decades as “enemies of the people,” in 1955 and 1956. Yet, as with many terror victims, efforts to rescue them from these decades of oblivion were halting and fragmentary.12 Their names appeared

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in scattered works of historiography in the late Khrushchev era, but before Trifonov’s work, the longest tribute to Valentin came in a 1963 article in the main army newspaper written by a small group of Old Bolshevik colleagues.13 His son’s more concerted attempt to tell the story of the life of his father (and uncle) was already well underway by the time that this tribute appeared. When he started research for it in the early 1960s, Trifonov was struck as much by the gaps as by the “archival Monts Blancs” of information about his topic. This tension between being overwhelmed and disappointed by documents would endure throughout the text’s subsequent drafting, reception and rewriting.

7 On the one hand, State and Party archives, including the main party archive at the Institute of Marxism‑Leninism, the principal state archive (TsGAOR) and the Central Museum of the Soviet Army, all contained copious records about his father and uncle, which the author notated, often verbatim over many pages of his notebooks. These ranged from police records about the brothers’ earliest period of party work in the revolutionary “underground” to telegrams, speeches and phone transcripts confirming the brothers’ central role in the revolution and on multiple fronts of the Civil War. Given the stigma long attached to both men, and to countless colleagues repressed during Stalinist terror, these files had long been unavailable and unappealing to researchers. Trifonov was therefore often the first person to have ever looked at them, making his work inherently innovative and valuable.14

8 On the other hand, though, partly because of the two decades of “forced forgetting” of the Trifonov brothers and many of their fellow revolutionaries, and partly due to their unrelenting party work and the chaos of the Civil War, many records of their contribution to Bolshevism had been destroyed, lost or never preserved in the first place. Trifonov did also have access to some family materials such as the diary of his uncle, Pavel Lur´e, and the memoirs of Pavel’s mother Tat´iana Slovatinskaia, with which to supplement party‑state materials. Equally, however, he was aware of how few direct family memories he himself possessed, due to his father’s relentless work schedule, and then his 1937 arrest.

9 There was a particular poignancy to the fact that this son was thus forced to resort to others’ records in order to fill the gaping holes in his own memories of his father, but even before Fireglow’s first publication, the author had also started to hear from writers and readers around the Soviet Union reporting similar gaps in knowledge about the Trifonov brothers. This correspondence evoked the critical need for more (or even any) information about them, as in one 1963 letter from a certain Mikhailenko, who had briefly met the brothers during the war, but craved more publications about them, to fill the gaps in his personal memories.15 It also began to forge a mnemonic community of Old Bolsheviks, veterans and historians, which would expand further after the text’s first publication, generating the much fuller second edition of Fireglow and thereafter granting the text a rich afterlife.

10 For example, in the early 1960s, before he had started research in earnest, Trifonov corresponded with a historian, M. Batorgin, who was writing a history of the Bolsheviks in pre‑revolutionary Rostov, where both Trifonov brothers had started their party careers. Confident that Valentin and Trifonov were now rightfully restored to the “pleiade” of local revolutionaries, and well‑informed about their pre‑revolutionary activities, Batorgin first wrote in 1960 to say that he still did not know “how the life path of both men ends.”16 When Trifonov wrote back to Batorgin with this information,

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together with news of his planned biography, their correspondence broadened, taking in a wider range of biographical episodes, yet also became more focussed on checking specific facts and details. However, this historical and historiographical correspondence was couched not just in the idiom of fact (or factography), but also, like Batorgin’s first letter, in the language of faith. “Iurii Trifonov,” he solemnly proclaimed, “I never doubted the devotion of both brothers to the party.” Batorgin’s project, ultimately published in Rostov just before Fireglow, was methodologically and ethically (though not stylistically) akin to Trifonov’s text : both blended archival sources with eyewitness testimony and snippets of information from published histories, in order to represent the brothers as fully and truthfully as the fragmentary surviving evidence permitted. However, both also sought to mythologise them as exemplars of a distinctively Leninist ideal of revolutionary and party devotion, cast into oblivion by terror and subsequent historical falsification.17

11 As Trifonov’s work on the manuscript intensified, and especially after previews of the work appeared in the Soviet press of 1963‑64, the author engaged in correspondence with several surviving colleagues of his father and uncle in order to hone the final draft of his text. The most frequent and engaged of these was the formerly repressed, now rehabilitated, Civil War veteran Ivan Vrachev.18 Vrachev had first written to Trifonov immediately after the author first publicly announced his plans to write about his father in 1963.19 “Agitated” by the discovery that Iurii Trifonov was the son of the man under whom he had fought on several fronts of the Civil War (and had then met in the 1930s), Vrachev was also relieved that the author had dared to raise “important questions” avoided by most Soviet historians who “are still acting very slowly and unfortunately at times with one eye on those constraints that you mention.”20 Thereafter, Vrachev continued to follow the material that Trifonov published about his father in 1964, and offered scrupulous feedback on drafts of the Znamia manuscript prior to its 1965 publication.21

12 On each occasion, Vrachev checked facts, pointed out errors and, where possible, sent the correct information instead. At times, Vrachev could not entirely clarify matters, but at others, he corrected the text with supreme confidence.22 An example of the latter came in his response to an early draft of Fireglow, where he acclaimed Trifonov’s use of historical and archival material, but criticised him for being “very modest in your evaluations of the revolutionary activity of your father.” Claiming that “I can judge this because I knew your father,” he insisted that Trifonov change his assessment of his military record to reflect the fact that that it “was not ordinary, but outstanding.”23 Reading a later draft at the end of 1964, Vrachev acclaimed the further progress that Trifonov had made towards becoming a “historian” and “expert in your field” ; this was now a “historical sketch […] written with the hand of an artist.” Still, though, Vrachev remained unsatisfied with the “modesty” of Trifonov’s presentation of Valentin ; it was his opinion—and the collective judgement of Old Bolsheviks—that he was, as previously pointed out, an “outstanding” figure.24

13 Trifonov quickly finished writing the book in late 1964 and submitted it to Znamia, without exploring all the avenues suggested by Vrachev. Like several colleagues at this juncture who were also trying to publish works about the Soviet past (especially those touching on the “cult of personality”), he was conscious that his publication chances might be dwindling with every day since the ouster of Khrushchev in late 1964.25 Znamia had greater success in publishing such texts than Novyi mir in the early

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Brezhnev era, due to its more conservative reputation and to the fact that it subjected such prospective publications to very stringent internal review before they even reached censors and other party‑state officials.26 Fireglow “squeaked in through a crack in the door” in this transitional epoch not only due to the subtlety of its criticisms of Stalinism and its unmistakable affirmation of Leninist ideals, but also thanks to the constructive critique provided by the main manuscript reviewer, the historian Vasilii Polikarpov.27 His late 1964 report sought not to criticise or dismiss the writer’s lack of historical expertise (as historian‑reviewers often did for Znamia and other journals), but rather to safeguard against political pot‑shots Trifonov’s important enterprise of “recreating bit by bit the identity of party‑state actors, hounded by Stalinist arbitrariness.” “The slightest imprecisions,” he warned, “will be used by the proselytisers of the cult, who will never lay down their weapons in trying to discredit what Iurii Trifonov has written.” Polikarpov therefore provided over a dozen pages of corrected dates, names and posts, as well as explaining at length why the sensitive military careers of Mironov and Dumenko had to be treated with the utmost care and nuance. Admiring Trifonov’s pioneering work, he sensed that his attempted factual reconstruction and reputational rehabilitation would face resistance in this period of lingering Stalinist legacies and threatened re‑Stalinisation.28

14 Polikarpov was prescient : while its later readers offered copious factual corrections and additions of the kind that Polikarpov gave here, Fireglow also attracted public and private criticism after publication, especially concerning Dumenko and Mironov. As Polikarpov also predicted, this battle was often fought at the level of microscopic detail, with all sides claiming factual accuracy and historical “truth.” Yet these ferocious exchanges also forged bonds between like‑minded literary and historical writers, as presaged by Polikarpov’s assistance, and between Trifonov and historians and eyewitnesses amongst his readership, as already indicated in his pre‑publication correspondence with a few such informants. The journal publication vastly expanded such discussion and collaboration. This was precisely because, as the next section explores, the text itself emphasised its inadequate historical data and memories, and invited more qualified readers to supplement and rewrite the text.

A Post‑memory text ?

15 In both of its published versions, Fireglow wove a tapestry of different sources, voices and methodologies, to attain the most complete possible picture of its biographical and historical subjects. It has been described as painstaking and “palaeological,” its deep commitment to “scrupulous” “reconstruction” visible on every page.29 Yet, more than the correspondence that preceded it, it also acknowledged gaps and silences in memory that were difficult or impossible to fill.30 Josephine Woll’s observation that Trifonov’s texts alternate between accretion and deconstruction of historical truth is particularly apt for Fireglow.31 Trifonov’s particular difficulties in researching his father and uncle were partly down to the official forgetting suffered by both (and hundreds of their colleagues), exacerbating the natural loss of memory and factual accuracy caused by time passing. They were also, though, connected to the peculiar meanings of biography in Bolshevik ethics, which suppressed individual thoughts of posterity in favour of full‑time service to the collective. All these themes and tensions are evident in the opening of the work, whose ambivalent, proliferating symbolism and diverse narrative

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modes immediately challenge the conventions of history and biography. Therefore, even when a more linear biographical narrative does get underway soon afterwards, the enigmatic prologue suggests that the reader should continue to seek hidden meanings beneath the careful, apparently prosaic compilation of documents about both men.32

16 The first paragraph of the text is immediately unsettling, plunging the reader into an abstract, ambiguous image of history and its effect on people. The initial metaphor evokes the different ways in which the eponymous “glow” (otblesk) of history is reflected on individuals, some barely warmed by it, but others burned. To this ambiguous metaphor is then added a simile likening history to a “huge fire” (the also eponymous koster), fuelled by each individual’s contribution(s). History is thus harmful and helpful, both an agent of destruction, but also an object of individual and communal construction.33

17 This portentous but ambiguous symbol is left without further explanation, the narrative then switching abruptly to a bucolic scene of the narrator and his father playing outside.34 From the abstract view of history in the first paragraph, we now focus in upon identifiable individuals and fond family memories. Yet the text remains unsettled and unsettling. The toys for the pair’s game turn out to be paper snakes, fashioned from old Civil War maps. Already transformed from documents into toys, these snakes, like the “fire” of the opening passage, continue to take on further meanings : a sudden chronological leap forward and switch of tone links the father’s carelessly destructive attitude to documents to his own destruction during the Great Terror (the night‑time arrest takes place at the same countryside location as the game‑playing).35 In a further leap forward across several decades, the adult narrator is then shown trying to reconstruct his father’s life, and mourning the silences caused partly by his father’s carelessness.

18 Yet he is also deeply seduced by “going after the documents” that had somehow been preserved : “they were all bathed in a red light,” he explains, “the glow of that huge, thundering fire in which all past Russian life burned.” This return of the “fire” image confirms the deeper continuity between the seemingly incongruous narrative modes of the opening passages, while further deepening the ambiguity of that image. The narrator’s father is now shown “stand[ing] close to the fire,” as one of the main “stokers” of revolution, this central but vulnerable position again evoking history’s destructive force and individuals’ contributions to its progress.36

19 This opening destabilises the narrative as much as it clarifies what is to come. It is “not a historical sketch, not a memoir about my father, not a biography of him, not an obituary,” the narrator explains, and it lacks the “comprehensiveness” and “linear form” of conventional biography or historiography.37 The destruction of people, documents and memories, so powerfully evoked through the symbolic and narrative shifts of the opening passage, makes such a complete, coherent narrative impossible. On the other hand, the opening to Fireglow also affirms that it is now possible for the narrator to “speak out loud” about previously stigmatised figures (the reasons for this greater openness are veiled, as is most of the text’s subsequent criticism of Stalin), and to use the remaining documentary traces (“old telegrams, protocols, newspapers, leaflets, letters”) to forge a direct connection not only to his father, but to the revolution more broadly.38 The text’s apparently disorientating, de‑stabilising opening

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in fact therefore establishes the key theme of the text : the difficulty, but also the necessity and obligation, of reconstructing historical truth and revolutionary ideals.

20 Within the rest of Fireglow, these tensions between deconstruction and reconstruction of memory are above all visible in the shifting structure of the povest´ and in the different ways that its narrator deploys his sources. Structurally, after the complicated opening, the text takes a broadly chronological approach to the brothers’ lives, starting not at birth or childhood, but only from the moment of their first involvement with radical politics in the early 20th century. This focus on the brothers’ ideological maturity means that the narrative can be structured around the successive party posts that they held in the pre‑revolutionary and early post‑revolutionary years, only very rarely pausing to reflect on their personalities, and not at all on their private lives. Indeed, their behaviour in these successive party posts is driven less by personal characteristics than by Bolshevik ethics, especially Leninist justice, a theme that unites many episodes and positive characters (including Lenin and Aron Sol´ts).

21 However, as the opening (non‑)definition of the text’s genre had warned, this could not be an entirely chronological and coherent narrative, and indeed there are frequent interruptions and disruptions to this orderly progression.39 The chronological account of the revolution and Civil War periodically leaps forward to the Great Terror, the narrator’s traumatic foreknowledge of this catastrophe irrupting into the text. As already shown, Valentin’s arrest and death appear from very early in the text, and Evgenii’s terror‑related fatal heart attack similarly looms into the middle of a passage about April 1918.40 The tragic deaths of several other figures are also suddenly foreshadowed in the midst of the revolution and Civil War, highlighting the tragedy of the party’s later turn against its heroes.41

22 In a similar way, the narrator’s reflections on his sources and methods alternate between faithful reconstruction of the events and ideals of the time, on the one hand, and interludes of frustration at the gaps and silences in the record, on the other. The text attains its greatest fluency in parts based on Pavel Lur´e’s diary of 1917‑1918, where the full quotidian record grants the narrator a firm grasp of events and thus permits him to recount the days of revolution in an unusually vivid, “literary” way, with metaphors and similes suddenly abounding.42 More typically, though, successive episodes are laboriously pieced together out of surviving archive documents, fragments of testimony and carefully selected pre‑ and post‑Stalinist history texts and memoirs.43 The care with which the narrator thus assembles and acknowledges his sources promotes historical methods and ethics sharply distinct from the falsifications and glib fluency of Stalinist historiography.44 At the same time, though, the narrator openly wishes he had more copious sources, and is often self‑conscious about the gaps and distortions in his evidence.

23 The most frequent motif in his meta‑narrative of historical research (introduced at the very start of the story) is the “trunk” of documents left by his father.45 Trifonov’s father’s papers were in fact held (and researched) at an Army archive, but the trunk serves throughout as a symbol for how fragmentary and haphazard the son found this paternal archive to be. While maintaining a largely chronological approach, as indicated above, the narrator is honest about the fact that his text is structured not necessarily by the key landmarks of the era or even of his father’s own life, but rather by the often minor events that could be reconstructed from documents “preserved” by chance in this chaotic, untended archive.46 This deductive method helps to reinforce

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the text’s critique of a priori history writing, and every single trace found is described as valuable and evocative.47 Nevertheless, the text remains haunted throughout by failures of memory, silences in testimony and gaps in the archive.

24 Appropriately, then, the text ends without firm resolution. The final long paragraph traces a horribly inexorable journey into the void : by defying Stalin and Stalinist policy (on the looming war), Valentin seals his fate, and the final lines of his biography tell us what we knew from the start : “people in military uniforms […] appeared in the night at Serebrianyi bor. My father was 49.”48 Yet this tragic end is not quite the end of the narrative : as at the start, the father’s life is framed by broader reflections on history, and in its last appearance in the text’s last sentence, the koster symbol takes on its most positive hue : “and the fire roars and sparks and lights up our faces, and will light up the faces of our children and those who will come after them.”49 The father’s death in the Holocaust of Stalinist terror thus gives way to an image of temporal and ideological continuity, his life’s example burning on for future generations. Yet this sudden shift into the koster metaphor, like the lurch away from it at the start of the text, does not clarify whether the text offers mourning or affirmation of the memory of revolution.

25 The ambiguous views of history, memory and trauma in Fireglow suggest that it is to some degree a “post‑memory” text, or a “post‑memoir” : that is, an account of deeply personal (often family) history shadowed by traumatic ruptures and anxiety about generational distance and gaps in the surviving evidence.50 However, while the majority of “post‑memory” texts can only hope in vain to restore the “intergenerational memorial fabric,” Fireglow made a more robust claim to resurrect revolutionary memory, claiming that the “fire” could burn on, and even be more powerfully reignited, thanks to such texts.51 Yet for this to happen, the historical research and patchy memories of one person (one who was not even alive at the time) were not nearly enough : it was precisely by emphasising the ruptures and silences in his own memories and sources that Trifonov invited his readers to fill them with their own, opening the text up to a collaborative rewriting that ultimately consumed much of the rest of his career.

Reader response and the (post‑) memory of revolution

26 As soon as Fireglow was published, Trifonov was overwhelmed with a “flood” of letters from its readers, which both helped and complicated the task of writing the book edition, while deepening the dilemmas of (post‑)memory dramatised in the original text.52 Some readers simply thanked and praised the author for supplementing fragmentary personal and public knowledge about the brothers. A certain Sal´kov from Odessa, for instance, offered reminiscences about how Valentin had inspired him during the war, but viewed Fireglow as more substantial, “a lifelong memory, and not just for me. It will be a memory for our sons and grandsons.”53 Sal´kov’s letter also expressed sadness that Valentin had become a victim of the “cult of personality,” and amongst Trifonov’s other readers were those who had personally suffered such a fate, placing Trifonov’s reception within the broader phenomenon of 1960s reader response and its discussion of Stalinist terror. Such readers included a repressed Civil War veteran, Del´va, and also a certain Orlova, whose emotional letter to Trifonov recounted that she too had been burned by the “fire” that had ended the brothers’ lives, but had never lost her faith in the party.54

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27 Other responses, though, offered additional testimony to fuel the eponymous “fire” of revolution and keep its memory burning in the present : as Trifonov’s then wife recalled, such correspondence showed how “many people were still alive, [and] they came out after Fireglow was published, sent letters and their documents and archives, shared their memories.”55 Because the text’s narrator had been so open about the inadequacy of his sources, many readers sent in historical evidence and eyewitness testimony to fill these gaps, often expressing a confident commitment to the collaborative, communal restoration of historical truth and revolutionary ideals that was more broadly typical of the early post‑Khrushchev era.56 However, the narrator’s honesty about his incomplete understanding of his father and his evocation of the distance between their respective generations and epochs also left the text vulnerable to critique and even outright rejection, precisely because of this avowedly patchy knowledge. Many readers had a quite different view of the period and personalities depicted, especially of Dumenko and Mironov, and they cited their more direct memories and fuller knowledge of the epoch to prove the superior “truth” of their views. Thus, these initial responses to Fireglow helped to (re)construct a fuller historical picture and thereby to(re)construct a mnemonic community, yet they also deconstructed, even denied, the author’s entitlement to describe the characters and events featured in his text.

28 Within the former, more common, responses after publication, a significant role was played by the same figures who had advised Trifonov prior to publication, such as Vrachev, but also by new Old Bolshevik and historian correspondents. As soon as Fireglow was first published, such readers started to send responses to the text, intended to highlight, and then to fill, the gaps in Trifonov’s account of the revolution and Civil War. The Old Bolshevik Pavel Shalaev, for example, wrote at least 17 letters to Trifonov, Trifonov’s mother and Pavel Lur´e between publication of Trifonov’s “very necessary and well‑written sketch about your father” in early 1965 and the end of that year, sometimes at daily intervals.57 Amongst the material that he feverishly dispatched to the author were unpublished memoir and historical manuscripts (for example, the first volumes of his 6‑volume unpublished autobiography about his time in pre‑revolutionary Tobol´sk), as well as small print‑run, locally published texts (including an article about Aron Sol´ts from a 1961 collection published in Tiumen´ and co‑authored with Nakoriakov).58 Although only some of these works had been published, Shalaev did not present them as illicit samizdat, but rather as a contribution to a forthcoming, important Soviet publication.

29 Despite old age and some serious health problems, Shalaev also responded to Fireglow by accelerating his already intensive writing program, to produce reams of new material about the brothers (including a 40‑page biographical sketch of Valentin), and about other pre‑ and post‑revolutionary figures and events ; again, these were fully intended for publication via Trifonov’s new text.59 Swiftly drafting and dispatching in October 1965 one such batch of material about “his real thoughts about that time,” to allow Trifonov “to understand the spirit of that epoch,” Shalaev acknowledged that his enclosed text lacked a fully worked through form (obrabotka). However, he believed that this was appropriate to their auxiliary function (“this isn’t an article, it’s material !”), and that their lack of “literary” form in fact only underscored their “full sincerity.” 60

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30 For his part, and in a similar vein, Trifonov’s already well‑established correspondent Vrachev sent copious further information to the author after the journal publication. These included a five‑page account of an attack on a Komintern train in 1920, never before written up, a 21‑page list of additions and corrections to the first journal issue and a five‑page list for the second half of Fireglow. Both these lists included numerous proposed insertions, some spanning several pages.61 These proposed rewritings, he explained, were intended to correct Trifonov’s excessively laconic representation of his father and the Civil War : You sped along at maximum motor speed along the south‑eastern and Caucasian fronts. This is hard to agree with, as very important HISTORICAL events occurred on these fronts. It’s irritating to read an abbreviated, dry party questionnaire [anketa] of the subsequent activity of Valentin Trifonov. So for that reason, I am trying to get rid of the gaps [probely] given in the text.62

31 Even after this seemingly exhaustive enumeration of the “gaps” needing to be filled in Trifonov’s text, though, Vrachev still had more to add. As late as the end of 1966 (apparently before seeing the book edition), he sent two more corrections to the journal edition, and even then had to add a post‑script. “No that’s not all,” he wrote, directing Trifonov to look at more historiography and Lenin‑era party documents to clarify his picture of the 1918‑19 period and Lenin’s view on the Cossack question.63

32 Shadowing such factographic collaboration were the other communications involving Old Bolsheviks and veterans that took place after Fireglow’s first publication. Shalaev contacted “old comrades” in Moscow and the Urals after publication, and transmitted details of their communications to the author (and to Lur´e), including several oral and written discussions about Fireglow with his long‑standing collaborator Nikolai Nakoriakov.64 Nakoriakov himself met Trifonov, and in turn introduced the author to more Old Bolshevik survivors.65

33 Such encounters expanded Trifonov’s store of oral history sources while also revealing the close ties and urgent commitment to the memory of revolution that bound together the few surviving remnants of the Old Bolshevik community. However, these exchanges also exacerbated awareness that this community and its memory were fragile, earlier decimated by terror, and now under further threat from memory loss, old age and death. When he met Nakoriakov, for instance, Trifonov was aware that his memories had been fragmented by the chronological distance from the revolution, and by the ageing that he had since undergone.66 Trifonov’s informants also admitted these weaknesses themselves. The seemingly inexhaustible Shalaev occasionally paused in his rapid‑fire correspondence with the author and his relatives to reflect on what he had forgotten, sometimes by quoting Pushkin’s Boris Godunov (“few faces has my memory preserved/few words reach me”).67 When trying to reconstruct the events in Tiumen’ prison involving Evgenii Trifonov in 1909, he explicitly admitted that “remembering what happened half a century ago is getting more difficult.”68 Shalaev also lamented the reluctance of some Old Bolshevik colleagues “to formulate [their] own memories.”69 This elegiac anxiety about memory’s depletion and loss would also haunt the book edition.

34 These offers of written and oral testimony constituted genuine attempts to supplement the gaps in Trifonov’s historical research, with their authors often recognising that Trifonov had the literary skill and celebrity to reach a larger audience than their low‑profile, more drily written historical publications (or manuscripts). However, as

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Polikarpov had predicted, some other readers sought instead to criticise and reject Trifonov’s account, especially its rehabilitating impulse, thus foreshadowing official criticisms of the text later in the Brezhnev era. By far the most controversial issue was the representation of Mironov and Dumenko, though one reader, Shul´ts also repeatedly questioned Valentin’s rehabilitation on the basis of his own observations of his behaviour in 1920.70 The larger body of letters doubting Trifonov’s more positive view of Mironov and Dumenko offered testimony and historical analysis, but again not to supplement Trifonov’s account as much as to undermine and invalidate it. In so doing, they articulated a distinctively post‑Stalinist blend of “exposing” historical truth while still “exposing” enemies.71

35 For example, one of Trifonov’s correspondents, Bogdan Kolćhigin, initially sought to help Trifonov expand his text, but changed his attitude after reading the published version of Fireglow. When Trifonov first wrote to him just before publication, Kolćhigin confirmed that he had “retained very good memories about your father,” and was happy to pass on these memories in order to enrich Trifonov’s “interesting work of commemorating the memory of veterans of the Civil War.” He described at length, for example, his memories of Trifonov’s father’s “very white and healthy full face with an attentive gaze and a pipe in his mouth” and of Trifonov’s uncle “in contrast to your father, dusky, sharp nosed, with […] a severe gaze, speaking little and wearing a pince‑nez.” He ended this first letter to Trifonov by passing on contact details of other veterans who could provide further details about his father and uncle.72 However, after reading the journal version of Fireglow, Kolćhigin sent two, much more critical letters to Trifonov within the space of a single month.73 These expressed his displeasure at Trifonov’s “defence of Dumenko and Mironov” and this time used his superior knowledge of Valentin to refute, rather than to enrich, Trifonov’s narrative. “I am convinced, he claimed in the first of these letters, that your father was of a completely different opinion about Dumenko.” In elaborating on the “large trauma to Soviet education [vospitanie]” that such “muddled” reputational rehabilitations could cause, Kolćhigin accused them of transgressing the scholarly and Soviet rules of historiography : both factually incorrect, and harmful to propaganda.74 Nevertheless, these objections did not entirely over‑ride Kolćhigin’s desire to continue contributing to knowledge about the brothers : both his letters of November 1965 ended with further suggestions for sources and contacts.

36 Other readers, though, used their historical knowledge and personal memories exclusively for the purpose of demolishing Trifonov’s account. A certain Saenko from Rostov wrote to both the author and the journal immediately after publication of Fireglow, to perform such a holistic denial. Beginning with the allegation that Trifonov “had clearly relied on the fact that participants in the events linked to [Dumenko’s] name are no longer alive, or if people are still alive, they don’t know the essence of the matter,” Saenko then claimed to speak on behalf of the “dozens, even hundreds” of people who did know the truth about the events and personalities represented in Fireglow. The rest of his letter advanced a point‑by‑point exposition of how Trifonov’s account of Dumenko didn’t “correspond to reality” : that is, to what Saenko himself had witnessed and experienced during the Civil War in the Don region, and had later confirmed against archive and museum materials. Saenko accompanied this array of facts with broader critiques of Trifonov’s historical methods and ethics. Comrade Iurii Trifonov, he proclaimed towards the end of his letter–, you are highly superficial and free in your approach to illuminating the Dumenko issue.

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You can’t approach historical facts that way. There must be truth [istina] here, and only truth, irrespective of whom it concerns, and whether it’s pleasant, or not entirely pleasant.

37 These references to istina were reinforced in Saenko’s parting statement that “in everything, we need to write the truth [pravda], as it is, and not write only what pleases someone,” again contrasting Saenko’s narrative to the ignorance, even falsification, of Trifonov’s text.75 Saenko left no part of Fireglow’s portrait of Dumenko intact in these efforts to supplant, rather than supplement, Trifonov’s original text.

38 The effects of this reader response on the next version of Fireglow were profound, yet the new text retained the original version’s beliefs about history and memory.76 Most obviously, Trifonov expanded his text almost twofold by incorporating the plentiful evidence sent by his readers. Such generous inclusion of others’ testimony not only reprised Trifonov’s method from the original version, but also resembled the deference to veteran testimony in, for example, Konstantin Simonov’s evolving representations of World War II at this time.77 The majority of such revisions affected the first half’s depiction of the years leading up to the Civil War, and by far the most important “co‑author” of this new text was Shalaev. Long extracts from his voluminous material about the brothers’ pre‑revolutionary imprisonment and exile were inserted, frequently (though not always) acknowledged by name.78 In a similar way, though at lesser length and frequency, Trifonov also wove other information from other Old Bolsheviks and veterans (including Vrachev) into his text. These enriched his text’s account of the Leninist period while subtly affirming the value of such networks of historic and mnemonic exchange.79

39 Yet this expanded source base did not eliminate the difficulties of reconstruction dramatised in Trifonov’s original text ; the new version of Fireglow still mourned irreparable gaps in memory. In the book’s meta‑narrative of his research and drafting of the text, the narrator added further examples of such lacunae : the encounter with Nakoriakov, coming more than five decades after his last meeting with Valentin Trifonov, yielded disappointingly little information, and so did new sources sent from the widow of another colleague of his father, Zakharov.80 It was openly admitted that such exchanges so long after the revolution and terror left only “memories of memories”, but the narrator “had no other memories” to use instead.81

40 In this sense, the second edition reaffirmed the urgency and importance of further investigation of the past ; precisely because most sources or informants could yield only a small amount of usable evidence about the distant past, the collective, incremental gathering of such information had to continue. And indeed, the publication of this second edition suggested no firm official prohibition on this yet. However, some new features of the 1966 text evoked a sense of anxiety that that there might soon be. In adding an anecdote criticising the weak implementation of the 20th Congress’ principles, and in refuting Kol´chigin (named in the text) and other journal readers who had objected to his presentation of Mironov and Dumenko, Trifonov firmly advocated both continuation of the historical research and rehabilitations of the “thaw” (with the concomitant need for nuanced biographies to supplant the stigmatisation of “enemies”).82 Yet, the obstacles to this agenda soon emerged more clearly, and Fireglow became entangled in the new era’s politics of memory and historiography.

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Legends and Facts in the Early Brezhnev era

41 Published in a small print‑run, the book of Fireglow provoked intense reader interest that far outstripped the limited supply of texts. As Shalaev observed to Trifonov in 1967, if it had been published in 3 million copies, they would all still have sold out.83 Fellow historians and literary colleagues wrote to the author asking him for copies of a book that they found impossible to locate in local book shops and libraries ; when copies did exist, they passed from hand to hand, like the most popular Khrushchev‑era fiction and the burgeoning samizdat of the Brezhnev era.84

42 Those lucky enough to find and read the book responded in a largely similar way as to the journal edition. Long‑standing informants, such as Shalaev, provided additional fact‑checking (“to note the very tiniest digressions from the truth”) and further evidence for use in future editions.85 The book also provoked more Old Bolsheviks to contact the author with information, sometimes in person.86 Meanwhile, those who had earlier disagreed with the portrayal of Dumenko and Mironov found no reason to change their minds. Kol´chigin, for example, praised the expanded edition for providing much new information and criticism of Stalin, but continued to attack Trifonov’s view of Dumenko, a contrast captured in his concluding observation that : “your work is truthful, but you know far from the whole truth.”87 In a similar vein, a certain Garin wrote in 1967 to praise Trifonov’s “wonderful book” and to request information about Slovatinskaia. But he also accused Trifonov of failing to understand his father’s principles, the necessity of punishing Mironov to prevent further “harm,” and the 1920s more broadly. “In 1937, you were 11, you’re not able to judge,” he caricatured the son’s ignorance, “If your father was alive today, he would have given you a thrashing.”88

43 The small size of the book edition in 1966 was already a sign of official discomfort, and this would become more pronounced by the end of the decade, through an effective ban on re‑publication.89 Trifonov was therefore unable to incorporate readers’ responses into a new edition of the text, as he had done with the journal edition’s reader responses.90 This did not mean, however, that this open‑ended text, and its expanding community of readers, came to a close after 1966. Instead, the interpersonal links forged by the texts’ two published versions continued to expand further, albeit largely in private, as the Brezhnev era evolved its characteristic, different forms of history‑writing and public memory.

44 The author himself remained fascinated over the rest of his career with the issues of history, memory and trauma raised by Fireglow. In the immediate aftermath of the book publication, though, he maintained a focus on the specific figures of Mironov and his father, his notebooks of 1967 listing the two individuals as key themes of his archival research in Moscow and in Rostov.91 The latter location, which Trifonov visited at length that year, proved particularly rich in terms of archival material and exchanges with local historians.92

45 As before, though, both Trifonov and his readers knew that the archives, even local ones, were both too voluminous and too restricted in access for a lone individual to resurrect the historical truth. Historians and others invested in similar projects therefore continued to share with the author their own discoveries of relevant sources. Vrachev, for instance, wrote to the author early in 1967, offering tips about where to find further information about his topic in TsGAOR, where he himself continued to

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research his own, overlapping interests.93 Almost a decade later, a certain Geguzin sent citations relevant to Trifonov’s interests, just unearthed in the Rostov archives ; he “couldn’t not tell you,” he said, and once he had, he “felt more at ease.”94 Trifonov did not just receive this information, however ; he also became a source for others’ research. For example, several museums made contact with Trifonov in the years after Fireglow’s last publication, asking him to contribute material about the Trifonovs and their era to their exhibitions.95 In this sense, Trifonov’s text contributed to the “historical turn” in late Soviet culture, both fuelling and revealing the dedication with which amateur and professional historians and writers continued to explore historical themes, even where their publication chances were dwindling.96

46 However, the text was not merely the focus of antiquarian or factographic discussion. Although Fireglow had been ambiguous and elusive in its presentation of both historical and political issues, it and its author were also drawn into the intensifying politics of history and historical justice of the late 1960s. One community revealed to the author through responses to his text(s), and particularly keen to recruit him to their cause, might loosely be termed Cossack activists. Both editions of Fireglow provoked enthusiastic responses from historians and literary writers who had long been frustrated at the ongoing—and, by the late 1960s, worsening—negative attitudes towards Cossacks in Soviet public culture.97 Dmitrii Petrov (Biriuk), for example, wrote to the author in 1967, astounded but also grateful that Trifonov had managed what he had not, despite devoting most of his literary career to the Cossacks and the Don : that is, publishing a positive literary representation of Mironov. What was striking in this writer’s letter was its apparent absence of literary rivalry : he was simply glad that someone, somewhere had written about this “remarkable person,” bypassing the censors who had blocked his own efforts, and thus fulfilling the wishes of Mironov’s colleagues and relatives who had long petitioned him for a portrait.98

47 Historian correspondents also revealed to Trifonov the past and present barriers to publication of positive, or even ambivalent, factual portrayals of the Cossacks. Assuming that Trifonov, as a “writer, not a historian” and someone “engaged in history […] only because you were the son of a famous father,” knew little about historical research into the Cossacks, a certain Efremov offered him a brief outline of this research. Unsurprisingly concentrated in the Don, it also stretched across the Soviet Union, including Leningrad where Efremov, a retired Neva editor, now worked as an amateur historian.99 What united these historians of the Cossacks, Efremov explained, was that “they all know the truth, not just from carefully and richly collected archival material and all manner of testimony, but also through personal memories, as active participants in the past.” These immaculate credentials, though, offered no guarantee of getting their work published. Efremov invited Trifonov to meet some of these historians to “help you become a historian‑fighter [istorik‑boets], alongside us,” thus seeking to improve Trifonov’s training as a historian as well as to expand the network of “fighters” for the “truth” about the Cossacks.100

48 Trifonov’s text thus continued to stand, as indeed it had from the moment of its first publication, at the unstable boundary between official and unofficial history and memory in the aftermath of the Khrushchev‑era “thaw.” It also increasingly served as a focus for discussion of what could and could not be said about the Soviet past, and why (not), as the Brezhnev era left behind the early flux that had contributed to Trifonov’s text being published in the first place.101 The majority of Trifonov’s correspondents

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amongst old Bolsheviks, local and amateur historians and interest groups still did not place their mutual interests in historical truth and justice in opposition to the Soviet party‑state and its ideology. They believed, rather, that their deep commitment to excavating the truth about the revolution and Civil War, resurrecting Old Bolshevik ethics and restoring historical justice—issues intertwined in real life, as in Trifonov’s text—was shared by the state, since these ideas were widely promoted in Soviet public culture, especially during the Khrushchev era but also as part of the growing cult of revolution in the Brezhnev era. However, as Trifonov’s exchanges with his readers continued into the late 1960s and early 1970s, their sharing of historical evidence was increasingly accompanied by sharing of information about obstructions to “truthful” representations of historical events and individuals, akin to the way that samizdat now sought to “chronicle” the state’s betrayals of its own principles.102

49 The lines were still not clear‑cut, however. Especially in the late 1960s, and to some degree in the early 1970s too, it was possible to argue publicly that both “fact‑based” accumulation of historical knowledge—epitomised by Trifonov’s methodology and by the exchanges with readers after publication(s)—and also nuanced, evolving views of individuals and events (also typical of Trifonov’s text, though not of some readers’ hostile responses to recently rehabilitated figures) were preferable to fixed hagiographic or demonising narratives. For example, two articles in Novyi mir in 1966 and 1967, during intensifying official attacks on the journal, used Fireglow to symbolise the continuing “obligation” to engage in excavation and revelation of “documentary, precise fact” and of “the raw truth,” rather than embellishment of the past.103 Deliberately tracing the opposite trajectory to Soviet public culture’s ever‑tighter embrace of “legends,” Novyi mir viewed Trifonov’s and other writers’ “collection of facts and the destruction of legends”, along with readers’ readiness to be “co‑participants in the investigation,” as the only way to deepen the “maturation of national memory” (vozmuzhanie narodnoi pamiati).104 Although the authors of these articles may not have known it, this was a very apt description of Trifonov’s interactions with his readers at this time.

50 Yet the dispute between “legends” and “facts” was unevenly matched, and supporters of the former were much closer to the levers of power—and publication—in the 1970s. The dispute over Mironov, for example, intensified at the start of this decade with several high‑profile publications by Budennyi and his supporters alleging that Fireglow and several other texts had dangerously misrepresented him.105 These ominous signs prompted one historian and highly decorated Civil War veteran, Gavrilov, to send a series of appeals direct to Brezhnev and Andrei Grechko in the first half of the 1970s ; he copied all his correspondence to Trifonov as a fellow victim of the state’s apparent turn against truth and justice.106 These attempts to refute “slanderous” accounts of Mironov and the Civil War combined meticulous detail with broad principles, echoing much of Trifonov’s earlier correspondence from readers.

51 Arguing in general terms against “untruth” (nepravda) and for the “objective” treatment of historical sources, as well as for the observation of legal principle in upholding Mironov’s rehabilitation, Gavrilov ironically resembled some of the earlier opponents of Trifonov’s forgiving view of Mironov and Dumenko. 107 In fact, though, Gavrilov sought to dissociate from such partisanship, urging Grechko to “separate yourself from the fact that you are a Buddenyite and we are Mironovites, and instead, relying on historical truth, archives and documents, give us your just and objective

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view.”108 Gavrilov’s more focussed debunking of recently published “historians,” meanwhile, recalled the exhaustive corrections and additions sent in by Trifonov’s Old Bolshevik correspondents several years earlier. During his 19‑page detailed critique of one 1972 article about Mironov, Gavrilov also often cited Fireglow itself as a factually accurate account to contrast to the “subjective,” “tendentious” Soviet press accounts.109 In all these appeals of the early 1970s, Gavrilov still expressed hope that Soviet public culture would revert to justice and Leninist truth, but his intense appeals straight to the top of the party‑state conveyed a desperate sense that this might be the last chance to rescue Mironov’s reputation, together with the principles that he and Trifonov jointly espoused.

Conclusion : Writers’ Choices and Possibilities in the 1970s

52 By the time that Gavrilov wrote to the CC, many of his contemporaries had already become convinced of the party‑state’s irrevocable lapse into falsehood, and had retreated into samizdat and tamizdat as the sole realm of historical truth. A particularly instructive example is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who, like Trifonov, had fluctuated between publication and prohibition in the early years of the Brezhnev era, and had also “expanded” a documentary‑fictional text into a much broader project. He used readers’ correspondence about Ivan Denisovich to initiate his enormous and apparently open‑ended “literary investigation” in The Gulag Archipelago : “I became the accredited chronicler of labour camp life, to whom people brought the whole truth,” he observed of this ongoing gathering of material in 1976.110

53 However, there were telling differences between these two projects and authors, principally because the theme of the Gulag was clearly prohibited from the early Brezhnev era, whereas the revolution remained the principal usable past for the Brezhnev regime. In the 1960s, Solzhenitsyn therefore carried out research with his 227 informants in the strictest secrecy and in the early 1970s the work received its first publication abroad.111 More generally, Gulag memory and history retreated entirely into private discussion, samizdat and tamizdat by the end of the 1960s (and until glasnost´), whereas Trifonov and his readers believed and hoped that their discussions of the revolution and civil war could and should be a part of Brezhnev‑era literature and public memory.112

54 Fulfilment of such hopes was partial and unpredictable, for Trifonov’s contemporaries as for the author himself. In the 1970s, texts similar to Fireglow did sometimes make it into print : both Anton Antonov‑Ovseenko and Leonid Petrovskii published similarly “rehabilitating,” document‑based biographies of their fathers, both Old Bolshevik victims of Stalinism, albeit under heavy censorship (and in Antonov‑Ovseenko’s case, a pseudonym).113 On the other hand, Roi Medvedev, one of the contacts whom Trifonov made through publication of Fireglow, could not publish his biography of Mironov at this time. Even though his research drew on Trifonov’s publications, and made similar use of veteran informants, such as his eventual co‑author Sergei Starikov, Medvedev decided that his Civil War research stood as little chance of Soviet publication as his work on Stalinism (such as Let History Judge, banned in the late 1960s). Accordingly, Medvedev’s and Starikov’s biography of Mironov was first published in the US in 1978 though Trifonov was able to read it in samizdat manuscript much earlier.114

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55 Trifonov himself was still able to pursue his intensifying interest in the revolutionary past in public venues. In 1974, he made a speech to the Soviet Writers’ Union advertising his determination to forestall the de facto reversal of the rehabilitation of figures such as Mironov.115 Four years later, he made good on his promise with the publication of his novel, The Old Man.116 In the text, he greatly expanded his previous representation of Mironov through the thinly veiled character Migulin, incorporating his extensive new archive research and the fruits of his ongoing exchanges with readers and fellow historians.117 Like Fireglow, the text also contains a meta‑narrative, typical of late Trifonov fiction’s play with time and space, in which the ageing main narrator Letunov recounts his obsessive (and, it transpires, conscience‑driven) archival research about Migulin, and also relives Civil War memories triggered by a letter from Migulin’s wife who had read one of his historical publications in 1974.118 While there is an autobiographical source for this fictional incident (Mironov’s widow and his son both wrote to Trifonov about Fireglow)119, it also reflects more broadly Trifonov’s enduring sense of the power of readers’ letters to conjure up the past and to reopen historical narrative to continual revision and rethinking.120

56 The Old Man, like the elliptical and polyphonic treatment of Stalinism in the slightly earlier House on the Embankment, complicated its narrative voice and perspective to a much greater extent than the meticulous reconstruction of personal history in Fireglow. 121 This facilitated publication of a work whose moral qualms about revolution and celebration of empirical research and mnemonic debate so sharply contrasted to the increasingly monolithic 1970s public memory of the revolution and civil war.122 The Old Man, like Fireglow, thus stood on the edge of Soviet literature, but it too was not dissident, as the contrast to Gulag Archipelago can again exemplify. Although Solzhenitsyn’s text was also polyphonic and “literary” in deploying its multifarious sources, its polemic ultimately pointed in one direction only : against the Soviet system as a whole, an attitude consonant with the author’s Messianic pursuit of the complete “truth” and excoriation of Soviet “lies” in the early to mid 1970s (and beyond).123 Trifonov’s attitudes to Soviet ideology and Soviet literature remained more fluid throughout the 1970s, making his complex historical fiction exceptional in the increasingly stagnant Soviet culture of the late Brezhnev era.

NOTES

1. “Iz dnevnikov i rabochikh tetradei [From diaries and notebooks],” Druzhba narodov, no. 6 (1998) : 119. The observation was prompted by reading an article in Krasnaia zvezda, 25 January 1957 about the Central Army Museum holdings on Valentin and Evgenii Trifonov. Trifonov’s archive contains a copy of this article. FSO (Das Archiv der Forschungsstelle Osteuropa, Bremen), f. 220 (Iurii Trifonov), 4.2.2.36. 2. On Mironov and Dumenko, see Filipp Mironov : Tikhii Don v 1917‑21gg. [Filipp Mironov : The Quiet Don in 1917‑21] (M. : Rossiia XX vek, 1997). 3. Iu. Trifonov, “Otblesk kostra [Fireglow], ” Znamia no. 2 (1965) : 142‑160 ; no. 3 (1965) : 152‑177.

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4. Iu. Trifonov, Otblesk kostra [Fireglow] (M. : Sovetskii pisatel´, 1966) ; this edition was 189 pages long. 5. See e.g. A. Wachtel, An Obsession with History : Russian Writers Confront the Past (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1994), 66‑87 ; P. Debreczeny, The Other Pushkin : A Study of Alexander Pushkin’s Prose Fiction (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1983), 239‑274. 6. See e.g. R. Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia : The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, 1956‑1974 (Palgrave : Basingstoke, 2001), 199‑233 ; D. Kozlov, “The Historical Turn in Late Soviet Culture : Retrospectivism, Factography, Doubt, 1953‑1991,” Kritika : Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2 (2001) : 577‑600. 7. On Trifonov as a minimally Soviet writer, see e.g. N. Leiderman, M. Lipovetskii, Ot sovetskogo pisatelia k pisateliu sov epokhi [From Soviet Writer to Writer of the Soviet Epoch] (Izdatel´stvo AMB : Ekaterinburg, 2001) ; M. Falchikov, “Endings and Non‑Endings in Iurii Trifonov,” in H. Chung, ed., In the Party Spirit (Amsterdam : Rodopi, 1996), 69‑77. On deconstructing binaries in late socialist culture, see A. Yurchak, Everything was Forever until it was No More (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2005). On “cultural” and “communicative” memory, see J. Assmann, “Collective memory and cultural identity,” New German Critique, 65 (1995) : 125‑133. 8. “Iz dnevnikov i rabochikh tetradei,” Druzhba narodov, no. 10 (1998) : 105. 9. His first, orthodox Socialist Realist Stalin‑era novel Students has often been seen as a veiled response to his father’s repression (e.g. J. Woll, Invented Truth : Soviet Reality and the Literary Imagination of Iurii Trifonov (Raleigh : Duke University Press, 1991), 20). David Gillespie traces the effects of grief for his father throughout his career (D. Gillespie, Iurii Trifonov : Unity Through Time (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1992), 6‑9 and passim.) 10. Leiderman, Lipovetskii, Ot sovetskogo pisatelia, 7‑10 ; P. Jones, “Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories ? Terror, Trauma and Survival in Soviet Culture of the Thaw,” The Slavonic and East European Review, 86, 2 (2008) : 346‑371. 11. Fireglow is widely seen as pivotal in all these senses, though remains little analysed (Gillespie, Iurii Trifonov, 6 ; Leiderman, Lipovetskii, Ot sovetskogo pisatelia, 13 ; V. Kardin, “ ‘Nas eshche sud ´by bezvestnye zhdut…’ (perechityvaia Otblesk kostra Iuriia Trifonova),” in Mir prozy Iuriia Trifonova : Sbornik statei [The World of Iurii Trifonov’s Prose] (Ekaterinburg : izdatel´stvo ural ´skovo universiteta, 2000), 158‑168 (here, 163‑64). 12. P. Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma : Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953‑70 (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2013), Chapter 4 ; M. Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer : Gulag Returnees, Crime and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2009). 13. Krasnaia zvezda, 18 December 1963 (Trifonov’s archive contains multiple copies of this article, suggesting its great importance to his research on Fireglow and other works concerning his father : FSO, f. 220, 4.2.2.40). 14. FSO, f. 220, 1.1.14 (notebooks for Fireglow research) ; 4.2.3.48 (preparatory materials for Fireglow). Many archives and archival materials remained completely inaccessible to ordinary researchers of course (see Polikarpov, “V sovmestnykh literaturno‑istoricheskikh boiakh (zapiski istorika) [In joint literary‑history battles (notes of a historian)],” in V. Polikarpov, A. Shitov, Iurii Trifonov i sovetskaia epokha [Iurii Trifonov and the Soviet Epoch] (M. : sobranie, 2006), 386). 15. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.15. 16. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.2. 17. Ibid. On Batorgin, see also A. Shitov, “Primechaniia. Otblesk kostra [Notes. Fireglow],” in Iu. Trifonov, Ischeznovenie : Sbornik (otblesk kostra, starik, ischeznovenie) [Disappearance. A Collection (Fireglow, The Old Man, Disappearance)] (M. : Moskovskii rabochii, 1988), 569‑579. 18. On Vrachev’s biography, see Ibid., and O. Trifonova, “O vremeni i o sud´be [On time and Fate],” who calls Vrachev a person who knew Valentin and Mironov, as well as many, many others known to us only through photos, 504).

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19. All Vrachev correspondence contained in FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.4. Reference to Vrachev’s first contact in Trifonov’s diaries : “Iz dnevnikov i rabochikh tetradei,” Druzhba narodov, no. 11 (1998) : 60‑61. 20. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.4. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. “Iz dnevnikov i rabochikh tetradei,” Druzhba narodov, no. 11 (1998) : 64 ; Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma, Chapter 6, examines other such works’ chances of publication, including Grigorii Baklanov’s July 1941 (whose final installment appeared in the same issue of Znamia as the first part of Fireglow). C.f. Woll, Invented Truth, 24, on increase in prohibitions by this time. 26. Iu. Trifonov, “Zapiski soseda [Notes of a Neighbour],” in Id., Rasskazy. Povesti. Roman. Vospominaniia. Esse [Stories. A Novel. Memoirs. Essays] (Ekaterinburg : U‑faktoriia, 1999), 658‑739, on contrast in publishing policy and reputation between Znamia and Novyi mir in the 1960s. 27. “Iz dnevnikov i rabochikh tetradei,” Druzhba narodov, no. 11 (1998), 64 ; Polikarpov, Shitov, “V sovmestnykh literaturno‑istoricheskikh boiakh,” 382‑386. 28. RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art), 618/18/80/79‑90. 29. A. Shitov, Iurii Trifonov i sovetskaia epokha : Fakty, dokumenty, vospominaniia [Iurii Trifonov and the Soviet Epoch. Facts, Documents and Memoirs] (M. : sobranie, 2006), 279, stresses “restoring wholeness” through this “palaeontology” ; Woll traces “reconstruction” (Woll, Invented Truth, 22) ; Gillespie describes text as “scrupulous” (Gillespie, Iurii Trifonov, 141). 30. This anxiety is less acknowledged in critical work on Fireglow ; though one review at the time of publication described the “pathos” of the son encountering his father through documents after so long (“Sud´ba i vremia [Fate and Time],” Novyi mir, 3 (1967) : 252‑55). 31. Woll, Invented Truth, 36. 32. Start of the biographical narrative : Znamia, no. 2 (1965) : 143. The literary qualities have been under‑emphasised by critics, who have mostly seen the work as documentary and historical. 33. Ibid., 142 ; Gillespie, Iurii Trifonov, 143, also notes the ambivalence of the koster. 34. Znamia, no. 2, 1965, p. 142. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 143 37. Ibid. 38. Znamia, 2 (1965) : 143. 39. Contrast this reading to a claim of the sudden “fluency” of Trifonov’s historical writing in Fireglow, and of his “virtually inexhaustible source of data” for the text (C. Maegd‑Soep, Trifonov and the Drama of the Russian Intelligentsia (Ghent : Ghent State University Russian Institute, 1990), 62). 40. Znamia, no. 2 (1965) : 153. 41. E.g. one the Red Guard’s founder members, K. Iurenev, has his biography summarized at his first appearance in the text, the summary ending “and in 1937 he perished, like many others, and is now rehabilitated” (Ibid., 151). 42. Lur´e’s diary is introduced in Ibid., 155, as a source of “exact information” about 1917‑1918 ; having reassured the reader that “all these details are not made up (vymysel) and not murky echoes of stories heard at some point from my father,” the narrator then resumes a vivid narrative of the time, for example describing “the first post‑October spring […] exploding like a young wine” (Ibid.).

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43. Amongst the pre‑ and post‑Stalinist historians used and cited by Trifonov are Pinezhskii and Naida (Ibid., 147‑149, 153‑154 ; no. 2, 158). 44. There are occasional direct critiques of Stalinist historiography’s silencing of the merits of true revolutionary heroes and exaggeration of Stalin’s leadership and Soviet military successes (this is also implicitly linked to the tragic consequences of Valentin’s attempts to alert Stalin to the threat of World War II at the end of the text) : Znamia, no. 2 (1965) : 147 ; no. 3 (1965) : 157, 168. 45. Introduced Znamia, no. 2 (1965) : 143, and the word sunduk is repeated several times afterwards. 46. Use of the verb “to be preserved” (sokhranit´sia) e.g. no. 2 (1965) : 159 ; no. 3 (1965) : 154, 165, 171‑72 (this last reference describes the “paper trash” at the bottom of the trunk). 47. e.g. Znamia, no. 2 (1965) : 149‑150, 152, 159 ; no. 3 (1965,) : 154, 158‑59, 163. Kardin, “Nas eshche bezvestnye,” 162, calls the text “a sharp rejection of a priori thinking.” 48. Znamia, no. 3 (1965) : 177. 49. Ibid. 50. On “post‑memory,” see e.g. M. Hirsch, Family Frames : Photography, Narrative and Postmemory (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1997) ; K. Goertz, “Transgenerational Representations of the Holocaust : from memory to ‘post‑memory’,” World Literature Today, 72, 1 (1998) : 33‑38 ; J. Young, “Toward a Received History of the Holocaust,” History and Theory, 36, 4 (1997) : 21‑43 ; on “post‑memoir” as a genre of “post‑memory” texts, see L. Morris, “Postmemory, postmemoir,” in Morris, Zipes, eds, Unlikely History : The Changing German‑Jewish Symbiosis (Basingstoke : Palgrave, 2002), 291‑306. 51. M. Hirsch, “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today, 29, 1 (2008) : 103‑128. 52. Maegd‑Soep, Iurii Trifonov, 64‑65 ; Gillespie, Iurii Trifonov, 140‑143. Shitov, “Primechaniia,” 569, estimates that over 200 letters were received by Trifonov, but these numbers are not borne out in available archival materials. These analyses also do not extend much beyond the quantitative. 53. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.22. Sal´kov continued to write with more information about the Civil War over the coming months. 54. FSO, f. 22, 4.2.1.8 ; Polikarpov, Shitov, Iurii Trifonov, 74. On 1960s readers of literature and the discussion of Stalinist terror, see D. Kozlov, The Readers of Novyi mir. Coming to terms with the Stalinist Past (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2013), 171‑239. 55. Trifonova, “O vremeni i sud´be,” 515. 56. The invasion of Prague in 1968 was a more significant turning point in intelligentsia attitudes towards the system (see e.g. B. Kagarlitsky, Boris, W. Nickell, “1960s East and West : The Nature of the Shestidesiatniki and the New Left,” Boundary, 2 36, no. 1 (2009) : 95‑104). 57. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.25‑28. Trifonova noted that Shalaev, as one of few survivors, had valuable memories and evidence to contribute to Trifonov’s archive (Trifonova, “o vremeni i sud´be,” 567). 58. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.25‑28. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. “Sincerity” had of course been a key value promoted in the “thaw” (for an excellent discussion of its meanings, see Kozlov, The Readers of Novyi mir : 44‑87). 61. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.4. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. 64. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.25‑28. 65. “Iz dnevnikov i rabochikh tetradei,” no. 11 (1998) : 69‑71. 66. Ibid. 67. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.25‑28.

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68. Ibid. 69. Ibid. 70. RGALI, 618/18/80/31‑33 (a letter to Voprosy istorii alleging Valentin was a Trotskyist), 56‑58 (letter to Pravda), 59‑62, 64‑67. These suspicions only dried up when Znamia obtained details of Valentin’s rehabilitation from Trifonov and sent them to Shul´ts : RGALI, 618/18/80/20, 54‑55, 64. 71. Dobson, Khrushchev’s Cold Summer. 72. FSO, f. 220, 2.4.82. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. RGALI, 618/18/80/68‑74. 76. “Iz dnevnikov i rabochikh tetradei,” no. 11 : 78. 77. Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma, Chapter 5. 78. Shalaev introduced as an informant in Iu. Trifonov, Otblesk kostra (M. : Sovetskii pisatel´, 1988), 15‑16, and his material frequently cited thereafter, for example long citations of testimony about the pre‑revolutionary era at : Ibid., 19, 32, 43‑45. The 1988 Sovetskii pisatel´ edition is cited in all references to the book edition, as the 1966 edition is currently impossible to obtain. There is no reason to suppose, though, that the text of the 1966 and the 1988 editions are different. 79. Vrachev material cited and acknowledged : Ibid., 109‑10, 126‑27, 130‑31 ; material from other Old Bolsheviks and their relatives : Ibid., 14 (Nakoriakov), 35 (Zahkarov and his widow Zakharova), 78‑81 (Godzievskaia). The other most frequently cited source is Evgenii Trifonov (Brazhnev) himself, whose memoirs and prison poetry are extensively added into the book addition. 80. Ibid., 14, 35. 81. Ibid., 36, 97. 82. Ibid., 65, 141. 83. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.25‑28. 84. FSO, f. 220, 2.4.128 ; “Iz dnevnikov i rabochikh tetradei,” Druzhba narodov, 11 (1998) : 83‑84. This hand‑to‑hand circulation of scarce published texts had happened most famously with Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone and Solzhenitsyn’s Ivan Denisovich after both texts were published in Novyi mir (in 1956 and 1962 respectively) and instantly sold out. 85. Shalaev letter of 4 February 1967, justifies such stringent fact‑checking by reminding Trifonov that he has “written not a novel but a documentary sketch in which what is written demands to accord with reality, otherwise the sketch loses its main value” (FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.25‑28). 86. “Iz dnevnikov i rabochikh tetradei,” Druzhba narodov, 1 (1999) : 90. 87. FSO, f. 220, 2.4.82 ; a similar resistance to Dumenko’s rehabilitation, from a history teacher from Kharkov (Katrechko) is described in Polikarpov, “V sovmesnykh literatyrno‑istoricheskikh boiakh,” 449. 88. FSO, f. 220, 2.4.46. 89. Trifonova, “O vremeni i sud´be,” 510 ; Kardin, “Nas eshche bezvestnye,” 164. 90. “Iz dnevnikov i rabochikh tetradei,” no. 1 (1999) : 90. 91. FSO, f. 220, 1.1.22 ; A. Shitov, Iurii Trifonov : Khronika zhizni i tvorchestva [Iurii Trifonov : A Chronicle of his Life and Works] (Ekaterinburg, 1997), p. 373. Gillespie, Iurii Trifonov, 143, points to overlapping of book publication of Fireglow and archive work for Old Man. 92. Maegd‑Soep, Trifonov and the Drama of the Russian Intelligentsia, 67 ; “Iz dnevnikov i rabochikh tetradei,” Druzhba narodov, no. 1 (1999) : 81‑82 ; Trifonova, “O vremeni i sud´be,” 510‑511. Trifonov’s archive for these years also contains material sent to the author by Rostov historians and/or from the Rostov press (e.g. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.2.31) 93. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.4 (he also clarifies date of first meeting with father, in 1918. The P.S. adds that the archive documents were actually about Evgenii, not Valentin).

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94. FSO, f. 220, 2.4.47. 95. FSO, f. 220, 2.4.30 (Volgograd museum) ; Polikarpov, Shitov, Iurii Trifonov, 450‑51 (Rostov museum). 96. Kozlov, “The Historical Turn.” 97. The review in the regional journal Don used Fireglow to praise and encourage a positive attitude to Cossacks (Don, 7 (1965) : 167‑168). 98. FSO, f. 220, 2.4.128. Trifonova, “O vremeni i sud´be,” 538, notes that Fireglow showed that the memory of Mironov was still “alive in the Don amongst his colleagues and friends.” 99. Another letter from a Moscow historian, Topilin, also informed Trifonov that passions were running high in the Don over Mironov and Dumenko’s ongoing misrepresentation (FSO, f. 220, 2.4.163 ; Shitov, Iurii Trifonov, 378‑380). 100. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.9. 101. The same was true of texts that notoriously remained in publication limbo in the late 1960s, such as Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward and Aleksandr Bek’s Thew New Appointment : see Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma, Chapter 6. 102. E.g. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.2.31 (see also above mentioned letters by Efremov, Petrov (Biriuk)). 103. The articles were : “Sud´ba i vremia” ; B. Kardin, “Legendy i fakty [Legends and Facts]”, Novyi mir, 2 (1966) : 237‑250. Trifonov read Kardin’s article and stored it in his archive (FSO, f. 220, 4.2.2.33). On the broader significance of this article, see Kozlov, The Readers of Novyi mir : 263‑294, and Polikarpov, Shitov, Iurii Trifonov i sovetskaia epokha, 448. On Trifonov’s vexed relationship with Novyi mir in the Khrushchev era, and its improvement after Tvardovskii was impressed by Fireglow, see “Zapiski soseda.” 104. Kardin, “Legendy i fakty.” 105. Publications included the ongoing (posthumous after 1973) publication of Budennyi’s multi‑volume memoirs, and several articles including “Protiv iskazheniia istoricheskoi pravdy [Against Distortion of the Historical Truth],” Voprosy istorii KPSS, 2 (1970) and “Komandarm 2‑oi armii F.K. Mironov,” Voenno‑istoricheskii zhurnal, 10 (1972). For Budennyi’s petitioning of the CC to allow him to publish critiques of recent literature and historiography about Mironov and the Don Civil War, see RGANI, f. 5, op. 61, d. 62, l. 5‑6. 106. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.5. 107. Ibid. 108. Ibid. 109. Ibid. 110. Quoted in E. Markstein, “Observations on the Narrative Structure of Gulag Archipelago,” in J. Dunlop, M. Nicholson, Solzhenitsyn in Exile (Stanford : Hoover University Press, 1985), 179. On Solzhenitsyn’s publication controversies in the 1960s (and beyond), see L. Labedz, Solzhenitsyn : A Documentary Record (Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1970) ; A. Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf (London : Collins and Harvill, 1980) ; M. Scammell, Solzhenitsyn. A Biography (New York : Norton, 1984), 410‑696. On readers’ letters about Ivan Denisovich, see Labedz, Solzhenitsyn, 14‑28 (a translation of “Chitaiut Ivana Denisovicha [They read Ivan Denisovich],” originally planned as a section of Gulag) ; Kozlov, The Readers of Novyi mir : 209‑38, and Dorogoi Ivan Denisovich. Pis´ma chitatelei 1962‑1964 [Dear Ivan Denisovich : Letters from Readers, 1962‑1964] (M. : Russkii put´, 2012). On Gulag Archipelago, see the above and n. 112, and also L. Toker, Return from the Archipelago : Narratives of Gulag Survivors (Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press, 2000), 101‑22 (especially 103, 118 and 122, on open‑endedness of text and invitation to future historians to rewrite it). Trifonov also obtained from Medvedev the manuscript of Cancer Ward, and believed it should be published (Maegd‑Soep, Trifonov and the Drama of the Russian Intelligentsia, 65). 111. One of the work’s prefaces describes this work with readers’ letters and interviews (A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918‑1956 (London : Harvill, 1986, xvii), while its two

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conclusions suggest both that the ‘book has reached the utmost limit’ and also that ‘all you friends who have survived and know the story well, write your own commentaries to go with my book, correct and add to it where necessary’ (Ibid., 471, 470). As in Fireglow, too, the main text frequently mentions informants and sources by name. First publication of the text : A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (New York : Harper and Row, 1973). The informants were only named and listed for the first time in a 2007 edition : A. Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag GULAG, 1918‑1956 : opyt khudozhestvennogo issledovaniia [The Gulag Archipleago, 1918‑1956 : An Experiment in Literary Investigation] (Ekaterinburg : U‑Faktoriia, 2007) : 13‑18. 112. S. Cohen, The Victims Return : Survivors of the Gulag after Stalin (London : I. B. Tauris, 2011), esp. 128‑139. 113. A. Rakitin, V.A. Antonov‑Ovseenko (M., 1975) ; L. Petrovskii, Petr Petrovskii (Alma‑Ata, 1974). On these biographies, see Cohen, The Victims Return, 137. Rakitin/Antonov‑Ovseenko’s biography sticks closely to the standard chronological biographical narrative, describing party posts held and the growth of the subject’s revolutionary consciousness. His death in 1937 is only very briefly described on p. 342 (in contrast to an earlier version of the biography, which contained far more description and condemnation of the terror : A. Rakitin, Imenem revoliutsii… Ocherki o V. Antonove‑Ovseenko [In the Name of Revolution : Sketches about V. Antonov‑Ovseenko] (M., 1965), 178). On the restrictions on this publication, see the revised and expanded edition published during glasnost´ : A. Rakitin, V.A. Antonov‑Ovseenko (L., 1989), 5. My thanks to James Ryan for his help with locating the 1975 text. 114. R. Medvedev, S. Starikov, Philip Mironov and the Russian Civil War (New York : Knopf, 1978) ; Shitov, Iurii Trifonov, 562 ; Maegd‑Soep, Trifonov, 64‑65. 115. Voprosy literatury, 1 (1974) : 60‑63. 116. Iu. Trifonov, “Starik [The Old Man],” Druzhba narodov, 3 (1978). 117. Woll, Invented Truth, 36. On the continuities between Fireglow and Old Man, and on recurrent motifs throughout Trifonov’s works, see : Trifonova, “O vremeni i sud´be” ; Maegd‑Soep, Trifonov, 160 ; Vl. Kabakov, “Steklo i serebro : biografiia i vymysel v gorodskoi proze Iu. Trifonova [Glass and Silver : Biography and Fiction in Iurii Trifonov’s Urban Prose],” in Mir prozy Iuriia Trifonova, 45‑51 ; Gillepsie, Iurii Trifonov, 143 ; I. Sukhikh, “Pytka pamiat´iu [A Trial of Memory],” Zvezda, 6 : 2002. 118. Shitov, Iurii Trifonov, p. 616. 119. FSO, f. 220, 4.2.1.16 ; 2.4.41 ; Shitov, Iurii Trifonov, p. 486. 120. On the treatment of history and memory in Old Man, see Woll, Invented Truth, 53‑79 (who concludes, p. 70, that Letunov’s “mission [is] to learn the truth by piecing it together out of the shards of the past”) ; Maegd‑Soep, Trifonov, 160‑176 (who sees the novel as dramatizing a ‘restless search for truth’, p. 170) ; Kolesnikoff, Yury Trifonov, 99‑106. 121. T. Seifrid, “Trifonov’s Dom na naberezhnoi and the Fortunes of Aesopian Speech,” Slavic Review, 49, 4 (1990) : 611‑624 ; Woll, Invented Truth, 16. 122. Maegd‑Soep, Trifonov, 163 ; Woll, Invented Truth, 70. Cohen describes Trifonov as one of the best ‘between the lines writers’ of the 1970s (Cohen, The Victims Return, 138), and Gillespie claims that texts such as Old Man “provide material to support the view that he is at heart a socialist realist… or that he is sympathetic to dissident ideas” (Gillespie, Iurii Trifonov, 157). 123. On the literariness of Gulag Archipelago, see e.g. Toker, Return from the Archipelago, 101‑122 ; S. Richardson, “The Gulag Archipelago as Literary Documentary,” in Dunlop, Nicholson, Solzhenitsyn in Exile, 145‑164 ; N. Pervukhin, “The Experiment in Literary Investigation,” SEEJ, 35, 4 (1991) : 489‑502. On the polemical, even sermonic tone that pervades all the different narrative approaches, see e.g. Pervukhin, “The Experiment.” On “truth” and “lies,” see Solzhenitsyn’s 1970 Nobel lecture (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/1970/solzhenitsyn‑lecture.html) and his 1974 “Live not by Lies” (http:// www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/livenotbylies.html).

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ABSTRACTS

This article examines the networks of sharing of historical information and memories of the early Soviet period, which formed as a result of the writer Iurii Trifonov’s research and publication of his biography of his father, “Fireglow” (1965; second, expanded edition, 1966). It analyses these “mnemonic communities” of Civil war veterans and local and amateur historians not as a form of dissidence, but rather as an illustration of the unstable boundaries of Soviet public memory and historiography in the early years of the Brezhnev era. More broadly, these exchanges between a writer and his readers were permeated by a belief in the accumulation, rather than deconstruction, of historical truth. In concluding, the article considers the similarities, yet also the crucial differences, between Trifonov’s expanding text and other, contemporary projects of historical and mnemonic reconstruction in the late 1960s and 1970s, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago.”

Cet article étudie les réseaux de partage des Mémoires et de l’information historique du début de la période soviétique qui ont fait suite aux recherches de l’écrivain Jurij Trifonov et à la publication, par celui-ci, de la biographie de son père, Otblesk kostra [Le Reflet du brasier] (1965 ; version augmentée en 1966). Il analyse ces « communautés mnémoniques » des vétérans de la guerre civile et des historiens amateurs locaux non pas comme une forme de dissidence mais davantage comme une illustration de l’instabilité des frontières de la mémoire publique soviétique et de l’historiographie dans les premières années de l’ère brejnévienne. Plus largement, ces échanges de l’écrivain avec ses lecteurs sont pénétrés d’une croyance en l’accumulation de la vérité historique, plutôt qu’en sa déconstruction. En conclusion, l’auteur examine les similitudes, mais aussi les différences cruciales, entre le texte de Trifonov, progressivement augmenté des contributions des lecteurs, et d’autres projets contemporains de reconstruction mnémonique et historique de la fin des années 1960 et des années 1970, tels que L’Archipel du Gulag d’Aleksandr Solženicyn.

AUTHOR

POLLY JONES University College, Oxford. [email protected]

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Dans la matrice discursive du socialisme tardif Les « Mémoires » de Leonid Il´ič Brežnev The discurse matrix of late socialism: Leonid Il´ich Brezhnev’s “Memoirs”

Nikolaus Katzer Traduction : Martine Sgard et Marc Elie

1 Leonid I. Brežnev est un écrivain soviétique. Il obtint en 1979 le prix Lenin pour ses mérites littéraires hors pair et fut admis à l’Union des écrivains d’URSS. Des années durant, les Mémoires publiés sous son nom restèrent en tête des ventes de la littérature soviétique, raison suffisante pour être répertorié dans les dictionnaires de littérature. Néanmoins nous nous interrogeons à raison sur l’intérêt que présente pour un historien la lecture de ces « Mémoires », qualifiés de géniaux et ovationnés comme tels du vivant de leur auteur mais immédiatement tombés dans l’oubli après sa mort, et sur les raisons du parcours singulier de cette œuvre. La signification historique de ce témoignage ne repose pas sur le seul fait que Brežnev a régné sur l’Empire soviétique plus longtemps que quiconque avant et après lui, Stalin excepté, ou qu’il a vu arriver et repartir cinq présidents américains en ses qualités de chef d’État et du parti. D’ailleurs, il est rare que les Mémoires de personnalités politiques en activité figurent parmi les sources apportant des informations substantielles sur leur parcours, leur personnalité ou leurs convictions. Les Mémoires de ce type font partie de l’activité politique quotidienne et sont généralement rédigés avec le soutien d’un professionnel, au même titre que les interventions et les discours. Brežnev ferait‑il ici figure d’exception ? Quelles révélations nous réserve l’héritage littéraire laissé par l’homme réputé comme le plus puissant de son temps, connu parmi ses proches comme un conteur zélé d’épisodes passés et communiquant volontiers, des heures durant, sa vision des choses au vaste public assistant aux congrès du parti ou aux assemblées générales ?

2 Un voile de plaisanteries politiques et de jugements à l’emporte‑pièce, auxquels se sont rajoutées récemment idéalisation sentimentale et dédramatisation nostalgique, recouvre aujourd’hui encore la période du dirigeant Brežnev1. Il faut prendre avec réserve ces grilles d’interprétations rapides. Leur manque de pertinence scientifique

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s’explique par les césures de l’histoire récente. Les stratèges de la perestroïka ont rétrospectivement stigmatisé les années de pouvoir de Brežnev entre 1964 et 1982 vues comme l’ère de la « stagnation » (zastoj), interprétation qui a marqué tant à l’Ouest qu’à l’Est2. Dans la Russie postsoviétique des années 1990, les transformations chaotiques et l’inquiétude généralisée de la population ont contribué à modifier cette vision. La réaction contre le discours de la stagnation s’accompagne de souvenirs assez largement partagés, faisant des années 1960 et 1970 « l’âge d’or » du socialisme, période au cours de laquelle la majorité des citoyens vivait dans une aisance modeste et pouvait se fixer des objectifs accessibles. Il semble à ceux qui ont perdu leur rang social ou leur logement que leur condition socio-politique était nettement plus prévisible avant la chute de l’URSS3. Si l’on s’en tient à ces observations, le système soviétique sous Brežnev ne s’était pas enlisé, mais progressait pour la première fois de son histoire à un rythme mesuré. Certes, la rivalité avec les États‑Unis pendant la guerre froide ne faiblissait pas, mais les habitants de l’Union soviétique pouvaient se croire les égaux de leurs grands concurrents de l’Ouest. Ils s’étaient défaits sans bruit du slogan qui affirmait que, bientôt, ils dépasseraient les États‑Unis, et qui avait cessé depuis longtemps de les stimuler. La seule illusion d’être au même niveau était affichée comme un immense succès des héritiers de l’empire stalinien en crise. En effet, une place incontestée au deuxième rang mondial les obligeait à gérer et préserver sciemment le statu quo. Faire évoluer une économie planifiée vers une société de consommation socialiste était en soi si ambitieux que cela soutenait la comparaison avec les grands projets du passé. Bien que l’enthousiasme de l’époque utopique se fût dissipé, la perspective d’une vie rangée et toujours meilleure attisait encore confiance et optimisme. Cette assurance est indissociable du nom de Brežnev, même si pour venir à bout de cette entreprise, il reprit les grandes lignes de son mentor politique, Nikita S. Hruščev4.

3 À cet égard, une analyse du texte et du contexte des « Mémoires » de Brežnev peut effectivement être utile pour dégager les strates enfouies de son héritage ambivalent. Ce n’est pas la qualité littéraire qui est ici prioritaire car elle n’enthousiasma réellement que les thuriféraires et courtisans du système de patronage5. De même, la question de la réalité biographique et historique ne sera abordée qu’en second lieu. Au premier plan, en revanche, nous mesurerons la valeur de cette œuvre comme source historique à l’aune de ce que le contexte de sa conception, la composition de ses différentes parties, les sujets, les motifs, les métaphores et les notions révèlent du caractère et de la perception personnelle du règne de Brežnev ainsi que du fonctionnement de la littérature officielle.

4 Des rumeurs selon lesquelles Brežnev n’aurait pas été l’auteur des « Mémoires » se propagèrent immédiatement après la parution de l’ouvrage. En Union soviétique, les soupçons sur la paternité de l’ouvrage proviennent de ce que les Mémoires personnels d’hommes politiques étaient un genre presque inconnu. Ceux qui exerçaient des fonctions dirigeantes au sein du parti ou de l’État appartenaient automatiquement à une caste de la confidentialité. Celui qui avait le droit de se remémorer publiquement, fût-il écrivain, artiste ou diplomate, ne s’exprimait pas depuis le cœur du pouvoir. Le désintérêt quasiment total avec lequel les Mémoires d’un Secrétaire général soviétique furent accueillis dans l’opinion publique des États occidentaux a des causes particulières. Le système de distribution soviétique ne prévoyait pas dans ce cas précis que les droits sur l’ouvrage fussent transmis aux maisons d’éditions occidentales. De

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plus, les experts qui, en Occident, avaient lu la prépublication en russe, partagèrent leurs doutes sur le sérieux du contenu.

5 Dans le cas de Brežnev, la question n’est pas tant de savoir si nous avons à faire à du ghostwriting ou même du ghoststory telling, bien qu’une comparaison avec de tels opuscules soit certainement instructive. Et quand bien même les Mémoires seraient un récit mensonger, reste à se demander malgré tout si leur objectif était de fausser le jeu avec le passé6. Puisqu’on attribue au « revers de la vérité […] cent mille figures »7, nous serions en droit d’attendre du cas présent des raffinements stylistiques et de l’esprit en abondance. Or, les Mémoires de Brežnev ont gagné leur réputation sur le terrain de la fonctionnalité politique, fort éloigné de toute ambition littéraire. Quiconque commence la lecture de cet ouvrage ne doit en attendre ni un plaisir esthétique ni un émouvant récit de soi8. Toutefois, on y découvre bien plus que des banalités.

6 Dans un premier temps, j’exposerai brièvement quelques remarques sur la fonction et la signification des autobiographies et des Mémoires dans la culture mémorielle soviétique, elles permettront de situer les « Mémoires » de Brežnev dans la tradition du genre. Puis j’apporterai des explications et critiques d’autres écrits mémoriels du célèbre auteur et analyserai comment des procédés fictionnels, pseudo‑documentaires ou factographiques sont utilisés pour rendre actuel le passé. En conclusion, je me demanderai en quoi ces textes témoignent du rapport des contemporains à l’histoire soviétique, de la politique culturelle des années 1970 et de ses mécanismes et je terminerai par l’examen – dans les contextes littéraire et historique de l’époque – de la question de l’authenticité des sources autobiographiques soviétiques à l’aune de l’exemple présenté ici.

Les Mémoires dans la culture mémorielle soviétique

7 La littérature et l’histoire évaluent les Mémoires chacune à sa façon. Leur caractère documentaire est néanmoins contesté depuis longtemps9. La culture mémorielle soviétique soulève des questions supplémentaires. En raison d’une genèse spécifique et d’une pratique de la censure stricte mais changeante, ce genre a acquis des particularités historiques au cours du temps. Il fut validé, mais de manière négative, par le flux des Mémoires postsoviétiques à partir des années 199010. Aucun auteur sérieux ne voulait plus être assimilé à ce qu’on appelait « Mémoires » à l’ère soviétique11. De son côté, le président de l’Union des écrivains, Georgij M. Markov, rapidement tombé dans l’oubli, avait chanté les louanges des Mémoires de Brežnev : des « leçons de service rendu au peuple », « qui ont exercé une influence massive sur toutes les formes et tous les genres littéraires »12. De telles professions de foi à la production mémorielle du réalisme socialiste confirment les critiques qui, rétrospectivement, doutent de la pertinence d’étudier la « crédibilité » de ce genre d’écrits. Quelques auteurs ont même affirmé que les Mémoires postsoviétiques n’étaient pas moins infectés par le « Mensonge avec une majuscule » (Lož) que ceux qui les avaient précédés13.

8 De telles réserves ne signifient aucunement que tous les souvenirs soviétiques sont fondamentalement à mettre en doute et, par conséquent, à exclure du débat scientifique. Elles signalent bien plutôt qu’il faut rechercher des critères fiables pour situer pertinemment le volumineux héritage textuel dans la culture mémorielle postsoviétique. Les débats ont été nourris de suggestions émanant du linguistic turn, ou

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tournant linguistique, pris par les sciences historiques internationales. Or, tous les critiques ne souhaitaient pas abandonner la conviction idéaliste selon laquelle – contrairement à la tradition du réalisme socialiste – il existe de « vrais » Mémoires. En fait, aucun auteur n’était en mesure de se « dissimuler » au milieu ou derrière les mots publiés14.

9 Depuis les années 1920, les autobiographes s’intéressent principalement au passé le plus récent. Dans un premier temps, il s’agissait des traumatismes de la Grande Guerre et surtout de la révolution et de la Guerre civile15. Dès cette phase fondatrice de l’écriture mémorialiste soviétique, ce qui relevait de la mémoire collective et des souvenirs individuels n’était pas laissé au hasard. Notions, métaphores et motifs étaient négociés au sein de l’élite politico‑culturelle, qui en établit des représentations historiques. Les médias modernes écrits ou audiovisuels les diffusaient dans la sphère publique ; elles étaient inculquées et ancrées dans les institutions éducatives et autres lieux de communication quotidiens, tels que salons de lecture, clubs ou assemblées générales. Il était presque impossible d’échapper à cette vaste caisse de résonance. Pourtant, et indépendamment de ces conditionnements, les résidus de perceptions alternatives demeuraient dans la mémoire individuelle, dans les souvenirs de famille et des générations. Ce trésor parallèle d’expériences vécues était transmis dans le cercle familier et se manifestait essentiellement à travers des témoignages privés, la communication non écrite et des textes de fiction non publiés16. Il finissait par être perçu publiquement souvent avec beaucoup de retard, quand il ne s’égarait pas tout à fait. Étant donné que le pouvoir soviétique légitimait son existence par le mythe fondateur de la victoire dans la guerre révolutionnaire, il était impensable qu’il existât des variantes dans la commémoration de la césure de 1914 à 192117. C’est seulement parmi les perdants, qui résidaient sur le territoire en se taisant ou vivaient à l’étranger, qu’une tradition orale et écrite parallèle put se maintenir. Elle comportait ses propres mythologèmes et sut adapter certains éléments au modèle du vainqueur18. Les deux traditions avaient en commun la tentative de donner par réduction une cohérence interne à des événements chaotiques et à une réalité contradictoire. Dénouer ces récits historiques révèle à quel point les positions différaient de part et d’autre des frontières, mais aussi au sein de chacune des deux communautés interprétatives.

10 La standardisation de l’écriture mémorielle du soviétisme précoce, en premier lieu du contenu, et par la suite de la forme également, a contribué à ériger un nombre restreint de sujets – dont le canon fut élargi et modifié au cours des décennies suivantes – au rang de représentations historiques et de témoignages créateurs d’identité19. Peu importait qu’ils correspondissent à des faits vérifiables ou qu’ils servissent principalement à démontrer de manière pseudo‑scientifique la vision prescrite.

11 Les « biographies » officielles de Stalin sont à classer dans cette catégorie20. Qui en était l’auteur était finalement sans intérêt. Ce qui importait était leur valeur d’exemple et de modèle. Tous les Mémoires et récits autobiographiques « subjectifs » rédigés après cela par des témoins d’époque devaient respecter le cadre « objectif » qu’avaient tracé les écrits de Stalin ou l’histoire officielle du parti21. L’histoire de la censure soviétique présente un bon nombre d’exemples de ce procédé de production mémorielle standardisée. Les plus significatifs d’entre eux datent du socialisme tardif et montrent que même des membres de l’élite soviétique loyale, comme le maréchal Žukov, étaient obligés de se battre sur tel mot ou telle phrase avec les censeurs22. Personne n’était censé écrire individuellement, ni sur soi‑même ni pour soi‑même. Žukov devait faire

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figure d’« homme officiel » ayant servi et servant encore Stalin, le parti, le socialisme, l’État ou le peuple23. C’est une des explications au tarissement du flux des Mémoires soviétiques à la fin des années 1930. Le genre, riche de tradition, avait perdu sa vivacité. Trop strictement réglementé, il menaçait de disparaître tout à fait. C’est seulement au commencement du dégel culturel des années 1950 qu’il éclôt de nouveau, sans néanmoins atteindre l’intensité des années précédentes24. Dans ce contexte, en se consacrant à nouveau au souvenir (auto)‑biographique en histoire mais aussi en littérature25, les Mémoires de Brežnev marquent une tendance remarquable au cours des années 1970. Le souhait de saisir et de comprendre le « sentiment d’une époque » et la constitution de « l’aplomb d’une personnalité » rencontra une certaine audience26. À partir du milieu des années 1970, des méthodes servant à l’analyse des Mémoires en tant que sources historiques purent renvoyer à des index scientifiques de textes autobiographiques27. Ils recensaient essentiellement des ouvrages consacrés à la littérature russe des XIXe et XXe siècles. On observa cependant quelques tentatives isolées d’arpenter le champ sensible des Mémoires historico‑politiques28.

Comment l’écrivain Brežnev a‑t‑il été fabriqué

12 La genèse des Mémoires de Brežnev est riche en anecdotes et bizarreries. Elle ne s’écarte des règles de la production mémorielle soviétique que dans les détails. En synthétisant, nous obtenons le tableau suivant : au milieu des années 1970, d’éminents membres du parti, avec à leur tête Konstantin U. Černenko, membre du Comité central du PCUS depuis 1971 et du Bureau politique depuis 1978, et Leonid M. Zamjatin, directeur général de l’agence TASS jusqu’en 1978 puis du service d’information internationale au Comité central, jugèrent opportun de consolider l’autorité du Secrétaire général à l’étranger par un bouquet de mesures de propagande. À l’occasion du 70e anniversaire de Brežnev, ils engagèrent tout d’abord la production d’un film documentaire pour le grand écran, Povest´ o kommuniste [Histoire d’un communiste]. Zamjatin était responsable du scénario. D’une durée d’environ une heure, le film, sorti en 1976, retrace une carrière modèle depuis les années 1930 : un garçon issu d’un milieu modeste gravit les échelons jusqu’à la tête de l’État, après avoir fait ses preuves sur le front de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, sur les chantiers de la reconstruction après 1945 et lors de la mise en culture des steppes dans les années 1950. Tout réussit à Brežnev, il charpente l’État par son travail, il sourit malgré le poids de ses tâches et vit modestement en dépit de sa position sommitale. Le septième et dernier volet du film célèbre l’homme politique chargé des affaires étrangères qui entretient un échange continu et assuré avec les hautes personnalités des pays frères socialistes et des hommes d’État du monde capitaliste29. Une autre forme d’hymne visuel, un « album photo » documentant ses voyages dans les régions reculées de l’Union soviétique, chante aussi les louanges du Secrétaire général, chef d’État et maréchal de l’Union soviétique et témoigne de son dévouement au peuple30. Enfin, des productions écrites publiées sous le nom de Brežnev constituèrent le point d’orgue de cette campagne publicitaire multi‑médiale. Il était devenu habituel, pour les politiciens et les chefs d’État occidentaux, de faire valoir leur vision du monde ou leur personne au moyen « d’autobiographies » ou de « Mémoires » souvent rédigés pendant leur mandat31. Brežnev ne semble pas y avoir pensé de lui‑même. Apparemment son intérêt fut éveillé en ce sens en janvier 1978 lors d’un voyage en train vers Tula où une éminente délégation se rendait pour décerner à la ville un titre d’honneur pour ses actes

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héroïques lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Dans une ambiance échauffée, il se mit à parler du bon vieux temps et à déclamer des vers. C’est ainsi que naquit l’idée de faire du chef de l’État et du parti le premier narrateur du passé récent. Le cercle restreint de ses éminents auditeurs du Comité central et du Bureau politique n’eût pas à le prier longtemps de ne pas faire montre de fausse modestie. Ils le confortèrent dans son rôle d’historien de l’époque : « Leonid Il´ič, mais c’est là l’histoire vivante du peuple et du pays ! Vous devriez écrire un livre, on vous aidera… »32.

13 Brežnev fit remarquer qu’il était surchargé, indice précoce de l’ampleur de l’aide nécessitée par la suite. Sans se soucier le moins du monde de la rédaction de ses Mémoires, il demandait à intervalles de plus en plus courts à ses complices quand le livre serait enfin prêt : « Je parle, je parle, mais personne ne m’aide. Je ne suis pas écrivain, moi !... »33. Ce n’était pas un secret, il lisait rarement et n’écrivait ni volontiers ni sans fautes. La question était donc de savoir qui prendrait la plume à sa place. Il fallait décider également quelle matière l’auteur aurait à disposition. Personne ne joua des coudes pour assumer cette mission imprévisible. Certains refusèrent, argumentant qu’ils étaient certes spécialistes de la rédaction d’articles et de discours mais pas de Mémoires. Il fallut donc forcer un peu pour trouver des « volontaires ».

14 Zamjatin fut promu au cœur du pouvoir situé à Staraja Plošad´. De là, il pouvait prendre en main la mise en œuvre de la volonté collective des très rares initiés avec plus de détermination. À l’origine, pas même Jurij Andropov, dirigeant des services secrets, ne fut mis au courant du projet. En spiritus rector, Zamjatin réussit à gagner à sa cause trois journalistes moscovites de renom : Anatolij A. Agranovskij, envoyé spécial depuis 1961 du journal gouvernemental Izvestija34, Aleksandr P. Murzin rédacteur au journal du parti Pravda35 et l’écrivain Arkadij Ja. Sahnin 36. Non seulement Brežnev refusait de dicter ses souvenirs, mais il ne voulait pas même recevoir les auteurs. Les papiers que ces derniers se voyaient remettre à la place des entretiens ne comportaient rien de nouveau, ni documents d’archives ni notes personnelles du Secrétaire général. Pour éviter d’exclure d’emblée toute idée originale, Zamjatin conseilla aux rédacteurs de mener leurs propres recherches sur les différents terrains d’action du dirigeant politique. Lui‑même et son jeune représentant Vitalij N. Ignatenko, qui avait occupé un poste dirigeant à la Komsomolskaja Pravda37, dirigeaient et surveillaient de concert la genèse de cet ouvrage qui promettait de devenir un chef‑d’œuvre.

15 Les auteurs choisis n’obtinrent qu’un délai de quelques mois pour rédiger leurs épisodes respectifs. Par la suite, les textes, indépendants les uns des autres, furent baptisés « trilogie ». Brežnev ne manifesta pas d’intérêt particulier à relire les écrits. De toute façon, la progression de la maladie et le déclin de ses forces ne lui permirent pas de prendre connaissance de plus de quelques passages avant l’impression. Ainsi il n’avait pas pu donner son aval à la plupart des « premiers jets » (bolvanki). À leur parution, les Mémoires ne mentionnaient ni les auteurs, ni les conseillers, ni les archivistes ni aucun autre assistant. Ainsi naquit, presque sans sa contribution personnelle, un nouvel écrivain soviétique.

16 Plusieurs revues de premier plan se disputèrent les épreuves des Mémoires. Finalement, c’est Novyj Mir, revue littéraire estimée, qui décrocha le gros lot. En 1978, les trois parties des Mémoires y parurent en feuilleton, sous les titres Malaja zemlja [La Petite terre], Vozroždenie [La Renaissance] et Celina [Les Terres vierges] 38. La même année, Politizdat, la maison d’édition moscovite de littérature politique, les publia séparément. Les fascicules comportaient entre 50 et 80 pages à peine. Suivirent de

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nombreuses éditions d’autres maisons en RSFSR, dans les langues respectives des républiques soviétiques, et atteignant des records de réimpression inédits dans l’histoire du marché du livre soviétique39. Les écoles et les établissements supérieurs firent des Mémoires une lecture obligatoire. Des conférences furent organisées pour débattre de leur importance en tant que témoignage historique ; des militants du parti et des collectifs d’ouvriers discutaient de l’influence qu’ils exerçaient sur les temps présents. À l’occasion du 75e anniversaire de Brežnev, le journal Voprosy literatury publia un hommage dithyrambique célébrant les Mémoires comme un événement d’une « immense portée » dans la « vie intellectuelle » de la société soviétique, ayant soulevé un « déferlement d’intérêt pour la lecture » et ajoutant qu’« en ce moment, ces livres [étaient] les plus populaires du monde »40. Cinéma, télévision et théâtre s’emparèrent du sujet41. Avec un tirage d’environ 400 millions d’exemplaires, la machine éditoriale produisit LE best‑seller de l’histoire littéraire soviétique, qui venait s’empiler dans les librairies. Le Secrétaire général se mua en « réalité de papier », peu importait que son œuvre eût vraiment « la valeur d’un document » (dokumentnost´) ou qu’elle fût lue42. Même le « Manuel abrégé » de Stalin n’a jamais atteint, loin de là, ce nombre considérable d’exemplaires43.

17 Les organisateurs de cette entreprise mirent un soin particulier à faire traduire et diffuser les Mémoires en langues étrangères. Depuis octobre 1976, le Bureau politique et le secrétariat du Comité central géraient par voie administrative la diffusion des écrits de Brežnev à l’Ouest44. Pour encourager la courbe rapidement ascendante du nombre des publications depuis la fin des années 1960, la diffusion fut systématisée et accélérée. Les discours, les articles et les reportages sur les voyages du Secrétaire général dans le pays des soviets ou à l’étranger ne devaient pas restés méconnus du public international. Un flux croissant de fascicules et de brochures inonda le marché du livre45. On pouvait donc s’attendre à ce qu’une « trilogie » autobiographique relançât les impressions.

18 En 1980, l’agence pan‑soviétique des droits d’auteurs publia un bilan des ventes à l’étranger des œuvres de Brežnev46. Il révélait l’impressionnante diffusion de ce matériel sur le marché mondial. Son rayonnement s’étendait apparemment des pays frères socialistes aux États du Sud et de l’Ouest européen, de l’Amérique du nord, centrale et du sud au monde arabe et aux pays d’Asie et d’Orient. Si l’on y ajoute les parutions dans la presse étrangère, les Mémoires ont trouvé des lecteurs dans 134 pays47. L’agence tenait les rennes des traductions et des impressions. Les ambassades soviétiques maintenaient le contact avec les centrales des partis communistes de leurs pays d’accueil et veillaient à ce que des maisons d’éditions locales affiliées répondent promptement aux demandes de Moscou. De temps à autre, des organismes partenaires étrangers demandaient eux‑mêmes l’autorisation de publier les Mémoires dans leur langue nationale.

19 Les plus proches collaborateurs de Brežnev au Bureau politique se servaient de ces « demandes en grand nombre » venant de l’étranger pour le convaincre de l’intérêt international toujours croissant pour sa personne et sa vie48. C’est ce même objectif que les ambassades soviétiques poursuivaient en demandant qu’on leur retournât les exemplaires, rédigés dans la langue de leur pays et tout frais sortis des presses, signés par le Secrétaire général en personne, afin de les distribuer à diverses personnalités politiques au pouvoir. À Paris, deux douzaines d’élus avaient ainsi été sélectionnés, parmi lesquels Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Jacques Chirac, François Mitterrand et Georges

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Marchais49. Ambassadeur soviétique en RFA depuis 1978, Vladimir S. Semenov, décrivit avec pertinence l’objectif de telles campagnes publicitaires dans une lettre personnelle à Brežnev à l’occasion de la deuxième édition, dans Marxistische Blätter [Feuillets marxistes], d’un recueil d’articles et de discours : la parution de votre livre a été un grand événement social et politique. Il a rencontré un accueil positif et la considération bienveillante des organes de communication de masse de la RFA. Dans le difficile contexte actuel, votre ouverture au lecteur d’Allemagne occidentale se traduira par un grand respect pour l’immense autorité et la reconnaissance internationale du dirigeant de l’État soviétique et du parti communiste de notre pays.50 Semenov l’informait également que la première édition avait été « épuisée en quelques jours », ce qui avait ainsi rendu nécessaire le lancement d’une réédition.

De la sémantique du grand récit

20 Les circonstances de la genèse des Mémoires laissent penser que leur contenu intellectuel et leur structure narrative sont sans prétention. Cette hypothèse est sans aucun doute corroborée par la comparaison de cet ouvrage à d’autres mémoires d’hommes politiques contemporains écrits hors des frontières soviétiques. Néanmoins, il n’est pas sans intérêt d’examiner comment les auteurs ont rempli leur mission, qui consistait à se mettre à la place du protagoniste et considérer l’histoire soviétique à travers son regard. Bien que l’utilisation du « Je » narrateur cherche sans ambages le contact avec le lecteur, elle reflète tout à fait les situations narratives au cours desquelles Brežnev avait coutume de raconter des anecdotes de sa vie à son auditoire. Malaja zemlja, composé de huit chapitres sans titres, définit la structure globale de tout le projet : Je n’ai pas écrit de journal pendant la guerre, mais les 1 418 jours et nuits passés au feu sont inoubliables. Il y eut des moments, des rencontres, des batailles et des minutes uniques qui, comme pour tous les combattants du front (frontoviki), ne disparaîtront jamais de ma mémoire. Je souhaite aujourd’hui parler d’un secteur comparativement petit de la guerre, que les soldats et marins nommaient « petite terre ». Elle était effectivement « petite »– moins de trente kilomètres carrés. Mais elle était aussi grande qu’un lopin de terre (pjad´ zemli) peut l’être quand il est abreuvé du sang de héros désintéressés et prêts au sacrifice.51

21 Un événement marginal en pleine Grande Guerre patriotique devient la bataille décisive pour ceux que le hasard avait mené en ces lieux. En avril 1943, Brežnev est promu chef de la division politique de la 18e armée et transféré vers cette partie du front disputée et éloignée de tout. Le « Je » narrateur évoque le danger de mort quotidien encouru par les soldats qui devaient traverser la baie située non loin de la ville de Novorossijsk. Tout soldat qui en réchappait était décoré. Le commissaire du Bureau politique chargé de surveiller les troupes reconnaît qu’il se sentait profondément solidaire de ceux qui résistaient de toutes leurs forces pour ne pas être « jetés à la mer » lors de l’opération « Neptune » des « hitlériens » (gitlerovcy) et « fascistes » (fašisty). « Je » et « nous » fusionnent52. Le narrateur souligne le caractère « exceptionnel », « décisif » et « total » de l’attaque ennemie, se déclare pourtant satisfait de la « place » (moe mesto) que lui a réservée le destin. Il fait son devoir au sein du collectif. La modestie ostentatoire est d’autant plus monumentale que le narrateur donne l’impression d’avoir écrit depuis « l’avant » sur « l’étroite tête de pont ». Brežnev est ainsi élevé au rang de combattant actif de premier ordre dans les commémorations

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de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. La grande bataille, certes, mais aussi et surtout le théâtre des événements déterminé par le hasard comptent pour beaucoup dans la victoire générale.

22 La deuxième série d’épisodes est composée de manière comparable. Vozroždenie décrit le travail de Brežnev en tant que premier secrétaire du Comité régional du PCUS à Zaporož´e en Ukraine après le 30 août 1946. Unissant leurs forces, les hommes réussirent à mener à bien, en quelques années seulement, l’étape de la « reconstruction de l’économie » dans la région soviétique dévastée du bassin du Dniepr53. Là où, à son arrivée, la friche recouvrait « débris et gravas », où « retentissait au loin le hurlement des chiens vagabonds » et où le « silence de mort des usines » rappelait l’époque épouvantable de la guerre civile, le serviteur et envoyé du parti laissa des « campagnes fleuries » (cvetuščie nivy) et une « région magnifique aux usines puissantes » (čudesnyj kraj moščnich predprijatij)54. Une édition bibliophile de 1979, publiée par la maison moscovite Detskaja Literatura renoue avec le pathos de la reconstruction des débuts de l’époque stalinienne en émaillant le texte de reproductions picturales socialistes‑réalistes en couleurs, datant essentiellement des années 1930 et 1940, et pour certaines, des années 1950 et 1970. Le narrateur insiste sur le fait que sa responsabilité dans la reconstruction de cette région industrielle de poids fit faire un bond à sa carrière. Néanmoins, les héros se distinguent davantage par la collégialité et le pragmatisme que par le carriérisme. Il se dit heureux d’avoir été le « témoin et l’acteur de ces prouesses ». Ce fut une « rude école » pour l’ouvrier et l’ingénieur qu’il était55.

23 Celina enfin, la troisième partie des Mémoires, peut être interprétée à la fois comme l’appropriation du grand projet de mise en valeur des « Terres vierges » dans les années 1950 et comme la dépossession de Hruščev de ce même projet, dont il était l’initiateur et le gestionnaire essentiel. Si l’on suit le fil de la narration, la steppe kazakhe est devenue le grenier à grain de l’Union soviétique en un temps record, entre 1954 et 1956. La récolte exceptionnelle l’année du 20e Congrès du parti confirmait et justifiait donc la pertinence de la reconduction de Brežnev au poste de Secrétaire du Comité central du PCUS en février 1956. À la suite de cela, tout sembla se dérouler parfaitement – tant pour le pays que pour son fils élu. Origine et destin du « Je » narrateur se cristallisent après un processus de maturation en trois étapes en un curriculum vitae idéal (post)stalinien de l’homme soviétique : Ouvrier par mon père, paysan par mon grand‑père, j’ai tenté ma chance comme travailleur aussi bien à l’usine qu’à la campagne. J’ai débuté comme ouvrier, mais dans les années d’effondrement économique et durant les longues périodes d’arrêt à l’usine j’ai appris à labourer, semer, récolter et j’ai commencé à comprendre ce que signifiait cultiver des céréales de ses propres mains.56

24 La diabolisation par les bolcheviks de la mentalité et du mode de vie paysan et la destruction de la culture villageoise sous Stalin devaient désormais être effacées des esprits. Grâce à une technique agricole moderne et des cadres compétents envoyés par le centre, non seulement les « terres vierges » de la périphérie furent mises en valeur et fertilisées mais l’antagonisme entre ville et village disparut. L’argumentation du narrateur est celle d’un ingénieur qui triomphe de la fracture sociale de son pays en fournissant un travail de reconstruction inédit. À l’exemple du Kazakhstan, il montre qu’une direction agro‑économique courageuse fondée sur l’innovation technologique est la condition sine qua non du progrès. Le programme de mise en valeur des terres vierges paraît ainsi avoir été le moteur d’une vague de productivité touchant toute

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l’économie et l’origine d’un essor des sciences et de la culture. De nouvelles branches industrielles naissent, des villes sont fondées. C’est dans le complexe agro‑industriel que le concept de modernisation des républiques et des régions arriérées atteint sa perfection. En référence au genre du grand roman de la période stalinienne, le « Je » narrateur parle d’une « épopée des terres vierges » (celinnaja ėpopeja), devenue le symbole du « service désintéressé à la patrie » qui démontre tout particulièrement les « qualités éthiques [supérieures] de l’homme soviétique »57.

L’art de l’omission

25 Les Mémoires publiés sous le nom de Brežnev ne cherchent ni le dialogue personnel avec le passé, ni le récit fidèle de sa perception subjective des événements en vue de les transmettre à la postérité. Dans cette optique, ils n’appartiennent donc pas au genre dont ils portent le nom. Ils ne méritent leur place de témoignage historique qu’à la lumière d’une rétrospective sur le contexte des années 1970. Le lecteur contemporain y cherchait des informations, l’historien, en revanche, s’intéresse à ce qui a été caché au lecteur. Le premier repérait intuitivement ce que le récit omettait. Soit il savait par expérience personnelle que bien des choses s’étaient passées autrement, soit il avait acquis pendant le dégel culturel une vision plus nuancée du passé récent58. C’est pourquoi la mise en scène de Brežnev en grand ponte du souvenir historique marque une césure sur plusieurs plans. L’exigence poststalinienne de faire de la sincérité (iskrennost´) un critère du débat social59 disparut de la sphère publique. Elle conservait malgré tout une vertu normative dans les milieux intellectuels alternatifs, qualifiés de « tendances malsaines et étrangères au réalisme socialiste soviétique » par les instances du parti60. Tandis que la mémoire historique était à nouveau étatisée pour imposer une culture dédramatisée du souvenir et mettre le passé au service de la politique, certaines voix dissidentes en marge de la sphère publique et officielle commençaient à se faire entendre61. Elles endossèrent le rôle de conservatrices du « publiquement indicible » pour le prémunir de l’oubli. La clandestinité idéologique et politique naissante revendiquait de nouvelles représentations de l’histoire, entretenait des codes linguistiques et des styles divergeant des formes de discours officielles et cherchait des moyens d’expression artistiques et indépendants62. Une culture hétérogène de l’écrit et du livre émergeait du Samizdat, qui contrecarrait tout essai d’uniformisation du discours historique officiel63.

26 Il fut par conséquent impossible d’imposer une nouvelle réglementation stricte de la conscience historique comme cela avait été le cas dans les années 1930. À elles seules, les nouvelles possibilités d’échanges d’informations et la transformation des relations entre pouvoir et société rendaient la tâche impossible. De plus, le caractère improvisé des Mémoires du Secrétaire général allait à l’encontre d’une tentative de poursuivre l’écriture de l’histoire récente à la manière du Manuel abrégé ( Kratkij kurs). Cette atmosphère rappelait plutôt le tumulte que souleva, dans les années 1950, la brochure de Stalin « Le Marxisme dans les questions linguistiques »64. Brežnev resta largement à l’écart de la rédaction. Ce n’était pas l’autorité d’un texte original mais l’objectif panégyrique qui importait au commanditaire. Les auteurs n’étaient nullement dilettantes en la matière. Ils n’avaient pas même besoin de mentir pour remplir leur mission, sauf s’ils avaient tenté de se mesurer au rigorisme moral d’Aleksandr I. Solženicyn, qui refusait de faire la moindre concession, même rhétorique, au

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régime65. Leur capacité à diluer une « vérité » conforme au système dans des images normées du réalisme socialiste faisait d’eux des prestidigitateurs verbaux. En reproduisant une « réalité » souhaitable, ils se conformaient aux conventions sociales66. On y décèle parfaitement ce qui a été omis avec virtuosité et ce qui était officiellement et publiquement inopportun. Les rédacteurs savaient intuitivement ce dont Brežnev voulait se souvenir et ce que son entourage jugeait souhaitable. Ils traduisirent avec brio les pensées de l’élite politique dans un scénario composé de blocs narratifs et de clichés67. Leurs styles, loin d’être hermétiques, laissent transparaître à tout instant ce qui a été passé sous silence : les victimes de la construction industrielle sous Stalin, les décisions erronées prises dans le chaos de la guerre, l’autoritarisme de certains commissaires politiques à l’endroit d’officiers supérieurs, l’omniprésence des services secrets, les répressions et les camps de travail, les désertions et la collaboration, les déceptions de la période de reconstruction, les contrecoups et les faux espoirs de la campagne de mise en valeur des terres vierges. Comme il était inimaginable que des itinéraires biographiques restassent intacts après les secousses de la première moitié du siècle et suivissent une voie rectiligne68, les auteurs des Mémoires choisirent un procédé qui évoquait tout au plus la stupeur, le doute, voire la critique, sans que ces thèmes ne devinssent jamais substantiels.

27 Cela leur permettait de présenter les différentes fonctions de Brežnev comme les épreuves d’un parcours de vie plutôt cohérent. Elles illustrent le défi permanent du parti d’écarter tout risque de dommage par l’éducation politique. Il est vrai que « tout le monde n’a pas compris », par exemple, que le pacte de non‑agression germano‑soviétique en 1939 avait pour seule fin d’obtenir « une pause nécessaire » afin de « consolider la force de défense du pays ». La publication de photographies montrant Molotov et Hitler ou Stalin et Ribbentrop tendait même la perche aux « discours provocateurs ». Or Brežnev, à cette époque Secrétaire du Comité régional du parti à Dnepropetrovsk chargé de l’industrie de l’armement, se montra à la hauteur de la situation, pourtant difficile. En 1940, peu de temps avant une réunion avec quatre cents chargés d’enseignement du parti, ses subordonnés lui demandent si le pacte doit y être « expliqué ou non ». « Expliqué, “absolument”, fut ma réponse. Nous l’expliquerons, camarades, jusqu’à ce que l’Allemagne fasciste ne compte plus deux pierres l’une sur l’autre »69.

28 Immédiatement après le décès de Stalin, on comprit à quel point il était risqué de prêter l’oreille aux voix du quotidien et du vécu. Même les tentatives les plus timides d’éclairer le passé récent sous une lumière critique produisaient des secousses violentes. Les prisonniers rentrés du goulag réclamaient leur réhabilitation et par leur seule présence plongèrent les sociétés d’après‑guerre et poststalinienne dans l’inquiétude et la confusion70. Les peuples déportés cherchaient à tout prix à rentrer chez eux. Des tendances anticonformistes gagnaient du terrain dans les milieux de la littérature, des médias, du cinéma, de la musique et parmi les jeunes. L’unicité de la représentation de l’histoire, comme l’unité de la société soviétique et du modèle collectif de « l’homme nouveau » commençaient à être ébranlées, et ce, malgré l’expérience vécue en commun de la victoire de la Guerre mondiale. La politique versatile de Hruščev contribuait à renforcer les tendances conflictuelles. C’est pourquoi Brežnev comptait bien écarter de l’espace public le chœur polyphonique de la pensée divergente et effacer le souvenir du dégel culturel71.

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29 Les rétrospectives sur la « résurrection » de l’Union soviétique après l’occupation et sur le grand projet néostalinien de mise en valeur des « terres vierges » étaient parsemées d’indices subtils sur l’existence d’embûches et de zones d’ombres. Dans la trame presque parfaite de la métaphore de la construction, les auteurs tissèrent quelques fils qui conféraient à l’ensemble un aspect équivoque. En réalité le produit devait ainsi gagner en clarté et en valeur. Une « vigilance particulière » était requise, car dans les années d’après‑guerre, des « bandes armées » semaient le trouble. Les fusillades nocturnes n’étaient pas rares. Brežnev aurait pris comme une insulte d’avoir survécu à la guerre pour se prendre une « pauvre balle » immédiatement après. « Honnêtement », il ne se préoccupait pas de sa propre sécurité mais de ce que « toute la population put mener une vie tranquille ». Courageusement, il prit le volant et seul, quitta de nuit Dnepropetrovsk et ses environs72. Pendant la guerre, comme dans les années suivantes, grandeur et banalité se côtoyaient : les épisodes devenus actes d’héroïsme tournaient vite à la caricature si l’on forçait trop le trait.

30 Les plans de construction du grand chantier de « Zaporožstal´ » nécessitaient sans cesse d’être corrigés. La productivité était faible, la main d’œuvre manquait. La ligne directrice résultait non pas de ce qui était « possible » mais de ce qui était « nécessaire ». Stalin avait eu avec Brežnev un « entretien sérieux » au téléphone. Le rythme de travail fut immédiatement accéléré. L’atmosphère devait être « à la mobilité combative, l’attitude générale à la fermeté, la modération et l’autodiscipline ». Les retards furent mis sur le compte de la guerre froide. Ils étaient dus aux tentatives inlassables des États capitalistes de tirer parti de « nos difficultés » pour « nous dicter leur volonté » et nous mettre à genoux. Mais au lieu de fléchir et de capituler face au refus de l’aide technique, l’Union soviétique démontra une fois de plus au monde que les « réserves de l’économie socialiste et les possibilités de notre économie planifiée sont intarissables »73.

31 Aucun contrecoup ne pouvait ébranler la foi de Brežnev en la justesse et la nécessité de la voie empruntée. Ce qui était détruit serait reconstruit tôt au tard avec les méthodes éprouvées74. Les immenses centrales électriques d’avant‑guerre étaient pour lui un « symbole de la puissance industrielle du pays soviétique » à reconstruire. Par l’intermédiaire des actualités hebdomadaires au cinéma et d’innombrables photos dans les journaux et revues, tout citoyen soviétique avait parfaitement en mémoire le projet pionnier « Dneprogės ». Ils savaient donc « que ce barrage est particulièrement beau ». Lors d’une excursion sur ces lieux exceptionnels, une étudiante écrivit avec exaltation : « Dneprogės est à notre terre ce que Puškin est à la littérature et Čajkovskij à la musique. Quels que soient les géants apparus depuis sur les rives de la Volga, de l’Angara et de l’Enisej – ils ne parviennent pas à faire de l’ombre à la majesté du patriarche de l’énergie soviétique ! »75. Brežnev s’estimait heureux d’avoir été « témoin et acteur de ces grandes prestations » avec lesquelles il fallait désormais renouer après les destructions de la guerre76.

32 L’histoire de la conception, de la publication et de la réception des Mémoires de Brežnev ne traduit pas un retour des méthodes staliniennes dans le monde littéraire. Certes, tous les moyens de l’appareil culturel étaient mobilisés pour créer une grande illusion historique, mais la prétention morale de cet artefact était faible77. Le Secrétaire général descendait dans les bas‑fonds de la biographie conventionnelle. Son itinéraire terrestre y fut bien sûr rendu héroïque à plusieurs reprises, par exemple, lorsque sur le front, « la terre brûlait, les pierres fumaient, le métal fondait et le béton se craquelait »,

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mais que les soldats restaient « fidèles à leur serment » de ne reculer en aucun cas78. Ou encore, lorsque le protagoniste fit surgir un « gigantesque complexe agro‑industriel » de nulle part (« na golom meste »)79. Il n’était cependant jamais déconnecté de la réalité, il connaissait les travers de la pratique et les soucis des petites gens, il voulait convaincre et pas seulement donner des ordres80.

33 Dans le « Je » narrateur, le lecteur reconnaît, dissimulé par des signes hyperboliques, le citoyen moyen dont les expériences vécues en des temps exceptionnels ont malgré tout des traits assez communs. Leonid Il´ič cherche le « dialogue amical » avec les directeurs d’usines, les convainc de ne pas seulement investir les confortables moyens financiers dans leur entreprise, mais aussi dans des logements solides. En effet, de nombreux ouvriers vivaient dans des baraques à la périphérie de la ville, ou se contentaient de logements provisoires (vremjanki) sur leur lieu de travail81. Brežnev connaissait le parler populaire, il comprenait le langage du grand peuple, plaisantait, aimait être en société. « S’il y a du pain, il y aura une chanson », c’est ainsi que débute la dernière partie de la trilogie82. Brežnev a su grimper les échelons depuis un milieu modeste jusqu’à l’élite soviétique. Il a su tirer bénéfice des grands projets de l’époque stalinienne, de l’industrialisation et de la guerre patriotique pour sa carrière. Ils étaient pour lui les rites initiatiques du passage vers un homo novus soviétique. Ils l’autorisaient, comme il aime à se souvenir, à servir de maître pour de jeunes camarades auxquels il montrait le droit chemin avec une patience amicale. Le promu se voyait comme un modèle de biographie soviétique réussie et c’est ainsi que les auteurs de ses Mémoires le dépeignirent.

34 Malgré la simplicité et la pléthore des détails, les textes paraissent par endroits fortement stéréotypés. Cela s’explique essentiellement par leur finalité, qui est de proposer à la société soviétique d’après‑guerre un modèle d’identification des plus concrets. Les Mémoires suggèrent l’homogénéité en éludant peu à peu la distinction sociale croissante, la réduisant à des conflits pratiques de groupes égaux en droits. Sans le succès de la construction d’un État industrialisé, tel est le message, la guerre n’aurait pu être gagnée. Toutes les victimes et les privations trouvaient leur justification dans la victoire. Cette vision sélective et nationalisée de la « Grande Guerre patriotique » ne demeura pas sans écho auprès de la population, car elle avait le mérite de proposer un consensus minimum viable83. De même, la reconstruction ne pouvait réussir que dans la mesure où l’agriculture parachevait la révolution technique lancée par Stalin. Dès lors, le dictateur ne pouvait pas être remis en question. Si la génération ascendante avait perdu son « père », l’élite dirigeante aurait perdu son point d’ancrage. Brežnev bénéficiait donc tacitement d’une place d’honneur.

35 Lors de la parution de la trilogie, l’inéluctable laïus sur la phase héroïque du socialisme et sa mise en relation avec le nom de Brežnev avait déjà été prononcé depuis longtemps. Cautionné avec succès, il menaçait désormais de perdre en couleurs. Or, comme « mon rêve et le rêve de quelques centaines de milliers de pionniers » étaient en grande partie exaucés, le pays pouvait se fixer de nouveaux objectifs dans un socialisme « développé » et « mûr »84. Ces objectifs formaient des points d’intersection dans le système de coordonnées de Brežnev. Il s’agissait des derniers grands thèmes de l’histoire soviétique : vétérans et soldats brochaient le passé et le présent d’une armée victorieuse ; ouvriers et ingénieurs continuaient à bâtir l’avenir dans un contexte de paix ; kolkhoziens et techniciens agricoles envoyaient la faim aux oubliettes et garantissaient une alimentation fiable, même en temps de crise. Réunis, ces objectifs

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s’adaptaient au goût et aux valeurs matérielles d’une classe moyenne soviétique sans relief85. Le mode de vie personnel de Brežnev s’illustrait certes par quelque luxe, mais témoignait aussi d’une certaine prédilection pour le « goût soviétique » apparu dans les années 1950 et 196086. Ce culte petits‑bourgeois des marchandises n’était pas très éloigné de celui auquel s’adonnaient les classes moyennes capitalistes87. Cependant de tels rapprochements se cantonnent essentiellement à la culture matérielle, c’est‑à‑dire aux habitudes de consommation des artistes, scientifiques, hauts fonctionnaires, personnel administratif du parti, cosmonautes et sportifs88.

36 Dans la société masculine de performance prônée par Brežnev, les femmes et les jeunes avaient du mal à trouver leur place. Patriotisme, disposition à la privation, mobilité et enthousiasme caractérisaient sa vision de l’histoire – et celle qui lui était attribuée – et du code de conduite de la société socialiste tardive. Pour mobiliser la jeune génération, on invoqua à nouveau les vertus qui avaient soi‑disant animé les grands chantiers du socialisme. Elles devaient aider, dans les temps présents, « à rendre la vie meilleure, plus juste, plus lumineuse, matériellement mais aussi plus riche intellectuellement » : détermination, courage, amitié, amour du travail89. Les chantiers de la ligne ferroviaire Bajkal‑Amur (BAM – Bajkalo‑Amurskaja Magistral´) ou de l’usine de construction automobile KamAZ à Naberežnye Čelny ont été réalisés dans l’esprit de cette tradition. Ils permettaient à la génération montante de faire ses preuves et de se distinguer, tout comme ses pères avant elle90. La jeunesse des années 1960 et 1970 n’avait toutefois aucun souvenir de la collectivisation, de l’industrialisation ou de la guerre. La technologie moderne faisait partie pour elle des évidences du quotidien aussi bien urbain que rural, du moins elle s’attendait à prendre part directement au progrès dans son aspect technique.

37 Les Mémoires de Brežnev donnaient peu matière à faire apparaître réalistes de telles attentes. Le conglomérat de superlatifs et de « petits faits d’armes », de détermination et de modestie n’ébranlait guère le nerf vital des enfants d’après‑guerre. À l’horizon de leurs intérêts pratiques, la composition d’épigone d’un archétype du « manuel abrégé » pour accéder au succès était forcément de la littérature kitsch. Les courtes années du dégel avaient enseigné un internationalisme qui plaçait le vécu personnel au‑dessus des affaires politiques. Des festivals culturels et de grandes rencontres sportives avaient su échapper, malgré toutes les réglementations, aux conventions diplomatiques rigides de la guerre froide. Face à ces expériences, les valeurs ascétiques reprises par Brežnev se trouvaient en posture difficile. Leur pathos traditionnel n’était plus que partiellement adapté aux changements de la vie quotidienne en Union soviétique. C’est une ironie de l’histoire que les millions d’exemplaires des œuvres de Brežnev aient eu moins d’impact que la poésie lyrique ostensiblement subjective de l’acteur et « barde » Vladimir S. Vysockij91. Celle‑ci n’était ni défendue, ni officiellement reconnue. À quelques exceptions près, elle n’était pas publiée mais se propageait, soit récitée par cœur soit par d’innombrables transcriptions ou enregistrements. Les vétérans trouvaient les vers sur la guerre si crédibles, qu’ils pensaient que le poète avait combattu comme eux sur le front ; des criminels y reconnaissaient le flair d’un initié qui maîtrisait leur langage ; les jeunes décelaient dans ses chansons un goût de l’aventure et un enthousiasme pour l’inhabituel qui leur semblait vrai, même lorsqu’elles se concluaient sur une déception. « L’authenticité » ne dépendait visiblement pas obligatoirement d’expériences vécues et personnelles. Elle se mouvait ici entre fidélité au système et désaccord92. Par conséquent, les approches dichotomiques qui se contentent simplement de distinguer le haut du bas, le public du

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privé ou la loyauté de l’opposition ne parviennent guère à saisir la perception de la société soviétique par ses contemporains. De même, l’opposition entre valeurs morales, telles que vérité et mensonge ou honnêteté et corruption, ne touche que des aspects marginaux de la réalité quotidienne des années 1960 et 1970. La « vie normale » (normal ´naja žizn´) ne rimait en rien avec rhétorique d’État ou normes idéologiques93. Elle gravitait autour d’habitudes, de modes de vie et de visions d’une existence meilleure94.

Le don

38 Malaja zemlja, Vozroždenie et Celina n’ont pas été proclamés « Trilogie » par nécessité ou embarras. Publier une œuvre de vieillesse si peu volumineuse en un volume n’aurait pas atteint le but escompté, d’autant plus que les différentes parties ne constituaient pas d’unité homogène. Or, les thèmes et les motifs avaient été choisis de manière à composer un autoportrait de Brežnev en homme qui gravit les échelons en jouant harmonieusement de trois composantes, zèle, proximité avec le peuple et détermination. Parallèlement, les textes répondaient à une vision minimaliste de l’histoire, dans laquelle le nécessaire et le juste convergeaient. Qu’il y avait‑il alors de plus logique que de doter le Secrétaire général d’un don qui illustrait parfaitement l’entente sur les règles de la « voie soviétique ascendante » ?

39 Le « Je » narrateur cesse de dissimuler ses origines partagées. Il fait des éléments prolétaire et paysan le label qualité de son parcours. Il lui a été donné de fusionner enfin nature et technique, culture villageoise et culture citadine, agriculture et industrie, et de réaliser l’héritage de Lenin, consistant à forger une alliance entre ouvriers et paysans (smyčka). Ainsi était oubliée la détresse des fils de paysans qui tentaient d’échapper à leur identité dans les années 193095. Doté de telles capacités jumelées et de telles expériences, le parvenu de l’héroïque période stalinienne ne pouvait avoir d’autre vocation que celle de primus inter pares au sein d’une direction collective. Nul n’incarnait et ne représentait mieux que lui les deux colonnes du système soviétique, l’agricole et la manuelle d’un côté, l’industrielle et la technologique de l’autre. Progressivement et contre vents et marées, il traversa des formations multiples, fut paysan et ouvrier, ingénieur agricole et mécanicien. L’harmonie fonctionnelle du socialisme tardif lui permit de devenir soliste dans le collectif, sans craindre d’être fustigé ou rejeté96. Il pouvait se permettre – soutenu par la loyauté des cadres privilégiés – de jouer de ses capacités, de cultiver ses passions et de manifester son faible pour les voitures, les montres et les décorations97. Modèle vivant, il montrait comment triompher de l’ascèse en période de construction, de guerre et de reconstruction, et comment se réjouir des conquêtes de l’économie soviétique98.

40 Considéré comme tel, le noyau des Mémoires consiste en la répétition d’une expérience collective. Le protagoniste progresse et mûrit en accomplissant ses devoirs. Du sommet de l’Olympe soviétique, en représentant d’une génération entière, il contemple ce qui a été accompli : comme ses pères, il a défendu son pays au péril de sa vie, sans parvenir à empêcher les ravages et les destructions. Comme eux, il a organisé la reconstruction en temps de paix, sans cesse exposé au danger extérieur. En engageant avec clairvoyance l’extension du territoire, il a achevé dans la perfection son service au « pays natal » et à la « patrie »99. Le projet d’un État modèle moderne et technologiquement hautement développé avait été mis en œuvre avec succès, il pouvait désormais être tranquillement poursuivi.

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41 Pour improvisées que soient leur composition et leur présentation, les « Mémoires », en tant que « Trilogie », remplissaient leur objectif : ils étaient le digne cadeau de la direction collective à son médiateur au Bureau politique. La direction en fit don au méritant comme consécration de son talent. Les Mémoires étaient la clé de voûte d’un projet de longue haleine consistant à munir le Secrétaire général d’une « biographie ». Cet honneur flattait sa vanité, car on lui attribuait les mérites dont se félicitaient ses camarades au sommet, c’est‑à‑dire avoir réussi à sortir le pays des années turbulentes qui suivirent la mort de Stalin100. En même temps, les rivalités de la guerre froide exigeaient que le meneur du plus grand pays du monde et de la seule autre grande puissance aux côtés des États‑Unis eût un visage et une histoire. Il est impossible de ne pas voir la ressemblance entre le portrait historisant de Brežnev et les campagnes médiatiques des présidents américains. C’est pourquoi « une brève esquisse biographique », parue aux Éditions de littérature politique en 1977, montrait en premier lieu l’homme chargé des affaires étrangères, couronné de succès et parcourant le monde en habitué101. Elle imposait le carcan narratif consistant à évaluer la valeur individuelle des prestations à l’aune de la grandeur de l’époque. Le message en était que seul celui qui, comme Brežnev, avait grandi et s’était endurci dans les années de « combat désintéressé du peuple soviétique », pouvait espérer rejoindre la « pléiade » des dirigeants politiques, élus pour mettre en œuvre les préceptes (prednačertanie) de Lenin et défendre les « acquis de la grande révolution d’Octobre socialiste »102. Sans « dirigeants prolétaires expérimentés » pour les guider, les « masses populaires » perdraient leur rôle décisif dans l’histoire. Brežnev incarnait le type idéal car il était lié « à jamais » aux « gens du travail » par les « liens du sang ». Où que l’envoyât le parti, il combattait « avec énergie et acharnement » pour la « grande cause du Communisme » 103.

42 Autre don au dirigeant du monde socialiste, les efforts internationaux engagés par les partis communistes pour diffuser des traductions de la trilogie dans les langues des différents pays : elles étaient signes de leur dévouement. Néanmoins, pour le Secrétaire général, les Mémoires n’étaient pas simplement une distinction symbolique ou un trophée. En effet les « scribes » (pisari) anonymes ne furent pas rémunérés pour leur travail. Les tantièmes conséquents revenaient à Brežnev en personne. Il finit par s’identifier si fortement au texte, qu’il annonça en passant, lors d’une présentation en grandes pompes du livre, qu’il avait l’intention d’en écrire une suite si sa santé le lui permettait. Pour les véritables auteurs en revanche, il restait tout au plus de modestes gains immatériels, au goût du Secrétaire général : ils furent décorés et ils caressaient l’espoir plus ou moins justifié d’un soutien pour accéder à des ressources rares, telles qu’appartement ou voiture. C’est pourquoi ils déclinèrent l’offre d’être promus au rang de rédacteurs de discours (spičrajter). Brežnev, le mécène entre les mécènes, ajouta les « Mémoires » sur la longue étagère de ses distinctions honorifiques104. Dans la « pluie d’étoiles » qui ne cessait de se déverser sur lui, elles tenaient véritablement lieu de joyau.

43 Dans les Mémoires, Brežnev est un homme qui se soucie des intérêts de son pays, parle aux ouvriers dans les entreprises et rend visite aux travailleurs dans les campagnes. Cela correspond parfaitement à l’affabilité avec laquelle il prononçait ses discours devant les collectifs d’usines, les syndicats et les petits fonctionnaires du parti105. Là, le narrateur était dans son élément. Les auteurs de ses Mémoires ne pouvaient qu’essayer de l’imiter au mieux. À cause de la guerre en Afghanistan, qui pesait lourdement sur les

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relations avec les États‑Unis, et en raison de l’aggravation rapide de l’état de santé de Brežnev, le projet médiatique perdit sa priorité106.

44 À un autre niveau, en revanche, les Mémoires conservèrent une signification particulière. Bien qu’ils ne purent remplir ni leur fonction intégrative à l’intérieur, ni leur effet de propagande à l’extérieur, ils expriment toutefois les éléments essentiels du budget « symbole » dans le système clientéliste brežnevien107. Cela est autant valable pour les auteurs, que pour le « patron » honoré à travers leurs textes. Il est indéniable que les journalistes ont réussi à décrire la guerre, la reconstruction et la mise en valeur des terres vierges d’une manière qui répondait très largement aux attentes du commanditaire. Certes, dans les manuels du journalisme, « l’écriture de Mémoires » ne faisait pas partie des aptitudes à maîtriser à tout prix. Toutefois le catalogue des genres obligatoires proposait avec l’esquisse, l’entretien, le feuilleton, les notes de voyage ou les épigrammes suffisamment de suggestions pour venir à bout de ce défi108. Celui qui s’était vu offrir les Mémoires n’a apporté que des corrections minimes aux épreuves ou n’a pas même lu les textes avant leur publication. Son passé, c’est‑à‑dire le passé soviétique, correspondait sous cette forme à ce que l’on pourrait nommer un guide popularisé pour l’enseignement de l’histoire à l’école ou la formation des adultes. Il s’agissait d’un consensus minimum qui ne nécessitait plus ni interprétation ni commentaires.

45 C’est ce qui avait échappé à l’ambassadeur soviétique à Tokyo, D.S. Poljanskij. Celui-ci, comme les rédacteurs, avait tout à fait compris l’objectif du texte, il jugea cependant devoir l’expliquer un peu plus au lecteur. On s’employa bien vite, depuis les plus hautes instances, à l’en empêcher, mais il fit tout de même scandale. Le diplomate avait décidé, fin 1978, d’écrire lui même une préface pour l’édition japonaise des Mémoires. Non seulement il n’en avait pas informé le Centre, mais il en profita pour présenter l’œuvre sous d’autres termes que ceux dont elle était habituellement accompagnée. Son essai de deux pages était une explication de texte que Černenko qualifia immédiatement de prétention scandaleuse. Voici ce qu’il avait eu à lire : la publication des Mémoires de Leonid Il´ič Brežnev est un grand événement pour l’humanité progressiste. Ce livre est une riche contribution à la chronique héroïque de la Grande Guerre patriotique. Il relate franchement et de manière inspirée la grandeur spirituelle de l’homme soviétique. C’est un document véritablement (voistine) bouleversant, qui glorifie la fermeté et le courage du peuple combattant (narod‑voin) et du peuple travailleur (narod‑truženik), son patriotisme et son dévouement au legs du fondateur de l’Union soviétique, V.I. Lenin. Le secrétaire général du Comité central du PCUS, Leonid Il´ič Brežnev, a parcouru le chemin ardu de la guerre, depuis les débuts difficiles jusqu’à la victoire finale. Une expérience vécue et militaire riche aida l’organisateur et dirigeant de l’État à concevoir une œuvre qui se distingue par la richesse d’idées ainsi que la profondeur des jugements et de la généralisation. Il s’agit d’un récit substantiel et impressionnant d’un témoin et acteur des événements.109

46 Ce que l’ambassadeur formulait, avec les meilleures intentions, pour transmettre au lecteur japonais que la « force vive de l’idée communiste » ne se trouvait pas uniquement dans les « combats mortels » de la guerre mais aussi dans le « travail véritablement surhumain » de la reconstruction, se transforma sous le zèle de sa plume en un récit parallèle exalté110. Vouloir surpasser la grande œuvre de façon rhétorique, voilà qui allait trop loin pour les initiateurs. L’édition japonaise des Mémoires parut donc sans la préface de l’ambassadeur. Černenko écrivit à Brežnev : « Regardez ce que fait le camarade Poljanskij ! S’il n’en a pas discuté avec vous, permettez‑moi de lui faire

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comprendre par les organes appropriés, qu’il ferait mieux d’y renoncer. On n’a encore jamais vu une chose pareille chez nous ! »111

Fiction et authenticité

47 « Véridicité », « authenticité » et degré de « véracité » sont des critères peu adéquats pour classer les Mémoires de Brežnev. Ils furent totalement ignorés ou presque par le public international. Il n’y eu quasiment pas de critiques en dehors des frontières soviétiques112. Personne n’osait comparer cet artefact difficile à juger avec des Mémoires d’hommes politiques d’autres pays, ni les mettre sur un même plan. Mais existe‑t‑il quelqu’un d’autre, parmi les dirigeants soviétiques, qui se soit souvenu et si oui de quoi ? Lenin avait beaucoup écrit, mais pas de Mémoires à proprement parler. Stalin écrivait nettement moins, se souvenait tout au plus des méfaits de ses rivaux, réels ou supposés, et ne laissa pas non plus de journal lorsqu’il décéda. Hruščev enregistra secrètement des bandes sonores, alors qu’il était déjà évincé de son poste, dont des extraits furent diffusés à l’étranger au début des années 1970.

48 Les « Mémoires » de Brežnev sont donc un signe des changements à l’œuvre dans la représentation publique du chef de l’État. Ils parurent de manière officielle et du vivant du dirigeant. Par leur matérialité ils assuraient par la présence symbolique du Secrétaire général dans le moindre recoin de l’Union soviétique. Le fait qu’ils soient issus de plumes anonymes et inconnues, ne soient que partiellement validés par leur non‑auteur mais attribués entièrement à celui‑ci, souligne leur rôle particulier dans le cadre de la production de textes du parti dans les années 1960 et 1970. Témoins d’une époque tardive, ils sont authentiques dans le sens où ils documentent l’usure et le creux de la scénographie du pouvoir soviétique. La mise en scène de Brežnev comme écrivain se réfère aux origines de la littérature soviétique dans les années 1920. À cette époque, on forgea certains principes de l’artisanat littéraire qui furent ensuite fixés pendant la période du réalisme socialiste : paternité rédactionnelle impersonnelle, création collective, fonctionnalité sociale et abandon du réalisme comme miroir de la vérité113.

49 C’est dans cette tradition que se situent les « Mémoires » de Brežnev. Le scénario qui les établit en chef-d’œuvre était certes spectaculaire, mais l’envergure en était très conventionnelle : ils furent mis en vente comme un produit de masse multimédia, sans libérer « auteur » et « héros » des personnalités‑types soviétiques normatives. Ni la pauvreté du noyau dur factuel, ni la plume autobiographique ne produisent de traits originaux. À l’image des auteurs réels, le sujet qui se remémore disparaît derrière une façade de stéréotypes. Les éléments de construction de cette forme de récit étaient supra‑individuels et reproductibles ad libitum114. Ils ne recherchaient pas l’originalité mais une confirmation permanente du familier et de l’habituel. Ce culte de la personne de la nomenklatura n’avait que peu de choses en commun avec ses antécédents pseudo‑religieux115. Les ornements verbaux rassemblés dans ce texte enjolivent plutôt un panégyrique moderne et sans prétention116. Lorsque le Secrétaire général note dans ses cahiers de travail qu’il l’a lu dans ses Mémoires, c’est à prendre au pied de la lettre117. Il faut se l’imaginer comme un homme heureux. Des auteurs professionnels lui révèlent des passages de sa propre vie, qu’il peut raconter avec volubilité à son cercle familier, alors qu’il n’aurait pas été capable de leur donner lui‑même une forme écrite. Il est probable qu’il était bouleversé et touché par le récit à peine distancié de ses expériences vécues. Dans cette mesure, les ghostwriters ont trouvé le ton juste, sans

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avoir jamais communiqué avec celui dont ils firent retentir le « je » – la plupart du temps entonné par un « nous ».

NOTES

1. Une biographie scientifique fait défaut. Citons, parmi les récits de vie existants : Leonid M. Mlečin, Brežnev, M., 2008 (paru dans la série de biographies grand public « Žizn zamečatel ´nyh ljudej [La vie des personnalités remarquables] », noté par la suite Mlečin, Brežnev 1). Une seconde version un peu modifiée par cet auteur parut la même année sous le même titre mais chez un autre éditeur (noté par la suite Mlečin, Brežnev 2). Cf. John Dornberg, Breschnew : Profil eines Herrschers im Kreml, München, 1973 [Brežnev : profil d’un dirigeant au Kremlin, paru en anglais à Londres en 1974 sous le titre Brezhnev : The Masks of Power]. 2. Voir les brochures transcrites du russe en allemand, par Leonid Karin, éd., Breschnew – Zeit der Stagnation : Eine objektive Analyse negativer Erfahrungen jener 18 Jahre (1964‑1982), da an der Spitze der Führung der UdSSR Leonid Breschnew stand [Brežnev – La période de stagnation : une analyse objective des expériences négatives des 18 années (1964‑1982) pendant lesquelles Leonid Brežnev était à la tête du gouvernement de l’URSS], M. 1989 ; en anglais, Aleksej Serov, éd., Leonid Brezhnev – the period of stagnation : An unbiased analysis of the negative experience of Leonid Brezhnev’s 18‑year leadership (1964‑1982), M., 1989. Cf. Dmitrij A. Vanjukov, Ėpocha zastoja [L’époque de la stagnation], M., 2008. 3. Boris V. Sokolov, Leonid Brežnev : Zolotaja ėpoha [Leonid Brežnev : l’âge d’or], M., 2004 ; Sergej N. Semanov, Brežnev – pravitel´ « Zolotogo veka » [Brežnev, dirigeant de « l’âge d’or »], M., 2002. 4. Stephan Merl, « Von Chruschtschows Konsumkonzeption zur Politik des “Little Deal” unter Breschnew [De la conception kroutchévienne de la consommation, à la politique du « Little Deal » sous Brežnev] » in Bernd Greiner, Christian Th. Müller, Claudia Weber, éds., Ökonomie im Kalten Krieg [L’économie pendant la guerre froide] ( =Studien zum Kalten Krieg, 4), Hambourg, 2010, p. 279‑310 ; Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era, Londres, 2013. 5. Voir à ce sujet le film documentaire « Zolotoe pero genseka [La plume d’or du Secrétaire général] » du réalisateur Andrej Sudilovskij (scénario : Vladimir Os´minin), diffusé pour la première fois par la chaîne télévisée « Kul´tura » le 18 décembre 2006. 6. Cf. Oliver Hochadel, Ursula Kocher, « Introduction », in Oliver Hochadel, Ursula Kocher, éds., Lügen und Betrügen : Das Falsche in der Geschichte von der Antike bis zur Moderne [Mentir et tromper : Le faux dans l’histoire de l’Antiquité à la Modernité], Cologne, 2000, p. 1‑7. 7. Michel de Montaigne, « Les Menteurs », in Essais, Livre I, Chapitre IX (37). 8. Sur le flou du genre littéraire historiographique mais qui n’exclut pas des récits de vie « authentiques » voir Volker Depkat, « Autobiographie und die soziale Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit [L’autobiographie et la construction sociale de la réalité] », Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 29, 2003, p. 441‑476. Cf. aussi Philippe Lejeune, Der autobiographische Pakt, Frankfurt am Main 1994, p. 13‑51. (Le pacte autobiographique, P. : Le Seuil, 1975). 9. Julia Herzberg, Gegenarchive : Bäuerliche Autobiographik zwischen Zarenreich und Sowjetunion [Contre‑archives : L’autobiographie paysanne entre l’Empire russe et l’Union soviétique], Bielefeld, 2013, p. 21‑64 ; idem, « Autobiographik als historische Quelle in “Ost” und “West” [L’art de l’autobiographie comme source historique à l’ “Est” comme à l’“Ouest”] », in

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Julia Herzberg, Christoph Schmidt, éds., Vom Wir zum Ich : Individuum und Autobiographik im Zarenreich [Du nous au je : individu et art de l’autobiographie dans l’Empire des tsars], Cologne, 2007, p. 15‑62 ; Brigitte Studer, Heiko Haumann, éds., Stalinistische Subjekte/ Sujets staliniens/ Stalinist Subjects : Individuum und System in der Sowjetunion und der Komintern [Individu et système en Union soviétique et au Komintern], 1929‑1953, Zürich 2006. 10. « Memuary na slome ėpohi [Mémoires au déclin d’une époque] », Voprosy literatury, N° 1, 1999, p. 3‑35 ; Marina Balina, « “Kakoj‑to neprojavlennyj žanr” : Memuary v literature socrealizma [Un certain genre indéterminé, les Mémoires dans la littérature du réalisme socialiste] », in Marina Balina, et al., éds., Sovetskoe bogatstvo : Stat´i o kul´ture, literature i kino. K šestidesjatiletiju Hansa Gjuntera [La richesse soviétique : Articles sur la culture, la littérature et le cinéma. Á l’occasion du 60e anniversaire de Hans Günther], SPb., 2002, p. 241‑258. 11. Balina, « “Kakoj‑to neprojavlennyj žanr” : Memuary v literature socrealizma », p. 241. 12. Cité d’après « Dobrye uroki služenija narodu [Les bonnes leçons de service rendu au peuple], Voprosy literatury, N° 12, 1981, p. 5 et suiv. 13. Aleksandr Borščagovskij, cit. dans Balina, « “Kakoj‑to neprojavlennyj žanr” : Memuary v literature socrealizma », p. 242. 14. Pavel Basinskij, cit. dans Balina, « “Kakoj‑to neprojavlennyj žanr” : Memuary v literature socrealizma », p. 242. 15. Igal Halfin, Red autobiographies : initiating the Bolshevik self, Seattle, 2011. 16. Igor´ V. Narskij, Fotokartočka na pamjat´ : Semejnye istorii, fotografičeskie poslanija i sovetskoe detstvo [Une photo en souvenir : histoires de famille, dédicaces photographiques et enfance soviétique], Čeljabinsk 2007. 17. Sur la formation et le contrôle de la mémoire publique à l’époque du grand changement, David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses : Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism 1914‑1939, Ithaca – Londres, 2011, p. 181‑237 ; Karen Petrone, The Great War in Russian Memory, Bloomington – Indianapolis, 2011, p. 1‑30. 18. Aaron J. Cohen, « Oh, That ! Myth, Memory, and the First World War in the Russian Emigration and the Soviet Union » Slavic Review, 62 (1), 2003, p. 69‑86. 19. Hans Günther parle de la fondation d’un « proto‑canon » H. Günther, « Die Lebensphasen eines Kanons – am Beispiel des sozialistischen Realismus [Les phases d’existence d’un canon – à l’exemple du réalisme socialiste] », in Aleida et Jan Assmann, éds., Kanon und Zensur. Beiträge zur Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation II, Munich, 1987, p. 138. Violetta V. Gudkova analyse à travers l’exemple des écrits dramatiques du début de l’époque soviétique la naissance de grilles servant à la description d’événements historiques. Elle retrace comment l’expérience personnelle se soumet à une « vision généralisée » et de quelle manière une matrice moralisante et idéologique s’impose pour interpréter valablement ce qui a été vécu. (V.V. Gudkova, Roždenie sovetskich sjužetov : tipologija otečestvennoj dramy 1920‑h – načala 1930‑h godov [La naissance des sujets soviétiques : typologie d’un drame national, années 1920 – début des années 1930] , M., 2008, p. 19). 20. Christoph Mick, « Frühe Stalin‑Biographien 1928‑1932 », Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 36 (3), 1988, p. 403‑423. 21. « Memuarnaja literatura [Littérature mémorielle], Literaturnaja Ėnciklopedija, t. 7, M., 1934, p. 131‑148. 22. Georgij K. Žukov, Vospominanija i razmyšlenija [Souvenirs et réflexions], M., 1969. 23. Cf. l’analyse de Mihail Bahtin, Voprosy literatury i ėstetiki. Issledovanija raznych let [Questions de littérature et d’esthétique], M., 1975, p. 169 ; Balina, « “Kakoj‑to neprojavlennyj žanr” : Memuary v literature socrealizma », p. 244. D’après lui, la liste officielle des événements de sa vie s’allongea dans le nécrologe.

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24. Pour le grand public, sans appareil critique et en référence à « l’écriture de mémoires révolutionnaires », V. Kardin, Segodnja o včerašnem : Memuary i sovremennost´ [Aujourd’hui sur demain : Mémoires et temps présent], M., 1961. 25. Au sujet du débat sur l’« académisme » et la « sécheresse scientifique » des représentations historiques ainsi que la nécessité de récits de vie animés, voir Dmitrij A. Žukov, Biografija biografii : Razmyšlenija o žanre [Biographie de la biographie : réflexions sur le genre], M., 1980, p. 8, 68. 26. Vladimir S. Barahov, Literaturnyj portret. (Istoki, poėtika, žanr) [Portrait littéraire (Sources, poétique, genre], L., 1985, p. 3 ; S. Rozanova, « Izdajutsja memuary [Publication de Mémoires] », Voprosy literatury, N° 8, 1976, p. 249‑275, (ici, p. 249). À propos de la discussion animée sur « le genre peu développé » voir encore I. Šajtanov, « “Neprojavlennyj žanr” ili Literaturnye zametki o memuarnoj forme [« Le genre indéterminé » ou les notes littéraires sur la forme mémorielle], Voprosy literatury N° 2, 1979,p. 50‑77 ; M.V. Teplinskij, « K voprosu o dostovernosti memuarov kak istoriko‑literaturnych istočnikov [De l’authenticité des Mémoires en tant que sources historiques et littéraires], in Učenye zapiski Kazanskogo pedagogičeskogo instituta [Notes scientifiques de l’Institut pédagogique de Kazan´], 1975, vyp. 149, Sb. 6, p. 133‑143 ; Publikacija memuarnyh istočnikov : Metodičeskoe posobie [Publication de sources mémorielles : manuel de méthodologie], M., 1972 ; Ju.N. Petljakov, Izdanie memuarnoj literatury v SSSR [Publication de littérature mémorielle en URSS], M., 1982. 27. Efim G. Buškanec, Memuarnye istočniki : Učebnoe posobie k speckursu [Sources mémorielles : manuel pour les cours spécialisés], Kazan´, 1975, p. 91. 28. Vadim S. Golubcov, Memuary kak istočnik po istorii sovetskogo obščestva [Les Mémoires en tant que sources pour l’histoire de la société soviétique], M., 1970. L’auteur décrit les témoignages autobiographiques comme une « source extrêmement délicate » (p. 112), mais qui joue un rôle important actuellement pour « venir à bout des falsifications », « restaurer la vérité historique » et « se défaire des conséquences fatales du dogmatisme et du subjectivisme en science de l’histoire » (p. 113). 29. Le réalisateur en était Igor´ V. Bessarabov (1919‑1993), auteur de films et caméraman, qui reçut en 1951 le prix de l’État soviétique et en 1982 le prix Lenin. Parmi ses œuvres on compte « Deti našego veka [Les enfant de notre siècle] » (1972) et « Trudnaja dolžnost´ byt´ revoljucionerom [La difficile fonction de révolutionnaire] » (1982). 30. Leonid M. Zamjatin, Vsegda s narodom : Fotoal´bom o poezdke L.I. Brežneva v rajony Sibiri i Dal´nego Vostoka [Toujours avec le peuple : Album photo du voyage de L.I. BreÂnev en Sibérie et en Extrême Orient], M. : Planeta, 1978. 31. Le genre des Mémoires d’hommes politiques est à peine étudié. Il manque également un débat théorique sur les « vies d’hommes politiques » en tant que sources historiques. Partant de Max Weber et se concentrant sur le parcours professionnel et la fonction publique, Michael Edinger, Werner J. Patzelt, éds., Politik als Beruf [La politique comme métier], Wiesbaden, 2011. Depkat (Autobiographie, p. 475) plaide sur le fond pour la reconnaissance des écrits personnels comme éléments structurels de l’écriture de l’histoire vécue. Cf. Idem, « Zum Stand und zu den Perspektiven der Autobiographieforschung in der Geschichtswissenschaft [Sur l’état et les perspectives de la recherche autobiographique en science de l’histoire] », Bios. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, oral history und Lebensverlaufsanalysen 23 (2), 2010, p. 170‑187 ; Anke Stephan, « Erinnertes Leben : Autobiographien, Memoiren und Oral History‑Interviews als historische Quellen [Vie remémorée : autobiographies, mémoires et histoire orale comme sources historiques] », Digitales Handbuch zur Geschichte und Kultur Russlands und Osteuropas, www.vifaost.de/geschichte/handbuch ; Jens Borchert, éd., Politik als Beruf : Die politische Klasse in westlichen Demokratien [La politique comme métier : La classe politique dans les démocraties occidentales], Opladen, 1999.

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32. « Zolotoe pero genseka », Russkaja Germanija Online N‑29, 2005 (Erreur ! Référence de lien hypertexte non valide.) (20 juillet 2009). 33. Mlečin, Brežnev 1, p. 592. 34. Dans les années 1970, Agranovskij (1922‑1984) comptait parmi les meilleurs journalistes du pays. Il avait rédigé de nombreux livres, scénarios et poèmes, travaillait pour la revue Literaturnaja Gazeta et écrivait dans les journaux Znamja et Novyj Mir. 35. Murzin (1929‑2006), issu d’une famille de paysans cosaques et dont le père fut déporté à la fin des années 1930 comme « koulak » dans un camp au bord de la Kolyma où il décéda, était depuis 1960 envoyé spécial de la Komsomol´skaja Pravda, avant de rejoindre la Pravda en 1966. Plus tard, il s’intéressa à l’assassinat de la famille du dernier tsar et fit paraître des entretiens menés avec l’un des meurtriers. Voir la notice nécrologique dans la Komsomol´skaja Pravda, le 27 juin 2006. 36. Sahnin (1910‑1999) avait été correspondant sur le front lors de la Seconde Guerre mondiale et écrivait depuis lors des récits et des essais littéraires. Il faisait partie des rédacteurs réguliers de la Pravda, d’Izvestija et de la Komsomol´skaja Pravda. Son premier roman parut en 1954. 37. Ignatenko (né en 1941) fut pendant trois ans directeur général adjoint de l’agence de presse TASS, avant de devenir celui de Zamjatin, en 1978, dans le service des Informations internationales du Comité central. Pour sa contribution au scénario du film documentaire « Récit d’un communiste », il fut récompensé par le prix Lenin en 1978. 38. « Malaja zemlja », Novyj Mir, N° 2, 1978 ; « Vozroždenie Novyj Mir, N° 5 ; « Celina », Novyj Mir, N° 11. 39. La première édition sous forme de brochures atteignit à elle seule 2 millions d’exemplaires pour « Malaja zemlja » (1978), plus 2,25 millions pour « Vozroždenie », (1978) et 4,5 millions pour « Celina » en 1979. 40. « Dobrye uroki služenija narodu », p. 3. 41. Nikolaj N. Mesjacev, « “Genseka na ėkrane dolžno byt” vtroe bol´še…” Iz interv´ju žurnalistu G. Kuznecovu [À l’écran, le Secrétaire général doit être trois fois plus grand…”, extrait d’un entretien avec le journaliste G. Kuznecov] », in L.I. Brežnev, Materialy k biografii [Documents pour une biographie], M., 1991, p. 211‑216. 42. Galina A. Orlova, « Izobretaja dokument : bumažnaja traektorija rossijskoj kanceljarii [L’invention d’un document : la trajectoire papier d’une administration russe], in Irina M. Kaspė, Status dokumenta : Okončatel´naja bumažka ili otčuždennoe svidetel´stvo ? Sbornik statej [Le statut d’un document : papier définitif ou témoignage aliéné], M., 2013, p. 20, 36. Le terme « dokumentnost´ » ne se rapporte pas seulement à la forme et à la fonction d’un document, mais aussi à sa détermination culturelle, sa position sociale et à son impact médiatique. 43. Entre 1938 et 1953 le « Manuel abrégé » parut en 301 éditions et atteint 42,8 millions d’exemplaires dans 67 langues (N.N. Maslov, « Kratkij kurs istorii VKP(b) – ėnciklopedija i ideologija stalinizma i poststalinizma, 1938‑1988 [Manuel abrégé d’histoire du PCUS, encyclopédie et idéologie du stalinisme et du poststalinisme, 1938‑1988] », in Sovetskaja istoriografija. Rossija XX vek [Historiographie soviétique : Russie, XXe siècle, M., 1996, p. 240. 44. RGANI (Archives d’État russes de l’histoire récente), f. 80, op. 2, d. 1. 45. En sus d’innombrables éditions uniques et de recueils, il parut une édition en neuf tomes avec des discours, messages de sympathie et des écrits choisis de Leonid I. Brežnev, Leninskim kursom, Tomes 1‑9, M., 1970‑1982. Version allemande publiée par Berliner Dietz‑Verlag entre 1971 et 1984 sous le titre Auf dem Wege Lenins : Reden und Aufsätze [Sur les traces de Lenin. Discours et essais]. 46. RGANI, f. 80, op. 2, d. 2, l. 34‑36. 47. RGANI, f. 80, op. 2, d. 2, l. 27. 48. Réunion du Bureau politique du 13 avril 1978, RGANI, f. 80, op. 2, d. 1, l. 20.

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49. Courrier du 15 juin 1979 de l’ambassadeur soviétique à Paris au secrétariat de Brežnev (RGANI, f. 80, op. 2, d. 1, l. 32). Comme il l’écrit le 9 novembre 1978 à Černenko, Fidel et Raul Castro doivent recevoir, à Cuba, un exemplaire signé, RGANI, f. 80, op. 2, d. 2, l. 22. 50. Courrier du 14 mai 1980, RGANI, f. 80, op. 2, d. 2, l. 33. 51. Brežnev, Malaja zemlja, p. 3. 52. Ibid. 53. Brežnev, Vozroždenie, p. 60. 54. Ibid., p. 3, 61. 55. Ibid., p. 8. 56. Brežnev, Celina, M., 1979, p. 3. 57. Ibid., p. 79. La référence hyperbolique à la catégorie des épopées, un genre intermédiaire entre l’epos héroïque et le roman bourgeois du réalisme socialiste soviétique, se retrouve dans les critiques soviétiques dithyrambiques, par exemple lorsque les Mémoires de Brežnev sont comparés au « profond bien‑fondé artistique » du « Slovo o polku Igoreve » (Georgij N. Jakovlev, « Kak sozdavalis´ memuary Brežneva [Comment les Mémoires de BreÂnev ont‑ils été créés] », in Brežnev, Materialy k biografii, p. 285). L’amalgame entre la mince « Trilogie » de Brežnev et l’ordre des récits « mammouths » staliniens est proche de la parodie. Sur l’histoire des genres littéraires, voir de Reinhard Lauer, « Die Roman‑Epopöe – eine stalinistische Gattung ? », [L’épopée, un genre littéraire stalinien ?] in Gabriele Gorzka, éd., Kultur im Stalinismus : Sowjetische Kultur und Kunst der 1930er bis 1950er Jahre [Culture et stalinisme : La culture soviétique et l’art des années 1930 à 1950], Brême 1994, p. 101‑116 ; Aleksej V. Čičerin, Vozniknovenie romana‑ėpopei [L’apparition du roman épopée], 2e édition, M., 1975. 58. Polly Jones, The dilemmas of de‑Stalinization : Negotiating cultural and social change in the Khrushchev era, Londres, 2006. 59. Voir la contribution de l’écrivain et vétéran de la guerre mondiale Vladimir M. Pomerancev, « Ob iskrennosti v literature [De la sincérité en littérature] », Novyj Mir, N° 12, 1953. 60. C’est ainsi que commentait une notice du service scientifique et culturel du Comité central du PCUS du 8 février 1954 la contribution de Pomerancev. V.Ju. Afiani, V.K. Vodop´janova, éds., Apparat CK KPSS i kul´tura 1953‑1957. Dokumenty [L’appareil du CC PCUS et la culture, 1953‑1957], M., 2001, p. 200). 61. Stephen V. Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw : Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat, Ithaca – Londres 2008. 62. Voir l’entretien avec l’artiste Viktor Pivovarov, « 70‑e : smena jazykovyh godov [Les années 70 : le changement de code linguistique], in Georgij Kizeval´ter, éd., Ėti strannye semidesjatye, ili poterja nevinnosti. Ėsse, interv´ju, vospominanija [Ces étranges années 1970 ou la perte de l’innocence. Essai, entretiens, souvenirs], M., 2010, p. 223‑231. 63. Cf. Vladimir A. Kozlov, éd., Kramola. Inakomyslie v SSSR pri Hruščeve i Brežneve, 1953‑1982 gg. Rassekrečennye dokumenty Verhovnogo suda i Prokuratury SSSR [La sédition : les nonconformistes en URSS sous Hruščev et Brežnev, 1953‑1982. Documents secrets de la Cour suprême et du parquet d’URSS], M., 2005 ; Dietrich Beyrau, Intelligenz und Dissens : Die russischen Bildungsschichten in der Sowjetunion 1917‑1985 [Intelligence et divergence : Les couches sociales intellectuelles russes en Union soviétique 1917‑1985], Göttingen 1993, p. 209‑255 ; Ljudmila M. Alekseeva, Istorija inakomyslija v SSSR : novejšij period [Histoire du non conformisme en URSS, période actuelle], Benson, Vt 1984. 64. Jakovlev, Kak sozdavalis´ memuary, p. 288. L’écrit de Stalin parut le 20 juin 1950 en impression partielle dans le journal du parti Pravda. D’autres compléments suivirent avant que l’œuvre ne soit imprimée la même année sous forme de brochure et traduite en de nombreuses langues. Sur le débat d’époque, Sessija otdelenij obščestvennych nauk Akademii nauk SSSR, posvjaščennaja godovščine opublikovanija genial´nogo proizvedenija I.V. Stalina « Marksizm i voprosy jazykoznanija ». Sbornik materialov [Session du département des sciences sociales de

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l’Académie des sciences d’URSS, dédiée à l’anniversaire de la publication de l’œuvre géniale de I.V. Stalin « Le marxisme et les questions linguistiques ». Recueil de documents], M., 1951 ; M. Miller, Marr, « Stalin and the Theory of Language », Soviet Studies 2 (4), 1951, p. 364‑371 ; Vladimir M. Alpatov, Istorija odnogo mifa : Marr i marrizm [Histoire d’un mythe : Marr et le marrisme], M., 1991 ; Boris S. Ilizarov, Početnyj akademik Stalin i akademik Marr [L’éminent académicien Stalin et l’académicien Marr], M., 2012. 65. Écrit quelques jours auparavant en langue originale (Žit´ ne po lži [Ne pas vivre dans le mensonge]) et paru pour la première fois en anglais le 18 février 1974 dans « Daily Express » (Londres), l’essai circulait en Russie au Samizdat. Alexander Solschenizyn, Offener Brief an die sowjetische Führung : Lebt nicht mit der Lüge, Darmstadt : Neuwied, 1974. [Aleksander SolÂenicyn, Lettre aux dirigeants de l’Union soviétique. Ne pas vivre dans le mensonge]. 66. Harald Weinrich, The linguistics of lying and other essays, Seattle 2005, p. 7 et sqq. Cf. Oleg Jurjew, Kriegsidylle und Liebesutopie, Nachwort zur Erzählung von Wsewolod Petrow, Die Manon Lescaut von Turdej, Bonn, 2012, p. 116 suiv. Dans un chapitre du roman autobiographique de Vladimir Jabotinsky, Les Cinq, (éd. des Syrtes, 2006) il est question aussi d’un narrateur « sincère » qui raconte des « histoires mensongères ». 67. Pendant la perestroïka, les auteurs ont cependant été dénoncés comme « hommes de mains » (podpevaly) et « courtisans » (ugodniki), qui s’étaient rassemblés autour du trône des souverains (Jakovlev, Kak sozdavalis´ memuary, p. 286, 287). 68. Cf. à l’aune de l’exemple allemand Hans‑Edwin Friedrich, Deformierte Lebensbilder : Erzählmodelle der Nachkriegsautobiographie (1945‑1960) [Images de vie déformées : Les modèles narratifs de l’autobiographie d’après‑guerre], Tübingen 2000. 69. Brežnev, Malaja zemlja, p. 8. 70. Vasilij S. Grossman, Vse tečet [Tout passe], Francort/Main : Posev, 1970. 71. Fedor M. Burlackij, « Brežnev i krušenie “ottepeli” [Brežnev et l’échec du “dégel”] », in Brežnev, Materialy k biografii, p. 102‑122. 72. Brežnev, Vozroždenie, p. 22. 73. Ibid., p. 7‑8 et 24‑25. 74. Brežnev, Celina, p. 60. 75. Brežnev, Vozroždenie, p. 4. 76. Ibid., p. 8. 77. Viktor V. Kabanov, Istočnikovedenie istorii sovetskogo obščestva. Kurs lekcij, Moscou 1997, p. 148‑162. 78. Brežnev, Malaja zemlja, p. 22. 79. Brežnev, Celina, p. 54, 79. 80. Ibid., p. 25, 65. 81. Brežnev, Vozroždenie, p. 47‑48. 82. Brežnev, Celina, p. 3. 83. Boris Dubin, « Goldene Zeiten des Krieges. Erinnerung als Sehnsucht nach der Brežnev‑Ära », in Manfred Sapper, red., Kluften der Erinnerung. Rußland und Deutschland 60 Jahre nach dem Krieg, Berlin 2005, p. 219‑233. 84. Brežnev, Celina, p. 78. 85. Henri Lefebvre fit référence, dans son ouvrage publié pour la première fois en 1958, Critique de la vie quotidienne, à un article de Nikolaj N. Žukov sur l’art, le design et le goût (« Vospitanie vkusa. Zametki hudožnika [L’éducation du goût. Notes d’un artiste] », Novyj Mir, N° 10, 1954, p. 159‑179), pour expliquer la transformation des besoins sociaux de la société poststalinienne en comparaison avec ceux du monde capitaliste. 86. Susan Reid, « Destalinization and Taste, 1953‑1963 », Journal of Design History 10 (2), 1997, p. 161‑175 ; David Crowley, Susan E. Reid, éds., Pleasures in socialism : leisure and luxury in the Eastern Bloc, Evanston, IL, 2010.

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87. Cf. Lefebvre, Critique de la vie quotidienne, I, P. : L’Arche, 1947. 88. Jukka Gronow, The Sociology of Taste, London, 1997 (Reprint 2001), p. 66. 89. « Dobrye uroki služenija narodu », N° 12, 1981, p. 5 et 6. 90. Johannes Grützmacher, Die Bajkal‑Amur‑Magistrale : Vom stalinistischen Lager zum Mobilisierungsprojekt unter Brežnev [Des camps staliniens au projet de mobilisation sous Brežnev], Munich, 2012 ; Esther Meier, « Massenmobilisierung in der Ära Brežnev ? Das Großprojekt KamAZ / Naberežnye Čelny, PhD, [Mobilisation de masse sous l’ère Brežnev ? Le grand projet KamAZ / Naberežnye Čelny], Hambourg, 2011 ; Christopher J. Ward, Brezhnev’s folly : the building of BAM and late soviet socialism, Pittsburgh, 2009. 91. Andrej E. Krylov, Anatolij V. Kulagin, Vysockij kak ėnciklopedija sovetskoj žizni. Kommentarii k pesnjam poėta [Vysockij, encyclopédie de la vie soviétique. Commentaires des chansons du poète], M., 2010. Cf. Evgenija Brodskaja, Anton Nesterov, « Vladimir Vysockij : Trudno byt´ klassikom [Vladimir Vysockij : De la difficulté d’être un classique], Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, N° 94, 2008, p. 317‑334 ; Jakov I. Korman, Vladimir Vysockij : ključ k podtekstu [V.Vysockij, une clé au soustexte], 2e édition, Rostov‑sur‑le‑Don, 2006 ; Sergej A. Golubkov, éd., Vladimir Vysockij v kontekste hudožestvennoj kul´tury. Sbornik naučnych statej [Vysockij dans le contexte de la culture artistique. Recueil d’articles scientifiques], Samara 2006. 92. L’historien Natan Ja. Ejdelman (1930‑1989) cite un autre exemple de « semi‑dissident ». Voir Gary M. Hambourg, « Writing History and the End of the Soviet Era : The Secret Lives of Natan Eidel´man », Kritika : Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7 (1), 2006, p. 71‑109. 93. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More : The Last Soviet Generation, Princeton 2006, p. 5‑10. 94. Petr L. Vajl´, Aleksandr A. Genis, 60‑e. Mir sovetskogo čeloveka [Les années 1960 : Le monde de l’homme soviétique], M., 1996, p. 5 f. ; Roger D. Markwick, « Cultural History under Khrushchev and Brezhnev : From Social Psychology to Mentalités », The Russian Review 65, 2006, p. 283‑301. 95. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on my mind : Writing a diary under Stalin, Cambridge 2009, p. 165‑222. 96. Cf. sur ce point général Oleg Kharkhordin, The collective and the individual in Russia. A study of practices, Berkeley, et. al., 1999, p. 329‑354. 97. Mlečin, Brežnev 1, p. 496‑504. 98. Stephen Kotkin, Amageddon averted. The Soviet collapse, 1970‑2000, Oxford, 2008, p. 28. 99. Dans une discussion sur le rôle de la littérature et de l’art dans la « conquête héroïque de nouveaux territoires » le Celina de Brežnev est nommément cité (« Novoe v kolhoznoj derevne i literatura [Littérature et nouveauté dans le village kolkhozien] », Voprosy Literatury, N° 1, 1979, p. 3‑38). 100. Mlečin, Brežnev 2, p. 496. 101. Voir la brochure publiée par l’Institut pour le marxisme‑léninisme au Comité central du PCUS de 228 pages avec de nombreuses illustrations de Leonid Ilíč Brežnev, Kratkij biografičeskij očerk [Court essai bibliographique], 2. Édition complétée, M., 1977. 102. Ibid., p. 3. 103. Ibid., p. 4 et sqq. 104. Voir l’énumération dans Vestnik Arhiva Prezidenta. Specialńoe izdanie : Generalńyj sekretar´ L.I Brežnev : 1964‑1982 [Journal des archives du président. Édition spéciale : le Secrétaire général L.I. BreÂnev,1964‑1982], M., 2006, p. 204‑209. 105. La maison d’édition pour la littérature politique recevait régulièrement comme instruction de publier des discours de Brežnev (RGANI, f. 80, op. 2, d. 1, l. 3‑5). Plus encore que les versions publiées, les prises de notes comportent des passages qui reflètent un véritable talent narratif et un penchant pour les anecdotes. Voir par exemple les discours prononcés devant les secrétaires et ministres du Comité central des républiques de l’Union et les secrétaires des sections

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subalternes du parti sur le thème de l’agriculture, daté de l’année 1967 (RGANI, f. 80, op. 2, d. 247, l. 1‑24). Cf. L.I. Brežnev, Voprosy agrarnoj politiki KPSS i osvoenie celinnyh zemel´ Kazahstana. Reči i doklady [Les questions de la politique agraire du PCUS et la conquête des terres vierges au Kazakhstan. Discours et rapports], M., 1974. 106. L’année de sa mort deux autres petits épisodes sont parus (« Žizn´ po zavodskomu gudku [La vie au rythme de la sirène de l’usine] » et « Čuvstvo Rodiny [Le sentiment patriotique] ») dans la brochure Leonid I. Brežnev, Vospominanija [Souvenirs], M., 1982. Puis trois autres, publiés de manière posthume dans le premier numéro 1983 de Novyj mir, (« Moldavskaja vesna [Printemps en Moldavie] », « Kosmičeskij oktjabr´ [Octobre cosmique] » et « Slovo o kommunistah [Un mot sur les communistes] »). Ces huit esquisses terminées n’ont été réunies qu’une fois dans une édition tirée à vingt exemplaires à usage interne (imprimée par l’éditeur « Krasnyj Proletarij »). L’édition intégrale en un volume n’a vu le jour qu’en 2005, avec de nouveaux documents, dont une courte « préface » anonyme à la première personne et de nombreuses photographies, mais sans introduction ni commentaire scientifique (Leonid I. Brežnev, Vospominanija, M., 2005). 107. Andreas Oberender, « Die Partei der Patrone und Klienten. Formen personaler Herrschaft unter Leonid Brežnev », in Annette Schuhmann, éd., Vernetzte Improvisationen : Gesellschaftliche Subsysteme in Ostmitteleuropa und in der DDR, Köln u.a. 2008, p. 57‑76. 108. Nikolaj G. Bogdanov, Boris A. Vjazemskij, Spravočnik žurnalista [Le manuel du journaliste], 3e édition, L., 1971, p. 258‑291. 109. Premier jet de la préface des Mémoires, RGANI, f. 80, op. 2, d. 2, l. 24. 110. RGANI, f. 80, op. 2, d. 2, l. 25. 111. Notice du 30 novembre 1978, RGANI, f. 80, op. 2, d. 2, l. 26. 112. Parmi les rares exceptions, Felix Philipp Ingold, « Ein mächtiger Autor : Breschnew als Literat [Un auteur puissant : BreÂnev en homme de lettres], Schweizer Monatshefte, 59, 1979, p. 111‑116. 113. Evgenij A. Dobrenko, Formovka sovetskogo pisatelja : social´nye i ėstetičeskie istoki sovetskoj literaturnoj kul´tury [Formation de l’écrivain soviétique : sources sociales et esthétiques de la culture littéraire soviétique], SPb., 1999. 114. Cf. Boris Dubin, « O nevozmožnosti ličnogo v sovetskoj kul´ture [De l’impossibilité de l’individuel dans la culture soviétique] », in Nikolaj S. Plotnikov, Aleksandr Haardt, éds., Personal ´nost´ : Jazyk filosofii v russko‑nemeckom dialoge [La personnalité : la langue de la philosophie dans le dialogue germano‑russe], M., 2007, p. 443‑452. 115. Benno Ennker, Heidi Hein‑Kircher, éds., Der Führer im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts [Le dirigeant dans l’Europe du XXe siècle), Marbourg, 2010. 116. Cf. au sujet de ce genre littéraire, Reinhard Lauer, « Herrscherlob in der russischen Literatur [Panégyrique dans la littérature russe] » in Britta Holtz, Ute Marggraff, éds., Herrscherlob und Herrscherkritik in den slawischen Literaturen. Festschrift für Ulrike Jekutsch zum 60. Geburtstag [Panégyrique et critique de dirigeants dans la littérature slave. Publication en honneur du 60e anniversaire d’Ulrike Jekutsch], Wiesbaden, 2013, p. 1‑14 ; Christoph Garstka, Das Herrscherlob in Russland. Katharina II., Lenin und Stalin im russischen Gedicht. Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik und Rhetorik politischer Lyrik [Le panégyrique en Russie. Catherine II, Lenin et Stalin dans la poésie russe. Une contribution à l’esthétique et la rhétorique de la poésie politique], Heidelberg, 2005. 117. Dnevnikovye i rabočie zapisi L. Brežneva [Écrits journaliers et de travail de L. Brežnev], RGANI, f. 80, op. 1) : Note du 11 novembre 1981.

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RÉSUMÉS

Cette contribution se propose d’analyser comment Brežnev a été fait « écrivain ». En se fondant sur la genèse de l’écriture, la publication et la réception de ses « Mémoires », elle montre comment l’appareil culturel soviétique a été mobilisé pour placer le Secrétaire général au centre d’une rétrospective historique et canonisée de la Grande Guerre patriotique et de la décennie qui suivit. Les réminiscences de biographie conventionnelle indiquent un assouplissement de la culture officielle du souvenir, jusque‑là très rigide. Les expériences et perceptions subjectives ne sont plus entièrement occultées mais rédigées dans un récit exemplaire. L’alternance d’héroïsme et de médiocrité vise le citoyen moyen de la société de consommation soviétique des années 1970 qui, après les privations du passé, doit savourer les fruits du « socialisme développé ». La jeune génération qui n’a pas vécu la guerre se voit proposer comme modèles le « soldat », « l’ouvrier » et le « kolkhozien » sous les traits, respectivement, du vétéran, de l’ingénieur et du technicien agricole. Ces figures constituent la trinité intégrative du système paternaliste brežnevien. Texte et contexte des « Mémoires » renvoient à la genèse complexe des autobiographies et de la rédaction de Mémoires en Union soviétique. La valeur historique des « Mémoires » de Brežnev est appréciée à l’aune du contexte de leur conception, de la composition des parties, des sujets, motifs, métaphores et concepts utilisés.

The present paper aims to analyze how Brezhnev was made to pass as a “writer.” The author examines the publication and public reception of these “memoirs” and shows how the Soviet cultural apparatus mobilized in order to place the General Secretary at the center of a historical, canonized retrospective of the Great Patriotic War and the subsequent decade. Several elements of the “memoirs” reminiscent of conventional biography point to a relaxation in the hitherto hidebound official memory culture. Subjective experience and perceptions are no longer subject to concealment but put into words in an exemplary narrative. The interplay of heroism and mediocrity is aimed at the average citizen of the Soviet consumer society of the 1970s who must savor the fruits of “developed socialism” after years of deprivations. The portrayals of the (by then) veteran, the engineer, and farm technician present the “soldier,” the “worker,” and the “kolkhoznik” as role models for the younger generation who had not experienced the war. These figures constitute the integrative trinity of the Brezhnevian paternalistic system. The text and context of the “memoirs” refer to the complex genesis of autobiography and memoir writing in the Soviet Union. The author assesses their historical significance in the light of their conception and the way in which their parts, topics, metaphors, and concepts have been assembled.

AUTEURS

NIKOLAUS KATZER

Deutsches Historisches Institut Moskau. nikolaus.katzer@dhi‑moskau.de

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Time and Tide The Remembrance Ritual of “Beskozyrka” in Novorossiisk Au fil du temps : le rituel mémoriel de la « Beskozyrka » à Novorossijsk

Vicky Davis

I am pleased to acknowledge the helpful comments of the CMR editors and anonymous reviewers ; and the advice of my supervisors, Kristin Roth‑Ey and Sarah Young, UCL‑SSEES. Сколько бесстрашных ребят в бушлатах и бескозырках нашли смерть в морской пучине. Сколько раз мы видели в море бескозырки погибших матросов.1 Возложите на море венки. Есть такой человечий обычай — в память воинов, в море погибших, возлагают на море венки.2 1 The battle to free the strategic Soviet Black Sea port of Novorossiisk from German occupation during the Great Patriotic War in 1943 was successfully fought from the beach‑head of Malaia zemlia, held by Soviet landing troops, including the young Leonid Il´ich Brezhnev. Thanks to the publication of Brezhnev’s over‑inflated memoir Malaia zemlia,3 the campaign and Brezhnev’s part in it became renowned in the Soviet Union while derided as insignificant by dissident and Western scholars.4 If the world and the rest of the Soviet Union virtually forgot this so‑called minor battle after Brezhnev’s death, its memory was retained in Novorossiisk. The unique remembrance ritual of “Beskozyrka” (a sailor’s cap), invented in Novorossiisk in 1968, has increased in scale and scope over the last decade, maintaining the war myth locally and further afield. This analysis of the Beskozyrka tradition provides a case study of a provincial ceremony of remembrance started during the war cult of the Brezhnev era and now thriving under the influence of a second war cult under President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. This article will examine the role of young people in the invention and development of the tradition, while establishing the reasons for its success in promoting the intergenerational transmission of war memory in Novorossiisk from the early Brezhnev era to today.

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Map of the Novorossiisk landings, 4th February 19435

2 As part of my doctoral project on war memory in Novorossiisk, research on the history of Beskozyrka and current attitudes towards the tradition was carried out during three trips to Novorossiisk between 2010 and 2013, with personal observation of the 2013 ceremony. The article builds on evidence from Novorossiisk museum archives ; local newspaper articles ; the published works of Konstantin Podyma, the main instigator of Beskozyrka ; and a series of personal interviews with a cross‑section of Novorossiisk residents.6

Hats off to Heroes : A Tribute from the Young People of Novorossiisk

3 According to the “invention of tradition” approach to the study of collective memory, developed by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger,7 commemoration is usually orchestrated by the state and the élite with little dissent, any bottom‑up approaches normally reinforcing top‑down collective memory, and with the emphasis largely on unity of remembrance rather than a plurality of voices. Basing his arguments on remembrance through social practice,8 Hobsbawm claims that ritualistic traditions are often invented by governments seeking legitimization, establishing social cohesion by an implied continuity with the past and inculcating through repetition certain behavioural norms and moral values deemed to be desirable in society. The functional approach of Hobsbawm, like that of Emile Durkheim and Maurice Halbwachs before him,9 may allow for some small agreed revision of memory, but emphasizes rather the solidarity of society in its collective memory. Indeed, any potential binary opposition of national and local remembrance, official and vernacular interpretation, could serve to undermine political and national solidarity.

4 Superficially Hobsbawm’s approach may seem to offer a useful paradigm in the case of the centralized Soviet Union, but in fact the Beskozyrka ritual was invented not by the national élite, but by a small group of young local people, albeit no doubt under the influence of the state’s burgeoning war cult. Within a year of Brezhnev’s appointment as General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet

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Union, he had re‑instated the Victory Day memorial ceremony on Moscow’s Red Square for the twentieth anniversary of the end of the war in 1965. Television increasingly brought war memory to the masses with the series Vyzyvaem ogon´ na sebia and Podvig both broadcast in 1965.10

5 The change in state policy to promote war memory was anticipated in Novorossiisk in 1963, when the local Communist Party newspaper, Novorossiiskii rabochii, filled a whole page with war memories,11 while the first reunion of “Malozemel´tsy” (troops who served on Malaia zemlia) took place on the twentieth anniversary of the successful culmination of the campaign.12 In 1965, the same paper was exceptionally published on a Sunday, devoting its whole four‑page edition to the revived Victory Day celebrations. One by‑product of the growing war cult, attributed by Nina Tumarkin to the state’s wish to “mobilize loyalty [and] maintain order,”13 was the increase in status of Brezhnev by virtue of his military service and of Novorossiisk thanks to its association with Brezhnev. In an exercise of mutual self‑promotion, Brezhnev awarded Novorossiisk the Order of the Great Patriotic War in May 1966. The increased momentum of the war cult enabled the relaxation of some restrictions on literary output, such that the first major Malaia zemlia war memoir appeared in 1967, authored by Georgii Vladimirovich Sokolov.14

6 With this build‑up of the memorial climate nationally and locally during the mid‑1960s, the time was ripe for a new form of commemoration in Novorossiisk. In January 1968, a ten‑line paragraph appeared in the youth section of Novorossiiskii rabochii, advertising “Operatsiia ‘Beskozyrka’” [The “Beskozyrka” Operation], a procession carrying the “torch of glory,” lit from the Eternal Flame on Ploshchad´ Geroev [Heroes’ Square] to the site of the Malaia zemlia landings in the small hours of 4th February, in commemoration of the twenty‑fifth anniversary of the start of the battle.15

7 The youth movement promoted by Novorossiiskii rabochii was inspired by the creation in 1962 of a club for young readers by Komsomol´skaia Pravda,16 the official organ of the Communist youth movement, the Komsomol. The Novorossiisk offshoot of the readers’ club, named Shkhuna rovesnikov, encouraged its teenage members (Shkhunatiki) to form the land‑based crew of an imaginary schooner, incorporating a system of ranks, an oath of adherence and passwords for meetings. The founding captain and self‑proclaimed helmsman of the Shkhuna rovesnikov was the novice Novorossiiskii rabochii journalist, Konstantin Ivanovich Podyma.17 Gathering his crew in November 1965, he invited all “romantics” and “fantasists” to set sail with him on a journey of dreams, discussion and self‑discovery.18 Thus started the weekly meetings in their “cabin” in the Novorossiiskii rabochii offices, 19 leading to the proposal to mark the anniversary of the landings in 1968. The idea was to commemorate unburied troops who had died at sea by carrying a sailor’s peakless uniform cap (the eponymous “beskozyrka”) four kilometres through the streets of the town just after midnight. The hat would then be ceremonially lowered into the sea at Malaia zemlia, surrounded by wreaths of flowers.

8 This ceremony is possibly a reflection of the increasing focus on military‑patriotic youth training in the Brezhnev era, strongly endorsed by the Komsomol.20 Membership of the Komsomol was expected for schoolchildren and students aged from 14 to 28 who became members of a primary cell, the bottom layer of a complex hierarchy of management mirroring the Communist Party organization.21 Nikolai Mitrokhin suggests that Komsomol activities centred around the war cult were highly controlled by nationalist sympathizers and encouraged by novels and memoirs about the war.22

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Furthermore, young people were taken to visit war sites and monuments as part of their moral upbringing (vospitanie).23 Novorossiisk teenagers were possibly even more exposed to memory of the war than many of their peers. According to a former member of the Shkhuna rovesnikov, the young post‑war generation of Novorossiisk was regaled with stories of wartime exploits recounted by their fathers and grandfathers.24 Moreover, it is claimed that the Shkhunatiki would routinely find grenades, shell‑cases and human remains, breeding a feeling of involvement in war memory from childhood and a sense of identification with the young partisans who had fought outside Novorossiisk during the war.25

9 Although the Shkhunatiki may in retrospect consider themselves to have been eccentric and atypical of their generation,26 they were probably rather the product of their times and cultural environment, with relatively normal family backgrounds including peasants, accountants, workers in the port, doctors and managers in industry.27 Indeed, according to Gleb Tsipursky’s analysis, most of the readers of Komsomol´skaia Pravda in the early 1960s represented “conformist youth,” who identified with the values propagated by the newspaper, including the strong sense of patriotism disseminated from above.28 However, Podyma and two female Shkhunatiki categorically dismiss suggestions of direct Komsomol influence on the original Beskozyrka ceremony,29 although it is possible that the overwhelming state propaganda machine of their youth went largely unnoticed due to its ubiquitous nature. They do, however, acknowledge Party support from the editor of Novorossiiskii rabochii, a member of the gorkom, the town committee of the Communist Party, who provided premises for their meetings and encouraged the already independent youngsters to organize the ceremony themselves, while nonetheless checking on the organizational details.30

10 F6H claims that it took time for the authorities to come to terms with the group’s sometimes unusual projects, although Podyma believes that the Komsomol was unwilling to help because of the absence of prestigious veterans from the first ceremony. On the other hand, Podyma does allege that there was some peripheral involvement from the KGB (the state security service), whose border guards set up searchlights along the shore to light up their proceedings,31 a claim disputed by F6H. In the light of competing claims and lack of decisive evidence, it is difficult to gauge with certainty the degree of influence from above. This grassroots movement was no doubt considerably influenced by political ideology and the national memorial climate, albeit with scope for initiative and inventiveness coming directly from the younger generation.

11 Involving only twenty‑two young people and six adults at first, the newly invented ritual of Beskozyrka faltered for a time, being banned by a Communist Party bureaucrat in 1969,32 despite its patriotic intent. Party concern may have been due to a degree of nervousness about potential crowds of young people gathering together after the protest events in Moscow against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 as, although the ceremony was permitted officially in 1970, it was restricted to a much smaller area. 33 Following the intervention of influential veterans and the gorkom, local Komsomol officials were apparently finally convinced of the value of the ceremony and gave it their approval in 1971,34 such that, by the outing of the third Beskozyrka, the number of participants had increased dramatically to five thousand, and by 1973 the press was already referring to it as an established tradition.35

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12 The rise in popularity of the Beskozyrka ritual during the 1970s mirrored the development of the war cult nationwide, when popular memory of the war was very much influenced by television and radio programmes.36 Similarly, war films and novels remained popular, uniting the people’s taste with state propaganda.37 Denis Kozlov attributes a nationwide manifestation of an interest in history to the fact that it was a more “culturally acceptable” subject of discussion in Soviet society than internal or external politics, which invariably strayed into the realm of uncertainty.38 This may have been true for the politically conscious intelligentsia, but the ordinary citizen could also identify with the courage shown and death toll in the war. In Novorossiisk, memory of the war was further promoted in 1973 when the town was made a Hero‑City of the Soviet Union due to the Malaia zemlia campaign ; with his vested interest in the town, Brezhnev himself came to make the official award in 1974. According to Hedrick Smith, a Western journalist based in Moscow, by the end of the 1970s Soviet cultural life had become “saturated with the war theme.”39

13 The early Beskozyrka tradition was apparently welcomed by both young and old, fusing the patriotic commemoration desired by the older generation with the romance of a secret society attractive to its young inventors. Sokolov recalls the emotion evoked by the ceremony as veterans silently remembered their fallen comrades, linked with their gratitude for the opportunity to pass on this memory to the younger generation.40 The involvement of veterans in moral education of the younger generation was then and remains today a key aspect of patriotic upbringing. In contrast, the main aspect of Beskozyrka enjoyed by the younger generation was the night‑time torchlit procession with the secrecy of a complex system of passwords, an adventure in keeping with the romantic leanings of the Shkhunatiki, nurtured by the state emphasis on “romantic militarism,”41 exemplified by the publication of a series of biographies of romantic figures in history, Plamennye revoliutsionery [Fiery Revolutionaries]. 42 Furthermore, the system of ranks and the military parade of Beskozyrka reflected official war cult values, which promoted a convergence of generations that would ensure the ceremony’s success.

A Changing Tradition or a Tradition of Change ?

14 The juxtaposition of the concept of longstanding tradition with a relatively young state such as post‑Soviet Russia may seem paradoxical, particularly bearing in mind the unsettled years of perestroika and the 1990s, when values were being re‑assessed and Beskozyrka struggled to survive. Hobsbawm contends that newly invented traditions may be more widespread during periods of rapid social change and modernization to which older established traditions may succumb.43 On the other hand, it may be argued that the comfort of any tradition, however young, is particularly welcome within an environment rendered unstable by war, political or financial crisis. According to Edward Shils, it is the very normativeness of tradition which acts as “the inertial force which holds society in a given form over time.”44 Similarly, Paul Connnerton sees the importance of ritual mainly in its invariance over time, as it relies increasingly on “habit‑memory,”45 a response acquired over the years. Halbwachs confirms that rituals tend to remain constant over time, even when society as a whole is in the process of change, as, especially in these circumstances, people tend to cling to tradition for the perceived security it offers,46 a position endorsed by Hobsbawm, who observes that

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society normally preserves continuity by resisting change, unless it is introduced very gradually from above.47

15 On the other hand, any inertia associated with a tradition, even one strongly linked with local identity, risks leading to stagnation, as evidenced by the political environment of the Brezhnev era. There is the concomitant risk that the ritual may become static and boring, with over‑reliance on “habit‑memory” leading to popular apathy rather than a proactive commitment to remember. However, my evidence suggests that, in the context of widespread external change, a society may adapt an old tradition for new conditions by grafting new rituals or language onto the original ceremony of commemoration. It is perhaps not surprising that an analysis of the development of the Beskozyrka tradition over time reveals gradual changes in the ritual which define each successive generation and serve to prevent potential mnemonic stagnation.

16 Accepting, unlike Connerton, that traditions may change gradually, Shils concludes that, despite this, the essential elements should remain recognizable during the process of transmission across generations.48 Jan Assmann goes even further, arguing that change in traditions is unavoidable.49 He contends that, as communicative memory transmitted orally spans a maximum of three or four generations, there must inevitably be some dilution of permanency with the passing of time. Shils, similarly, argues that traditions have an inbuilt life‑span, although the relative inertia inherent in his model of propagation seems to argue against sudden inventions or changes in tradition. To survive for over four decades, however, particularly during the social and political consequences of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Beskozyrka tradition has needed to incorporate change. If necessity is the mother of invention, this has led the organizers of Beskozyrka to adopt a process of re‑invention and rejuvenation, enabling each generation to place its own stamp on the ritual, while serving to prevent mnemonic stagnation and promote local identity. It will be demonstrated that the series of changes in Beskozyrka has been established not merely as the passive response typical of a comfortably apathetic society, but in a proactive attempt to attract young people and propagate war memory across the generations. Furthermore, in view of the scale and frequency of these innovations, it may even be argued that the concept of change in the Beskozyrka ritual has become an invented tradition in its own right.

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The Unknown Sailor, Novorossiisk.

Photograph Vicky Davis, 10/05/2010

17 Minor changes to the ceremony included a variation in the route in the 1970s, to take in the monument to the Unknown Sailor, the ribbons of his beskozyrka flowing prominently behind his head. With even younger children and their parents in mind, the time was brought forward firstly to the afternoon and then the evening of 3rd February, better facilitating cross‑generational transmission. Raisa Mikhailovna Sokolova, archivist of the Novorossiisk museum, describes the addition of a solemn oath to the proceedings in 1978, the tenth anniversary of the tradition and the week during which Brezhnev’s memoirs were published.50 Repeating the oath made by Major Tsezar´ L´vovich Kunikov’s troops prior to battle, the young people swore to become a living memorial to those who had given their lives. The original marine infantry had sworn to die for their country : Волю свою, силы свои и кровь свою, каплю за каплей, мы отдадим за жизнь и счастье народа, за тебя, горячо любимая Родина !51 Furthermore, their historic success was reinforced in a dispatch from the War Council : Вашей обороной, мужеством и геройством гордятся ваши отцы, матери, жены и дети. Мы знаем, что маленькая земля станет большой и принесет освобождение стонущим от фашистского ига нашим родным отцам, матерям, женам и детям.52 The heroes of Malaia zemlia were thus situated in a mythical historical continuum, charged with ensuring the freedom of their children, the generation responsible for the invention of the Beskozyrka tradition.

18 In contrast, the oath made by the Beskozyrka carriers in 1980 principally reflected the prevailing ideology of the Brezhnev era, as participants vowed to strive to work hard to fulfil Communist ideals, including the stringent economic demands of the tenth

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five‑year plan.53 It is perhaps not surprising that, in a ceremony with links to the General Secretary’s wartime service, political ideology further complicated simple memory. Despite an ostensible wish to commemorate the past, this pragmatic consideration of the political environment, present and future, demonstrates that, towards the end of the Brezhnev era, national concerns barely connected with war memory had superseded the location‑specific myth of Malaia zemlia.

19 In the early years after the fall of the Soviet Union, interest in Beskozyrka waned in line with national trends after Gorbachev had dismantled the Brezhnev era war cult and the struggle with the economy took over.54 Newspaper reports of the ritual are scarce and several of my respondents mentioned that Beskozyrka in its original form barely survived,55 with one member of the Shkhuna rovesnikov blaming the decline on the end of the Komsomol organization,56 which had apparently continued to endorse the ceremony since 1971. However, a retired headmistress recalls that one hundred children from each of the local schools were invited during the 1990s to the town’s theatre for a different type of commemoration involving about 5,000 annually,57 reinforcing the claim that the town’s head of culture and other founding members of the ceremony kept the ritual alive.58 This is plausible, since, following the town council’s decision to take over responsibility for the ritual, it was back to full strength in 1998 for its thirtieth anniversary,59 when a further innovation was introduced. Recalling the fact that two landings had actually taken place in 1943, two torches were lit and two hats carried to beaches : the first to Malaia zemlia in the usual fashion, and the second transported by tank to the site of the failed landings at Iuzhnaia Ozereika, where the ritual has evolved slightly differently, with its own committed following.60

Beskozyrka at the Eternal Flame on Heroes’ Square

Photograph Vicky Davis, 03/02/2013

20 The twenty‑first century has seen a partial return under President Putin to more conservative Soviet values, a renewed emphasis on vospitanie and the development of a new war cult.61 Once again, politicians promote a common interest in social coherence and continuity with the Soviet past, presenting the people with the image of a strong and united nation. It is notable that Putin admits to “a clear respect, even nostalgia” for the past,62 a phenomenon well documented in Russia as a whole, particularly on the part of the older generation.63 It seems that the involvement of the younger generation

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is central to current policy for the propagation of war memory, utilizing many of the strategies of the Brezhnev era, for example visits to schools by veterans and young people standing on military guard at monuments.

21 The majority of Russians of all ages welcomes the associated ceremonies and ritual reminiscent of the Brezhnev era, particularly Victory Day in May.64 However the notoriously cold weather in February provides a ready‑made excuse for inhabitants of Novorossiisk to stay indoors and not attend Beskozyrka. Some respondents search for further reasons for non‑attendance, explaining how they would like to join in the procession, but would find it difficult to get there in the rush‑hour traffic ; moreover, they claim that their children are tired after school.65 Possibly with this in mind, the organizers introduced in 2010 a newly invented offshoot of Beskozyrka, “Svecha v okne” the “candle in the window” movement, whereby those staying at home are encouraged to show their solidarity with the marchers outside by lighting a candle to place in the window as they pass by. Heavily promoted by the town council on posters and in newspaper advertisements, this modern idea is reminiscent of other ceremonies of remembrance worldwide. This new supplementary invented tradition is particularly popular amongst women not wishing to venture outdoors,66 and involves far more people than ever before, even if they do not demonstrate the commitment of those taking part in the cold. An innovation grafted onto an older, established tradition, it has the effect of enriching, rejuvenating and refreshing the ritual, rendering it more attractive to the younger generation and their parents. Furthermore, a new daytime Beskozyrka especially for children was introduced in 2013, attracting a further audience of 4,700 young people,67 a cohort of citizens not able to deploy excuses when taken to the ceremony by their teachers, with their families responding to a complex mixture of expectation and freedom to attend.

22 The highlight of 2011 was a reconstruction of the landings at Malaia zemlia, repeated annually since then. Such events have become very popular globally, including in Russia, where the annual reconstruction of the Battle of Borodino attracts large crowds.68 Whereas the older generation still recalls the more recent Soviet past, living memory of the war itself is on the brink of extinction. Perhaps for this reason, war memory in Russia often refers to ubiquitous heroism rather than to the more specific examples still cited in the 1990s.69 On the other hand, there is considerable local geographical detail in the reconstructions, which bring to life the generalisms of the national war myth with some historical accuracy.

23 A re‑enactment on the actual battle site can be a very powerful means of propagating collective memory, while still representing a relatively passive experience for the large audience. In contrast, the more intimate group in Iuzhnaia Ozereika witnessed a different spectacle in 2011. In a seemingly spontaneous gesture, the young beskozyrka bearer attracted gasps of admiration from spectators as he strode into the sea up to his shoulders to deposit the hat on the waves.70 An exchange of messages in an online forum established that he had gone into the water of his own accord, in a sudden surge of empathy with the original landing troops, and with no orders from above.71 In the light of this personal tribute in braving the winter waves, it appears that the romanticism of the young founders of Beskozyrka lives on, at least in Iuzhnaia Ozereika,72 where there remains some scope on the fringe for the individual in organized remembrance today. However, this originally spontaneous part of the ceremony has now been incorporated into the main ritual at Malaia zemlia, an

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indication perhaps of the increasingly centralized control of Beskozyrka, both administratively in the organization by the town council, and physically in the ranks of Cossacks holding the spectators at bay. Such top‑down intervention has prompted some negative comments in online discussions from citizens about over‑organization and the desecration of genuine memory for the sake of political utility.73

The Beskozyrka bearer laying the hat and the wreath in the sea

Photograph Anatolii Pozdniakov74, 03/02/2013.

24 What started out as a series of sometimes minor innovations and refinements to the invented tradition of Beskozyrka has become a tradition of invented change in its own right, enabling each generation to take ownership of the ritual. Even in 2012, more changes were still being promised : Из года в год суть акции [...] не меняется, но с каждым разом сценарий обрастает новыми памятными деталями. Этот год не станет исключением.75

25 Despite the innovations, there is comfort in the continuity of symbolism in the Beskozyrka tradition. With candles, caps and ribbons, its interpretation and essence remain constant, although the consistency of symbolism permits only one interpretation of the past, in accord with the conventions of the war myth, albeit widely endorsed by the local population. Beskozyrka still appeals to the same members of society : the conservative middle classes, teachers, cadets and veterans, although the first actors would hardly recognize the scale of today’s operation and the veterans are becoming fewer.

26 With the participation of schools, the interest of parents is guaranteed. Here is an example of the harnessing of children to effect what I term the “reverse propagation” of memory, with some young families new to Novorossiisk learning about Beskozyrka and coming to appreciate local history thanks to their children.76 As in the case of the original inventors, the memory “message,” with its traditional symbolism, is still being transmitted back in new ways to the older generation by the youngest, complementing and reinforcing the traditional propagation mechanism from older to younger generations.

27 In contrast, responsibility for the Beskozyrka ritual, founded by and traditionally associated with the young people of Novorossiisk, was taken over in 1999 by the regional youth committee, this time involving a committee for youth rather than the

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younger generation themselves, who thereby appear to have lost their original ownership of the ceremony. The following year, Beskozyrka became known as a pan‑Russian operation,77 its name today emphasizing its roots : “Vserossiiskaia molodëzhnaia patrioticheskaia aktsiia ‘Beskozyrka’” [The pan‑Russian patriotic youth movement “Beskozyrka”]. Despite the implicit geographical expansion, attendees are largely local, with the financial burden of the ceremony falling on the town of Novorossiisk, whose mayor now takes responsibility for its implementation, possibly reflecting some local rivalry over the ownership of memory between the hero‑city of Novorossiisk and the regional centre of Krasnodar. The 2011 advertising pamphlet, published by the region, confirms the continued emphasis on youth participation, although there is no mention of its young founders and their vision, indicating perhaps that the authorities are anxious to take all the credit.

28 Despite this omission, Podyma, a prolific inventor of tradition both in Novorossiisk and Moscow, has numerous publications on Beskozyrka and other less well‑known memorial rituals to his credit.78 For over forty years he consistently propagated the myth of Malaia zemlia, building up a legend around the Shkhuna rovesnikov, which, he claims, spread from Novorossiisk to other “outposts” around the Soviet Union.79 At the same time he nurtured his own personality cult as its “romantic” founder and only true guardian of memory.80 In Novorossiisk Podyma’s name has become just as recognized as those of the real heroes of Malaia zemlia. While children learn about the history of Kunikov and his landing troops,81 older interviewees are equally likely to speak about the propagation of memory through Podyma’s Beskozyrka ritual,82 which has also been assimilated into the local history of the town, albeit a generation younger than the war itself.

29 Moral education of the young is once again valued, inculcated in schools thanks to the new emphasis on patriotism, a topic now included in the school curriculum, which is dictated by the state and implemented through the regions.83 Apparently this is endorsed by some parents and grandparents,84 who appreciated such behavioural instruction in the Pioneer and Komsomol organizations of their youth and welcome it now for their own children and grandchildren.85 The mnemonic vicious circle may have been broken through the tradition of change, but Soviet society’s traditional values are increasingly being projected through ritual onto the younger Russian generation, subject today to domination and determination by the élite who now organize Beskozyrka, rather than the romantic young idealists of 1968.

Time and Tradition

30 Confiding her personal thoughts during remembrance ceremonies, a respondent reflects : “I think behind my eyes : I try to imagine it, from films and books, how awful it was : explosions, how they lived. It must have been very hard.”86 This is a good example of trans‑temporal empathy promoted by a successful memorial ritual, whereby the imagination is converted into a time‑machine capable of linking two distant moments in time by the act of memory. Shils expresses well the notion of time‑travel through the imagination, considering tradition to be “the past in the present but as much part of the present as any very recent innovation.”87 The return to the past both culturally and mnemonically raises the question of the complex temporality of memory with respect to historical time : an imaginative memory may

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close the gap between past and present which exists thanks to the passage of historical time. A traditional society is typically brought together spatially by the annual rhythm of anniversaries, integrating it temporally with its common past by the temporary reduction of historical distance, thereby promoting understanding of past events and empathy with the people involved.

31 Personal identification with the troops was also noticeable in discussions with younger male respondents about war films, demonstrating the “prosthetic memory” described by Alison Landsberg, which offers a mechanism “at the interface between a person and a historical narrative about the past” for the acquisition of powerful memories which were not actually experienced.88 This type of visual influence is similarly possible during the Beskoyrka reconstructions, when a reversal of time is apparent on the very same space where the landings took place, reducing the perceived relative time gap between past and present with a concomitant increase in identification between present‑day participants and the original troops. Those taking part in the ritual act as time‑travellers, approaching the Malaia zemlia monument from the present, crossing the timeless space around it, to arrive in the past via the Brezhnev era as they reach the monument itself. Thus the monument in the shape of the prow of a launch, erected in 1982, seems transformed back into the original craft it represents, while its sculpted depictions of the original 1943 landing troops are transformed by the ritual into the ranks of the modern soldiers reconstructing the landings. The static monument and the memory it channels may have outlived the heroes, but still transmit the timeless testimony of non‑contestable patriotic heroism appreciated by all stake‑holders in the Beskozyrka ritual.

Malaia zemlia memorial

Photograph Vicky Davis, 02/04/2004

32 According to Sokolov, the beskozyrka floating on the water is carried by the same waves as in 1943, themselves depicted as insensitive carriers of memory of those who lost their lives : Не выйдут, нет, не выйдут на берег эти ребята. Только бесчувственные волны бьются о берег, напоминая о минувшем…89 33 Thus the sea itself is deemed to be an agent in the apparent closing of the temporal gap between 1943 and today. Not only the waves recall the night, apparently. A classmate of Konstantin Podyma feels that nature as a whole sees the need to reproduce the

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conditions of 1943 in tribute to the troops.90 An aspect of the war myth expressed by respondents of all ages includes the legendary icy wind and stormy weather every year on the night of 3rd ‑ 4th February.91 Podyma himself stated on one of his recent visits to Novorossiisk : Так уж назначено природой, что третьего февраля в Новороссийске всегда ненастье – дождь, ветер, пробирающий до костей холод.92 In a masterpiece of understatement, Novorossiiskii rabochii proclaims : В этот день свято соблюдаются традиции не только жителями, но и погодой. Третье февраля никогда не балует теплом.93 34 Women, particularly, refer to wearing layers of clothes for the ceremony,94 with some men feeling that the freezing weather enables them better to empathize with the landing troops jumping into the icy water in the middle of the night.95 Podyma, describing in 1975 the first Beskozyrka seven years previously, emphasized the similarities : Февральская ночь была морозной, ветерной. Точно так же, как много лет назад…96

35 Even the password on that night reflected the prevalent winter wind in Novorossiisk : “Nord ost” [north‑easterly]. In 2012, myth became reality, as hardy citizens turned out in unprecedented temperatures :97 Третьего февраля в Новороссийске хорошей погоды не бывает. Никогда ! Но в этом году погода сжалась и вчерашние минус 15 с ветром, сменили вполне терпимые минус 3.98 36 The Beskozyrka tradition, which was started on the 25th anniversary of the landings, also has its own anniversary timeline. One recent book, for instance, links the 35th anniversary of the landings with the tenth anniversary of Beskozyrka itself, giving almost equal importance to both.99 A newspaper article in 2007 completely misunderstands the dates, though, confusing the commemoration with the actual historical event, and stating that 2007 would see the 39th anniversary of the landings, rather than the 39th anniversary of Beskozyrka. 100 It is tempting to infer that the journalist is a relatively young person, for whom the fixed temporal horizon of 1968 seems just as far away as 1943, such that real time and mythical time have virtually converged. Certainly, it provides further evidence that, for some at least, the act of commemoration has become more significant than the distant event it commemorates, while also suggesting that memory of the Malaia zemlia campaign in Novorossiisk is indeed incomplete without the Beskozyrka tradition.

37 Beskozyrka also breaks the established temporal order in another way, eating into free time on a long February evening, when many families would prefer to be at home. Since 2010, even the private time of those not taking part in the procession outside has been invaded by ritualistic time thanks to the “candle in the window” movement, which also demands extra memorial space as the Beskozyrka ritual expands into people’s homes. There is no doubting the spatial and temporal expansion of Beskozyrka. What started out as a small‑scale evening event now takes up the whole of the 3rd February, and most of the previous day, as increasing numbers of delegates from other towns are invited to take part in an ever‑longer programme of events in a growing statement of local identity.

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The Turning of the Tide

38 Some scholars argue that the construction and propagation of collective war memory depends substantially upon performative ritual.101 On the other hand, Allan Megill argues that there is no need for ritual commemoration in a society where direct, living memory remains strong.102 However, this argument ignores not only the comfort provided to the bereaved by repetition in a social context, but also the fact that often passive memory is reinforced by the more active process of ritualistic remembrance. Similarly, Pierre Nora’s claim that modern society has effectively banished ritual is patently not applicable to war memory in Russia,103 being also robustly disputed by Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, who emphasize the fact that survivors of European wars still engage in collective acts of commemoration.104

39 Serguei Oushakine has proposed that modern Russians are united in their collective memory by a “patriotism of despair” following the segregation and fragmentation brought about by the trauma of recent wars, especially in Afghanistan and Chechnia.105 Beskozyrka, however, is not rooted in the disillusionment of bereaved families ; rather, in common with other rituals of commemoration of the Great Patriotic War,106 it demonstrates the sense of a debt on the part of the living to those who lost their lives in the landings, a sacrifice which led to the eventual liberation of Novorossiisk from enemy occupation. In Russian social culture, the exact site of burial is a vital focus for socially prescribed mourning.107 In the case of soldiers lost at sea, with no obvious monument or grave for the bereaved family to visit, the simple sailor’s cap floating on the waves provides the only focal point for tributes of flowers and the expression of emotion.

40 The original Beskozyrka ceremony also served to fill an ideological vacuum in the Soviet Union. Celebrations in February are not uncommon in other societies to alleviate the tedium and hardship of the long winter before the days lengthen and the signs of spring appear. In a blend of Christian and pagan tradition, many countries hold a carnival week at the beginning of February before the onset of the rigours of Lent, although the traditional Russian carnival Maslenitsa was banned in Soviet times. Beskozyrka is neither joyous nor food‑orientated, but does involve those elements of flame and liturgy more often associated with church ritual. Similarly, the sailor’s hat is borne in procession and laid on the waves in an act resembling an offering to the memory of the landing troops. Reinforcing this interpretation, one respondent throws sweets and biscuits into the sea behind the hat and the wreaths, as her own small sacrifice to the dead.108

41 Candles are very often lit in a Russian Orthodox church in an act of memory and are carried by President Putin in official services of remembrance.109 With implicit religious symbolism, the new “candle in the window” movement now effectively brings the sacred memorial ritual into the secular home, using the symbolism of the candle to shed light on memory. The placing of the candle on a windowsill, visible from the outside, also breaches any remaining barriers between the collective and the private with respect to memory. The quasi‑religious symbolism of the liturgy and ritual of Beskozyrka is evident in the symbols of light and fire, the imagery of sacrifice and martyrdom. Secular collective memory and organized religion have much in common, with memory perhaps becoming a “surrogate” religion or faith system.110

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42 Although few Soviet soldiers in the war were overt Christians, the Orthodox Church today is very close to the state, a situation accepted by veterans and encouraged by Putin, who ensures that priests pray for the war dead.111 The joint influence of state and Church should aid in principle both the retention of collective memory and the inculcation of conservative moral values. However, most of my respondents did not feel the necessity for the presence of a priest at Beskozyrka, most viewing it as a purely secular occasion,112 despite the claim by local priest Father Georgii that 95 % of the population of Novorossiisk are Orthodox believers. On the other hand, Father Georgii considers his presence there to be vital. He has been invited by the Mayor to attend in an official capacity for the last eight years, demonstrating the increasing importance of the Church in Russia both socially and politically. While wearing his own military medals, Father Georgii’s role remains largely symbolic, as he is not usually invited to speak, in contrast to his input on other memorial occasions.113 There is no doubt that religion does play a part in memory today, but, according to my evidence, that part is largely in the personal sphere.

43 The need for individual personal remembrance and mourning is rarely acknowledged in top‑down, “invention of tradition” theory, but is recognized by Winter in his analysis of the process of remembrance as the response to bereavement.114 Issues of personal grief may no longer be applicable so long after the war, but individuals must still make a choice whether or not to attend a ritual, even if subject to group pressure. Connerton addresses this particular question in his study of how collective memory is transmitted and retained by social groups both large and small,115 concluding that the phenomenon of “habit‑memory” supplants any interpretative capacity of the individual. The evidence in Novorossiisk, however, demonstrates a strong commitment by attendees to the ceremony in the face of often daunting weather conditions which serve only to strengthen the bond between those remembering and those remembered. Most participants in the Beskozyrka tradition are not simply passive spectators, but are able to justify their presence, usually accepting some physical discomfort as an aid to their interpretation of the ritual. This may not always be true for those simply watching a reconstruction, but it remains the case for those making the longer journey to the beach at Iuzhnaia Ozereika outside Novorossiisk. Here, the genuinely involved younger participants are compared favourably with the original Shkhunatiki by Galina Krympokha, an Honoured Citizen of Novorossiisk, who is credited with keeping the Shkhuna rovesnikov and its crew afloat over the long years since its inception 116 : “Tam net ravnodushnykh glaz” [there are no indifferent eyes there].117

44 It is possible that the current wave of nostalgia for the Soviet Union plays a role in the popularity of rituals of remembrance dating back to the Brezhnev era.118 My observations, however, point rather to the importance of a sense of continuity with the past – not with the Soviet Union in general, but rather to a familial connection provoked by the strong feeling of empathy with the landing troops. Many of my interviewees were able to point to their individual ancestors who had fought locally in the war, with respondents at both ends of the age spectrum claiming that they had inherited the hardy and heroic character of their forebears.119 It appears that older family members act as links in a memory chain which connects today’s citizens genetically with the landing troops. Extrapolating from the individual to the community in general, the headmistress of School No. 6 observed that the heroism typical of wartime is transmitted through ritual, as if “caught” by the younger

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generation in the form of improved behaviour : “geroicheskoe iavlenie diktuet povedenie [an heroic occurrence dictates behaviour].”120 A local historian commented on this phenomenon, stating that “it is as if they drink it in their mothers’ milk.”121 For example, a former soldier believes that the town’s inhabitants “were born” from Malaia zemlia,122 while a town councillor interprets memory as “our blood, our duty, future and past together.”123 Indeed, a young teacher sees war memory as part of the town’s “living organism,” whereby knowledge about Malaia zemlia is “naturally” assimilated. 124 Thus the propagation of memory is linked to the transmission of a belief and behaviour system. This sense of communal memory nurtured in the young is epitomized in the slogan ubiquitously found on school walls : “Pobeda deda moia pobeda” [My grandfather’s victory is my victory].

45 In contrast, evidence suggests that some young adults may have experienced enough of the Beskozyrka tradition following years of enforced participation as schoolchildren.125 However, the tradition is re‑fuelled with fresh blood as newcomers to the area seem keen to attend the ceremony,126 while locals bring friends from further afield to experience it at first hand,127 attracted by the unique maritime connotations of the ritual.128

46 It is clear that there remains a place today for traditional ritualistic ceremony in this modern, youth‑oriented society, despite the fact that an established tradition may be regarded as a sign of conservatism in a society, as it simply maintains the status quo. In Novorossiisk evidence suggests that the combination of the new state‑sponsored war cult of the Putin era,129 with the influence of the more reactionary, provincial older generations, is sufficient to counteract the sometimes anti‑traditional attitude of young people.

47 Although currently larger than ever, the numbers attending Beskozyrka remain substantially smaller than those celebrating Victory Day in Novorossiisk, mainly due to the different nature of the remembrance involved. As a celebration of national victory in 1945, Victory Day is less solemn than Beskozyrka. Citizens feel that Victory Day is a different type of event : national, happier and more celebratory, while Beskozyrka demands a more thoughtful approach to memory, which, according to many respondents, comes directly from the romantic soul of the young people of Novorossiisk.130

48 The continuing sense of identification with Beskozyrka of the younger generation, with the gratitude and participation of many of their elders, maintains a sense of social cohesion that may easily have died out with other traditions during the 1990s. Furthermore, its original, specifically local interpretation endures, despite and also thanks to a series of changes, usually regarded as elements of creative enrichment of the ceremony and recently taking their inspiration from commemorative norms worldwide rather than a small local youth club. Shils may regard originality as the enemy of tradition,131 but, in Novorossiisk, it has helped to avoid any dilution of meaning and has guaranteed the longstanding popularity of Beskozyrka, which is now at an all‑time high, with no sign of ritual fatigue. Indeed, official council figures state that 15,000 participants in 2011 remembered the heroes of 1943,132 while figures for 2013 suggest that a record 23,500 attended the ceremony, an indication of the growing popularity of the tradition.133 Although Beskozyrka remains a tradition reinforcing local identity, Podyma has claimed that visitors from 270 other towns have taken part over the years.134 In 2011, for example, delegates were invited from other hero‑cities to

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take part in a series of events and a ritual on a much larger scale, with coverage on the national television news confirming the status and identity of Novorossiisk nationwide. 135 With the national focus in 2013 on the 70th anniversary of victory in Stalingrad, 136 however, the only visiting delegation to Novorossiisk was from the regional capital, Krasnodar. The considerable local and national media hype serves to convince many younger respondents that Beskozyrka is famous worldwide, such that they express naïve surprise that it remains unknown in Western Europe.137

49 For today’s ritual, it is the town council which bears the brunt of, and takes the credit for the organization of Beskozyrka. It is in this respect that responsibility for the propagation of memory has changed most significantly, with the original bottom‑up transmission of Beskozyrka by the younger generation now centralized and controlled by the local authorities, and the only remaining spark of individuality and spontaneity on the periphery now officially incorporated into the official mainstream narrative at Malaia zemlia.

50 Young people in Novorossiisk appear today to be less able or willing to use their own initiative in the field of memory than in the Brezhnev era. What started as a rare example of a bottom‑up ritual in the Soviet Union, albeit under the not insignificant influence of the Brezhnev era war cult, has become more like the top‑down type of invented tradition described by Hobsbawm, with its emphasis on the propagation of social values through collective memory. With Russia going through a second cult of war memory under Putin, the Soviet emphasis on patriotism and moral education of the young are once again in evidence, affording national and local conditions under which this unique remembrance ritual is thriving and where increasing empathy with the landing troops is demonstrated. There may be a growing audience of schoolchildren to ensure its future propagation, but, nonetheless, the tradition would not last unless enjoying popular approval from the public as a whole, with the support of local and regional authorities. The proactive maintenance of this tradition with its regular re‑invention helps to define the identity of the hero‑city of Novorossiisk and ensures that the myth of Malaia zemlia remains at the heart of the local community.

NOTES

1. “So many fearless young sailors in pea‑jackets and caps perished in the deep. So many times we saw dead sailors´ caps floating on the sea.” Georgii Sokolov, My s Maloi zemli [We are from Malaia zemlia] (M. : Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1979), 367‑368. 2. “Lay wreaths on the waves./This is society´s custom :/in memory of soldiers who died at sea,/ wreaths are laid on the waves.” Excerpt from Andrei Voznesenskii, “Rekviem” (1975) : Andrei Voznesenskii : Sobranie sochinenii v trëkh tomakh [Andrei Voznesenskii : Collected Works in Three Volumes], vol. 2 (M. : Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1984), 269. 3. Leonid Il´ich Brezhnev, “Malaia zemlia,” in Malaia zemlia : Vozrozhdenie [Malaia zemlia : Regeneration] (M. : Prosveshchenie, 1979), 1‑95 (first published in 1978).

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4. For example : Zhores Medvedev, Andropov (Oxford : Blackwell, 1983), 101 ; and Nina Tumarkin, Moscow´s War Memorial : The Story of a National Symbol (Wellesley, MA : Wellesley College, 1988), 50. 5. Reproduced with the permission of Novorossiiskii istoricheskii muzei‑zapovednik. 6. 124 local citizens aged from 18 to 93 were interviewed between May 2010 and February 2013, with further evidence collected by email correspondence. 55.3 % of the interviewees were women and 44.7 % men. Interviewees, including Konstantin Podyma, teachers and lecturers, students, war veterans, housewives, historians, librarians, town councillors and journalists, were invited to discussions loosely structured around a series of questions in their workplace, at home or on neutral territory. UCL ethical approval was obtained for the project and confidentiality of respondents was guaranteed, although some experts agreed to waive this right. Anonymous interviewees are identified using the format “F (female) or M (male)/first digit of age/identifying letter” ; the date of the relevant interview follows in brackets. 7. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1983). 8. Ibid. 9. Emile Durkheim, Moral Education, trans. E.K. Wilson (New York : Free Press, 1961) (first published 1925) ; Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York : Free Press, 1995) (first published 1912) ; Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago, IL – London : University of Chicago Press, 1992) (first published 1925). 10. S. Kolosovii, Vyzyvaem ogon´ na sebia [We draw fire on ourselves] (USSR : Mossfil´m, 1964‑1965) ; Podvig [The Exploit] (USSR : Tsentral´noe televidenie SSSR, 1965). 11. Captain M. Shiriamov, “Zavtra ‑ Prazdnik Pobedy [Tomorrow is Victory Day],” Novorossiiskii rabochii (8 May 1963), 2. 12. Georgii Sokolov, Malaia zemlia : Rasskazy i ocherki [Malaia zemlia : Stories and Essays] (Krasnodar : Krasnodarskoe knizhnoe izdatel´stvo, 1967), 383. 13. Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead : The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York : BasicBooks, 1994), 133‑134. 14. Sokolov, Malaia zemlia : Rasskazy i ocherki. 15. “Operatsiia ‘Beskozyrka’ [The ‘Beskozyrka’ Ceremony],” Novorossiiskii rabochii, (12 Jan. 1968), 4. 16. Konstantin Podyma, “Vechnyi ogon´ ” : ty gori, ne sgorai… [“Eternal Flame” : You are burning, never go out…] (M. : Pilotnoe izdanie, 2008), 8. 17. Konstantin Podyma, Schastlivogo plavaniia, “Shkhuna Rovesnikov” ! [Happy sailing, “Shkhuna Rovesnikov” !], (M. : Detskaia literatura, 1975), 5. 18. Ibid., 6. 19. Raisa Sokolova, Beskozyrka (Novorossiisk : Departament kul´tury Krasnodarskogo kraia, c. 2005), 8‑9. 20. See Jonathan Brunstedt, “Building a Pan‑Soviet Past : The Soviet War Cult and the Turn Away from Ethnic Particularism,” Soviet and Post‑Soviet Review, 38, (2011) : 149‑171, 163. 21. A. Yurchak, Everything was Forever until it was no more : The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ and Oxford : Princeton University Press, 2006), Chapter 3. 22. Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia : dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR, 1953‑1985 gody [The Russian Party : The Russian Nationalists’ Movement in the USSR, 1953‑1985] (M. : Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003), 114‑116 ; 277. 23. Brunstedt, “Building a Pan‑Soviet Past,” 164‑166. 24. F6H, a former Shkhunatik (interview 05/02/2013). 25. Konstantin Podyma (05/02/2013). 26. F6H considers them to have been “angular rather than curved” (email 15/09/2013).

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27. F6H. 28. Gleb Tsipursky, “Conformism and Agency : Model Young Communists and the Komsomol Press in the Later Khrushchev Years,” Europe‑Asia Studies, 7, (2013) :1396‑1416. 29. F6H and F7E (05/02/2013). 30. See Podyma, « Vechnyi ogon´ » : ty gori, ne sgorai… , 2008, 19 ; and “Mify – ne rify, no v farvatere ‘Beskozyrki’ – ni k chemu ! [Myths are not reefs, but for Beskozyrka there are no smooth waters !],” Novorossiiskie izvestiia (16 Feb. 2011), http://novodar.ru/index.php/ novohistory‑punkt/2148‑mnrnvfbnkch‑02‑2011 [accessed 21/12/2011]. Parents of some marchers also worked for the Communist Party (Podyma and F7E). 31. “Mify – ne rify” Novorossiiskie izvestiia. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. ; and Konstantin Podyma, “Beskozyrka” : Cherez gody i stoletiia : Dokumental´naia povest´ [“Beskozyrka” : After Years and Centuries] (Novorossiisk – M. : 2008), 41‑2. 34. “Mify – ne rify,” Novorossiiskie izvestiia. 35. Podyma, “Beskozyrka,” 2008, 41 and 47 ; and “Plyvi, beskozyrka [Float, Beskozyrka],” Novorossiiskii rabochii (7 Feb.1973), 3. 36. Particularly Ot vsei dushi [From all my Heart] (see Kristin Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time : How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca, NY – London : Cornell University Press, 2011), 275‑277 ; and the radio programme V etot den´ 30 let nazad [Thirty Years Ago Today], see http://www.tvmuseum.ru [accessed 01/05/2013]. 37. William Tompson, The Soviet Union under Brezhnev (Harlow : Pearson Education, 2003), 102. 38. Denis Kozlov, “The Historical Turn in Late Soviet Culture : Retrospectivism, Factography, Doubt, 1953‑91,” Kritika : Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 2, (2001) : 577‑600, 599. 39. Hedrick Smith, The Russians (New York : Quadrangle and The New York Times Book Company, 1976), 316. 40. Sokolov, My s Maloi zemli, 367‑368. 41. Brunstedt, “Building a Pan‑Soviet Past,” 163. 42. The state‑sponsored series was published from 1964 to 1990 ; see Polly Jones, “The Fire Burns On ? The Fiery Revolutionaries Biographical Series and the Rethinking of Propaganda in the Early Brezhnev Era”, Slavic Review (forthcoming). The original crew were not only inventors of patriotic tradition, but also a literary society relishing war poetry, who notably paid homage to the romantic figure of poet Pavel Kogan, killed in the battle for Novorossiisk : F6H and Konstantin Podyma, … chtob ikh ne zabyvali my : Dokumental´nye ocherki [So that We do not Forget Them] (Novorossiisk — M. : 2009), 28. 43. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction : Inventing Traditions,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2008), 1‑14. 44. Edward Shils, Tradition (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1981), 25. 45. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1989), 23. 46. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory. 47. Eric J. Hobsbawm, “The Social Function of the Past,” Past Present, 55, (1972) : 3‑17. 48. Shils, Tradition. 49. Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique, 65, (1995) : 125‑133, 128. 50. Sokolova, Beskozyrka, 16‑17. 51. “We will give up our own will, strength and blood, drop by drop, for the life and happiness of the people, for you, our beloved Motherland.” Sokolova, Beskozyrka, 16 ; and Sokolov, Malaia zemlia, 10. 52. “Your fathers, mothers, wives and children will be proud of your defence, courage and heroism. We know that this small area of land will become great and will bring about the

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liberation of our fathers, mothers, wives and children groaning under the fascist yoke.” Sokolov, Malaia zemlia, 8. 53. Leaflet held in the archives of Novorossiiskii istoricheskii muzei‑zapovednik : “Operatsiia ‘Beskozyrka‑80’,” MA 15049, Novorossiiskoe PPO, zak. No. 334 (21/01/1980). 54. Catherine Merridale, “War, Death and Remembrance in Soviet Russia,” in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000), 61‑83, 79. Stephen Lovell considers that “war was not central to Gorbachev´s self‑understanding as it had been for his predecessors.” (Stephen Lovell, The Shadow of War : Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the Present (Chichester : Wiley‑Blackwell, 2010), 9‑10.) 55. For example, M9A (07/05/2010), in charge of other rituals of remembrance ; M5F (29/03/2011), a senior lecturer ; and F3A, a teacher (10/05/2010). The local press makes no mention of Beskozyrka in 1993, the fiftieth anniversary of the landings. 56. F7E. 57. F7A (23/08/2013). 58. F7E. 59. “… Beskozyrka na volne [Beskozyrka on the Waves],” Novorossiiskii rabochii (4 Feb. 1998), 1. 60. According to the manager of a local veterans´ council (19/03/2011). 61. The Putin era war cult has been well documented in, for example, Jutta Scherrer, “Sowjetunion/Rußland : Siegesmythos versus Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung [The Soviet Union/ Russia : The Victory Myth versus a Reappraisal of the Past],” in Monika Flacke, ed., Mythen der Nationen, volume 2. 1945 : Arena der Erinnerung [National Myths, Volume 2, 1945 : The Field of Memory] (Mainz am Rhein : Philipp von Zabern, 2004), 619‑657 ; I. Kurilla, “The Symbolic Politics of the Putin Administration,” in Philipp Casula and Jeronim Perovic, eds., Identities and Politics during the Putin Presidency (Stuttgart : Ibidem, 2009), 255‑269 ; Lovell, The Shadow of War ; Ivo Mijnssen, “The Victory Myth and Russia´s Identity”, Russian Analytical Digest, 72, (2010) : 6‑9 ; Lisa Kirschenbaum, “World War II in Soviet and Post‑Soviet Memory,” Soviet and Post‑Soviet Review, 38, (2011) : 97‑103 ; N.E. Koposov, Pamiat´ strogogo rezhima : istoriia politika v Rossii [Memory of a Strict Regime : The History of Politics in Russia] (M. : Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2011) ; and Olga Kucherenko, “That´ll Teach´em to Love Their Motherland ! : Russian Youth Revisit the Battles of World War II,” The Journal of Power Institutions in Post‑Soviet Societies, 12, (2011). 62. Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle, “Brezhnev Reconsidered,” in Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle, eds., Brezhnev Reconsidered (Basingstoke : Palgrave, 2002), 203‑217, 206. 63. For example : Svetlana Boym, “From the Russian Soul to Post‑Communist Nostalgia,” Representations, 49, (1995) : 133‑166 ; Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York : BasicBooks, 2001) ; Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko, “The Politics of Nostalgia : A Case for Comparative Analysis of Post‑Socialist practices,” Ab Imperio, 2, (2004) : 487‑519 ; Svetlana Boym, “Nostalgia and its Discontents,” Hedgehog Review, 9, (2007) : 7‑18 ; and Serguei A. Oushakine, “We´re Nostalgic but We´re not Crazy : Retrofitting the Past in Russia,” The Russian Review, 66, (2007) : 451‑482. 64. Stephen M. Norris, “Memory for Sale : Victory Day 2010 and Russian Remembrance,” Soviet and Post‑Soviet Review, 38, (2011) : 201‑229 ; and Elizabeth A. Wood, “Performing Memory : Vladimir Putin and the Celebration of World War II in Russia,” Soviet and Post‑Soviet Review, 38, (2011) : 172‑200. 65. Notably M3E (22/03/2011), F4F (18/03/2011), F4H (16/03/2011) and F4I (17/03/2011). 66. For example F2A (14/05/2010), F3F (16/03/2011), F3I (18/03/2011), F5N (02/04/2011) and F6F (15/03/2011). 67. Oksana Mashkarova, “Vakhtu pamiati budut nesti i deti [Children will also Hold a Memorial Ceremony],” Novorossiiskii rabochii (18 Jan. 2013), 2 ; Lina Gritsenko, “Detiam pokazali, kto

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nastoiashchii supergeroi [Children were Shown who is a Real Superhero],” Novorossiiskii rabochii (5 Feb. 2013), 2 ; and interview with Deputy Mayor Natalía Vladimirovna Maiorova (04/02/2013). 68. See Julie Buckler, “Taking and Retaking the Field : Borodino as a Site of Collective Memory,” in Julie Buckler and Emily D. Johnson, eds., Rites of Place : Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe, (Evanston, IL : Northwestern University Press, 2013), 203‑223, 218. 69. Norris, “Memory for Sale,” 217. 70. Ol´ga Gailesh, “Novorossiisk ‘Beskozyrka 2011’,” Munitsipalńaia novostnaia lenta (4 Feb. 2011), http://www.nrnews.ru/news/?id=42581 [accessed 09/02/2011]. 71. Ibid. : online responses. 72. Although the lack of romanticism in most modern youngsters is bemoaned by G.A. Krympokha in “Proshchaite, Galina Alekseevna [Farewell, Galina Alekseevna],” Novorossiiskii rabochii (22 Aug. 2011), http://www.novorab.ru/ArticleSection/Details/3658 [accessed 02/09/2011]. 73. Online responses to Gailesh, “Novorossiisk ‘Beskozyrka 2011’,” Munitsipalńaia novostnaia lenta. 74. Photograph by Anatolii Pozdniakov, copyright of the photographer and reproduced with his permission. 75. “From year to year the movement [...] does not change, but on each occasion the programme acquires new memorial components. This year will be no exception.” Evgeniia Simanovich, “‘Svechu v okne’ mozhet zazhech´ kazhdyi [Everybody can Light a Candle in the Window],” Novorossiiskii rabochii (23 Jan. 2012), http://www.novorab.ru/ [accessed 23/01/2012]. 76. For example F3C (15/03/2011), M3F (16/03/2011) and F4L (05/02/2013). 77. Sokolova, Beskozyrka, 17‑19. 78. For a description of a ritual invented by Podyma in 1976 to commemorate those who died on the first night of the war in 1941, see Podyma, “Vechnyi ogon´” : ty gori, ne sgorai…, 5. Other works on memory by Podyma include : Na volne pamiati [On the Waves of Memory] (M. – Novorossiisk : Sentiabr´, 2008) ; “Beskozyrka” : Cherez gody i stoletiia ; and …chtob ikh ne zabyvali my : Dokumentalńye ocherki. 79. Podyma, “Vechnyi ogon´” : ty gori, ne sgorai…, 5. 80. Sokolova, Beskozyrka ; and Professor Tamara Iurina, “Teleurok grazhdanstvennosti, posviashchennyi 40‑letiiu operatsii ‘Beskozyrka’ [Television Lesson on Citizenship : The 40th Anniversary of the ‘Beskozyrka’ Movement]”, Novaia Rossiia (3 Feb. 2008). Furthermore, 15,000 documents await scholarly study in Podyma´s archive, RGASPI. 81. According to the history curriculum of School No. 6 and the Bekar School in Novorossiisk. Information is also propagated in local libraries. The pupils´ viewpoint was analysed from the results of a survey of schoolchildren of the Bekar School and School No. 6. 82. A total of 65 out of 124 interviewees. 83. Patriotism is the new top topic of the Russian curriculum, according to the headteachers of School No. 6 (13/05/2010), School No. 19 (29/03/2011) and the Bekar School (06/05/2010). Furthermore, schools devote the whole month of February to patriotism, almost seamlessly linking history of the landings on 3rd February with national men´s day, “Den´ zashchitnika Otechestva,” on 23rd February. 84. A total of 21 respondents : 14 women and 7 men. 85. One local library held an event in 2009 to celebrate the birth of the Komsomol, according to librarians F5J and F5K (23/03/2011). 86. F4G (15/03/2011). 87. Shils, Tradition, 13.

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88. Alison Landsberg, “Prosthetic memory : Total Recall and Blade Runner,” in Mike Featherstone, Roger Burrows, eds., Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk : Cultures of Technological Embodiment (London : Sage, 1995), 175‑189, 2. 89. “They will never return, no, these lads will never return to shore. Only the senseless waves beat on the shore, remembering the past …” Sokolov, My s Maloi zemli, 368. 90. F6F. 91. Sokolova, Beskozyrka, 14 ; interviewees include F2A, F4G, F4I, M5B (18/03/2011), F6F and F8C (05/05/2010). 92. “It is appointed by nature that it is always foul weather on 3rd February in Novorossiisk, with wind, rain, and bitter cold which penetrates to the bones.” (“Fevral´skii poryv [February Storm]), Novorossiiskii rabochii (29 Jan. 2011), 3.) 93. “On this day, tradition is religiously observed not only by citizens, but also by the weather. A warm wind never blows on 3rd February.” Viktoriia Nikolaenko, “‘Beskozyrka’ vskolykhnula volny nashei pamiati [‘Beskozyrka’ Stirred up the Waves of our Memory],” Novorossiiskii rabochii (4 Feb. 2011), 1. 94. For example F3A, F3K (23/03/2011), F4G, F6D (09/05/2010), F7B (08/05/2010) and F7C (19/03/2011). 95. Especially M3A (10/05/2010) and M5B. 96. “The February night was freezing and windy. Exactly the same as many years ago …” (Podyma, Schastlivogo plavaniia, “Shkhuna Rovesnikov” !, 67‑8). 97. F3A by personal email (04/02/2012). 98. “There is never good weather on 3rd February. Never ! But this year the temperature plunged even below yesterday´s ‑15C, with wind too, a change from the usual more tolerable ‑3C.” “V Novorossiiske sostoialas´ sorok chetvërtaia operatsiia ‘Beskozyrka’ [The forty‑fourth ‘Beskozyrka’ ceremony has taken place in Novorossiisk],” Novorossiiskii rabochii (3 Feb. 2012), http://www.nrnews.ru/news/?id=47939 [accessed 04/02/2012]. However prevalent the myth, it could not influence the unusually high temperatures of February 2013 : “Tak zharko v nachale fevralia v krae bylo 30 let nazad [It was just as warm at the beginning of February 30 Years ago],” Novorossiiskii rabochii (8 Feb. 2013), 2. 99. Sokolova, Beskozyrka, 15. 100. “Galina Krympokha prochitala lektsiiu o vysadke desanta na Maluiu zemliu starsheklassnikam shkoly No. 30 [Galina Krympokha Spoke about the Malaia zemlia Landings to Senior Pupils at School No. 30],” Munitsipal´naia novostnaia lenta (1 Feb. 2007), http:// nrnews.ru/news/?id=2729 [accessed 2/9/2011]. 101. See, for example, Yael Zerubavel, Recovered Roots : Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition (Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press, 1995). 102. Allan Megill, “History, Memory, Identity,” History of the Human Sciences, 11 (1998) : 37‑62. 103. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History : Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations, 26 (1989) : 7‑24, 12. 104. Jay Winter, and Emmanuel Sivan, “Introduction,” in Jay Winter and Emmanuel Sivan, eds., War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1‑5, 1. 105. Serguei Oushakine, The Patriotism of Despair : Nation, War and Loss in Russia (Ithaca, NY – London : Cornell University Press, 2009). 106. For example, the custom in Russia to lay flowers to the war dead after a wedding. 107. Catherine Merridale, “Russia,” in Glennys Howarth and Oliver Leaman, eds., Encyclopedia of Death and Dying (London : Routledge, 2001), 390‑1. 108. F7C. 109. Catherine Merridale, Ivan´s War : Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939‑1945 (New York : Picador, 2006), 378.

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110. Barbara Misztal, “Durkheim on Collective Memory,” Journal of Classical Sociology, 3, 2003 : 123‑143, 139. 111. Merridale, Ivan´s War, 378‑9. 112. Particularly male interviewees, who stressed the mixture of faiths and ethnicities of the original troops. 113. Interview with Father Georgii (14/03/2011). 114. J.M. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning : The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1995). Winter interprets mourning practices as providing consolation through classical art, language and monuments within the traditional healing framework. 115. Connerton, How Societies Remember. 116. Tatíana Staroverova, Novorossiiskii rabochii (30 Nov. 2010), http://www.novorab.ru/ ArticleSection/Details/1733 [accessed 02/09/2011]. 117. “Fevral´skii poryv,” Novorossiiskii rabochii. 118. See FN 66. 119. Notably M1A (14/05/2010) and F8C. 120. Interview 27/10/2010. 121. M5E (26/03/2011). 122. M4B (17/03/2011). 123. M5D (23/03/2011). 124. F3A (10/05/2010). 125. For example, M1A. 126. 8 out of the 12 relative newcomers to the town interviewed claimed that they take part in Beskozyrka. 127. According to F3E (16/03/2011). 128. For example, friends from other towns are invited by M4C (29/03/2011) and F7A. 129. See, among others, Brunstedt, “Building a Pan‑Soviet Past” ; Kirschenbaum, “World War II in Soviet and Post‑Soviet Memory” ; Norris, “Memory for Sale” ; and Elizabeth A. Wood, “Performing Memory.” 130. Voiced by several respondents, particularly F3I. 131. Shils, Tradition, 236. 132. “V Novorossiiske proshla Vserossiiskaia vakhta pamiati ‘Beskozyrka‑2011’ [The Pan‑Russian Memorial Ceremony ‘Beskozyrka‑2011’ Took Place in Novorossiisk],’ Ofitsialńyi sait administratsii i Dumy munitsipalńogo obrazovaniia gorod‑geroi Novorossiisk (4 Feb. 2011), http://www.admnvrsk.rujoo.admnvrsk.ru/index.php/2010‑02‑26‑12‑44‑41/4277‑‑l‑2011r [accessed 09/02/2011]. This figure was revised upwards to nearer twenty thousand by the local press : Gailesh, “Novorossiisk ‘Beskozyrka 2011’.” 133. Provisional figure from Deputy Mayor Natalía Maiorova. 134. Podyma, “Beskozyrka,” 47. Podyma claims that, over the 45 years since its inception, 350,000 people have taken part in the ceremony : Oksana Mashkarova, “Novorossiisk pomnit ! [Novorossiisk Remembers !],” Novorossiiskii rabochii (05/02/2013), 1. 135. “”Novosti [The News],” Pervyi kanal, 0900 (4 Feb. 2011), http://www.1tv.ru/ newsvideoarchive/pd=04.02.2011 [accessed 08/07/2012]. 136. This took place on 2nd February, while the Beskozyrka ceremony was on 3rd February 2013. 137. See also reference to the alleged fame of the “Shkhuna rovesnikov” in its heyday throughout the Soviet Union : Evgenii Lapin, “‘Shkhuna’ ne spuskaet parusa [´The Schooner´ is not lowering its sails],” Novorossiiskii rabochii (8 Nov. 2010), http://novorab.ru/ArticleSection/ Details/1509/24 [accessed 20/11/2011].

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ABSTRACTS

This article traces the development of a ritual of remembrance invented in 1968 by a small group of young people to perpetuate the memory of Soviet landing troops lost at sea off Novorossiisk. With a series of changes, this annual tradition of “Beskozyrka” (a sailor’s cap) has flourished over the years, resisting sweeping political, economic and social changes towards the end of the twentieth century to become even more successful today than in the Brezhnev era. It is argued that, thanks to national and local conditions under which collective war memory is thriving, increasing empathy with the troops is demonstrated such that this continuing legacy of the youth of 1968, far from being discarded after Brezhnev’s death, is increasingly relevant to the identity of the hero‑city of Novorossiisk today.

Cet article retrace l’histoire d’un rituel mémoriel inventé en 1968 par un petit groupe de jeunes afin de perpétuer le souvenir des troupes soviétiques embarquées perdues en mer au large de Novorossijsk. Cette tradition annuelle de la « Beskozyrka » (du nom d’une coiffe de marin) a connu diverses fortunes mais a traversé les ans, résistant aux profonds changements politiques, économiques et sociaux de la fin du XXe siècle pour s’affirmer aujourd’hui avec davantage de succès que pendant la période brejnévienne. L’auteur fait valoir que, grâce aux conditions locales et nationales qui rendent florissante la mémoire collective de la guerre, l’empathie croissante à l’endroit des troupes est telle que ce legs de la jeunesse de 1968, loin d’avoir été désavoué à la mort de Brežnev, est aujourd’hui de plus en plus en adéquation avec l’identité de la ville héros de Novorossijsk.

AUTHOR

VICKY DAVIS University College London. [email protected]

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From “counter‑revolutionary monuments” to “national heritage” The Preservation of Leningrad Churches, 1964‑1982 Des « monuments contre‑révolutionnaires » à « l’héritage national » : la préservation des églises de Leningrad, 1964‑1982

Catriona Kelly

The present article draws on research for my book project, Socialist Churches : Radical Secularisation and Heritage Preservation in Petrograd and Leningrad, 1918‑1991, generously sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, UK (research grant “National Identity in Russia : Traditions and Deterritorialisation,” 2007‑2011). Travel and interviewing costs were also supported by the Ludwig Fund, New College. Interviews from the project are cited with the code Oxf/AHRC, the place code SPb. and date (09 etc.), and also a recording number and the initials of the interviewer. My thanks go to the interviewers and informants, and also to Alexander D. Margolis, Mikhail V. Shkarovsky, Alexander V. Kobak, and Alexandra M. Piir for their help and advice. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers of Cahiers du Monde russe, and the audience of the Russian History Workshop at Georgetown University, particularly Michael David‑Fox, Eric Lohr, and Steven A. Grant, for their comments, which were greatly to the benefit of the final text.

1 On 2 July 1975, the Commission for the History, Preservation, and Restoration of Monuments at the Leningrad Section of the Union of Architects (LOSA) and the Union’s City Planning Commission held a meeting devoted to the proposed reconstruction of Haymarket Square (Sennaya ploshchad´), known from 1952 to 1992 as “Peace Square” (ploshchad´ Mira). The meeting, described in Russian as “extended” (rasshirennoe) was an event that, characterically for the times, called into question the division between “public” and “private.”1 It was unadvertised, and held in a place that was, technically, open only to members. Yet it was typical, at this period, for events held in the creative unions to be attended by the family members, associates, and assorted hangers‑on of actual members.2 And in this case, those attending by official invitation (more than 60 in all, according to the official minutes) included at least a dozen non‑architects, among them members of the Union of Artists, such as the sculptor Valentina

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Malakhieva (1923‑1997), representatives of the All‑Russian Society for the Preservation of Monuments of History and Culture (VOOPIiK), and other people from Soviet “public life” (obshchestvennost´), such as the historian T.A. Kukushkina from Leningrad State University. Other outsiders may have figured as unlisted members of the audience.3

2 The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a plan that had been drawn up by the architect D.A. Butyrin (1933‑2010). This proposed to offset the erection of a new bus station on Haymarket Square by rebuilding the bell‑tower of the former Church of the Dormition (popularly known as “The Saviour on the Haymarket,” Spas na Sennoi), demolished in January 1961 in order to make room for the overground pavilion of a metro station.4 The discussion rapidly started to range much further, however, with some contributions, such as Malakhieva’s, becoming very emotional : Not long ago we were here to discuss the preservation of the Cathedral of Saints Boris and Gleb on the Sinope Embankment. Many vital, important, and accurate things were said. And then what ? The cathedral got blown up ! Never mind all our discussions and motions. And on the thirtieth anniversary of Victory [in World War II] as well. When our enemies blew up our monuments, it was clear what they were doing – destroying our culture. But what about when we do it ourselves ? The last speaker said, ‘It’s dreadful that the church on the Haymarket was blown up, but the people who are guilty aren’t around any more, we should make a fresh start.’ That’s a great suggestion – refuse to recognise your mistakes, and make them all over again.5

3 Another participant in the discussion, the architect and architectural historian Vladimir Lisovsky, went as far as to argue that “simply reconstructing the bell‑tower is pointless ; we should reconstruct the church too,” though he did immediately add, “but that’s quite impossible.”6 For T.A. Kukushkina, the demise of the church “damages our entire culture.”7

4 Whatever the extent of their disagreement about what to do with Haymarket Square in the 1975 present, those attending the meeting were firmly agreed about one thing. The demolition of the Church of the Saviour had been “a fatal error of city planning” (rokovaya gradostroitel´naya oshibka), and an affront to their own relationship with the city as well. As the architect Oleg Bashinsky put it : In my memories, the only thing that the Haymarket calls to mind is the church. The loss is incalculable. If there is any chance of reconstructing it, then that must be done.8

5 With hindsight, informed by the widespread restitution of churches to religious denominations beginning in the late 1980s, and the reconstruction of demolished ecclesiastical buildings in the following two decades, the events of 1975 may not appear very surprising.9 However, at the time, things seemed different. It is difficult to overstate just what a turning point the Brezhnev era represented with regard to the status of churches (and more generally, historic buildings) in the aesthetic hierarchy of the Russian intelligentsia generally, and of the Leningrad intelligentsia particularly.

6 This article sets out to examine the processes by which attitudes to the historic churches of Leningrad altered, and the underlying causes behind these processes. It assesses the effects of the shift in taste on the questions of which buildings were considered worthy of preservation and how they were cared for. It also discusses the impact of the new perceptions on the treatment, in city planning, of entire urban spaces, using the Haymarket – one of Leningrad’s key central squares, and a cause of planning headaches since the 1940s – as a focus for the discussion. I illustrate the

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emergence of a general consensus that preservation of historic churches should be enhanced. But I also identify the persistence of very significant differences about the social role of the churches. Different groups of social actors (religious believers, the Church hierarchy, officials in the State Inspectorate for the Preservation of Monuments (GIOP), members of VOOPIiK, non‑affiliated intellectuals of different stances and generations) all had their own, often contradictory, notions of what the purpose of these buildings should be. After an introductory section addressing the general historical background, I give a brief sketch of heritage preservation policy in Leningrad under Stalin and Khrushchev, before explaining the shift in attitudes to churches that took place in the late 1960s, and its impact on the treatment of individual buildings and of integrated urban spaces.

Rediscovering History : The Moderation of Late‑Soviet Modernism

7 The discussion of Leningrad appeals not just because of the famous architectural merits of the place (though that consideration is, obviously, important), but because the late Soviet era saw a gradual breakdown of the strongly centralising drive of mature Stalinist culture, manifested, among other things, in the rigid control over the spatial world of the so‑called “model socialist city.” In the 1930s, cities were often planned long‑distance, by officials whose command of the territory that they aimed to regulate might be distinctly vague.10 While a great deal of standard building still went on after 1953 – indeed, the famous “Decree on Architectural Excesses” of 1955 demanded the increased use of pattern‑book systems‑building for new residential buildings – there was a very active revival of “regional studies” (kraevedenie) that included close attention to the material world of local urban localities.11 In this respect, precisely a “peripheral” view of Soviet culture can be revealing, not just in pointing to the standardisation of culture, but to ways in which it was becoming more diverse.

8 Such a microhistory is illuminating also because the examination of how planners and architects handled the case of churches lays bare some vital contradictions in the culture of “developed socialism.” From the late 1960s onwards, the recuperation of the past was often generously accommodating, and included much attention to non‑Soviet phenomena and objects, from the salon culture of the 1820s to the boyar palaces of the medieval and early modern periods.12 This was a phenomenon quite different in kind from the “national Bolshevism” of the Stalin years, with its definition of the national patrimony in terms of a strictly denominated canon of great writers, great artists, and master architects.13 Yet a highly ideologised view of the past and present persisted, and some historical objects were considered more valuable than others. The promptings for preservation were not only, and indeed not mainly, aesthetic. Buildings considered of little architectural importance, but linked with famous figures in the Soviet canon, were, on the whole, better preserved than buildings that were considered to be of high architectural importance, but whose associations were with dubious persons or practices.14 Further, the whole process of recuperating the national patrimony was fraught with risks. It is at one level reasonable to understand the Brezhnev era as a period when the “Russian party” in government finally gained the ascendancy, to be followed by the all‑out resurgence of conservative nationalism in the Gorbachev era and its legitimation after the collapse of Soviet power.15 But there were other forces at

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work too, as illustrated, for example, by an explicit attack that B.S. Andreev, a secretary of the Leningrad City Committee, levelled at “Slavophile tendencies” during a speech to Leningrad Komsomol propagandists in 1972. That too much interest in “the Russian soul” might make one slide away from interpretation in terms of social classes’ (sotsial ´no‑klassovyi podkhod) remained a significant anxiety.16 Churches were, from this point of view, a decidedly ticklish case. As Steve Smith has pointed out, The preservation of places of worship posed a particular challenge to Communist regimes, since it was in this area that the desire to maintain the national patrimony collided with the usually stronger desire to build an industrial, urban and socialist society emancipated from religious belief.17

9 The drive to promote rational atheism lasted until the very end of Soviet power : as late as 1986, the Komsomol, in collaboration with the State Museum of Ethnography in Leningrad, mounted an expedition to Pskov province in order to carry out an investigation of religious beliefs among young people, and to inculcate new, secular traditions.18 To put it another way, one could say that churches, and religious art more generally, embodied what the anthropologist Michael Herzfeld has termed “cultural intimacy,” being seen both as an inalienable expression of the spiritual attainment (dukhovnost´) of Russian culture, and as a manifestation of its shameful backwardness.19 As N.R. Levinson, writing in 1932, put it, In the vestries of churches and monasteries, as well as run‑of‑the‑mill cultic theatrical props meant only to have an effect through rich appearance and vulgar glitter, many items of refined craftsmanship were hidden away.20

10 Yet at the same time, attitudes to ecclesiastical art and church architecture were not inflexible, and they underwent significant changes over time. In the 1930s, the view that a “cultic building” was by definition a “counter‑revolutionary monument” had been widespread.21 At the meeting in LOSA on 2 July 1975, by contrast, not one person used this term, and the arguments against rebuilding the Saviour on the Haymarket mainly related to generalities about the need to move forward, rather than backward, in city planning.22 While people did not argue, in the 1970s and early 1980s, that churches should be rebuilt because they were churches (this development came only at the very end of Soviet power), the sense of what a church might stand for shifted from the early Soviet position (ideologically suspect unless demonstrated otherwise). More and more churches were recognised as architecturally important, irrespective of their original function.23

11 This radical shift in perception and taste operated on a variety of different levels. As is well known, the Brezhnev era saw official encouragement being given to the celebration of heritage in academic and museum work, city planning, and “propaganda” in the broadest sense (officially‑published literature and the arts, journalism, and cultural work with “the Soviet masses”).24 De‑Stalinisation under Khrushchev had undermined not only the governing myth of the former leader’s inalienable virtue and puissance, previously a central force for collective identity and social solidarity, but also the underlying principle of any political or social authority vested in such a myth, stigmatised as “the cult of personality.”25 The revival of the Lenin cult was at best a partial solution, given that Lenin had long been embalmed (both in the literal and the metaphorical sense).26 To avoid atomisation and loss of morale, a search for alternative focuses of collective belonging was urgently required. Under Khrushchev, the proposed nostrum was the promotion of an ideology based on

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radical modernism, including functionalist architecture as well as space travel and socially committed, rational collectivism. As rumour had it, the leader had little patience with heritage preservation : he was said to have responded to a visit to Trakai Castle in Lithuania by remarking sardonically on the waste of money spent on restoring those old buildings.27

12 The 1960s saw the redevelopment of entire urban areas, the projects that set the tone being the construction of the radically functionalist New Arbat avenue in Moscow, with its streamlined shop frontages and mid‑rise towers, and the insertion of Mikhail Posokhin’s geometrical Palace of Congresses into the Kremlin (1961).28 If all old buildings were threatened by the modernising tides, churches were particularly likely to be swept away. They were not just useless ; they stood for the backward values that were being targeted by radical atheism, promoted by the Party leadership since 1954, and by the new crackdown on religious worship initiated by an anti‑clerical drive beginning in 1959. Not surprisingly, “cultic” structures were prominent among the buildings summarily demolished.29

13 Not since 1941 had the Soviet Union seen such an aggressive assault on religious architecture. The difference from the 1930s, however, was the commitment in the Party leadership to relatively open debate on the social changes being pushed through. The new, ruthless, attitude to the cultural landscape attracted prominent critics. On 23 August 1956, the flagship newspaper Literaturnaia gazeta published an open letter from writers, architects, artists, and historians under the title “In Defence of Monuments of Culture.” It referred to widespread “indignation” as “wonderful monuments perish.” It pointedly alluded to the destruction of heritage that had taken place in the Stalin era in order to press the case that, in the transformed world, such destruction must stop.30 In 1962, the writer Viktor Nekrasov, one of the most influential voices of the Thaw, published an article in Novyi Mir in which he echoed these arguments, and unfavourably contrasted the Italian reverence for architectural heritage with the cavalier attitude to old buildings in the Soviet Union. As Nekrasov put it, “when a meeting is called to ‘review the list [of protected monuments] and reduce it by 50 per cent’, one feels not just astonishment, but also alarm.”31 In both these publications, the destruction and neglect of “cultic buildings” (including the Trinity Church at Ufa, demolished in 1956 to make way for the Monument to the Friendship of the Russian and Bashkir Peoples, mentioned in the Literaturnaya gazeta open letter, and a group of medieval churches and a synagogue in Kiev, cited by Nekrasov) were the pivot of the entire argument.

14 Whatever the actual impact of Khrushchev’s personal tastes on top‑level policy, the political position of heritage preservation was to change significantly under Brezhnev’s leadership. On 23 July 1965 came the decree of the Council of Ministers of the RSFSR that established VOOPIiK, a mass‑membership association modelled on VOOP (The All‑Union Society for the Protection of Nature, which had a pedigree going back to 1925). The effort to involve non‑professionals in the discussion of city planning had no precedent in the recent past : in Leningrad, for example, the Old St. Petersburg‑New Leningrad Society, a local association of volunteers involved in heritage preservation, had closed down in 1938. At the centre of the new initiatives were relics of medieval Russia, including material with religious associations – icons (as evoked by Vladimir Soloukhin in an immensely influential essay of 1969, “Black Boards”),32 the “white stone” churches of cities such as Vladimir and Rostov the Great, the lives of Russian

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saints, and so forth. Tourism to the so‑called “Golden Ring” (a range of well‑preserved historic sites within easy reach of Moscow, including Pereslavl´‑Zalesskii, Iaroslavl´, Suzdal´, as well as Vladimir and Rostov) was extensively developed, both for foreign and domestic travellers. In the texts of excursions, it was customary to emphasise the “popular” or “folk” (narodnoe) character of the buildings that were visited, including ecclesiastical buildings.33 As Petr Vail´ and Aleksandr Genis entertainingly put it, in their general study of the Soviet 1960s, this was a time when “every self‑respecting intellectual put a pair of lapti [peasant bast shoes] on his TV, pinned a postcard of St. George and the Dragon to his wall, and drank garlic‑flavoured vodka to the sound of the bells of Rostov.”34

“An Odiously Ecclesiastical Appearance” : “Cultic Buildings” in Stalinist Leningrad

15 Given the emphasis on icons and the “bells of Rostov” in late Soviet heritage preservation, Leningrad, a place without medieval Russian remains of any description, obviously represented something of a special case. But Leningrad was also seen as a major jewel of the national heritage. Vladimir Soloukhin’s essay “Letters from the Russian Museum” (1966) favourably contrasted the place with Moscow in terms of what had survived, and in 1965, a landmark publication in Literary Gazette by the medievalist, and soon‑to‑be leading heritage campaigner, Dmitry Likhachev, argued vehemently that it was essential to preserve the city’s historic vertical skyline.35 The city had, in any case, a well‑established preservation lobby with a history going back well before 1917.36 Yet at the same time, churches had traditionally played at best a marginal role in this established history of Leningrad preservation, which had tended to focus primarily on secular buildings.37

16 As Leningrad was transformed into a “model socialist city” from 1931 onwards, large numbers of historic churches were demolished. There was a significant and noisy local lobby of radical atheists, as expressed in the activities of the “League of the Militant Godless,” and the city (uniquely in the USSR) had not one but two anti‑religious museums (the Museum of the History of Religion, housed in the former Kazan´ Cathedral, and the Anti‑Religious Museum, in the St. Isaac’s Cathedral).38 But while the “militant godless” made a significant contribution to the harassment of believers and closure of “cultic buildings,” the demolition of these buildings was caused by a whole variety of factors, including the demands of the “military‑industrial bloc,” of local planners, and of local soviets’ efforts to improve infrastructure at the micro level.39 With the multiple voices in favour of reusing structures that had “no purpose,” or recycling materials from these, the monuments protection bodies (the Department for Museums and the Protection of Monuments, the State Restoration Workshops, and other offices of Glavnauka, and from 1937, Lensovet’s own Department for the Preservation of Monuments), had limited room for manoeuvre. Preservationists had, in any case, an agenda of their own : they wanted to rid the city of “ugly” buildings as well as to preserve ones of outstanding beauty. Their hierarchy of values was driven by a commitment to architecture of the so‑called “Golden Age” – the Baroque, and above all neo‑classical, buildings of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Certain churches – such as St. Isaac’s Cathedral, which was simultaneously an anti‑religious museum and a museum of architecture – were the focus of close attention and warm

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concern ; others were of much less significance.40 The Church of the Saviour on the Haymarket (begun in 1753) was an official monument, but of low rank. In 1929, after the introduction of categories in 1928, it was placed in the third of four categories, and in 1930, further downgraded to the bottom category. In 1935, it was removed from the list of monuments altogether.41 In 1936, the Architectural and Planning Board of Lensovet informed the local district soviet that since the restructuring of the Haymarket was part of the 1935 General Plan for the Reconstruction of Leningrad, and since the church had been “much spoilt by later alterations,” the Department for the Preservation of Monuments would not object to its demolition.42

17 The fact was that for the Leningrad intelligentsia in the pre‑war period, church architecture was of little intrinsic interest. Famous masterpieces such as Fel´ten’s neo‑Gothic church commemorating the victory at Chesme were admired, but part of the point was that they lacked what a document of 1931 described as “an odiously ecclesiastical appearance.”43 Almost everything built after 1850 (for some observers, 1825) excited distaste.44 Naturally, so‑called “eclectic architecture” was despised (in tune with the general contempt for all buildings in this style).45 But with the exception of Marian Peretiatkovich’s memorial church to the sailors who perished at Tsusima, the so‑called ‘Saviour on the Waters’ (Spas na vodakh), even modernist churches were regarded with disfavour.46 Alfred Parland’s Church of the Resurrection (“the Saviour on the Blood”) was considered important for its mosaics, rather than architecturally, and the monuments preservation authorities made no great efforts to save it when it was earmarked for demolition in 1938.47

18 The war years had already witnessed a considerable revival of interest, at the all‑Soviet level, in medieval church architecture, once this started to come under assault by the enemy. A report from Novgorod filed in January 1944 even classified churches, traditionally branded “havens of obscurantism” in Soviet rhetoric, along with “institutions of political education” : The German barbarians have destroyed all the institutions of political education and objects of material value, for instance, in the city of Novgorod, the monument to the Millennium of Russia has been destroyed, and also the eighteenth‑century Palace Tower, the twelfth‑century Church of St. Theodore Stratilates, etc., also the library of the city of Novgorod, which had more than 80,000 books in it. The golden domes of the St. Sophia and St. George Cathedrals have been carried off to Germany.48

19 In Leningrad, damage to churches did not have the same symbolic weight as damage to secular buildings, in particular the palaces of Pushkin (Tsarskoe Selo), Pavlovsk, and Peterhof, the objects of lavishly sponsored state restoration programmes.49 Damage to churches did not get space in propaganda texts, and even when it affected buildings of acknowledged architectural importance, was usually rectified slowly. The Cathedral of the Trinity in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, for instance, remained roofless as late as 1956, when restoration sponsored by the Moscow Patriarchate, rather than the state, was finally put in train.50 The heritage preservation body retained many of the same officials as in the 1930s, and attitudes had changed little.51 There were almost no new listings of historic churches.52 Demolitions of churches continued – in 1948, the Church of Saints Zachary and Elizabeth on ulitsa Kalyaeva (Zakhar’evskaya ulitsa) was pulled down.53 As this case showed, the principles of the 1935 General Plan of Leningrad remained in force : this had envisaged that much of the historic fabric of the city would remain unchanged, except for “partial alterations (demolition of small‑scale structures,

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corner buildings) in some individual cases, in order to facilitate transport flow and to improve the architectural realisation of certain streets and squares.”54 Churches were among the “individual cases” that were envisaged.55

The neo‑Baroque Church of SS Zachary and Elizabeth

The neo‑Baroque Church of SS Zachary and Elizabeth, remodelled by the leading architect L.N. Benua (Benois) in 1897‑1899, and demolished in 1948. Photographed before 1917.

20 Part of the background to this was that attitudes to the Orthodox Church were still at best guarded, despite the 1943 concordat between church and state. Only two Leningrad churches were opened in the post‑war years, and GIOP took a tough line with religious communities using buildings that were listed monuments.56 In the Khrushchev era, relations briefly improved (the Trinity Cathedral in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery reopened for worship in 1957).57 However, during the emergence of the harsher line in the late 1950s, Leningrad became a haven for radical secularism, the site of the Soviet Union’s first “Palace of Marriages,” an institution whose primary aim was to reduce the allure of the church wedding.58 The Plenipotentiary of the Council of the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church put a great deal of administrative effort into pressurising church congregations, with a view to accelerating closures.59 GIOP maintained its former slightly hostile neutrality to church architecture, dropping from its lists the eighteenth‑century Church of St. Alexander Nevsky at Ust´‑Izhora, and doing nothing to obstruct the demolition of the Church of the Saviour on the Haymarket, though a member of GIOP’s Learned Council, the architectural historian Professor V.I. Piliavskii, did organise a protest meeting in the late autumn of 1960 in the Leningrad Engineering and Building Institute (LISI), after a publication in

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Leningradskaia pravda had gleefully announced the removal of this “disgraceful blot” from Haymarket Square.60

21 As late as 1965, attitudes to church architecture, among professional architects, were often cautious. A letter to the Deputy Chairman of Lensovet’s Executive Committee drafted by members of LOSA’s Department for the Preservation of Monuments in 1965 noted the importance of the Sampson Cathedral on what was then Marx prospekt (now Great Sampson prospekt). “Begun in 1728 as a memorial to the Battle of Poltava,” this was a “unique” building that attracted tourists even though it had never undergone “scientific restoration,” and was being used as a warehouse. The letter recommended that the building be transferred to the local district soviet and used for “social and cultural purposes,” after “a mandatory complete scientific restoration” had taken place. It would appear that the letter was never actually sent : the copy of the letter in the LOSA archive is endorsed with the comment, Aleksandr Lukich ! Referring to the Sampson Cathedral (and in connection with the objection of K.A. Pavlova [the head of GIOP], who is in charge of the building), Korobkov considers that it would be better not to send this letter.61

22 The writer of this comment continued, ‘“I don’t agree myself,” but the hesitation reflected the still uncertain status of efforts to ensure that empty churches (as opposed to those used for worship) were properly restored.

23 Yet by the end of the year, LOSA was receiving, without apparent consternation, a fiery document from two specialists in history of art, Professor N.A. Kozhin and P.E. Kornilov, “To Preserve the Beauty of Leningrad,” which vehemently attacked the demolition of the Saviour on the Haymarket, concluding, “The entire square has been wrecked.”62 And a just a few years later, a thorough‑going rapprochement even with church architecture of the late Imperial era had taken place. Take, for instance, the effort made by VOOPIiK in 1972 to compel the Leningrad city authorities to take in hand the restoration of the neo‑Byzantine Church‑Mausoleum of the Kazan´ Icon of the Mother of God at the former New Maidens’ Convent (Novodevichii monastyr´) on Moskovskii prospekt. Built by Vasilii Kosiakov, a leader of architectural revivalism, the church was (and is) imposing and richly decorated, but it had never been an official monument. Writing to the City Architect of Leningrad, Gennadyi Buldakov, on 11 February 1972, however, Boris Piotrovskii, Chairman of VOOPIiK, dwelled precisely on the building’s exceptional merits : The building of the Mausoleum […] is of great architectural and artistic value ; it has six domes and is on a square plan ; it is richly decorated with art ceramics and carving, and the domes have a magnificent ceramic covering on a lead lining.63

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The Mausoleum (Church of the Kazan´ Mother of God)

The Mausoleum (Church of the Kazan´ Mother of God) at the New Maiden Convent, St. Petersburg (Vasilii Kosiakov, 1908‑1912). Photograph Catriona Kelly, 2013.

24 From the point of view of traditional Petersburg preservationism, the Mausoleum was triply odious : it was unmistakably a church, and in an architectural style that was considered alien to local tradition ; in its exuberant, free‑standing bulk, it was out of kilter with the “severe” ensembles (such as Rossi’s General Staff Building) that were held to manifest the summit of architectural achievement.64 In November 1928, the Mausoleum was placed on a list of churches scheduled for demolition, so that the bricks they were built of could be recycled, and the then head of Glavnauka (the Narkompros section responsible for the preservation of monuments) had described it as being “of no artistic or historical significance.”65

Leningrad Preservationism in the Brezhnev Era : New Canons for a New Establishment

25 The reasons underlying the growing reverence for ecclesiastical architecture were complex, involving local as well as national factors, and shifts in both political structure and mentality. In retrospect, Leningrad preservationism in the Brezhnev era has often been taken as primarily a form of licit opposition to the regime, a way of expressing broadly‑based hostility in a forum licensed by official policy.66 It is certainly true that a motif that came up regularly in 1970s protests was the failure of the authorities to consult. An example was Boris Piotrovskii’s letter to Gennadyi Buldakov, quoted earlier, which went on to observe that the project for reconstructing the New Maidens’ Convent and Cemetery “was approved in 1967, without the general public’s being given the chance to discuss it” [emphasis added].67 (One can compare Valentina Malakhieva’s observation, quoted in my opening paragraphs here, that the protests

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over the demolition of the Church of Saints Boris and Gleb had simply been ignored.) It would be reasonable to suppose that at least some advocates of preservation were motivated by exactly this kind of scruple about the non‑democratic character of governance.

26 However, the sense that the public ought to be consulted was itself the result of official policy. The Brezhnev‑era debates over preservation were a phenomenon of the establishment, as well as an anti‑establishment phenomenon. As befitted a movement that was not just sanctioned, but positively encouraged, by the authorities, VOOPIiK was permeated by the Soviet “great and good.” The chairman of its Leningrad section, Boris Piotrovskii, came from a dynasty of leading archaeologists, and had been, since 1964, the Director of the Hermitage, the premier cultural post in the city. Practically everyone on VOOPIiK’s board in Leningrad (with the exception of financial administrators, a traditionally menial role) was a Party member.68

27 But if VOOPIiK’s primary function at its highest levels was to express the views of the cream of the Leningrad “official” intelligentsia, the historical revival also drew in large numbers of Leningraders who would not willingly have co‑operated with the authorities on any other issue.69 For its part, VOOPIiK was more than an on‑paper organisation that people remember having to belong to whether they chose to do so or not.70 It was also a serious and effective social force, comparable with the war veterans’ associations that Mark Edele’s work has portrayed as a significant feature of the political landscape at this period.71

28 A further contributing factor was that, from 1966 onwards (after assignation of relations with “cults” to the Council on Religious Affairs of the Central Committee), attitudes to the official Orthodox Church became considerably less aggressive, both across the Soviet Union generally, and in Leningrad. Militancy on the part of officials started to be directed mainly at the so‑called “sectarians,” particularly illegal (unregistered) groups of Baptists, as well as at Orthodox dissidents.72 Certainly, efforts were still made to stop young people from participating in acts of worship even of the semi‑tolerated denominations, such as the Orthodox Church, but systematic harassment of these became less common.73 This partial appeasement with Orthodoxy was one of the reasons why religious art and church architecture could now become more prominent in academic and popular discussions, and why the locution “Church Slavonic” (rather than “Old Slavonic”) was now permissible.74

29 But the late 1960s and early 1970s was not just a period of institutional and social change. The period also witnessed a shift in aesthetic perceptions. As the local historian Alexander D. Margolis recalled in 2007 : I spent my entire childhood living on the Griboedov Canal Embankment, opposite the Saviour on the Blood. I think we moved from there in 1964, yes. And my entire childhood was accompanied by talk about what a hideous church it was and how it would be a great idea to blow it up, simply get rid of it. [...] In the 1960s, you could have counted on the fingers of one hand the people who thought that church was worth keeping. There’s been a complete transformation of people’s attitudes.75

30 In fact, below the surface, the transformation began before Leonid Il´ich took over as General Secretary. The new hardline attitude to religious belief after 1959 was not of particular concern to the Leningrad intelligentsia in a broad sense, though it certainly impacted on the lives of believers themselves. However, the demolitions of churches did now attract attention, as part of a rise in the sensitivity to the loss of historic

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buildings of all kinds. The architect Yury Kurbatov was later to remember that the 1961 demolition of the Saviour on the Haymarket Church, and the razing in 1962 of the Greek Orthodox Church (built in 1861‑1865 to a neo‑Byzantine style by R.I. Kuz´min), along with the dismantling of the Ruska Portico during construction of the Gostinyi Dvor metro station in 1962, and the destruction of the Pirogov Museum a few years later, pushed him and many of his friends into a radical stance.76

31 During the Brezhnev years, the swell of feeling against cultural destruction began to rise. In 1966, Joseph Brodskii’s poem “Halt in the Desert,” one of the poet’s first masterpieces, represented the demolition of the Greek Church as the onset of new barbarism. The poem indignantly juxtaposed the memory enshrined in this building, and the mechanical, compulsive return to former haunts exemplified by a dog pissing in its accustomed place : One day, when we no longer are, more accurately, after us, and in our place will rise up also something of a kind to horrify all those who knew us. But by that time there won’t be many such. Thus, for old memory’s sake, a dog Will cock its leg in the familiar place.77

32 Here, recollection was reduced to a Pavlovian reaction, a kind of “pre‑cortical” memory. Conversely, the destruction of the church itself stood for “false memory syndrome” on a city‑wide scale, the start of a new, illiterate, “Dark Age.” The poet Boris Ivanov later recalled the text’s extraordinary impact on Brodsky’s generation. He read some sad and bitter verses about the destruction of an Orthodox church in the centre of Leningrad, and not in Stalin’s times – but in our own. It was not a rebuke to the distant past, but a rebuke to all of us, since we had succumbed to cultural anaemia and memory loss. This was not the versifying of a politician ; it was the discourse of a prophet invoking the vacant spaces in our spiritual life.78

33 As the cultural critic Igor´ Smirnov remembered, Brodsky and his immediate circle were not preoccupied with spiritual values in the sense of traditional religious ones. They preferred to live for the moment : “Conversations about higher things weren’t tolerated : Soviet propaganda had usurped them.”79 At this point, the Greek Church was less important as a “church” than as a token of the European associations of Leningrad (Petersburg).80 But the next generation – the so‑called “1970‑ers” – had a much closer sympathy with the religious meaning of church buildings. In their case, a major revival of interest in religio‑philosophical traditions – and in Orthodoxy as part of this – went with a passionate absorption in the aesthetics of early modernism.81 Naturally, intellectuals who took a vivid interest in the activities of the early twentieth‑century Religious‑Philosophical Society, and who were deep admirers of Orthodox thinkers such as Father Sergii Bulgakov and Father Pavel Florenskii, were unlikely to take a hostile view of modernist churches. And it was precisely in the late 1970s that an extraordinarily important work of recuperation aimed at church architecture – the study eventually published by Vladimir Antonov and Aleksandr Kobak as The Sacred Places of Petersburg ‑ began to take shape. 82 In this publication, the churches of the immediately pre‑revolutionary period, including style russe buildings such as the Church of the Protection of the Mother of God on Lieutenant Schmidt Embankment

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(Vasilii Kosiakov, 1895‑1897) were treated just as reverently as those in the previously canonical neo‑classical style.

34 It was not just among cerebral members of the self‑styled “unofficial culture” that values were changing. A shift in aesthetic perceptions was making itself felt within “official” culture too. In 1966, after the passing of the most significant new legislation on monument protection since the late 1940s, GIOP added a number of important early twentieth‑century buildings to the list of protected architecture, among them Vitebsk Station and its opulent restaurant hall, apartment blocks such as the Emir of Bukhara’s House, banks, and department stores.83 Over the following years, architectural journals began to give more and more space to buildings in the style moderne.84 Such buildings were also accorded increasing prominence in guidebooks. A guidebook published in 1967 repeated the usual accusations. In the capitalist era, not one architectural ensemble was created. What is more, the ensembles from earlier eras, the period of the flowering of Russian architecture, began to be destroyed. Capitalism led architecture up a blind alley.

35 Yet this guidebook also prominently reproduced, without any negative commentaries, photographs of leading modernist buildings, such as the Eliseev Stores.85 After some hesitation in GIOP, it was decided to include “monuments of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries” in the official album, Monuments of Leningrad, published in 1968.86 L.S. Aleshina’s Leningrad and Its Surroundings, published in 1980, a joint edition with an East German publishing house, and by far the most inclusive pocket guide to the city’s architecture produced since 1917, represented a real watershed, in that it avoided evaluative comments of any kind (though Aleshina did provide a prudently sententious introduction). The movement from judgement to information was typical of mainstream historical writing at this period too.87

36 As the institutional and conceptual background changed, the policy in GIOP towards churches also gradually began to shift. On 4 April 1966, the Inspectorate’s Learned Council resolved to re‑confer the status of monument on the Church of Aleksandr Nevsky in Ust´‑Izhora, delisted in 1960.88 Certainly, policy remained conservative : not one of the new additions to the list of protected monuments in January 1966 included, say, a church from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.89 In 1947, there had been 36 churches on the official list of protected monuments ; in 1968, there were 35.90 However, by the late 1960s, GIOP’s inspectors were increasingly ready to intervene when industrial enterprises, scientific institutes, museums, and other bodies mistreated historic buildings that they held under lease, and pressure was also put on the lessees of churches. For example, the “post‑box institute” (carrying out secret military research) that occupied the Church of Saints Simeon and Anne on Mokhovaia built by the Russian baroque architect M.G. Zemtsov in 1731‑1734 was repeatedly cajoled to carry out the repainting of the façade that was required by the Inspectorate. The Director of the Museum of the Arctic and Antarctic on ulitsa Marata was nagged about the hooks for Soviet flags that had been drilled into the façade of the building it occupied, the former Church of the Co‑Religionists (Edinovertsy, built by A.I. Mel´nikov in 1820‑1838).91 These efforts were largely unsuccessful, since GIOP, though a thorn in the side of church congregations and indeed local architects of modernising bent, was institutionally weak compared with the “military‑industrial base” and the scientific organisations embedded into it. The Museum of the Arctic, for instance, was a subsidiary of the large and powerful Institute of the Arctic and Antarctic, a flagship of

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Soviet “civilising ambitions” in the North since the 1930s. But the effort to regulate lessees was significant in itself. By contrast, in the 1930s, GIOP’s predecessor had allowed the lessees of the Church of Saints Simeon and Anne to remove original pillars in the interior so that a concrete proscenium arch and load‑bearing beam could be inserted, while two metal, concrete and wood staircases in aggressively modernist style had been built inside the Church of the Co‑Religionists.92

37 Yet even in the 1970s and 1980s, care for ecclesiastical buildings went only so far. One significant manifestation of historicism as applied to architectural monuments generally was the effort on the part of preservation bodies to ensure that such buildings should be used for their original purposes (at any rate, where these were “cultural” in nature).93 A book published in 1981 claimed that “the most [architecturally] valuable” buildings in the city “are used in the ways envisaged by their architect creators.” Among those listed were “theatres, educational institutions, covered markets, and dwelling‑houses.”94 Churches were conspicuously absent from the list. Occasional suggestions from members of the public that historic church buildings might be restored to worship died in the private files of the local authorities. In 1969, a group of would‑be parishioners living in and around Murino, just north of the Leningrad city boundaries, mounted a concerted and well‑organised campaign for the reopening of the St. Catherine’s Church (built by the leading architect Nikolai L´vov in 1786). The group’s spokesman, one Georgii Ivanovich Slukhov, accumulated pages of documentation in which he detailed the rude response that he had received from a local officials (“we don’t need the church, we’ll pull it down, and we’ll have you in one by one and then see how many of you want to go through with this”). He laid out at length his own war record, and the war record of the Orthodox Church, the millions of roubles that it had raised for tanks. The eloquence fell on deaf ears, however. Even the claims by believers that they would look after the church (which contemporary photographs indicate was in a thoroughly dilapidated condition) better than its current lessees did not produce a change of heart.95 The suggestion that churches should reopen was treated no more favourably when it did not come from religious organisations. A letter passed by GIOP in 1970 to the Plenipotentiary on Religious Affairs put forward a suggestion that it would be historically appropriate to return the Church of the Sign in Pushkin (Tsarskoe Selo) to believers. The response came back that this was out of the question, since no believers had actually expressed an interest in the building.96

38 Just as had been the case in the 1920s and 1930s, the appropriate use for an ecclesiastical building was deemed to be “cultural education.” In 1972, the Vice‑President of the Presidium of the Leningrad Section of VOOPIiK, evidently in response to a request from the Central Council of the organisation, forwarded the latter a list of monuments in Leningrad and details of what purposes they were currently serving. Four of the thirteen buildings that described as being used in “impermissible” ways were churches : the Church of the Annunciation on Primorskoe Road, which was then a rubber factory ; the Church of the Annunciation on 8th Line, Vasilievskii Island, which was a metal‑works ; the Alexander Nevsky Monastery (a scientific institute and an “experimental factory”) ; and the former Catholic Church of St. Stanislav, working as a warehouse.97 But what VOOPIiK considered preferable was not ecclesiastical use, but making a structure over as an exhibition hall, as happened with Rastrelli’s Smol´nyi Cathedral, and with VOOPIiK’s own premises, the former Church of the Mother of God Joy of Those Who Grieve. The plans for conversion of the latter were entirely secular : a

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cloakroom was to be created and ‘radiator cases like the ones in the House of Friendship’ created ; the windows were to have special drapes fixed up, and the parquet was to get a coat of lacquer.98

39 At the same time, unlike the “redundant” churches of which the Church of England disencumbered itself at the same period, the disused “cultic buildings” of Leningrad were not turned into living accommodation. In this respect at least, a certain sense of the sacral persisted. It was one thing to turn a former church into a temple of art, and quite another to sully it with “daily life” (byt) of the kind that intellectuals disapproved. 99

Planning for the New City

40 The growing historicism, and new aesthetic permissiveness, did not simply have an impact on individual buildings. It fundamentally reshaped the principles of city planning. In the days when the socialist city was being constructed, architect‑planners had sought to focus city squares on secular structures. For Lev Il’in, the most important city planner of the first two decades of Soviet power, the exemplary urban space was Narva Square, with its pre‑revolutionary neo‑classical monument, Narva Gates, encased by a framework of Soviet‑era neo‑classical blocks.100 Plans for Haymarket Square dating from the late 1930s and from the early 1950s had emphasised homogeneity as the primary principle behind the reconstruction of the square – a principle that rendered superfluous and embarrassing any buildings that were notably different in architectural style. In the 1935 General Plan for the Reconstruction of Leningrad, Haymarket Square had been accorded a key role as the link between the old city centre and the new (the House of Soviets on what was then called International prospect, later Stalin prospect, and then Moscow prospect). An article published in The Architecture of Leningrad in 1939 had evoked the project of harmonisation that was to take place, with the removal of the old trading halls : The disorganisation of the square’s architectural identity, its insanitary character now make extremely pressing the issue of its complete reconstruction in architectural and planning terms. The project that the Architecture and Planning Department of Lensovet has drawn up anticipates that the market halls will be moved to other Leningrad markets.

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The Saviour on the Haymarket Church, c. 1935

Courtesy Museum of the History of St. Petersburg

41 The church building was also to be included in this process of purging and harmonisation : it would be rebuilt to echo the design of the guardhouse building standing opposite : The reconstruction anticipates the preservation of Beretti’s guardhouse building on the narrow side of the square and the rebuilding of the church, whose facades will be reshaped so that they form a pendant to Beretti’s archway. The opposite side is realised in the form of two five‑storey blocks with pilasters used to articulate architectural rhythm.101

42 A considerably more detailed plan preserved, in draft form, in the archive of the landscape designer E.A. Poliakova, an associate of Il´in’s, and a member of staff at the Museum of the City in Petrograd‑Leningrad from 1918 to 1941, refers specifically to the intrusive presence of a dilapidated house from the 1750s “in the elaborate and elegant Baroque style,” not to speak of a far more uncongenial later building, an apartment block from 1912 that was described as a “seven‑storey giant with an amazingly tasteless façade, crudely decorated with coloured tiles.” Once completed, the new homogeneous five‑storey blocks would be uniformly rusticated to second‑storey height, and between the third floors, a frieze would be created “encircling, as it were, the entire square.” Both the key buildings on the square, the church and the guardhouse building, would be reconstructed : the bell‑tower and domes would be removed, while the guardhouse would be broadened and heightened. In the centre of the square would be placed “a monument to the heroic defence of Petrograd during the Civil War.”102

43 The plan to reconstruct the square was interrupted by the onset of war, but once the conflict was over, reconstruction was on the agenda again. In 1946, N.V. Baranov, then the Chief Architect of the city, wrote in Building and Architecture of Leningrad journal that

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the reconstruction of the Haymarket “is to be completed.”103 Extensive work on levelling out building heights was done in the early 1950s, but the square still nagged at the instincts of city planners.104 The completion of the metro station in 1963 did not help matters, as its boxy style failed to resolve the spaces left vacant by the demolished church.

44 In 1965, M.Z. Vil´ner, presenting yet another plan for its redevelopment, spoke of the widespread dissatisfaction with the square’s current state : The Haymarket – or Peace Square as it is now called – is one of the few open spaces in the city of Leningrad whose architecture and general disorganisation excite dissatisfaction among most of those living in the city, and not just among professionals. Despite all the efforts to make the square architecturally elegant, it remains a conglomerate of diverse buildings. In short, it is a mish‑mash. And no architect can avoid confronting the issue.105

45 Interestingly, even at this stage one of the participants in the discussion, B.A. Razodeev, the head of the department of city planning at the State Inspectorate for the Protection of Monuments, was prepared to argue that the removal of churches from city squares had been an architectural disaster, resulting in desolation. Things like those buildings [i.e. two houses that Vil’ner proposed replacing by a modern building] should be preserved. It’s not the point that they aren’t official monuments. Demolishing is dead easy, but preservation isn’t. In Hungary, in Italy, you can see lots of examples of a new building done really well, with marble and aluminium, next to an old one, and they rub along together, and the problem is solved with reference to the entire square. And with us ? We had Uprising Square, and we pulled the church down, and built a metro station that looks like the church, only worse. So, now we’ve pulled down the church on Haymarket, so are we to put up a hotel ? No, that won’t do. So let’s put up an office block, the kind you’d get anywhere… It’s not good : demolish first, think up the solution later.106 “We’ve made too big a success of the demolition,” concluded Razodeev, to laughter and applause.107

46 Once an obstacle to the square’s integration and elegance, the Church of the Saviour was seen, by 1965, as an important constituent of its character. A decade later, preservationist attitudes had become still more assertive, with architects openly arguing that the dominanta, or “keynote,” of many areas in central Leningrad was and should be an ecclesiastical building. In the spring of 1975, this principle was invoked to argue for the retention of the Church of Saints Boris and Gleb : The building of the former Church of Saints Boris and Gleb is not an official monument of architecture. However, its picturesque silhouette enlivens the humble panorama of the ordinary buildings on the embankment. After the construction of the hotel and the automated telephone exchange, the significance of the building as a kind of ‘buffer’ between old and new buildings will grow still further. [...] The unjustified demolition of the Church of Saints Boris and Gleb would be yet one more mistake of city planning comparable with the demolition of the Church of the Saviour on Peace Square [the Haymarket] or the demolition of no. 16 Rimskii‑Korsakov prospekt and other sites that will be extremely difficult to replace.

47 Rather than being presented as a “foreign body” in the landscape of the Neva embankments, adorned towards the centre of the city by structures from the “Golden Age,” the Church of Saints Boris and Gleb was interpreted as an important complement to these long‑valued building. It was one of a triangle of buildings (all, as it happened, ecclesiastical) that made up the core “ensemble” of this particular area :

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The Church of Saints Boris and Gleb plays the role of the third basic dominanta of the embankment. Its city planning role is quite different from that of Smolnyi Cathedral or the Alexander Nevsky Monastery. [...] Its well‑chosen location, on a bend of the Neva, means that, without jarring against the main dominanty of the site, the church none the less contributes to the rhythmic articulation of the three‑kilometre‑long embankment [on which it stands].108

48 Thus, the “city planning significance” (gradostroitel´noe znachenie) of church buildings was now a generally accepted principle of Leningrad architecture – in professional discussions, if not in the mainstream press. The discussion of Haymarket Square that took place a few months later was entirely in accordance with the shifting views, as was the concern on the part of VOOPIiK’s board to provide money for church restoration. In 1972, for example, the Society spent 5,000 roubles (about double the annual salary of a middle‑ranking academic) in order to draw up plans for a restoration of the crumbling exterior of St. Catherine’s Church at Murino, and four times that on work at the Chesme Church, in very poor condition after a fire back in the 1930s.109

The Church of Saints Boris and Gleb on the Kalashnikov Embankment

Photographed by N.G. Matveev (c. 1910). http://oldsp.ru/photo/view/4019.

49 By now, it was not just representatives of the highly‑educated intelligentsia who were worried about the fate of old buildings – even including churches. Rank‑and‑file members of VOOPIiK also contacted the society’s governing body to alert them to neglected buildings. A striking case in point is a letter written by a VOOPIiK member in Sestroretsk, and expressing concern about “a badly damaged church” in the nearby resort of Zelenogorsk, on the Primorskoe shosse : We know it was built in 1912. The architect is unknown.110 At the moment, the Zelenogorsk Food Trade Depot is in it. You can see war damage inside and outside, it looks quite pitiful. The bell‑towers are damaged, the plaster’s coming off. You can

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see red brick in places. But once it was a grandiose and impressive building. Now it would cost lots to restore it. It stands on a prominent place, right by the coastal highway, where tourists going out for trips are always passing by, and foreigners among them. The Sestroretsk Executive Committee [of the local soviet] often gets letters from members of the working people and intelligentsia expressing the desire that the building should be restored. But it is hardly unique and possessing of such architectural and artistic virtues as to deserve preservation. The Sestroretsk District Committee of the CPSU and the Executive Committee of the District Soviet are unanimous – pull the building down and put something new up there instead.

50 The letter‑writer’s obvious confusion about the situation – should the church be restored, or on the other hand, pulled down ? – did not dissipate as he continued to ponder what should be done. Perhaps an organisation should be found to build a tourist centre and repair the church ? Locals of long standing were unanimous that it should be preserved, and that would be a “far‑sighted step in a political sense,” bearing in mind, once again, those foreign tourists. At the same time, it seemed that the Architecture and Planning Committee had already made a formal or informal decision in favour of demolition.111 While the response in the highest levels of VOOPIiK to this artless missive has not survived, the church did ; restoration commenced in 1980 (to have it looking respectable in time for the Moscow Olympics), and plans were laid to convert it from a warehouse into a local museum.112 This outcome – the use of a former church building as an exhibition hall – continued to be the preferred solution in the city also.113

51 Yet the sole church‑museum with a display that at least partly focused on architecture remained the St. Isaac’s Cathedral, and even here, the Foucault’s Pendulum hanging from the dome as an aid to “atheist education” continued to hark back to an era when defusing the “counter‑revolutionary” character of these structures had been a prime objective.114 And most churches, including architectural monuments, which were not used for worship, remained in dire condition, particularly in areas where tourists were unlikely to see them.115 At the eighteenth‑century Church of Prophet Elijah in the Gunpowder Factory district, repairs after a fire in 1974 dragged on inconsequentially for years ; the fine neo‑Gothic Church of Saints Peter and Paul at Shuvalovo was in a ruinous state.116 All the same, ideals of city preservation now accommodated and indeed focused on these structures, despite the continuing severe control of the religious belief that had been the original force behind their construction. The shift from “counter‑revolutionary monument” to valued achievement of national and popular tradition was differently nuanced, and more gradual, in Leningrad than in some other Russian cities. But by the mid‑1970s, it was well entrenched.

52 This article has argued that the Brezhnev era saw a fundamental reassessment of the existing principles of city planning in Leningrad, and of the place of ecclesiastical architecture within this. The 1920s and 1930s had been characterised by the emergence of a broad intellectual consensus, in the city’s elite, about the ethos of planning and preservation. Pre‑revolutionary monuments were not repudiated per se, but were valued and thought suitable for integration into the modern planning of the “socialist city” only where they suited the governing aesthetic (secular and neo‑classical). Primary effort was expended on buildings that were pronounced to be architectural masterpieces, especially those that did not look like churches to begin with. While Stalin’s concordat with the Russian Orthodox Church in 1943 in significant respects re‑inscribed church‑state relations, the attitudes of city planning departments did not change fundamentally. The Khrushchev era, on the other hand, witnessed both a

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worsening of state‑church relations generally, and an assault on the principles of heritage preservation. Adverse reaction to the new wave of iconoclasm preceded the change of leadership in 1964 (the demolition of the Church of the Saviour on Sennaia Square generated waves of indignation below the surface). However, the heritage preservation movement started to gain real momentum after the founding of VOOPIiK in 1965. The society’s files, like those of the heritage preservation section of the Union of Architects, point to a remarkably dynamic debate on the role of churches in city planning, and make clear the underlying links of the argument with broader shifts in attitude to aesthetics and national identity. While in terms of everyday practices such as maintenance churches often continued to be neglected, symbolically they were starting to play a far larger role in the “Petersburg text” than at any period since 1917.

53 At the same time, there was persisting uncertainty about the role of churches in the landscape, and a tenacious commitment to the secular use of buildings that were considered to be of historical and aesthetic value. It was not until the post‑Soviet era that another church listed as an architectural monument was returned to believers for worship, and in the 2010s, four major ecclesiastical buildings still made up the “Museum of Four Cathedrals,” with a focus on architecture, rather than on religious practice, in the displays.117 Equally, attitudes to the role of the church in city planning changed slowly, with new building mostly confined to small commemorative structures, or to the city’s suburbs.118 As of the time of writing (September 2013), the reconstruction of the Church of the Saviour on the Haymarket continued to be the regular subject of discussion. However, the church had not yet been rebuilt, while discussions on how to reshape the square, still interpreted as scrubby and unsatisfactory in appearance, went on gripping not just professional planners and architects, but the city’s population more generally.119

54 Alongside its contribution to understanding of shifting attitudes to the non‑Communist past, and to the limits of change in stance, the history of attitudes to churches also provokes reflection on the history of “socialist cities” in a broader sense. Classic studies of late socialist urban geography, such as R.A. French and F.E. Hamilton’s The Socialist City (1979) have tended to emphasise the peculiarities of spatial structure, such as the absence of suburbs, the different configuration of industrial/residential zoning, and the lack of correlation between social status and place of residence (i.e. the non‑existence of “working‑class” and “middle‑class” areas, districts denominated by particular ethnic groups, and so on).120 Commentators from post‑socialist Russia have tended to make arguments along similar lines.121 The discussions over the fate of churches, on the other hand, show increasing preoccupation with a feature that was not specific to the socialist city. Certainly, these discussions were ideologically localised (it was not until the mid‑1980s that Soviet newspapers and journals began to give space to the issue of church conservation), but at the same time, they happened in institutionally significant places, such as the Union of Architects, an indication that ecclesiastical architecture was increasingly becoming part of ‘official’ Soviet culture.

55 The handling of religious buildings in Soviet Russia was, by the 1970s, no longer “Soviet” in the way this would have been understood in the early 1920s (when the non‑Soviet character of these structures had regularly been underlined).122 Added to that, contemporary Western Europe was seeing a drop in church attendance, not infrequently accompanied by the demolition or radical conversion of “redundant churches.”123 But the popular alternative paradigm of “normalisation” (often applied to

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developments such as the increasing importance of private life in late socialist culture) does not fit the situation either, since the social and economic constriction of religious communities’ activities (for instance, the ban on fund‑raising and on access to state grants) still expressed a radical secularism that owed something to the socialist past. Late socialist Leningrad was becoming less “socialist,” but the result was not something that necessarily resembled an urban centre in Western Europe or the US. It is also unclear that what happened here was even ‘typical’ of processes in other Soviet urban centres, given that, as I have emphasised, the rise of local identity was a key development of the period. But perhaps the very sense of paradoxicality and diversity, as expressed by discussions that undercut the often vaunted “public/private” division, is an insight that can be used to correct the monolithic understanding of the “period of stagnation” as a time when overall social norms and preferences were obvious to all, and when “everything was forever until it was no more.”124

NOTES

1. For studies that posit a straightforward division between public and private behaviour, see e.g. Vladimir Shlapentokh. Public and Private Life of the Soviet People : Changing Values in Post‑Stalin Russia (New York : Oxford University Press, 1989) ; Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War : Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945‑1957 (Armonk, NY : M. E. Sharpe, 1998). For work that takes a more complex view of this divide, see e.g. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More : The ‘Last” Soviet Generation (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2006), and the contributions to Lewis Siegelbaum, ed., Borders of Socialism : Private Spheres of Stalin’s Russia (Basingstoke : Macmillan, 2006). 2. E.g. in the Dom kinematografista (the filmakers’ central club in Leningrad), as I recall from direct observation in 1981. 3. There is no overall list of those attending : those mentioned are those who actually spoke. 4. A Decree of the Presidium of Lensovet passed on 21 January 1960, “O stroitel´stve vtorogo uchastka Moskovsko‑Petrogradskoi linii metropolitena imeni V.I. Lenina v Leningrade [On the Construction of the Second Section of the Moskovsky prospekt‑Petrograd Side Line of the Leningrad Underground Railway Named after V.I. Lenin],” implementing an earlier decree of Lensovet’s Executive Committee (4 June 1959), stated that the station, then called “Oktiabr ´skaia,” should be built “in place of the church.” The church was to be cleared by the executive committee of the local district (Oktiabr´skii) by 1 May 1960, and handed over to Lenmetrostroi for demolition (TsGANTD‑SPb. [Central State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation, St. Petersburg], f. 36, op. 1‑1, d. 353, l. 7, l. 9). 5. “Protokol rasshirennogo zasedaniia komissii okhrany pamiatnikov istorii i kul´tury i gradostroitel´noi komissii LOSA, sovmestno s Leningradskim otdeleniem VOOPIiK [Minutes of the Joint Meeting of the Commission on the Preservation of Monuments of History and Culture and City Planning of LOSA and the Leningrad Section of VOOPIiK],” 2 July 1975, TsGALI‑SPb. [Central State Archive of Literature and Art, St. Petersburg], f. 229, op. 1, d. 117, l. 21. The reference to “cathedral” here is a slip of the tongue – the Church of Saints Boris and Gleb was never accorded that status. 6. Ibid., l. 24.

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7. Ibid., l. 21. 8. Ibid., l. 28. 9. For a usefully broad discussion of the changes, see Stephen A. Smith, “Contentious Heritage : Churches in Russia and Temples in China in Communist and Post‑Communist Times,” publication forthcoming. My thanks to the author for making a copy of this article available to me in advance of publication. See also Sanami Takahashi, “Church or Museum ? The Role of State Museums in Conserving Church Buildings, 1965‑85,” in Journal of Church and State, 51, 3 (2009) : 502‑517 ; and Victoria Arnold, “The Experience of Sacred Place in Post‑Soviet Russia : a Geography of Orthodoxy and Islam in Perm´ Krai,” D. Phil Thesis, Oxford, 2012 (which includes a discussion of Soviet attitudes to “sacred space”). A general study of property restitution is Csongor Kuti, Post‑Communist Restitution and the Rule of Law (Budapest : Central European University Press, 2009) : on the Orthodox Church, see p. 199‑201. 10. For a discussion of long‑distance planning in Gor´kii, see Heather DeHaan, Stalinist City : Planners, Performance, and Power in 1930s Nizhnii Novgorod (Toronto : University of Toronto Press, 2013) ; for the centralisation of the landscape, more generally, see Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman, eds., The Landscape of Stalinism : The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space (Seattle : University of Washington Press, 2003). 11. See Victoria Donovan’s study of three Old Russian cities at this era, Pskov, Novgorod, and Vologda, “Nestolichnaia kul´tura : Regional and National Identity in Post‑1961 Russian Culture,” D.Phil Thesis, University of Oxford, 2011. There is a brief discussion of the revival of kraevedenie in Emily D. Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself : The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie (University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), p. 176‑182. 12. Two major figures here, both Leningraders, are Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev and Yurii Mikhailovich Lotman ; crucial publications by them include Likhachev’s Poetika drevnerusskoi literatury [Poetics of Old Russian Literature] (L. : Nauka, 1969) and Lotman’s Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin : Biografiia pisatelia [Alexander Pushkin : Biography of a Writer] (L. : Prosveshchenie, 1981). On the recuperation of medieval buildings, see Alexei Elfimov, Russian Intellectual Culture in Transition : The Future in the Past (Münster : Lit, 2003). 13. To date, discussion of Stalinist culture has focused mainly on canon formation in written texts (see e.g. David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism : Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931‑1956 (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2002) ; Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader : Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1997) ; idem, The Making of the State Writer : Social and Aesthetic Contexts of Soviet Literature (Stanford University Press, 2001) ; with some attention also to art history, Jan Plamper, The Stalin Cult : A Study in the Alchemy of Power (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2012) ; Oliver Johnson, “The Stalin Prize and the Soviet Artist : Status Symbol or Stigma ?,” Slavic Review, 70, 4 (2011) : 819‑843, but the process could be matched in architectural history : for an account focusing mainly on political purges in the architectural world, see Hugh D. Hudson, Blueprints and Blood : the Stalinization of Soviet Architecture, 1917‑1937 (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1994). 14. In Leningrad, the “monuments of history” (as opposed to ‘monuments of architecture”) included, alongside the buildings linked with the October Revolution and its historical actors, headed by Lenin, the various apartments and other places associated with famous writers and artists, headed by Pushkin. Great efforts were made to preserve these sites in a manner appropriate to their perceived historical importance : for example, when a rank‑and‑file Communist wrote in 1978 to the Lenin Museum in Moscow that the setting of the Lenin memorial in Razliv (where the leader had camped out between revolutions in 1917) was being “ruined” by the construction of hotels and “amusement venues” nearby, the result was an exhaustive enquiry by the Leningrad Party authorities (TsGAIPD‑SPb. [Central State Archive of Historical and Political Documents, St. Petersburg], f. 24, op. 210, d. 2, l. 29‑35).

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15. For influential discussions of the revival of nationalism under Brezhnev, The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1983) ; idem, The New Russian Nationalism (New York : Praeger, 1985) ; Geoffrey Hosking, The Awakening of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1990) ; Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia : Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953‑1991 (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1998) ; Nikolai Mitrokhin, Russkaia partiia : dvizhenie russkikh natsionalistov v SSSR, 1953‑1985 gody [The Russian Group : The Russian Nationalist Movement in the USSR, 1953‑1985] (M. : Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003). 16. Speech by B.S. Andreev, Secretary of the Leningrad City Committee of the Komsomol : “Stenograficheskii otchet seminara propagandistov komsomol´skogo politprosveshcheniia i komsomol´skogo aktiva [Stenographic Record of the Seminar of Komsomol Political Education Propagandists and the Komsomol actif], 25 September 1972. TsGAIPD-SPb., f. K‑598, op. 27, d. 457, l. 98. The anthropologist Sergei Alymov has produced several exemplary studies of the slippery relation with inherited culture in post‑war Soviet ideological texts : see e.g. “The Concept of the ‘Survival’ in Soviet Social Science of the 1950s and 1960s,” Forum for Anthropology and Culture 9 (2013), 157-183. 17. Smith, “Contentious Heritage,” 1. 18. “O rabote komitetov Komsomola Pskovskoi oblasti po ateisticheskomu vospitaniyu yunoshei i devushek, vnedreniiu novykh obriadov v zhizn´ molodezhi [On the Work of the Komsomol Committees of Pskov Province Concerning the Atheist Education of Young Men and Women and the Impact of New Rituals on Local Youth],” (1986). RGASPI‑M [Russian State Archive of Historical and Political Documents : Centre for the Documents of Youth Organisations], f. 1, op. 95, d. 371, l. 12‑25. 19. Michael Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy : Social Politics in the Nation State (New York : Routledge, 1997). 20. N.R. Levinson, “Okhrana vnemuzeinykh pamiatnikov [On the Preservation of Monuments Outside Museums],” Sovetskii muzei 6 (1932) : 54, 57. 21. See, for example, the reference to the Church of the Resurrection (“Saviour on the Blood”) in Leningrad as such a “counter‑revolutionary monument” in an article sent to Leningradskaia pravda by a manual worker in 1938 : G.A. Tiurin, “Ob ispol´zovanii zdanii zakrytykh tserkvei i molitvennykh domov [On the Use of the Buildings of Closed Churches and Houses of Prayer],” TsGA‑SPb. [Central State Archive, St. Petersburg], f. 7384, op. 33, d. 50, l. 10‑13. 22. For instance, the architect Yu.A. Eliseev pointed out that the metro station was now a significant point on the square, so that new planning decisions would have to take it into consideration. TsGALI‑SPb., f. 229, op. 1, d. 117, l. 21. 23. Takahashi, “Church or Museum ?” describes this process with regard to two key sites, the complex of wooden churches at Kizhi and the Solovki Monastery. Both were turned into museums, the former in 1965, and the latter in 1967. As Takahashi points out, it became possible to classify religious culture as “progressive” at this period (p. 508) ; one could add that once churches had become the proper subject of “scientific investigation” (nauka), their status vis‑à‑vis “scientific atheism” also shifted. 24. This development was noted at the time by scholars such as John Dunlop and Geoffrey Hosking, and has since been extensively discussed in studies such as Alexei Elfimov, Russian Intellectual Culture in Transition (Münster, 2004). On heritage, see also the enormous and informative volume edited by A.S. Shchenkov, Pamiatniki arkhitektury v Sovetskom Soiuze : ocherki istorii arkhitekturnoi restavratsii [Monuments of Education in the Soviet Union : Studies of the History of Architectural Restoration] (M. : Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli, 2004). 25. For an impressive recent study of Stalin’s legacy, see Polly Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma : Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2013).

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26. The Lenin cult in the post‑Stalin era richly deserves specialist study ; an outline account of the cult’s broad history is Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives ! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1983). For an excellent recent history of the issues raised by de‑Stalinisation, see Jones, Myth, Memory, Trauma. 27. M.G. Meierovich, U menia poiavilas´ mechta [I Have a Dream] (Iaroslavl´ : Aleksandr Rutman, 2004), 177. 28. For an excellent discussion of the remodelling of this key area of Moscow, see Stephen Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev’s Thaw : Experience and Memory in Moscow’s Arbat (Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 2008). On the Palace of Congresses, see Catherine Merridale, Red Fortress : The Secret Heart of Russia’s History (London : Allen Lane, 2013). 29. For instance, in Vladimir Province, 25 per cent of the 346 non‑active churches existing in 1962 were demolished. A.A. Fedotov, “Reforma prikhodskogo upravleniia i zakrytie khramov v 1960‑e gody (Po materialam Ivanovskoi, Vladimirskoi i Kostromskoi oblastei) [The Reform of Paraish Management and the Closure of Churches in the 1960s (From Materials in Ivanovo, Vladimir, and Kostroma Provinces],” Istoricheskii vestnik 1, 12 (2001), http://krotov.info/ history/20/1960/fedotov.htm. 30. “V zashchitu pamiatnikov iskusstva [In the Defence of Monuments of Art],” Literaturnaia gazeta, 23 August 1956. 31. V. Nekrasov, “Po obe storony okeana [On Both Sides of the Ocean],” Novyi Mir 11 (1962) : 122. This article appeared in the same number of Novyi Mir as Solzhenitsyn’s epoch‑making story Odin den´ Ivana Denisovicha [A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich]. 32. Vladimir Soloukhin, “Chernye doski : Zapiski nachinaiushchego kollektsionera [Black Boards : Notes of a Beginning Collector],” (1969) : see e.g. his Slavianskaia tetrad´ [Slavonic Notebook] (M. : Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1972). 33. I recall this myself in Novgorod in 1980 ; the same was true of a trip to Vladimir in 1980, when particular attention was drawn to the little animal sculptures outside the Cathedral of St. Demetrios, as works of “folk art.” 34. P. Vail´, A. Genis, 1960‑e : mir sovetskogo chekoveka [The 1960s : The World of the Soviet Person] (Ann Arbor : Ardis, 1988), 218. 35. Soloukhin’s article was republished in his Slavianskaia tetrad´. D.S. Likhachev, “Chetvertoe izmerenie [The Fourth Dimension],” Literaturnaia gazeta 68 (10 June 1965) : 2. 36. On this, see e.g. Katerina Clark, Petersburg, Crucible of Revolution (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1995) ; Emily Johnson, How St. Petersburg Learned to Study Itself : The Russian Idea of Kraevedenie (University Park, PA : Pensylvania State University Press, 2006) ; G.A. Popova, Muzei Goroda v Anichkovom dvortse : Sobytiia, sud´by, kollektsii [The City Museum in Anichkov Palace : Events, Personal Histories, Collections] (SPb. : Muzei istorii Sankt‑Peterburga, 1998). 37. As argued in Catriona Kelly, “Socialist Churches : The Preservation of ‘Cultic Buildings’ in Leningrad, 1924‑1940,” Slavic Review 71, 2 (Winter, 2012) : 792‑823. 38. For a good outline account of the League of the Militant Godless in Leningrad, see N.B. Lebina, “Deiatel´nost´ ‘voinstvuiushchikh bezbozhnikov’ i ikh sud´ba [The Activities of the ‘Militant Godless’ and Their Fate],” Voprosy istorii 5‑6 (1996) : 154‑157. 39. Kelly, “Socialist Churches.” 40. For a detailed discussion of this period, see Kelly, “Socialist Churches.” 41. TsGALI‑SPb., f. 32, op. 1, d. 61, l. 78‑87 (1929), l. 4‑15 (1930). The categories ran from “highest” to “third” ; the Church of the Saviour was in Category 2 in the 1929 list, and Category 3 in the 1930 list. For the 1935 list, see TsGA‑SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 74, l. 12‑15, and for the 1938 list, GARF, f. 259, op. 37, d. 304, l. 31‑32. See also the online “Appendix” to Kelly, “Socialist Churches,” http://oxford.academia.edu/CatrionaKelly. 42. TSGALI‑SPb., f. 9. op. 1, d. 2, l. 158. 43. TsGA‑SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 76, l. 36.

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44. The members of the Narkompros preservation bodies in the early 1920s (led by Konstantin Romanov) had taken 1850 as the cut‑off dates, but for Lev Ilín and his associates in city planning, it was the neo‑classicism of Rossi and Zakharov that was canonical. I discuss this in Socialist Churches, Chapter 3. 45. See e.g. Leningrad : Putevoditel´ [Leningrad : A Guidebook] (2nd edn. ; 2 vols. ; M. ‑ L. : OGIZ, 1933), vol. 1, 251, which dismisses the style as “a compromise between gentry and bourgeois architecture.” 46. Peretyatkovich’s church appeared on a list of 1927 (TsGANTD‑SPb., f. 192, op. 3‑1, d. 9277, ll. 459‑462), but was not listed in 1929 (TsGALI‑SPb., f. 32, op. 1, d. 61, ll. 78‑87). It was demolished in 1932. For the later history of the structure, including efforts to reconstruct it (a chapel was built on the foundations in 2002‑2007), see the official website, http://www.spas-na-vodah.spb.ru/ (last accessed 29 August 2013). 47. TsGA‑SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 76, l. 36. 48. “Spravka o sostoianii narodnogo obrazovaniia v raionakh oblasti, osvobozhdennykh ot nemetsko‑fashistskikh zakhvatchikov [A Note on the State of Popular Education in the Districts Liberated from the German Fascist Invaders],” January 1944 (exact date not given), TsGAIPD‑SPb., f. 24, op. 11, d. 198, l. 1‑2. 49. On preservation of the palaces, see e.g. A.A. Kedrinsky, M.G. Kolotov, L.A. Medersky, A.G. Raskin, Letopis´ vozrozhdeniia : Vosstanovlenie pamiatnikov arkhitektury Leningrada i prigorodov, razrushennykh v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi Voiny nemetsko‑fashistskimi zakhvatchikami [Chronicle of a Resurrection : The Restoration of Architectural Monuments in Leningrad and its Environs Destroyed in the Great Patriotic War by the German Fascist Invaders] (L. : Izd. literatury po stroitel´stvu, 1971) ; A.A. Kedrinskii, M.G. Kolotov, B.N. Ometov, and A.G. Raskin, Vosstanovlenie pamiatnikov arkhitektury Leningrada [The Restoration of the Architectural Monuments of Leningrad] (L. : Stroiizdat, 1983) ; B.M. Kirikov, Okhrana arkhitekturnykh pamiatnikov Leningrada v gody sovetskoi vlasti [The Preservation of the Architectural Monuments of Leningrad during the Years of Soviet Power](L. : Znanie, 1988) ; Okhrana pamiatnikov Sankt‑Peterburga : K 90‑letiiu Komiteta po gosudarstvennomu kontroliu, ispol´zovaniiu i okhrane pamiatnikov istorii i kul´tury Sankt‑Peterburga [The Preservation of the Monuments of St. Petersburg : To Honour the 90th Anniversary of the Committee for the State Control, Exploitation, and Preservation of Monuments of History and Culture, St. Petersburg] (SPb. : Propilei, 2008) ; Steven Maddox, “‘Healing the Wounds’ : Commemorations, Myths, and the Restoration of Leningrad’s Imperial Heritage, 1941‑1950,” Ph.D Thesis, University of Toronto, 2008. 50. ASPbE [Arkhiv Sankt‑Peterburgskoi Eparkhii], f. 1, op. 7, d. 40, l. 37‑42. 51. Two leading figures were Nikolai Belekhov (1904‑1956), who in the late 1930s worked as the chief architect in the Department for the Protection of Monuments at Lensovet, and who headed GIOP from 1941 until his death (for a detailed account of his biography, see Maddox, “‘Healing the Wounds’”) ; and Sergei Pobedonostsev, who headed the Department for the Protection of Monuments from 1937 until 1941 (when he was called up for military service), and who took over as head of GIOP in the years after Belekhov’s death. Pobedonostsev still regularly took part in meetings of the Scientific Council of GIOP in the late 1960s. 52. In the official list of 1947, the only three examples of “cultic buildings” not listed in 1938 were the Church of St. Ilýa the Prophet (1782‑6, by Nikolai L´vov), the Anglican Church on nab. Krasnogo Flota, and the “Masonic Church.” TsGA‑SPb., f. 9620, op. 2, d. 1, l. 55‑55 ob. 53. See the information on this church in Vladimir Antonov and Aleksandr Kobak, Sviatyni Sankt‑Peterburga [Sacred Places of St. Petersburg] (3rd ed. ; SPb. : Liki Rossii, 2010). 54. “Generalńyi plan razvitiia Leningrada [General Plan for the Development of Leningrad],” TsGA‑SPb., f. 7384, op. 20, d. 1, l. 17.

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55. This policy was endorsed at the centre. See e.g. the documentation relating to the Church of the Saviour Not Made by Human Hands in the Volkovo Cemetery : on 2 August 1935, the Architecture and Planning Board (APU) of Lensovet stated that it had no objection to the building’s demolition, but on 28 October 1935, VTsIK replied, “This memorandum [spravka] is not sufficient for our purposes. We require accurate information about whether the church is included in the plan for the reconstruction of the city and the cemetery.” (TsGA‑SPb., f. 7384, op. 33, d. 177, l. 11, 14). 56. For a useful discussion of church‑state relations in the post‑war years, see Elena V. Shun ´gina, “Politika Sovetskogo gosudarstva v otnoshenii Rossiiskoi pravoslavnoi tserkvi v 1940‑1950 gg : vozvrashchenie kul´tovykh zdanii tserkvi (po materialam Leningrada). Dissertatsiia na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata istoricheskikh nauk [The Politics of the Soviet State with Regard to the Russian Orthodox Church in the 1940s and 1950s : the Return of Cultic Buildings (A Case Study of Leningrad). Dissertation for the Candidate of Historical Sciences Degree],” Russian Academy of Sciencies, Institute of History, St. Petersburg, 2009. Archive of the Institute of History, RAN. Item (ed. khr.) 398. My thanks to Professor Boris Kolonitsky for arranging access to this item. For a brief discussion of GIOP’s attitudes, see Catriona Kelly, “Competing Orthodoxies : Identity and Religious Belief in Soviet and Post‑Soviet Russia,” in Mark Bassin and Catriona Kelly, eds., Soviet and Post‑Soviet Identities (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2012). 57. For a discussion of this episode, see Shun´gina, “Politika,” 83‑85. 58. On the Palace of Marriages, see K.L. Emel´ianova, Pervyi v strane [The First in the Country] (L. : Lenizdat, 1964). 59. See e.g. G. Zharinov, “O prazdnike paskhe v 1962 g. [On the Easter Celebrations in 1962],” letter to the Chairman of the Council on the Affairs of the ROC, 11 May 1962, TsGAIPD‑SPb., f. 25, op. 89, d. 80, l. 37‑38. 60. For a description of this episode, not documented in any of the archival material I have come across, see V. Smirnov, “Skvernaia istoriia [A Nasty Story],” Neva 3 (2004), http:// magazines.russ.ru/neva/2004/3/smir19.html. Piliavskii also chaired the meeting of LOSA on 2 July 1975 (TsGALI‑SPb., f. 229, op. 1, d. 117, l. 34), but did not contribute to the discussion. 61. TsGALI‑SPb, f. 341, op. 1, d. 691, l. 3. S.V. Korobkov was the official in GIOP who was to be sent a copy of the letter ; by 1967, he himself was the head of GIOP (TsGANTD‑SPb., f. 386, op. 1, d. 31, l. 86). 62. Ibid., l. 38. 63. TsGALI‑SPb., f. 229, op. 1, d. 72, l. 22. 64. L. Il´in, “Ansambl´ v arkhitekturnom oblike Leningrada [The ansambl´ in the Architectural History of Leningrad],” Arkhitektura SSSR 2 (1933), 9‑11. 65. TsGA‑SPb., f. 3199, op. 2, d. 428, l. 6‑7. 66. See e.g. the comments by Alexander Kobak on the entire preservationist movement as “anti‑Communist” in the 2006 TV film The Twilight of a Big City (later removed from circulation after adverse comments from then governor Valentina Matvienko that it was “not timely”). 67. Letter from B.B. Piotrovskii to the Chief Architect of Leningrad, G.N. Buldakov, 11 February 1972, TsGALI‑SPb., f. 229, op. 1, d. 72, l. 22. 68. See for example “Spisok razovyi rukovdoiashchego sostava LGO VOOPIiK [List of the Staff of the Board of Management of the Leningrad City Section of VOOPIiK],” (1985), which indicates that 12 out of 14 people holding official positions in the organisation’s administration were Party members ; the non‑party members included the society’s accountant and the head of its “social inspectorate.” TsGALI‑SPb. f. 229, op. 1, d. 563, l. 97. 69. On this, see Oxf/AHRC SPb‑07 PF2 CK (interview with Alexander Margolis). 70. It was, admittedly, also this : see e.g. Oxf/AHRC‑SPb‑08 PF46 ANK (woman b. 1969, interviewed by Anna Kushkova) : “Suppose there’s a collection, some membership dues or whatever for the monuments protection society. So, say, someone from work turns up and says,

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‘Give me 50 kopecks.’ I’ve no idea what society she’s talking about, and […] I’m not bothered about protecting monuments either, given the state does that very well by itself. Why should I hand over 50 kopecks ? But there was all this stuff about collectivism, common rules, and so on, and not coughing up was just not done. So you did cough up.” 71. Mark Edele, Soviet Veterans of the Second World War : A Popular Movement in an Authoritarian Society, 1941‑1991 (Oxford, 2008). 72. Material from the archive of the Plenipotentiary for Religious Affairs in Leningrad (see TsGA‑SPb., f. 2017, op. 1, d. 3 (1966), d. 18 (1969), etc.) confirms this picture of passivity with reference to Orthodoxy. For discussion of the action against “sectarians” contemporary with the events, see particularly the work of Michael Bourdeaux, for instance Aida of Leningrad : The Story of Aida Skripnikova (London : Mowbrays, 1976). 73. For instance, in 1970 a report from the Leningrad Plenipotentiary on Religious Affairs, G. Zharinov, to the Council on Religious Affairs in Moscow reported that the numbers of young people lighting candles in the churches of Leningrad over Easter was a worrying development (even if some young people could be found using the candles to light their cigarettes) : “Dokladnaia zapiska o prazdnovanii v tserkvakh Leningrada paskhi v 1970 godu [Report on the Celebration of Easter in Leningrad Churches, 1970],” (19 May 1970), TsGA‑SPb., f. 2017, op. 1, 3, 24, l. 56‑58. 74. As in D.S. Likhachev’s discussions of Old Russian literature, for example. 75. AHRC‑SPb.‑07 PF2 CK (interview by Catriona Kelly with Alexander Margolis). 76. Yu.I. Kurbatov, “Istoricheskaia sreda i kontseptual´nost´ novykh form. Opyt Leningrada 1970‑kh – 1980‑kh godov [The Historical Environment and the Conceptualisation of New Forms. Architectural Practice in Leningrad in the 1970s and the 1980s],” in B.M. Kirikov and L.V. Kornilova, eds., Pamiatniki istorii i kul´tura Sankt‑Peterburga (SPb. : Beloe i chernoe, 2005), 398‑401. 77. Iosif [Joseph] Brodskii, “Ostanovka v pustyne [Halt in the Desert],” Stikhotvoreniia i poemy [Lyric and Narrative Poems], ed. Lev Losev (2 vols. ; M. : Vita Nova, 2011), vol. 1, 210. 78. Boris Ivanov, “Po tu storonu ofitsial´nosti [Beyond Official Culture], » Sochineniia [Works[ (M. : NLO, 2009). vol. 2, 412. Emphasis original. 79. Igor´ Smirnov, Deistvuiushchie litsa [Dramatis Personae] (SPb. : Petropolis, 2008), p. 22. My thanks to the author for providing a copy of this material. 80. Compare the very limited interest shown by Brodskii in the two important churches, the Cathedral of the Transfiguration and the St. Panteleimon Church, visible from the building in which he grew up, the Muruzi House, in his memoir Less Than One (Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1987). 81. See Josephine von Zitzewitz, “The ‘Religious Renaissance’ of the 1970s and its Repercussions on the Soviet Literary Process,” D.Phil Thesis, University of Oxford, 2009. Several of the figures dealt with here, including Elena Shvarts and Viktor Krivulin, were Leningraders. 82. The first edition of Sviatyni Peterburga, in three volumes, came out in 1994, and there have been two new editions, expanded and corrected, since. In an interview conducted by me in 2009 (Oxf/AHRC SPb‑09 PF10 CK), Aleksandr Kobak described the process of researching the book, whose topic was not conveyed to the staffs of the archives where he and Antonov worked (instead, their declared topic was “the public buildings of Leningrad”). However, as Kobak observes, the pair “only ever ordered material on churches,” so that the archivists “must have understood pretty well what we were up to” – a further indication of a general shift in values. The manuscript was then smuggled out to Paris in 1983, but the hoped‑for appearance of the book was delayed by the inability of Nikita Struve, the director of the YMCA Press, to obtain funding (perhaps, one assumes, because of the size and complexity of the manuscript). 83. “Protokol zasedaniia Uchenogo Soveta GIOP [Minutes of the Meetning of the Learned Council of GIOP],” 10 January 1966, TsGANTD‑SPb., f. 386, op. 1, d. 13, l. 1‑3.

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84. See e.g. G. Lisovsky, “Master shkoly natsionalńogo romantizma [A Master of the School of National Romanticism],” LPan 4 (1975) : 42‑44 (on N.V. Vasilév, architect of the mosque, whose work is also considered in A. Shchukin, “Golubye kupola mecheti [The Blue Domes of the Mosque],” LPan 8 (1987), 38‑9) ; B.M. Kirikov, S.G. Fedorov, “Zodchii‑entsiklopedist : O tvorcheskom puti arkh. G.V. Baranovskogo [An Encyclopaedic Architect : On the Creative Path of Arch. G. V. Baranovsky],” LPan 2 (1985) : 29‑32 (includes material on the Eliseev Store) ; V.G. Isachenko, “V shirokom diapazone : tvorcheskoe nasledie P.Yu. Syuzora [In Broad Focus : the Creative Heritage of P. Yu. Syuzor],” LPan 10 (1985) : 28‑31. 85. Peterburg‑Leningrad. Al´bom, comp. G.N. Savin, text written by N.A. Bartenev (L. : Lenizdat, 1967), 12, 64‑65. 86. For the discussions round the content of this book, see the materials for the meeting of the Learned Council of GIOP, 9 January 1967, TsGANTD‑SPb., f. 386, op. 1, d. 31, l. 5, and the minutes of the meeting on 14 April 1967, ibid., l. 52. 87. L.S. Aleshina, Leningrad i okrestnosti : Spravochnik‑putevoditel´ [Leningrad and Its Surroundings : A Reference Guidebook] (M. – Leipzig : Iskusstvo, 1980). On developments in historical writing in the post‑Stalin era, see Denis Kozlov, “The Historical Turn in Late Soviet Culture : Retrospectivism, Factography, Doubt, 1953–91,” Kritika 2, 3 (2001) : 577‑600. 88. “Protokol zasedaniia Uchenogo soveta GIOP,” 4 April 1966, TsGANTD‑SPb., f. 386, op. 1, d. 13, l. 54. 89. “Protokol zasedaniia Uchenogo soveta GIOP,”10 January 1966, TsGANTD‑SPb., f. 386, op. 1, d. 13, l. 1‑3. 90. Compare TsGA‑SPb., f. 9620, op. 2, d. 1, l. 55‑55 ob., and TsGALI‑SPb., f. 229, op. 2, d. 2, l. 1‑30. 91. See the material in files no. 173 (Saints Simeon and Anne) and 481 (Co‑Religionists), NA UGIOP [Scholarly Archive of the Board of the State Inspectorate for the Preservation of Monuments]. 92. Ibid. 93. Obviously, it was also not proposed to turn banks back into banks, palaces into elite accommodation, and so on. That would be a development of the post‑Soviet era. 94. A.S. Raskin, N.N. Vesnina, Okhrana pamiatnikov arkhitektury Leningrada [In Defence of the Architectural Monuments of Leningrad] (L. : Stroiizdat, 1981). 95. The extensive correspondence to do with the case is held in the files of VOOPIiK at TsGALI, f. 229, op. 1, d. 224, l. 1‑12. Murino was a bone of contention not just at this period : there are documents on file with submissions about the church’s importance and its poor condition from the late 1950s and the 1980s as well. See e.g. TsGALI‑SPb., f. 229, op. 1, d. 564, l. 39‑40 (representations to VOOPIiK from 1985). 96. TsGA‑SPb., f. 2017, op. 1, d. 18, l. 89. 97. TsGALI‑SPb., f. 229, op. 1, d. 72, l. 127‑128. 98. “Spisok rabot v khrame Vsekh Skorbiashchikh [List of Building Works in the Church of the Mother of God Joy of Those who Grieve],” TsGALI‑SPb., f. 229, op. 1, d. 39, l. 70. 23 June 1970. At this period, the Church of Saints Simeon and Anne was removed from its “post‑box institute,” but transferred to the Meteorological Museum : see Biulleten´ ispolnitelńogo komiteta Leningradskogo soveta deputatov trudiashchikhsia [Bulletin of the Executive Committee of Lensovet], 15 (1972) : 21. 99. Some monastic city representations (podvoría) were turned into domestic accommodation in the early Soviet period, as were parts of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, but this does not seem to have happened in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, the general preservation policy was to try and prevent mundane activities from taking place in architectural monuments : the files of VOOPIiK include some entertaining examples of this, including fuss about refreshments in the Coffee Pavilion in the Summer Gardens (definitely not to include alcohol or anything more than soft drinks and biscuits), and about sunbathing outside the Peter and Paul Fortress (an offence to the building’s solemn history as a prison for sainted revolutionaries).

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100. Il´in, “Ansambl´ v arkhitekturnom oblike Leningrada,” 9‑11. 101. S.M. Zemtsov, “Rekonstruktsiia Sennoi i Obukhovskoi ploshchadei [The Reconstruction of Haymarket and Obukhovo Squares],” Arkhitektura Leningrada, 3 (1939), 47‑48. 102. Untitled note on the reconstruction of the Haymarket (no author given), c. 1940, OR RNB (Manuscript Department of the Russian National Library), f. 606 (Evgeniia Alekseevna Poliakova), ed. khr. 127, l. 1‑5. For a sketch of Polyakova’s biography and her work on green space in Leningrad, see T.V. Barabko, “‘Zelenoe stroitel´stvo’ Leningrada v 1920‑kh – 1940‑kh godakh (po materialam arkhiva E.A. Poliakovoi [Park and Garden Architecture in Leningrad from the 1920s to the 1940s],” in Universitetskii istorik [The University Historian] vol. 10 (2012) (St. Petersburg State University : History Faculty), 135‑141. 103. N.V. Baranov, “Zadachi Leningradskikh arkhitektorov v realizatsii piatiletnego plana vosstanovleniia i razvitiia g. Leningrada i oblasti [The Tasks of Leningrad Architects in Realising the Five‑Year Plan for the Reconstruction and Develoment of Leningrad and Province],” Stroitel ´stvo i arkhitektura Leningrada 1 (1946) : 3. 104. For a general historical account of the square’s development, abundantly illustrated, see Zoia Yurkova, “Sennaya ploshchad´ : vchera, segodnya, zavtra [The Haymarket : Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow],” http://lib.rus.ec/b/375320/read. 105. “Stenograficheskii otchet obsuzhdeniia proekta zastroiki ploshchadi Mira v Leningrade [Stenographic Record of the Discussion on the Plan of Construction on ploshchad´ Mira [Peace Square], Leningrad],” 18 November 1965, TsGALI‑SPb., f. 341, op. 1, d. 682, l. 18. 106. Ibid., l. 38. For Razodeev’s position, see the article on the website of the St. Petersburg Union of Restorers “Tat´iana Nikolaeva : Alleya slavy [Tatiana Nikolaeva : The Avenue of Fame],” (author not credited) http://www.srspb.ru/article.php?id=247. (accessed 8 February 2013). 107. “Stenograficheskii otchet obsuzhdeniia,” l. 38. 108. “Chernovik Obrashcheniia Prezidiuma Soveta LGO VOOPIiK” (April 1975) : “Zakliucheniia o zastroike Sinopskoi naberezhnoi i k proektu ee rekonstruktsii [Draft Letter from the Presidium of the Council of the Leningrad City Section of VOOPIiK (April 1975) : Conclusions on the Plan of Construction on the Sinope Embankment and the Project for its Reconstruction],” TsGALI-SPb., f. 229, op. 1, d. 168, l. 1, 7. 109. TsGALI‑SPb., f. 229, op. 1, d. 72, l. 53. 110. The building the writer had in mind was the Church of the Kazan´ Icon of the Mother of God, at no. 547, Primorskoe shosse, constructed by N.N. Nikonov (beginning in 1910) in the “Moscow‑Sudzal” style. It was closed after the War (when the Soviet forces invaded Zelenogorsk, then Teriokki), and used as a warehouse. In the 1960s, the Orthodox Church petitioned for its return, but received a refusal. It was returned to Orthodox use in 1989. See http://al- spbphoto.narod.ru/Hram/zelenogorsk.html. 111. TsGALI‑SPb., f. 229, op. 2, d. 45, l. 12. 112. http://al-spbphoto.narod.ru/Hram/zelenogorsk.html. 113. Examples in St. Petersburg itself included the former Church of St. Panteleimon, transferred to the Museum of the History of Leningrad in 1980 (conversion into a Museum of the Battle of Gangut commenced not long afterwards), or the Chesme Church, where the “Victory of Chesme” exhibition was opened in 1977. 114. I remember seeing this displayed myself in 1985 : otherwise, a visit to St. Isaac’s mainly consisted of viewing the city from the upper galleries. 115. The sense that tourists were offended by churches in poor repair was routinely used as an argument in favour of restoration : see, for instance, the comments on the church at Zelenogorsk cited above. 116. On the Shuvalovo church, see S. Karishnev, “Vozrodim khram ! [We’ll Resurrect the Church !],” Vyborgskaia storona 4 (1992) : 2 ; on the Church of St. Elijah the Prophet, see Father

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A. Budnikov, Tserkov´ Sviatogo Proroka Ilii [The Church of the Holy Prophet Elijah] (SPb. : Izdanie khrama Sviatogo Proroka Ilii, 1998). 117. The situation with churches that were not listed was rather different. Even before the Millennium of the Orthodox Church in 1988, a landmark in church‑state relations, one important church, the Chapel of the Blessed Ksenia of Petersburg (now St. Ksenia), was returned for worship (in 1984). And the late 1980s and early 1990s were to see the return of many churches that were considered of the first architectural importance, including the Kazan´ Cathedral (in 1989 ; the New Maiden Convent was returned in the same year). At the same time, the pro‑restoration lobby was much less vocal than in Moscow. In 1990, the then Metropolitan Aleksii, later Patriarch Aleksii, declined pro tem the return of the St. Isaac’s Cathedral and the Royal Stables (Koniushennaia) Church, on the grounds that the ROC currently lacked the money and staff to be able to cope. Even after the passing of the 2010 statute that made over all buildings that had been used for legal worship before 1917 to religious denominations, the ROC in St. Petersburg held back from pressing its claims. (For a detailed discussion of this period, see Kelly, “Competing Orthodoxies”). 118. Examples in the first category include the memorial church to the Blockade victims incinerated in a brick factory that once stood on the site (Victory Park, Moscow prospekt), and the memorial to the demolished Cathedral of the Trinity on Trinity (formerly Revolution) Square. 119. Not one important church has been rebuilt in Petersburg since the collapse of Soviet power (in striking contrast to Moscow, and indeed the much smaller settlement of Pushkin, where the Catherine Cathedral, blown up in 1939, was rebuilt in 2010). On Sennaia ploshchad´ in the post‑Soviet period, see e.g. the material on the site of the preservation organization “Zhivoi Gorod” [Living City], http://www.save-spb.ru/page/houses/houses/sennaya_ploschad_.html? section=houses/houses, just as I was finishing this article, it was reported that the Church of the Saviour might be rebuilt as part of yet another reconstruction of the square : see Galina Artemenko, “V Sankt‑Peterburg pristupili k samomu statusnomu tserkovnomu proektu [In St Peterburg, work has started on the Church rebuilding project par excellence],” IA Regnum, http://archi.ru/events/news/news_present_press.html?nid=46135. When I took part in a discussion about vanished buildings in St. Petersburg on 13 April 2013, the other participants (including a representative of the lobby group Zhivoi Gorod, a curator at the Museum of the History of St. Petersburg, an architectural historian, and a specialist in the history of St. Petersburg’s theatres) unanimously agreed off‑air that while rebuilding the Saviour on the Haymarket might be acceptable, that church was a special case ; the proposal to rebuild the Church of the Archangel Michael on Kulibin Square (in Little Kolomna) was, for instance, quite ridiculous ; the square looked better without it. Preservation groups these days are far more concerned about “civil buildings” (i.e. secular ones) than religious buildings, leaving religious groups to exert pressure about the latter. 120. R.A. French, and F.E. Ian Hamilton, eds., The Socialist City : Spatial Structure and Urban Policy (Chichester : Wiley and Sons, 1979). 121. See e.g. the contributions to a round‑table on urban culture in the journal Forum for Anthropology and Culture 7 (2011). 122. I address this point more thoroughly in “Making Buildings Soviet : Radical Secularism and the Preservation of ‘Cultic Buildings,’ 1918‑1924,” Chapter 1 of Socialist Churches. 123. On the history of the Redundant Churches Fund (now the Churches Conservation Trust), which was set up in 1968, see Matthew Saunders, “The Redundant Churches Fund Comes of Age” (1990), http://www.ihbc.org.uk/context_archive/28/redundant.htm. (Accessed 14 February 2013). 124. As in the title of the well‑known study by Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More : The “Last” Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, 2006). Yurchak argues strongly that the group at which he looks in detail – his own contemporaries, or

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those born around 1960 – did not have a sense of “cognitive dissonance,” instead taking a “performative” stance to the Soviet language of power. But it is clear that for older historical subjects, the re‑examination of the past launched in the Khrushchev era had been a watershed, and that those who had lived through it (such as the people involved in the debates I have discussed here) were often left with a sense of not really knowing what the canons of historical memory should be.

ABSTRACTS

This article addresses the shifting meaning of ecclesiastical buildings in the late Soviet interpretive system and hierarchy of values. The focus is on Leningrad, a city of acknowledged architectural importance, but also one constructed in the relatively recent past, with most important buildings dating from the 1760s and later. The relatively late date at which Leningrad’s churches were constructed meant that they did not fit automatically into the hierarchy of values established during and after the Second World War (Great Patriotic War), which placed at the pinnacle churches from the medieval era. Many of the city’s churches also did not fit into the hierarchy of architectural values recognised in the city itself from the early twentieth century onwards, which had traditionally emphasised neo‑classical buildings created in the period 1780‑1820. In the Brezhnev era, partly as a result of the nationwide shifts in attitudes to the Russian Orthodox Church and the evaluation of heritage taking place in the 1960s (marked by the foundation of the All‑Russian Society for the Preservation of Monuments of Heritage and Culture in 1965, and the increasingly accommodating attitude to Orthodox practice evident from the late 1970s), attitudes to church architecture became much more favourable, a circumstance that radically changed the understanding of appropriate city planning, so that churches, once an embarrassment, began to be perceived as crucial to the city’s panoramas. This process is significant not only in terms of Leningrad’s own development as a city, but in terms of the history of the late socialist city, since the enhanced presence of churches represented neither a “normalisation,” internationally speaking, nor a contribution to the specificity of the socialist city that has been so often discussed in Western accounts of the era.

L’auteur étudie l’évolution de la signification des édifices religieux dans le système interprétatif et l’échelle des valeurs de la fin de l’époque soviétique. Son étude porte sur Leningrad, une ville à l’importance architecturale certes reconnue mais qui a été érigée dans un passé relativement récent : en effet, la plupart de ses bâtiments majeurs sont postérieurs à 1760. La date, relativement tardive, de construction des églises de Leningrad ne les inscrivait pas nécessairement dans l’échelle des valeurs en cours pendant et après la Seconde Guerre mondiale (Grande Guerre patriotique), qui plaçait au pinacle les églises de l’époque médiévale. Nombre d’églises de la ville ne s’inscrivaient pas davantage dans l’échelle des valeurs architecturales admises par la ville elle‑même depuis le début du XXe siècle quand, traditionnellement, elle mettait en avant les bâtiments néo‑classiques construits entre 1780 et 1820. À l’époque brejnévienne, l’attitude envers l’architecture religieuse est devenue beaucoup plus favorable en partie du fait de l’évolution à l’échelle nationale des comportements envers l’Église orthodoxe russe et, dans les années 1960, de l’évaluation de l’héritage (fondation de la Société pour la protection des monuments d’histoire et de la culture de la Russie en 1965, et attitude de plus en plus accommodante envers l’évidence de la pratique orthodoxe depuis la fin des années 1970).

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Cette circonstance a radicalement modifié la perception qu’on avait d’une planification urbaine appropriée, de telle sorte que les églises, qui autrefois constituaient une gêne, ont commencé à être perçues comme essentielles au panorama urbain. Ce processus est significatif dans le cadre du propre développement de Leningrad en tant que ville mais aussi dans celui de l’histoire de la ville à la fin de l’époque soviétique dans la mesure où la présence accrue d’églises ne représentait ni une « normalisation » sur le plan international ni une contribution à la spécificité de la ville socialiste, qui a été si souvent discutée dans les rapports occidentaux sur cette période.

AUTHOR

CATRIONA KELLY University of Oxford, [email protected]

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V.V. Pokhlëbkin and the search for culinary roots in late soviet Russia V.V. Pohlëbkin et la quête de racines culinaires en Russie à la fin de l’ère soviétique

Adrianne K. Jacobs

The author would like to thank Donald J. Raleigh, Edward Geist, Emily Baran, Audra Yoder, Alison K. Smith, Ronald F. Feldstein, A.I. Jacobs, Isabelle Oyahon, Marc Elie, and the two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable comments on this project. On the roots of Pokhlëbkin’s name, see Ronald F. Feldstein, “An Introduction to William Pokhlëbkin and his Contributions to Russian Culture,” Glossos 11 (Fall 2011), http://slaviccenters.duke.edu/uploads/media_items/ issue-11-feldstein.original.pdf.

1 In the late 1960s, when Vil´iam Vasil´evich Pokhlëbkin first began writing on food and drink in the USSR, many of his readers believed that his peculiar name––closely related to pokhlëbka, a variety of Russian soup––masked a group of researchers.1 How could one person know so much about cuisine, culture, and history ?2 In reality, Pokhlëbkin, a historian of international relations, turned to food writing after being ejected from the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences in 1959 due to a public disagreement with the institute’s director.3 In the wake of this falling out, Pokhlëbkin relocated from Moscow to Podol´sk where he embraced a life‑long passion for cuisine and built a new career as a journalist and independent researcher.4 During the 1970s, Pokhlëbkin gained popularity among a Soviet public that both enjoyed a higher standard of living than earlier generations and turned increasingly inward, toward forms of socializing that centered on interpersonal relationships and long evenings of conversation over food and drink.5 He eventually produced over 100 written works on cuisine, firmly establishing himself as a culinary legend in the Russian‑speaking world by the time of his death in 2000. Today, Pokhlëbkin continues to hold a prominent place in the domain of Russian gastronomy, with his books in ongoing circulation and experts bowing to or sparring with his theories.

2 The present study investigates Pokhlëbkin’s culinary thought and his legacy in post‑Soviet Russia as a means of moving beyond dominant characterizations of the

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Brezhnev era. During this period, important changes swept Soviet culinary discourse, particularly as food writers looked to national history to enrich and renew the Soviet table. These changes suggest dynamism in the Brezhnev years, the likes of which some scholars now argue characterized the social, cultural, and intellectual life of this era better than the so‑called “stagnation” paradigm.6 At the same time, this search for historical continuity reflects a desire for stability, a yearning for national and cultural roots, and a reaction against the political and social upheavals of the previous half‑century. Significantly, this tendency persisted through the decades, drawing an arc of continuity from the 1970s through the early 2000s, and cutting across the ruptures of perestroika and collapse. Examining Soviet food culture offers a new perspective on questions of “stagnation” and “dynamism,” allowing us to move toward a more satisfying characterization of the years between Brezhnev’s consolidation of power in the late 1960s and the dawn of Gorbachev’s reforms in the mid‑1980s.

3 Through his cookbooks and culinary prose, Pokhlëbkin aimed to rearrange the hierarchy of authority in the Soviet kitchen, elevating historical knowledge and practice above the advice of medical and nutritional scientists.7 His work thus articulates a viewpoint I describe as gastronomic historicism : the privileging of historical custom as the ultimate authority in food‑related matters, including a reliance on historical information as a means of explaining dietary and culinary principles. The emergence of gastronomic historicism in the USSR supports the notion of a “historical turn” in late Soviet culture.8 Denis Kozlov has argued that a diverse “search for origins” marked late Soviet society, as certain groups “sought to legitimize their existence by constructing new historical continuities.”9 A sense of cultural loss and the Thaw‑era disruption of official historical narratives energized the pursuit of stable, rooted identities. In the Brezhnev years, as Andrew Jenks suggests, “continuity with the past, rather than a radical break, became a central theme of cultural construction.”10

4 As part of this post‑Stalin “search for origins,” members of the intelligentsia engaged in “politics by culture,” using journals and creative works to propagate a Russian nationalism that was often at odds with official policies.11 Artists and intellectuals made increasing use of nationalist rhetoric to critique urbanization, industrialization, and environmental degradation, looking for truth and regeneration in national tradition and rurality.12 Faced with waning enthusiasm for the Soviet project and an onslaught of ideologically threatening Western cultural influences, Soviet officialdom also embraced aspects of this historical turn, exploiting Russian nationalism to shore up political legitimacy.13 During the Brezhnev years, individuals and groups throughout the Soviet Russian socio‑political hierarchy engaged in a diverse and collective search for meaning, bowing—or at least paying lip service—to the authority of history and national “traditions,” as they sought better means of approaching the present and the future.

5 In the culinary sphere, this historical turn meant respecting “national” cuisines, the longstanding food customs they allegedly represented, and the wisdom that brought them into being.14 Pokhlëbkin used historical knowledge not only as a key mode of defining the cuisines he discussed, but also to criticize the culinary status quo and express anxiety over the deleterious effects of modernization. Initially a response to the conditions of Soviet life under Brezhnev, Pokhlëbkin’s concerns segued neatly into a critique of perestroika and, later, post‑Soviet society, while also mirroring trends taking hold elsewhere in the world. During the 1990s, he espoused a more intensely

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nationalistic gastronomic historicism to counter the economic instability, foreign influence, and cultural degradation that, he believed, threatened Russian society. The burgeoning disillusionment of the Brezhnev era flowed steadily into the anxieties of the post‑Soviet period. The ongoing popularity of Pokhlëbkin’s works and his legacy in Russia today speak to his ideas’ resonance with a public that craved stability and continuity with the past. Meanwhile, parallels between Pokhlëbkin’s ideas and public discourses about food in Europe and America suggest that, in certain ways, Soviet and some foreign food cultures evolved in tandem, responding to similar impulses and concerns. Rather than an isolated phenomenon of the age of “developed socialism,” gastronomic historicism represents the culinary facet of a search for roots that took place throughout the industrialized world in the late twentieth century ; studying this development reveals commonalities between seemingly diverse geographic, political, and temporal spaces.

Recapturing Culinary Wisdom

6 Until the Brezhnev years, dominant Soviet food paradigms focused largely on the future, emphasizing what could be, rather than tackling contemporary conditions or considering the past. During the 1920s, food “futurists” admonished readers to eat a modern, rational diet based in part on “healthy” food surrogates, and to cast off home cooking in favor of communal dining. This would, they supposed, help transform individual and collective identities, aiding in the creation of a new Soviet person freed from the yoke of prerevolutionary customs. Traditional modes of eating still had their proponents, but most menus bore the mark of new dietary standards, demanding more fat and sugar and a broader range of proteins than would be found in a typical Russian peasant diet.15 Along with the Second Five‑Year Plan (1933‑37) and its propaganda trumpeting the dawn of a “better” life came a wave of culinary standardization. The Stalin regime, as Edward Geist argues, “developed a single orthodox cuisine and imposed this monopoly upon Soviet culture as a whole.”16 Here, futurist and traditionalist visions converged in a “socialist realist” food paradigm, uniting “bourgeois luxury” with “enthusiasm for a qualitatively new ‘scientific’ way of eating.” 17 Mass‑produced luxury foods and the ideal of dining out at chic cafés tantalized the public with a future when even common laborers would live as well as the late imperial bourgeoisie.18 Stalinist gastronomy reached its apotheosis in Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche [The Book About Delicious and Healthy Food, 1939], which advertised the successes of Soviet industry and agriculture, while teaching housewives—no longer targets for “liberation” from the kitchen—to be “cultured” consumers.19

7 After Stalin’s death, publishers made available a vastly wider array of cookbooks : Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche appeared in revised editions alongside new texts on housekeeping, cooking with common ingredients or convenience foods, and enjoying Soviet ethnic cuisines.20 Many of these publications celebrated modes of cooking and dining rooted in modern nutritional science and technological advances, also touting Soviet successes in these spheres. As Natalia B. Lebina argues, the Khrushchev period saw an important shift toward Western (especially American) food culture, including the introduction of “rational” or “progressive” forms of trade and dining—self‑service and automatic vending—and the increased use of prepared foods. The “glamour” and “luxury” of the Stalin period faded, as did the hardships of the war and immediate

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postwar years : Soviet food experts now favored speed, convenience, accessibility, and uniformity.21 In the Khrushchev‑era imagination, the future was, as Susan E. Reid contends, to be marked by “sober, rational taste appropriate to a modern, industrial, workers’ state.”22 Scientific rationality now reached a new apex, stripped of such Stalin‑era fripperies as lace tablecloths and homemade aspics, and reified in the spread of soda water dispensers and heat‑and‑eat cabbage rolls.23

8 From the mid‑1960s through the 1980s, a tension between standardization and diversification increasingly defined Soviet culinary culture. Even as the state demanded that public dining menus and nutritional guidelines adhere to a rigid standard, Soviet citizens experienced unprecedented gastronomic diversity through cookbooks, the press, and greater travel opportunities.24 Interest in home cooking grew as Soviet urbanites enjoyed higher living standards and more leisure time than previous generations. Cookbooks and pamphlets celebrating the national cuisines of the USSR presented the greatest variety of dishes, ingredients, and cooking styles. These national cuisines did not, of course, represent some concrete, primordial reality. Rather, they were the creations of food professionals engaged, however consciously or unconsciously, in a project of “imagining” the national community.25 In the late Soviet context, these imaginings functioned as propaganda for the “friendship of the peoples,” while also offering a tool for the preservation of local culture.26 During the Brezhnev years, some Soviet food experts and home cooks began to turn away from— even if they did not wholly reject—science, technology, and the fictional bright future, looking increasingly to history and tradition for inspiration and authority in the kitchen.

9 Pioneering this trend, Pokhlëbkin insisted that Soviet home cooks would benefit from a renewed connection with fundamental culinary knowledge. In his columns for Nedelia (The Week, a Sunday supplement to Izvestiia) he suggested that Soviet citizens needlessly clung to prejudices against certain food items, such as wholesome fish and traditional sunflower oil, simply because they did not know how to properly consume them.27 He also criticized an apparent disregard for good taste among cooks, whose incompetence yielded greasy gravies, and other food experts, whose “purely medical” approach to food championed unappetizing but “healthy” salads.28 Pokhlëbkin suggested that chefs and scientists focused too much on the bare facts of nutrition, leaving aside food’s other characteristics : flavor, aroma, its ability to influence mood and to facilitate conviviality. Their ignorance of culinary customs led to the spread of bland, monotonous meals, while the lack of care evident in restaurants and canteens placed the burden on individuals to seek out gastronomic pleasure at home.29 Pokhlëbkin thus made the case in his popular Tainy khoroshei kukhni for embracing national traditions and home cooking in spite of the existence of an extensive public dining system. Stopping short of an open critique of state‑run eateries, Pokhlëbkin likened public dining to a new, modern bridge, while describing home cooking as “our old, but sure, true bridge, which connects us to the culture of the past and with the historical traditions of our Homeland, to the national customs of the people, and with our family, our loved ones.”30

10 In this quest to teach better living through home cooking, Pokhlëbkin addressed very real problems facing Soviet citizens. He understood that the supply deficits plaguing Soviet consumers often made it necessary to work with undesirable foodstuffs. While necessities such as bread generally remained available, some goods could be hard to

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acquire or of poor quality.31 He openly discussed cooking with low‑quality ingredients in Zanimatel´naia kulinariia, claiming that anything short of outright spoilage could be “corrected through the culinary process.”32 Pokhlëbkin also offered instructions on using electric ranges, which had begun to displace common gas ranges and single‑burner stoves, in spite of his disdain for the new technology, which he regarded as being largely unsuited for any kind of cooking outside of boiling or reheating.33 He thus hinted that he understood the difficulties his readers faced in procuring desired products and working with the limited array of cooking equipment made available by state industry.

11 Pokhlëbkin did not, however, address the question of who exactly would be doing the cooking. Declining to endorse anyone’s “liberation”—let alone women’s—from the kitchen, he broke with official rhetoric promising female “emancipation” through such services as public dining.34 He felt his readers should reject the resources the state offered them to ease their domestic burdens, including cafeterias and convenience foods. Pokhlëbkin viewed cooking as a critical life skill and the responsibility of all able adults, often addressing a neutral reader (chitatel´) or eater (edok), rather than a female housewife (khoziaika).35 Yet Pokhlëbkin’s writings still fell into a genre understood as feminine and therefore also aligned with dominant expectations that wives and mothers would handle food procurement and preparation, in addition to their responsibilities outside of the home.36 His commitment to the revival of culinary knowledge and national tradition, then, may have helped reinforce a deeply imbalanced division of labor between the sexes. Pokhlëbkin challenged not the established gender order, in which Soviet women shouldered a double burden of domestic and professional responsibilities, but rather the culinary status quo of poor food standards in public dining and in Soviet homes.

Dining on History in the Brezhnev Era

12 Pokhlëbkin’s gastronomic historicism comes through most clearly in his writings on ethnic cuisines, which identify knowledge of history as the foundation of proper cooking. His Natsional´nye kukhni nashikh narodov, described recently as “the first comprehensive Soviet ethnic cookbook,” represented a landmark in the national cuisines genre, which had been growing since the 1950s.37 Pokhlëbkin rooted this volume and related press articles in information he gathered during his travels throughout the USSR collecting recipes, cookbooks, and old cookware.38 Concerned with cultural preservation, Pokhlëbkin went beyond offering recipes for popular dishes, such as Georgian lamb soup (kharcho) and Ukrainian dumplings (vareniki).39 He drew attention to the place of forgotten or obscure dishes, such as Russian tiuria [bread and kvas soup], in national culture and history, while also charting the political, social, cultural, and economic factors that drove a given cuisine’s evolution up to the present. 40 In Natsional´nye kukhni, Pokhlëbkin thus pointed to Orthodox Christian fasting traditions in order to explain the slow development of Russian cuisine prior to the eighteenth century, arguing that the divide between Lenten and non‑Lenten menus slowed the emergence of dishes that combined a variety of ingredients. European influence finally set Russians on the road to creating the dishes recognized today as Russian staples : kotlety, meat‑filled pirozhki, and mayonnaise‑rich salads.41 Elsewhere,

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he encouraged his readers to recapture the wisdom of the past and enjoy the simple pleasures of homemade “pirog with nothing” or marinated crowberries.42

13 In his later Soviet‑era works, Pokhlëbkin further committed to this vision of a deep connection between history, tradition, and good eating. In Tainy khoroshei kukhni, he attacked doctors, nutritional scientists, and their influence on the Russian diet. Presaging arguments he would make in his post‑Soviet writings, Pokhlëbkin asserted that, while a doctor can describe the nutritional content of raw foods, only the cook, through the application of time‑tested techniques, could make sure that the body absorbs these nutrients. Doctors cannot make food smell or taste good, but it is precisely these qualities that ensure that food will be truly healthful, sustaining the individual physically, emotionally, and psychologically.43 Pokhlëbkin admonished his readers to heed advice stemming from culinary expertise and historical knowledge, rather than relying on the nutritional standards and standardized foods they found elsewhere. Pokhlëbkin pointed to the tendency of nutritional science to make “zigzags,” repeatedly changing position on whether a particular food is healthful or harmful.44 He also positioned his “culinary encyclopedia,” O kulinarii ot A do Ia, as a necessary tool for “preserving and strengthening the best national traditions,” which were crucial to the formation of “Soviet daily life.”45 For Pokhlëbkin, history and tradition represented the forces that could provide a way out of consuming tasteless, poorly prepared foods. His writings provided a necessary link for Soviet citizens to the principles and knowledge—in danger of being lost to time—that could provide them with a more joyful, satisfying, and delicious existence.

14 Pokhlëbkin believed that in order to properly prepare a given culture’s dishes one had to understand the people’s history and traditions. Pokhlëbkin thus outlined a canon of foods that made Russian cuisine distinctive : sour rye bread, numerous soups, and slow‑cooked fish, mushroom, grain, and vegetable dishes. These items represented both Russia’s native crops and also the distinctive cooking style developed through the use of the Russian oven (russkaia pech´), which cooked foods slowly at a falling temperature.46 Yet, as suggested by his embrace of European innovations (noted above), Pokhlëbkin also celebrated those foreign influences and innovations that either complemented or improved upon the characteristics of Russian cuisine.47 A robust cuisine, in his mind, accepted those new techniques, technologies, and foods that would complement but not overwhelm national characteristics. By extension, Pokhlëbkin hinted that Russian cuisine required responsible caretakers, such as himself, to guide its evolution, differentiating between beneficial and harmful influences.

15 Rather than simply suggesting that “old” meant “authentic” and therefore “good,” Pokhlëbkin contended that the passage of time worked to refine and perfect cuisines. Pokhlëbkin, looking on one occasion beyond Soviet borders, described Chinese cuisine as an ancient and sophisticated complex of techniques, ingredients, and dishes, contrasting this with “unpalatable, unwholesome” American cuisine, a recent invention suited only to impatient twentieth‑century life.48 Taking this perspective, Pokhlëbkin hinted at his discomfort with the role of modern science in the sphere of food and drink. Similarly, in his earliest foray into food writing, Chai, ego tipy, svoistva, upotreblenie, Pokhlëbkin praised new achievements in growing and processing tea, and improvements in experts’ understanding of tea’s properties. Yet he also suggested that the “ancients” had already learned much of what modern scientists later labored to discover. Although thermodynamics, for example, could explain the necessity of

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warming the teapot, tradition held fast : The teapot must still be treated according to customs as old as the act of drinking tea itself. Modern science had, at best, used its powers to reaffirm what those of past generations already knew, improving on this knowledge mostly by systematizing it.49

16 Although he focuses on history and “traditional” foods, Pokhlëbkin’s vision of a full and satisfying gastronomic life would be attainable only in a modern, literate society. He offered his readers a means of revering their own national heritage while also celebrating the cuisines of their Soviet neighbors as part of the “true flowering” of national cultures under socialism.50 Between 1970 and 1982, Pokhlëbkin published numerous articles on not only Russian food, but also Ukrainian, Georgian, and Central Asian cuisines, topics on which he considered himself an authority. Pokhlëbkin also wrote on food customs in such countries as China, Scotland, and Finland.51 He thus set out to “internationalize” culinary knowledge by disseminating information about foods, cooking techniques, and cookware in order to further cross‑cultural understanding and improve home cooking and professional gastronomy.52 Such efforts at knowledge circulation, Pokhlëbkin insisted, demanded literacy and education. In Tainy khoroshei kukhni, he called on Soviet home cooks to learn both skills and historical narratives in order to “literately” (gramotno) prepare tasty and healthy meals.53 He explained that in the past the strong continuity of cultural traditions allowed some “illiterate old ladies” to cook well almost effortlessly, but a person who had no experience of these customs—such, he implied, as the average Soviet home cook—must study and practice in order to succeed in the kitchen.54

17 Pokhlëbkin’s advocacy of historical traditions sometimes belied his promotion of innovation. Coaxing Russians into eating saltwater fish, for example, he promoted a substitute for the longstanding Russian custom of dining on lake and river fishes. In this case, he aligned with officials in Soviet trade and the food industry, whose efforts to sell seafood reached new heights in the 1970s in the face of meat shortages and vanishing freshwater fish.55 Pokhlëbkin, however, promoted only the home preparation of dishes found in traditional cuisines, not the consumption of pre‑prepared and factory‑made fish products in a cafeteria setting.56 He also advised the use of accessible, affordable sugar (instead of honey) to make preserves, and to experiment with salting a variety of fruits and vegetables, rather than sticking to the customary cucumbers, cabbage, and mushrooms of old Russian cuisine.57 Here, Pokhlëbkin bowed to realities facing Soviet consumers—limited supplies and lack of choice—and sought means of retaining long‑time kitchen favorites (raspberry jam) while also experimenting with unfamiliar foods (saltwater fish) available in Soviet stores. Although he rejected elements of culinary modernization, Pokhlëbkin did not advocate a return to the past insofar as that would be shutting oneself off from the availability of nourishing and enjoyable dishes from throughout the USSR and abroad. Pokhlëbkin instructed his readers to use the contemporary world’s advantages wisely, exploring them with a critical eye and without rejecting established tradition.

Fighting “Culinary Stupidity”

18 Pokhlëbkin’s nationalism, latent during the Soviet period, became pronounced in his post‑Soviet writings, where he drew on his earlier rhetoric of gastronomic historicism to find solutions to new problems. While still encouraging his readers to take up the

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best other cultures had to offer, Pokhlëbkin now also emphasized the importance of consuming primarily dishes from one’s “own” national cuisine in order to maintain individual and cultural wellbeing.58 For Pokhlëbkin, much of Russianness resided in food, and each step away from old customs, which Russians rich and poor formerly embraced, dealt a blow to national health and identity.

19 After 1991, enjoying his new freedom to criticize the Soviet state, Pokhlëbkin blamed poor health and bad diet on governmental mismanagement.59 He now declared that “culinary stupidity” and Soviet officials’ medicalization of food had burdened Soviet citizens with unpalatable, low quality, and unhealthy fare.60 The Russian public had grown “too naïve and trusting” of medical experts’ advice during the twentieth century, and had therefore fallen into dreadfully unhealthy eating habits. Confronting Soviet medical experts’ proclamations, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, that fats contribute to heart disease and obesity, Pokhlëbkin now insisted that a dish’s healthfulness hinged on its preparation, not its fat content ; “culinary illiteracy” and artificial fats caused the health problems that so concerned Soviet doctors.61 Soviet food had been standardized, the culinary arts had declined in status, and public dining had become, in Pokhlëbkin’s words, “one of society’s most purulent sores.”62 He argued that when Russians finally renewed their interest in cooking during the 1970s, they had to start from square one. Cultural wisdom had vanished and some people could not even identify Russian dietary staples.63 The foolish meddling of bureaucrats and doctors, according to Pokhlëbkin, wrought havoc on public health and cut Russians off from their national traditions. Disheartened, Pokhlëbkin did not represent one of the Russians who looked “back upon the Brezhnev era as a time when Russian national traditions were nurtured and protected,” although the connection of his works with this era may stimulate such feelings in his readers.64 Rather, he railed against the degradation of the national diet both during and after the Soviet period, declaring that, in order to enjoy healthy, delicious food, one must rely on tradition, not modern or alien innovations.

20 Yet Pokhlëbkin did not wholly reject foreign cuisines, instead praising “internationalization,” while condemning the process by which cuisines became “cosmopolitan.” Here Pokhlëbkin reproduced a murky distinction, pervasive in postwar Soviet discourse, between positive and negative forms of foreign influence. As Yurchak explains, “cosmopolitanism was described as a product of Western imperialism, which, in pursuit of its materialist goals, strove to undermine the value of local patriotism among the peoples of the world, thereby weakening their national sovereignty.” Meanwhile, “internationalism,” a “good and enriching” form of foreign influence, stood as cosmopolitanism’s opposite, representing a progressive international culture, rather than a product of imperialism.65 Pokhlëbkin, exploiting the vagueness of these concepts, argued that culinary internationalization involved the dissemination of traditional cooking methods from around the world, elements of which could be incorporated into other national cuisines.66 Cosmopolitanization, meanwhile, described standardization and modernization, especially the universalization of a narrow range of cooking technologies and industrially produced foods.67 Pokhlëbkin’s use of “cosmopolitanism” carried no obvious taint of anti‑Semitism, as the term had in other contexts, although he did employ it to signify dishes that evinced a suspicious lack of “national specificities.”68 Best represented by American‑style dining, cosmopolitan cuisine prized uniformity and convenience over good taste, seasonality, or

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wholesomeness.69 Russians, Pokhlëbkin insisted, ought to dabble in foreign food traditions, experiencing a “process of culinary enlightenment,” developing good taste, and becoming “cultured.”70 Simultaneously, they were to avoid fast food, “eclectic” dishes not related to any national cuisine, and prepared convenience foods. For Pokhlëbkin this stood as the only way to “guarantee the preservation of Russian cuisine’s national distinctiveness” and to renew the “national spirit.”71 Working to understand foreign cuisines, in Pokhlëbkin’s mind, represented part of an effort to preserve Russian national cuisine, to build a strong and stable cultural base for daily life.

21 In the 1990s, Pokhlëbkin spoke to a larger trend in post‑Soviet Russian food culture, namely a heightened desire for foods that could be interpreted as fundamentally Russian. During this period, the introduction of foreign food products and restaurants, in combination with growing income inequality and a seeming loss of collective values, spurred a nationalist backlash in the culinary sphere. Food advertising and packaging drew on cultural‑historical allusions to exploit nostalgia for the past, while also appealing to “a nationalist pride that [reinforced] the specificity of a Russian experience at odds with the encroaching outside world.”72 According to Melissa L. Caldwell, post‑Soviet Russian consumers who made “nationalist” food choices did so both because these foods appeared more wholesome and familiar, and also because they offered a connection to a larger, imagined Russian community, a bulwark against declining collective responsibility, poor health, and socioeconomic stratification.73 Even wild and homegrown foods tapped into Russian “geographic nationalism,” being perceived as the bearers of cultural values, by virtue of growing from the Russian soil.74

22 Appropriately, Pokhlëbkin also set about defending the places of vodka and tea in Russian culture. Insisting that Russian rye and river water rendered vodka authentic, he labeled the products of foreign liquor firms “pseudo‑vodkas.”75 He decried the Gorbachev government’s decision to reduce vodka production as ignorant ; it betrayed the regime’s blindness to the workings of history.76 Having grown bitter at the decline of domestic tea production in the 1980s and 1990s, Pokhlëbkin blamed Georgian leaders and tea producers for Russia’s new need to import tea, a once‑foreign product that Russians had long ago assimilated to their own cultural practices. Georgians, he wrongly claimed, did not drink tea, did not want Russians to have it, and therefore sabotaged production.77 Pokhlëbkin thus responded to the apparent intrusion of undesirable Western influences into Russian cultural space, also taking it upon himself to attack those within the USSR or Russia whom he held responsible for shortages of key products or for their declining quality.

23 Pokhlëbkin’s more obvious nationalism stemmed largely from the disillusioning potential of historical study and his experience of the ongoing social, political, and economic upheavals of the late 1980s and the 1990s.78 In the uncertain climate of the first post‑Soviet decade, food for many Russians—Pokhlëbkin and his admirers included —represented not only sustenance or a tool for conviviality, but also a medium through which they could experience their own Russianness. Rather than a new development, this represented a continuation of the nostalgia and nationalism—and their attendant gastronomic historicism—that had blossomed during the Brezhnev years. Pokhlëbkin’s Soviet‑era writings, like his publications of the 1990s, relied on a vision of primordial ethnicity that had grown in prominence in the late Soviet period. Pokhlëbkin had in the 1970s lauded the “flowering” of national cultures throughout the USSR. Yet the climate

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of the 1990s seemed wrong for nurturing Russian national culture, and the conditions of the Brezhnev era, however welcoming they had seemed at the time to cultural restoration, had apparently not allowed for a true national culinary revival. Over the course of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Pokhlëbkin witnessed declining culinary standards, growing interethnic tensions, and the introduction of state projects that, in his view, ignored historical realities. In the 1990s, Pokhlëbkin’s discourse grew politically charged, more Russocentric, and more critical of anything he perceived as a deleterious influence on specifically Russian national culture. The continuity of these concerns and priorities in his work over three decades suggests that the ideas Pokhlëbkin expressed in the 1990s grew out of the late Soviet experience, remaining intimately connected to his Soviet‑era gastronomic historicism and to late Soviet nationalist revivalism. Pokhlëbkin reacted angrily to the apparent realization of the fears underlying the Brezhnev‑era search for historical continuity and cultural stability, as global fast food and economic crisis widened the gulf between Russians and their national culinary heritage.

Embracing Gastronomic Historicism

24 Both during the Soviet period and after 1991, Pokhlëbkin’s work resonated with readers extensively enough to ensure that his books sold well and that his name has continued to serve as a marker of culinary expertise. Hailed as a “magician” in the Soviet period, Pokhlëbkin’s name later began to appear alongside that of Elena Molokhovets, author of Podarok molodym khoziaikam, a nineteenth‑century text regarded as the most important Russian cookbook of the prerevolutionary era.79 In the Russian press, food columnists now invoke Pokhlëbkin’s ideas to add an air of authority to their articles on everything from cakes to barley to vodka.80 Among intellectuals who came of age in the Soviet 1970s, Pokhlëbkin achieved near cult status. Zinovii Zinik credited Pokhlëbkin with inspiring his 1986 novel Russofobka i fungofil (published in English as The Mushroom Picker), which features an enigmatic professor “Pokhlobkin” mentoring a food‑obsessed intellectual.81 Literary critic Petr Vail´ labeled Pokhlëbkin a “cultural hero,” praising him for teaching Soviet citizens to enjoy dining and cooking as part of the good life.82 Critic and gastronome Aleksandr Genis, meanwhile, declared Pokhlëbkin a literary giant whose readers, members of a “world‑wide secret society,” share a “spiritual kinship.”83

25 Yet not all responses to Pokhlëbkin’s food writing have been wholly positive. I.A. Sokolov took Pokhlëbkin to task in a 2011 monograph on the Russian tea trade for contradicting himself on the question of tea’s accessibility at the end of the nineteenth century.84 Western reviewers of Istoriia vodki (published in English as A History of Vodka in 1992) pointed out factual inaccuracies, suggesting that the volume would be more profitably read with bottle in hand.85 In Russia, Boris Rodionov penned an entire book to debunk Pokhlëbkin’s claims about vodka, arguing in the main that it cannot be considered a “national drink,” since modern vodka was the product of state initiatives, not traditional distillation methods.86 In his view, Pokhlëbkin played fast and loose with the historical record, ignoring the distinctive character of earlier Russian distillates, which did not necessarily “evolve” into modern vodka. Meanwhile, celebrity chef Maksim Syrnikov, Pokhlëbkin’s self‑proclaimed heir, corrects the old master’s work when certain details seem insufficiently historical.87 While critiques such as Sokolov’s

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focus rightly on factual and logical errors, more persistent criticisms from the likes of Rodionov and Syrnikov indicate the continuing relevance of gastronomic historicism in contemporary Russian food culture. Not only do these experts continue to debate with Pokhlëbkin, they put forth arguments that ultimately hinge on a deep concern, much like Pokhlëbkin’s, for the preservation of national culture.

26 While Pokhlëbkin’s influence remains limited primarily to the Russian‑speaking world, his ideas fit into larger, international constellation of concerns about modern diets. In recent decades, many societies have, as Warren Belasco asserts, begun to critique the “modern industrialized food system,” condemning either the quality of the foods it produces or its mode of production, and thereby depicting modern food as “uninteresting, unnatural, dangerous, and inequitable.”88 Pokhlëbkin reserved most of his ire for the former target—the foods he perceived as poor quality and unhealthy— while his criticisms of the industrial mode of production typically focused on its potential to degrade Russian national culture and morality, not on labor conditions, animal welfare, or the environment. Still, his desire to return to more “authentic” cooking practices found parallels outside of Russia. The second half of the twentieth century saw a fresh wave of cookbooks touting the virtues of home cooking based on local customs. In postwar West Germany, cookbooks used recipes for “traditional” German foods to connect home cooks to culinary traditions throughout Germany, including areas that were not part of the FRG, as a means of creating a new and, in Alice Weinreb’s words, “digestible” postwar nation.89 Similarly, in postcolonial Britain in the 1970s Jane Grigson and other cookbook authors celebrated good English fare and imagined a small and cozy nation.90 In the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, food experts and writers reacted to social, cultural, and political upheaval, a rising tide of ethnic revivalism, and a longstanding American fascination with French cuisine by concerning themselves with food traditions rooted in American soil, embracing everything from frontier cookery to “soul food.”91 In the socialist world outside the USSR, food discourses also served as conduits for ethnic identities and “banal nationalism,” as in Yugoslavia where cookbooks appearing in the 1970s and 1980s often set the “authentic, traditional” cultures of individual ethnic groups (or sometimes the whole “Yugoslav people”) in opposition to modern foods and lifestyles.92

27 More explicit critiques of the modern industrial food system also gained traction in the late twentieth century and after. In North America and Europe, food experts, individual consumers, and political activists launched attacks against the industrial and fast foods that had grown in popularity since the postwar years. By the 1970s, segments of the American population openly rejected these products through grass‑roots efforts to block the opening of new fast food franchises or by propagating urban legends about food contamination, while professional food critics decried the popularization of junk food.93 Some Europeans embraced “American‑style” foods and food service for their taste, novelty, or convenience, while others associated these products with the erosion of tradition, declining public health, and American cultural and economic imperialism. Out of this milieu grew the Slow Food Movement, which activist Carlo Petrini founded in 1986 to protest opening of a McDonald’s in Rome.94 Slow Food provides an especially important piece in this puzzle, as contemporary food writers influenced by this ideology—which advocates gastronomic pleasure, home cooking with local and seasonal ingredients, and a rejection of the mainstream Western diet—present us with striking parallels to Pokhlëbkin’s thought.95 Most notably, journalist Michael Pollan has, like Pokhlëbkin, argued for a rejection of allegedly science‑based diets that focus

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on calories and nutrients, promoting instead a return to cultural traditions.96 Both Pokhlëbkin and Pollan, moreover, see their respective nations’ mainstream diets as rootless in terms of national culture. Pointing to what he describes as America’s “national eating disorder,” Pollan states that this situation, in which Americans have become simultaneously health‑obsessed and remarkably unhealthy, would never have arisen “in a culture in possession of deeply rooted traditions surrounding food and eating.”97 Pollan cites America’s lack of a “single, strong, stable culinary tradition” as the core reason for Americans’ susceptibility to the unwise interventions of the food industry and nutritional science quackery.98

28 Was Pokhlëbkin aware of developments outside of his home country ? It is difficult at best to uncover the exact pathways by which foreign influences made their way to a given Soviet thinker, but Pokhlëbkin did leave behind some clues as to his contact with foreign food writing. In Cuisine of the Century, he listed the “greatest culinary experts of the twentieth century,” praising in particular certain chefs from Russia, Europe, and the United States.99 Here Pokhlëbkin expressed his admiration of American chef James Beard who believed in “simple, natural, honest food […] that can be eaten with delight.” 100 Pokhlëbkin amassed an impressive library that included Danish, Swedish, and German cookbooks, a rare English‑language volume on Cambodian cookery, and a 1967 edition of Nouveau Larousse Gastronomique.101 Pokhlëbkin fluently read Serbo‑Croatian, Estonian, several Scandinavian languages, and German. He also made use of English‑ and French‑language texts, presumably understanding these well enough to get by with the aid of his bilingual dictionaries.102 This peek into his library, which has yet to be catalogued, suggests that the world of late Soviet cuisine did not evolve in a vacuum of state socialism, as one of the gastronomic guiding lights of the final Soviet decades absorbed developments from beyond Soviet borders.

29 Of course, all experts and activists promoting “slow,” “national,” or “traditional” meals do not express identical agendas or espouse a single ideology. As Caldwell has highlighted, Russians’ interest in wild and “ecologically clean” products grows not from an environmentalist counter‑culture, as in Western Europe and North America, but from a belief that Russian nature will care for the Russian people.103 Yet these contrasts should not obscure the important convergence that we see in the development of gastronomic discourse in Russia, Europe, and North America. Pokhlëbkin, like culinary crusaders elsewhere in the world, sought to renew the nation through its kitchen, responding to the seemingly deleterious effects of modernization and urbanization by serving forth history and national culture in the place of frozen meals and “cosmopolitan cocktails.”104 In the second half of the twentieth century—a time when national and imperial fictions appeared to be unraveling, and when consumers viewed global, industrial food systems with increasing suspicion—food experts and home cooks around the world began to dig up their culinary roots, combining personal explorations with a desire to return society to an imagined familiarity and domesticity by harnessing seemingly stable aspects of food culture.

Conclusion : Redefining Culinary Authority

30 In the Brezhnev era, Pokhlëbkin’s cookbooks and gastronomic prose embodied a new current in Soviet food writing, advocating cultural renovation through a recapturing of national traditions and lost wisdom. While other food writers took part in this

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movement, Pokhlëbkin remained its most prominent representative and now stands in the pantheon of great Russian food writers. His work represents neither the science‑and‑industry gospel of Stalin‑era socialist realist foodways nor the just‑add‑water “rationality” of the Khrushchev era. Rather, Pokhlëbkin aimed to revive historical traditions, enriching the contemporary table with dishes tested by time and the experience of countless cooks. After 1991, he persisted to believe that Russians ought to know and rely upon their own national traditions, while embracing the best of what other cultures had to offer, in order to sharpen their own sense of national identity, to live healthier lives, and to better understand other peoples. Tapping into a vein of nationalism and a desire for historical continuity that ran from the Brezhnev era through the 1990s, Pokhlëbkin promised that respecting and perpetuating Russian traditions would provide the physical, moral, and cultural nourishment he and many of his fellow Russians craved.

31 In championing tradition, packing his books with historical information, and appearing to unmask truths about foods familiar and forgotten, Pokhlëbkin desired to recalibrate his reader’s conceptions of authority in the culinary realm. Russians, should, in Pokhlëbkin’s view, set aside trendy diets and convenience foods, instead returning to (or creating anew) a life in which good food plays a key role. He thus rejected the earlier paradigm in which dining required constant expert mediation by food industry officials, nutrition scientists, and food service workers ; this, Pokhlëbkin believed, had cut Russians off from cultural heritage and inherited wisdom. He turned his back on modern authorities, cataloguing instead the fundamental skills and information necessary to eat and live well independently of bureaucrats and specialists.

32 Pokhlëbkin wanted to enlighten the Russian people, who supposedly had so long depended upon prepared foods and meager rations that they could no longer even properly boil noodles. By taking this approach, Pokhlëbkin rearranged the hierarchy of trust and authority that existed in the Soviet kitchen.105 From the 1930s through the 1960s, science, medicine, and industry reigned supreme, with experts offering advice that claimed to tap into this necessary body of knowledge. In Pokhlëbkin’s conception, however, history and experience rested at the top of the hierarchy, his own writings serving as the conduit for this information. Pokhlëbkin’s work thus attempted to alter one of the trust relationships that guided food choices within the USSR, as he sought to undermine the reader’s faith in scientists, doctors, and industry, while establishing his own credibility through his historical and culinary expertise. Moreover, having thus established his authority, Pokhlëbkin then granted access to this font of wisdom, thereby empowering the reader in gastronomic matters. Pokhlëbkin revealed, to echo historian of science Steven Shapin, “the facts of the matter,” offering up the tools one would need to navigate (or abandon) the complex world of modern, urban food culture. 106

33 The fact that Pokhlëbkin’s message held and continues to hold so much appeal not only points to cultural continuities between the Brezhnev era and the first post‑Soviet decades ; it also suggests ambivalence toward the advances of the modern era, at least in the sphere of food culture. Had all his readers retained their faith in science and industry and remained comfortable with allowing these entities to put food on their plates, Pokhlëbkin would likely have faded into obscurity. Instead, portions of the Russian public proved ready to follow Pokhlëbkin on a search for a new authority, a new source of knowledge, which could offer an alternative to standardized cafeteria

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chow, prepared foods, and the seeming cultural instability of late modernity. Pokhlëbkin’s gastronomic historicism served as encouragement to Russian readers seeking to reclaim a lost or vanishing national heritage, while tapping into a broadly shared desire for historical continuity and stability that took shape both within and outside of Russia at the end of the twentieth century.

NOTES

1. All translations from Russian are the author’s own unless otherwise indicated. 2. Elena Mushkina, Taina kurliandskogo piroga [The Secret of the Courland Pie] (M. : Severnyi palomnik, 2008), 300. 3. Iurii Poliakov, “Liudi nashei nauki. Mysli i suzhdeniia istorika [The People of Our Scholarship. A Historian’s Thoughts and Judgements],” Svobodnaia mysl´ 21, 2 (February 2002) : 89‑91. Poliakov claims Pokhlëbkin slapped Director Mikhail Khvostov after he reprimanded Pokhlëbkin for not fulfilling a labor plan. Other accounts hold that Pokhlëbkin publicly berated Khvostov for encouraging timeserving and hampering researchers’ productivity. Smert´ kulinara : Vilíam Pokhlëbkin [The Death of a Culinary Expert : Vilíam Pokhlëbkin], dir. Mikhail Rogovoi (M. : Telekanal Rossiia, 2005), online video, Telekanal Rossiia, http://russia.tv/video/show/video_id/ 90793/brand_id/4747. 4. In childhood Pokhlëbkin longed to play in the kitchen, although the adults around him refused to allow him to explore such “girly” interests. He found the opportunity to develop his culinary skills only during his service as a regimental cook in the Second World War. V.V. Pokhlëbkin, Tainy khoroshei kukhni [The Secrets of Good Cooking] (M. : Molodaia Gvardiia, 1979), 12‑19. 5. Alexei Yurchak argues that from the mid‑1950s to the mid‑1980s for many Soviet citizens “belonging to a tight milieu of svoi, which involved constant obshchenie, was more meaningful and valuable than other forms of interaction, sociality, goals, and achievements, including those of a professional career.” Such socializing included endless “around the table drinking‑eating‑talking.” Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More : The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2006), 149. See also Vladimir Shlapentokh, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People : Changing Values in Post‑Stalin Russia (New York : Oxford University Press, 1989), 153‑63. Reading habits are difficult to gauge, but the multiple editions and large print runs of Pokhlëbkin’s major works suggest that publishers found them salable. By 1991, his Chai, ego tipy, svoistva i upotreblenie [Tea, Its Types, Properties and Use] (M. : Pishchevaia promeshlennost´, 1968) had been published in three Russian editions, as well as Tatar and Polish ; Natsionalńye kukhni nashikh narodov [The National Cuisines of our Peoples] appeared in multiple Russian editions, and in Finnish, German, English, Portuguese, Croatian, and Hungarian ; and Tainy khoroshei kukhni appeared in six Russian editions. Bibliografiia proizvedenii V.V. Pokhlëbkina i otzyvov na nikh v otechestvennoi i zarubezhnoi presse, 1948‑1999 gg. [A Bibliography of the Works of V.V. Pokhlëbkin and Reviews of Them in Domestic and Foreign Press, 1948‑1999] (M. : N.p., 1999), 59, 63‑64. Joyce Toomre notes that over one million Russian‑language copies of Natsionalńye kukhni were published during the Soviet period, making it one of the most heavily published Soviet cookbooks, alongside Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche [The Book about Delicious and Healthy Food]. Toomre, “Food and National

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Identity in Soviet Armenia,” in Food in Russian History and Culture, ed. Musya Glants and Joyce Toomre (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1997), 213n39. 6. For an overview of the stagnation paradigm, see Edwin Bacon, “Reconsidering Brezhnev,” in Brezhnev Reconsidered, eds. Edwin Bacon and Mark Sandle (New York : Palgrave MacMillan, 2002), 1‑21. Juliane Fürst discusses recent challenges to “stagnation” in “Where Did All the Normal People Go ? : Another Look at the Soviet 1970s,” Kritika 14, 3 (Summer 2013) : 621‑640. 7. My focus on concepts of authority in cooking advice literature is influenced by Alison K. Smith’s groundbreaking work on debates over the Russian diet in the prerevolutionary era. Smith, Recipes for Russia : Food and Nationhood under the Tsars, (DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press, 2008). 8. Denis Kozlov, “The Historical Turn in Late Soviet Culture : Retrospectivism, Factography, Doubt, 1953‑91,” Kritika 2, 3 (Summer 2001) : 578. Catriona Kelly has identified a desire among segments of the late Soviet intelligentsia to create continuity between their own ideas, experiences, and lifestyles, and those of their nineteenth‑century predecessors. Kelly, Refining Russia : Advice Literature, Polite Culture and Gender from Catherine to Yeltsin (New York : Oxford University Press, 2001), 337‑45. Andrew Jenks treats the Palekh artists’ community as an encapsulation of the Brezhnev‑era use of primordial Russianness as the foundation of Soviet Russian identity. Andrew Jenks, “Palekh and the Forging of a Russian Nation in the Brezhnev Era,” Cahiers du Monde russe 44, 4 (October‑December 2003) : 629‑55. 9. Kozlov, “Historical Turn in Late Soviet Culture,” 578. 10. Jenks, “Palekh and the Forging of a Russian Nation,” 642. 11. Yitzhak Brudny, Reinventing Russia : Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953‑1991 (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2000), 4‑15. 12. Ibid., 150‑91. Musya Glants argues that representations of food in late Soviet visual art indicate a desire for a return to national traditions, similar to that expressed in the Village Prose movement. Glants, “Food as Art : Painting in Late Soviet Russia,” in Glants and Toomre, Food in Russian History and Culture, 215‑237. 13. Jenks, “Palekh and the Forging of a Russian Nation,” 654. In the mid‑1970s Alexander Yanov predicted the intensification of the regime’s co‑optation of nationalism. Yanov, The Russian New Right : Right‑Wing Ideologies in the Contemporary USSR, trans. Stephen P. Dunn (Berkeley : Institute of International Studies, 1978). 14. As anthropologists have demonstrated, “national” cuisines are elaborate cultural constructions, used most often to define the character and boundaries of the national community. See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine : Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 30, 1 (January 1988) : 3‑24. More recently, Alison K. Smith has argued that a national cuisine’s construction is influenced especially by “conceptions of ‘tradition,’ new products and modes of production and consumption brought about by trade and other contacts with foreigners, conscious discussion of a national cuisine, and conscious efforts to codify that cuisine.” Smith, “National Cuisines,” in The Oxford Handbook of Food History, ed. Jeffery M. Pilcher (New York : Oxford, 2012), 445. Also see Smith on the articulation of a Russian national cuisine in the prerevoluionary period, and this cuisine’s connection to nationalist ideologies : Smith, “National Cuisine and Nationalist Politics : V.F. Odoevskii and ‘Doctor Puf,’ 1844‑45,” Kritika 10, 2 (Spring 2009) : 239‑260. 15. Halina Rothstein and Robert A. Rothstein, “The Beginnings of the Soviet Culinary Arts,” in Glants and Toomre, Food in Russian History and Culture, 177‑194. 16. Edward Geist, “Cooking Bolshevik : Anastas Mikoian and the Making of the Book about Delicious and Healthy Food,” Russian Review 71, 2 (April 2012) : 295. 17. Ibid., 301. 18. Jukka Gronow and Sergey Zhuravlev, “The Book of Tasty and Healthy Food : The Establishment of Soviet Haute Cuisine,” in Educated Tastes : Food, Drink, and Connoisseur

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Culture, ed. Jeremy Strong (Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 27. See also Gronow, Caviar with Champagne : Common Luxury and the Ideals of the Good Life in Stalin’s Russia (New York : Berg, 2003) ; Irina Glushchenko, Obshchepit : Mikoian i sovetskaia kukhnia [Obshchepit : Mikoyan and Soviet Cuisine] (M. : Vysshaia shkola ekonomiki, 2010). 19. Geist, “Cooking Bolshevik,” 295‑296. I use Geist’s translation of this volume’s title, which more accurately reflects the grammatical construction of the Russian title than the common English rendering, Book of Tasty and Healthy Food. 20. For a brief overview of the development of Soviet cookbook publishing, see Gronow and Zhuravlev, “Book of Tasty and Healthy Food.” 21. Natalia B. Lebina, “‘Plius destalinizatsiia vsei edy...’ Vkusovye prioritety epokhi khrushchevskikh reform : Opyt istoriko‑antropologicheskogo analiza [‘Plus the Destalinization of All Food…’ The Taste Priorities of the Era of Khrushchev’s Reforms : The Experience of Historical‑Anthropologicical Analysis],” Teoriia mody 21 (Fall 2011) : 213‑42. 22. Susan E. Reid, “Cold War in the Kitchen : Gender and the De‑Stalinization of Consumer Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev,” Slavic Review 61, 2 (Summer 2002) : 218. 23. Reid argues that during the Khrushchev era the Soviet central government and consumer goods industry emphasized making daily life more “rational” and “socialist,” beginning with the kitchen. Susan E. Reid, “The Khrushchev Kitchen : Domesticating the Scientific‑Technological Revolution,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, 2 (April 2005) : 289‑316. 24. Catriona Kelly asserts that cafeteria and restaurant menus were standardized throughout the USSR. Kelly, “Leningradskaia kukhnia, ili La cuisine leningradaise—protivorechie v terminakh ? [Leningrad Cuisine, or La Cuisine leningradaise—A Contradiction in Terms ?]” Antropologicheskii forum 15 (2011) : 269. Gronow and Zhuravlev emphasize the variety of cuisines and dishes represented in post‑Stalin Soviet cookbooks, although they note that the difficulties involved in procuring foodstuffs limited home cooks’ abilities to prepare exotic dishes. Gronow and Zhuravlev, “Book of Tasty and Healthy Food,” 51. On Brezhnev‑era food shortages, see Anna Kushkova, “Surviving in the Time of Deficit,” in Soviet and Post‑Soviet Identities, eds. Mark Bassin and Catriona Kelly (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2012), 278‑95. On the influence of foreign and domestic travel on Soviet worldviews in the Brezhnev era, see Donald J. Raleigh, Soviet Baby Boomers : An Oral History of Russia’s Cold War Generation (New York : Oxford University Press, 2012), 210‑17. 25. Benedict Anderson coined the now ubiquitous term “imagined community” as a means of describing modern conceptions of “nation” in 1983. For his definition, see Anderson, Imagined Communities : Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London and New York : Verso, 1991), 5‑7. Scholars have likewise emphasized the “imagined” nature of national cuisines. Citing a number of fellow anthropologists, Sidney W. Mintz and Christine M. DuBois, for example, write, “once imagined, such [ethnic or national] cuisines provide added concreteness to the idea of national or ethnic identity. Talking and writing about national food can then add to a cuisine’s conceptual solidity and coherence.” Mintz and Dubois, “The Anthropology of Food and Eating,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002) : 109. On national cuisines as cultural constructs, also see note 14 above. 26. For example, the Planeta publishing house released a series of illustrated recipe cards as part of its mission to propagandize “the achievements of our country and brother countries in the spheres of economy, science and culture, the Soviet way of life, the peoples’ struggle against imperialism and colonialism, for peace and national independence.” GARF (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii), f. R‑9640, op. 1, d. 1, l. 1. Some ethnic cuisines cookbooks professed their commitment to preserving traditional culture. See, for example, A.V. Zotova, Mordovskaia kukhnia [Mordovian Cooking] (Saransk : Mordovskoe knizhnoe izdatel´stvo, 1977) ; N.I. Kovalev, Russkaia kulinariia [Russian Cuisine] (M. : Ekonomika, 1972). Such texts most often reflected what Nicholas V. Riasanovsky describes as the “Soviet solution” to the nationalities problem : the

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belief that “a transformed unitary society” could be achieved “best not by mixing different peoples in different stages of development but by having each nationality evolve to its own highest level, from which each could consciously and freely join others in a new higher synthesis.” Riasanovsky, Russian Identities : A Historical Survey (New York : Oxford University Press, 2005), 221‑22. 27. V.V. Pokhlëbkin, “Labardan ili treska [Haberdine or Cod],” Nedelia, 17‑23 May 1971, 10 ; Pokhlëbkin, “Chudesa na postnom masle [Miracles with Vegetable Oil],” Nedelia, 3‑9 January 1972, 14‑15. 28. V.V. Pokhlëbkin, “Sousy [Sauces],” Nedelia, 24‑30 March 1975, 20‑21 ; Pokhlëbkin, “Salaty [Salads],” Nedelia, 16‑22 January 1978, 22‑23. 29. On the standardization and quality of late Soviet public dining, see Kelly, “Leningradskaia kukhnia” ; Glushchenko, Obshchepit, 180‑192. 30. Pokhlëbkin, Tainy khoroshei kukhni, 6. 31. Kushkova, “Surviving in the Time of Deficit” ; Kushkova “Sovetskoe proshloe skvoz´ vospominaniia o prodovol´stvennom defitsite [The Soviet Past Through Memories of Food Deficits],” Neprikosnovennyi zapas 64, 2 (2009), http://magazines.russ.ru/nz/2009/2/ku10.html. 32. V.V. Pokhlëbkin, Zanimatelńaia kulinariia [Cooking is Fun] (M. : Legkaia i pishchevaia promyshlennost´, 1983), 19. 33. Ibid., 7‑10 ; V.V. Pokhlëbkin, “Elektricheskaia kukhnia [Electric Cooking],” Nedelia, 2‑8 October 1978, 14‑15 ; Pokhlëbkin, Kukhnia veka [Cuisine of the Century] (M. : Polifakt, 2000), 413‑14. On single‑burner stoves, see N.B. Lebina, Entsiklopediia banalńostei : Sovetskaia povsednevnost´ : Kontury, simvoly, znaki [An Encyclopedia of Banalities : The Soviet Everyday : Contours, Symbols, Signs] (SPb. : Dmitrii Bulanin, 2006), 186‑87, 291 ; Catriona Kelly, “Making a Home on the Neva : Domestic Space, Memory, and Local Identity in Leningrad and St. Petersburg, 1957‑Present,” Laboratorium 3, 3 (2011) : 62‑63. 34. The state vowed repeatedly to “emancipate” women by socializing elements of domestic labor, thereby relieving women’s burden and allowing them to participate more fully in the workforce and the social‑political life of the country. The “double‑burden,” however, persisted throughout the Soviet era. Barbara Alpern Engel, “Women and the State,” in The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 3, The Twentieth Century, ed. Ronald Grigor Suny (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006), 468‑94, esp. 487‑490. As Susan E. Reid suggests, in the postwar Soviet Union, “emancipation” meant, in real terms, that women worked outside of the home while maintaining primary responsibility for domestic matters. The modern Soviet housewife’s alleged need for advice to make family responsibilities more manageable drove a postwar boom in advice literature that continued into the 1970s. Reid, “Khrushchev Kitchen,” 296‑299. 35. See for example, Pokhlëbkin, Zanimatelńaia kulinariia, 3. 36. Cooking columns appeared most often in women’s journals including Rabotnitsa and Krest íanka or alongside articles on women’s fashion and housekeeping in publications such as Nedelia. Soviet home cookbooks had, at least since the Stalin years, largely addressed housewives. Geist, “Cooking Bolshevik,” 309. Brezhnev‑era cookbooks continued to target the khoziaika, sometimes echoing the title of Elena Molokhovets’ legendary prerevolutionary Russian cookbook, Podarok molodym khoziaikam [A Gift to Young Housewives]. See, for example, I.S. Kravtsov, Sovety molodym khoziaikam [Advice for Young Housewives] (Odessa : Maiak, 1970) ; V.I. Kapustina, S.M. Ziabreva, and T.V. Beznogova, Sekrety khoroshei kukhni : Sovety molodoi khoziaike [The Secrets of Good Cooking : Advice for Young Housewives] (M. : Pishchevaia promyshlennost´, 1977) ; A.G. Bendel´, Kukhnia molodoi khoziaiki [The Young Housewife’s Kitchen] (Sverdlovsk : Sredne‑Ural´skoe knizhnoe izdatel´stvo, 1982). On Elena Molokhovets, see Joyce Toomre, ed. and trans., Classic Russian Cooking : Elena Molokhovets A Gift to Young Housewives (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1992).

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37. V.V. Pokhlëbkin, Natsionalńye kukhni nashikh narodov : Osnovnye kulinarnye napravlenie, ikh istoriia i osobennosti : Retseptura [The National Cuisines of Our Peoples : The Fundamental Culinary Currents, Their History and Specificities : Recipes] (M. : Pishchevaia promyshlennost´, 1978). Although national cuisine cookbooks began appearing in quantity during the 1950s, the genre did not come into its own until the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the number and variety of these publications increased considerably. Pokhlëbkin’s Natsionalńye kukhni was under consideration for publication as early as 1974, but did not appear until several years later apparently because Pokhlëbkin fell ill and could not complete the manuscript on time. GARF, f. R‑9659, op. 2, d. 108, l. 6. 38. Avgust Pokhlëbkin (son of V.V. Pokhlëbkin), in discussion with the author, Podol´sk, Russia, 15 July 2012. Natsionalńye kukhni is divided into eleven chapters, each dedicated to a cuisine or group of cuisines : Russian ; Ukrainian ; Belorussian ; Moldavian ; Caucasian ; Uzbek and Tajik ; Turkmen ; Kazakh and Kyrgyz ; Baltic ; North Caucasian, Volga, Permian, Karelian, and Yakut ; Subarctic, Mongolian, and Jewish. 39. Pokhlëbkin, Natsionalńye kukhni, 124, 73‑74. 40. Pokhlëbkin placed tiuria in the pantheon of traditional Russian soups alongside shchi, rassol ńik, solianka, okroshka, and botvinía. Ibid., 13 ; Pokhlëbkin, “Shchi, borshchi, i prochie supy [Shchi, Borshch, and Other Soups],” Nedelia, 22‑28 January 1973, 14‑15. Other Soviet food writers rejected tiuria as an unwholesome relic of Russia’s peasant past. A.I. Titiunnik and Iu.M. Novozhenov, Sovetkskaia natsionalńaia i zarubezhnaia kukhnia [Soviet National and Foreign Cuisines] (M. : Vysshaia shkola, 1977), 14 ; Kovalev, Russkaia kulinariia, 4. 41. Pokhlëbkin, Natsionalńye kukhni, 8‑12. 42. V.V. Pokhlëbkin, “Pirogi,” Nedelia, 16‑22 August 1971, 19 ; Pokhlëbkin, “Lesnye lakomstva [Forest Delicacies],” Turist 8 (1974), 23. 43. Pokhlëbkin, Tainy khoroshei kukhni, 25‑26. 44. Ibid., 21. 45. V.V. Pokhlëbkin, O kulinarii ot A do Ia : Slovar´‑spravochnik [On Cooking from A to Z] (Minsk : Polymia, 1988), 7. 46. Pokhlëbkin, Natsionalńye kukhni, 12‑14. Experts on the prerevolutionary Russian diet tend to select the same foods as typically Russian. R.E.F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt : A Social and Economic History of Russia (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1984) ; Toomre, Introduction to Classic Russian Cooking. 47. Pokhlëbkin, Natsionalńye kukhni, 8‑12. 48. V.V. Pokhlëbkin, “Kitaiskaia kukhnia [Chinese Cuisine],” Aziia i Afrika segodnia 4 (1981) : 50‑52 49. Pokhlëbkin, Chai, ego tipy, svoistva, upotreblenie, 94, 65‑73. 50. Pokhlëbkin, Natsionalńye kukhni, 3. Here, Pokhlëbkin taps into the “Soviet solution” (Riasanovsky’s term) for the nationalities problem, as described in note 26 above. 51. V.V. Pokhlëbkin, introduction to Shotlandskaia kukhnia [Scottish Cuisine], by Jane Warren (M. : Legkaia i pishchevaia promyshlennost´, 1983), 3‑6 ; Pokhlëbkin, introduction to Bliuda kitaiskoi kukhni [The Dishes of Chinese Cuisine], by Li Tsin (M. : Legkaia i pishchevaia promyshlennost´, 1981), 3‑19 ; Pokhlëbkin, introduction to Finskaia natsionalńaia kukhnia [Finnish National Cuisine], by Hilkka Uusivirta, trans. and ed. Pokhlëbkin (M. : Legkaia i pishchevaia promyshlennost´, 1982). 52. Pokhlëbkin, O kulinarii ot A do Ia, 3‑7. 53. Pokhlëbkin, Tainy khoroshei kukhni, 5, 7‑8. 54. Ibid., 27‑28. 55. The Soviet Ministry of Trade supported opening specialized fish stores and fish counters in food stores throughout the USSR during the 1970s. See for example, RGAE (Rossiiskoi gosudarstvennoi arkhiv ekonomiki), f. 465, op. 1, d. 1007, l. 14‑15. In 1976 “fish day” was

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introduced at cafeterias across the country as a means of making up for shortages of meat. Glushchenko, Obshchepit, 186. On the impact of environmental degradation on Soviet fisheries, see D.J. Peterson, Troubled Lands : The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction (Boulder : Westview Press, 1993), 76‑78. Meat shortages persisted throughout the Brezhnev years. The Soviet Ministry of Trade addressed this problem at trade conferences and saw it appear in consumer complaints. See for example, RGAE, f. 465, op. 1, d. 1007, l. 13 ; RGAE, f. 465, op. 1, d. 3082, l. 75. 56. Pokhlëbkin, “Labardan ili treska” ; Pokhlëbkin, “Dary Neptuna na nashem stole [Neptune’s Gifts on Our Table],” Nedelia, 2-8 July 1973, 14-15. 57. V.V. Pokhlëbkin, “Varen´e [Preserves],” Nedelia, 20‑26 September 1971, 14 ; Pokhlëbkin, “Solen´ia [Salted Foods],” Nedelia, 18‑24 September 1972, 14‑15. 58. V.V. Pokhlëbkin, Moia kukhnia i moe meniu [My Cooking and My Menu] (M. : Tsentrpoligraf, 1999), 245‑246. This is a collection of previously unpublished recipes and essays Pokhlëbkin wrote during the 1980s and 1990s. 59. Pokhlëbkin, like other Soviet cultural producers, faced censorship and ideological constraints. He could not publish newspaper columns that featured goods absent from Soviet stores, and the first edition of O kulinarii ot A do Ia was stripped of certain entries (e.g., “Vodka”) in order to conform with Gorbachev‑era anti‑alcohol campaigns. Smert´ kulinara ; Mushkina, Taina kurliandskogo piroga, 306‑7. 60. Pokhlëbkin, Kukhnia veka, 301, 330. 61. Pokhlëbkin, Moia kukhnia i moe meniu, 55, 276‑77. 62. Ibid., 269. 63. Ibid., 324. 64. Jenks, “Palekh and the Forging of a Russian Nation,” 654. 65. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, 162‑63. 66. Pokhlëbkin, Moia kukhnia i moe meniu, 108‑109 ; Pokhlëbkin, O kulinarii ot A do Ia, 3‑7. 67. Pokhlëbkin, Moia kukhnia i moe meniu, 108‑109. 68. On “cosmopolitanism” as part of Stalin’s persecution of Soviet Jewry, see Elena Zubkova, Russia After the War : Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945‑1957, ed. and trans. Hugh Ragsdale (Armonk, NY : M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 135‑38. 69. Pokhlëbkin, Kukhnia veka, 367, 472. 70. Pokhlëbkin, Moia kukhnia i moe meniu, 111. 71. Ibid., 183. 72. Melissa L. Caldwell, “The Taste of Nationalism : Food Politics in Postsocialist Moscow,” Ethnos 67, 3 (2002) : 39. 73. Ibid. 74. Melissa L. Caldwell, “Feeding the Body and Nourishing the Soul : Natural Foods in Postsocialist Russia,” Food, Culture and Society 10, 1 (2007) : 43‑71 ; Caldwell, Dacha Idylls : Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2011), 74‑100. 75. V.V. Pokhlëbkin, Istoriia vodki [A History of Vodka] (M. : Inter‑verso, 1991), 224, 236‑37. 76. Ibid., 258‑59. 77. V.V. Pokhlëbkin, Chai i vodka v istorii Rossii [Tea and Vodka in Russia’s History] (Krasnoiarsk : Krasnoiarskoe knizhnoe izdatel´stvo, 1995), 288. This is a revised edition of Chai, ego tipy, svoistva, upotreblenie, published together with Istoriia vodki. Darra Goldstein notes that tea, introduced in the nineteenth century, developed a strong presence in Georgia during the Soviet era when the Georgia was the USSR’s leading tea producer. Goldstein, The Georgian Feast : The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1999), 6. 78. Denis Kozlov posits that “nationalist images” emerged in response to a “disturbed consciousness” that developed from intense historical inquiry. He writes, “While nationalism

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does not tell the whole story, it is probably true that the late Soviet historical debate proved culturally pluralistic and politically divisive. Having started a collective reflection, it diverged across myriad social, ethical, cultural, educational, political, and ethnic differences.” Kozlov, “Historical Turn in Late Soviet Culture,” 600. 79. “Volshebniaia kukhnia Pokhlëbkina [Pokhlëbkin’s Magical Cookery],” V mire knig 4 (1982) : 65 ; “Borshch nashei zimy [The Borshch of Our Winter],” Trud, 17 January 2008, 32 ; Anastasiia Barashkova, “Syrnaia golovushka [A Little Ball of Cheese],” Moskovskii komsomolets, 16 September 2007, 41 ; Irina Mak, “Sobrat´, no ne solit´ [To Gather, Not to Salt],” Izvestiia, 25 November 2005, 29. On Molokhovets see Toomre, Classic Russian Cooking. 80. See for example, Tat´iana Mar´ina, “Tortik dlia liubimoi babushki [A Cake for a Beloved Granny],” Sankt‑Petersburgskie vedomosti, 29 September 2010, 6 ; Irina Mak, “Naslazhdaias´ zhemchuzhnoi kashei [Enjoy Pearl Porridge],” Izvestiia, 3 December 2010, 7 ; Svetlana Gromova, “Osobennosti russkogo vkusa [The Peculiarities of Russian Taste],” Komsomol´skaia pravda, 28 April 2003, 10. As of September 2012, a search for Pokhlëbkin’s name on celebrity chef Maksim Syrnikov’s popular LiveJournal blog yielded over 130 items. Kare_l (Syrnikov), Reaktsionno‑kulinarnyi ZhZhurnal (blog), Erreur ! Référence de lien hypertexte non valide. 81. Zinovii Zinik, “Emigratsiia kak literaturnyi priem [Emigration as a Literary Device],” Literaturnaia gazeta, 20 March 1991, 11. 82. Petr Vail´, “Veselyi stol [The Happy Table],” in Pokhlëbkin, Kukhnia veka, 7. 83. Aleksandr Genis, “Khleb i zrelishche [Bread and Circuses],” Zvezda, 1 January 2000, 220 ; Genis, “Pokhlëbkinu [To Pokhlëbkin],” in Kolobok : Kulinarnye puteshchestviia [Kolobok : Culinary Journeys] (M. : AST, 2006), 206‑219. 84. I.A. Sokolov, Chai i chainaia torgovlia v Rossii, 1790‑1919 gg. [Tea and the Tea Trade in Russia, 1790‑1919] (M. : Sputnik, 2011), 41. 85. David Christian, Review of A History of Vodka by V.V. Pokhlëbkin, Slavic Review 53, 1 (Spring 1994) : 245‑47 ; Geraldine Sherman, “Varmints Made off with Their Drink : A History of Vodka,” Globe and Mail, 23 January 1993. Mark Lawrence Schrad offers a detailed discussion of the inaccuracies in—and controversies surrounding—Istoriia vodki in Vodka Politics : Alcohol, Autocracy, and the Secret History of the Russian State (New York : Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2014). 86. Boris Rodionov, Bol´shoi obman : Pravda i lozh´ o russkoi vodke [A Big Fraud : Truth and Lies about Russian Vodka] (M. : AST, 2011). 87. Maksim Syrnikov, “Eshche raz pro kundiumy [Once More on Kundiumy],” Sait Maksima Syrnikova [Maksim Syrnikov’s Website], last modified 16 August 2012, http://syrnikov.ru/ index.php? option=com_content&view=article&id=76:2011-12-06-06-36-00&catid=1:latest‑news&Itemid=50. 88. Warren Belasco, “Food and Social Movements,” in Pilcher, Oxford Handbook of Food History, 482. 89. Alice Weinreb, “The Tastes of Home : Cooking the Lost Heimat in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s,” German Studies Review 34, 2 (2011) : 359. 90. Kate Colquhoun, Taste : The Story of Britain through its Cooking (London : Bloomsbury, 2007), 361‑364. 91. Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty : A Social History of Eating in Modern America (New York : Oxford University Press, 1993), 213‑26 ; Donna R. Gabaccia, We Are What We Eat : Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1998), 175‑201 ; Matthew Frye Jacobsen, Roots Too : White Ethnic Revival in Post‑Civil Rights America (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 2006). 92. Wendy Bracewell, “Eating Up Yugoslavia : Cookbooks and Consumption in Socialist Yugoslavia,” in Communism Unwrapped : Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe, eds. Paulina Bren and Mary Neuberger (New York : Oxford University Press, 2012), 185‑91.

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93. Steve Penfold, “Fast Food,” in Pilcher, Oxford Handbook of Food History, 294. 94. Carlo Petrini, Slow Food : The Case for Taste, trans. William McCuaig (New York : Columbia University Press, 2003),1‑7 ; Geoff Andrews, The Slow Food Story : Politics and Pleasure (Montreal and Kingston : McGill‑Queen’s University Press, 2008), 11‑12. 95. On Slow Food ideology, see Andrews, Slow Food Story, 3‑64. 96. Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food : An Eater’s Manifesto (New York : Penguin, 2008), 1‑15. 97. Michael Pollan, The Omnivore’s Dilemma : A Natural History of Four Meals (New York : Penguin, 2006), 2. 98. Ibid., 5. 99. Pokhlëbkin, Kukhnia veka, 438. 100. Ibid. 101. I enjoyed the privilege of visiting Pokhlëbkin’s former home (in Podol´sk, Russia), now the residence of his son, Avgust Pokhlëbkin, during the summer of 2012. I am grateful to Avgust for this opportunity and for his generous hospitality. 102. Pokhlëbkin, discussion. 103. Caldwell, Dacha Idylls, 78‑80. 104. Pokhlëbkin, Kukhnia veka, 394. 105. Steven Shapin argues that in the “credibility‑economy” claims to authority can be strengthened through two different modes of accessibility : “On the one hand, where we have independent access to the ‘facts of the matter,’ we may be able to use that knowledge to gauge the claims of experts. On the other hand, the representation of expert knowledge as far beyond lay accessibility can serve as a recommendation for its own truth.” Shapin, Never Pure : Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 30. 106. Ibid., 30.

ABSTRACTS

This article uses the writings of influential Soviet food expert V.V. Pokhlëbkin (1923‑2000) to explore the intersection of food culture, national identity, and conceptions of authority in late Soviet Russia. Pokhlëbkin began in the Brezhnev years to push Russian food culture away from some of the central conventions of accepted Soviet culinary practice. Eschewing “scientific” modes of dining approved by Soviet nutritional and medical experts, Pokhlëbkin insisted on rooting culinary decisions in historical tradition and custom. His work thus represented the gastronomic side of a larger “historical turn” taking place in late Soviet culture. This search for historical continuity embodied a desire for stable national and cultural roots, and a reaction against the upheavals of the previous half‑century. After 1991, Pokhlëbkin committed more fully to nationalist visions for Russia’s cultural renewal. Not solely a product of the Brezhnev years, then, this gastronomic historicism persisted through the decades, cutting across the ruptures of perestroika and collapse. More broadly, Pokhlëbkin’s views found parallels in contemporaneous public discourses about food in the US and across Europe. These commonalities suggest that, in the late twentieth century, Russia shared with other industrialized societies a late‑modern

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malaise that expressed itself in part through a search for historically stable, nationally rooted food cultures.

Cet article s’appuie sur les écrits de V.V. Pohlëbkin (1923‑2000), influent expert soviétique en gastronomie, pour explorer les interconnections de la culture alimentaire avec l’identité nationale et les conceptions de l’autorité en Russie à la fin de l’époque soviétique. Dans les années Brežnev, Pohlëbkin a commencé à détacher la culture alimentaire russe de certains des grands principes de la pratique culinaire soviétique. Prenant ses distances avec les modèles « scientifiques » de repas approuvés par les médecins et nutritionnistes soviétiques, Pohlëbkin a insisté pour inscrire les décisions culinaires de base dans la tradition et les coutumes historiques. Son travail a ainsi représenté le volet gastronomique d’un « tournant historique » plus important qui marqua alors la culture à la fin de l’époque soviétique. Cette quête de continuité historique exprimait un désir de racines culturelles et nationales stables et une réaction aux bouleversements survenus pendant la première moitié du siècle. Après 1991, Pohlëbkin s’est engagé davantage encore dans les visions nationalistes du renouveau culturel de la Russie. Cet « historicisme gastronomique » n’a pas été le fait des seules années Brežnev, il a perduré au cours des décennies, passant au travers des ruptures de la perestroïka et de l’effondrement. Plus globalement, les vues de Pohlëbkin avaient leurs parallèles dans les discours publics contemporains sur l’alimentation aux États‑Unis et partout en Europe. Ceci laisse à penser qu’à la fin du XXe siècle, la Russie partageait avec d’autres sociétés industrialisées un malaise postmoderne qui trouvait partiellement son expression dans la quête de cultures alimentaires traditionnelles nationales historiquement stables.

AUTHOR

ADRIANNE K. JACOBS University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, [email protected]

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De nouveaux fronts pour la mission civilisatrice

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Faites tomber les murs ! La politique civilisatrice de l’ère Brežnev dans les villages kirghiz Tear down the walls! Civilizing Kyrgyz villages Brezhnev way

Moritz Florin Traduction : Geneviève Bégou

1 La lecture du 9e plan quinquennal de l’URSS révèle un poste surprenant : la livraison de 6,5 millions de mètres linéaires de clôture en lattis à la République socialiste soviétique kirghize pour la période 1971‑1975. En l’occurrence, il ne s’agissait nullement de treillis de fer barbelé mais de clôtures avec des « finitions attrayantes »1. Quelle raison pouvait‑elle bien pousser les habitants de la République socialiste soviétique kirghize à s’équiper de tant de clôtures bien fignolées ?

2 L’objectif était de remplacer les duvale, ces murs de clôture qui ceignaient traditionnellement les cours et jardins des maisons kirghizes et ouzbèkes, en particulier dans le Sud de la République kirghize. Le but officiel de la vaste campagne de démolition lancée en 1971 était d’« ouvrir » ces maisons autrefois invisibles de l’extérieur. Les habitants devaient maintenant se procurer les fameuses clôtures en lattis.

3 Cette restructuration des villages à coup de bulldozer n’était nullement une fin en soi mais plutôt l’élément d’un tardif programme soviétique de civilisation par l’ouverture, le contrôle social mutuel et la consommation. La suppression des duvale était certes une mesure coercitive, non sans rappeler la campagne de dévoilement des femmes dans les années 1920 : il fallait rendre visible l’invisible, contrôler ce qui jusqu’alors était caché aux yeux de l’État2. Si la religion en Asie centrale est bien comme Devin DeWeese le suggère, avant tout un culte du foyer, on peut considérer cette campagne comme la dernière attaque soviétique contre l’islam3. Toutefois, la promotion de clôtures en lattis, de lave‑linge, de téléviseurs, de chaises et de tables comme indicateurs d’une modernité universelle, dénote une nouvelle approche. Démolir des murs ne signifiait pas la même chose que « dévoiler » ou « démasquer »4. Le présent article étudie une politique de civilisation à la Brežnev – po brežnevski – moins violente, moins destructrice mais en fin de compte moins fructueuse que celles de l’ère stalinienne.

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4 Contrairement au tableau de stagnation brossé par certains chercheurs, les années 1970 furent une époque de grand dynamisme et de changement dans les zones rurales5. Sous Brežnev, le nombre des « aïl » [villages6] connut un net recul au Kirghizistan, passant de 2 534 en 1965 à 1 762 en 19857. La baisse démographique n’était nullement la cause de l’abandon de ces « agglomérations sans perspectives », bien au contraire. À la différence d’autres régions de l’URSS, l’Asie centrale avait connu sous Hruščev et sous Brežnev de forts taux de natalité8. La diminution du nombre d’agglomérations était la conséquence d’une volonté politique pour toute l’URSS. Il fallait ici restructurer l’activité d’élevage en substituant aux petites unités existantes de grandes exploitations mécanisées, et valoriser l’ensemble de l’espace rural. À la place d’une multiplicité de petites colonies, l’implantation de grands centres regroupés rendrait la vie rurale plus attirante et contribuerait à généraliser les acquis de la vie citadine : centres médicaux, jardins d’enfants, équipements sportifs ou écoles de meilleure qualité9.

5 De nombreux auteurs se sont penchés sur le foyer moderne khrouchtchévien, clé d’une projection concrète de l’avenir10. Dans les villes, des ménages modèles virent le jour. Les romans et la télévision promouvaient un style de vie moderne. Il existait même des cours à l’intention des habitants des Hruščevki nouvellement construits 11. Pour l’ère Brežnev, les chercheurs parlent d’une véritable « révolution de la consommation »12, mais la recherche s’est concentrée uniquement sur les cadres de vie urbains de la partie occidentale de l’URSS13. Les tentatives d’ouverture et de modernisation des foyers dans des régions éloignées et présumées en retard de développement n’ont pas encore été étudiées14.

6 L’exemple des aïle dans la République kirghize met en lumière les méthodes de l’État dans une région périphérique « arriérée » parmi les plus pauvres d’URSS, sans importance politique, et insignifiante dans le contexte de la guerre froide. La volonté de modernisation restait une force politique motrice jusqu’au fin fond de l’Asie centrale, mais cette modernité soviétique était ambivalente. D’une part, la campagne de démolition des duvale participait d’une politique d’européanisation mais aussi de russification : la culture soviétique des villes à population majoritairement russe pénétrait jusque dans les villages kirghiz et ouzbeks15. D’autre part, sous Brežnev, l’État semblait plus désireux que jamais de proposer une version de la modernité compatible avec les traditions nationales. Toutefois, l’État n’était pas le seul acteur de la modernisation. La population rurale participait aussi à la réalisation de sa propre modernité. Loin de simplement réagir aux défis, les communautés rurales étaient capables d’interpréter à leur propre manière le rapport entre la modernité soviétique et les traditions européenne, russe et nationale.

Duvale et yourtes : les habitats traditionnels en milieu rural

7 Jusqu’à la collectivisation, la majorité des habitants du territoire intégré après 1924 dans la République soviétique kirghize menait une vie nomade et vivait sous la yourte16. Il existait aussi des villages de colons, des agglomérations d’Ouzbeks sédentarisés et des campements d’hiver pour les nomades, avec des constructions en dur (kyštoo)17. La répression du grand soulèvement de 1916 puis la collectivisation du début des années 1930 sonnèrent le glas du nomadisme à l’ancienne en Asie centrale. Les famines, la fuite et les expulsions eurent largement raison du tissu social clanique traditionnel des

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nomades18. La disparition de l’ordre ancien allait cependant de pair avec l’avènement d’un ordre nouveau : les nomades furent contraints de se rattacher à des kolkhozes. Dans toute la République kirghize, les aïle, les villages de colons et les kyštoo existants s’agrandirent et de nouvelles agglomérations surgirent de terre19.

8 Si les plans officiels d’urbanisme prévoyaient pour ces dernières de larges rues parallèles et de nombreux espaces verts20, l’État laissait une assez grande liberté aux architectes locaux dans la conception des nouvelles maisons. Les habitants étaient autorisés à décider eux‑mêmes du volume de la maison, du partage de la cour, du mode de construction ou du type de clôture21. Dans la RSSA kirghize présoviétique, les duvale se trouvaient surtout dans les régions méridionales marquées par l’agriculture sédentaire. Paradoxalement, la soviétisation permit leur propagation sur tout le territoire, y compris dans les villages d’anciens nomades22.

9 La collectivisation créa un paysage composite : d’anciennes agglomérations typiques de la Russie du Sud, d’Ukraine, d’Asie centrale (ouzbèke, ouïgoure, tadjike) ou de style mélangé voisinaient avec de nouvelles implantations, souvent contiguës aux cités existantes, aux ruelles étroites et hauts murs caractéristiques23. Les nouvelles constructions s’inspiraient de différents modèles. Au Nord, l’influence russe semble avoir été plus forte : nombre de maisons avaient des fenêtres sur rue, et les clôtures en lattis en remplacement des murs en torchis y étaient plus fréquentes qu’ailleurs24. Au Sud, en revanche, l’influence ouzbèke se faisait sentir et les murs aveugles, les fameux duvale, étaient plus répandus25.

10 L’État n’imposait pas aux villageois un type de construction particulier. Julia Obertreis a toutefois montré que dans les années 1930, les travailleurs des kolkhozes étaient fortement incités à imiter les modèles « européens ». Rangées, propres, blanches, les maisons « européennes » étaient le signe d’une certaine culture. Les propagandistes voyaient dans le mur aveugle qui entourait la plupart des maisons d’Asie centrale une preuve du retard de la région en matière d’architecture26. Dans les années 1930, l’État faisait aussi la promotion d’une nouvelle culture de la consommation. Les montres ou les bicyclettes bien visibles sur les photos des kolkhoziens représentaient des biens de consommation résolument « modernes », « européens »27.

11 Malgré ces incitations à la modernisation et à la consommation, la réalité semble avoir été différente. Partout régnait une pénurie des biens vantés par la propagande : le matériel de construction pour des maisons « modernes », par exemple, n’était jamais disponible en quantité suffisante. Peinture blanche, briques cuites, ciment et béton étaient des denrées rares28. Les villageois étaient contraints de recourir aux méthodes traditionnelles. Leur matériau principal demeurait la brique d’adobe (argile crue). Les constructions parasismiques, en briques cuites et en ciment, ou les bâtiments à plusieurs étages restaient l’exception.

12 De même, dans un premier temps, les nouveaux biens de consommation à parvenir dans les villages étaient rares. Les objets usuels traditionnels gardèrent donc leur importance dans la vie quotidienne. Dans les années 1950, Saul Abramzon réalisa une étude ethnographique des villages de Darhan et de Čičkan dans la région d’Yssyk‑Köl et nota que les habitants déterminaient eux‑mêmes l’agencement intérieur de leur habitation. Ils intégraient par exemple à leurs nouvelles habitations les portes de yourtes, très basses et richement sculptées. De même, il n’était pas rare qu’ils continuent à dormir sur les traditionnels töšöks [couvertures pliées et empilées]. Tables et chaises, fourchettes et cuillères étaient très peu répandues29. Dans les zones où les

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habitants des kolkhozes pratiquaient encore l’élevage, l’influence de la yourte sur le nouvel habitat était capitale. Les bergers utilisaient toujours les yourtes à l’estive et nombre d’entre eux en installèrent une dans le jardin clos de leur maison : apparemment, la qualité du sommeil y était meilleure30. La culture matérielle conservait donc, du moins en Kirghizie, de nombreuses traditions présoviétiques.

13 Jusqu’à l’époque de Hruščev, il n’y eut que peu de changement dans ce domaine. La Seconde Guerre mondiale et l’immédiat après‑guerre avaient certes confronté les populations rurales à de nouveaux défis. Elles connurent les recrutements, les nouvelles réquisitions, les soulèvements et finalement les déportations en Asie centrale de centaines de milliers de présumés traîtres à la patrie31. Pourtant, l’aspect extérieur des villages ne changeait guère. Jusqu’à la fin des années 1960, la forme dominante des implantations en Asie était celle de nombreux petits villages répartis sur le territoire d’un kolkhoze32. Depuis les années 1950, l’agrandissement des kolkhozes ou leur fusion en sovkhozes concernait surtout leur structure administrative et la répartition des champs. En revanche, jusque dans les années 1960, les fusions d’agglomération semblent avoir été extrêmement rares en Asie centrale33. De même, il n’existait pratiquement aucun village planifié dans les anciennes zones d’établissement, hors des régions de « terres vierges » gagnées sur la steppe dès le milieu des années 195034. C’est pour cette raison qu’à la fin de la décennie suivante se répandit l’idée que les vieilles colonies devaient « de toute urgence se moderniser et s’adapter aux nouvelles conditions de production »35.

L’État et les villages après Stalin

14 Même si, dans un premier temps, la structure des colonies ne connut presque pas de modifications, l’ère Hruščev apporta de grands changements dans les zones rurales. Le départ d’une grande partie du contingent des personnes déportées en Asie centrale pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale améliora la situation de l’approvisionnement36. Parallèlement, l’État redoublait d’efforts pour intervenir dans la vie des villageois. L’administration khrouchtchévienne poursuivait en cela un double objectif : d’une part, une efficacité accrue de la production agricole ; de l’autre, une « modernisation » et un « relèvement du niveau culturel » des villages.

15 La campagne de suppression des yourtes illustre parfaitement cette double orientation politique. Son objectif était apparemment d’organiser de manière plus efficace et « actualisée » le quotidien des bergers. Pour économiser la laine, les yourtes restantes devaient être remplacées par des tentes en matériaux synthétiques. Dans le même ordre d’idées, il fallait remplacer les objets usuels en cuir, en cuivre et en bois par des objets en aluminium, prétendument « modernes » et « pratiques »37. Le motif économique semble avoir joué un rôle central dans la suppression des yourtes. Leur fabrication demandait un travail intensif et cette laine, expliqua Hruščev dans un discours au Comité central kirghiz en 1959, devait plutôt servir à la production de beaux tissus qui seraient utilisés dans toute l’URSS38. La destruction des yourtes visait donc à moderniser le quotidien et améliorer l’efficacité.

16 Il ne s’agissait là que d’une petite partie d’un vaste et double programme : améliorer le rendement de l’agriculture et conduire les villages vers la modernité « culturelle ». Pour atteindre le premier objectif, il convenait, entre autres moyens, d’agrandir sans cesse les troupeaux, d’exploiter de nouveaux pâturages, de regrouper des kolkhozes et

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de déplacer des habitants de colonies présumées « sans perspectives » vers les nouveaux territoires des steppes39. Par ailleurs, dans le contexte de la campagne antireligieuse, les mosquées furent fermées et les religieux pourchassés40. Par bien des aspects, il s’agissait d’un rejeu des campagnes des années 1920 : certains délits du quotidien (prestuplenija v sfere byta) furent bien plus sévèrement sanctionnés qu’auparavant41. L’État combattait les dépenses fastueuses suscitées par les noces, luttait contre le mariage des mineures, le versement des dots et la polygamie : tous ces comportements étaient perçus comme les signes d’un « retard » du développement des villages d’Asie centrale42. Dans ce contexte, la « modernité » avait une double signification technico‑économique et culturelle.

17 La politique de Hruščev était impopulaire à maints égards. Turdakun Usubaliev, premier secrétaire du parti de la RSS kirghize, rapporte dans ses mémoires qu’entre 1962 et 1964, il s’adressa plusieurs fois directement à Hruščev pour lui demander de tempérer, voire d’annuler certaines décisions qu’il aurait eu du mal à faire passer auprès de l’opinion (obščestvennost´)43. Les yourtes en matériau synthétique, par exemple, étaient trop chaudes en été et trop froides en hiver. En outre, la yourte traditionnelle était le bien principal d’un ménage (semi‑)nomade et un symbole national44. S’il faut en croire Turdakun Usubaliev, la réintroduction des yourtes en feutre45 est le résultat de son intervention personnelle auprès de Hruščev.

18 Au début de l’ère Brežnev, il était possible de critiquer publiquement les atteintes aux modes de vie des villageois. Un récit de Čingiz Ajtmatov, Proščaj Gul´sary [Adieu Gul ´sary], publié en russe en 1966, est particulièrement célèbre. Il raconte l’histoire du vieux berger Tanabaj qui parcourt la steppe, de nuit, avec son vieux cheval Gul´sary. En chemin, Tanabaj a tout loisir de méditer sur sa vie. Il repense à l’année où un hiver précoce avait anéanti une grande partie de son bien trop vaste troupeau de moutons. Au kolkhoze, personne n’était joignable ; dans les nouvelles structures administratives centralisées, personne ne se sentait responsable des simples bergers. Pour Tanabaj, accroître l’efficacité signifiait une surcharge de travail et beaucoup d’amertume46. Mais un autre sujet perturbe le berger pendant sa pérégrination nocturne : Tout en examinant l’antique pièce couverte de rouille, il s’émerveillait de l’art avec lequel elle avait été façonnée. Non seulement c’était une perfection, mais encore, ça ne manquait pas d’idée. Bel exemple du travail des vieux forgerons kirghiz ! Oui, le métier était perdu, oublié pour toujours. On n’avait plus besoin de kichèn, à présent. Mais d’autres choses avaient disparu aussi, et ça, c’était dommage. Quels beaux ornements, quels beaux ustensiles d’argent, de cuivre, de bois, de cuir ne savaient‑ils pas faire ! Des objets qui n’avaient rien de précieux, sinon leur beauté. Chacun était une pièce unique. Il n’y en a plus de comme ça, de nos jours. Maintenant, on vous emboutit tout en aluminium, à la chaîne […]. Pourtant, dans sa jeunesse, il avait été du côté des fossoyeurs du passé. Une fois même à une réunion du Komsomol, il avait fait un discours où il réclamait la suppression des iourtes. […] Après quoi, on s’aperçut que l’élevage de plein air était impossible sans iourtes. Et maintenant, à chaque fois, Tanabaï s’étonnait d’avoir pu dire des choses pareilles et traîner les iourtes dans la boue, alors que pour la vie nomade, on n’avait encore rien trouvé de mieux.47 Le récit d’Ajtmatov aborde la disparition des traditions, accélérée par la politique de Hruščev. Pourquoi tout fabriquer en aluminium, alors que les anciens objets usuels étaient plus beaux, plus pratiques et surtout conformes à la tradition kirghize ?

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Le parti et la démolition des duvale

19 La véhémence des protestations qui s’élevèrent contre la destruction de l’ordre ancien sous Hruščev rend d’autant plus étonnante la démolition des duvale sous Brežnev. Cette nouvelle intervention de l’État dans l’univers des kolkhozes, au mépris des traditions villageoises, semble prouver que le parti n’avait pas renoncé à la politique civilisatrice de l’ère Hruščev : il lui avait simplement cherché d’autres champs d’action. Les murs avaient d’abord une fonction pratique. Dans l’islam ils acquièrent souvent une signification religieuse. Dans les textes de loi arabes, ils tracent la frontière entre privé et public, permis et interdit, monde religieux et monde séculier48. Si la signification religieuse des duvale reste encore à étudier, il est clair qu’ils étaient une composante traditionnelle de la vie villageoise et citadine. Les dirigeants de l’Empire russe et de l’Union soviétique en revanche y voyaient une preuve de l’arriération de l’Asie centrale49. À l’époque soviétique, la propagande établissait souvent une comparaison avec le hujum, c’est à dire le « dévoilement » forcé des femmes musulmanes à la fin des années 192050. Vue sous cet angle, la démolition des duvale (avec pour conséquence la destruction de l’aspect traditionnel des villages) peut se voir comme une preuve supplémentaire de la position de l’État, toujours prêt à entrer en conflit ouvert avec les villages au nom de la modernisation et de la civilisation athéiste.

20 Cette interprétation n’est pas fausse mais elle ne représente qu’une facette d’une campagne contradictoire à plus d’un titre. Paradoxalement, la démolition contrainte et forcée des duvale souligne un regain d’attention de l’État brejnévien aux sensibilités nationales. L’entreprise représentait certes une intervention violente dans l’univers des villageois, mais ces murs n’avaient pas la même valeur de symbole national que la yourte. La République soviétique kirghize était vue comme une nation d’anciens nomades. Mais les murs étaient de tradition sédentaire51. Dans la région d’Oš, l’un des centres de la campagne, la différence culturelle entre les Ouzbeks sédentaires et les anciens nomades kirghiz était particulièrement visible. Les villes d’Oš et d’Uzgen étaient majoritairement ouzbèkes. Dans les campagnes les Ouzbeks vivaient surtout dans les régions de riz et de coton, alors que les nomades kirghiz habitaient les piémonts52. En ce sens, la campagne n’était pas dirigée contre les traditions des nomades, mais contre les Ouzbeks sédentaires et leur influence culturelle en République kirghize.

21 En ce qui concerne les duvale, les processus décisionnels en République kirghize restent obscurs. En 1976, dans un document récapitulant les succès de la campagne pour le ministère de l’Intérieur de l’URSS, le Comité du parti de la région d’Oš décrivait le déroulement des opérations. En avril 1965, des députés kirghiz du Soviet suprême de l’URSS avaient publié un article dans le journal régional d’Oš sous le titre « Le duval – un vestige nuisible du passé »53. La réaction n’avait pas tardé : le 17 mai 1965, le Comité central kirghiz décidait de lutter contre l’ennemi. Dans un premier temps, le projet de démolition se limita à une campagne de propagande et dans les villages, les décisions donnèrent lieu à de « grands débats »54. Le 9e plan quinquennal y coupa court en formulant noir sur blanc ses exigences. Une vaste campagne de démolition se déroula de 1971 à 1975. « En quelques jours, ces vestiges d’une époque depuis longtemps révolue disparurent littéralement de la vie des gens », pouvait‑on lire dans le rapport à Moscou du Comité du parti de la région d’Oš, à l’automne 197255.

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22 Le rapport souligne le rôle moteur du comité central kirghiz, conformément à l’image que les hautes instances du parti kirghiz donnaient volontiers d’elles‑mêmes : des acteurs autonomes d’une république souveraine agissant (déjà à l’ère Brežnev) bien indépendamment de Moscou56. Turdakun Usubaliev, dirigeant du parti de la République kirghize de 1961 à 1985, rapporte dans ses Mémoires que « sa » république avait été la première à créer un ministère de la Construction pour les zones rurales (Ministerstvo sel ´skogo stroitel´stva, Minsel´stroj). Les autres républiques, puis Moscou, en 1967, avaient suivi l’exemple. Son initiative avait permis d’augmenter les investissements dans la construction de colonies rurales. Usubaliev évoque aussi à ce propos la démolition des duvale dans la région d’Oš. Aujourd’hui encore, il se considère (lui et non Moscou) comme l’instigateur de la politique de restructuration des villages57.

23 Usubaliev semble avoir été un ardent défenseur de la « modernisation » et de la « civilisation ». Ses Mémoires, publiés après l’effondrement de l’URSS, lèvent toute équivoque à ce propos : le discours soviétique de la modernisation était sa raison d’être de Premier secrétaire du parti58. La pensée progressiste était pourtant en conflit latent avec son rôle de représentant d’une république essentiellement rurale. Dans les années 1970, sous l’influence de la « prose villageoise » russe, les intellectuels proches d’Usubaliev se retournaient de plus en plus contre la « modernisation » trop radicale des villages.59 Usubaliev se trouvait ainsi dans une position intermédiaire. Partisan de la démolition des duvale et de la « modernisation », il soulignait par ailleurs l’importance de prendre « en compte les particularités de la vie et des intérêt de la population rurale afin que chaque famille […] dispose de sa propre maison aménagée avec un lopin et une cour équipée »60. À l’instar de son homologue ouzbek Šarov Rašidov61, il prenait indirectement position contre une modernisation et une urbanisation radicales des zones rurales, imposées au mépris des structures traditionnelles. Il servait ainsi de médiateur entre la fraction de l’appareil du parti qui prônait une modernisation inconditionnelle, et tous ceux qui exigeaient une meilleure prise en compte des traditions locales.

Consommation et russification

24 La démolition des duvale n’était pas le seul élément de la politique de modernisation des villages sous Brežnev. La destruction de l’ancien devait permettre un renouveau. La restructuration des villages, les foyers modèles ou la publicité pour la consommation moderne révèlent le fort russocentrisme de l’ère Brežnev, particulièrement visible dans une république « asiatique » et présumée « à la traîne » comme la République kirghize.

25 Globalement, la restructuration architecturale des villages s’orientait sur les modèles occidentaux européens. Dès 1971, dans toute la République kirghize, des séminaires de présentation firent découvrir « de nouvelles clôtures en lattis, plus légères, avec des finitions attrayantes » et des portes de jardin « modernes »62. Une campagne pour un paysage urbain « plus lumineux » vit le ravalement de centaines de milliers de maisons, repeintes en blanc dans tout le pays, l’alignement des rues et la plantation de quelque 3,5 millions d’arbres. Un slogan de l’époque exhortait : « Faisons en sorte que chaque maison et chaque cour soient conviviales, propres, attrayantes et engazonnées ! »63. À l’évidence, les propagandistes s’inspiraient de deux visions opposées : d’une part, l’image des maisons traditionnelles d’Asie centrale, sombres, sales et poussiéreuses ; de

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l’autre, l’image idéalisée d’une maison campagnarde russe, agréable et confortable, avec un jardin bien vert, visible de l’extérieur.

26 La présentation régulière de foyers modèles était destinée à influencer les villageois en donnant de la visibilité aux possibilités offertes par la vie moderne (sovremennyj byt)64. Ces foyers modèles devaient mettre en évidence aux yeux du peuple l’utilisation optimale de l’argent du ménage. Selon la propagande, l’exemple enseignerait ainsi à ne pas dilapider le budget familial en fêtes diverses et permettrait d’éradiquer les coutumes « arriérées » comme le versement du « prix » de la fiancée ou son rapt65.

27 La modernisation de l’Asie centrale signifiait aussi une forte augmentation des ventes de ces articles ménagers pratiques et auréolés d’une représentation européenne idéalisée du monde « civilisé ». La recrudescence d’achats de chaises, de tables, de couteaux et de fourchettes à Oš fut annoncée comme un véritable triomphe : les habitants ne s’asseyaient plus par terre mais à table ; ils ne mangeaient plus avec leurs doigts mais utilisaient des couverts66. L’État pariait sur l’intérêt pratique de ces articles mais aussi sur leur valeur de marqueur de statut social : avec l’ouverture des villages, il était facile de (sa)voir qui marchait, ou non, avec son temps.

28 Cette idée s’exprime aussi dans les entrevues d’histoire orale. La nouveauté qui se propageait en Asie centrale provenait bien d’un contexte russe urbain. Une Kirghize née en 1957, originaire de la province d’Oš, raconte : En arrivant pour la première fois à Biškek en 1967, j’ai été étonnée par les immeubles d’habitation, les rues et les fleurs. Nous participions au festival de la langue russe « Le russe est la langue de la paix et l’amitié ». On nous a installé dans le foyer n° 4 d’un internat. C’est là que j’ai vu pour la première fois un lavabo, et j’en ai parlé à tous mes amis (rire). […] Lors des préparatifs pour Biškek, ma maman m’a cousu des « pantalons » (štany, des pantalons de femmes portés sous la jupe), une chemisette et une jupe de laine. J’étais habillée comme les Russes pour la première fois (sourire). En fait, nous étions toujours habillées à l’ouzbèke : de longs pantalons et une robe, et la tjubetejka sur la tête. […] Même chez nous habitants des kolkhozes, j’ai appris à mes enfants à se laver les dents, à enfiler un pyjama avant de dormir et à changer régulièrement les draps. Je dois avouer que je ne voyais pas mes enfants souvent. […] À la maison je ne manquais pas de lire le journal après le travail car j’y voyais un moyen d’étendre ma culture générale.67

29 La démarche personnelle de l’interlocutrice pour se conformer à un idéal de citoyenne soviétique cultivée portait sur l’apparence, la consommation ou l’hygiène et la propreté. Il est frappant de constater la perception de son idéal de la modernité à travers un filtre russe : pour reprendre ses termes, elle ne s’habillait pas dans un style « moderne » mais « russe ».

30 Globalement, il semble que nombre d’habitants des zones rurales se soient efforcés d’adopter un comportement plus cultivé au quotidien, légitimant ainsi une certaine recherche personnelle d’épanouissement. Un interlocuteur de la région de Naryn rapporte : Autrefois, à l’époque soviétique, quand nous allions en ville, nous mettions nos plus beaux vêtements. À Frunzé, nous avions honte de ne pas porter de complet. Autrefois, tout le monde se comportait encore de manière cultivée mais regardez aujourd’hui comment les gens se tiennent dans la rue, ici. C’est tout simplement abominable !68

31 Si, pour l’interlocuteur, la volonté soviétique de sophistication générale n’est pas une contrainte mais un aspect positif de la vie de l’époque, peut‑être faut‑il voir là l’effet d’une idéalisation postsoviétique. L’opinion exprimée reflète également la pensée

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soviétique qui exigeait des individus une certaine sophistication, puis laissait cette exigence devenir une obligation que chacun s’imposait à soi‑même et imposait aux autres. Dans l’insistance des personnes interrogées sur le fait qu’elles voulaient être « soviétiques », il faut entendre la connotation de vouloir être « civilisé » c’est à dire correspondre à un idéal culturel imaginé, européen ou russe.

32 Dans l’ensemble, l’État de l’ère Brežnev réussit à répandre une certaine idée de la civilisation et de la culture dans le quotidien des villageois. En témoignent surtout les nouvelles habitudes de consommation : le traditionnel töšöks, composé de couvertures empilées, cédait du terrain aux lits. En 1975, dans un rapport à Frunzé, la province d’Oš se félicitait d’avoir vendu des centaines de lits l’année précédente69. De même, la fourniture de machines à laver, de téléviseurs et d’autres biens de consommation était certainement accueillie de manière positive – à condition qu’ils soient effectivement disponibles en quantité suffisante. Par ailleurs, il fallait épargner pour pouvoir se procurer ces articles onéreux70. L’État avait donc réussi à créer un besoin de posséder des équipements qui facilitaient la vie mais étaient aussi des signes purement extérieurs d’un mode de vie civilisé et cultivé. D’un point de vue pratique, l’avantage des lits soviétiques sur les töšöks, des fourchettes sur les doigts ou des tables et des chaises sur les coussins et les tapis était limité, mais du point de vue social, leur possession signalait un comportement cultivé, conforme à la représentation d’un idéal européen.

La démolition des duvale et les représentations des sexes

33 L’augmentation de la consommation encouragea une tendance à l’européanisation, ou russification, souvent relevée, en particulier pendant la perestroïka71. La médaille avait cependant un revers, car à maints égards, cette politique de civilisation dans les villages se révéla ambivalente. Si le but avoué était de moderniser les villages et de civiliser les habitants, l’État était cependant prêt à faire des compromis. L’image de la famille promue par le parti, par exemple, était tout à fait conservatrice.

34 Dans l’optique du parti, un des buts de la démolition des duvale était de donner de la visibilité à la vie des femmes. Nauka i religija écrivait en octobre 1974 : Dans le cas présent, la question de la femme retient particulièrement l’attention. Dans la famille kirghize, la femme est un partenaire égal et respecté. Son travail pour le bien‑être de la société est respecté, ce qui en retour renforce le sentiment de sa propre dignité et la pousse à exceller dans tous les domaines, y compris la sphère domestique et familiale. Aujourd’hui, la vie de la femme a gagné en visibilité. La capacité de gérer son ménage, de rendre sa maison confortable et moderne et de bien élever ses enfants […], quelle femme ne s’efforcerait‑elle pas d’y parvenir ? Et quand ta maison et ta famille sont citées en exemple […], quel mari ne se sentirait‑il pas empli de fierté ?72

35 En clair : donner de la visibilité à la sphère privée en permet le contrôle social. L’image idéale de la famille que soutenaient les propagandistes n’était aucunement progressiste ou particulièrement féministe. Le but était moins une franche « modernisation » qu’une restructuration et un ajustement des villages d’Asie centrale à l’idéal soviétique et conservateur de la vie familiale. Cet idéal était diffusé auprès des populations ? La

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propagande louait en particulier les nouvelles possibilités techniques des équipements ménagers. Nauka i religija écrivait à ce sujet : Le combat pour la nouvelle culture du quotidien (byt) se décline sous diverses formes, dont des écoles de la vie quotidienne, destinées aux femmes. Un logement modèle est exposé dans une des nouvelles maisons. On y voit des meubles contemporains, de la vaisselle, un réfrigérateur, une machine à laver, un aspirateur et d’autres articles du quotidien. Des ménagères expérimentées conseillent les visiteurs sur la meilleure manière d’organiser l’économie domestique et le quotidien de la famille, et sur la gestion optimale du budget familial.73

36 Des « foyers modèles » enseignaient donc aux populations à gérer leur budget. Le côté pragmatique est frappant : interviennent ici des « ménagères expérimentées » et non, comme autrefois, des propagandistes marxistes particulièrement zélés. La conscience idéologique était moins déterminante que la conduite exemplaire au quotidien.

37 Les villages kirghiz entendaient ainsi un discours caractéristique de l’évolution de la consommation urbaine de l’ère Brežnev. Natalia Chernyshova écrit que les articles ménagers (machines à laver ou aspirateurs) étaient accueillis dans les foyers en ambassadeurs de la révolution technico‑scientifique. Les ménagères qui les utilisaient faisaient figure d’acteurs (domestiques) de la modernisation74. Même en Asie centrale, le but déclaré était de combattre la discrimination envers les femmes grâce aux potentialités des appareils ménagers : l’utilisation de machines à laver soulageait les femmes dans leur travail. En 1975, le Comité du parti de la région d’Oš rapportait qu’en l’espace de deux ans, une famille sur neuf avait acheté un réfrigérateur, et une famille sur cinq un téléviseur – sans parler des acquisitions de machines à laver, d’autos et de motos75.

38 Si les ménagères devenaient des agents de la modernisation, les hommes, quant à eux, se voyaient aussi attribuer un nouveau rôle. À ce sujet, il est intéressant de remarquer que, recourant aux institutions traditionnelles de la société kirghize présoviétique, « patriarcale » selon la propagande, l’État institua des conseils d‘anciens. L’idée était que des hommes méritants, respectés des jeunes, pourraient par leur exemple personnel « être à la pointe du combat contre les pratiques néfastes et les vestiges de la religion ». Car : « Les aksakal grisonnants avec l’âge et que la vie a rendu sages, sont de bon conseil pour la vie personnelle. »76 Notons l’utilisation du terme « aksakal ». Les aksakal étaient masculins, par définition, puisque le mot signifie littéralement « barbes blanches ». L’État tolérait donc la renaissance d’une institution « patriarcale » violemment combattue à l’ère stalinienne.

39 Malgré la reprise de l’appellation présoviétique, les nouveaux aksakal étaient surtout des citoyens soviétiques méritants : vétérans de guerre, membres du parti ou directeurs de kolkhozes77. Il ne s’agissait donc ni d’une renaissance de l’institution traditionnelle des tribunaux aksakal – l’État ne les reconnaîtrait comme instance médiatrice de conflits qu’au milieu des années 199078 – ni d’une réinterprétation locale des tribunaux de camarades de l’ère Hruščev. Les aksakal de l’ère Brežnev avaient plutôt un rôle de « conseillers » (propagande dixit). L’utilisation de cette institution traditionnelle fut apparemment une parfaite réussite. La plupart du temps, les aksakal soviétiques soutenaient les objectifs majeurs de la propagande. Ils étaient chargés, par exemple, d’exhorter les villageois à ne pas gaspiller tout leur argent pour les mariages ou les enterrements mais à l’utiliser pour une consommation « rationnelle ». Le président d’un comité d’aksakal raconte :

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Dans chaque village il y a un comité des aksakal, qui a même des sous‑comités dans les quartiers, dans les rues. Tout ce qui se passe dans le quartier est de notre ressort : les habitants doivent discuter avec les aksakal […]. Vous savez, il y a tellement de dépenses irrationnelles pour les rituels d’enterrement. […] En ce qui concerne les mariages, il ne faut pas qu’ils soient fastueux, ni utiliser plus de cinq véhicules pour former le cortège de la noce au moment de la cérémonie à l’état civil (ZAGS).79

40 L’État avait subtilement détourné à ses propres fins ces aksakal soviétiques, sous couvert d’institution villageoise traditionnelle. L’aksakal cité ci‑dessus ne s’est jamais considéré comme le représentant de traditions nationales ou de la religion islamique, mais comme un propagandiste de valeurs telles le rationalisme, la modération et la modernisation.

41 La réunion de notables soviétiques en comités d’aksakal garantissait leur conformité avec les objectifs de l’État. Une institution du « passé patriarcal » collaborait avec la politique soviétique civilisatrice. L’exemple kirghiz conforte la thèse de l’avancée d’une image conservatrice des sexes à l’ère Brežnev80. L’homme était le chef de la famille, la femme s’occupait du foyer conjugal et élevait les enfants.

La ville et la campagne

42 Tout en agissant prudemment dans ses rapports avec les populations rurales, l’État poussait plus avant l’assimilation des univers urbains et ruraux. Cette politique recelait un énorme potentiel conflictuel : jamais consultés, les villageois demeuraient les observateurs muets du changement. Voici comment Jurij Černičenko, écrivain et correspondant de la Pravda, décrivit la destruction des duvale dans la région de Talas, à population majoritairement kirghize : Dans la vallée de Talas on détruit les duvale. Le matin le bulldozer arrive, le maître des lieux lui montre par où commencer, – et déjà le mur de boue séchée de la minuscule forteresse masquant la cour à bétail (dans les constructions kirghizes anciennes elle est toujours devant), la maison et le jardin sont en ruine. Ces ruines sont fertiles, on les répand dans le jardin. Commence la réorganisation : l’étable recule au fond, et la maison – neuve d’habitude, en brique – avance sur la ligne rouge. Dans la rangée des platanes apparaissent les poteaux des lampadaires.81

43 Dans cette région où les maisons aux toits de tuiles, construites sous le régime soviétique, étaient entourées de duvale, il s’agit d’éliminer un simple mur, mais Černičenko met en avant la rationalité du processus : même la poussière de l’ancien mur peut servir. Le « maître de céans » (hozjain) se montre coopératif mais demeure un observateur silencieux, un subalterne dont le propagandiste de Moscou ne cherche pas à connaître l’opinion.

44 Dans les rapports de presse, le silence des personnes concernées n’est certainement pas un hasard. Stigmatisée par sa prétendue arriération, la population rurale occupait une place insignifiante dans le débat. Les personnes interrogées mentionnent la récurrence de conflits « au quotidien » (na bytovom urovne) : les citadins traitaient les ruraux de « moutons ». Les individus qui s’estimaient cultivés disaient aux Kirghiz de la campagne qui « ne savaient pas se tenir » : « Tu descends certainement de ta montagne ? »82 Ces railleries faisaient l’amalgame entre un comportement « bête », c’est à dire sans culture et un passé nomade « arriéré », jetant l’opprobre sur ce dernier. Le stigmate est toujours présent. Aujourd’hui encore, celui ou celle qui n’aura pas refermé une porte

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d’entrée, prouvant ainsi son ignorance des us et coutumes de la vie urbaine moderne, s’entendra dire : « Es‑tu donc né dans une yourte ? » De tels propos montrent la profonde pénétration de la pensée civilisatrice dans le quotidien et son influence sur le contrôle social réciproque. Face à une élite urbaine au comportement moderne et européen se trouvait une population rurale prétendument arriérée, et muette.

45 Malgré cette privation de parole dans l’espace public, la population rurale n’acceptait pas les interventions de l’État sans réagir. Nombre de villageois masquaient les barrières avec des bâches. Les démolisseurs trouvaient parfois de grands murs de briques cuites ou de béton armé à la place du torchis. Les duvale subsistèrent en de nombreux endroits83. Beaucoup de villageois préféraient ne pas être continuellement exposés au regard des voisins et de l’État. Jusqu’à nos jours, les hauts murs faits des matériaux les plus divers sont une caractéristique de nombreux villages mais se rencontrent aussi dans des agglomérations postérieures à la perestroïka, implantées autour de la capitale Frunzé, aujourd’hui Biškek.

46 Les chiffres grandioses du Comité central kirghiz – les années 1970 auraient vu la construction de nouvelles écoles pouvant accueillir 230 000 élèves, de 4 500 lits d’hôpital ou de 9 millions de mètres carrés de logements – dissimulaient d’énormes problèmes. Briques et ciment manquaient un peu partout, poussant les villageois à fabriquer et utiliser des briques de terre sèche pour leurs besoins personnels84. La construction des habitations individuelles s’organisait principalement de manière privée et le manque de matériaux de construction entraînait un marché noir florissant85. Un document interne du début des années 1980 révèle qu’un nombre non négligeable de personnes, dans toute la République kirghize, mais surtout dans les villes, vivaient encore dans des « baraques » et des « caves »86. Parallèlement, la pression migratoire vers les villes croissait malgré les grands investissements dans « l’assistance culturelle » aux régions rurales.

47 Sous Brežnev, la population rurale restait muette : la presse ne lui offrait aucune tribune pour aborder publiquement les problèmes ou simplement exprimer sa morosité. Certains indices laissent toutefois percer un ressentiment dissimulé envers la population urbaine. Des études sociologiques réalisées dans les années 1970 pour l’Union soviétique indiquent un mécontentement croissant des individus face à leur situation personnelle de logement et à l’amélioration générale des conditions de logements au cours de la décennie précédente87. La plus grande abondance de biens ne profitait pas nécessairement à tous. Dans la mesure où il y avait plus à partager, il y avait aussi plus de conflits de répartition. Une chanson de berger composée en 1972 à Frunzé l’évoquait ainsi : Garder les moutons, c’est mon quotidien, Mais l’appartement, c’est le tien.88

48 La chanson laisse entendre en filigrane la pénurie de logements dans les villes. Mais plus encore, elle exprime un ressentiment envers les citadins privilégiés ainsi qu’un désir de prendre part à cet univers de la consommation créé par l’État.

49 Les ressentiments des ruraux envers les citadins avaient souvent une tonalité ethnique sous‑jacente, dénonçant non pas l’urbanisation mais la russification. L’écrivain Tugel ´baj Sydykbekov écrivait en 1973 dans une lettre au Comité central kirghiz : L’humiliation volontaire a conduit à ce que d’un côté les Kirghiz soient moralement abattus, et de l’autre – on a laissé à certains Russes irréfléchis, qui se croient supérieurs, les coudées franches pour déclarer ouvertement : « À quoi bon vous

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apprendre à vivre en ville ? Allez plutôt garder les moutons dans les montagnes ! » […]. Au moment où ces tendances chauvines apparaissent, nous disons : « Le russe est notre seconde langue maternelle. Il est de notre devoir de savoir la langue de Puškin, Turgenev et Lenin » !89

50 Sydykbekov présentait ici le contraste entre la ville et la campagne comme une opposition entre des citadins russes et une population rurale muette et soumise. Mais l’écrivain s’empêtre aussi dans des contradictions : on dissuadait les Kirghiz de s’installer en ville parce qu’ils étaient des ruraux, mais par ailleurs on les russifiait. S’ensuivait une double discrimination qui entravait une modernisation autonome tout en poussant à la russification.

51 Le ressentiment ne concernait pas uniquement le rapport entre les Kirghiz ruraux et l’élite urbaine « russifiée ». La région d’Oš, centre de la campagne d’éradication des duvale, comptait une importante minorité ouzbèke90. Traditionnellement sédentaires, les Ouzbeks formaient la population citadine majoritaire. De plus, l’agriculture sédentaire, comme la culture du coton et du riz, étaient traditionnellement entre leurs mains. Comme les Kirghiz habitaient les piémonts, ils n’avaient guère accès aux réseaux des sédentaires91. Alors que les préjugés sur l’élite « russifiée » exprimaient aussi un ressentiment à l’encontre de l’idéal soviétique de civilisation, le préjugé sur les Ouzbeks leur reprochait le contraire, c’est à dire une attitude non soviétique. Une opinion répandue parmi les Kirghiz voulait que les Ouzbeks, avides de biens de consommation auxquels les Kirghiz n’avaient pas accès, contrôlent le commerce et l’économie corrompue d’Oš92. Ici aussi, les inégalités face à la consommation contribuèrent probablement à renforcer les anciens stéréotypes et le ressentiment entre ville et campagne.

52 L’ampleur des problèmes non résolus ne se révéla que pendant la perestroïka, quand de jeunes ruraux émigrés à Frunzé créèrent un mouvement protestataire réclamant la construction de logements.93 À la même époque, la région d’Oš fut le théâtre de violents affrontements entre Ouzbeks et Kirghiz. Les chiffres officiels firent état de 171 morts94. Le mécontentement n’était plus silencieux : il s’exprimait. Les causes du conflit sont complexes et partiellement enracinées dans le passé présoviétique. Mais dans les deux cas, une des causes identifiées est un fort déséquilibre social et culturel entre la campagne et la ville95. Les conflits de l’époque de la perestroïka témoignaient de l’échec d’une politique dont l’objectif était justement de surmonter les différences entre ces deux pôles.

La critique

53 Les espoirs d’une civilisation par la consommation, encore présents au début des années 1970, diminuèrent progressivement vers la fin du mandat de Brežnev. Le scepticisme face à la recherche du bien‑être matériel individuel gagna de nouveau du terrain dans le cinéma et la littérature. Des films comme Zolotaja osen´ [L’automne doré] de Tolomuš Okeev ou Volč´ja jama [La fosse aux loups] de Bolotbek Šamšiev critiquaient de manière étonnamment directe la recherche effrénée de biens matériels96. Influencé par le mouvement russe de la littérature paysanne, ils opposaient deux univers : le village, pur et non corrompu et la ville, russifiée et matérialiste97.

54 En République kirghize, le rapport au mouvement de la littérature paysanne était conflictuel car la foi dans le progrès était toujours présente. Les intellectuels étaient

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entre deux feux : propagandistes de l’État et propagateurs du mantra soviétique du progrès, mais également critiques. La complexité de la critique intellectuelle de la politique de Brežnev qui résulte de cette position est savoureusement mise en évidence dans une comédie de Mar Bajdžiev. Le premier acte décrit la première visite des parents du marié (Kuručbek Sumsarov et Sajraš Sumsarova) chez les parents de la mariée (Bopuš Monkoloev et Kukuš Monkoloeva). Il faut discuter des préparatifs du mariage. En fait, il s’agit surtout de déterminer l’ampleur de la fête et la contribution financière de chacun. Avant l’arrivée des parents du marié, les parents de la mariée se concertent : Kukuš : Ne montre ta joie à personne ! Au contraire, lamente‑toi : « Sans vous, notre fille serait diplômée du supérieur, elle serait devenu quelqu’un ; mais vous lui avez tourné la tête, vous l’avez enlevée sans notre autorisation ! » – c’est comme ça qu’il faut parler. Menace‑les du tribunal ! Bopuš : Et elle en serait où actuellement ? Elle serait devenue médecin. Heureusement qu’elle s’est mariée avant ! Kukuš : Grand Dieu surtout ne le dis pas aux beaux‑parents ! Tu vas diminuer le prix par deux ! Bopuš : « Diminuer le prix ? » Tu veux la vendre, ou quoi ? Kukuš : Il ne s’agit pas de vente, mais de coutume. Je l’ai portée neuf mois dans mon sein, je l’ai éduquée pendant 18 ans. Quels sacrifices j’ai fait pour elle. J’en ai arrêté de manger, de boire, de dormir ! Et voilà qu’une paire de ses bottes coûte 150 roubles. Et ces trucs‑là, comment s’appellent‑ils (elle n’arrive pas à trouver le mot). Ces… Bopuš : Jeans, ou quoi ? Kukuš : C’est ça ! Ils coûtent 250 roubles. Tout ma vie je n’ai porté que des robes à moins de 50 roubles. […] Et je n’aurais pas le droit à un petit cadeau ?98 Quand arrivent les parents du marié, Kukuš exhorte encore une fois son mari : Kukuš : Tais‑toi, allonge‑toi sur le divan. Ouvre le journal. Quand ils entreront ne te précipite pas comme un âne. Commence par poser lentement ton journal, ensuite enlève tes lunettes, fais silence, puis dit bonjour d’un ton posé et intello. Bopuš : Et pourquoi pas carrément insulter leur mère, en russe ? Kukuš : Tu as perdu la tête ? Ils te prendraient pour un voyou et s’enfuiraient. Ils arrivent. Allonge‑toi !99

55 Commence alors un long processus de négociations. Tout en voulant paraître aussi cultivées que possible, les deux parties s’efforcent qui de faire monter la dot, qui de payer le moins possible. Mais attention à ne pas avoir l’air trop « russe» : malgré tout, c’est à l’homme d’accueillir les invités et de régler le côté matériel des choses, pas à la femme. L’organisation du mariage exige donc de complexes compromis entre les idéaux soviétiques et les traditions tribales. La recherche de toujours plus de consommation mènera ici aux antipodes du but initial : Bajžiev décline le paradoxe et montre combien la prétendue occidentalisation (les blue jeans) et la russification (les rôles attribués aux sexes) pouvaient s’accompagner d’un retour aux traditions (la dot).

56 La comédie illustre bien l’apparition simultanée de deux courants au sein de l’élite soviétique : la critique de la destruction de l’ordre ancien et la peur de voir le monde des campagnes infiltrer celui des villes100. Sur ce dernier point, Bajžiev exprimait une critique omniprésente pendant la perestroïka : la politique de Brežnev avait écarté la Kirghizie du chemin de la modernité soviétique. L’urbanisation des villages avait échoué et la ville devenait village. Une psychologie villageoise, voire « tribale », se répandait. Le chemin de la modernisation tracé par la révolution était abandonné depuis longtemps101.

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57 La critique de la supposée « stagnation » occulta le fait que la politique de Brežnev n’était probablement pas seule responsable de l’échec de la modernité soviétique. Dans les premières années de la perestroïka, l’atmosphère de « maintenant plus que jamais » allait révéler un fort sentiment de confiance dans le progrès, même parmi les intellectuels. Un Brežnev ou un Usubaliev avaient cru, eux aussi, au programme de modernisation bien ciblée de leur politique, mais la critique balayait inévitablement ces considérations. En fin de compte, pour de nombreux intellectuels, il ne restait aucune voie socialiste vers la modernisation : du point de vue d’une élite idéaliste et progressiste, Stalin, Hruščev et Brežnev avaient échoué dans leur entreprise de « modernisation » des villages kirghiz. Dans un entretien avec l’auteur de cet article, l’écrivain Vjačeslav Šapovalov (né en 1947) résuma ainsi le constat de nombre d’intellectuels : Šapovalov : Pas de chance, le destin nous a trompés. Nous y avons cru, nous voulions à tout prix l’assimilation. L’écrivain Joseph Coetzee […] et Albert Camus racontent comment les Européens sont partis. Ils décrivent les lieux où la sauvagerie (dikost´) a commencé ; et chez moi aussi il y a le motif du départ des Russes d’ici, le motif de leur difficile séparation de cette terre. Pourtant c’est la seule issue possible. Je crois que les Kirghiz n’ont pas besoin de la culture européenne aujourd’hui. M. F. : Ils n’en ont pas besoin ou ils n’en veulent pas ? Šapovalov : Ils n’en ont pas besoin au sens où ils n’en veulent pas. Y compris la culture russe comme guide, comme Kulturträger [facteur de civilisation, – en allemand dans le texte, MF] européen.102

58 Le propos est particulièrement fort. Représentant d’une élite qui se considère elle‑même comme européenne, Šapovalov exprime pourtant un point de vue très répandu : la fin de l’ère Brežnev et le retour d’une « sauvagerie » auparavant contrôlable ne traduisent en fin de compte que l’échec d’un projet colonial. Pour l’élite, l’échec brejnévien de la modernisation non violente des villages signifiait l’échec de la modernité soviétique en Kirghizie.

Conclusion

59 Selon Natalya Chernyshova, l’État aurait moins cherché à intervenir dans la vie privée des citoyens à l’époque de Brežnev. La consommation aurait graduellement remplacé la politique, entraînant une modernisation de la société tandis que la politique de modernisation de l’État reculait103. L’exemple des villages d’Asie centrale montre cependant que pour le parti, la consommation restait un formidable facteur de modernisation dont l’action civilisatrice et éducative, évoquée dans toute la littérature, s’avérait fondamentale dans ces zones104. La modernité ne devait plus se limiter aux villes : elle devait parvenir jusqu’au plus lointain, au plus insignifiant village d’Asie centrale. Le projet de modernisation de ces zones rurales économiquement ou stratégiquement insignifiantes reflétait une conviction toujours présente en une modernité universelle à laquelle tous les citoyens soviétiques devaient pouvoir prendre part.

60 Malgré cette ambition d’universalité, l’État brejnévien se montrait conciliant vis‑à‑vis des traditions locales. Les protestations déclenchées par la démolition des yourtes ou la lutte antireligieuse de l’ère Hruščev poussèrent l’État à réviser sa politique : la mise en œuvre d’une modernisation sélective conjugua l’ouverture des habitations, le contrôle

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social mutuel et la consommation avec une tolérance des rôles traditionnels des sexes et la relance d’institutions « patriarcales » comme les conseils d’aksakal. Le droit chemin de la modernité multipliait les méandres des contradictions et des inconséquences idéologiques.

61 L’État s’efforçait ainsi d’éviter les conflits, mais le « consommateur » restait néanmoins un concept rhétorique au caractère normatif, basé sur la représentation idéale d’un citoyen soviétique instruit et citadin. Cette modernité à l’occidentale exerçait pourtant une réelle fascination sur les populations rurales. De la volonté d’universalisme de l’État surgit toutefois un conflit non résolu. Un certain malaise se manifesta à la fin des années 1970 : du point de vue de la périphérie, la prétendue universalité de la modernité soviétique provoquait une spécificité culturelle. Les villageois kirghiz n’étaient pas en position de remettre en cause le principe de la modernité soviétique, mais ils interprétèrent les offres de l’État à leur manière et les adaptèrent à leur cadre de vie. Ils contribuèrent ainsi à l’affaiblissement de la suprématie du parti sur le rapport entre tradition et modernité à la fin de l’ère soviétique.

NOTES

1. Materialy Ošskogo obkoma KP Kirgizii ob opyte raboty partijnyh organizacii Ošskoj oblasti Kirgizskoj SSR v dele pod´´ema urovnja byta naselenija, [Documents du Comité régional d’Oš du PC de la RSS kirghize sur l’expérience de travail des organisations du parti de la région d’Oš en matière d’élévation du niveau de vie de la population], oct‑nov. 1976, RGANI (Rossijskij Gosudarstvennyj Arhiv Novejšej Istorii), f. 5, op. 69, d. 382, l. 16. 2. Sur les campagnes des années 1920 et la violence générée par la peur de ce qui est dissimulé, cf. Jörg Baberowski, Der Feind ist überall : Stalinismus im Kaukasus, München : Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2003. Cf. également Marianne Kamp, The New Woman in Uzbekistan : Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling Under Communism, Seattle : University of Washington Press, 2006 ; Douglas Northrop, Veiled Empire : Gender & Power in Stalinist Central Asia, Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press, 2004 ; Adrienne L. Edgar, Tribal Nation : The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan, Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2004. 3. Devin DeWeese, Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde : Baba Tükles and Conversion to Islam in Historical and Epic Tradition, University Park, PA : Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994, p. 40 ; Cf. également Bruce Privratsky, Muslim Turkistan : Kazak Religion and Collective Memory, Richmond : Curzon Press, 2001, p. 74‑81. 4. Lire à ce sujet Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear off the masks ! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth Century Russia, Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2005. 5. Sur la notion de stagnation et son approche critique, cf. Edwin Bacon et Mark Sandle, eds., Brezhnev Reconsidered, Houndsmills : Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. 6. Le terme « aïl » décrit à l’origine une communauté de pâturages ou de yourtes. À l’époque soviétique, tous les villages kirghiz, même ceux qui avaient été créés à l’époque soviétique, étaient appelés aïl. 7. Oskon D. Osmonov, Istorija Kyrgyzstana : Kratkij kurs [Histoire du Kirghizistan : cours abrégé], 2e édition, Biškek : Bijiktik, 2004, p. 450.

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8. D’après l’analyse des recensements correspondants. Itogi vsesojuznoj perepisi naselenija 1989 goda, t. 7, 2e partie : Nacionalńyj sostav naselenija [Bilan du recensement fédéral de la population en 1989 : composition de la population par nationalité], Minneapolis : East View Publishers, 1993, p. 562. Itogi vsesojuznoj perepisi naselenija 1970 goda. t. 4 : Nacionalńyj sostav naselenija SSSR [Bilan du recensement fédéral de la population de 1970, t. 4, composition de la population par nationalité], M. : Statistika, 1973, p. 284‑289. Cf. Gerhard Simon, Nationalismus und Nationalitätenpolitik in der UdSSR : Von der totalitären Diktatur zur nachstalinschen Gesellschaft, Baden‑Baden : Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1986. 9. Ibid. 10. Cf : Susan A. Reid, « Khrushchev Modern : Agency and Modernization in the Soviet Home », Cahiers du Monde russe, 47, (1‑2), 2006, p. 227‑268, 227. 11. Cf (entre autres) Reid, Khrushchev Modern ; Larissa Zakharova, « Fabriquer le bon goût. La maison de modèles de Leningrad à l’époque de Hruščev », Cahiers du monde russe 47, (1‑2), 2006), p. 195‑226. Monica Rüthers, Moskau bauen von Lenin bis Chruščev : Öffentliche Räume zwischen Utopie, Terror und Alltag, Wien : Böhlau, 2007. 12. Natalya Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev‑Era, London – New York : Routledge, 2013, p. 1‑3. 13. La recherche a longtemps privilégié l’ère Hruščev. En témoignent également les auteurs d’un récent recueil sur le « socialisme des années soixante ». Cf. Anne E. Gorsuch, Diane P. Koenker, eds., The Socialist Sixties : Crossing Borders in the Second World, Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press, 2013. Notons toutefois la récente parution des premiers travaux sur les cultures de la consommation à l’ère Brežnev. Cf. Chernyshova, Soviet Consumer Culture, p. 12. 14. Une étude fait exception, mais elle reste superficielle en raison de ses sources : Judith Pallot, « Rural Settlement Planning », Soviet Studies, XXXI (2), 1979, p. 214‑230. 15. Dans la république kirghize même, le contraste était très marqué entre les villes russes et les villages à prédominance kirghize. En 1970, 66 % des habitants de Frunzé se déclaraient de nationalité « russe » ; en zone rurale, en revanche, la majorité de la population était kirghize. Itogi vsesojuznoj perepisi naselenija 1989 goda, t. 7, 2e partie, p. 562. Itogi vsesojuznoj perepisi naselenija 1970 goda, t. 4, p. 284‑289. 16. Selon un rapport soviétique officieux de 1986 sur « L’histoire de la RSS de Kirghizie », 85 % des Kirghiz menaient encore une vie nomade ou semi‑nomade en 1916 au nord du pays. À la même époque, au sud du pays, seul un quart de la population était sédentaire. A.K. Karypkulov, éd., Istorija Kirgizskoj SSR : Dobrovolńoe vhoždenie Kirgizii v sostav Rossii i ego progressivnye posledstvija [Histoire de la RSS de Kirghizie : l’entrée librement consentie de la Kirghizie dans la composition de la Russie et ses conséquences], vol. 2, Frunze : Kyrgyzstan, 1986, p. 114‑115. 17. Karypkulov, éd., Istorija Kirgizskoj SSR, p. 109‑110, 122‑126. Le problème de l’opposition des catégories « sédentaire » et « nomade » ou « semi‑nomade » provient de l’épineuse définition du nomadisme « pur ». Les Kirghiz nomadisant avec leurs troupeaux disposaient le plus souvent des lieux fixes comme aires d’estives (žajloo) dans les montagnes ou de pâturages d’hiver (kyštoo) dans les vallées. Les quelques bâtiments en dur (étables, etc.) généralement présents dans les campements d’hiver constituent le noyau cellulaire des villages et des kolkhozes ultérieurs. Ainsi, à maints égards, une grande partie des tribus kirghizes était depuis toujours « semi‑nomade ». Le changement entraîné par la colonisation russe se rapporte avant tout à l’adoption des modes d’exploitation et des modes de vie des colons russes. Le « nomadisme » fut par conséquent une catégorisation très influencée par la perception russe de la vie nomade, considérée comme différente et arriérée. 18. Sur le soulèvement en Asie centrale, cf. Jörn Happel, Nomadische Lebenswelten und zarische Politik : Der Aufstand in Zentralasien 1916, Stuttgart : Steiner, 2010, p. 57‑95 ; Daniel R. Brower, « Kyrgyz Nomads and Russian Pioneers. Colonization and Ethnic Conflict in the Turkestan Revolt of 1916 », Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 44, 1996, p. 41‑53. Sur la collectivisation et la

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famine, Isabelle Ohayon, La sédentarisation des Kazakhs dans l’URSS de Staline : Collectivisation et changement social (1928‑1945), P. : Maisonneuve et Larose, 2006 et Niccolò Pianciola, Stalinismo di frontiera : Colonizzazione agricola, sterminio dei nomadi e costruzione statale in Asia centrale (1905‑1936), Rome : Viella, 2009. 19. L’exemple de deux villages dans la région de Yssyk‑Köl offre une description de ce processus in Saul M. Abramzon, Byt kolhoznikov kirgizskih selenij Darhan i Čičkan. Kolhoz im. K.E. Vorošilova (« Ala‑too ») Pokrovskogo rajona Issykkul´skoj oblasti Kirgizskoj SSR [Mode de vie des kolkhoziens kirghiz des villages de Darhan et Čičkan. Kolkhoz K.E. Vorošilov (Ala‑too), district de Pokrov, région d’Issyk‑Köl de la RSS kirghize], M. : Izdatel´stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1958. Voir aussi Saul M. Abramzon, ed., Očerki po istorii hozjajstva narodov Srednej Azii i Kazahstana [Études sur l’économie des peuples d’Asie centrale et du Kazakhstan], L. : Nauka, 1973. 20. Cf. Ernst Giese, Sovchoz, Kolchoz und persönliche Nebenerwerbswirtschaft in Sowjet‑Mittelasien : Eine Analyse der räumlichen Verteilungs‑ und Verflechtungssysteme, Münster : Selbstverlag des Instituts für Geographie und Länderkunde, 1973, p. 199. Pour une description détaillée d’un de ces villages, cf. Abramzon, Byt kolhoznikov et également Julia Obertreis, Imperial Desert Dreams : Cotton Growing and Irrigation in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, 1860s‑1991, ouvrage non publié, Habilitation, Freiburg 2011, p. 206‑207. 21. Abramzon, Byt kolhoznikov, p. 13‑58. Giese, Sovchoz, Kolchoz, p. 199‑200. 22. Ibid. 23. Giese, Sovchoz, Kolchoz, p. 190‑200. 24. Pour une description détaillée (et parfois illustrée) de la cohabitation de différentes formes de clôtures des cours, cf. : Abramzon, Byt kolhoznikov, p. 147‑170. 25. Cf. RGANI, f. 5, op. 69, d. 382, l. 1‑115. Par conséquent, la démolition des duvale concerna en premier lieu la région d’OÒ, au sud du pays. Des rapports mentionnent aussi des démolitions à Talas. La forte proportion d’Ouzbeks dans la population de la Kirghizie méridionale suggère la présence d’un grand nombre de duvale. Voir aussi (bien qu’imprécis sur le sujet) : Giese, Sovchoz, Kolchoz, p. 199. 26. Obertreis, Imperial Desert Dreams, p. 206‑207. 27. Ibid. 28. Cette remarque s’appliquait encore à la situation des années 1970. Turdakun Usubaliev, premier secrétaire du parti de la RSS kirghize, rapporte dans ses Mémoires combien il devait se batailler à Moscou afin d’obtenir davantage de matériaux pour la construction de bâtiments parasismiques. Des notes internes corroborent son propos. Turdakun U. Usubaliev, Ne mogu molčat´. Otvety nedrugam [Je ne peux pas me taire. Réponses aux ennemis], vol. 4 de ses Mémoires, Biškek : Šam, 1997, p. 551‑597. Voir plus bas dans le texte « Le parti et la démolition des duvale ». 29. Obertreis, Desert Dreams, p. 207, Abramzon, Byt kolhoznikov, p. 191‑205. 30. Abramzon, Byt kolhoznikov, p. 170. Pour une vision ethnologique de la persistance d’éléments du mode de vie nomade, cf. Svetlana Jaquesson, Pastoréalismes : Anthropologie historique des processus d’intégration chez les Kirghiz du Tian Shan intérieur, Wiesbaden : Reichert, 2010. 31. Sur les déportations et les conflits afférents, cf. Marc Elie, « La vie en déportation (1943‑1953) », in Aurélie Campana, Grégory Dufaud, Sophie Tournon, éds., Les Déportations en héritage : Les peuples réprimés du Caucase et de Crimée hier et aujourd’hui (Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009, p. 53‑76. 32. Giese, Sovchoz und Kolchoz, p. 193. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., p. 199.

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35. Ibid. Cf. également Z.G. Frejkin, S.N. Rjazancev, O.R. Nazarevskij D.A. Cumicev, « Die mittelasiatischen Republiken », in Vadim V. Pokšiševskij, éd., Sowjetunion : Regionale ökonomische Geographie, Gotha : Haack, 1967, p. 433‑465, ici : p. 445. 36. Sur la réhabilitation, cf. Pavel I. Djatlenko : Reabilitacija repressirovannyh graždan v Kyrgyzstane, 1954‑1999 [La réhabilitation des citoyens réprimés en Kirghizie, 1954‑1999], Biškek : KRSU, 2010 et Moritz Florin, Sowjetpatriotismus und Nation in Kirgistan, 1941‑1991, thèse non publiée, Hambourg, 2012, p. 108‑167. 37. Turdakun U. Usubaliev : Ėpoha, sozidanie, sud´by [Époque, création, destin], Mémoires, vol. 1, Biškek : Šam, 1995, p. 178. Cf. le reportage Čingiz Ajtmatov, Č. Karžaubaev, « Gde že novaja jurta čabana ? [Où est donc la nouvelle yourte du berger] » Pravda, 24.5.1962. 38. Usubaliev, Ėpoha, sozidanie, sud´by, p. 178. 39. Les conséquences de ces campagnes sur les particuliers sont encore trop peu connues. Une étude décrit les transferts de population en analysant le cas des déplacements forcés des Yaghnobis au Tadjikistan : Thomas Loy, Jaghnob 1970 : Erinnerungen an eine Zwangsumsiedlung in der Tadschikischen SSR, Wiesbaden : Reichert Verlag, 2005. Ce même cas a été étudié par John Schoeberlein, « Shifting Ground. How the Soviet Regime Used Resettlement to Transform Central Asian Society and the Consequences of This Policy Today », in Komatsu Hisao, Obiya Chika, John S. Schoeberlein, éds., Migration in Central Asia : Its History and Current Problems, Osaka, 2000, p. 41‑64. Sur l’exploitation des terres vierges, cf. Michaela Pohl, « The ‘Planet of One Hundred Languages’. Ethnic Relations and Soviet Identity in the Virgin Lands », in Nicholas B. Breyfogle, éd., Peopling the Russian Periphery : Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History, London : Routledge, 2007, p. 238‑262 ainsi que sur la « steppe de la faim » Obertreis, Desert Dreams, p. 286‑328. 40. Sur la campagne antireligieuse comme projet de modernisation, Andrew B. Stone, « Overcoming Peasant Backwardness : The Khrushchev Antireligious Campaign and the Rural Soviet Union », Russian Review 67 (2), 2008, p. 296‑320. Sur la campagne antireligieuse en Asie centrale, Yaacov Ro’i, Islam in the Soviet Union : From the Second World War to Gorbachev, New York : Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 207‑214. Sur la situation en Kirghizie, voir Florin, Sowjetpatriotismus und Nation, p. 145‑158. 41. Sur les campagnes des années 1920 et 1930, et la condamnation des « délits du quotidien », Northrop, Veiled Empire. Sur la Kirghizie, voir aussi Ali F. Iğmen, Speaking Soviet with an Accent : Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan, Pittsburgh, PA : Univ. of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. Sur la situation en Kirghizie, Isabelle Ohayon « Lignages et pouvoirs locaux. L’indigénisation au Kirghizstan soviétique (années 1920‑1930) », Cahiers du monde russe 49 (1), 2008, p. 145‑182. 42. Documents majeurs : Protokol No. 26/b zasedanija bjuro CK KP Kirgizii, 11.1.1959, § 1, O nedostatkah naučno‑ateističeskoj propagandy v respublike [Procès‑verbal n° 26/b de la réunion du bureau du CC du PC de Kirghizie, le 11.1.1959, §1, sur les insuffisances de la propagande scientifico‑athéiste dans la république], CGAPDKR (Centralńyj Gosudarstvennyj Arhiv Političeskoj Izdanii Kirgizskoj Respubliki), f. 56, op. 4, d. 1164, l. 3‑9 undet l. 16‑21. Protokol No. 15/B zasedanija bjuro CK KP Kirgizii, § 6, O realizacii postanovlenija CK KPSS ot 14 ijunja 1960 goda‚ O seréznyh nedostatkah v rabote partijnyh organizacii Turkmenistana, Uzbekistana, Kirgizii i Tadžikistana po preodoleniju feodalńyh perežitkov v otnošenii k ženščine, 9.7.1960 [Procès‑verbal n° 15/b de la réunion du bureau du CC du PC de Kirghizie, sur la mise en œuvre de la décision du CC du PCUS du 14 juin 1960 sur les manques sévères dans le travail des organisations du parti des républiques turkmène, ouzbèke, kirghize et tadjjike à propos de l’élimination des réminiscences féodales dans les relations avec les femmes, 9.7.1960], CGAPDKR, f. 56, op. 4, d. 1232, l. 6‑8. Pour une analyse, cf. Florin, Sowjetpatriotismus und Nation, p. 145‑159. 43. Usubaliev, Ėpoha, sozidanie, sud´by, p. 178. 44. Cf. à ce sujet Ajtmatov, Karžaubaev, « Gde že novaja jurta čabana ? ». 45. Usubaliev, Ėpoha, sozidanie, sud´by, p. 178.

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46. Tchinguiz Aïtmatov (Čingiz Ajtmatov), Adieu Goulsary, traduit du kirghiz par l’auteur et Lily Denis, P. : Édition du Rocher, 2012 (1re édition française, 1968) p. 112‑113. 47. Ibid. 48. L’auteur n’a pas connaissance d’études sur la signification religieuse des murs en Asie centrale, mais des études existent sur les villes, surtout pour les pays arabes. Sur la Fez médiévale, voir Simon O’Meara, Space and Muslim Urban Life : At the limits of the Labirinth of Fez, London : Routledge, 2007. Sur les débats actuels voir, Oliver Leaman, Controversies in Contemporary Islam, London : Routledge, 2014, p. 45‑46. 49. Cf. Jeff Sahadeo, Russian Colonial Society in Tashkent, 1965‑1923, Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2007, p. 34‑37. 50. Pour une comparaison entre duvale et voile, cf. S. Ibraimov « Čuvstvo sem´i sovetskoj [Le sentiment de la famille soviétique] », Pravda, 17.7.1976 ; et Junusov, Abdullaev, Kočubaev, Abdykadyrov, « Duval – vrednyj perežitok prošlogo [Le duval, un mauvais vestige du passé] », Leninčil žolu, 23.4.1965. 51. Tel est en tout cas l’avis de la recherche soviétique. Cf. Abramzon, Byt kolhoznikov, p. 147‑160. 52. V. Chaug, « Demografičeskie tendencii, formirovanie nacij i mežėtničeskie otnošenija v Kirgizii [Tendances démographiques, formation d’une nation et relations interethniques en Kirghizie] », in M. Kudabaev, M. Gijo, M. Denisenko, éds., Naselenie Kyrgyzstana [La population du Kirghizistan], Biškek 2004, p. 109‑157, 150. 53. Ibid. 54. RGANI, f. 5, op. 69, d. 382, l. 67‑77. 55. Ibid. l. 16. 56. Cf. en particulier les quatre tomes des Mémoires de Turdakun Usubaliev : vol. 1 : Ėpoha, sozidanie, sud´by ; vol. 2 : Nado znat´ prošloe, čtoby ne ošibat´sja v buduščem [Il faut connaître le passé pour ne pas se tromper dans l’avenir], Bikek : Šam, 1996 ; vol. 3 : Kak menja presledovali gorbačevcy : Moral´nyj i političeskij terror : Rasskaz byvšego pervogo sekretarja CK Kompartii Kirgizii [Comment les hommes de Gorba©ev m’ont persécutés, Terreur politique et morale. Récit d’un ancien premier secrétaire du CC du PC de Kirghizie], Biškek 1997 ; vol. 4 : Ne mogu molčat´. Otvety nedrugam. Ces dernières années, d’autres anciens fonctionnaires du parti ont publié leurs Mémoires. Citons l’ouvrage de l’ancien fonctionnaire, puis premier ministre, Tursunbek Čyngyšev : Vospominanija. Sobytija, ljudi [Souvenirs. Événements et personnes], Biškek : Bijiktik, 2008) ou celui de Žumagul Saadanbekov, Menin ömürüm [Ma vie], Biškek, 2010. Les récentes publications de Mémoires d’anciens fonctionnaires du parti mériteraient une étude particulière. Tous les auteurs insistent sur leur position autonome vis‑à‑vis de Moscou. 57. Usubaliev, Ne mogu molčat´, p. 562. 58. Cf. note 52. Les Mémoires d’Usubaliev sont volontairement conçus comme une défense contre ceux qu’il qualifie de « Gorbačevcy » et « d’ennemis » personnels. Usubaliev se défend surtout des accusations de népotisme, de corruption, de réseaux de clans et d’influences qui auraient dominé la vie politique pendant son mandat. Il leur oppose sa foi inébranlable dans le parti et la modernisation soviétique, qui ne disparaîtra que sous Gorbačev. Au fil de presque 3 000 pages d’une précision digne d’un juriste, étayées de reproductions de documents d’archives parfois exhaustifs, Usubaliev s’efforce de réfuter toutes les critiques à son encontre. 59. Cf. Moritz Florin : « Bei uns gab es keine Dissidenten. Kritik und Dissidenz an der zentralasiatischen Peripherie » in Boris Belge, Martein Deuerlein, éds., Goldenes Zeitalter der Stagnation ? Perspektiven auf die sowjetische Ordnung der Breznev‑Ära, Tübingen : Mohr Siebeck, 2014, (à paraitre). 60. Turdakun Usubaliev, « Stroitel´stvo na sele – vsenarodnuju zabotu [La construction au village, c’est le souci de tous] », Sovetskaja Kirgizija, 14.4.1979. Cf. également Usubaliev, Ne mogu molčat ´, p. 562‑563.

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61. Sur des débats similaires en Ouzbékistan, cf. Obertreis, Imperial Desert Dreams, p. 319‑321. 62. RGANI, f. 5, op. 69, d. 382, l. 78. 63. Ibid., l. 101. 64. Ibid., l. 60. 65. Ibid., l. 67‑70. Cf. également T. Sarbanov, « U nas v Kirgizii prazdnik [C’est la fête chez nous en Kirghizie », Nauka i religija 10, 1974, p. 8 ; Ju. Černičenko, « Razrušenie ograd [La destruction des clôtures] », Pravda 30.3.1972. 66. RGANI, f. 5, op. 69, d. 382, l. 54. 67. Cet entretien fait partie d’un ensemble de 201 entretiens réalisés dans le cadre d’un projet de l’Académie OSZE de Bišek. Ils sont consultables en ligne : http://www.osce‐academy.org/en/ research‐and‐publications/historical‐research/. Citée ici une femme kirghize de l’oblast´ d’Oš, née en 1957, OO‑N 2‑1. 68. Entretien avec une femme kirghize de Naryn, née en 1952, Biškek 12.12.2010. 69. RGANI, f. 5, op. 69, d. 382, l. 80. 70. Ibid. 71. Cf. Florin, Sowjetpatriotismus und Nation, p. 268‑275. 72. Sarbanov, « U nas v Kirgizii prazdnik ». 73. Ibid. 74. Chernyshova, Consumer Culture, p. 8. 75. RGANI, f. 5, op. 69, d. 382, l. 54. 76. Sarbanov, « U nas v Kirgizii prazdnik ». 77. Cf. RGANI, f. 5, op. 69, d. 382, l. 46‑47. 78. Sur l’histoire et l’actualité de cette institution, cf. Judith Beyer, « Revitalisation, Invention and Continued Existence of the Kyrgyz Aksakal Courts. Listening to Pluralistic Accounts of History », The Journal of Legal Pluralism 53‑54, 2006, p. 141‑175. 79. Entretien avec un Kirghiz, né en 1928, oblast´ d’OÒ, in Ustnaja istorija nezavisimogo Kyrgyzstana, Akademija OBSE [Histoire orale du Kirghizstan indépendant, Académie OSCE (Organisation pour la sécurité et la coopération en Europe)], Biškek 2010, OO‑N 7‑1. 80. Cf. Barbara Evans Clements, A History of Women in Russia : From Earliest Times to the Present, Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2012, p. 274‑275. 81. Černičenko, « Razrušenie ograd ». 82. Il est difficile de déterminer la date d’apparition de cette expression. Elle est néanmoins très fréquente dans les débats internes des années 1960 et jusqu’au début des années 1970. Cf. le discours de Tügölbaj Sydykbekov, Stenogramma V s´´ezda pisatelej kirgizii za 1971 god [Procès‑verbal du Ve congrès des écrivains de Kirghizie en 1971], 14.5.1971, CGAKR (Central´nyj Gosudarstvennyj Arhiv Kyrgyzskoj Respubliki), f. 1465, op. 1, d. 284, l. 86. Cf. également (e.a.) les entretiens de l’auteur avec Vjačeslav Šapovalov (1947‑), Biškek 17.1.2011 et avec Svetlana Suslova (1949‑), Biškek 18.1.2011. Sur les conflits interethniques, cf. une étude basée sur des entretiens de Botakoz Kassymbekova, « Memories of Riots of 1967 in Chimkent, Kazakh SSR and Frunze, Kirghiz SSR », Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung, 2007, p. 80‑90. 83. RGANI, f. 5, op. 69, d. 382, l. 79. Dans un article pour Sovetskaja Kirgizija, Turdakun Usubaliev critiqua indirectement la démolition des duvale. D’après lui, tout le monde « ne s’était pas détaché immédiatement de l’ordre ancien et seul le temps avait fait comprendre l’utilité du changement. » Cf. Usubaliev, « Stroitel´stvu na sele – vsenarodnuju zabotu ». 84. C’est ce qui ressort d’une lettre de Turdakun Usubaliev à Leonid Brežnev, le 23.11.1979, dans laquelle il demande plus de matériaux de construction. Jusqu’à présent, seuls 30 % des maisons de la RSSK sont en briques cuites. La grande majorité des maisons est toujours en adobe. Mais ces constructions traditionnelles ne sont pas parasismiques. Copie de la lettre d’Usubaliev à Brežnev, 23.11.1979, dans Usubaliev, Ne mogu molčat´, p. 575‑578.

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85. C’est du moins ce que révèle Usubaliev dans un appel à construire plus de maisons parasismiques en RSSK. Cf. : Usubaliev, « Stroitel´stvo na sele – vsenarodnuju zabotu ». 86. Postanovlenie CK KP Kirgizii « Ob okazanii pomošči Kirgizskoj SSR v stroitel´stve sejsmostojkih žilih domov [Résolution du CC du PC de Kirghizie sur l’attribution d’une aide à la RSS de Kirghizie dans la construction de logements répondant aux normes parasismiques] », Usubaliev, Ne mogu molčat´, p. 582‑595, ici p. 588. 87. Henry W. Morton, « Who Gets What, When and How ? Housing in the Soviet Union », Soviet Studies 32 (2), 1980, p. 235‑259. Cf. également Esther Meier, « Massenmobilisierung in der Ära Brežnev ? Das Großprojekt KamAZ/Naberežnye Čelny », thèse non publiée, Hamburg, 2011, p. 107. 88. Chant d’un berger kirghiz, relevé par Tügölbaj Sydykbekov en 1972. (En langue kirghize : « Koj bagarga men ėptüü ‑ Üj salarga sen ėptüü. » in Tügölbaj Sydykbekov, Men mi ŋ žyl žašadym. Ajan, an˙gemeler, maekter, kattar [J’ai vécu mille ans. Rêves, discussions, conversations, lettres], BiÒkek : Akyl, 1998, p. 379. 89. Ibid., p. 373. Reproduit en russe dans Usubaliev, Nado znat´ prošloe, p. 223. 90. La région (oblast´) d’Oš comprenait alors les régions généralement regroupées aujourd’hui, de manière imprécise, sous l’appellation « Sud‑Kirghizstan », à savoir les régions de Batken, Žalal‑Abad et Oš. Selon le recensement soviétique, en 1970, la région d’Oš comptait 312 694 Ouzbeks, 641 857 Kirghiz et 144 793 Russes. Tadjiks (21 193) et Ukrainiens (23 850) formaient deux grands groupes minoritaires. Par suite des déportations de l’époque stalinienne, des Allemands, des Kurdes, des Azerbaïdjanais et des Turcs meskhètes vivaient dans la région. Cf. : Itogi Vsesojuznoj perepisi naselenija 1970 goda, t. 4, p. 284‑289. 91. Au recensement de 1989, la ville d’Oš comptait 46 % d’Ouzbeks, 24 % de Kirghiz et 20 % de Russes. La ville d’Uzgen totalisait 27 525 habitants dont 24 167 Ouzbeks, 4 244 Kirghiz et 1 440 Russes et Ukrainiens. En revanche, dans la région d’Uzgen, les Ouzbeks ne représentaient que 6,5 % de la population rurale, kirghize à 86,9 %. Se reporter aux données chiffrées dans Valery Tishkov, « “Don’t Kill Me, I’m a Kyrgyz” : an Anthropological analysis of violence in the Osh ethnic conflict », Journal of peace research 32 (2) 1995, p. 134. 92. Cf. : Bhavna Dave, « A Shrinking Reach of the State ? Language Policy and Implementation in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan », in Pauline Jones Luong, éd., The Transformation of Central Asia : States and Societies from Soviet Rule to Independence, Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2003, p. 120‑158, ici 144‑145. Il est difficile de documenter ces stéréotypes très présents dans les entretiens oraux postsoviétiques. Les livres ou les films à avoir utilisé de tels clichés sont rares. Citons le film policier de Bolot Šamšiev Volč´ja jama [La fosse aux loups]. Le film raconte l’histoire d’une bande mafieuse du Sud‑Kirghizstan, manifestement dirigée par un clan familial ouzbek. Bolot Šamšiev, réalisateur, Vol´čja jama, Kirgizfil´m, 1983. 93. Sur ce mouvement protestataire, né en 1989 et dont les meneurs organisèrent des manifestations d’abord sous le nom de « Ašar », puis « Demokratičeskoe dviženie Kyrgyzstana [Le mouvement démocratique du Kirghizstan] », cf. les Mémoires des participants : Kazat Akmatov, Okujalar, adamdar. Min˙ bir kün, Bišhkek : Akyl, 1998) et Žypar Žekšeev, Čyndyk bir gana özündö, Biškek 1997. Pour une analyse du mouvement, étayée par des Mémoires, des entretiens et des articles de presse, cf. Florin, Sowjetpatriotismus und Nation, p. 274‑293. 94. Tishkov, « “Don’t Kill Me, I’m a Kyrgyz !” », p. 134‑135. 95. Ibid. Voir aussi Florin, Sowjetpatriotismus und Nation, p. 285‑294. 96. Šamšiev, Vol´čja jama ; Okeev, Tölömüš, Zolotaja osen´, Kirgizfil´m 1980. Pour une analyse, voir Florin, Sowjetpatriotismus und Nation, p. 206‑212. Cf. également : Gul´bara Tolomušova, Territorija Kinostan : Kyrgyzskoe kino v licah [Le territoire du cinéstan : les hommes du cinéma kirghiz (Biškek : 2010), p. 60‑70 et Leonid Djadjučenko : Tolomuš Okeev (Biškek : Izdatel´stvo ŽZL, 2005), p. 273‑281.

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97. Sur le mouvement de la littérature paysanne et ses rapports avec le nationalisme russe, cf. Yitzhak M. Brudny, Reinventing Russia : Russian Nationalism and the Soviet State, 1953‑1991, Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1998). Sur ce mouvement en Kirghizie cf. en détail Florin, Sowjetpatriotismus und Nation, p. 174‑201. Sur le rapport de Čingiz Ajtmatov au mouvement de la littérature paysanne voir également Joseph P. Mozur, Parables from the Past : The Prose Fiction of Chingiz Aitmatov, Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, x. 98. Mar Bajdžiev, Na scene [Sur la scène], Biškek : Fond Sedep, 2005, p. 213. 99. Ibid. 100. Signalons à ce sujet les romans d’Ajtmatov I dol´še veka dlitsja den´ [Une journée plus longue qu’un siècle], 1980 et Plaha [Les rêves de la louve], un des grands romans de la perestroïka, publié en 1986. Ajtmatov évite le nationalisme mais ces deux romans sont à compter au registre de la littérature paysanne. Cf. Florin, Sowjetpatriotismus und Nation, p. 210‑212, 260‑261 et Mozur, Parables from the Past. 101. Cf. : Florin, Sowjetpatriotismus und Nation, p. 258‑265. 102. Entretien avec Vjačeslav Šapovalov. 103. Chernyshova, Consumer Culture, p. 9, 162‑183. 104. Sur l’aspect didactique de la consommation, cf., en particulier, Zakharova, « Fabriquer le bon goût », p. 195‑225.

RÉSUMÉS

La vie quotidienne, la construction de logements et la consommation pendant la période brejnévienne ont fait l’objet d’une abondante littérature. L’attention des chercheurs s’est surtout portée, jusqu’à présent, sur les grandes villes de la partie occidentale de l’URSS. Certains observateurs parlent même d’une véritable révolution consumériste sous Brežnev. Par opposition, l’histoire des zones rurales ne relate généralement que déclin et délabrement. L’exemple de l’Asie centrale montre néanmoins que l’État était prêt à investir dans des régions sans grand intérêt sur le plan économique ou celui de la politique, intérieure et extérieure. Cet article présente une vaste campagne de restructuration des villages en République kirghize, dans des régions rurales considérées comme particulièrement arriérées. Il ressort clairement de cette étude que le but recherché était non seulement une efficacité accrue, mais aussi une modernisation culturelle des villages. Ouverture, contrôle social mutuel et consommation devinrent des instruments de civilisation. Les populations rurales élaborèrent à leur tour leurs propres stratégies face à la modernité soviétique ainsi proposée, sinon imposée. Elles intégrèrent les offres étatiques de modernisation à leur quotidien pour les exploiter de la manière la plus judicieuse possible.

There is abundant literature about daily life, housing construction, and consumption during the Brezhnev era. So far, scholars have primarily focused on the larger towns of the Soviet Union’s western part. Some observers even speak of a genuine Brezhnev‑era consumerist revolution. In contrast, the history of rural areas generally tells of decline and decay. However, the case of Central Asia shows that the State was willing to invest in regions showing no interest in economic terms or in terms of internal or external policy. This article presents a sweeping village restructuration campaign in rural areas of the Kyrgyz Republic considered as particularly backward. It shows that the purpose was not only to improve efficiency but also to modernize

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villages culturally. Openness, mutual social control and consumption became civilizing tools. In turn, rural populations devised their own strategies in the face of this suggested, not to say imposed, Soviet modernity. They integrated the State’s modernization scheme into their daily lives in such a way as to use it most judiciously.

AUTEURS

MORITZ FLORIN Friedrich-Alexander Universität, Erlangen Nürnberg, [email protected]

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À fleurets mouchetés L’architecture soviétique sous le glacis brejnévien Muffled moves: Soviet architecture during Brezhnev’s “Ice Age”

Fabien Bellat

1 L’univers architectural de l’ère brejnévienne offre une image particulièrement peu chaleureuse. Monuments officiels en général colossaux et glaçants, groupes statuaires souvent à la limite du délire idéologique, vastes zones urbaines infligeant aux habitants des paysages fonctionnellement et matériellement inachevés… Si cet aperçu schématique inspirerait plutôt le désir de fuir, peut‑être faudrait‑il dépasser les raccourcis habituels – car à plusieurs titres la période fut moins monolithique qu’il n’y paraîtrait1.

2 De fait, pour les architectes, la direction collégiale chapeautée par Brežnev offrit une ambivalence toute janusienne. D’un côté furent délaissées dans une certaine mesure les recherches esthétiques – ce qui fut ressenti comme une grave perte, donnant lieu à des plaintes croissantes au fil de la décennie 1970 – mais de l’autre ce fut une période d’intense activité constructive. Aussi, la mythologie de la stagnation brejnévienne est‑elle valable pour l’architecture ? Exista‑t‑il également dans ce domaine une progressive fossilisation décisionnelle ? Ou la complexe voire chaotique réalité soviétique dépassa‑t‑elle même les apparatchiks du monde architectural ? La retenue des protagonistes – souvent formés au silence calculé et aux phrases de commande de l’ère stalinienne – n’offre hélas que peu de témoignages exploitables. Pourtant, dans les œuvres et dans de furtifs commentaires la période vit apparaître de premiers échos discrètement critiques et tentatives de contourner les pesanteurs politiques, ainsi qu’en témoignerait en 1967 la remarque acerbe de Feliks Novikov : « Nous trompons le gouvernement soviétique pour son propre bénéfice »2.

3 Le sujet regorge donc de terrains mouvants, souvent difficilement lisibles. Quoiqu’il en soit, cette matière reste peu étudiée et les productions de cette époque souvent rejetées sans examen sérieux. Alors que l’Occident daubait l’URSS des années 1970 comme une terre où rien d’intéressant architecturalement ne se serait produit depuis longtemps, le petit groupe des contestataires soviétiques créant une architecture de papier répliqua que son imaginaire avait justement résulté de l’ère brejnévienne, en contrepoint à la

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pétrification des instances architecturales3. De même, les livres d’histoire même les plus autorisés insistèrent sur la volonté de recherche de la période, défendant son esprit de contextualisme supposé humaniser une efficacité constructive à grande échelle4. Donc la question oppose des vues nettement contradictoires, justifiant une nouvelle attention, d’autant que les réponses sont bien visibles dans le paysage urbain de feu l’URSS.

Palinodies architecturales

4 D’emblée, l’histoire de l’architecture soviétique est une longue série de reniements, palinodies et mutations esthétiques. Après l’effervescence innovatrice du constructivisme, le néo‑académisme de l’ère stalinienne instaura une phase en apparence stylistiquement anachronique (pourtant motivée par une volonté d’assimilation symbolique), et ce avant que la déstalinisation architecturale décidée avec virulence en 1954 ne ramenât l’URSS à une esthétique et technique plus en phase avec la modernité internationale5.

5 Ce second modernisme directement encouragé par Nikita Hruščev eut plusieurs effets immédiats. D’abord, les formes historiques furent abandonnées quasiment sur le champ – au moins sous la férule khrouchtchévienne. Ensuite, la recherche somptuaire fut sévèrement discréditée. Enfin, essentiellement dans le domaine de l’habitat, la préfabrication lourde (re)devint un outil majeur de l’architecture. Matériellement parlant, cela donna des édifices civiques moins pompeux, éliminant presque tout apparat ornemental et symbolique (allant même jusqu’à évacuer les blasons soviétiques de nombre de projets), plus fonctionnalistes, tandis que l’habitat changea relativement d’échelle, généralisant le principe des barres d’immeubles multipliées, conçues selon des projets types. Cependant, l’aversion déclarée de Hruščev pour les ascenseurs – des équipements qu’il jugeait non sans raison dispendieux et d’un entretien pénible – entraîna une autre conséquence simple : ces barres conservèrent un format encore proche des immeubles d’habitation staliniens, c’est‑à‑dire d’une moyenne de quatre à cinq étages, un nombre supérieur de niveaux étant unanimement considéré comme rendant indispensable le fameux ascenseur. Ce trait distinctif des projets khrouchtchéviens devait lui aussi être vite remis en question. Là se situerait d’ailleurs un des premiers éléments clés de l’architecture sous Brežnev : continuité d’une sémantique moderniste, mais remise en cause presque intégrale des choix effectués sous le leader précédent.

6 Les derniers travaux des mandarins du néo‑académisme stalinien – dont Karo Alabjan, Aleksandr Vlassov, Arkadij Mordvinov – les virent obligés de renier l’architecture somptuaire, pour se consacrer dorénavant exclusivement à la réalisation de quartiers complets d’habitation. Ainsi, Mordvinov (1896‑1964), après avoir été l’une des principales victimes des philippiques de Hruščev fut toutefois chargé du district Čerëmuški à Moscou6. Si l’architecte y abandonna toute tentative de décor, il chercha néanmoins à garder une certaine élégance dans le parement des façades en briques. Considéré comme exemplaire par la propagande, son travail fut continué longtemps après sa mort par son équipe – et jusqu’au terme de la décennie 1970, les plans coordonnés par Mordvinov en 1955 furent appliqués à peu près selon les intentions initiales, la qualité de construction se dégradant cependant au fil des années. À Čerëmuški et ailleurs, cette apparente continuité ne doit cependant pas leurrer non

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plus. Sous couvert d’une fidélité aux intentions des plans antérieurs, souvent nombre de points architecturaux importants furent reconsidérés subrepticement – en premier lieu par la réintroduction d’éléments symboliques à des emplacements stratégiques, ensuite par un changement d’échelle considérable dans les édifices d’habitation. Ce sont ces palinodies tacites qu’il importe de préciser maintenant.

La monumentalité sous Brežnev : une réaffirmation conquérante

7 Sous Hruščev la monumentalité ne fut donc pas bien en cour. Le second concours pour le Palais des Soviets en 1959 distingua des projets intéressants, avec les dernières œuvres des grands noms de l’architecture stalinienne et l’apparition de nouveaux professionnels, mais rien n’en émergea. Pourtant, fut bâti en 1961 par Mihail Posohin (1910‑1989) le massif Palais des congrès dans l’enceinte du Kremlin, quasiment le seul programme de prestige accompli par Hruščev. Aussi, là où ce dirigeant se désintéressa globalement des édifices somptuaires, privilégiant la tentative de résolution rapide de la pénurie de logements, son successeur choisit de ne pas choisir. En somme, sous Brežnev le programme de construction de logements en masse connut une nouvelle et folle ampleur – passant de 1 245 000 appartements construits en 1953, à 2 266 000 en 19707 – tandis que de nombreux projets civiques et équipements monumentaux furent lancés ou virent le jour.

8 Au fur et à mesure que s’écoulaient les années Brežnev se fit jour une inflation d’un nouveau désir de représentation. Les pavillons soviétiques aux expositions universelles témoignent de ce glissement. Celui de Bruxelles 1958, signé par Anatolij Poljanskij (1928‑1993) joua la carte subtile d’un effacement monumental, sobre structure métallique revêtue d’une délicate enveloppe de verre. Face aux lyriques pavillons français de Guillaume Gillet et américain d’Edward Durell Stone, l’œuvre plus sage de Poljanskij fut considérée comme un échec. Le Kremlin retint la leçon, et à l’exposition de Montréal 1967, le majestueux pavillon signé par Posohin marqua la réaffirmation conquérante d’une monumentalité modernisée. Ce processus devait bientôt culminer avec le dernier pavillon de l’URSS à une exposition universelle, celle d’Osaka 1970, à nouveau œuvre de Posohin. Là, l’architecture formant une colossale flèche de métal se muait quasiment en métaphore d’une fusée… Montréal 1967 et Osaka 1970 se signalèrent donc par un retour au premier plan de la propagande extérieure, par des œuvres solennelles et expressives, inventant un nouveau langage architectural entre modernité et allusions symboliques, celles‑ci étant destinées à exprimer implicitement la puissance de l’URSS.

9 Si ces manifestations internationales appelaient traditionnellement des architectures d’exception, ces bâtiments ne furent pas isolés, puisque encore en 1970 le même Posohin dans les ambassades soviétiques de Washington et Brasilia souligna la dimension palatiale des édifices par la majesté des accès ou l’opulence des espaces de réception8. Cela devint d’ailleurs une constante de l’architecture diplomatique soviétique : les ambassades de l’URSS en France – Igor Pokrovskij architecte, 1976 – et à Cuba – Aleksandr Ročegov, 1977 (Ill.1) – imposèrent au cadre urbain existant un nouvel ordre monumental, à Paris grâce à la puissance des travées de béton, à La Havane au moyen d’une colossale tour formant donjon. Si ces monuments intégrèrent discrètement les contraintes ou ressources locales, ils furent toutefois typiques de la

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variante soviétique du brutalisme. Bien que cette esthétique trouvât sa source dans les travaux tardifs de Le Corbusier (couvent de La Tourette, parlement de Chandigarh) ou via les œuvres de Marcel Breuer ou Paul Rudolf, le brutalisme soviétique médita ces précédents français et américains, en retenant la puissance monolithique du béton brut, mais les ramenant vers des compositions plus traditionnelles. De même, ces installations témoignaient de la capacité soviétique à intégrer dans son propre système de valeurs des esthétiques étrangères – dans un geste créatif ouvert, finalement en porte‑à‑faux par rapport aux gémonies de propagande stigmatisant la supposée décadence du monde occidental. Malgré leur présence hors territoire, ces exemples d’architectures soviétiques disposant de moyens considérables ne constituèrent toutefois pas des exceptions.

Ill. 1 – Aleksandr Ročegov, ambassade d’URSS à La Havane, 1977

10 Simultanément, la collégialité brejnévienne ramena l’architecture publique vers une monumentalité glacée à la limite de la résurrection de la pompe stalinienne. C’était aussi une manière de réponse à l’opulence américaine, dont alors l’architecture elle aussi s’attachait à signifier son influence dorénavant prépondérante. Ce tant à l’étranger que sur son sol avec, par exemple, la solennelle ambassade des États‑Unis d’Amérique à New Delhi, conçue en 1954 par Edward Durell Stone, ou du même auteur le Kennedy Center à Washington en 1962. De même, le Lincoln Center à New York, conçu entre 1955 et 1969, par une équipe comprenant notamment Wallace Harrison, Pietro Belluschi, Eero Saarinen, Philip Johnson, retourna à un parti urbain et à des formes dont l’emphase monumentale peinait à s’accorder avec une sémantique se voulant toujours moderne ; et de fait l’ensemble du Lincoln Center fut accueilli avec une froideur acide par la critique architecturale américaine, qui y vit souvent un pachyderme stylistiquement anachronique9. URSS comme États‑Unis connaissaient donc le même problème de représentation officielle via des architectures

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monumentales. Une différence majeure séparait pourtant l’opinion publique des deux superpuissances rivales. Aux États‑Unis, la question resta entachée de propos polémiques, accablant les architectes et les administrations de commentaires peu amènes, tandis qu’en URSS la chose se fit progressivement, réintroduisant d’abord avec précaution des dispositifs monumentaux, puis prenant plus d’assurance dans la grandiloquence, sans que le milieu architectural n’y opposât de questionnement réel. Les bâtisseurs restaient des instruments attentifs aux murmures du pouvoir, et essayaient d’adapter leurs façades à ce qu’ils percevaient comme le désir du régime.

11 À ce propos, la reconstruction de Taškent sous la direction d’Evgenij Rozanov (1925‑2006) est exemplaire. Si les ensembles ministériels de la place Lenin sont encore khrouchtchéviens dans leur rigueur moderne – visiblement inspirés des œuvres américaines de Breuer – déjà des éléments plus lyriques trahissent l’influence des travaux brésiliens d’Oscar Niemeyer. Dans les monuments suivants bâtis à Taškent par Rozanov – le musée Lenin en 197510, le palais de l’Amitié entre les peuples en 198011 – la monumentalité s’est affirmée, usant de dispositifs majestueux comme des rampes d’accès, des terrasses portant les édifices, des jeux de volumétrie sculpturaux, un rappel des claustras de type persan dans une logique monumentale néo‑classique. De telles œuvres étaient véritablement la recréation d’une approche palatiale soviétique modernisée. Ces bâtiments réaffirmèrent le rôle prégnant de l’idéologie au cœur de l’espace urbain, jusqu’à écraser l’environnement par d’inquiétants pachydermes de pierre semblant de nouveaux châteaux forts.

12 Dans une logique similaire, plusieurs ensembles urbains staliniens demeurés inachevés furent aussi l’objet de pompeux projets d’achèvement. Ce fut notamment le cas du parc Pobeda à Leningrad, conçu en 1945 sous la direction de Nikolaj Baranov (1909‑1989) et que le même architecte dota en 1978 d’une colossale salle de concert‑stade, espèce de glacial Colisée soviétique marquant une continuité à la fois formelle et politique des équipements, ceux‑ci paraissant avant tout conçus pour magnifier le régime plutôt que pour servir réellement. Mais l’exemple le plus éloquent de cette tendance à la remonumentalisation de l’espace urbain fut l’affaire tourmentée du soviet de Volgograd. Si l’ensemble du plan directeur de 1944, signé par Alabjan, avait globalement été appliqué, il manquait toutefois le point d’orgue de ce majestueux ensemble urbain – le gratte‑ciel du soviet, dessiné par Lev Rudnev. Dans la guerre d’influence à laquelle s’étaient livrés les deux architectes pour le contrôle de la reconstruction de Stalingrad, cette partie essentielle du plan échoua, la déstalinisation compromettant définitivement l’achèvement… Un tel échec était inadmissible pour la direction brejnévienne, pour qui l’utilisation accrue du souvenir de la Grande Guerre patriotique servit d’argument idéologique majeur. En 1970, après une consultation censément ouverte12, l’étude d’une nouvelle tour du soviet de Volgograd fut confiée à un architecte bien installé dans le milieu local, Efim Levitan (1915‑2007). Déjà largement impliqué dans la reconstruction de la ville vers 1950, celui‑ci perpétua la logique monumentale stalinienne, mais en lui donnant une expressivité formelle apparemment modernisée. Là, les masses exprimaient des choix compositionnels traditionnels, tandis que l’expression stylistique jouait d’une modernité brutaliste certes inspirée d’exemples occidentaux, mais soviétisée par un sens marqué de l’emphase. Pour des raisons cumulant indécision des autorités locales et manque de ressources économiques, le bâtiment ne fut pas réalisé. Ainsi le centre de Volgograd resta étrangement privé du monument central censé servir de cœur politique.

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13 De même, une certaine inflation mémorielle conduisit à l’hypertrophie des nouveaux monuments célébrant la Grande Guerre patriotique. L’un des plus significatifs fut celui terminé en 1967 par l’architecte Jakov Belopol´skij (1916‑1993) et le sculpteur Evgenij Vučetič (1908‑1974) à Volgograd13. Véritable complexe monumental célébrant la bataille de Stalingrad, l’ensemble réussit l’acrobatique synthèse conceptuelle réunissant la flamme du Soldat inconnu de l’Arc de triomphe et la crypte funéraire de Napoléon, créant ainsi un curieux lieu de mémoire, tandis que la titanesque statue de la Mère‑Patrie – elle inspirée de la Victoire de Samothrace ! – donnait à l’URSS un des plus étonnants sanctuaires patriotiques du XXe siècle. Dans une logique similaire, le monument aux Défenseurs de Leningrad (Ill.2), signé en 1971 par Sergej Speranskij (1914‑1983), réussit lui aussi un tour de force compositionnel, celui de cumuler la plupart des symboles monumentaux traditionnels sur un seul site, tout en parvenant à leur trouver une expression relativement modernisée14. Là encore l’idée de la crypte ouverte du tombeau de Napoléon fut reprise pour la cour excavée, avec une Déploration maternelle reprenant un canevas Renaissance, tandis que l’obélisque monumental ou les galeries funèbres sont ornées de citations de l’antiquité. Un tel assemblage réactualisait une symbolique historiciste digne de la période stalinienne, sauf que l’ère brejnévienne en tentait ici une ultime adaptation – y intégrant cette fois des formes modernes acérées, sacralisant le discours monumental avec une pesanteur délibérée, entre patriotisme exacerbé et ambiance de recueillement funèbre. Un collage qui nuit d’ailleurs à l’efficacité du monument, peinant à choisir entre rappel des défunts et logorrhée soviétique de rigueur. Speranskij devint un des spécialistes de cette veine monumentaliste sur programme idéologique et patriotique. En courtisan habile à saisir les attentes du Politbjuro, il développa plusieurs projets similaires de monuments à la Victoire. Son projet le plus irréaliste fut celui répondant au concours de 1972 pour un musée à Lenin sur le même site où aurait dû être édifié le Palais des soviets, proche du Kremlin. Là, Speranskij proposa une architecture d’échelle surhumaine, formant une sorte de porte‑avion étrange, couvert de symboles soviétiques15. Si ces propositions plurent au pouvoir, qui ambitionna un temps de les réaliser, c’est finalement leur caractère délirant qui les condamna, en faisant des monstres économiquement irréalisables.

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Ill. 2 – Sergej Speranskij, Monument aux Défenseurs de Leningrad, 1971

14 De fait, ces monuments ou projets impressionnants souffraient de plusieurs handicaps. D’abord ils témoignaient d’une difficile adaptation de schémas traditionnels à une culture architecturale mettant désormais en doute la pertinence des formes anciennes. Ensuite, ils contribuèrent à isoler la production architecturale des besoins réels du pays, en donnant l’image d’une monumentalité débridée, imposée au sommet par la pression idéologique. Malgré tout, l’importance du souvenir de la Grande Guerre patriotique ou le culte de Lenin firent que ces édifices restèrent considérés en général avec une réelle fierté par la population, les protégeant ainsi quelque peu du discrédit dans lequel fut assez vite plongé le reste de l’architecture brejnévienne. Quant aux architectes eux‑mêmes, ces pachydermiques mémoriaux suscitèrent au contraire une ironie de moins en moins dissimulée, comme en témoignerait cette pique de Feliks Novikov : « Grâce aux efforts conjoints des architectes, sculpteurs et artistes, un monument de la Victoire sur l’Art a été dessiné. »16

15 À Moscou, un bâtiment incarne presque à lui seul ce désaveu graduel : le siège de l’Académie des sciences de l’URSS. Objet d’un concours en 1968, remporté par Jurij Platonov (1929‑ ), le bâtiment fut commencé en 1970, et seulement achevé extérieurement vers 198517. L’Académie atteint un sommet dans la monumentalité pour la monumentalité, jusqu’à produire un édifice certes impressionnant, mais déficient à bien des égards. Le surhaussement de l’édifice sur un talus presque castral, sa vaste cour d’honneur enfermée entre des ailes basses, sa colossale tour centrale formant donjon, sa tour de l’horloge entre cauchemar de ferronnier et fantasmagorie de science‑fiction, ses couronnements d’acier – en tout l’Académie apparaît irrésistiblement comme un château moderne. Dans ses espaces intérieurs, la débauche de marbre et de cuivre jusque dans les pièces les plus secondaires et cachées témoigne d’un esprit somptuaire ayant perdu toute mesure18. De toute évidence le statut très enviable des académiciens sous l’URSS exigeait un palais qui soit l’équivalent

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monumental des privilèges de la caste savante… Nombre de couloirs ont été conçus pour magnifier une perte d’espace criante, formant des labyrinthes conduisant à de poétiques cours octogonales sommées de verrières, le tout formant des jardins d’hiver introduisant de bienvenues respirations dans ce décor oppressant. En somme une architecture devenue folle, victime des présupposés ayant présidé à sa conception.

16 Malgré son caractère exceptionnel l’Académie ouvrit une brèche dans l’architecture brejnévienne, propageant bientôt une veine baroquisante. À Moscou aussi, le théâtre Gor´kij signé en 1973 par Vladimir Kubasov19 ou le Théâtre musical pour enfants bâti en 1975 par Boris Krasil´nilkov20, entre autres, témoignent de cette transformation de l’architecture en objets sculpturaux expressifs, presque inquiétants dans leurs aspérités et surfaces minérales rébarbatives, leurs groupes statuaires emphatiques s’accrochant sur les façades comme des vautours idéologiques guettant leurs proies. Ces équipements furent largement copiés à travers l’URSS, propageant un nouveau goût somptuaire sur le territoire, de telle sorte que les monuments brejnéviens en vinrent finalement à répondre en égaux à leurs précédents majestueux de l’ère stalinienne.

17 Or, quelle que soit leur utilité plus ou moins justifiée, de tels édifices étaient par nature particulièrement dispendieux. Une tare non négligeable dans une économie soviétique de moins en moins capable d’assumer ses déséquilibres21. Dans ces équipements voluptuaires, la concentration de matériaux rares (marbre, bronze, cristal) et leur abondant usage d’acier et de ciment ont indubitablement pesé sur l’aggravation de la pénurie quotidienne en URSS. Pour les architectes appréciés par le pouvoir, tels Posohin ou Rozanov, cette résurgence de la monumentalité constituait certes une véritable manne de grandes commandes officielles. D’autant que ces édifices flattant l’orgueil du parti permettaient aux bâtisseurs de déployer leur inventivité, et surtout d’échapper à la routine peu créative des projets‑types alors de plus en plus la norme pour l’habitat. Mais, ce faisant se creusa le fossé entre la façade officielle et la réalité du pays – d’un côté les apparatchiks du parti bâtissaient des palais réservés à leurs cérémoniaux, de l’autre, les installations domestiques témoignaient d’un appauvrissement dorénavant difficilement dissimulable.

18 Ainsi une telle architecture introduisit en URSS un effarant contraste entre les « châteaux » du parti et les « masures » du peuple22. Graduellement s’installa ainsi un schéma séparant l’aristocratique nomenklatura, utilisant ou habitant des édifices prestigieux, et le reste de la population, auquel on ne fournissait plus que des logements aussi industrialisés que désincarnés. Ce contraste architectural criant eut certainement un rôle implicite dans le progressif discrédit idéologique du régime.

L’habitat : standardisation de masse et syndrome de la citadelle

19 En matière d’habitat, la période brejnévienne introduisit à plusieurs titres un tournant radical. Là où Hruščev avait essentiellement perpétué le format stalinien modéré des immeubles à quatre ou cinq étages, son successeur eut une politique privilégiant massivement les superblocs à grande hauteur, atteignant souvent jusqu’aux vingt étages.

20 Un tel changement d’échelle obligeait concurremment à un niveau technologique accru. Cela demandait également des quantités considérables d’acier. De facto, deux

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exigences incontournables qui allaient justement devenir problématiques avec l’état préoccupant de l’économie soviétique dans la décennie 1970. Cela eut une première conséquence directe : l’allongement des délais de livraison, faute d’approvisionnement adéquat. En résulta en outre une perte générale de qualité dans les finitions, souvent sacrifiées, faute de moyens. Malgré ces handicaps pourtant guère oubliables, les recueils publiés sous Brežnev concordent pour célébrer un accroissement majeur des livraisons d’habitations23 – une insistance qui n’a rien d’innocent, et qui auprès des relogés pouvait un temps dissimuler l’abaissement du niveau architectural général au profit d’une hypothétique résolution de la crise durable du logement.

21 Si ceci aurait pu compenser cela, donnant apparemment aux architectes l’occasion de nombreux chantiers, la réalité est plus sombre, puisque cette fièvre bâtisseuse privilégia les professionnels déjà bien installés, comme Posohin, ou favorisa ceux qui se consacrèrent avant tout au perfectionnement de la préfabrication, tel Ročegov (1917‑1998). Ces deux dignitaires du premier cercle architectural soviétique monopolisèrent les meilleures commandes, bénéficiant d’un accès prioritaire aux matériaux24. Pour eux, leur place bien assise dans les organes architecturaux d’État permettait des réalisations soignées, destinées à servir de vitrines au régime.

22 Pour les autres, le contexte était bien différent. En premier lieu, ceux‑ci durent faire avec des livraisons erratiques de matériaux. Ensuite, leurs projets furent systématiquement revus à la baisse, éliminant les aspects les plus intéressants, rabotant ou les privant de nombre d’installations de qualité pour les habitants (squares paysagés, espaces piétonniers, équipements sportifs et culturels), réduisant leurs travaux à de secs remplissages du territoire habité. Ce contexte défavorable était déjà largement déprimant en soi, aussi la coupe fut‑elle bientôt pleine avec deux tares consubstantielles : l’obligation de se conformer à des modules préfabriqués ne permettant guère de variations constructives ou esthétiques, et l’allongement exponentiel de la durée des chantiers25, qui atteignit parfois près de dix ans pour des ensembles d’habitat. Une telle débâcle esthétique et pratique ne pouvait que contribuer à discréditer à la fois le régime et le milieu architectural, les deux apparaissant de plus en plus déconnectés des faits réels.

23 Ces spécificités soviétiques n’empêchèrent pas une acculturation simultanée de modèles étrangers, en l’occurrence les grands ensembles français, tels ceux de Georges Candilis à Toulouse Le Mirail26. Cette influence des grandes barres hexagonales éclatées de Candilis donna lieu en URSS à des imitations qui, malheureusement, écartèrent la principale qualité de leur source française : l’ouverture de l’espace. Certes les Soviétiques reprirent les dispositifs hexagonaux, mais en les refermant sur une vaste cour intérieure uniformément cernée par les tours. Ce schéma fut choisi selon toute vraisemblance pour des raisons techniques et économiques. Cela nécessite un bref rappel : la France des années 1950 avait systématisé la construction dite en ligne ; autrement dit, le placement des barres mutuellement en parallèle, afin qu’une seule grue puisse construire deux immeubles simultanément. Sous Hruščev, impressionné par les procédés de préfabrication déposés par la firme Camus, les Soviétiques avaient déjà adapté cette méthode française. Sous Brežnev, ils en optimisèrent la portée, en plaçant une grue au centre d’un heptagone, permettant ainsi l’érection a priori plus rapide de non pas deux immeubles, mais de sept super‑blocs… Cela créa fatalement des unités urbaines fort rébarbatives, donnant extérieurement l’image de forteresses habitées, comme ouvertes à regret par le mince espace laissé entre les barres, le square

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central paraissant alors un enclos fermé. Un dispositif qui n’est pas sans rappeler le Castel del Monte en Italie, modèle architectural canonique ici monstrueusement hypertrophié dans des habitats d’une vingtaine d’étages (Ill.3).

Ill. 3 – Groupe d’immeubles sur dispositif heptagonal, Moscou, vers 1975

24 Ce syndrome de la citadelle ne contribua pas peu à étouffer le décor urbain soviétique – accentuant jusqu’à la caricature le principe de cour entre immeubles des mikrorajon staliniens, dont la relative intimité était ici définitivement perdue dans le passage à une échelle surhumaine. Ce dispositif presque castral avait un autre vice capital, il fermait les tours sur elles‑mêmes, rendant difficile la création d’un tissu urbain autour, aboutissant de facto à une séparation nette entre zones habitables et espaces sociaux. Par ricochet, cette tentative de résolution de la crise du logement contribua à dégrader l’accès des habitants à des éléments de loisirs communautaires, souvent éliminés les premiers des réalisations, faute de budgets. Loin d’être aveugles, les architectes soviétiques pressentirent les effets potentiellement négatifs de tels choix pratiques. Au mitan des années 1970, nombre de leurs efforts semblent avoir eu pour principale finalité d’envisager des alternatives avec un succès mitigé, malgré des opérations d’ampleur. Georgij Gradov (1911‑1984) par exemple envisagea des ensembles d’habitat expérimental pour 10 000 habitants en groupes de grandes tours de trente étages selon une esthétique encore corbuséenne, mitigée par des volumes éclatés ou sur plans triangulaires. Dignes héritiers de l’esprit visionnaire constructiviste des années 1920, ces projets censés permettre de meilleures conditions de logement par des villes moins denses étaient néanmoins totalement irréalistes tant du point de vue économique que face à des infrastructures défaillantes. L’heure n’était plus favorable à l’utopie. Ces conditions contribuèrent également à accélérer l’éclatement de la supposée unité stylistique à l’œuvre en URSS.

25 Car, paradoxalement, alors que la période khrouchtchévienne avait réussi à diffuser une unité architecturale moderniste à travers l’ensemble de l’Union, malgré l’apparent rouleau compresseur de la standardisation, le règne de Brežnev échoua au contraire à imposer une esthétique unique. En effet, comme sous Stalin, la période vit une coexistence des modèles issus du cénacle moscovite avec des tendances cherchant à faire émerger un semblant d’identité locale. Par exemple, sous Stalin, Leningrad fut le fer de lance de l’opposition au palladianisme soviétisé de Žoltovskij ; sous Brežnev via ses nouveaux ensembles de logement la ville fut pionnière dans la mise en place d’une

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modernité hiératique, ressuscitant des dispositifs monumentaux d’esprit implicitement stalinien. Baranov, ex‑architecte en chef de la ville, continua à peser sur les choix urbains de Leningrad presque jusqu’à sa mort27. S’opposant avec virulence à la modernité internationale tant dans les décennies 1940 que 1950, Baranov eut sous Brežnev une nouvelle occasion de mettre en place des dispositifs utilisant l’habitat comme décor monumental. Son influence sur l’apparence du district Primorskaja fut capitale : si sur la rive gauche du canal une série de tours témoigne du goût moderne international de l’époque khrouchtchévienne, la rive droite revint à des éléments somptuaires, comme le placage de marbre, les travées de façade puissamment modelées, les arches colossales liant les bâtiments les uns aux autres pour former une sorte d’arc triomphal continu (Ill.4). Comme lors du règne stalinien, l’habitat se retrouvait là subordonné à une signification monumentale magnifiant les réalisations du régime.

Ill. 4 – Nikolaj Baranov (dir.), groupe d’immeubles de l’île Primorskij, Leningrad, 1978

Paradoxes d’une ville ex novo : Tol´jatti

26 La période vit aussi la continuation de ce qui était désormais la tradition soviétique de la construction épique de cités nouvelles. Tol´jatti en est un cas emblématique, dans ses accomplissements comme ses échecs. Si la construction du barrage et du lac artificiel sur la Volga en 1952 ne donna lieu qu’à une ville d’un format encore médian, la politique khrouchtchévienne d’accroître la production automobile entraîna d’abord l’érection du dantesque complexe industriel de Lada (achevé en 1967), puis obligea à envisager un second centre urbain à une échelle étendue. Le plan directeur de Boris Rubanenko (1910‑1985), appliqué entre 1967 et 1980 consacra le rôle dorénavant majeur de la voiture, avec des avenues démesurées articulées par une série de ronds‑points modules. Ces carrefours giratoires furent les premiers du genre en URSS28.

27 Au cœur du parc Pobeda, le point de gravité du district Avtozavodskij aurait dû se parer d’un centre civique colossal (Ill.5), enterrant le trafic sous une dalle permettant une circulation piétonnière surhaussée. Cette conception vaguement corbuséenne, envisagée en 1945 par Perret au Havre, fut essentiellement tentée aux États-Unis au cours des années 1960, dans quelques réhabilitations de centres urbains dégradés –

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notamment au Civic Center de Boston, visiblement médité par Rubanenko. Sur ce point l’URSS rejoignait un débat urbain mondial, sauf qu’à Tol´jatti elle appliquait ce trait moderniste ex nihilo.

Ill. 5 – Boris Rubanenko, Palais de la Culture, Tol´jatti, 1971

28 Tol´jatti posait néanmoins des problèmes urbanistiques redoutables. Non sans audace, Rubanenko pensa les résoudre en ignorant délibérément les obstacles. En premier lieu, avec son plan très hiérarchisé et ses modestes équipements, la petite ville stalinienne ne permettait guère une extension conforme aux nécessités d’une grande cité moderne. Rubanenko contourna ce handicap en construisant une seconde cité, côtoyant la première, un vaste espace forestier de plusieurs kilomètres carrés séparant les deux zones urbaines. Cette solution presque roublarde dans sa simplicité fut un coup de génie, puisqu’elle transforma la forêt en une espèce de Central Park version soviétique, offrant une réserve écologique pouvant servir de lieu de loisirs, tandis que l’érection d’un boulevard de desserte longeant le bois permit de relier les deux cœurs urbains désormais juxtaposés. Cela préservait l’héritage naturel et le bâti stalinien, tout en autorisant la construction sans encombre d’une ville adaptée à des besoins humains et industriels d’une échelle accrue. Avec la même élégance de vues, reprenant en cela les conceptions constructivistes de l’époque de sa formation au terme des années 1920, Rubanenko veilla à repousser le plus loin possible sur le plateau la gigantesque usine Lada, à la fois bien séparée des espaces habités et bien reliée à eux par de larges voies automobiles.

29 Quant au centre urbain lui‑même, il se fonda sur un schéma cruciforme – selon une logique similaire à celle de la nouvelle capitale brésilienne, faisant ainsi implicitement de Tol´jatti une sorte de Brasilia‑sur‑URSS – le bras vertical de la croix courant du lac jusqu’à l’usine, tandis que son bras horizontal servait d’axe secondaire délimitant les différents blocs d’habitation (Ill.6). Cette titanesque jonction urbaine abrita le parc Pobeda et différents équipements sportifs, tandis qu’à son intersection, servant de centre de gravité à tout Tol´jatti, fut installé le centre civique comportant notamment le Palais de la Culture. Quant aux blocs délimités par la grille orthogonale ou diagonale des avenues, ils furent eux‑mêmes subdivisés en unités urbaines, ces mikrorajon ayant chacun leurs écoles, cinémas, centres commerciaux. Tout avait donc été préparé pour créer une ville de qualité29.

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Ill. 6 – Boris Brandenburg, tour d’habitation, Tol´jatti, 1973

30 S’ils avaient été appliqués dans leur intégralité, les plans de Rubanenko auraient laissé une ville brillante. Or les déséquilibres de l’ère brejnévienne ne permirent pas l’achèvement du monumental centre civique envisagé par l’architecte ni la construction des aménagements des rivages du lac, qui auraient offert à Tol´jatti de nécessaires espaces collectifs de délassement et une optimisation de son environnement30. De même, plusieurs avenues ne furent que partiellement construites, faisant de certains quartiers des lieux amorphes, manquant des infrastructures indispensables. Tol´jatti représente donc le paradigme des ambitions urbaines de l’ère brejnévienne, cherchant à égaler l’ampleur des réalisations staliniennes, cette fois selon une esthétique contemporaine. Ce qui tend à donner une allure paradoxale à de tels ensembles urbains, scindés entre le souvenir du passé soviétique et la volonté de concrétiser une vision soviétisée du monde futur. D’une certaine manière Tol´jatti est une ville théoriquement parfaite, que les écueils de la réalité ont mutilée. Ce n’est pourtant qu’un cas parmi d’autres, la plupart des cités soviétiques comportant une conséquente dose d’inachevé, qui obère toujours plus ou moins leur fonctionnement et leur qualité de vie.

Naufrage pratique, naissance d’une contestation

31 Si les lignes de césure sont relativement nettes d’un genre architectural à l’autre, sous Brežnev ce qui apparaît toutefois le plus problématique est le définitif divorce qualitatif entre l’architecture administrative et celle du logement.

32 Si Hruščev avait vilipendé l’architecture stalinienne pour son supposé gâchis de ressources, paradoxalement sa diatribe n’était que superficiellement juste, et essentiellement erronée. Car, hormis quelques programmes de prestige (métro, gratte‑ciel de Moscou), les bâtiments staliniens demandaient certes des finitions d’une certaine qualité (enduits et ornements réalisés par des artisans qualifiés), mais en définitive leur gros œuvre n’exigeait pas de solutions complexes. Dans leur grande majorité, ces constructions utilisaient avant tout la brique, matériau aussi économique que facile à mettre en œuvre, tandis que leur dimension encore moyenne permettait de conserver des portées aisément franchissables, ne requérant pas là non plus l’usage de

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solutions technologiques perfectionnées. En résumé, l’architecture stalinienne présentait de jolies apparences mais restait technologiquement traditionnelle et donc était adaptée à une économie de déséquilibre des ressources.

33 En mettant au ban les choix historicistes des architectes staliniens et en exigeant d’eux le développement accru de la standardisation, Hruščev créa à son insu un goulot d’étranglement qui allait se révéler fatal pour l’habitat soviétique sous son successeur. Car le recours à la préfabrication ne pouvait d’abord se faire que si la production en usine pouvait suivre les intenses programmes de construction. Ensuite, cette même standardisation exigeait des solutions constructives plus pointues, qui devaient se révéler un gouffre à acier et à ciment. En la matière, les exigences heurtaient de front celles du complexe militaro‑industriel, celui‑ci ayant inéluctablement gardé sa prévalence avec la course aux armements31. Le règne des panelnye doma ou immeubles en préfabriqué se révéla ainsi plus un opposant qu’un adjuvant pour la résolution de la crise du logement. De plus, alors que les hruščevki, avec leurs quatre étages, se bâtissaient avec des moyens limités, l’inflation d’échelle de la période brejnévienne rendit indispensables des structures à la fois plus lourdes et aux portées plus larges, pour supporter des tours d’une réelle ampleur, sans parler du problème des équipements techniques complexes tels que les ascenseurs et les gaines de chauffage et d’alimentation en eau capables de desservir une vingtaine d’étages. Derrière une apparence de modernité et d’efficacité, le recours à la préfabrication industrielle pour le logement fut en fait un choix économique désastreux, qui contribua fatalement à la débâcle matérielle soviétique ! Les plus lucides réclamèrent que soit mis un terme à une préfabrication se révélant contre‑productive, et que soient à nouveau encouragées des recherches qui puissent être à la fois originales et moins dévoreuses de ressources qui, de toute manière, s’avéraient de plus en plus comptées. C’est dire combien la marge de manœuvre était limitée et inconfortable. L’avertissement vint d’architectes pourtant plutôt bien installés dans le sérail, tels que Anatolij Poljanskij, Natan Osterman ou Feliks Novikov. Ceux‑ci réclamèrent des opérations conceptuellement plus ambitieuses, et surtout ils soulignèrent le fossé croissant entre les commandes de prestige et la routine des superblocs – prise de position courageuse qui ne fut pas sans effets négatifs sur leur carrière.

34 Clairvoyants sur les difficultés croissantes des chantiers, eux et nombre d’autres architectes essayèrent de se spécialiser dans des niches censées leur assurer une présence architecturale stable. Ce faisant ils redonnaient vie à une coutume initiée au début des années 1930 par les constructivistes, lorsque ceux‑ci essayèrent de s’adapter au néo‑académisme stalinien. Or une différence essentielle séparait les constructivistes de leurs lointains successeurs de l’ère brejnévienne : les premiers avaient eu ce réflexe par volonté de survie esthétique et politique, tandis que les seconds ne cherchaient qu’à pallier la lente désagrégation du milieu architectural dans son ensemble. Ainsi, tenu à l’écart des gratifiantes commandes palatiales brejnéviennes et désireux de fuir la médiocrité des ensembles d’habitat, Poljanskij se spécialisa dans la construction de grands hôtels dans les zones touristiques de l’Union, comme la Crimée, signant notamment en 1977 l’élégant complexe hôtelier Intourist de Jalta. Ce type de programme permettait de construire des bâtiments ambitieux et soignés, offrant aussi la possibilité de signer des espaces imaginatifs, tandis que les chambres autorisaient une réflexion indirecte sur l’habitat. Le soin apporté par Poljanskij à ses hôtels se distingua à la fois par la volonté de perpétuer un niveau de qualité élevé, tout en refusant de céder aux pressions pour muer ses édifices en palaces de la nomenklatura.

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Car là aussi se jouait un enjeu capital, celui de l’usage des édifices, les hôtels de Poljanskij comme ceux de ses émules étant censés ne pas servir uniquement aux membres du parti, et fonctionner comme flatteuses vitrines de l’URSS tant pour les touristes étrangers qu’intérieurs. Ces enjeux contribuèrent au maintien de projets singuliers, et ce programme hôtelier fut donc fort recherché par les architectes – aussi la période brejnévienne vit la réalisation d’équipements impressionnants, se signalant par une modernité lyrique. Toutefois de telles occasions restèrent rares, n’apportant pas de solution durable à une profession se sentant de plus en plus prisonnière des pesanteurs du régime.

35 Autre moderne convaincu, Osterman (1916‑1969) – auteur de barres assez tributaires de l’influence corbuséenne, dont sa Maison du nouveau mode de vie, à Moscou, finie en 1969 – voulut quant à lui propager une conception de la ville plus dynamique, voire révolutionnaire, dans la lignée des utopies urbaines des années 1920. Osterman déclara par exemple : Dans son ensemble, la question de l’habitat de l’avenir est compliquée et peu étudiée. C’est à cause de cela qu’on peut expliquer les différences d’orientation prises quant à sa résolution, conduisant toutes au même but : la conception, la construction d’un habitat tel qu’il pourra satisfaire toutes les exigences de l’homme de la société communiste.32

36 Si sa première phrase, cinglante, contrastait avec le tact usuel de ses collègues – en général peu enclins à exprimer leur insatisfaction, à plus forte raison dans une revue étrangère –, la seconde sentence est plus intéressante, exprimant mieux les non‑dits fréquents de l’architecture sous Brežnev. Bien qu’à première vue le propos ressemblât au discours idéologiquement de mise, en fait Osterman évoquait implicitement la présence d’une indécision fondamentale, imposant autant de vues architecturales qu’il y a d’équipes chargées de résoudre les problèmes urbains, suggérant ainsi une absence de politique en matière urbaine. Ces commentaires concluaient un long article, dont chaque paragraphe condamnait à demi‑mot la médiocrité de la réflexion théorique et leur peu de résultat pratique. Si un tel discours pouvait certes être accepté parmi les architectes étrangers, en URSS il conduisit surtout Osterman à prêcher dans le désert, le rendant aussi impuissant que ses prédécesseurs du constructivisme. Aussi ses recherches sur la réforme des villes existantes et la conception de nouveaux centres spacieux restèrent‑t‑elles sur le papier : la préfabrication lourde, sur des partis d’urbanisme assez traditionnels garda la maîtrise de la situation.

37 Moins installé que Poljanskij et plus lucide qu’Osterman, après un début de carrière moscovite prometteur dans les années 1950‑1960, Novikov (1927‑ ) eut le malheur de contester dans des réunions de l’Union des architectes l’hégémonie de la préfabrication, résumant : « L’habitat standard actuel est comme du bois mort. Une myriade d’oiseaux peuvent se percher sur ses branches, or qu’est‑ce qu’une forêt sans une seule feuille, sans fleur, sans fruit ? »33 Aussi réclama‑t‑il pour ses travaux de la ville satellite de Zelenograd des solutions rompant avec les déficiences constructives des grands ensembles… Cette exigence pourtant normale eut l’heur de contrarier le gotha architectural soviétique, qui veilla à ce que l’encombrant Novikov soit insidieusement mis sur une voie de garage. Cela le contraignit ensuite à mener sa carrière loin de la mare moscovite aux crocodiles, en projetant ou bâtissant nombre d’équipements ambitieux dans les périphéries de l’empire soviétique, notamment à Samarkand34. Novikov eut d’ailleurs un réflexe très partagé par nombre de ses collègues issus d’une même génération : abandonner Moscou, trop dominée par les mandarins de

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l’Union des architectes, pour chercher dans des villes moins contrôlées par cette instance de meilleures possibilités architecturales. Si effectivement la marge de manœuvre y était un peu plus conséquente, toutefois la lenteur pour l’approbation des projets et les problèmes d’approvisionnement de matériaux aboutissaient à une autre forme d’impasse.

38 Cependant, ces tentatives avortées de réforme architecturale, l’implicite résurgence monumentale stalinienne, la difficulté à faire aboutir les chantiers se liguèrent donc pour propager chez les architectes un sentiment d’échec, tandis que se cristallisa dans la collectivité l’opinion d’un abandon de ses besoins en faveur de la satisfaction des seuls appétits de la vorace nomenklatura. Toutes circonstances qui favorisèrent l’émergence vers 1980 de l’ironique architecture dite de papier. Car certains architectes, considérant même les niches des programmes spécialisés comme inefficaces, choisirent de ne pas exister officiellement. Ceux‑là pratiquèrent une sorte d’architecture des catacombes, leurs projets étant délibérément conçus telles des utopies n’attendant pas la réalisation, des architectures de papier voulant tout ignorer des cénacles officiels soviétiques.

39 Alors qu’aucune architecture réelle ne pouvait exister en URSS sans le soutien matériel de l’État, un nombre croissant de jeunes architectes refusa de participer au pacte avec le pouvoir, soit en se réfugiant dans des emplois purement alimentaires, soit en refusant carrément d’adhérer à l’Union des architectes. Ainsi s’installa peu à peu dans le domaine architectural un réflexe similaire à celui des quelques peintres non‑conformistes groupés autour d’Oskar Rabin35. Mais du côté de l’architecture, nulle exposition des bulldozers. Au contraire, ne cherchant aucune visibilité publique en URSS, ces architectes de la clandestinité voulurent faire circuler leurs projets presque sous le manteau, pratiquant une espèce d’équivalent architectural du samizdat. Et comme pour les écrivains de l’émigration intérieure, c’est l’écho rencontré à l’étranger par leurs productions qui devait les mettre sur le devant de la scène sans qu’ils l’eussent vraiment voulu. L’envoi en 1979 de projets clairement utopiques, notamment par Jurij Avvakumov et Mihail Belov, à un concours japonais sur le thème d’habitations, créa la surprise, attirant ainsi l’attention internationale sur l’existence d’une contestation architecturale en URSS36. Parmi les axes de réflexion développés par ces architectes en rupture de ban, se trouva naturellement la contestation de la toute puissance de la préfabrication en URSS. Avvakumov et Belov synthétisèrent cela dans un projet de 1983, donc réalisé un an après la mort de Brežnev, intitulé Sepulchral Skyscraper, or Metropolitan Self‑Elevating Columbarium – titre plus qu’explicite, désignant ouvertement la préfabrication en fossoyeur de l’architecture. Au cours des années 1980, cette veine d’ironie sombre devait se développer dans les visions mi‑cauchemardesques, mi‑foraines de Brodskij et Utkin, ces créateurs préparant ainsi à leur manière le tombeau de l’architecture soviétique, en faisant un argument de diffusion auprès des scènes asiatique, européenne et américaine.

40 Étonnamment, ce succès inattendu des architectes de papier semble avoir moins embarrassé les dignitaires du parti que les tentatives des peintres – il n’y eut pas la même férocité bornée dans les tentatives et brimades pour les décourager. Cela eut pour conséquence de leur conférer une certaine aura comme créateurs libres, appréciation qui permit une relative pénétration de leurs approches dans les cercles architecturaux jusque‑là officiels. C’est ainsi que Novikov, toujours hésitant entre liberté de vues et acceptation des cadres existants, puisa dans les propositions de ces

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utopistes un certain renouvellement formel pour ses propres projets, s’ouvrant vers la fin des années 1970 à des approches assez similaires à celles du post‑modernisme occidental37.

41 Loin de se résumer à une personne, ce réflexe fut en fait largement partagé par les architectes actifs dans les marges de l’empire soviétique, usant de leur art pour réaffirmer leurs origines. Par un mouvement centrifuge, les républiques telles que celles de Géorgie, de Kirghizie et d’Arménie en premier lieu, initièrent des recherches mêlant expressionnisme et régionalisme38. En Géorgie, entre autres, la galerie d’art à Chakaja, dessinée en 1977 par V. Davitaja39 se signala par le retour à l’usage des matériaux locaux, jouant de la pierre pour imaginer un bâtiment compact comme un château‑fort, dans un brutalisme formel éliminant toute référence idéologique soviétique pour mieux affirmer un parallèle ostensible avec l’architecture de la Géorgie ancienne. Ce syncrétisme en appelant à des sources immémoriales connut un succès foudroyant, lançant une vague de bâtiments administratifs à Tbilissi assumant désormais leurs allusions à des formes religieuses médiévales, comme le siège de la société des chasses conçu par A. Čihladzé en 1980. Style qui devait atteindre son apogée en 1985 dans l’emblématique palais des Cérémonies conçu par V. Džorbenadzé et V. Orbeladzé40. Cet historicisme délibéré s’accompagna d’un effacement radical des symboles soviétiques, contre une vive revendication en faveur de l’identité géorgienne. Cette production neuve se prolongea par une nouvelle conscience du patrimoine urbain ancien, la Géorgie se faisant l’une des pionnières de la réhabilitation des secteurs patrimoniaux en URSS.

42 La Kirghizie imita ce processus, lançant en 1979 sur des dessins de A. Djumakaliev la construction d’une série de restaurants actualisant la forme des tentes kirghizes traditionnelles41. La situation était quelque peu différente en Arménie, puisque cette république avait eu dès 1920 en l’architecte Aleksandr Tamanjan (1878‑1936), un ardent zélateur du style néo‑arménien. S’il fut alternativement combattu par ses confrères politisés ou considéré comme un pionnier du renouveau de la culture arménienne, il n’en demeure pas moins que son action comme urbaniste et bâtisseur contribua fortement à définir la nouvelle identité soviétique d’Erevan. L’architecture stalinienne canonisa son style néo‑arménien, le tuf volcanique local devenant incontournable. Si sous Hruščev cette veine fut largement abandonnée, les jeunes architectes qui émergèrent sous Brežnev entendirent réactiver l’usage du tuf, matériau depuis longtemps associé à l’Arménie traditionnelle, cherchant à inventer une culture arménienne à la fois fidèle au passé et ancrée dans le présent. Cela est particulièrement sensible dans les travaux du trio constitué par Artur Tarhanjan, Spartak Kačikian et Hračja Pogosian. Leur monument commémoratif du génocide des Arméniens (cosigné avec Sašur Kalašjan), construit en 1967, initia à la fois le caractère moderne lyrique et l’affirmation identitaire de leur architecture. Leurs grands équipements publics suivants, dont le cinéma Rossija, l’aéroport d’Erevan, conçus en 1974, puis le complexe sportif projeté en 1976‑1979 mais seulement réalisé en 1984, développèrent une veine expressive qui entendait réaffirmer l’originalité de l’Arménie face à Moscou42. Ce en se tournant par exemple vers des modèles non soviétiques, leur aéroport répondant ainsi au terminal français de Roissy 1 par Paul Andreu, et leur stade à l’opéra australien de Sydney par Jorn Utzon – sources appréciées pour leur modernité internationale, mais dûment arménisées, produisant d’ambitieux objets spatiaux, utilisant certes le tuf en

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revêtement, mais selon un langage formel dynamique, propulsant l’Arménie au premier rang de la modernité.

43 Si cette tendance régionaliste se fit encore à pas mesurés sous Brežnev, elle connut une considérable amplification sous ses successeurs, jusqu’à ce que l’arrivée au pouvoir de Gorbačev marque l’apogée d’une monumentalité désoviétisée, renationalisant le décor urbain des capitales de Géorgie ou d’Arménie. En cela, les choix intellectuels qui guidèrent le domaine architectural furent clairement le corollaire de l’accroissement des revendications nationales qui couvaient déjà dans les marges de l’URSS.

44 L’originalité de ces architectures rejoignit des préoccupations alors communes au bloc de l’Est : forger une architecture non dépendante de Moscou, référence considérée désormais entre attraction et répulsion. Ainsi, dans la relativement prospère Estonie une plus grande pluralité stylistique exista vers 1970, entre l’urbanisme brutaliste moderne d’un Mart Port ou un goût pour de fines interventions contemporaines dans les quartiers historiques43, en cela proche d’une tendance alors en plein développement en Allemagne ou en France avec la loi Malraux sur les secteurs protégés. La Roumanie aussi, bien qu’également étranglée par une lancinante pénurie de matériaux, tendit au même moment à revendiquer d’autres chemins architecturaux. Honteuse de sa dépendance esthétique passée envers l’URSS, Bucarest fut jusque vers 1980 un lieu de débat créatif fort, où entre autres les personnalités dominantes de Horia Maicu ou Cezar Lazarescu firent de la Roumanie une scène entendant rivaliser moins avec Moscou qu’avec Paris44.

45 Au‑delà de cet écho esthétique, l’œuvre de ces contestataires donna également lieu à une conséquence singulière : elle contribua à changer la mentalité des architectes soviétiques. En envoyant de leur propre initiative des propositions aux concours étrangers, ce désaveu tacite de la position de l’architecte soviétique comme seulement employé par l’État brejnévien encouragea d’autres, y compris parmi les officiels, à vouloir bâtir hors du bloc de l’Est. Ce faisant, ils minaient plus ou moins volontairement la mainmise soviétique sur leur propre métier, redevenant ainsi des architectes au sens libéral du terme. Cette évolution commença timidement en 1971 avec une participation soviétique à la compétition française pour le futur centre Pompidou : Tarhanjan, Kačikjan et Pogosjan envoyèrent une proposition aussi majestueuse que lyrique, en coque semi‑ouverte sur la ville ; une architecture qui montra au jury présidé par Jean Prouvé qu’en URSS les capitales des républiques disposaient d’architectes capables d’une réelle audace technique et formelle45. Ce processus de participation à la scène internationale atteignit son pic en 1982, lors du concours pour l’Arche de la Défense : Paris reçut pas moins de quarante‑huit projets en provenance d’URSS ! Et là aussi, il ne s’agissait pas d’envois de marginaux rêvant de passer à l’Ouest : ainsi se compta parmi eux le très officiel Rozanov, alors tout juste auréolé des lauriers de son monument de la Libération à Luanda, qui ambitionna de servir la République française de Mitterrand comme il servait l’URSS de Brežnev et la dictature soviétisante de l’Angola46. Si les commentateurs français raillèrent avec un peu de légèreté le nombre important de propositions soviétiques47, les moquant comme habitués aux monuments flattant le pouvoir, cette myopie ne vit pas l’essentiel : désormais les architectes russes considéraient qu’ils pouvaient avoir d’autres commanditaires que le parti. Dès la disparition de Brežnev, les architectes ne se voulaient plus des homo sovieticus dociles.

46 C’est d’ailleurs au début des années 1980 que commença dans le milieu une phase d’émigration assez conséquente, surtout vers l’Allemagne de l’Ouest, la France et les

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États‑Unis, les architectes voulant dorénavant choisir leurs projets48. Ce au risque d’une difficile acclimatation à l’économie de marché, plus de dix ans avant que leurs confrères restés à Moscou ne soient obligés de perdre à leur tour la sécurité de l’emploi. Mais, pour ceux‑ci, l’échec des réformes d’Andropov puis la désintégration gorbatchévienne avaient déjà donné un coup d’arrêt progressivement fatal à l’architecture soviétique.

Coda : un théâtre architectural sans vainqueurs

47 Entre les décennies 1960‑1980 le monde soviétique du bâtiment éprouva des bouleversements essentiels, accentuant malgré lui les crises léguées par le passif stalinien, mais cherchant également à résoudre différemment les questions cruciales de l’urbanisme. Alors que les précédents changements politiques et esthétiques avaient violemment affecté l’architecture, la période brejnévienne introduisit des choix différents d’une manière plus sensible. Cette fois, contrairement au sort des constructivistes ou des architectes staliniens, il n’y eut plus de virulentes mises au ban, accusant leurs victimes d’être des ennemis du peuple ou autres fariboles sordidement imaginaires. À l’inverse de Hruščev qui, dans sa politique de déstalinisation, désigna les architectes comme boucs‑émissaires, les années Brežnev furent plus insidieuses dans la faveur ou la disgrâce nimbant ou frappant les bâtisseurs. Si Posohin par exemple fut un Salieri typique, il ne fut pourtant plus en mesure d’exercer sur ses collègues une domination sans conteste et sans partage comme l’avaient fait ses prédécesseurs staliniens. Indéniablement, cette période vit dans le cénacle architectural un certain apaisement des mœurs, puisque les architectes purent exercer leur métier avec plus de sérénité, risquant certes d’être écartés des commandes prestigieuses, mais pouvant continuer leur activité sans menace de déportation ou privation de toute existence artistique. Cela ne signifie pas pour autant que l’ère brejnévienne fut un éden pour architectes. Quoique moins tonitruantes, les luttes internes pour le contrôle de l’architecture soviétique subsistèrent, il est vrai plus souterraines. Le jeu se jouait dorénavant au fleuret moucheté, laissant par conséquent les intéressés plus disponibles pour résoudre les non moins importants problèmes de la construction en URSS.

48 En cela la période fut paradoxalement une relative apogée pour l’action pratique des architectes. Or, sous Brežnev, l’histoire de l’architecture fut aussi celle d’une progressive perte de contrôle sur l’ensemble des facteurs économiques et constructifs. Sous Stalin les impérities avaient menacé, interrompu ou mutilé nombre d’opérations architecturales mais la volonté du pouvoir de mener à bien quelques réalisations d’envergure avait permis de surmonter plusieurs de ces inconvénients consubstantiels. Sous Brežnev l’indécision des sphères dirigeantes, partagées entre désir de renouer avec l’emphase stalinienne et débordées par l’ampleur des besoins en logement, contribua à une schizophrénie architecturale, puis à un étouffement progressif des options créatives et pratiques sous le sarcophage de la préfabrication lourde. Cela même introduisit un changement significatif : tandis que sous Stalin et Hruščev les architectes s’étaient montrés des affidés s’effaçant au service du pouvoir, ou essayant d’en obtenir une position capable d’assurer leur prééminence, sous Brežnev leur docilité fut moins inconditionnelle, et commença à être plus affichée que réelle. Même de manière discrète, l’architecture aussi entendait remettre en question sa situation. Face à des architectes‑bureaucrates tels Posohin, Ročegov, Baranov, des personnalités

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plus souples, comme Rozanov, Rubanenko, Novikov, entendirent pratiquer une architecture de qualité sans s’asservir complètement à l’appareil. Cette coexistence semi‑pacifique des mouvances créatrices pérennisa une relative pluralité des réponses constructives, faisant en définitive de l’ère brejnévienne un des moments les plus contrastés de la production architecturale soviétique. Ce ne fut toutefois qu’une victoire à la Pyrrhus, puisque la mainmise de la préfabrication précipita la ruine du secteur du bâtiment, ses rouages ne pouvant plus fonctionner efficacement faute de ressources.

49 En définitive, malgré des difficultés croissantes, sous Brežnev l’architecture en URSS légua un héritage bâti d’une réelle importance – et surtout fut moins monolithique qu’elle ne le parut. Car le domaine architectural releva le défi de réinventer une nouvelle fois une tradition soviétique, cette fois‑ci selon des modalités moins arbitraires, plus polysémiques. Enfin, en dépit de l’absence de débats théoriques équivalents à ceux du constructivisme ou du néo‑académisme stalinien, la période brejnévienne vit toutefois des questionnements forts traverser un milieu qui joua des pesanteurs de l’appareil dans un trouble mélange de docilité affichée et de contestation tacite. Ainsi, sous la façade trompeuse de l’apparente glaciation brejnévienne, l’architecture soviétique connut encore un réel dynamisme qui, désormais, ne s’inféodait plus uniquement aux symboles de l’URSS, mais entendit au contraire tenter dans ou hors les cadres prévus par le régime une amorce de créativité libre.

NOTES

1. Étant historien de l’art, et non pas historien, je m’en suis tenu prioritairement aux méthodes de ma discipline. De fait, j’ai d’abord consulté une trentaine de publications soviétiques à caractère monographique thématique ou biographique : ces ouvrages, mentionnés en référence quand cela s’impose, ont permis de prendre la température architecturale de l’époque. Je ne les ai pourtant guère utilisés pour leurs propos, car ces livres sont souvent des chef‑d’œuvre de la litote et de langue de bois, presque toujours d’un caractère descriptif lapidaire, ce qui en fait des sources d’un intérêt critique réduit pour un lectorat non formé à l’architecture. Quant aux pièces d’archives elles‑mêmes, elles m’ont par exemple aidé à étudier des cités comme Tol´jatti – seule ville où j’ai eu un accès complet aux archives locales, les autres agglomérations visitées telles que Saint‑Pétersbourg, Moscou, Volgograd, Nižnij‑Tagil, Ekaterinburg, Magnitogorsk m’ayant autorisé des explorations non négligeables, mais plus ciblées sur la période stalinienne. Enfin, j’ai surtout utilisé ce qui distingue le plus l’histoire de l’art de l’histoire stricto sensu, c’est‑à‑dire l’étude du territoire bâti même, observant en priorité sur le terrain le résultat architectural effectivement légué par la période brejnévienne. Tout comme l’historien du fait militaire doit comprendre sur carte ou in situ les fluctuations des lignes de front, l’historien de l’architecture doit lire dans les divers types de monuments les critères, réflexes, lacunes, présupposés idéologiques, esthétiques ou techniques d’une époque. Cela aussi peut servir d’argument de première main pour analyser la force ou la débâcle économique d’un pouvoir donné. Bien sûr, d’autres architectes ou problématiques auraient pu être évoqués : ce qui suit relève de mes choix, dans la limite du format imparti.

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2. Vladimir Belogolovskij, Aleksandr Rjabušin, Feliks Novikov, Ekaterinburg : Tatlin, 2009, p. 103. Ma traduction. Le contexte de ce propos fut un échange entre l’architecte et son commanditaire, le ministre de l’Industrie électronique, qui choisirent conjointement de qualifier le bâtiment du futur ministère comme édifice industriel, afin de contrer un règlement interdisant la construction d’équipements administratifs sur le site choisi. La manœuvre échoua, donnant lieu à une bataille politique qui contraria l’achèvement du projet jusqu’en…1993. 3. Heinrich Klotz, éd., Paper architecture New Projects from the Soviet Union, New York : Rizzoli, 1988, p. 7. 4. Andreï Ikonnikov, L’architecture russe de la période soviétique, Liège : P. Mardaga, 1990, p. 345. Architecte de formation, Ikonnikov (1926‑2001) fut un des principaux historiens soviétiques de l’architecture et ses ouvrages contribuèrent largement à la perception intérieure et extérieure du bâtiment en URSS. Voir A. Kudriaceva, Andrej Vladimirovič Ikonnikov : polveka služenija arhitekture [Andrej V. Ikonnikov : un demi‑siècle au service de l’architecture], M. : éditions URSS, 2007. 5. Vladimir Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 298‑299. En décembre 1954, lors d’un discours face aux organisations professionnelles des architectes, dans le langage fort coloré dont il pouvait être capable, Hruščev prit violemment à partie les bâtisseurs présents (tel que Mordvinov, alors président de l’Académie d’architecture), les accusant de gâchis de ressources et d’excès ornementaux. Ce coup d’éclat du nouveau maître du Kremlin marqua le soudain coup d’arrêt de l’architecture néo‑académique, forçant les architectes à réinventer impromptu une culture moderne. 6. Aleksandra Latur, Moskva 1890‑2000 [Moscou 1890‑2000], M. : Iskusstvo XXI°, 2007, p. 347. 7. Source : Narodnoe hozjaistvo SSSR v 1974 g. [L’économie en URSS en 1974], M. : Gosstatizdat, 1974, p. 581. Je remercie Steven Harris de m’avoir communiqué ces données. Ceci étant, les chiffres indiqués par les publications me paraissant fortement sujets à caution, souvent démentis par l’examen des quartiers construits, ces estimations demeurent hautement contestables (et appelleraient une autre recherche générale à travers la Russie, impossible à réaliser pour un seul article, sans parler des financements nécessaires). Le seul cas qui m’a paru à peu près fiable (après recherches in situ) est celui des prévisions pour Tol´jatti, réclamant pour 1975 des logements pour 190 000 personnes correspondant à 1 700 000 m2 habitables : il semblerait que l’objectif ait été atteint, même si ce fut visiblement au détriment de la réalisation des équipements collectifs. Voir Boris Rubanenko, éd., Novij Tol´jatti [Le nouveau Tol´jatti], M. : Izd. Znanie (Stroitel´stvo i Arhitektura, XXII, 10), 1971, p. 12. 8. Ces édifices contrastant vivement avec les ambassades construites antérieurement à New Delhi (1954), Ottawa (1956), et au Caire (1958), qui furent conçues avant tout selon une logique fonctionnaliste spartiate, presque jusqu’à apparaître comme de banals immeubles de bureaux. 9. La critique d’architecture du New York Times, Ada Louise Huxtable y vit un pastiche imbécile doublé d’une forteresse refusant de s’ouvrir à l’espace urbain environnant… Jugement qu’elle maintint dans sa réflexion plus tardive : Ada Louise Huxtable, Kicked A Building Lately ?, Berkeley : University of California Press, 1989. 10. A.V. Rjabušin, Evgenij Rozanov, M. : Strojizdat, 1995, p. 36‑41. 11. Ibid., p. 107‑119. 12. Les concours soviétiques n’ont pas grand‑chose à voir avec leurs équivalents du monde occidental : si la procédure des architectes invités est commune aux deux systèmes culturels, l’URSS se distingue souvent par le caractère aléatoire des procédures de compétition, avec des projets fréquemment jugés non pas par des jurys constitués, mais par les administrations commanditaires elles‑mêmes, sans recours à des spécialistes extérieurs. Ce fut le cas du soviet de Volgograd, ce qui explique par exemple la difficulté à comprendre à la fois les attentes du projet – en l’absence de programme publié – et la justification du projet favori – décision qui resta interne, ne faisant pas l’objet d’un rapport destiné à être communiqué. Ce qui signifie que le

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chercheur travaillant sur l’architecture soviétique doit bien souvent retrouver les projets dans les archives des architectes eux‑mêmes (quand on arrive à établir leur participation !), puisqu’aucune source exploitable ne liste leur intervention à la supposée compétition étudiée. 13. A.K. Zajcev, Memorial sborki v gorodah geroja [Ensembles mémoriels dans les villes‑héros], M. : Strojizdat 1985, p. 88‑93. Le même tandem avait déjà réalisé à Berlin en 1947 la colossale nécropole soviétique de Treptow. 14. M.I. Astafeva‑Dlugač et V.S. Speranskaja, Sergej Speranskij, L. : Strojizdat, 1989, p. 135‑157. 15. Ibid., p. 108, 167. 16. Belogolovskij, Rjabušin, Feliks Novikov, p. 140. La sentence est tirée du carnet de notes de l’architecte, et datée de 1982. Ma traduction. 17. Les rares sources sur cet édifice divergent considérablement sur la chronologie ; ce qui signifierait probablement que le chantier fut tant bien que mal mené en fonction des quotas de matériaux obtenus irrégulièrement chaque année. 18. Ayant donné une communication en septembre 2012 dans cet édifice, j’en ai examiné de près la conception intérieure : nulle part ailleurs je n’ai vu de marbre utilisé jusque dans les escaliers de service (même Saint‑Pierre de Rome ne tombe pas dans ce travers !). Un cas d’école rare, dans l’architecture du xxe siècle. 19. Latur, Moskva, 1890‑2000, p. 365. 20. Ibid., p. 368. 21. Voir Rudolf G. Pikhoia [Pihoja], URSS, Histoire du pouvoir : quarante ans d’après‑guerre, Longueuil, Québec : éditions Keruss, t. 1, 2007, p. 597‑608. 22. Situation qui, toutes proportions gardées, rappelle l’important mouvement de reconstructions de châteaux en France entre 1750 et 1780 ; geste qui accrut une exaspération populaire devant une opulence contrastant vivement avec des conditions paysannes d’habitat encore largement déplorables. 23. Notamment (collectif), « Arhitektura Moskvi 75 [L’architecture de Moscou 75] », Moskovskij raboči, M., 1975. 24. Voir Mihail Posohin, Gorod dlja čeloveka [La ville pour l’homme], M. : Strojizdat, 1980. 25. Le cinéaste Jean‑Marie Poiré exploita ce fait dans son assez pertinente comédie Twist again à Moscou (1986) ; l’architecte en chef actuel du Giprogor de Tol´jatti, Mihail Sjardin (entretien avec lui dans son bureau, 24 juin 2013) me confirma qu’au terme de la décennie 1970 les retards enflèrent entre cinq à neuf ans… 26. N.K. Solovev, Sovremennaja arhitektura Francii [L’architecture contemporaine de la France], M. : Strojizdat, 1981, p. 154‑163. Ce livre est un exemple typique des conséquentes enquêtes menées hors URSS par ses architectes, afin de rassembler le maximum de matériaux adaptables en contexte soviétique. Leur seul défaut fut d’être publiées des années après les premières recherches, faisant ainsi souvent des Soviétiques des imitateurs de modèles déjà déconsidérés dans les pays étudiés. Dans une logique similaire, Andrej Meerson (1930‑) pour le colossal bloc d’habitation qu’il construisit à Moscou sur la rue Begovaja entre 1964 et 1972 fut lourdement influencé par l’unité d’habitation de Marseille bâtie par Le Corbusier entre 1946 et 1952. 27. Nikolaj Baranov, Siluėt goroda [La silhouette de la ville], L. : Strojizdat, 1980, p. 154‑160. 28. Mihail Barhin, Gorod : struktura i kompozicija [La Ville : structure et composition], M. : Nauka, 1986, p. 248. 29. Rubanenko, Novij Tol´jatti, et du même auteur, Gorod Tol´jatti [La Ville de Tol´jatti], M. : Akademija Arhitektury SSSR, 1972. 30. Ces problèmes sont toujours d’actualité, et le maire en poste de nos jours a commencé des travaux pour y remédier. Projets que je suis de près, la municipalité m’ayant demandé en septembre 2012 une expertise de son patrimoine, et m’ayant confié depuis la réalisation d’une exposition sur la construction de Tol´jatti, événement programmé en Russie et en France en 2014. 31. Pikhoia, URSS, Histoire du pouvoir, p. 532‑544.

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32. Nathan Osterman, « L’habitat de l’avenir », L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, numéro spécial sur l’architecture soviétique, P., janvier 1970, p. 99. 33. Belogolovskij, Rjabušin, Feliks Novikov, p. 138. Carnet de notes de l’architecte, sans date. Ma traduction. 34. Ibid., p. 50‑74. 35. Voir Oscar Rabine, L’artiste et les bulldozers, P. : Laffont, 1981. 36. Klotz, Paper Architecture New Projects from the Soviet Union, 1988, p. 7. 37. Belogolovskij, Rjabušin, Feliks Novikov, p. 91‑98. Noter toutefois que le post‑modernisme occidental eut une posture de citation et d’ironie envers le passé (aboutissant parfois à un façadisme déconnecté des réalités pratiques), que dans leur grande majorité les Soviétiques ne partagèrent pas, préférant une approche plus solide de refonte des sources au service des usages contemporains. 38. Une série d’ouvrages sur l’architecture des républiques fut publiée en 1986, en prévision des commémorations du 70e anniversaire de la révolution. Ces livres cherchèrent significativement à minorer la place des expériences régionalistes, mais ne firent pas tout à fait l’impasse dessus, les considérant encore comme relevant de la niche de la culture nationale encadrée par un contenu supposément socialiste. L’examen des projets, d’un nationalisme croissant, montre amplement que cette interprétation était désormais une fiction vidée de sens. 39. T. Kvirkvelija et N. Mgaloblišvili, Arhitektura Sovetskoj Gruzii [L’architecture de la Géorgie soviétique], M. : Strojizdat, 1986, p. 213. 40. Ibid., p. 210. 41. E.G. Pisarskoj et V.V. Kurbatov, Arhitektura Sovetskoj Kirgizii [L’architecture de la Kirghizie soviétique], M. : Strojizdat, 1986, p. 268‑270. 42. Karen Baljan, Artur Tarhanjan, Spartak Kačikjan, Gračjan Pogosjan, Ekaterinburg : Tatlin, 2012, p. 30‑38. Voir aussi Taline Ter Minassian, Erevan : La construction d’une capitale à l’époque soviétique, Rennes : Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2007. 43. Mart Port, Arhitektura v Sovetskoj Estonii [L’architecture en Estonie soviétique], Tallin : Periodika, 1983. 44. Ana Maria Zahariade, Arhitectura in proiectul comunist. Romania 1944‑1989 [L’architecture dans le projet communiste : Roumanie, 1944‑1989], Bucarest : Simetria, 2011. 45. Baljan, Artur Tarhanjan, Spartak Kačikjan, Gračian Pogosjan, p. 58. Ces architectes synthétisèrent dans leurs réalisations suivantes le style proposé pour le monument parisien, à savoir dans l’aéroport et dans le cinéma Rossija à Erevan, tous deux signés en 1974. 46. Rjabušin, Evgenij Rozanov, p. 94‑97 pour le monument angolais (inachevé du fait de la guerre civile, mué en mausolée à Agostinho Neto), et p. 142‑143 pour le projet d’arche de La Défense. 47. François Chaslin, Les Paris de François Mitterrand, P. : Gallimard, 1985, p. 168. Sur les 424 projets reçus, 62 étaient américains, ce qui en comparaison souligne le nombre important de projets soviétiques, qui n’avaient jamais envoyé autant de projets à un concours étranger depuis le monument à Christophe Colomb de Saint‑Domingue, en 1929. 48. Ce fut entre autres le cas d’Aleksandr Rappaport, désormais basé à Londres, de Vladimir Papernij en Californie (qui fait depuis une belle carrière comme designer et critique), ou Iskander Galimov installé en Autriche, alternant entre petites constructions et travaux décoratifs de luxe. Quant à Utkin, il se réinstalla dans les années 1990 à Moscou, où désormais il travaille surtout comme auteur de villas pompeuses pour les oligarques actuels.

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RÉSUMÉS

Parmi les phases de l’architecture soviétique, celles du constructivisme et de l’époque stalinienne restent assez bien connues et étudiées. Toutefois, celle de la période brejnévienne ne suscite que depuis peu un réel intérêt scientifique et public. Jusqu’ici, cette architecture avait donné lieu à un universel rejet d’ordre à la fois affectif et politique, la disqualifiant d’un trait de plume comme sans qualité et produit servile d’une stagnation idéologique. Or l’examen de cette production bâtie révèle bien plus de diversité qu’attendu et fait état de premiers signes de contestation. Si sous Brežnev les recherches stylistiques restèrent minoritaires, les architectes avaient depuis longtemps appris à agir dans les cadres d’une URSS aux instances aussi nombreuses que souvent incertaines sur leurs propres marges de manœuvres. Les archives (moscovites ou des métropoles régionales) laissent apparaître l’utilisation de ce contexte défavorable par les bâtisseurs pour affiner la technologie de la préfabrication, créer des plans d’urbanisme ambitieux (dont celui de la cité neuve de Tol´jatti en 1967), ou tenter d’utiliser les failles de l’encadrement pour promouvoir des projets hors normes, voire de s’émanciper de la tutelle d’État en envoyant à titre privé des propositions aux concours internationaux. Additionnés, ces réflexes démentent le monolithisme qu’on supposait à l’architecture brejnévienne : sous le visage de marbre du régime, le corps créatif bougeait encore.

Among the phases of Soviet architecture, those of constructivism and of the Stalin Era are fairly well known and studied. However, the architecture of the Brezhnev era has only recently aroused real scientific and public interest. So far, this architecture has been universally dismissed – for both emotional and political reasons – as lacking quality and being a servile product of ideological stagnation. However, more careful analysis of this architectural production reveals much greater diversity than expected as well as first signs of protest. Even though stylistic researches remained minority under Brezhnev, architects had long ago learnt to act within the boundaries of a system marked by a plethora of administrative bodies unsure of their latitude in decision‑making. Archives (from Moscow or regional cities) reveal how these builders used this unfavorable context to refine the technology of prefabrication, to create ambitious urban plans (including the new city of Tol´iatti in 1967), to attempt to promote unconventional projects, and even to free themselves from State control by privately sending proposals to international competitions. All put together, these reflexes belie the supposed monolithism of Brezhnevian architecture: behind the marble façade of the regime, there was still creative life.

AUTEUR

FABIEN BELLAT École nationale supérieure d’architecture, Versailles. Université d’État, Tol´jatti. [email protected]

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Science, development and modernization in the brezhnev time The Water Development in the Lake Balkhash Basin Science, développement et modernisation à l’époque brejnévienne : aménagement et gestion de l’eau dans le bassin du lac Balhaš

Tetsuro Chida

1 More than twenty years have passed since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the first socialistic state in world history. Whereas the Soviet Union pursued its socialistic way of modernization, in reality, we can find many more common characteristics than differences between modernity in socialist and capitalist states in the twentieth century. David L. Hoffman rightly mentioned that “socialism itself was one of the many ideological products of European modernity.”1 James Scott emphasized that modern states strove to make countable and visible all human resources as well as natural wealth, which was a core feature of modernization and could be ensured only through large‑scale, standardized measures.2 In the Soviet context, leaders and policymakers had unalterably pursued these features of modernity through planned economy, grandiose formalized developmental projects, and socialization and man‑induced manipulation of the workforce as well as of natural resources. The Soviet “democratic centralism” gave policymakers virtually limitless authority to politically endorse and expeditiously realize these socialist modernization measures.

2 The grandiose water development in Central Asia was the most typical and comprehensible example of socialist modernization in the Soviet Union. Its biggest fruits were huge dam constructions in the Aral Sea, Lake Balkhash, and Ob‑Irtysh River basins, and lengthwise grandiose irrigation canals and drainage systems for cotton and rice. Paul Josephson noted that “hydropower in the Soviet Union had its roots in Enlightenment notions of nature and the desirability of man’s dominion over it.”3 This desire was legitimized by the “transformation of nature” concept in the Soviet Union, which Marxist philosophers and Soviet geographers had elaborated in earnest since the postwar Stalin period.

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3 However, the water development in Central Asia finally resulted in the Aral Sea catastrophe, which can be listed as “the greatest man‑caused ecological catastrophe” in the whole history of mankind.4 As is well known, anthropogenic factors like over‑irrigation and low water efficiency in the basin were the direct cause of the shrinkage of the Aral Sea. The Soviet governmental authorities and intellectuals recognized them quite well, but they did not (or “could not”) take sweeping, comprehensive measures to save the Aral Sea. Soviet policymakers and planners assumed that every detail of locales were countable and visible to them, whereas in reality, they were absolutely invisible because “locales” and “places” were always distant and, more importantly, separated from the metropolis. The centralized party‑state officials always assumed that they could count and grasp all about localities despite never seeing directly what was going on there. Anthony Giddens defined such phenomena as the “separation of space from place”5. In the case of the Aral Sea basin, it resulted in on‑site irrational use of water resources and impermissible disposition of irrigated plots on marginal farmlands by local bureaucrats and actual tillers of plots, only to make hypocritical shows of accomplishment of plans. This was really one of the limits of modernization under a planned economy.

4 At the same time, “reflexive modernization” also functioned in the Soviet Union.6 As discussed below, from the beginning of the 1960s, not only a number of Soviet intellectuals but also some engineers began to suppose that the transformation of nature itself was good, but that negative feedback on human activities from the transformed nature should be taken into account, when a developmental project was actually planned. The Soviet geographers of the Institute of Geography, U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, explicitly conceptualized this change in way of thinking, and modified the “transformation of nature” concept, which was initially refined during “Stalin’s Plan for Transformation of Nature” in the post‑war Stalin period. However, this Soviet version of “reflexiveness” in practice spoiled the legitimacy of the “socialist” variation of modernization. The alteration of the socialist concept of modernization and the approach to the human‑nature relationship contradictorily played a role in hampering the actual realization of some developmental projects in the agricultural‑water sector in Central Asia. The restoration of the irrigation development in the Lake Balkhash basin is one good example that occurred during the Brezhnev era. We can also observe the causes of the infinite postponement and final rejection of the Siberian rivers diversion project from this perspective.

5 In this paper, first, the author will make a rough sketch of the “transformation of nature” concept and the chronological change of its content. It will be clearly shown that the Soviet geographers of the Institute of Geography in Moscow gradually modified the “transformation of nature” concept during the 1960‑1970s. Second, the author will overview the developmental plans in the Lake Balkhash basin, correlating them with the “transformation of nature” concept, especially under the Brezhnev authorities. Finally, this paper will argue that “reflexive modernization” under the socialist regime, typified by modification of the “transformation of nature” concept, prevented the progress of the actual developmental policy, which explicitly bears evidence of the declining legitimacy of “socialist modernization.” The Brezhnev era is a crucial period in this argument, and this paper will evince one of the key elements of the Brezhnev authorities : “political indecisiveness.”

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6 Various scholars have already discussed the “transformation of nature” concept and its actual establishment. The pioneering works of Marshall Goldman and Zhores Medvedev still have academic significance today.7 Philip Pryde concurrently touched upon various aspects of “conservation” in the Soviet Union while mentioning some of the conceptual background.8 Stephen Brain’s work concentrates upon the conceptual change in forest management from the second half of the nineteenth century up to the end of “Stalin’s Plan for Transformation of Nature.”9 Douglas R. Weiner also touches upon the concept, but his main academic interest is more in the Soviet‑Russian nature protection discourses and movements.10 Julia Obertreis portrayed the colonial history of Central Asia from the tsarist period until the demise of the U.S.S.R., mentioning the actual situation of “transformation of nature” and “nature protection” in Uzbekistan.11 The above‑cited Paul Josephson made a comparative analysis of modernization between the Soviet Union and the United States, referring to the “transformation of nature” concept during the post‑war Stalin era and construction of dams in the Volga River basin.12 Compared with these previous studies, this article is unique in its explanation of the linkage between the developmental concept and actual development in a concrete region of the Soviet Union by use of archival materials in Moscow and Almaty as well as Soviet periodicals and monographs.

The “transformation of nature” concept and its modifications

7 While various embryonic ideas leading afterwards to the “transformation of nature” concept had already been expressed by Russian intellectuals at the end of the nineteenth century, it was only after the October Revolution that Soviet intellectuals further enriched the debate about the anthropogenic transformation of nature. Eventually, Marxist philosophers and Soviet geographers elaborated the concept after World War II with the start of “Stalin’s Plan for Transformation of Nature” in 1948 that human beings could maximally utilize natural “productive forces” for their own sake, which became possible only under socialism. For them, “humans” and “nature” develop not independently, but “dialectically” with close, strong interactions. As Ivan Ivanov‑Omskii, a Marxist philosopher, said, “Only socialist states are able to utilize the geographical environment effectively and transform it rationally on the basis of accurate scientific data,” which “ensures new speed of increase of human dominion over nature.”13

8 Stalin’s Plan for Transformation of Nature consisted of certain components : creation of shelter belts to the west of the Ural River ; tree planting around sovkhoz‑kolkhoz plots ; construction of ponds and cisterns for local amelioration ; and introduction of the grassland system of agriculture with crop‑fodder rotation on plots. Here, Trofim Lysenko, the notorious Lamarckian agronomist, jumped on the bandwagon with the theory of “cluster planting of trees,” whose ineffectiveness and lack of foundation afterwards became apparent.14 In 1950, Iosif Stalin further put into practice “Great Constructions of Communism” projects in the framework of the Stalin’s Plan, including the construction of the famous Volga‑Don Canal, Stalingrad, and Kuibyshev Hydroelectric Stations in the Volga River basin and so on. The most grandiose project was the Major Turkmen Canal, running across the Karakum Desert through the dried up former riverbed of the Uzboi for around 1,100 kilometers with two water reservoirs

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and hydroelectric stations on the path to the Caspian Sea. Stalin decided the construction on his own authority without any feasibility study. The Major Turkmen Canal should have served for desert irrigation for pasturage in the Karakum Desert with tree or shrub planting along the canal, finally contributing to alleviation of the desert climate.15 Soviet hydrologists calculated the effects on the water balances of the Aral Sea as a result of the canal construction, which promised a drop in the sea level.16

9 Stephen Brain described the confrontation between “technocrats” and “prometheans” of forest management during the Stalin’s Plan. The former respected “local variation, natural limits, and the importance of experimental results,” while the latter consisted of Lysenkoists, who forced all to introduce a uniform method of forestry irrespective of geographic conditions, advanced “the notion that forests could be made to conform to the human will and relied upon ideological claims to back up their beliefs.”17 Soviet geographers held diverse views on the human‑nature relationship and nature transformation, and each can be placed somewhere in between. In general, Soviet geographers both in Moscow and Leningrad succeeded in protecting the independence of the geographical sciences in the Soviet Union, not giving in to Lysenko’s “uniform” approach to nature.18

10 In March 1953 immediately after Stalin’s death, the Soviet authorities abruptly shut down obviously reckless nature transformation projects. The Major Turkmen Canal project was also abandoned. Excavation of the main canal had started only five days before Stalin’s death.19 Soviet intellectuals temporarily ceased to refer to transformation of nature under the wave of “de‑Stalinization” in Soviet society.

11 Soviet geographers and “naturalists” engaged in the legislation process of the Nature Protection Law of the R.S.F.S.R., adopted at the Supreme Soviet in 1960. Here, they called for “nature protection through its enrichment.”20 This idea led directly to a revised concept of “transformation of nature,” which the geographers of the Institute of Geography, U.S.S.R. Academy of Science, brought back in 1956 under the initiative of the Institute head, Innokenti Gerasimov.21 They did not initially use the term “transformation of nature (preobrazovanie prirody),” which evoked Stalinism, but “thermal and water regime on the earth’s surface and its transformation for practical purposes.” They argued that agricultural crops should be produced in accordance with geographic zones and natural conditions, and that “science and practice designed the techniques, aimed at transformation of natural processes for the purpose of alteration of the thermal‑moisture regime in certain territories and its better adjustment to the necessities of agriculture.”22

12 In 1960, Gerasimov argued that it should be one of the main tasks of the Institute to conduct “scholarly researches about the object‑oriented transformation of natural conditions and the full‑fledged usage of natural power to enhance productive forces of the socialist national economy.”23 In 1961, the “transformation of nature in the Soviet Union and her neighbouring countries” became the key research task of the Institute, which Gerasimov and Andrei Grigor´ev, the former director of the Institute until 1950, got to lead.24

13 In general, the ongoing scientific and technological revolutions encouraged them to be optimistic about human capacity in nature transformation with its protection and enrichment, which prompted them to bring the concept to the fore again. Gerasimov wrote in the annual research program of the Institute in 1961 that “in our times of technological progress, especially in the field of nuclear energy and its use for peaceful

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purposes, mankind will be able to proceed with international‑scale coordinated activities of radical transformations of nature for his own sake, focusing upon object‑oriented changes of natural balance of heat and moisture inherent in various natural‑climatic zones and large regions.”25 From 1961, the bimonthly journal of the Institute of Geography, Proceedings of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, Geographical Series, started to place a specialized section entitled “Natural Resources, Protection and Transformation of Nature” in almost every number. Gerasimov described the theoretical development of transformation of nature as the “vanguard areas of geographic sciences,”26 but, at the same time, he did not conceal his conviction about the capabilities of the Soviet Union to put grandiose projects of transformation of nature into full‑fledged execution. More specifically, Gerasimov apparently endorsed the idea about the death of the Aral Sea as a result of the irrigation development and water reservoir construction in the basin, insisting that “Central Asia is characterized by a closed hydrologic circle, which can be further developed by increase of evaporation, given the expansion of irrigated plots in the foothill and desert areas.”27

14 However, the Moscow‑based geographers significantly modified the “transformation of nature” concept afterwards. They did not suppose it to be the endless process of “development” of humans and nature, but insisted that human beings should beforehand take into account “feedback” from the environment subjected to transformation. That is, Soviet geographers still agreed with human‑induced nature transformation itself, but at the same time thought that people should approach landscapes affected by transformation by calculating both “positive” and “negative” effects. Il’ia Novik, a specialist in cybernetics and the human‑nature relationship at the Institute of Philosophy, called this conceptual modification the “cybernetization of the natural system,” of which Gerasimov expressed his approval.28

15 In February 1965, that is, after the dawn of the Brezhnev period, Vsevolod Anuchin, a geographer at Moscow State University and a leading advocate of unification of physical and economic geographic disciplines (“unified geography”), published an acrimonious article in Literaturnaia Gazeta, the official paper of the Writers’ Union of the U.S.S.R. Then, he severely accused Gerasimov and the Institute of Geography that, allegedly, they were not able to gain a comprehensive grasp of the relationship between nature and society, giving a high place only to physical geography and driving out economic geography and landscape science (landshaftvedenie) from the Institute. Anuchin pinned the label of “antigeografizm” to the academic stance of the Institute of Geography.29 Gerasimov forthwith made a written protestation against Anuchin and condemned his criticism as baseless, introducing various examples of new directions and results of economic geographers and landscape specialists at the Institute, stating that “the study about the geographic aspects of the interrelationship between nature and society now became a core task of the Institute.”30 Anuchin’s harsh criticism seemed to make Gerasimov recognize the necessity to elaborate a grand theory of geographic sciences as soon as possible, which finally resulted in the introduction by Gerasimov of the “constructive geography” theory in 1966, which urged geographers to investigate triadic subjects concurrently : systematic transformation of nature, rational industrial distribution, and migration movement and ideal population disposition. Gerasimov emphasized that “the combination of these triadic subjects guaranteed the indispensable ‘economization’ of the geographical sciences as a whole,” which responded to the criticism by Anuchin.31

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16 Across the second half of the 1960s, Gerasimov slightly changed his approach to actual conditions around the “transformation of nature” concept. For example, in 1967, Gerasimov recognized that the above‑mentioned “closed hydrologic circle” in Central Asia had not been scientifically evinced by exact calculations,” opining that “the problems about water balances in Central Asia are quite complicated and include a number of very important but still‑unsettled scientific‑technological issues.”32 At last, in 1969, Gerasimov admitted that the future of the Aral Sea was becoming an “imminent issue.” He further demanded that Soviet geographers conduct wholesale investigations and analyses of the basin, without which it would be impossible to set a clear vision about the correct solution to the Aral Sea problems.33 At the same time, he insisted that planners should beforehand factor into the budget the costs for prevention or elimination of “negative effects,” emanating from nature transformations.34 He further stated that “under contemporary conditions the conservation of nature is becoming inseparable from its transformation, from the rational exploitation of its resources.”35 What is important here is the fact that Gerasimov’s article was published in the most authoritative journal of the C.P.S.U., Kommunist, which meant that Gerasimov’s concept received official endorsement from the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.

17 During the 1970s, Soviet geographers paid more attention to “ecology” as with the case of the West, although it was still anthropocentric for many, requiring the optimization of the human‑nature relationship and harmonization between economic development and environmental factors. Given such conditions, Vladimir Preobrazhenskii and Lev Abramov, geographers close to Gerasimov, even issued a warning about the destruction of the “society‑nature system” as a result of human activities, armed with mighty high‑technologies.36 Gerasimov pleaded no contestation against the “struggles for nature protection by progressive public opinion in capitalistic countries,” despite his strong emphasis on the superiority of socialism over the issues of target‑oriented nature protection through its transformation.37

18 Gerasimov remained cautious as to the full‑fledged implementation of one of the most gigantic nature transformation projects in the entire world, the Siberian water diversion to Central Asia. He insisted in 1982 that it is “impossible to conduct any transformation of nature without negative side effects. […] The Asiatic diversion does not meet demands, which necessitates further all‑round researches, including about alternative measures.”38 He persisted, on a scientific basis, about negative feedback from the actual transformations of nature up to the end of his life. Gerasimov with Grigorii Voropaev, the director of the Institute of Water Problems in Moscow, even pointed out that the planned quantity of water for diversion in the project document of the first phase was not enough to prevent the process of desertification around the Aral Sea. They alternatively proposed to enhance the efficiency of local water use through reconstruction of irrigation networks and other measures.39

19 In sum, the “transformation of nature” concept went through significant modification before and after 1960. Gerasimov, the most voiceful proponent of the modified version of the “transformation of nature” concept, assumed it to be the all‑embracive balanced notion of “development” and “conservation,” which pursued concurrent ensuring of actual nature transformation, rational use of natural resources, nature protection, and socioeconomic prosperity of people. He obviously raised the bar for the on‑site

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realization of the concept. This was the conceptual aspect of “reflexive modernization” in the Soviet Union during Brezhnev’s time.

“Transformation of nature” and the fate of Lake Balkhash

20 Lake Balkhash is a unique inland water body with a surface area of 16,400 km2 located in the southeastern part of Kazakhstan, and it can be divided into the saline East Balkhash and the freshwater West Balkhash at the narrow strait in the center, called Uzyn‑Aral. The Ili River supplies more than 70 percent of water inflow into Lake Balkhash. Four small rivers, Karatar, Aksu, Lepsy, and Ayagoz, flow into the East Balkhash. The altitude of Lake Balkhash depends upon the inflow volume of the rivers and fluctuates periodically. Owing to the constant supply of freshwater from the Ili River, the salinity of the West Balkhash is low, at a level for possible industrial use, which gives economic significance to Lake Balkhash. The precondition of water use was completely different from that of the Aral Sea, filled with economically less valuable brackish water, inside which local people engaged in fishery and water transportation. Balkhash City, one of the centers of non‑ferrous metallurgy in Kazakhstan, is located on the northwestern shore of Lake Balkhash, which is the main consumer of water resources in the West Balkhash. The total area of the basin extends up to 410,000 km2, and includes China, Kazakhstan, and a small terrain of Kyrgyzstan. The largest river, Ili, is a transboundary waterway between the upstream People’s Republic of China and the downstream Republic of Kazakhstan. However, this article concentrates upon the cases in the territory of the former U.S.S.R.

Kapchagai Hydropower Station and irrigation development

21 Irrigated agriculture had been conducted from old times upstream of the Ili River in today’s People’s Republic of China. On the other hand, local Kazakhs in the Zhetysu (Semirechie) region had been nomadic or semi‑nomadic and full‑scale agricultural development started after Russian colonizers settled there. However, it was only at the end of the 1920s that Soviet intellectuals and engineers began seriously considering the future development of the basin. Experimental rice cultivation along the Karatal River was introduced in 1930,40 which shifted into full gear only after the deportation of Koreans from the Far East in 1937. As for the Ili River basin, scholars of the Central Asian State University in Tashkent conducted an expeditionary investigation in the downstream area of the Ili River in 1926 and 1927, which concluded that there existed 500,000 hectares of arable land including 45,000 hectares in the Akdala area, suitable for rice cultivation through irrigation.41 These “500,000” and “45,000 hectares” would be the fundamental indicators for the future planning of agricultural development in this area. According to Dmitrii Bukinich, an irrigation engineer who headed various geographic expeditions in Central Asia, Mongolia, and Afghanistan, there was no other crop except for rice suitable for this region because of the prevalence of saline soil.42 They also presented the embryonic idea of constructing the Kapchagai Hydropower Station.43

22 A full‑fledged study for water development of the Ili River was organized only during World War II when many industrial facilities evacuated into the Semirechie, which in

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turn suffered a shortage of electricity.44 The Permanent Ili Comprehensive Expedition (postoianno deistvuiushchaia Iliiskaia kompleksnaia ėkspeditsiia) was organized in 1944, headed by Shafik Chokin, the director of the Institute of Energy of Kazakh S.S.R.45 They made the primary project document of the Kapchagai Reservoir. Interestingly, they held a negative view on the gigantic irrigation development downstream of the Ili River.46 Finally, in 1959, the project document (today’s “feasibility study”) of the Kapchagai Hydropower Station was submitted and widely acclaimed by the the Gosplan Council for Techno-Economic Assessment (Expert Commission)47 in Moscow after its modification by the All‑Union Project Designing and Research Institute of Water Facilities Construction (Gidroproekt).48 The Kapchagai Reservoir itself was not an efficient hydraulic facility because of its low percentage (23.5 percent) of planned effective water volume. The installed capacity of the hydropower station was only 360 MW, almost ten times less than the Nurek Hydropower Station in Tajikistan (3,000 MW).49 According to the project document, the Kapchagai dam would store more than double the volume (28.1 km3) of the annual average water outflow from the dam (11.8 km3). Chokin wrote in his memoir that the Kapchagai Reservoir should have been “an instrument for the regulation of long‑term fluctuations of river flow, and could be the regulator of the surface level and water regime of Lake Balkhash.”50 The instability of the altitude and salinity of Lake Balkhash influenced the water supply to Balkhash City and other settlements around the lake. Yet the Gosplan Expert Commission proposed another variant of water use, which seemed to be “economically” more efficient, urging Gidroproekt “to accelerate the designing of the single comprehensive scheme of land‑water usage in the downstream area of the Ili River and to clarify the influence of the water reservoir upon the development of agriculture and animal breeding.”51

23 In the Aral Sea basin, the Karakum Canal started operation of its first‑phase section in 1959 and of its second‑phase section in 1960. As during the Stalin era, the myth of “gigantism” still remained popular and influential among some tiers of Soviet intelligentsia and bureaucrats. In 1959, Nikolai Kalachёv, a hydraulic engineer of the Institute of Energy of Kazakh S.S.R. and a colleague of the above‑mentioned Chokin, succeeded in publishing a written proposal in the high‑impact journal of the Presidium of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences (Bulletin of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences) about the construction of an artificial channel with four hydroelectric stations, connecting the Ili River with the Chu River (transboundary river between today’s Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, flowing east of the Ili River), for the irrigation development of 3,500,000 hectares in the Bet‑Pak‑Dala Desert region. As Kalachёv clearly designated, Lake Balkhash would have been divided into areas of small water bodies after this channel had started full operation in a distant future.52 He once again propagated his idea at a conference on comprehensive usage of land‑water resources in the Central Asian republics and southern Kazakhstan in May 1962.53 However, the Soviet authorities alone seemed to dismiss this sort of nothing‑but‑gigantic project without any feasibility demonstration. The mere “massiveness” or the unrealistic transformation of deserts had ceased to appeal in the developmental designing of the U.S.S.R. Rather, Soviet planners came to demand a Soviet version of “feasibility” and scientific basis.

24 In 1964, the hydraulic engineers of the Kazakh branch of Gidroproekt (Kazgidroproekt) worked out another project document about the irrigation of “430,000 hectares” around the delta zone of the Ili River mainly for rice‑pasture rotation (110,000 hectares for rice cultivation), almost at the same time that the Soviet government officially gave final approval for the construction of the Kapchagai Hydropower Station. The irrigated

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area would be limited up to 100,000 hectares under natural conditions including 20,000 for rice cultivation with consideration given to irrigation development in the upstream area in Kazakhstan and China and conservation of muskrat breeding in the delta area.54 It could have been possible to cultivate “430,000 hectares” only if the whole volume of water resources of the Ili River had been used for irrigation with long‑term and seasonal control by the Kapchagai Reservoir. The project premised the probable elimination of Lake Balkhash in the future.

25 The State Expert Commission of Gosplan began the assessment process in March 1965. The final report of the Expert Sub‑Commission encompassed the obviously conflicting opinions of its members, which were split between “pro‑development” and “anti‑development” regarding gigantic melioration measures. On the one hand, the final report demanded expansion of the area of rice cultivation up to 33 or 40 percent of the whole irrigated land, not the 25 percent proposed in the project document,55 although the standard irrigation demand for rice (20,000 m3/ha) is four to five times more than that for other crops.56 One member of the Expert Sub‑Commission suggested a further investigation into the possibility of irrigation development not only in the downstream sites below Akdala, but also on uncultivated lands between Kapchagai and Akdala.57 On the other hand, the final report further mentioned that in a distant future, Lake Balkhash will cease to exist if the hydromelioration measures in the scheme are implemented fully. […] The Expert Sub‑Commission thinks that it should be a subject for broad public discussion in the Republic whether the complete disappearance of Lake Balkhash is admissible or not.58

26 Vadim Dёzhkin, a biologist and specialist in hunting from the Central Union of Consumers’ Societies, expressed this view to the Expert Sub‑Commission.59 He made an assessment of the project document over the future perspective of muskrat hunting in the delta area. What is critical is that the Commission heard and accepted his harsh criticism against the project. He further states in his assessment report the following : The author of the scheme takes one‑sided approach to the consequences of the complete drying up of Lake Balkhash, measuring them only through expected economic effects. The disappearance of the vast water surface of Balkhash is bound to lead negative climatic changes of northern Kazakhstan and deterioration of living conditions in the cities and towns around Balkhash. Neither must we forget about the great historical and aesthetic values of the lake. We are obliged to categorically cast doubt on the righteousness of the designers’ task in making a scheme for the full use of the delta zone of the Ili River for irrigation. Comprehensive economic development of this area should include agriculture (in less than the estimated area) in conjunction with hunting and fishery as well as keeping part of the valuable natural system intact.60

27 This statement corresponded well with the arguments, elected by “naturalists” of that time, as given in the above‑cited Douglas Weiner’s work. In fact, Dёzhkin himself pursued his career at the state nature reserve in Voronezh. However, the important point here is that he did not oppose agricultural development as a whole, but appealed as to the necessity of its coexistence with other economic sectors.

28 Lake Balkhash and the delta areas of its basin were also important for fishery. Accordingly, it was quite natural that V. Dashenkin, a Sub‑Commission member representing the fishery sector, severely accused Gidroproekt that no fishery specialist took part in the designing work and that no compensation measures were considered for the damage to the fishery sector inflicted by ecological degradation in the basin as a result of the agricultural development. He resoundingly proclaimed that “we must not

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agree to the disappearance of Lake Balkhash in the future.”61 In addition, an expert in livestock breeding also demanded rewriting of the project document, complaining of its sketchiness about the feasibility of developing transhumance in the delta area.62 Thus, specialists in three important economic sectors downstream of the Ili River and in Lake Balkhash made critical reviews of the project document. Furthermore, several experts condemned the ignorance about the negative effects on industrial and domestic waters caused by the irrigation development, although no representative of the metallurgical industry in Balkhash City participated in the assessment processes.

29 Followed by the Expert Sub‑Commission’s final report, the Gosplan Expert Commission at last rejected the perspective of future irrigation development on “43,000 hectares,” and demanded a “fundamental rewriting” of the project document. Rather, it recommended to begin land reclamation in the Akdala area on no more than 40,000 or 50,000 hectares and to remake a project document for it.63 One of the reasons was the advantage of rice cultivation at the downstream sites of the Syr‑Darya River from the perspective of reclamation costs and farmers’ experiences. The Lake Balkhash basin was markedly inferior to the lower Syr‑Darya regarding these points. The second and more important factor was the invalidity of the data provided by the Gidroproect engineers. The project was not designed comprehensively, and did not take into consideration damages to other economic sectors (fishery, hunting, river transportation, and industrial and domestic water supply) as a result of the shrinkage of Lake Balkhash after the full‑fledged agricultural water development of the region.64 That is, the Expert Sub‑Commission criticized the lack of investigation and analysis of the project document concerning negative feedback from the transformed nature to human activities. This way of thinking resonated quite well with the modified version of the “transformation of nature” concept.

30 In fact, in 1961, Mark L´vovich, a hydrologist of the Institute of Geography in Moscow, emphasized the priority of agriculture over hydroelectric power generation in water development, saying that “in practice, the use of water for agricultural production (soil moisture, irrigation water) should take the first place in the designing of the comprehensive planning for water usage.” He explicitly endorsed irrigation expansion in Central Asia, but at the same time did not forget to point out, It is important to take into consideration that to use one source of water inevitably influences another source. [The Soviet] economic complex envisages distribution of waters properly to all sectors of the national economy on the basis of general national interests.65 In 1964, Anatolii Korobov, the deputy chairman of the U.S.S.R. Gosplan, made a speech in front of Soviet geographers at the Fourth Congress of the All‑Union Geographic Society, accentuating the increasing role of transformation of nature by socialist society poses new challenges to geographic sciences. […] More and more scholar‑geographers are now being engaged in the preliminary studies about the development and disposition of productive forces in the U.S.S.R., and providing consultative support to our planning organs.66

31 As he mentioned in his speech, Gerasimov was a member of the Expert Commission of Gosplan at that time.67 Although the author did not find any clue that geographers actually took part in the above‑mentioned assessment processes, it is certain that Gerasimov’s view on transformation of nature was shared with specialists in the Expert Commission in Gosplan.

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32 It was not by chance that, at almost the same time as the above‑mentioned final report was issued, the editorial board of the journal Proceedings of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, Geographical Series gave approval to publish one article about a future perspective on the industrial development around Lake Balkhash, written by an economic geographer of the Institute of Geography in Moscow, Mikhail Buianovskii. Although his main argument that Balkhash City should be the center of the steel industry in Kazakhstan with use of abundant freshwater resources was not brought to realization, his strong assertion did hit the mark that any developmental measure must not enhance the mineralization process of the lake. He even proposed that the Kapchagai Hydropower Station not be constructed. He further rightly warned that degradation of the delta area would lead to “complete destruction of reeds and muskrats” there, and that salinization of Lake Balkhash would be inevitable in the case of organizing irrigated agriculture in large areas, which “would cast the problem of the fate of Lake Balkhash into the future, analogous to the Aral Sea.”68 It seemed that the “anti‑developmental” forces gained the upper hand in the case of the irrigational expansion as for the Lake Balkhash basin.

33 However, the Plenum of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. in May 1966 encouraged backing up further irrigational developments all over the Soviet Union, particularly for grain production including rice. Minister of Land Reclamation and Water Resources of the U.S.S.R., Evgenii Alekseevskii, declared that the Soviet Union would aim for 100 percent self‑sufficiency in rice in spite of a 40 percent self‑sufficiency rate at that time. 69 At the same Plenum, Masimkhan Beisebaev, the chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Kazakh S.S.R., stated that Kazakhstan owned a tremendous potential for grandiose rice cultivation along the Syr‑Darya, Ili, Karatal, and Charyn Rivers. The latter three rivers are located in the Lake Balkhash basin.70

34 The Plenum became an additional accelerator to start experimental irrigation in the Akdala area. In 1967, the central government decided to experimentally organize two rice sovkhozes in the Akdala area under the direct control of the all‑union Ministry of Melioration and Water Economy. The authorities of Kazakh S.S.R. further lobbied for the prompt realization of rice cultivation in the lower reaches of the Ili River. In the same year, Dinmukhamed Kunaev, the authoritative party head of Kazakhstan and candidate member of the Politburo in Moscow, sent a petition to the C.P.S.U. Central Committee to urge hydraulic engineers to finish constructing irrigation facilities (head work and a magisterial irrigation channel) and irrigated plots of 40,000 hectares in the Akdala area by 1973 at the latest, referring to the potential irrigation development in the lower reaches of the Ili River on “430,000 hectares” in the future.71

35 In 1968, the Gosplan Expert Commission approved the “Feasibility Report on the Comparative Cost Effectiveness and Priority of Irrigation for Rice Growing in Promising Regions of the U.S.S.R.,” made up of the All‑Union Project Designing Institute of Water and Amelioration Construction (Giprovodkhoz). This document admitted the “advantageous position” of the Akdala area for rice cultivation, but, at the same time, still mentioned the future potential for land melioration on 430,000 hectares downstream of the Ili River. Furthermore, the report clearly stated that “in connection with the decrease of the influent quantity to Lake Balkhash, we should take into account that, according to the available data, the efficiency of the current regime of the lake is insignificant, and incomparable with the efficiency of the usage of the Ili River flow for irrigation.”72 The local Kazakh authorities and the Soviet ameliorators had not

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given up the grandiose agricultural development in the Ili‑Balkhash basin. At that moment, in turn, the political back‑up for the expansion of irrigated farms by the Brezhnev regime seemed to be immovable.

36 Some geographers also gave support for irrigational development in the basin. In 1967, Viktor Shul´ts, a big name in hydrology in Tashkent, proposed a grandiose idea in a monograph entitled “Transformation of Nature in Central Asia,” edited by Gerasimov. He argued as follows : If we consider that relatively a lot of water is now lost in vain [by evaporation], it is possible to drain Lake Balkhash. After the completion of drainage, it will be easy to predict that we will gain the prospect of irrigating 14‑15 million hectares with use of our own water resources in Central Asia alone [including those of the Aral Sea basin].73

37 Gerasimov also contributed an article with the general introduction of the book, in which he presented the vast area of cultivable lands through irrigation in Central Asia, as Shul’ts did, but, at the same time, he emphasized the difficulty of predicting what would happen after the implementation of developmental measures in the region, calling for the wholesale progress of scientific researches on “the most effective ways of transformation of nature, and a forecast of changes of natural conditions instigated by the growing scale of technical measures.”74 He also touched upon the necessity of accurate scientific predictions about the future water balance of Lake Balkhash after the wholesale irrigational development in the basin. Here, Gerasimov held onto his “transformation of nature” concept.75

38 Once again, matters took a turn for the worse for the developers in 1969, when citizens in Balkhash City were whipped into a panic, since they felt serious misgivings as to the future shrinkage of Lake Balkhash and the potential depletion of drinking water as a result of the construction of the Kapchagai Reservoir and the irrigation development of the lower reaches of the Ili River. According to Nikolai Guliaev, the first secretary of the Balkhash gorkom, a number of inhabitants began to leave the city.76 In response to this, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan gave an order to publish an explanatory article in the republican newspaper to dispel citizens’ concerns until 15 September.77 The mainstream of the Ili River finally closed on 28 September 1969. However, it was only on 12 November when R. Sedykh, head of Kazgidroproekt, and B. Amosov, the chief engineer of the construction site of the hydropower station, published an account in the republican newspaper Kazakhstanskaia Pravda. That is, they tried to excuse themselves, only after the situation became irreversible. In the article, they tried to address apprehensions over environmental degradation and deterioration of living conditions, asserting that the Kapchagai would bring win‑win results for all the stakeholders downstream of the Ili River, including fishery, livestock breeding, and muskrat hunting, through artificial regulation of seasonal water discharge from the Kapchagai. They estimated the drawdown of Lake Balkhash to be only around 1 to 1.25 meters during impoundment into the water reservoir. As mentioned above, the water level of Lake Balkhash had changed in the long term, depending upon the inflow volume from the rivers and precipitation. And they concluded that this level of drawdown was within the boundaries of natural fluctuations of the lake.78

39 However, the apology of the project representatives provoked open debates in Literaturnaia Gazeta, which Marshal Goldman concurrently referred to.79 Ėligii Stavskii, a naturalist writer, incited animadversions on the project. He inserted in his article the

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voice of Mikhail Gorodetskii, a department head of the Balkhash Copper‑Smelting Plant : “We need Lake [Balkhash] no less than air. […] You see that deserts are surrounding us. Then, where do we take waters if the lake will not exist ?”

40 Stavskii further condemned the ill‑preparedness of the project. Full‑fledged scientific research about future water use and its impact on nature and human activities had only just begun. According to an official of Kazgiprovodkhoz, their result would be given only in 1972.80 Following this, the editorial board published a number of voices, which evidently defended the anti‑developmental opinions. One item of feedback to Stavskii’s article was really suggestive : We do not oppose the transformation of nature itself, but go against the one‑sided, bureaucratic, and unwise approach to it, against the violation of the comprehensive principle, and against any anti‑scientific actions in the case of matters of nature.81

41 By the beginning of the 1970s, this mentality, resonant with the modified version of the “transformation of nature” concept, seemed to be widely shared with intellectuals, who developed a keen interest in nature. At the same time, it should be added that there was no consensus around what was “scientific.”

42 At last, Ufa Akhmedsafin, the most authoritative hydrogeologist in the Republic and a full member of the Academy of Sciences of Kazakh S.S.R., raised an alarm over the optimistic estimations about the drawdown of Lake Balkhash. He calculated that if irrigated plots were developed up to 50,000 hectares until 1978, then 57 percent of the annual water flow of the Ili River would be lost in the Kapchagai and for irrigation. As a result, according to him, the altitude of Lake Balkhash would drop by as much as 2.5 meters (not 1.25 meters as Sedykh and Amosov estimated) during the first six to eight years of impoundment into the Kapchagai dam.82 The editorial board also gave an opportunity for the above‑mentioned Sedykh to make an excuse. He dared to denounce the above‑mentioned Kalachëv’s gigantic scheme of water diversion from the Ili River to the Chu River basin as “seditious,” seeking to evince that the prospective disappearance of Lake Balkhash was only related to this sort of too‑grandiose idea. Indeed, he promised to satisfy the requirement of a number of scholars to prolong the term of initial impoundment in the dam (from five to six years as in the project document to eight to nine years) and, as a result, minimize the shrinkage and mineralization of Lake Balkhash. He promised “not to make a conflict with nature,” stating that “Balkhash City has stood, is standing, and will stand along the shore of Lake Balkhash.”83

43 The Kapchagai Reservoir began to impound water on 26 December 1969. The first generator started operation on 22 December 1970. The Kazakh branch of Giprovodkhoz (Kazgiprovodkhoz) drew up another project document related to land reclamation on 52,000 hectares in the Akdala area only in 1971. This small‑scale project was named “Phase One.” Kazgiprovodkhoz proposed to take 1.1 km3 per year for irrigation, that is, one‑tenth of the annual water flow of the Ili River. However, the Gosplan Expert Commission rejected the project document once again, restricting the organization of an experimental sovkhoz to 2,000 or 3,000 hectares in northern Akdala.84 First, the soil, relief, and other geographical conditions of the area were far from ideal ; at least, they were much worse than those of the lower Syr‑Darya Massif. In addition, more than half of the potential plots should have been washed out thoroughly for cultivation because of soil salinity.85 Second and more important, the Expert Sub‑Commission regarded it

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risky to further expand water‑consumptive irrigated lands without any coordinated scheme for seasonal water outflow from the Kapchagai Reservoir.86 In fact, the Soviet government had already ordered the relevant ministries to formulate a “seasonal scheme” for water outflow from the Kapchagai dam in 1967.87 Kazgidroproekt was responsible for working out a coordinated scheme. In accordance with these conclusions, the Gosplan Expert Commission demanded that the relevant ministries and agencies make out a coordinated plan for water outflow and impoundment, and a comprehensive scheme of land‑water usage downstream of the Ili River.88 However, subsequent deployment suggests that this requirement was never satisfied. A number of stakeholders in water resources had demanded various amounts of water at a huge variety of times. It appeared to be just impossible to make up a fixed well‑coordinated scheme. Furthermore, the experimental discharge of copious amounts of water from the Kapchagai in March 1972, which targeted the artificial inducement of floods in the delta area to push the maximum growth of natural pasturage in spring, resulted in miserable failure.89 A representative of Kazgidroproekt lamented at an interministerial meeting in April 1972, “Considering the extraordinary complexity of evaluating the economic effects of various proposals [about seasonal discharges by the stakeholders], the [seasonal discharge] regime should be worked out every year … with the participation of the relevant agencies and with consideration of forecasts of influent quantity into the [Kapchagai] Reservoir and Lake Balkhash.”90

44 This evaluation of the Gosplan Expert Commission eventually determined the direction of the water development of the Ili River. The Akdala area would be further cultivated unless it would have negative effects on the other economic sectors and Lake Balkhash itself. In 1975, S. Duisenov, a hydrologist of the Hydrometeorological Department of Kazakh S.S.R., asserted that “the value of Balkhash as a source of water supply is much more significant than its significance in other economic sectors (water transportation, fish catch, and so on).”91 Nevertheless, local party officials in Alma‑Ata and ameliorators in Moscow did not give up massive irrigation development in the Akdala region. Asanbai Askarov, the first secretary of the Alma‑Ata obkom, expatiated how local leaders supported the idea of large‑scale land reclamation in the lower reaches of the Ili River. He honestly remembers in his memoir that he raised the issues of further development of the Akdala region as a promising agenda to Leonid Brezhnev himself, who visited Alma‑Ata in 1976 and took part in a meeting of the party‑economic activists of the Republic. Brezhnev had job experience in Kazakhstan as the party head of the Republic during the Khrushchev era, and was familiar with the situation of the southern Balkhash region. There and then, he gave instructions to the above‑mentioned Alekseevskii, who accompanied Brezhnev, to accelerate the tempo of the irrigation development in the Akdala area. Alekseevskii agreed with the idea.92 After that, the Ministry of Land Melioration and Water Economy of the Soviet Union, together with the Gosplan and the Ministry of Energy and Electrification, elaborated future developmental targets of the Ili River basin, and proposed in the first place to develop 52,000 hectares in the Akdala area with the construction of one more reservoir nearby, while they estimated the potential to cultivate 124,000 hectares.93 In 1980, the Ministry of Agriculture of Kazakh S.S.R. published a brochure about the future potential for rice cropping in the southern Balkhash region, which displayed the possibility of a total cultivation of 200,000 hectares for crop rotation, including 100,000 hectares for rice, although only 20,000 hectares had been used for rice until that time.94 In spite of these initiatives and movement, the total area of irrigated plots

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in the downstream area of the Ili River did not greatly expand, limited to 30,000 hectares for rotation including 12,500‑14,200 hectares for rice.95

45 Afterward, it seems that the target of intensive cultivation gradually moved from the lower range of the Ili River to the middle reaches around the republican capital, Alma‑Ata. Askarov wrote in his memoir that the soil salinity of the Akdala made the republican authorities reconsider the place of intensive irrigation, and they afterwards began to push cultivation in proximity to the Kapchagai Reservoir. In addition, the Great Alma‑Ata Channel was planned and actually constructed from 1981 to 1985, cutting across various tributaries of the Ili River from east to west.

46 In the early 1970s, Soviet hydrologists had already foreseen the shrinkage and the elevation of the salinity level of Lake Balkhash owing to a combination of anthropogenic and natural factors. In June 1970, the Presidium of the Council of Ministers set an altitude of 341.0 m as the critical level of Lake Balkhash.96 As to the saline level, 2 g/l is the limit for domestic use. Although the irrigation potential was not fulfilled in the lower Ili River, long‑term precipitation deficiencies had an impact on the altitude and the saline concentration of Lake Balkhash. The water level declined from 343 m in 1969 to 340.5 m in 1986.

The Balkhash-Alakol Basin Area

The Balkhash-Alakol Basin Area after the construction of the Great Alma-Ata Canal in 1985 By Tetsuro Chida and Kaol Ito

47 The saline level in the West Balkhash increased from 1.23 g/l in 1970 to 1.79 g/l in 1983. As Kadar Keser and Hiroshi Matsuyama calculated, the inflow into the Ili delta decreased by an average of 3.4 km3 per year from 1970 to 1986, affected by natural factors (accounting for 62 percent) and anthropogenic causes (accounting for 38 percent).97 The continuous regression of Lake Balkhash obliged the power engineering

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authorities in Kazakhstan to further slow the tempo of impoundment into the Kapchagai Reservoir. Eventually, it never fully accumulated the planned volume of water (28.1 km3). Only two of five power generators were operating in the middle of the 1980s.98 When the altitude of Lake Balkhash dropped lower than the predetermined critical level in 1986, the authorities of Kazakh S.S.R. made a decision to start constructing the dam across the Uzyn‑Aral Strait, which was afterwards abandoned owing to public pressure. Afterward, hydrologists in Moscow and Leningrad “scientifically” verified its ineffectiveness to maintain the altitude and salinity level of the Western Balkhash, and actually the water level once again began rising from 1987. The Kapchagai Hydropower Station became inefficient, the irrigation development was limited, and hence Lake Balkhash is still “standing” and supplying industrial water to Balkhash City.

48 At all events, it is possible to say that the republican and provincial political figures (for example, party officials) were the most energetic advocates of water development in the Lake Balkhash basin. For local leaders, the implementation of gigantic projects was the simplest way to flaunt their authority and power. And every republican and provincial leader of Brezhnev’s time competed with each other over the acquisition of budgets and subsidies from Moscow for concrete projects. However, it should be added that Kunaev’s place in it was quite impalpable. First, Kunaev was a hero for citizens of Kapchagai City, because he gave significant contributions to the infrastructure building of the city. He wrote in his memoir that he provided directions for land reclamation of the Kerbulak Massif, located close to Kapchagai City. As a result, the newly cultivated lands began to supply vegetables, potatoes, and watermelons for the citizens of Kapchagai and Almaty.99 Second, he had been repeatedly elected as the deputy of the Supreme Soviet of Kazakh S.S.R. from the Bakanas electorate, located in the lower reaches of the Ili River (Balkhash District), which encompassed its delta zone and the Akdala area. Therefore, he was also responsible for the economic development and the environmental protection of the region. Third, Balkhash City was a special place for him, since he started his career in 1936 as a metallurgical engineer in the Balkhash Copper‑Smelting Plant as soon as he graduated from an institute in Moscow. He could not put aside the misgivings of the citizens of Balkhash City. In fact, he referred to one dialogue with Aleksei Kosygin in his memoir where he petitioned him to lay down a water pipeline to Balkhash City in order to supply abundant fresh drinking water for the citizens, which was realized afterwards.100

Conclusion : Science, development, and modernization in the Brezhnev period

49 The “transformation of nature” concept was elaborated after World War II during Stalin’s Plan for Transformation of Nature. As a result of the scientific and technological revolution, Soviet geographers, mainly staff of the Institute of Geography, U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, renewed the concept after 1960 with significant modification of its content. Now, nature should be transformed with precautions against negative effects as a result of transformation and pre‑calculation of costs for this measurement. As mentioned above, this conceptual change itself was the Soviet version of “reflexive modernization.”

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50 Many of the projects related to transformation of nature were implemented without delay like the construction of the Karakum Canal in the Aral Sea basin and the Kapchagai Reservoir in the Lake Balkhash basin. These projects had received approval during the Stalin or Khrushchev era. Brezhnev’s significant concern for irrigation in Central Asia further promoted the expansion of irrigated lands in the Aral Sea basin. During the Stalinist period, agricultural and irrigation development had to be promoted swiftly and uniformly on a massive scale, which was regarded as “scientific” by Stalin himself. Khrushchev’s de‑Stalinization unleased pro‑conservational voices of Soviet naturalists and scholars. However, Khrushchev himself advocated the massive and uniform style of development of the Stalinist type. He also often made self‑righteous decisions with scientific contents, particularly about farming methods. Brezhnev also supported the idea of large‑scale extensive development, but only on the basis of feasibility and scientific technical substantiation. As a result, Soviet scientists and engineers gained more liberty. If scientists and experts said “no,” then the Brezhnev regime did not give any political support. His regime clearly hesitated in implementing economically groundless or scientifically unsubstantiated projects related to nature transformation, charging final decisions to Soviet scholars and technicians. Furthermore, it often took a great amount of time to scientifically verify the effectiveness of nature transformation measures. The diversity of their opinions and projections, in turn, hindered the formulation and implementation of actual measures. Thus, the U.S.S.R. Gosplan Expert Commission rejected twice the feasibility studies on agricultural development in the downstream area of the Ili River, but the Soviet government had not given any political endorsement to these projects. Local leaders strove to obtain the consent of Brezhnev himself about the further irrigation development in the Ili River basin, which finally ended in vain.

51 In this manner, it is possible to say that the renovated concept of “transformation of nature” in reality played both promoting and hampering roles in actual nature transformation in Central Asia. The “transformation of nature” concept during the post‑war Stalin era actually promoted the large‑scale irrigation development in Central Asia. The “unproductive” Aral Sea had been regarded as an inevasible sacrifice to the economic development of Central Asia. Concerning the Ili‑Balkhash basin, the “transformation of nature” concept at least had restrictive effects on preventing catastrophic ecological degradation of Lake Balkhash. The freshwater of the West Balkhash was an important resource for the industrial development of Balkhash City. Therefore, both Kazakhstani and Russian scientists eagerly engaged in investigations into the negative impacts of the developmental measures on the altitude and salinity of Lake Balkhash. At the same time, Gerasimov’s concept of “transformation of nature” premised the priorities of science and human potential under socialism, where all changes in environment could be properly foreseen and guided to maximize human wellbeing. However, the reality of actual developmental projects showed that it took so much time or appeared to be just impossible. The abandonment of several developmental plans in the Lake Balkhash basin itself was a byproduct of the reflexive modernization in the Soviet Union. However, then, the concept had already ceased to function as expected, as a lubricant for “real” nature transformations, but adversely played the role of restraining them if scientifically not justified. The “transformation of nature” concept was a product of socialist modernity plus a tool for utopian social engineering. Deprivation of its effectiveness, accompanied by the “political indecisiveness” of the Brezhnev era, nullified the legitimacy of socialist modernization,

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and, eventually, of the socialist ideology. The Brezhnev regime helplessly observed what was going on. As a result, Lake Balkhash was saved, but the Aral Sea was pushed forward unto its death.

NOTES

1. David L. Hoffmann, “European Modernity and Soviet Socialism,” in David L. Hoffmann and Yanni Kotsonis, eds., Russian Modernity : Politics, Knowledge, Practices (Basingstoke : Macmillan Press, 2000), 257. 2. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven : Yale University Press, 1998). 3. Paul Josephson, Industrialized Nature : Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World (Washington : Island Press, 2002), 24. 4. Marq de Villers, Water : The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource (N.Y. : Mariner Books, 2001), 106. 5. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1990), 18‑19. 6. As Giddens noted, “reflexivity” is the consistent “never‑to‑be‑relaxed monitoring” of actions, which is “the necessary basis of modernity.” In this sense, “reflexive modernity” is a corollary of the monitoring of the modernization process itself. Ulrich Beck characterized it as “the self‑confrontation with the effects of risk society” in the industrial era, which urges the transformation of the approaches and practices of modernization. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 36‑37 ; Ulrich Beck, “The Reinvention of Politics : Towards a Theory of Reflexive Modernization,” in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization : Politics, Traditions and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Cambridge : Polity Press, 1994), 6. 7. Marshall I. Goldman, The Spoils of Progress : Environmental Pollution in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1972) ; Zhores A. Medvedev, Soviet Agriculture (New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), 145‑150 ; Zh.A. Medvedev, Vzlёt i padenie Lysenko [The Rise and Fall of Lysenko] (M. : Kniga, 1993), 197‑209. 8. Philip R. Pryde, Conservation in the Soviet Union (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1972). 9. Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest : Russian Forestry and Stalinist Environmentalism, 1905‑1953 (Pittsburg : University of Pittsburg Press, 2011). 10. Douglas R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom : Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1999). 11. Iu. Obertrais, “‘Mertvye’ i ‘kul´turnye’ zemli : Diskursy uchënykh i imperskaia politika v Srednei Azii, 1880‑e–1991 gg. [The “Dead” and “Cultured” Lands : Scientists’ Discourses and Imperial Policy in Central Asia, 1880s‑1991],” Ab Imperio, no. 4 (2008) : 191‑231. 12. Josephson, Industrialized Nature, Chapter 1. 13. I.I. Ivanov‑Omskii, Istoricheskii materialism o roli geografiicheskoi sredy v razvitii obshchestva [Historical materialism and the role of geographic environment in the development of society] (M. : Politizdat, 1950), 152‑153. 14. Medvedev, Soviet Agriculture, 145‑146.

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15. Tetsuro Chida, “Sengo Starin‑ki Torukumenisutan ni okeru Unga Kensetsu Keikaku to Araru‑kai Mondai [Grandiose Canal Construction Projects in Turkmenistan and the Aral Sea Problem in the Post‑War Stalin Period],” Surabu Kenkyuu [Slavic Studies], 56 (June 2009) : 17 [in Japanese]. 16. Boris Zaikov, a Soviet hydrologist, calculated that the level of the Aral Sea would decline as much as 7.73 meters if the Major Turkmen Canal took 375‑400 m/sec in its first phase, and as much as 14.2 meters under the withdrawal of 600 m/sec in the future. Boris Zaikov, Vodnyi balans i uroven´ Aral´skogo moria v sviazi so stroitel´stvom Glavnogo turukemnskogo kanala [The Water balance and the level of the Aral Sea after the construction of the Major Turkmen Canal] (L., 1952), 33‑34. 17. Stephan Brain, Songs of the Forest, 141. 18. The author previously discussed the conceptual debates related to “space” and “region (geographical zone)” among Soviet geographers in the post‑war Stalin period, which clealy distanced themselves of the “uniformed” approach to nature by Lysenkovists and put a high value to the diversity of landscapes and geographical environments. Tetsuro Chida, “Taminzoku Ryouiki Teikoku Soren ni okeru Chirigaku to Kuukan‑Chiiki Ninshiki : Sengo Starin‑ki wo Chuushinni [Geographical Science and the Conception of ‘Region’ and ‘Space’ in the Soviet Union as a Multinational ‘Territorial’ Empire],” Chiiki Kenkyuu [Regional Studies], 10, 2 (April, 2010) : 119‑121 [in Japanese]. 19. “Nachalos´ general´noe nastuplenie na Kara‑Kumy ! Skrepery vyshli na osnovnuiu trassu kanala [A general offensive into the Kara-Kum got underway ! Scrapers came to the main track of the canal],” Turkmenskaia iskra (04 March 1953) : 1. 20. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, 265. 21. Gerasimov became the director of the Institute from 1950 and worked out until his death in March 1985. He was initially a geomorphologist and played an active role in geographical and geological expeditions in Central Asia and Kazakhstan during 1930s including around Lake Balkhash. 22. Their argument became the conceptual background to Khrushchev’s policy of regional agricultural specialization. I.P. Gerasimov, “Teplovoi i vodnyi rezhim zemnoi poverkhnosti, ego rol´ v dinamike prirodnykh protsessov, geograficheskie razlichiia i metody preobrazovaniia dliia prakticheskikh tselei [Thermal and water regime of the Earth’s surface, its role in the dynamics of natural processes, geographic differences and methods of transformation of nature for practical purposes],” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR. Seriia geograficheskaia, no. 4 (1956) : 47‑49. 23. I.P. Gerasimov, “Geografiia v Sovetskom Soiuze (vvedenie) [Geography in the Soviet Union (preface)],” I.P. Gerasimov et al., eds., Sovetskaia geografiia. Itogi i zadachi [Soviet geography : results and tasks] (M. : Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo geograficheskoi literatury, 1960) : 10. 24. ARAN (Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk [Archive of Russian Academy of Sciences]), f. 200, Institut geografii [Institute of Geogpraphy], op. 1, Upravlencheskaia dokumentatsiia Instituta [Administrative documentation of the Institute], d. 155, Plan nauchno‑issledovatel´skikh rabot Instituta na 1961 god [The annual research plan of the Institute], l. 16, Plan nauchno‑issledovatel ´skikh rabot Problemy “Teoriia preobrazovaniia prirody SSSR i prilegaiushchikh territorii [The research plan on the problems “Theories of transformation of nature in the U.S.S.R. and adjacent territories”]. 25. ARAN, f. 200, op. 1, d. 155, l. 7‑8, Vvedenie k planu nauchno‑issledovatel´skikh rabot [Introduction of the annual research plan]. 26. I.P. Gerasimov, “Sovetskaia geograficheskaia nauka i problem preobrazovaniia prirody [The Soviet geographic science and the problem of transformation of nature],” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR. Seriia geograficheskaia, no. 5 (1961) : 7. 27. Gerasimov, “Sovietskaia geograficheskaia nauka,” 11‑12.

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28. A.G. Doskach, “Nauki o Zemle i voprosy preobrazovaniia prirody [Earth sciences and the issues on transformation of nature],” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR. Seriia geograficheskaia, no. 5 (1962) : 136. 29. V. Anuchin, “Istoriia s geografiei [History with geography],” Literaturnaia gazeta (18 February 1965), 2. 30. I. Gerasimov, “‘Ischezla’ li geografiia ? [Did geography “disappear” ?]” Literaturnaia gazeta (29 April 1965), 2 ; in addition to Gerasimov, six scholars (of four articles), all of whom were based in either the Institute of Geography or Moscow State University, openly debated in the paper. 31. Gerasimov, “Konstruktivnaia geografiia : tseli, metody, rezul´taty [Constructive geography : purposes, methods and results],” Izvestiia Vsesoiuznogo geograficheskogo obshchestva, no. 5 (1966) : 393. 32. I.P. Gerasimov, Preobrazovanie prirody i razvitie geograficheskoi nauki v SSSR. Ocherki po konstruktivnoi geografii [Transformation of nature and the development of geographic sciences in the USSR. The overview of constructive geography] (M. : Znanie, 1967) : 72. 33. I.P. Gerasimov, “Nuzhen generalńyi plan preobrazovaniia prirody nashei strany [Our country needs master plan of transformation of nature],” Kommunist, no. 2 (1969) : 77. 34. Gerasimov, “Nuzhen generalńoi plan,” 69. 35. Gerasimov, “Nuzhen generalńoi plan,” 78. 36. V.S. Preobrazhenskii i L.S. Abramov, “Stanovlenie konstruktivnoi geografii [The establishment of constructive geography],” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR. Seriia geograficheskaia, no. 1 (1976) : 15. 37. I.P. Gerasimov, “Vzaimodeistvie prirody i obshchestva i zadachi konstruktivnoi geografii [Interaction between nature and society and the tasks of constructive geography],” in I.B. Novik, ed., Problemy optimizatsii v ėkonomiki [Problems of optimization in economy] (M. : Nauka, 1978), 13‑14. 38. ARAN, f. 1850, Lichnyi fond Gerasimova Innokentiia Petrovicha (1905‑1985) [Collections of personal documents of Gerasimov Innokentii Petrovich (1905‑1985)], op. 1, d. 192, l. 11, Zapiska Gerasimova “O materialakh, sviazannykh s perebroskoi stoka sibirskikh i severnykh rek na iug [Report by Gerasimov about the diversion of Siberian and northern rivers into the south].” 39. G.V. Voropaev, I.P. Gerasimov, O.K. Kibalćhich and N.I. Koronkevich, “Problema pereraspredeleniia vodnykh resursov v Sredinnom regione : prognoz izmeneniia prirodnykh uslovii [The problem of the redistribution of water resources in the Central region : forcast of translation of natural conditions],” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR. Seriia geograficheskaia, no. 6 (1982) : 25‑26. 40. P.F. Domrachev, Balkhash i Pribalkhashé [Lake Balkhash and its surroundings] (Alma‑Ata : Kazakhskoe kraevoe izdatel´stvo, 1935) : 53. 41. M.M. Nedzvetskii, “Irrigatsionnye izyskaniia v Pribalkhashí [Surveys on irrigation around Lake Balkhash],” Narodnoe khoziaistvo Kazakhstana, no. 4‑5 (1929), 53, 58. 42. Domrachev, Balkhash i Pribalkhashé, 53. 43. Nedzvetskii, “Irrigatsionnye izyskaniia v Pribalkhashí,” 55. 44. Sh.Ch. Chokin, Chetyre vremeni zhizni [Four times of life] (Almaty : Bilim, 1998) : 190. 45. Chokin afterward became president of the Academy of Sciences of Kazakh S.S.R. (1964‑1967). 46. V.L. Tsenatsevich and V.A. Kiktenko, “Perspektivy razvitiia irrigatsii v basseine r. Ili [The perspectives on the irrigational development in the Ili River basin],” in Sh.Ch. Chokin, ed., Problema vodokhoziaistvennogo ispol´zovaniia reki Ili [The problem about the water use of the Ili River] (Alma‑Ata : Izdatel´stvo Akademii Nauk Kazakhskoi SSR, 1950) : 71‑72. 47. The Council for Techno‑Economic Assessment (later the State Expert Commission) was the permanent organ within the All‑Union State Planning Committee (Gosplan), whose role was to make assessments of the feasibility studies of the developmental projects, which held strategic importance at a national level. The Expertise Sub‑Commission was organized to each project, and

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members of the Sub‑Commission were further divided into groups by subjects. Each group made an assessment from a perspective of its specialty, and finally, all documents were assembled and summarized to a final assessment report. The permanent Council (or Expertise Commission) finally adopted an official resolution based on the final assessment report by the Sub‑Commission. The resolution would be used as information in making a final decision of each project in Gosplan and the Council of Ministers. 48. RGAE (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ėkonomiki [Russian State Archive of Economics]), f. 4372, op. 58, 1957‑1959 gg., d. 670, Ob ėkspertize proektnogo zadaniia Kapchagaiskoi GĖS [About the experts’ assessment concerning the project document of the Kapchagai Hydropower Station], l. 186, Postanovlenie Soveta tekhniko‑ėkonomicheskoi ėkspertizy [The resolution of the Council for Techno‑Economic Expertise] (18.07.1959). 49. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 58, d. 670, l. 70, Zakliuchenie po razdelam ėnergetiki [The conclusion about the power engineering section]. 50. Chokin, Chetyre vremeni zhizni, 195. 51. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 58, d. 670, l. 217, Zakliuchenie ėkspertnoi (pod)komissii [The conclusion of the experts’ subcommission] (l. 189‑218). 52. N.S. Kalachёv, “Kompleksnye issledovaniia v basseine reki Ili [Comprehensive studies about the Ili Rvier basin],” Vestnik Akademii Nauk SSSR, no. 5 (1959) : 115‑118. 53. A.S. Kes´, “Soveshchanie po kompleksnomu ispol´zovaniiu zemelńykh i vodnykh resursov respublik Srednei Azii i Iuzhnogo Kazakhstana [The meeting on comprehensive use of land and water resources in Central Asia and the South Kazakhstan],” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR. Seriia geograficheskaia, no. 5 (1962) : 193. 54. Muskrats are valuable fur animals to make fur coats and caps, introduced from the North America and Scandinavia to the Ili River delta in the 1930s. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, 1965‑1975 gg., d. 466, Materialy ėkspertizy skhemy gidromeliorativnykh meropriiatii dlia razvitiia sel´skogo khoziaistva i zverovodstva v nizovíakh r. Ili [Materials of the experts’ assessment about the scheme of hydromelioration measures for the development of agriculture and animal breeding in the lower reaches of the Ili River], l. 120, Postanovlenie Gosėkspertizy [The resolution of the State Expertise] (24.04.1965) (l. 120‑125), 130, Zakliuchenie ėkspertnoi podkomissii [The conclusion of the Experts’ Subcommission] (10.04.1965) (l. 126‑144). 55. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 466, l. 131. 56. Tekhniko‑ėkonomicheskii doklad sravnitelńoi ėkonomicheskoi ėffektivnosti i ocherёdnosti orosheniia zemel´ pod risoseianie v perspektivnykh raionakh SSSR [The techno‑economic report about the comparative economic analysis of the effectiveness and preference of irrigation for rice cultivation in the promising regions in the U.S.S.R.] (M., 1968), 37. 57. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 466, l. 137. 58. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 466, l. 133. 59. The Central Union of Consumers’ Societies was the competent agency of hunting of wild animals including muskrats. Its Kazakh branch was responsible for animal hunting in the delta area of the Ili River. 60. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 466, l. 86‑87, Zakliuchenie po razdelu “zverovodstvo” [The conclusion about the “animal breeding” section] (24.03.1965). 61. The author could not find the detailed biography of Dashenkin. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 466, l. 96, Zakliuchenie po razdelu “rybokhoziaistvennye meropriiatiia” [The conclusion about the section of “measures for fishery”] (27.03.1965). 62. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 466, l. 100‑105, Zakliuchenie po razdelu “obvodnenie” [The conclusion about the section of “watering of pastures”] (11.03.1965). 63. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 466, l. 124‑125. 64. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 466, l. 124‑125, 142‑144.

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65. M.I. L´vovich, “O kompleksnom ispol´zovanii i okhrane vodnykh resursov [Comprehensive use and conservation of water resources],” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR. Seriia geograficheskaia, no. 2 (1961) : 37, 39‑40. 66. A.V. Korobov, “Geografiia i khoziaistvo [Geography and economy],” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR. Seriia geograficheskaia, no. 4 (1964) : 4‑5. 67. Korobov, “Geografiia i khoziaistvo,” 11. 68. M.S. Buianovskii, “Balkhash – Ili i vozmozhnost´ organizatsii krupnogo promyshlennogo kompleksa v Pribalkhash´e [The Balkhash‑Ili basin and the potential of the establishment of a large‑scale industrial complex around Lake Balkhash],” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR. Seriia geograficheskaia, no. 3 (1965) : 61‑62. 69. RGANI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii [Russian State Archive of Contemporary History]), f. 2, Plenumy TsK KPSS [Plenums of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.], op. 3, Materialy Plenumov [Materials of Plenums], d. 9, Maiskii Plenum TsK KPSS (25-27.05.1966). Stenogramma pervogo zasedaniia (25.05.1966). Nepravlennyi ėkzempliar [May Plenum of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (25-27.05.1966). Shorthand record of the first session (25.05.1966). Unmodified copy], l. 28, Doklad Alekseevskogo E.E. [Report by Alekseevskii E.E.]. 70. RGANI, f. 2, op. 3, d. 9, l. 130, Rech´ Beisebaeva M. 71. AP RK (Arkhiv Prezidenta Respubliki Kazakhstan [The President’s Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan]), f. 708, TsK KP Kazakhstana, op. 42, 1967 g., d. 194, Perepiska s TsK KPSS, l. 85‑86, Zapiska D. Kunaeva v TsK KPSS o stroitel´stve Akdalinskogo massiva orosheniia [Report by D. Kunaev to the Central Committee of the CPSU about the consolidation of irrigated lands in the Akdala area] (05.04.1967). 72. Tekhniko‑ėkonomicheskii doklad, 37. 73. V.L. Shul´ts, “Izuchennost´ vodnykh resursov Srednei Azii i puti ikh ispol´zovaniia [The research degree about water resources in Central Asia and the way of their usage],” in I.P. Gerasimov, A.S. Kes´ i V.N. Kunin, eds., Problemy preobrazovaniia prirody Srednei Azii [Problems about transformation of nature in Central Asia] (M. : Nauka, 1967) : 67. 74. I.P. Gerasimov, “Nauchnye problemy preobrazovaniia prirody Srednei Azii dliia razvitiia oroshaemogo zemledeliia i pastbishchnogo zhivotnovodstva [Scientific issues on transformation of nature in Central Asia for the development of irrigation farming and pasturable livestock farming],” in Gerasimov et al., eds., Problemy preobrazovaniia prirody, 15, 19. 75. Gerasimov dealt with this topic about Lake Balkhash along with the Aral Sea. Gerasimov, “Nauchnye problemy,” 17‑18. 76. AP RK, f. 708, op. 46, 1969 g., d. 149, Informatsii obkomov, ministerstv i otdelov TsK [Information of provincial party committees, ministries and departments of the Central Committee], l. 18‑19, Ob usilenii volneniia zhitelei goroda Balkhasha [About intensification of unrest among residents of Balkhash City] (28.07.1969). 77. AP RK, f. 708, op. 46, d. 149, l. 69, Zapiska M. Fazylova o situatsii v g. Balkhashe [Report by M. Fazylov about the situation in Balkhash City] (03.09.1969). 78. R. Sedykh i B. Amosov, “Kapchagai — soiuznik Balkhasha [Kapchagai — the ally of Balkhash],” Literaturnaia gazeta (12 November 1969), 4. 79. Goldman, The Spoils of Progress, 58‑62. 80. Ėligii Stavskii, “Sud´ba Balkhasha [The fate of Balkhash],” Literaturnaia gazeta (19 November 1969), 11. 81. “Balkhash mozhno spasti ! Pis´ma sporiat [Balkhash can be saved ! Letters are arguing],” Literaturnaia gazeta (25 March 1970), 12. 82. U.M. Akhmedsafin, “Opasnost´ odnobokogo podkhoda [The danger of one‑sided approach],” Literaturnaia gazeta (25 March 1970), 12.

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83. R. Sedykh, “Sem´ raz otmer´ ! [Measure out seven times !]” Literaturnaia gazeta (11 February 1970), 11. 84. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 5058, Materialy ėkspertizy proektnogo zadaniia orosheniia i osvoeniia zemel´ Akdalinskogo massiva v nizovíakh reki Ili Kazakhskoi SSR [Materials of the experts’ assessment about the project document on the irrigation and land development in the Akdala area in the lower reaches of the Ili River, Kazakh SSR], l. 221‑222, Postanovlenie Gosėkspertizy [The resolution of the State Expert Commission] (14.04.1971). 85. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 5058, l. 226, 234, Zakliuchenie ėkspertnoi podkomissii [The conclusion of the experts’ subcommission] (31.03.1971) (l. 223‑247). 86. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 5058, l. 244‑245. 87. TsGA RK (Tsentralńyi gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Respubliki Kazakhstan [Central State Archive of the Republic of Kazakhstan]), f. 1626, Ministerstvo melioratsii i vodnogo khoziaistva Kazakhskoi SSR [Ministry of Melioration and Water Economy of Kazakh SSR], op. 3, 1940‑1975 gg., d. 1108, Dokumenty po zatopleniiu Kapchagaiskogo vodokhranilishcha (1972 g.). T. II. [Documents concering the impoundment in the Kapchagai Water Reservoir (1972). Volume 2], l. 75, Zapiska Ia. Sokolova, nachalńika Kazgidroproekta [Report by Ia. Sokolov, the director of Kazgidroproekt]. 88. RGAE, f. 4372, op. 66, d. 5058, l. 221‑222. 89. TsGA RK, f. 1626, op. 3, d. 1107, Dokumenty po zatopleniiu Kapchagaiskogo vodokhranilishcha (1972 g.). T. I [Documents concering the impoundment in the Kapchagai Water Reservoir (1972). Volume 1], l. 101, Zapiska Zh. Baigisieva po povodu rezul´tatov martovskogo popuska iz Kapchagaiskogo vodokhranil´shcha [Report by Zh. Baigisiev about the results of water discharges from the Kapchagai Water Reservoir in March]. 90. TsGA RK, f. 1626, op. 3, d. 1107, l. 46, Zakliuchenie po materialam “K osnovnykh polozhenii po rezhimu popuskov vody v period pervonachalńogo napolneniia Kapchagaiskogo vodokhranilishcha [The conclusion about the materials “To the basic provisions about the regime of water discharges during the period of primary impoundment in the Kapchagai Water Reservoir].” 91. S.T. Duisenov, “Problema ozera Balkhash v sviazi s vodokhoziaistvennym ispol´zovaniem stoka rek v ego basseine [Problems about Lake Balkhash in connection with the use of river flows in its basin],” Meteorologiia i gidrologiia, no. 9 (1975) : 59. 92. A. Askarov, Sud´ba [Destiny] (Almaty : Merei, 1994), 145. 93. RGANI, f. 5, Organy TsK KPSS [The organs of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.], op. 69, Za 1966 g., d. 1077, Sel´skokhoziaistvennyi otdel. Dokumenty po voprosam melioratsii zemel´ [Agricultural Department. Documents about issues on land melioration], l. 138, Zapiska o bolee polnom ispol´zovanii Kapchagaiskogo vodokhranil´shcha dlia orosheniia zemel´ [Report about more complete use of the Kapchagai Water Reservoir for irrigation] (22.12.1976). 94. Rezervy uvelicheniia risa v iuzhnom Pribalkhashé Alma‑Atinskoi oblasti [Available capacity of expansion of rice production around the southern shore of Lake Balkhash in Alma‑Ata Province] (Alma‑Ata : Kainar, 1980), 2. 95. Masanobu Nomura, “Kazafusutan ni okeru nouson no henyou : Baruhashi‑chiku Bereke mura ni tsuite [The Transformation of a Farming Village in Kazakhstan : The Case of Beleke Village in Balkhash District],” Kyouyou Kenkyuu [Cultural Research], 6, 3 (March 2000) : 132 [in Japanese]. 96. V. Nikolaev, “A mozhet, ėto ėksperiment ? [Maybe, is this an experiment ?]” Kazakhstanskaia pravda (6 March 1987) : 4. 97. Kadar Kezer and Hiroshi Matsuyama, “Decrease of river runoff in the Lake Balkhash basin in Central Asia,” Hydrological Processes, 20, 6 (April, 2006) : 1422‑1423. 98. A.A. Tursunov, I.M. Mal´kovskii and Zh. Dostaev, “K peresmotru proektnoi otmetki NPU Kapchagaiskogo vodokhranil´shcha [About resetting of the planned normal headwater level of the Kapchagai Water Reservoir],” in A.A. Tursunov et al., eds., Problemy kompleksnogo ispol

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´zovaniia vodnykh resursov Ili‑Balkhashskogo basseina. Sb. nauchnykh statei [Issues on comprehensive use of water resources of the Ili‑Balkhash basin. Collection of research papers] (Alma‑Ata : Izdanie KazGU, 1985) : 18‑19. 99. D.A. Kunaev, Ot Stalina do Gorbachëva (V aspekte istorii Kazakhstana) [From Stalin to Gorbachev (In the aspect of the history of Kazakhstan)] (Almaty : Sanat, 1994) : 184. 100. Kunaev, Ot Stalina do Gorbachëva, 160‑161.

ABSTRACTS

The concept of “transformation of nature” was elaborated after World War II during Stalin’s Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature. After 1960, Soviet geographers renewed the concept with a significant modification: nature should be transformed with precautions against the negative effects of this transformation. However, in reality, this conceptual modification had restrictive effects on actual irrigational developments in the Lake Balkhash basin because they lacked scientific and economic substantiations of their negative impacts. The Brezhnev regime never gave political endorsement to scientifically unverified projects of that type. Thus, deprivation of its effectiveness, accompanied by the “political indecisiveness” of the Brezhnev era, nullified the legitimacy of socialist modernization, and, eventually, of the socialist ideology.

Le concept de « transformation de la nature » a été élaboré après la Seconde Guerre mondiale dans le cadre du Grand Plan pour la transformation de la nature proposé par Stalin. Après 1960, les géographes soviétiques ont renouvelé le concept en apportant une modification significative : la nature devait être transformée avec précaution afin d’éviter les effets négatifs de cette transformation. En fait, les preuves économiques et scientifiques des impacts négatifs faisant défaut, cette modification conceptuelle a eu des effets restrictifs sur le développement concret du système d’irrigation dans le bassin du lac Balhaš. Le régime brejnévien n’a jamais soutenu politiquement les projets de ce type non validés scientifiquement. Ainsi, le manque d’efficacité du régime, assorti de « l’indécision politique » caractérisant la période, a invalidé la légitimité de la modernisation socialiste et, finalement, celle de l’idéologie socialiste.

AUTHOR

TETSURO CHIDA Slavic Research Center (SRC), Hokkaido University, [email protected]

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« Марафон гостеприимства» Олимпиада‑80 и попытка модернизации советского сервиса1 « La course à l’hospitalité » : Les Jeux olympiques d’été de 1980 et la tentative de modernisation du secteur soviétique des services The Soviet “marathon” for hospitality development : 1980 Summer olympics and the country’s attempt at modernizing its service sector

Aleksej D. Popov

1 23 октября 1974 г. на сессии МОК (Международный олимпийский комитет) было принято решение о проведении XXII летних Олимпийских игр в Москве. Более 5 лет длилась подготовка к Олимпиаде‑80, которая стала не только спортивным мегасобытием, но и дипломатическим поединком, идеологической PR‑кампанией, актом межкультурного диалога, тестом на эффективность для советской системы управления. Учитывая масштабность и многогранность этого события, неудивительно, что до сих пор недостаточно изученными остаются важные вопросы, связанные с подготовкой и проведением Олимпиады‑80. История этого мегасобытия2 достаточно обзорно рассматривается в общих изданиях по истории олимпийского движения, преимущественно в спортивном, политическом и экономическом контексте3. Относительно недавно была также предпринята попытка раскрыть его значение через призму советского международного туризма4. В то же время совершенно недостаточное внимание было уделено ещё одному аспекту « олимпийского марафона» СССР – его влиянию на модернизацию советской сферы обслуживания, в первую очередь гостиничного дела и общественного питания.

2 Следует отметить, что тема модернизационных процессов в российской и советской истории имеет обширную историографию. Однако ни в одной из существующих работ Олимпиада‑80 не рассматривается в контексте модернизации, уступая место таким грандиозным событиям, как реформы Петра I, столыпинские реформы или сталинская индустриализация. На наш взгляд, это обусловлено двумя причинами. С одной стороны, для

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историографии Российской империи и СССР вообще было характерно недостаточное внимание к истории непроизводственной сферы на фоне гипертрофированного интереса к развитию сельского хозяйства и промышленности, что вполне естественно учитывая аграрный, а затем индустриальный характер общества. С другой стороны, свою негативную роль, очевидно, сыграло стереотипное представление о « застойности» брежневского периода, его низком модернизационном потенциале по сравнению с другими этапами советской истории. Обычно к числу сверхпроектов эпохи « застоя» относят лишь эпопею, связанную с завершающим этапом строительства Байкало‑Амурской магистрали (БАМ), которое в 1974 г. получило статус Всесоюзной ударной комсомольской стройки5. Однако с позиции современной постиндустриальной парадигмы развития России и ряда других постсоветских государств такое недостаточное внимание представляется неоправданным, поскольку именно фактор Олимпиады‑80 заставил руководство СССР едва ли не впервые обратить столь серьезное внимание на развитие отечественной непроизводственной сферы (сферы услуг). Согласно авторской гипотезе, подготовка к проведению Олимпиады‑80 стала первым в истории СССР примером модернизации постиндустриального типа (когда основной приоритет уделялся сфере услуг) и, одновременно, последним примером использования советской системой мобилизационной модели модернизации, апеллирующей к фактору « внешней угрозы». 3 Важной предпосылкой для исследования новых аспектов истории XXII Игр стало снятие грифа секретности и публикация большого количества архивных документов центральных органов власти СССР, которые ранее были практически недоступны исследователям6.

« Все для спорта, все для победы» : олимпийская мобилизация в СССР

4 В российской и советской истории импульсы модернизации очень часто не имели имманентный характер, а были вызваны влиянием внешних факторов 7. Конъюнктура « холодной войны» придала спортивному по своей природе событию большое политико‑идеологическое значение. Впервые право провести Олимпиаду получило социалистическое государство, и власти СССР с пафосом заявили, что XXII Игры « откроют качественно новый этап в олимпийском движении»8. Олимпиада‑80 в организационном отношении должна была превзойти все предыдущие игры и продемонстрировать всему миру преимущества социалистической системы, а её многочисленные иностранные гости после посещения СССР должны были способствовать распространению за рубежом позитивной информации о советской действительности9. Достижение этой задачи означало, что кроме соперничества за олимпийские медали, должна была состояться и борьба за лучшее качество обслуживания гостей Олимпиады‑80. В этой негласной борьбе советским предприятиям сферы услуг необходимо было показать свое превосходство над западной индустрией гостеприимства (industry of

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hospitality). Однако « стартовые» позиции были не в пользу Советского Союза. В аналитической записке от 21 марта 1979 г., подготовленной для ЦК КПСС Агентством печати « Новости», сообщалось : За последние месяцы западная пропаганда в целом сместила акцент антиолимпийской кампании с требования бойкота Олимпиады‑80 на проблемы « трудностей Советского Союза в сфере обслуживания». Распространяются измышления о том, что Советский Союз якобы не в состоянии обеспечить проведение Олимпийских игр на должном уровне из‑за недостатка гостиниц, ресторанов, увеселительных заведений и продуктов питания.10 5 Даже в представлении самих граждан СССР качество советского сервиса значительно проигрывало западным образцам. Чрезвычайно распространенным стало ироничное утверждение о « ненавязчивости» советского сервиса, негативное отношение к которому подтверждала и расхожая фраза о том, что мол « у нас бытовое обслуживание, у них – сервис» 11. Вежливое и доброжелательное отношение работников сферы услуг к клиентам являлось одним из ярких впечатлений для советских туристов, оказавшихся за рубежом. Например, при ответе на вопрос : « Насколько то, что Вы увидели за границей, соответствовало Вашим ожиданиям ?» бывшие участники таких путешествий, совершенных в 1960‑1980‑е гг., отвечали следующее : ‑ Осталась в восторге. Особенно впечатлило отношение к пешеходам, движение транспорта, обслуживание в магазинах [здесь и далее выделено нами – А.П.]. ‑ Обалдела, что есть так много всего красивого, о чем мы не знали. Понравилась красота жизни, праздник жизни, сервис, яркость, удобства.12 6 Поэтому для победы в этом соперничестве двух систем и демонстрации превосходства сферы обслуживания СССР необходимо было совершить настоящую революцию в советском сервисе, но её достижение являлось даже более трудной задачей, чем борьба за олимпийские медали13.

7 С практической точки зрения перед организаторами XXII Олимпийских игр стояли следующие задачи : ‑ обеспечить транспортное обслуживание участников и гостей Олимпиады, в том числе за счет модернизации транспортной инфраструктуры ; ‑ построить новые и реконструировать старые спортивные сооружения ;

‑ возвести Олимпийские деревни для приема спортивных делегаций в Москве и Таллине ; ‑ обеспечить всех иностранных гостей качественными услугами размещения и питания, культурно‑развлекательной программой, транспортным и медицинским обслуживанием ; ‑ создать условия для освещения хода игр отечественными и зарубежными средствами массовой информации ; ‑ разработать эффективную систему обеспечения безопасности во время проведения Олимпиады в СССР ‑ подготовить и обучить персонал для обслуживания участников и зрителей Олимпийских игр ;

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‑ сконструировать и обеспечить бесперебойную работу автоматизированной системы передачи информации и управления играми (АСУ « Олимпиада»)14. 8 Peшение cложных задач, связанных с проведением Олимпиады‑80, побудило советское руководство обратиться к уже неоднократно проверенному в прошлом мобилизационному типу развития15. В марте 1975 г. для координации работы по подготовке к проведению Игр был создан Оргкомитет « Олимпиада‑80», который возглавил И.Т. Новиков16. В составе Оргкомитета действовало 20 различных комиссий, например : по капитальному строительству ; медицинскому обслуживанию ; культурной программе ; безопасности и общественному порядку ; отбору и выпуску изделий с олимпийской символикой ; информационно‑пропагандистской работе. Вслед за этим аналогичные по своим задачам структурные подразделения были созданы при ВЦСПС, ЦК ВЛКСМ, в министерствах и ведомствах, в исполнительных органах власти республиканского, областного и городского уровня17.

9 C конца 1920‑х гг. экономическое развитие СССР осуществлялось на основе пятилетних планов. Цикл олимпийской подготовки достаточно гармонично вписывался в такую систему планирования. Основные хозяйственно‑экономические мероприятия по подготовке к Олимпиаде‑80 были включены в X пятилетний план развития народного хозяйства СССР (1976‑1980 гг.). Согласно совместному отчету Оргкомитета « Олимпиада‑80» и Министерства финансов СССР, общие затраты на подготовку и проведение XXII Олимпийских игр составили свыше 1,9 млрд. руб., в т.ч. 257,3 млн. в иностранной валюте18. Из них к « прямым» расходам можно отнести около 581 млн. руб. или 30,5 % от общей суммы. Так, более 431 млн. руб. было потрачено на строительство и реконструкцию спортивных сооружений и ещё 150 млн. руб. составили организационные затраты на проведение Олимпиады‑80. Большую же часть расходов можно назвать « сопутствующими». Свыше 1,1 млрд. руб. было направлено на развитие неспортивной инфраструктуры – транспортных объектов, гостиниц, объектов связи, радио и телевидения. Ещё около 135 млн. руб. было потрачено на строительство и ремонт объектов коммунального назначения, а также общее благоустройство в олимпийских городах. Наконец, около 76 млн. руб. израсходовали на закупку за рубежом товаров народного потребления и оплату услуг иностранных фирм19. 10 Помимо расходов государственного бюджета увеличивались ассигнования на строительство объектов сферы услуг со стороны профсоюзных организаций, добровольных спортивных обществ, предприятий с частичным государственным капиталом, структур потребительской кооперации. Например, в Украинской ССР инвестиции ВАО « Интурист» (Всесоюзное акционерное общество по иностранному туризму в СССР « Интурист») в развитие собственной гостиничной базы резко возросли с 21,1 млн. руб. в VIII пятилетке (1966‑1970 гг.) и 36,7 млн. руб. в XIX пятилетке (1971‑1975 гг.) до 90 млн. руб. в Х пятилетке (1976‑1980 гг.)20. При этом в строительстве « интуристовских» гостиниц, введенных в эксплуатацию во второй половине

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1970‑х гг., принимали участие венгерские, югославские, французские и шведские строительные организации21. 11 В процессе подготовки к Олимпиаде‑80 в полной мере проявился плановый характер развития советской экономики. Например, ещё осенью 1977 г. (почти за 3 года до начала Олимпиады) на специальном совещании в московском ресторане « Прага» было утверждено меню для спортсменов‑олимпийцев и членов олимпийских делегаций на время XXII Игр, включавшее 360 основных блюд22. Однако также имели место случаи значительного отклонения от плановых показателей, в частности при строительстве и реконструкции спортивных объектов. Например, под угрозой срыва оказалась сдача в эксплуатацию спортивного комплекса « Олимпийский» на Проспекте Мира в Москве и даже обсуждался вопрос о переносе запланированных к поведению здесь соревнований на другие арены23. Аналогичная ситуация возникала и с некоторыми предприятиями сферы обслуживания. В сентябре 1978 г., менее чем за 2 года до Олимпиады‑80, в докладной записке Отдела торговли и бытового обслуживания ЦК КПСС констатировалось, что подготовка торговой сети и, в частности, предприятий общественного питания ведется крайне медленными темпами. […] В Москве из 74 предприятий строительство 16 ещё не начато, причем по 7 из них отсутствует даже проектно‑сметная документация.24 12 Важнейшим внутренним источником для финансирования олимпийской модернизации стали средства рядовых советских граждан. Вместо применявшихся в предыдущие десятилетия государственных займов, особенно широко использовавшихся в годы индустриализации, было использовано два относительно новых способа привлечения средств населения. Согласно совместному отчету Оргкомитета « Олимпиада‑80» и Министерства финансов СССР за 1976‑1980 гг. было реализовано товаров с олимпийской символикой на сумму 3,6 млрд. руб., а также продано лотерейных билетов « Спортлото» и « Спринт» на сумму 1 млрд. руб.25 Также имели место добровольные пожертвования населения, которые иногда приобретали достаточно неожиданные формы. Например, пенсионер Турсун Юсупов из кишлака Караун (Бухарская область Узбекской ССР) подарил участникам XXII Олимпийских игр 10 тонн яблок из своего личного сада26.

13 При сооружении, реконструкции и благоустройстве олимпийских объектов косвенным источником средств являлся бесплатный труд советских людей на регулярно проводившихся субботниках и воскресниках. В некоторых ведомствах, например на предприятиях системы Главинтуриста СССР была проведена кампания « Олимпиаде‑80 – 80 ударных дней». Мобилизуя советских граждан безвозмездно работать на олимпийских объектах, власти апеллировали не только к их патриотизму и любви к спорту, но и к чувству гостеприимства. Вот что писал об этом начальник Московского городского оргкомитета « Олимпиада‑80» В.А. Анисимов : Жители Ленинского района столицы выступили с инициативой : отработать каждому по четыре часа на строительстве олимпийских объектов и благоустройстве улиц и дворов. Население Дзержинского района объявило всестороннее шефство над сооружениями Олимпиады‑80. […] Причем главной здесь была не просто любовь к спорту,

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[…] основным мотивом такого общегородского энтузиазма явилось именно желание не ударить в грязь лицом, принимая в своем доме гостей со всего света.27 14 Если в промышленности СССР серьезные недостатки планово‑централизованного управления компенсировались богатейшими природно‑сырьевыми ресурсами страны28, то при модернизации сервиса власти попытались опереться на « неисчерпаемый кладезь» славянского (и не только славянского) гостеприимства. В текстах официального дискурса о подготовке предприятий сферы услуг к Олимпиаде‑80 постоянно звучали обращения к исконным традициям « гостеприимства» и « хлебосольства», а также таким человеческим качествам, как широта души, щедрость и радушие 29. Утверждалось, что « добродушие и гостеприимство составляют неотъемлемую черту характера советских людей»30. Слово « гостеприимство» (аналог английского « hospitality» и французского « hospitalité») рефреном проходило через все публикации на олимпийскую тематику31.

« От Москвы до самых до окраин…» : расширяющаяся география олимпийского сервиса

На всех Олимпийских направлениях широким фронтом ведутся работы по приведению в порядок фасадов служебно‑технических зданий, озеленению прилегающих к ним территорий и благоустройству жилых поселков.32 15 По мнению ряда авторов для российской (советской) бытовой сферы был характерен « комплекс фасадов» и тесно связанный с ним феномен т.н. « потёмкинских деревень». Основные усилия концентрировались на достижении великолепия « фасадов», что должно было служить символом государственного величия, в то время как для повсеместного внутреннего обустройства огромной территории страны ресурсов обычно не хватало33. Понимая всю условность употребления в данном контексте слова « фасад»34 нами будет предложен термин « демонстрационное место» – любой объект, независимо от его происхождения, величины и основного функционального назначения, специально подготовленный для показа иностранным гостям или непосредственно предназначенный для их обслуживания.

16 Для более эффективной презентации « Страны Советов» наиболее рациональной стратегией могла стать четкая локализация « демонстрационных мест» и предельно возможное сокращение их количества, что позволило бы сконцентрировать на подготовке каждого объекта максимальное количество финансовых, материально‑технических и людских ресурсов. Однако в случае с организацией XXII Олимпийских игр реализация такой стратегии была практически невозможна. Несмотря на то, что центральным местом проведения Олимпиады‑80 являлась Москва, которая и ранее посещалась наибольшим количеством вояжеров из‑за рубежа, а также имела сравнительно высокую степень благоустройства благодаря своему столичному статусу, сама логика проведения спортивных

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соревнований требовала расширения олимпийской географии. Групповые матчи олимпийского футбольного турнира должны были пройти на стадионах Киева, Минска и Ленинграда, а местом проведения соревнований по парусному спорту стал Таллин. Соответственно, инфраструктура всех этих крупных городов также стала объектом масштабной модернизации. 17 Если в вопросах строительства основных спортивных объектов главным заказчиком работ выступал Оргкомитет « Олимпиада‑80», то в вопросах сооружения и реконструкции предприятий индустрии гостеприимства он лишь координировал деятельность Главинтуриста СССР, ЦСТЭ ВЦСПС (Центральный совет по туризму и экскурсиям Всесоюзного центрального совета профессиональных союзов), БММТ « Спутник» (Бюро международного молодежного туризма « Спутник»), Министерства торговли СССР, городских исполнительных комитетов (для предприятий коммунальной собственности) и ряда других организаций. Всего в пяти олимпийских городах Советского Союза для размещения официальных лиц, спортсменов, журналистов и иностранных туристов было подготовлено около 240 гостиниц, общежитий, кемпингов, мотелей и пансионатов более чем на 196 тыс. мест. Их питание было организовано в 173 ресторанах, 517 кафе и столовых, 84 из которых были специально открыты к Олимпиаде‑80. Эти предприятия общепита одновременно могли вместить свыше 180 тыс. человек 35.

18 Естественно, что наиболее масштабная деятельность была развернута в Москве. Только по линии ВЦСПС здесь были сданы в эксплуатацию три крупных гостиничных комплекса общей емкостью 13,3 тыс. мест – Центральный дом туриста, « Салют» и « Измайлово». Также начала действовать гостиница « Космос» на 3,6 тыс. мест, находившаяся в ведении ВАО « Интурист». Всего же благодаря активному олимпийскому строительству гостиничный фонд столицы СССР увеличился более чем на 50 %36.

19 Центральным « демонстрационным местом» Олимпиады‑80 стала рассчитанная на 12 тыс. мест Олимпийская деревня в Москве, которая никак не могла носить « потёмкинский», бутафорский характер из‑за постоянного внимания к ней зарубежных и отечественных журналистов, членов официальных спортивных делегаций. После посещения Олимпийской деревни лояльно настроенный к СССР американский предприниматель Арманд Хаммер заявил : Ваша Олимпийская деревня удобна со всех точек зрения. И в то же время она красивая. Она так же грандиозна, как церемония открытия Игр. […] Вернувшись в США, я скажу мэру Лос‑Анджелеса, что тот просто обязан приехать в Москву еще до конца Игр. Полезно посмотреть, как все организовано у вас в столице, поучиться !37 20 При этом постоянно подчеркивалось, что после окончания XXII Игр Олимпийская деревня станет новым жилым микрорайоном столицы, и простые советские люди будут пользоваться всеми её зданиями и инфраструктурой38. Этот же риторический аргумент (сегодня – иностранным

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гостям Олимпиады‑80, а завтра – гражданам СССР) использовался и во всех остальных случаях, связанных с олимпийским строительством.

21 Поскольку соревнования по стрельбе и часть соревнований по велоспорту проходили на спортивных объектах в Подмосковье, то здесь также были созданы условия для качественного обслуживания гостей Олимпиады‑80. Для приема иностранных туристов был подготовлен международный молодежный лагерь БММТ « Спутник» на 1200 мест в подмосковном поселке Ивакино. На территории Московской области было введено в строй 17 новых предприятий общественного питания на 3700 мест, ещё 29 предприятий на 5200 мест подверглись реконструкции. Особенно много благодарностей от гостей Олимпиады‑80 получили рестораны Загорска (Сергиева Посада)39. 22 В Киеве, где было проведено 7 официальных матчей олимпийского футбольного турнира, незадолго до Олимпиады‑80 были сданы в эксплуатацию 3 новые гостиницы – « Братислава», « Мир», « Русь». Всего же в столице Украинской ССР для приема иностранных гостей Олимпиады‑80 и советских туристов было подготовлено 13 гостиниц (6150 мест), 1 мотель (150 мест), несколько кемпингов (500 мест) и 31 общежитие (15180 мест)40. Для их обслуживания в Киеве также было подготовлено 54 ресторана, кафе и столовых, 120 торговых предприятий и 220 точек службы быта41. Активное строительство новых объектов индустрии гостеприимства велось также в Ленинграде и Минске. 23 Ещё одним городом, где широко развернулась олимпийская модернизация, стал Таллин – столица Эстонской ССР. Во второй половине 1970‑х гг. здесь был построен Олимпийский центр парусного спорта, а также Олимпийская деревня, готовая принять 600 спортсменов. Также в преддверии Олимпиады‑80 в Таллине были сооружены новый морской вокзал, международный аэровокзал, телебашня высотой 314 метров, международная телефонная станция, городской спортивно‑зрелищный зал на 4000 мест, новая автомагистраль, связавшая центр города с парусным центром – всего более 50 объектов. Были среди них и объекты индустрии гостеприимства – 28‑этажная гостиница « Олимпия» на 810 мест, новые рестораны (включая ресторан « Пирита» на 790 мест), кафе и бары42. 24 Одним из обязательных ритуалов, связанных с проведением игр, являлась эстафета передачи олимпийского огня из греческой Олимпии в город, принимавший очередную Олимпиаду. Путь олимпийского огня от границы СССР до Центрального стадиона в Москве занял 30 дней. Поскольку при передвижении факел с огнем сопровождался официальными лицами и многочисленными представителями средств массовой информации, то маршрут его движения также превратился в практически непрерывную цепочку « демонстрационных мест», охватив большое количество больших и малых населенных пунктов СССР. Пламя олимпийского факела будет светить над степями Молдавии, отразится в водах могучего Днепра, его увидят русские поля, русские березы. Колонна, сопровождающая олимпийский огонь, пересечет три советские республики – Молдавию, Украину, Российскую Федерацию,

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города Кишинев, Черновцы, Хмельницкий, Винницу, Житомир, Киев, Полтаву, Харьков, Белгород, Орел, Курск, Тулу.43

25 Предполагалось также, что во время проведения Олимпиады‑80 именно эти населенные пункты станут транзитными пунктами для иностранных автотуристов, желающие посетить спортивные соревнования в Москве, Киеве и Минске. Поэтому по всей трассе прохождения олимпийского огня были построены, реконструированы, отремонтированы и переоснащены сотни гостиниц, мотелей, кемпингов. Например, в Советской Украине это были гостиница « Закарпатье» в Ужгороде, гостиница « Киев» с Черновцах, гостиница « Октябрь» в Виннице, мотель « Елочка» под Житомиром, мотель « Дружба» под Харьковом и т.д. – всего 114 объектов44. Аналогичная подготовка велась также на территории Белорусской ССР и Молдавской ССР45.

26 На территории Белоруссии, Молдавии и Украины при подготовке приема зарубежных гостей Олимпиады‑80 большое внимание уделялось демонстрации национально‑культурной самобытности проживающих здесь народов. Это нашло свое отражение не только в привлечении для встречи иностранцев многочисленных ансамблей фольклорного творчества, но и в использовании для оформления гостиниц и ресторанов традиционных мотивов народной культуры, введении в меню национальных блюд. Даже находясь в Москве и Ленинграде, участники Олимпиады‑80 и иностранные туристы могли познакомиться не только с « исконно русской кухней», но и с кулинарными традициями других народов, населяющих Советский Союз. По словам составителей олимпийского меню « советскую кулинарию в равной степени украшают и украинский борщ, и узбекский плов, и грузинский шашлык, и азербайджанский суп пити, и армянская толма»46. В одном только Ленинграде к приему гостей XXII Олимпийских игр было подготовлено 12 тематических кафе с блюдами русской кухни и 20 кафе с национальными блюдами кухонь других народов СССР 47. 27 В мировой практике Олимпийские игры всегда стимулировали значительный интерес к стране их проведения со стороны иностранных туристов, что учитывали и организаторы Олимпиады‑80. Весной 1979 г. на пресс‑конференции руководства Главинтуриста СССР было заявлено, что на XXII Олимпийские игры ожидается прибытие около 300 тыс. иностранных туристов, из которых 65‑70 % будут составлять граждане капиталистических стран (особенно США, Франции, ФРГ)48. Для того чтобы обслужить как можно больше зарубежных гостей Олимпиады‑80 и при этом снизить нагрузку на инфраструктуру Москвы, Ленинграда, Киева, Минска и Таллинна, « Интуристом» было разработано 56 специальных олимпийских маршрута. Они были спланированы таким образом, чтобы после краткосрочного пребывания в одном из олимпийских городов иностранные туристы посетили также Вильнюс, Ригу, Владимир, Суздаль, Донецк, Львов, Одессу, Харьков, Ужгород, Ялту, Сочи, Батуми, Сухуми, Ессентуки, Новороссийск, Волгоград, Братск, Иркутск, Новосибирск, Хабаровск, Самарканд, Бухару, Хиву и другие города страны49. Последними в список городов, рекомендованных для показа иностранцам, были включены также Казань и Пермь50. Более

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половины всех иностранных гостей, посетивших Олимпиаду‑80, путешествовали именно по таким « удлиненным» маршрутам51. 28 Часть из этих маршрутов была открыта для иностранных автотуристов, что обусловило масштабный ремонт наземных транспортных коммуникаций. Только на территории Украинской ССР для обслуживания иностранных автотуристов было специально подготовлено 136 автозаправочных станций и 29 станций техобслуживания, 123 автопавильона и 67 площадок отдыха52. Особое внимание было уделено подготовке ведущей к Черному морю автотрассы : Москва – Харьков – Симферополь – Ялта, поскольку в 1970‑е гг. приморский летний отдых зарубежных гостей стал одним из заметных трендов развития иностранного туризма в СССР53. В частности, на территории Крымской области была сооружена новая транспортная развязка возле симферопольского аэропорта « Центральный», реконструировано и капитально отремонтировано 111,7 тыс. кв.м. дорог и тротуаров, на площади ещё около 61,9 тыс. кв.м. был проведен текущий ремонт. Общий объем средств, израсходованных в Крыму на благоустройство прилегающих к транспортным магистралям улиц, парков и скверов составил свыше 1,3 млн. руб.54 Именно фактор Олимпиады‑80 заставил республиканские и областные власти впервые обратить серьезное внимание на создании вдоль оживленных автотрасс туалетов общего пользования, которые отвечали бы минимальным санитарно‑гигиеническим нормам55. 29 Все сказанное выше позволяет утверждать, что в пространственном измерении позитивное влияние Олимпиады‑80, в том числе на развитие инфраструктуры сферы обслуживания, наблюдалось на очень значительной части территории СССР и выходили далеко за пределы традиционной олимпийской географии (Москва, Ленинград, Киев, Минск, Таллинн). С одной стороны, наличие большого количества « демонстрационных мест», имевших определенную иерархию в зависимости от ожидаемого охвата зарубежных гостей, приводило к « распылению» финансовых средств и других ресурсов, выделявшихся на подготовку к Олимпиаде‑80. С другой стороны, расширяющаяся география объектов вероятного посещения иностранцами определяла рост материально‑технической базы предприятий сферы услуг во многих регионах страны.

Конфитюр для космической державы : особенности олимпийского снабжения56

30 Для советской плановой экономики была характерна централизованная, чрезвычайно бюрократизированная и негибкая система снабжения, касающаяся всех сфер экономики. Ещё со времен сталинской индустриализации при выделении средств и материалов на строительство или оснащение объектов народного хозяйства приоритетом всегда пользовались стратегические предприятия тяжелой промышленности (т.н. группа « А»). Предприятия сферы услуг, за исключением небольшого количества объектов, обслуживающих государственную и партийную элиту,

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обычно являлись аутсайдерами в борьбе за « материальные фонды». Однако Олимпиада‑80 впервые изменила эту безрадостную для советской индустрии гостеприимства традицию, что в условиях советской « экономики дефицита» имело огромное значение.

31 Поставки строительных материалов для сооружения крупных гостиничных комплексов, где должны были размещаться иностранные гости XXII Олимпийских игр, находились под постоянным контролем со стороны высшего руководства страны. Также были приняты специальные решения, касающиеся выполнения заявок на продовольственные товары для участников и гостей Олимпиады‑80, для чего были заранее созданы необходимые запасы, а также составлены задания на поставки, что было особенно актуально для скоропортящейся и сезонной продукции57. 32 Обслуживавшие иностранцев гостиницы тех городов, через которые проходили олимпийские маршруты « Интуриста», получали из централизованных фондов по целевому назначению новую мебель, сантехнику, осветительные приборы, постельные принадлежности и ковровые изделия58. Так, при подготовке к Олимпиаде‑80 гостиничного комплекса « Ялта» (Крымская область) были обеспечены специальные поставки из Вильнюса, Еревана, Киева, Минска, Риги, Харькова и других городов страны. В своих служебных записках руководители этого комплекса, способного одновременно принять 2,6 тыс. гостей, с особым удовлетворением отмечали получение накануне Олимпиады‑80 большой партии туалетной бумагой, которая в СССР являлась дефицитным товаром59. Вопрос обеспечения гостиниц, например, льняными простынями или бумажными салфетками решался с огромными трудностями при вмешательстве республиканских и общесоюзных органов60. В тех ресторанах и кафе, где могли появиться зарубежные вояжеры, также были проведены ремонтные работы, закуплено новое оборудование и инвентарь. Кроме того, здесь появились папки‑меню, счета, ценники с олимпийской символикой61. Одни только московские предприятия общепита в процессе подготовки к Олимпиаде‑80 получили около 25 тыс. единиц холодильного и технологического оборудования, 60 тыс. комплектов мебели, 85 тыс. комплектов форменной одежды62. 33 Специальные средства были выделены на пошив форменной одежды для обслуживающего персонала гостиниц и ресторанов – официантов, метрдотелей, швейцаров, гардеробщиков и работников других сервисных специальностей. Так, по заказу Оргкомитета « Олимпиада‑80» Общесоюзный Дом моделей одежды (Москва) сконструировал 23 модели форменной одежды для работников олимпийского общепита. Линейка моделей находилась в широком стилистическом диапазоне. Если костюм повара и женщины‑официанта являлись примерами элегантного универсализма и утилитаризма, то костюм бармена и мужчины‑официанта явно копировал западные образцы (бордовый пиджак, черный галстук‑бабочка), а костюм лоточниц, осуществлявших выносную торговлю, был стилизован под традиционный русский сарафан63. Однако на практике полностью обеспечить работников олимпийской сферы услуг унифицированной формой не удалось.

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Особенно большие проблемы с этим возникали на периферии. Например, в отчете Крымского отделения ВАО « Интурист» о подготовке к Олимпиаде‑80 отмечалось : Не решены вопросы комплексного обеспечения отделения обувью и форменной одеждой. Обувь в настоящее время отделение получает мелкими партиями (15‑20 пар), что не дает возможности обеспечить коллективы структурных подразделений обувью одного цвета и фасона. Аналогичное положение по обеспечению форменной одеждой.64 34 Среди советских чиновников нашлись и те, кто решил использовать приоритетность олимпийских поставок в корыстных целях. Так, проведенная в конце 1979 г. ревизия валютно‑финансовой и хозяйственной деятельности Оргкомитета « Олимпиада‑80» выявила, что несколько сотрудников этой организации направляли различным предприятиям заявки на поставку изделий из хрусталя и других дефицитных товаров для олимпийских нужд, а затем продавали их частным лицам или использовали по собственному усмотрению65.

35 Очевидным доказательством превосходства советской стороны в олимпийском противостоянии с Западом могло бы стать проведение Олимпиады‑80 без привлечения внешних ресурсов, средств и оборудования. Однако это оказалось неразрешимой задачей. В « олимпийском» выпуске пропагандисткой книги « СССР : 100 вопросов и ответов» этот вопрос не мог быть обойден вниманием, поскольку очень часто задавался иностранцами : Вопрос : Зачем было брать на себя проведение Олимпиады, если, как оказалось, вы без помощи Запада не можете справиться с подготовкой к ней ? Ответ : Организаторы Олимпиады с самого начала ориентировались в первую очередь на возможности советской промышленности, которая обеспечила три четверти всех олимпийских потребностей. Одну пятую необходимого для проведения Олимпиады взялись поставить на коммерческих условиях другие социалистические страны и только 4–5 % удовлетворялись за счет закупок в странах Запада – в основном в связи с необходимостью иметь традиционное для Олимпийских игр стандартное оборудование.66

36 В открытых источниках без особой конкретизации сообщалось, что официальными поставщиками и спонсорами XXII Олимпийских игр стали не только 222 советских предприятия, но и 103 зарубежные фирмы67. Здесь также делался акцент на том, что основная часть олимпийского импорта была связана с приобретением спортивного оборудования – гимнастических матов во Франции, катамаранов в Польше, велотренажеров в Италии, искусственного покрытия для хоккея на траве в ФРГ68. Однако на самом деле перечень поставок был гораздо более широк. Именно Олимпиада‑80 показала, насколько Советский Союз, являвшийся мировой сверхдержавой и крупным индустриальным государством, способным запускать в космос космические корабли, оказался не готов к решению малозначительных проблем, связанных с бытовым обслуживанием и сервисом.

37 Среди статей олимпийского импорта определенная часть приходилась на специализированное оборудование для предприятий общественного питания

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(например, кофейные аппараты). На предприятиях питания Олимпийской деревни в Москве не только барное оборудование, но даже оборудование цехов подготовки полуфабрикатов было импортного производства69. В то же время ресторан « Пирита», обслуживающий участников олимпийской парусной регаты в Таллине, был обеспечен из фондов межреспубликанской базы Всесоюзного объединения « Союзторгоборудование» оборудованием советского производства, которое имело явные дефекты – повреждения ржавчиной, деформированные ручки и переключатели70. 38 На фоне масштабной подготовки к Олимпиаде‑80 неожиданную остроту приобрела, казалось бы, незначительная проблема – отсутствие производства в СССР мелко расфасованных молочных продуктов (особенно сливок и йогурта), соусов, джемов и конфитюров, соков в вакуумной упаковке, герметично упакованных копченых колбас и сыров71. Несмотря на задание Оргкомитета « Олимпиада‑80» советская пищевая промышленность так и не смогла наладить производство такой продукции в достаточном количестве. Проблема была решена за счет централизованных закупок в объеме около 10 тыс. тонн за рубежом, главным образом в социалистических странах и в Финляндии72. Опыт показал, что использование продуктов питания в мелкой расфасовке удобно, гигиенично, эстетично и намного ускоряет процесс обслуживания. Кроме того – использование расфасованной продукции с точным весом частично помогало решить традиционную для советского общепита проблему « недовеса» порций и « недолива» напитков73. 39 Чтобы избежать обвинений со стороны иностранцев в низком уровне жизни советских граждан и хроническом дефиците предметов потребления, часть олимпийского импорта на время проведения XXII Игр оказалась в свободной продаже в магазинах олимпийских городов, особенно Москвы. Описание продовольственного изобилия на прилавках московских магазинов в дни проведения Олимпиады‑80, когда обычные жители столицы могли свободно приобрести импортные колбасы и сигареты, жевательную резинку, соки в вакуумной упаковке и баночное пиво стало для них одним из наиболее ярких воспоминаний об этом спортивном мегасобытии74. 40 Кроме того, промышленность СССР смогла лишь на 30‑35 % обеспечить поставку одноразовой пластиковой посуды отечественного производства для временных и передвижных олимпийских пунктов питания. Остальная часть пластиковой посуды также была закуплена в Финляндии вместе с оборудованием для её переработки и утилизации75. 41 Поскольку XXII Игры проводились в летнее время, особое значение приобрел вопрос обеспечения их гостей прохладительными напитками. Помимо минеральной воды, которую пищевая промышленность СССР производила в достаточном количестве, очевидной была потребность в сладких газированных напитках. Однако данный вопрос был решен достаточно эффективно и даже принес советской стороне дополнительные валютные поступления. Безалкогольный напиток « Пепси‑Кола» по лицензии американской компании « PepsiCo Inc.» в 1970‑е гг. уже производился в СССР на заводах в Новороссийске (с 1974 г.) и Евпатории (с 1978 г.), благодаря чему только в Москву для участников и гостей Олимпиады‑80 было поставлено

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около 6 млн. бутылок этого напитка. В тоже время продукция традиционного спонсора олимпийских игр – американской компании « The Coca‑Cola Company» до конца 1970‑х гг. не была представлена на советском рынке76. Однако на основе заключенного с Оргкомитетом « Олимпиада‑80» спонсорского контракта компания « The Coca‑Cola Company» в 1978‑1979 гг. бесплатно предоставила советской стороне значительное количество своей готовой продукции (напитки « Кока‑Кола» и « Фанта»), концентрата для производства этих напитков, а также специальное торговое оборудование. Поскольку на тот момент « PepsiCo Inc.» имело эксклюзивные права на распространение своей продукции в Советском Союзе, то напитки « The Coca‑Cola Company» распространялись только на территории олимпийских спортивных объектов, которые согласно международному законодательству на время проведения Игр получали экстерриториальный статус77. В отчете о финансовых итогах Олимпиады‑80 отмечалось, что общая сумма доходов от спонсорского сотрудничества с « The Coca‑Cola Company» для СССР составила свыше $ 16 млн., а от « PepsiCo Inc.» было получено $ 2,5 млн.78 42 Вместе с тем, заместитель председателя Оргкомитета « Олимпиада‑80» Владимир Коваль вспоминает, что часть советского руководства весьма негативно отнеслась к идее привлечения на советский рынок прохладительных напитков западных торговых марок. В своих мемуарах он так воспроизводит обоснование этой консервативной позиции : Зачем нам этот скипидар напополам с лимонадом ? ! Зачем нужно вести этот напиток в Россию, если у нас есть прекрасный русский квас, у нас минеральные воды, наконец, тонизирующие прохладительные напитки типа « Байкал» ? Зачем ?79 43 По воспоминаниям В.И. Коваля на протяжении всего цикла олимпийской подготовки также велись переговоры с ещё одной транснациональной компанией – « McDonald’s Corporation». Её руководство предлагало построить в Москве к Олимпиаде‑80 три крупных ресторана быстрого питания, обеспечить их необходимой техникой и полуфабрикатами, обучить персонал, а также заплатить крупный спонсорский взнос. Однако советская сторона, несмотря на очевидную выгодность таких условий, не пошла на заключение контракта с этой компанией из‑за влияния консервативного лобби в высшем руководстве страны, которое увидело в этом опасность « протаскивания в страну пагубного западного образа жизни»80. По всей видимости, такое решение объяснялось не только желанием советской номенклатуры ограничить западное культурное влияние, но и опасением, что советские граждане смогут, не покидая пределы страны, получить представление о лучшем качестве сервиса, нежели тот, который предлагали советские предприятия общепита.

Борьба за олимпийские кадры : человеческий ресурс модернизации сервиса

44 Для обеспечения качественного олимпийского сервиса огромное значение имел кадровый вопрос. Предполагалось, что для обслуживания участников и

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гостей Олимпиады‑80 будет привлечено около 150 тыс. специалистов и работников массовых профессий, из которых 103 тыс. чел. пройдут специальную подготовку и переподготовку. Примерно 65 % от этого количества приходилось именно на работников гостиничного хозяйства (администраторы, дежурные по этажу, сотрудники бюро обслуживания, горничные, гардеробщики, подносчики багажа), общественного питания (повара, буфетчики, кондитеры, официанты) и торговли (продавцы, контролеры‑кассиры)81. Реально в обслуживании олимпийских делегаций и иностранных туристов на Олимпиаде‑80 приняло участие около 128 тыс. чел., представлявших 300 учреждений и организаций, относящихся к сфере компетенции 60 различных министерств и ведомств. Кроме этого к работе было привлечено свыше 70 тыс. студентов‑волонтеров82.

45 Как и в случае с инфраструктурой, вопрос подготовки олимпийских кадров имел самую широкую географию, которая не ограничивалась пятью городами проведения Олимпиады‑80. Во многих регионах страны для работников сферы обслуживания проводились специальные курсы обучения по « олимпийской» программе. Например, учебный курс для работников предприятий общественного питания – поваров, официантов и метрдотелей, включал 3 основных блока : 1) знакомство с « прогрессивными» формами обслуживания (например, по системе « шведский стол») ; 2) занятия по изучению иностранных языков ; 3) идеологическая подготовка (разбор вопросов, чаще всего задаваемых иностранными туристами в беседах с советскими гражданами)83. 46 В 1978‑1980‑х гг. по всей стране на городском, областном, республиканском и всесоюзном уровне проводились смотры‑конкурсы профессионального мастерства среди работников общественного питания под общим лозунгом « Участникам и гостям Олимпиады‑80 – высокую культуру обслуживания». Такие мероприятия должны были выявить лучших среди поваров, кондитеров, барменов и официантов, тех, кто был « особенно корректен, хорошо воспитан, безупречен в работе»84. Например, летом 1979 г. под девизом подготовки к Олимпиаде‑80 был проведен молодежный конкурс профессионального мастерства Челябинского городского треста ресторанов и кафе. В нем приняли участие около 50 местных поваров, кондитеров и официантов, которые попытались удивить жюри оригинальной сервировкой столов и изысканным « олимпийским» меню85. Победителей таких конкурсов на время Олимпиады‑80 отправляли в те города, где непосредственно проходили спортивные соревнования олимпийской программы. Выполняя свои функциональные обязанности на предприятиях олимпийского общепита, они также должны были знакомить иностранцев с особенностями национальных кухонь представляемых ими республик и своими фирменными блюдами. Например, в олимпийскую Москву с этой целью было направлено 160 лучших поваров и других работников системы общественного питания Грузинской ССР86. После возвращения с « олимпийской вахты» на свои предприятия эти работники советского сервиса должны были передавать приобретенный опыт коллегам, стать образцами для профессионального подражания. Осенью 1980 г. были

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подведены итоги Всесоюзного смотра на лучшую подготовку к обслуживанию участников и гостей Олимпиады‑80 среди предприятий общественного питания Министерства торговли СССР. Главными призами были отмечены рестораны и кафе олимпийских городов – Москвы, Киева, Минска, Таллина. Но среди награжденных также были лучшие коллективы предприятий Вязьмы, Львова, Симферополя, Ярославля87. 47 Процесс подготовки кадров обусловил потребность в специализированной учебной литературе. В 1978 г. появилось учебное пособие « Технология приготовления смешанных напитков», ставшее первым советским изданием для подготовки барменов88. В Киеве накануне Олимпиады‑80 было издано учебное пособие для подготовки швейцаров, гардеробщиков, кладовщиков камеры хранения, подносчиков багажа из числа студентов высших учебных заведений89. В общих пособиях по организации гостиничного и ресторанного облуживания стали появляться разделы, описывающие специфику работы с гостями из‑за рубежа90, а некоторые образцы учебной литературы были специально посвящены этой теме91. 48 Обеспечение качественного сервиса потребовало заимствования некоторых западных технологий оказания услуг. Одной из ярких новаций общественного питания в период подготовки Олимпиады‑80 стала популяризация обслуживания по принципу « шведский стол» (в англ. и франц. « buffet»). Пионерами использования « шведского стола» в СССР стали кулинары республик Прибалтики – прежде всего Литовской ССР, которые в конце 1970‑х гг. широко популяризировали этот метод обслуживания на всесоюзных смотрах и конкурсах92. В частности, был признан передовым опыт организации « шведского стола» для посетителей ресторана « Ветрунге» на балтийском курорте Клайпеда93. Впоследствии именно по этому принципу было организовано питание спортсменов в Олимпийской деревне Таллина, в ресторане при Главном олимпийском пресс‑центре в Москве, в московских ресторанах « Белград» и « Севастополь», а также на некоторых других объектах. Впервые в СССР такой формой обслуживания смогли воспользоваться не только индивидуальные vip‑туристы, но и туристские группы94.

49 Также фактором Олимпиады‑80 было обусловлено появление в стране новых типов предприятий общепита. Например, в Москве для обслуживания зрителей спортивных мероприятий впервые были использованы закупленные за рубежом в количестве 25 штук передвижные автокафе, основным блюдом которых были горячие сосиски95. В предолимпийском Таллине было создано несколько небольших гриль‑баров, оборудованных электрическими грилями импортного производства96. 50 Несмотря на то, что олимпийская модернизация советского сервиса опиралась преимущественно на внутренний кадровый потенциал, к обслуживанию гостей Олимпиады‑80 в очень ограниченных рамках, но все же были привлечены зарубежные специалисты. Известно, например, что в качестве консультанта по организации питания в Олимпийской деревне Москвы был привлечен генеральный шеф‑повара Олимпиады 1972 г. в Мюнхене Зепп Биндерт. При этом в советских источниках подчеркивалось, что,

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ознакомившись с организацией питания на Олимпиаде‑80, он лишь выразил свое восхищение, заявив, что ему самому следует поучиться у коллег из СССР 97.

51 Среди организаций, сотрудничавших с зарубежными партнерами в вопросах подготовки кадров, особенно следует выделить Главинтурист СССР. В одной из своих статей начальник этой организации С.И. Никитин отмечал, что некоторые её работники для заимствования иностранного опыта выезжали в ГДР, Болгарию, Венгрию, Чехословакию, Финляндию, Италию и Францию, а в Советском Союзе регулярно проводились семинары по организации гостиничного и ресторанного обслуживания с участием американских, итальянских, французских, швейцарских коллег98. Также начиная с 1975 г. при участии Института повышения квалификации Главинтуриста СССР в Советском Союзе стали проводиться ежегодные семинары барменов, во время которых своим опытом с ними, в частности, делились американские специалисты. Всего к Олимпиаде‑80 в таких семинарах приняло участие более 500 советских барменов99. 52 Следует также отметить, что во второй половине 1970‑х гг., в том числе в связи с конъюнктурой Олипиады‑80, активизировалась работа по созданию идеологических основ обслуживающей деятельности в СССР. В текстах публичного дискурса всё чаще стали звучать идеи о существовании особой, советской модели сервиса. Утверждалось, что если на Западе показная вежливость работников сферы услуг объясняется корыстными мотивами или страхом потерять работу, то в Советском Союзе качественное обслуживание основывается на принципах гуманизма, желании помочь ближнему и быть полезным обществу100. « С любовью к людям» – вот девиз советского сервиса. Советский сервис – это не только обслуживание, но прежде всего акт человеколюбия.101 53 Однако и в этом направлении олимпийской подготовки советская система столкнулась с рядом явных и скрытых проблем. Во‑первых, приходилось преодолевать сформировавшееся в предыдущие десятилетия советской власти пренебрежительное отношение к обслуживающей деятельности в непроизводственной сфере, в то время как безусловный приоритет всегда отдавался работникам промышленности : Помести рядом слова « официант» и, скажем, « металлург» или « нефтяник». Есть разница ? Вот и выходит, что шансов « заполучить» на работу в сферу услуг парня или девушку не просто с комсомольским значком, но и с комсомольским сердцем, несравнимо меньше, чем почти в любой профессии группы « А».102 54 В 1975 г. на страницах молодежного журнала « Смена» появился очерк о работе Московской школы официантов и метрдотелей. Автор материала высказывал надежду на то, что скоро в коллективы предприятий сферы обслуживания вольются представители новой генерации « интеллигентной молодежи», которые заменят « грубиянку‑официантку» и « подвыпившего продавца». Он же со слов преподавателей этой школы приводил примеры довольно распространенных случаев, когда родители учащихся

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отрицательно относились к обучению здесь своих детей, считая работу официанта унизительной, « лакейской» профессией103.

55 Но одновременно с этими « рецидивами» пренебрежительного отношения к работникам сферы услуг, уходившими своими корнями в более ранние периоды истории СССР, именно в годы « застоя» завершилось формирование скрытой, « теневой» идеологии советской сферы обслуживания. Рост числа желающих обучаться по профессии повара, официанта или продавца зачастую был вызван не желанием ежедневно совершать « акт человеколюбия», а корыстными соображениями. В условиях советской « экономики дефицита» работа на предприятиях сферы услуг обеспечивала доступ к дефицитным благам и давала множество возможностей для получения дополнительных « теневых» доходов104. Например, на предприятиях общественного питания это было связано с практиками « недовеса», « недолива», « обсчета» клиентов, или же получения от них т.н. « чаевых».

56 Тема « чаевых» в советской сфере услуг заслуживает особого внимания. В дореволюционной России, как и на Западе, именно « чаевые» (англ. « tip», « gratuity» ; франц. « pourboire») являлись эффективным механизмом материального стимулирования работников сервисных специальностей за качественный труд. Однако в СССР на официальном уровне отношение к « чаевым» было резко негативным. Они назывались пережитком прошлого, безобразным с моральной точки зрения явлением, в одинаковой степени унизительным как для дающего « на чай», так и для принимающего такую « подачку»105. В системе « Интуриста» борьба с « чаевыми» велась с первых лет существования этой организации. Например, в директивном письме Правления ВАО « Интурист» от 15 января 1936 г. говорилось о том, что администраторы гостиниц, уличенные в получении « чаевых» от иностранных туристов, должны не только увольняться с работы, но и привлекаться к уголовной ответственности за взяточничество106. В туристскую книжку, которую получал каждый клиент « Интуриста», была включена следующая информация : « Служащие в гостиницах, на железных дорогах, пристанях, а также и служащие « Интуриста» не требуют и не ждут от Вас получения чаевых»107. 57 Накануне Олимпиады‑80 негативное отношение властей к « чаевым» не изменилось, однако наблюдались определенные попытки найти компромисс между личной экономической заинтересованностью и советской моралью. В конце 1970‑х гг. в ресторанах ВАО « Интурист» стала применяться новая система премирования, основанная на показателе т.н. « бездефектного труда». Предприятия, на которых не было выявлено серьезных недостатков в обслуживании, считались образцовыми, и здесь во все счета посетителей автоматически включалась 5 % надбавки за высокое качество сервиса. В конце месяца эти дополнительные средства расходовались на совершенствование материально‑технической базы, проведение социально‑культурных мероприятий и повышение квалификации сотрудников, а также частично шли на их премирование. По сути дела, речь шла о попытке управляемой « легализации « чаевых», однако такая сложная

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и ограниченная схема не создавала реальной мотивации у всех сотрудников даже там, где такая практика существовала108. 58 Кроме того, в процессе подготовки к Олимпиаде‑80 на предприятиях системы « Интуриста» и некоторых других организаций стали достаточно активно внедряться принципы хозрасчета, бригадно‑звеньевой метод, совмещение профессий и другие ограниченные формы повышения эффективности труда в сфере обслуживания109. Однако это так и не привело к кардинальным изменениям в мотивации труда работников советской сферы услуг. Отвечая на вопросы автора статьи о специфике труда работников общественного питания в конце 1970‑х‑1980‑е гг. информант Владимир К. отмечал в своем интервью следующее : « Чаевые» – эти « копейки» никто тогда всерьёз не принимал. Все работали на обсчёте, недоливе, недовесе и других « шалостях» советской сферы обслуживания. Зарплата составляла не более 30 % нашего дохода. За сезон [используя « теневые» схемы – А.П.] официант мог заработать на бывший в употреблении автомобиль « Жигули», а бармен валютного бара « Интуриста» за два года работы – на 2‑комнатную кооперативную квартиру. Для равнодушного к коммунистической идеологии молодого человека работать в сфере гостиничного обслуживания и общепита Ялты [популярного советского курорта – А.П.] – это было все равно, что играя в лотерею выиграть джек‑пот.110

« Рекорд гостеприимства и тепла…» : как оценить итоги олимпийской модернизации советского сервиса ?

Как ждали мы тебя, Олимпиада, Как долго мы готовились к тебе ! И ты пришла чеканностью парада, Единственная в сердце и судьбе. Ты по Москве прошествовала гордо И, по‑московски щедрая, смогла Установить средь множества рекордов Рекорд гостеприимства и тепла.111 59 3 августа 1980 г. на Центральном стадионе им. В.И. Ленина в Москве состоялось торжественное закрытие Игр XXII Олимпиады, которые длились всего 16 дней, однако потребовали 2096 дней напряженной подготовки. Для высшего руководства СССР важно было закрепить позитивное значение этого события в сознании советской и зарубежной аудитории. Вскоре после завершения Олимпиады‑80 Генеральный секретарь ЦК КПСС Л.И. Брежнев направил приветственное послание всем участникам подготовки и проведения игр. В этом документе, в частности, констатировалось, что для проведения Олимпийских игр были подготовлены замечательные спортивные сооружения […], построены первоклассные гостиницы, другие предприятия обслуживания. Повсюду к участникам и гостям Игр было проявлено гостеприимство и искреннее радушие советских людей.112

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60 Постановление Политбюро ЦК КПСС « Об итогах игр XXII Олимпиады 1980 г.» называло проведение и результаты этого мегасобытия « большим морально‑политическим успехом Советского Союза»113.

61 В советской прессе было опубликовано множество комплементарных отзывов иностранных гостей об олимпийском гостеприимстве. Например, гости Олимпиады‑80 из капиталистических стран, проживавшие в московской гостинице « Россия», так оценили уровень полученного здесь сервиса : Замечательный отель. Чистый, уютный. Для персонала нет никаких трудностей. Я чувствую себя как дома. ‑ Гостеприимство в гостинице « Россия» было исключительным. ‑ Меня поразил высокий уровень обслуживания и дружелюбие персонала. Особенно меня радовал самовар с чаем каждый вечер. Я возвращаюсь домой, но все же я буду скучать о гостинице « Россия».114 Гости олимпийских футбольных матчей в Киеве также отмечали оказанный им радушный прием : ‑ Мы очень тронуты теплым приемом, культурным обслуживанием и особой любезностью сотрудников гостиницы [« Астория»], […] особенно хочется отметить обслуживание в ресторане и великолепное качество пищи.115 ‑ Во время нашего пребывания здесь [в гостинице « Русь»] мы все были окружены большим вниманием, непрерывно ощущали искреннее, сердечное гостеприимство. Киев прекрасно подготовился к олимпийскому турниру.116 Всего же гостями Олимпиады‑80 в книгах отзывов различных предприятий сферы обслуживания было оставлено 31 тыс. благодарственных отзывов, из них 21 тыс. – в Москве117. 62 Однако такое многоголосье восторженных отзывов, активно тиражировавшихся в текстах советского публичного дискурса, вовсе не означает, что истинное качество олимпийского сервиса действительно было безукоризненным. Так, во внутренних документах Оперативного штаба Главинтуриста СССР по обслуживанию гостей XXII Олимпийских игр содержатся десятки справок об « отклонениях в обслуживании иностранных туристов». Наиболее значительное количество « отклонений» было связано с проблемами в транспортном обслуживании (срыв подачи автобусов для встречи и проводов туристских групп, а также для выезда на экскурсии). Однако имели место также жалобы отдельных иностранных туристов на проблемы в организации питания – медленное обслуживание, однообразное меню, маленькие порции блюд, скудный ассортимент и низкое качество продуктов в буфетах некоторых гостиниц и общежитий, где размещались гости из‑за рубежа118. Кроме того, так и не была решена проблема перевода на иностранные языки меню в олимпийских ресторанах, кафе и столовых. Ассортимент предлагаемых блюд не учитывал особенности питания гостей из мусульманских стран и вегетарианцев119.

63 Определенное, тщательно скрываемое разочарование, могли вызвать не только качественные, но и количественные результаты обслуживания гостей Олимпиады‑80. В результате политического бойкота, поводом для которого

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стал ввод советских войск в Афганистан, в Играх XXII Олимпиады отказались принимать участие около 30 стран мира, включая США, Канаду, ФРГ, Китай и Японию. Несмотря на то, что небольшое количество вояжеров из этих стран всё же приехало в Советский Союз, их число было намного меньшим, чем прогнозировалось до объявления бойкота. Так, количество американских туристов на Олимпийских играх 1980 г., по разным подсчетам, составило от 1 до 3 тыс. чел.120 Значительно меньше ожидаемого было и количество туристов из Великобритании. Те из них, кто все же посетил Советский Союз, в беседах с гидами‑переводчиками сообщали о том, что перед поездкой британские чиновники убеждали их, что « настоящие англичане должны бойкотировать Олимпиаду»121.

64 Интересно, что сама идея бойкота Олимпиады‑80 в одной из советских интерпретаций оценивалась как попытка сорвать неизбежный « рекорд гостеприимства» и « триумф радушия». Им [организаторам бойкота – А.П.] просто физически больно от мысли, что в Москву из разных стран приедут тысячи спортсменов и сотни тысяч туристов. Им неприятно, что эти люди увидят нашу страну, почувствуют её красоту, щедрость и широту её души, доброжелательность её граждан. Поэтому они так нервничают, так клевещут на нас и так кричат.122 65 Как уже говорилось выше, первоначально ожидалось прибытие на XXII Олимпийские игры 300 тыс. иностранных туристов, из которых 65‑70 % должны были представлять капиталистические страны123. Реальные объемы иностранного (въездного) туризма в СССР во время Олимпийских игр оказались примерно на 30 % меньше запланированных показателей. Согласно данным официального отчета Оргкомитета « Олимпиада‑80» непосредственно за дни её проведения в 5 олимпийских городах СССР побывало около 211,3 тыс. интуристов из 72 стран мира. Из них Москву посетило 133,6 тыс., Ленинград – 39,8 тыс., Киев – 24,2 тыс., Минск – 10,9 тыс. и Таллин – 2,8 тыс. иностранных туристов124. При этом большинство из них представляли лояльные к СССР вояжеры из социалистических стран. Вместо запланированных 30‑35 % они составляли более 65 % среди клиентов « Интуриста»125 и более 69 % среди обслуженных БММТ « Спутник»126.

66 Если к общему числу иностранных туристов добавить 3,5 тыс. официальных лиц и почетных гостей из‑за рубежа, 8,3 тыс. членов иностранных спортивных делегаций и 3,5 тыс. представителей зарубежных средств массовой информации127, то общее количество посетителей СССР, непосредственно связанных с фактором Олимпиады, составило всего около 226,6 тыс. чел. Это цифра не кажется очень значительной, если учесть, что всего за 1980 г. Советский Союз посетило около 5 млн. иностранных туристов 128. Интересно, что примерно таким же (около 5 млн. чел.) было общее количество посетителей на соревнованиях XXII Олимпийских игр с учетом советских граждан129. Соответственно, доля иностранных гостей Олимпиады‑80, как среди общего количества интуристов в СССР за тот год, так и среди зрителей на олимпийских трибунах, составляла менее 5 %. Однако можно ли на основании этой статистики сделать вывод, что

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колоссальная концентрация усилий на подготовку и проведение Олимпиады‑80 оказалась не оправданной ? 67 На наш взгляд, для руководства СССР « демонстрационное» значение XXII Игр в расчете на иностранную аудиторию являлось первичной и главной, но не единственной причиной гипертрофированного внимания к Олимпиаде‑80. Подготовка к этому спортивному мегасобытию вскрыла многие проблемы советской социально‑экономической модели, в первую очередь связанные с недостаточным развитием сферы услуг, одновременно породив иллюзию быстрого решения этих проблем привычным для власти мобилизационным путем. Применив концепцию Алексея Юрчака об « авторитетном дискурсе»130, можно предположить, что олимпийская риторика советского авторитетного дискурса 1974‑1980 гг. была направлена на мотивацию части граждан СССР к напряженному и не всегда высокооплачиваемому труду на олимпийских объектах, которые относились не только к спортивной, но и к транспортной, гостинично‑ресторанной инфраструктуре. Этими же внутренними причинами можно объяснить такую широкую географию олимпийской подготовки. Кроме того, « олимпийский марафон» СССР, по всей видимости, должен был иметь не только мобилизационный, но и консолидирующий эффект. Достойная встреча гостей Олимпиады‑80, вопреки проискам реальных и вымышленных недругов СССР за рубежом131, могла рассматриваться как очередная сверхзадача, достижение которой требовало общих усилий всего советского народа132. 68 Когда XXII Игры завершились, советскому руководству необходимо было сохранить олимпийские модернизационные импульсы, « конвертировав» их как в улучшение качества обслуживания посещавших СССР иностранных туристов, так и в повышение уровня бытовых услуг для советских граждан. Например, в статье об итогах Олимпиады‑80 на страницах журнала « Общественное питание» заместитель министра торговли СССР В. Бычков призвал всех работников отрасли обобщить накопленный олимпийский опыт, обеспечить его распространение и повседневное внедрение, « сделать достигнутый высокий уровень сервиса нормой [выделено нами – А.П.] при организации обслуживания трудящихся нашей страны»133. Очевидно, что олимпийский сервис предлагалось рассматривать как своеобразной « стахановской рекорд» в советской сфере услуг, который должен был стать примером для подражания у всех её работников. После окончания Олимпийских игр в СССР состоялась символическая передача, « дарение» советскому народу не только спортивных сооружений, объектов инфраструктуры и предприятий индустрии гостеприимства, построенных или реконструированных к Олимпиаде‑80, но и высоких стандартов олимпийского сервиса. Но для поддержания олимпийского качества работники советской сферы услуг должны были вновь и вновь проявлять активность, неравнодушие и способность к самопожертвованию, не требуя за это дополнительного материального вознаграждения. 69 Однако анализируя развитие советского сервиса в 1980‑е гг. можно сказать, что попытка олимпийской модернизации так и не привела к революционным преобразованиям в сфере услуг. В памяти многих людей, живших в позднем

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СССР, советская сфера обслуживания, особенно общепит, так и осталась « скопищем воришек, хамов и грязнуль», где « воровали все, начиная от сторожа, кончая заведующим»134. С одной стороны, так и не были ликвидированы « двойные стандарты» в обслуживании иностранцев и советских граждан, когда последние чувствовали себя клиентами « второго» или даже « третьего сорта»135. С другой стороны, зарубежные вояжеры также зачастую очень критично оценивали то качество услуг, которое они получали в Советском Союзе. В 1986 г., после многодневного путешествия по СССР, один из западногерманских туристов отмечал следующее : Вы обратили внимание на грязное здание аэропорта… ? А как не совсем чисто в кафе ? Как лениво обслуживает официант ? В магазинах продавцы совсем не заинтересованы в рекламе своих товаров. Вот если бы все это принадлежало частным лицам, то, уверяю Вас, этого не было бы.136 70 В этой реплике, представлявшей « взгляд со стороны», прямо указывается на одну из основных причин, по которой запланированная на 1980 г. революция советского сервиса потерпела поражение. Неодинаковое качество советского и западного сервиса было обусловлено системными, институциональными различиями в их организации. На Западе предприятия индустрии гостеприимства преимущественно находились в частной собственности и действовали в конкурентной среде, что стимулировало предпринимательскую инициативу, способствовало постоянному поиску более эффективных форм обслуживания клиентов. В Советском Союзе фактическим собственником предприятий сферы услуг, так же как и промышленных предприятий, являлось государство, которое устанавливало монопольные правила игры на рынке и тяготело к директивному управлению и централизованному распределению137. Благодаря конъюнктуре Олимпиады‑80 советское руководство едва ли не впервые осознало важность для государственных интересов не только промышленности, транспорта или сельского хозяйства, но и сферы услуг. После этого для ускоренного развития советского сервиса было сделано все, что могло быть сделано в условиях планово‑централизованной экономики и административно‑командной системы управления. Волевым мобилизационным решением для предприятий сферы услуг были выделены финансовые средства, материальные фонды, произведены импортные поставки за иностранную валюту, расширены штаты, усовершенствованы формальные механизмы материального и морального стимулирования труда работников сервисных специальностей. Для решения олимпийских задач были максимально мобилизованы не только гражданские службы, но и армейские формирования, советская милиция и органы государственной безопасности. Общеизвестно также, что подготовка к Олимпиаде‑80 сопровождалась беспрецедентной « зачисткой» Москвы от тех, кого система считала опасными, неблагонадежным и просто « лишними» на этом « прекрасном празднике спорта и мира»138.

71 Однако назревший вопрос проведения глубоких и качественных преобразований советской социально‑экономической модели так и не был поднят вплоть до второй половины 1980‑х гг. Во время подготовки к

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Олимпиаде‑80 совершенно не ставился вопрос о необходимости разгосударствления и децентрализации сферы оказания услуг населению СССР. В ходе « олимпийского марафона» второй половины 1970‑х – начала 1980‑х гг. фактически были лишь заимствованы определенные технологические методы организации обслуживания (например, « шведский стол»), а также в ограниченном виде использованы « смешанные», « гибридные» формы организации и мотивации труда, которые частично соответствовали западным стандартам. Таким образом, мы сталкиваемся здесь с новым примером т.н. « консервативной модернизации»139, когда заимствуя определенные инструментальные достижения западного мира, власти СССР так и не создали адекватных социально‑экономических механизмов для их саморазвития. Именно поэтому попытка олимпийской модернизации так и не привела к качественным, действительно революционным изменениям советского сервиса. Однако определенные позитивные импульсы в развитие сферы услуг все же были привнесены.

NOTES

1. Автор благодарит редакторов выпуска и анонимных рецензентов за помощь и ценные советы в процессе подготовке данной статьи. Часть материалов из архивов Москвы была собрана благодаря краткосрочной стипендии Германского исторического института в Москве. 2. Феномен мегасобытий (Mega‑Events) уже стал предметом для отдельных исследований, например : М. Roche, Mega‑Events and Modernity : Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture, London : Routledge, 2000 ; E. Трубина, « Полис и мегасобытия», Отечественные записки, 2012, № 3, 48. http://www.strana-oz.ru/2012/3/polis-i-megasobytiya. 3. См., например : J.R. Gold, M.M. Gold, Olympic Cities : City Agendas, Planning, and the World’s Games, 1896–2016, London : Taylor & Francis, 2010 ; A. Guttmann, The Olympics : A History of the Modern Games, Champaign : University of Illinois Press, 2002 ; C.R. Hill, Olympic Politics, 2 ed., Manchester : Manchester University Press, 1996 ; H. Preuss, The Economics of Staging the Olympics : A Comparison of the Games 1972‑2008, Cheltenham : Edward Elgar, 2004 ; D. Miller, The Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC : Athens to Beijing, 1894‑2008, Edinburgh : Mainstream Publishing, 2008. 4. В.Э. Багдасарян и др., « Олимпиада‑80 как апофеоз “холодной войны” в туризме», в Советское зазеркалье : Иностранный туризм в СССР в 1930‑1980‑е г ?.г., М. : ФОРУМ, 2007, с. 208‑241. Попытка « альтернативного» взгляда на олимпийскую тему представлена также в статье : Carol Marmor, « Unser eigenes olympisches Spiel ? Anmerkungen zu einer estnischen Ausstellung zum 30. Jahrestag der Olympischen Segelwettkämpfe von 1980», Forschungen zur baltischen Geschichte, 7, 2012, s. 185‑196. 5. Подробнее о БАМе, как советском спецпроекте, см. : J. Grützmacher, Die Baikal‑Amur‑ Magistrale : Vom stalinistischen Lager zum Mobilisierungsprojekt unter Brežnev, München : Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag 2012.

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6. Более 300 документов Российского государственного архива новейшей истории (РГАНИ), отражающих самые разные аспекты подготовки и проведения XXII летних Олимпийских игр, были опубликованы в сборнике : Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами : Документальная хроника Олимпиады‑80 в Москве, М. : Междунар. фонд « Демократия», 2011. 7. « Российская модернизация : проблемы и перспективы (материалы “круглого стола”)», Вопросы философии, 1993, № 7, с. 3, 14. 8. Правда, 7 января 1979, № 7, с. 6. 9. О большом значении, которое придавалось проведению XXII Олимпийских игр высшим руководством СССР вспоминает, например, заместитель председателя Оргкомитета « Олимпиада‑80» Владимир Коваль, см. : В.И. Коваль, Записки олимпийского казначея, 2‑е изд., М. : Сов. спорт, 2010, с. 112‑124. 10. Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами, с. 210. 11. Д.А. Аманжолова и др., Введение в специальность : история сервиса, М. : Альфа‑М ; ИНФРА‑М, 2007, с. 18. 12. Подробнее см. : О. Попов, « Back in USSR» : повернення з турпоїздки за кордон у контексті радянських повсякденних практик, Наукові записки з української історії : Зб. наук. статей. Вип. 29. Переяслав‑Хмельницький, 2012, с. 333‑338. 13. На XXII Олимпийских играх СССР имел колоссальное превосходство над остальными странами‑участниками в медальном зачете. Советские спортсмены получили 80 золотых, 69 серебряных и 46 бронзовых медалей, хотя этот беспрецедентный успех во многом объяснялся отказом от участия в Олимпиаде‑80 ряда капиталистических стран. 14. Московская олимпиада в цифрах и фактах, Справочник, М. : Физкультура и спорт, 1982, с. 7. 15. А.Г. Фонотов, Россия : от мобилизационного общества к инновационному, М. : Наука, 1993, с. 5. 16. Новиков Игнатий Трофимович (1906‑1993) – советский государственный деятель, в 1958‑1962 гг. – министр энергетики и электрификации СССР, в 1962‑1975 гг. – заместитель Председателя Совета Министров СССР и Председатель Госстроя СССР, школьный друг и доверенное лицо Л.И. Брежнева. 17. И.Т. Новиков, Олимпийский меридиан Москвы, М. : Физкультура и спорт, 1983, с. 18. 18. Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами, с. 829 ; Коваль, Записки олимпийского казначея, с. 158‑159. 19. Там же. 20. ЦГАВО Украины (Центральный государственный архив высших органов власти и управления Украины), ф. 4672, оп. 1, д. 271, л. 78. 21. С. Никитин, « Международные туристские связи СССР», Внешняя торговля, № 7, 1980, с. 15. 22. Московская олимпиада в цифрах и фактах, с. 137. Это меню, в частности, содержало такие блюда из дефицитных в Советском Союзе деликатесных продуктов, как кета с лимонов, севрюга по‑русски, осетрина в рассоле, крабы натуральные, икра паюсная. 23. Советский спорт, № 114‑В, 2010, 3 августа, с. 18‑19. 24. Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами, с. 322. 25. Там же, с. 830. 26. И. Сосновский, « Яблоки для Олимпиады», Физкультура и спорт, № 7, 1980, с. 23. 27. В.А. Анисимов, « Хлеб да соль !», Смена, 1980, № 14, с. 6.

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28. В. Красильщиков, « Россия и мировые модернизации», Pro et Contra, Т.4, 1999, № 3, с. 98. 29. Анисимов, « Хлеб да соль !», с. 7. 30. ГАРФ (Государственный архив Российской Федерации), ф. Р‑9610, оп. 1, д. 678, л. 3. 31. См., например : Советский спорт, 9 августа 1980, с. 1. 32. ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9612, оп. 3, д. 1342, л. 31. Цитата взята из стенограммы доклада представителя Министерства транспорта СССР на одном из совещаний, посвященных подготовке к Олимпиаде‑80 (20 ноября 1979 г.). 33. Аманжолова, Введение в специальность : история сервиса, с. 37. 34. Фасад (фр. Façade – « передний») – наружная, лицевая сторона здания. 35. Новиков, Олимпийский меридиан Москвы, с. 46. 36. ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9610, оп. 1, д. 677, л. 126. 37. Цит. по : Багдасарян, « Олимпиада‑80 как апофеоз « холодной войны» в туризме», с. 225‑226. 38. См., например : В. Шворина, « Деревня в городе», Работница, 1980, № 1, с. 24. 39. Н. Никифоров, « Уверенная работа подмосковных кулинаров», Общественное питание, 1980, № 12, с. 10‑11. 40. ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9610, оп. 1, д. 677, л. 126‑128. 41. Олимпийские дни Украины / сост. П.Е. Есипенко и др., Киев : Здоров´я, 1982, с. 51. 42. « Парусный центр встречает», Физкультура и спорт, 1980, № 7, с. 31‑32 ; Советский спорт, 26 июня 1980, с. 4. 43. М. Егоров, « Эстафета олимпийского огня», Физкультура и спорт, 1980, № 1, с. 32. 44. Олимпийские дни Украины, 124. 45. См. : Советский спорт, 6 июня 1980, с. 2. 46. А. Никашова, « Олимпийское меню», Общественное питание, 1979, № 7, с. 26. 47. Ю. Измерли, « Ленинград», Там же, с. 33. 48. ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9612, оп. 3, д. 1357, л. 18. 49. « Маршрутами « Интуриста», Путешествие в СССР, № 4, с. 14. 50. Багдасарян, « Олимпиада‑80 как апофеоз « холодной войны» в туризме», с. 233. 51. ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9612, оп. 3, д. 1450, л. 5. 52. Олимпийские дни Украины, с. 48, 125. 53. В.М. Брагинский, « Структура перестройки иностранного туризма в СССР в свете изменения характера туристического спроса», в Развитие иностранного туризма в условиях интенсификации общественного производства в СССР : Сб. науч. трудов, М. : ПО « Авангард», 1987, с. 71. 54. ГААРК (Государственный архив в Автономной Республике Крым), ф. Р‑3287, оп. 7, д. 3355, л. 11‑12. 55. Там же, д. 3354, л. 3. Аналогичная работа проводилась также на трассах : Москва – Ленинград – Выборг, Москва – Минск, Москва – Ярославль, Брест – Минск – Москва, Ужгород – Львов – Киев, Киев – Одесса, Черновцы – Тернополь – Львов – Киев, Таллин – Ленинград, Таллин – Рига. Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами, с. 351. 56. Глубоко символично, что в материалах для официального отчета о деятельности Оргкомитета « Олимпиада‑80» слово « конфитюр» было написано с ошибкой (« конфетюр») – настолько « экзотическим» был этот продукт для советских людей. См. : ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9610, оп. 1, д. 676, л. 168. 57. См., например : Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами, с. 77‑78, 374. 58. ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9610, оп. 1, д. 677, л. 12. 59. ЦГАВО Украины, ф. 4672, оп. 1, д. 393, л. 224.

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60. См., например : ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9612, оп. 3, д. 1450, л. 256 ; ЦГАВО Украины, ф. 4745, оп. 1, д. 17, л. 29 . 61. ЦГАВО Украины, ф. 4672, оп. 1, д. 375, л. 27. 62. ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9610, оп. 1, д. 677, л. 136. 63. Н. Арапова, « Наша олимпийская мода», Общественное питание, 1979, № 7, с. 28‑29. 64. ГААРК, ф. Р‑3287, оп. 7, д. 3355, л. 36. 65. Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами, с. 421. 66. СССР : 100 вопросов и ответов, М. : Агентство печати « Новости», 1980, с. 91‑92. 67. Новиков, Олимпийский меридиан Москвы, с. 101‑102. 68. Московская олимпиада в цифрах и фактах, с. 138. 69. М. Эшкинд, « Предприятия Олимпийской деревни», Общественное питание, 1980, № 7, с. 20‑23. 70. М. Эшкинд, « Таллин‑Tallinn», Общественное питание, 1979, № 7, с. 31. 71. ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9610, оп. 1, д. 677, л. 136. 72. Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами, с. 384‑385. Парадоксально, но в отличие от Финляндии, ни одна из стран социалистического лагеря не смогла обеспечить поставки в СССР растворимого кофе и черного молотого перца в мелкой расфасовке. 73. М. Эпштейн, « Мы были горды за свой труд…», Общественное питание, 1980, № 11, с. 21, 23. 74. Советский спорт, № 114‑В, 2010, 3 августа, с. 18‑19. 75. В. Бычков, « Закрепить достигнутый уровень», Общественное питание, 1980, № 11, с. 15 ; Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами, с. 373‑374. 76. Впервые посетив в 1957 г. Советский Союз знаменитый колумбийский писатель Габриэль Гарсиа Маркес назвал свой очерк‑репортаж об этой стране « СССР : 22 400 000 квадратных километров без единой рекламы кока‑колы». 77. Коваль, Записки олимпийского казначея, с. 80. 78. См. : К. Архангельская, « Олимпиада‑80 сквозь призму упаковки». http:// article.unipack.ru/30884/; Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами, с. 115, 424‑425, 574, 576‑577, 830. 79. Коваль, Записки олимпийского казначея, с. 79. 80. Там же, с. 84‑86. 81. Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами, с. 310, 313‑314. 82. А. Соловьев, « Туристические организации СССР накануне XXII Олимпиады», Власть, 2007, № 3, с. 76. 83. ЦГАВО Украины, ф. 4745, оп. 1, д. 17, л. 45. 84. Б. Найманов, « Ивакино готовится», Общественное питание, 1980, № 2, с. 15. 85. Л. Старикова, « Конкурс в Челябинске “Олимпиада‑80”», Общественное питание, 1979, № 9, с. 26‑27. 86. В. Гулашвили, « Праздник большого искусства», Общественное питание, 1980, № 12, с. 16‑17. Достаточно строгий отбор и специальную проверку органами КГБ проходил также гиды‑переводчики, медицинский персонал, работники транспорта, торговли, культурной сферы – то есть все те, кто должен был непосредственно взаимодействовать с иностранными гражданами. 87. « Итоги всесоюзного смотра», Общественное питание, № 10, 1980, с. 52. 88. А.Г. Кудрявцев, Технология приготовления смешанных напитков, М. : Ин‑т повышения квалификации Главинтуриста СССР, 1978. 89. М. Кальницкий, « 25 лет назад». http://m.kiyany.obozrevatel.com/news/ 2005/7/20/1715.htm.

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90. См., например : Н.В. Коршунов, Организация обслуживания в ресторанах : Учебник для средних проф.‑тех. училищ. 2‑е изд., перераб. и доп., М. : Высшая школа, 1980 ; Н.А. Надеждин и др, Современный ресторан и культура обслуживания, М. : Экономика, 1980 ; Техника обслуживания и культура работы в гостиницах : Учебное пособие, К. : Вища школа, 1977. 91. См., например : Ю.В. Кашина, В.В. Никульшин, Организация обслуживания иностранных туристов в гостинице : Учебное пособие, М. : ПО « Авангард», 1979. 92. « Шведский стол», Общественное питание, № 5, 1979, с. 53. 93. См., например : К. Сакалаускас, « Шведский стол» в Клайпеде», Там же, № 12, 1980, с. 53‑54. 94. ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9612, оп. 3, д. 1449, л. 165. 95. Там же, ф. Р‑9610, оп. 1, д. 677, л. 139, 154. 96. Эшкинд, « Таллин‑Tallinn», с. 31‑32. 97. См., например : Советский спорт, 9 августа 1980, с. 1. 98. Никитин, « Международные туристские связи СССР», с. 15. 99. ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9612, оп. 3, д. 1476, л. 23 ; « Пятый семинар барменов», Общественное питание, 1980, № 3, с. 59‑60. 100. И. Резвицкий, « Особенности торговой этики», Советская торговля, 1979, № 1, с. 49. 101. Известия, 15 марта 1979, с. 3. 102. Н. Соболь, Я. Сало, « Плюс хорошее настроение…», Смена, 1977, № 7, с. 4. 103. См. : Г. Режабек, « Работа среди праздника», Смена, 1975, № 1, с. 19. В советское время слово « обслуживать», близкое к традиционному русскому слову « услужить» (по Далю – « быть полезным», « помогать») часто связывалось с понятием « прислуживать», которое имело негативный, унизительный смысл. Аманжолова, Введение в специальность : история сервиса, с. 17. 104. Любопытно, что именно в период подготовки к Олимпиаде‑80 на Западе появились две классические работы, посвященные анализу « теневой» экономики в СССР : G. Grossman, « The “Second Economy” of the USSR», Problems of Communism, 26 (5), 1977, p. 25‑40 ; A. Katsenelinboigen, « Coloured Markets in the Soviet Union», Soviet Studies, 29 (1), 1977, p. 62‑85. 105. См., например : Правда, 15 декабря 1979, № 349, с. 3. 106. ГАГС (Государственный архив г. Севастополя), ф. Р‑250, оп. 3, д. 1, л. 166‑А. 107. Там же, оп. 1, д. 110, л. 35. 108. ГААРК, ф. П‑8298, оп. 1, д. 61, л. 85. 109. См., например : Там же, ф. П‑822, оп. 1, д. 455, л. 113 ; М. Эшкинд, « Ялта ждет гостей», Общественное питание, 1980, № 4, с. 61‑62. 110. Интервью с Владимиром К., работником предприятий общественного питания Ялты в конце 1970‑х – 1980‑е гг. (январь 2013 г.). Личный архив автора. 111. Советский спорт, 4 августа 1980, с. 1. 112. Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами, с. 786. 113. Там же, с. 794. 114. Цит. по : Советский спорт, 14 августа 1980, с. 4. 115. ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9612, оп. 3, д. 1450, л. 294. 116. Олимпийские дни Украины, с. 130. 117. ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9610, оп. 1, д. 677, л. 138. 118. Там же, ф. Р‑9612, оп. 3, д. 1450, л. 29‑31. 119. Там же, л. 192. 120. Багдасарян, « Олимпиада‑80 как апофеоз « холодной войны» в туризме», с. 224

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121. ГААРК, ф. П‑1, оп. 4, д. 2106, л. 39. 122. Цит. по : Р. Рождественский, « Самое мирное сражение», Смена, № 14, 1980, с. 5. 123. ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9612, оп. 3, д. 1357, л. 18. 124. Там же, ф. Р‑9610, оп. 1, д. 677, л. 130‑131. Реальное количество иностранных туристов могло быть даже меньшим, поскольку использовавшаяся методика подсчета не исключала « двойного» и « тройного» учета тех из них, которые могли посещать спортивные состязаниях сразу в нескольких олимпийских городах. 125. ГАРФ, ф. Р‑9612, оп. 3, д. 1450, л. 146‑147. 126. РГАСПИ (Российский государственный архив социально‑политической истории), ф. 5М, оп. 3, д. 257, л. 1. 127. Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами, с. 797‑798. 128. О.С. Востоков, Организация и совершенствование управлением иностранного туризма в СССР. Автореф. дис…к.э.н., М., 1984, с. 17. 129. Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами, с. 797. 130. См. : Алексей Юрчак, « Поздний социализм и последнее советское поколение», Неприкосновенный запас, 2007, 52, № 2, с. 81‑97. 131. В 1979 г. был создан советский мультфильм « Баба Яга против !», в котором противники проведения Олимпиады‑80 в СССР были изображены в образах традиционных отрицательных персонажей русского фольклора – Бабы Яги, Змея Горыныча и Кощея Бессмертного. 132. Возможно, что именно поэтому среди советских людей появилась шутка, что вместо обещанного Н.С. Хрущевым достижения к 1980 г. коммунизма решено было провести Олимпиаду. См. : Багдасарян, « Олимпиада‑80 как апофеоз « холодной войны» в туризме», с. 237. 133. В. Бычков, « Закрепить достигнутый уровень», Общественное питание, 1980, № 11, с. 17. 134. См., например : « Система общественного питания « Общепит». СССР». http:// leg0ner.livejournal.com/85978.html. 135. См., например : С. Говорухин, Welcome, или Вход воспрещен, Советская культура, 13 июня, 1987, с. 6 ; Welcome, или Вход воспрещен. Читатель продолжает разговор, Там же, 3 октября, 1987, с. 6 ; В. Иванова, Пора и себя уважать…, Правда, 16 ноября 1987, с. 1. 136. ГААРК, ф. П‑1, оп. 11, д. 119, л. 55. 137. А.С. Сенявский, « Советская мобилизационная модель экономического развития : историко‑теоретические проблемы», в Мобилизационная модель экономики : исторический опыт России ХХ века. Мат. Всерос. науч. конф. (Челябинск, 28‑29 ноября 2009 г.), Челябинск, 2009, с. 26. 138. См., например : « О мероприятиях МВД и КГБ СССР по обеспечению безопасности и охраны общественного порядка в период проведения ХХП Олимпийских игр в Москве». http://psi.ece.jhu.edu/~kaplan/IRUSS/BUK/GBARC/pdfs/sovter75/num31.pdf; Пять колец под кремлевскими звездами, с. 351‑353, 628‑630, 635‑638. 139. В работах российского исследователя А.Г. Вишневского подробно описаны пять других примеров « консервативной модернизации» СССР – экономической, городской, демографической, культурной и политической. См. : А.Г. Вишневский, Серп и рубль : Консервативная модернизация в СССР, М. : ОГИ, 1998.

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RÉSUMÉS

L’article analyse l’influence des XXIIe Jeux olympiques d’été sur le développement du secteur soviétique des services, qualifié par l’auteur de modernisation conservatrice. La nécessité de garantir un service de première qualité aux invités étrangers à ces J.O. de 1980 a obligé le gouvernement soviétique, pour la première fois, à accorder la plus grande attention au développement de l’industrie d’accueil, particulièrement celui des hôtels et des entreprises de restauration collective. Le service olympique devait établir dans ce secteur le plus haut niveau de « record stakhanoviste » et faire preuve d’une dynamique positive à long terme. Certes, il s’agissait de construire de nouveaux projets mais aussi de moderniser les équipements existants, de former les employés du secteur des services, et même, partiellement, d’emprunter certaines technologies mises en œuvre en Occident dans ce domaine. Ces processus ont touché Moscou ainsi qu’une grande partie du territoire de l’Union soviétique. De plus, les autorités ont dépensé un montant considérable de devises pour importer des équipements spécialisés et des denrées alimentaires que l’industrie soviétique ne produisait pas. Cependant, en réalité, l’amélioration de la qualité du service pour les invités des J.O. de 1980 et la maîtrise du manque de produits alimentaires ne furent que locales et de courte durée. La modernisation du secteur des services avait été réalisée sur la base des méthodes de l’économie planifiée centralisée et n’avait pas prévu l’introduction des principes de marché libéraux de l’industrie d’accueil occidentale. C’est précisément pour cette raison, et en dépit de son « marathon olympique », que le secteur soviétique des services ne connut pas de transformation révolutionnaire.

This article analyzes the impact of the 1980 Summer Olympics on the development of the Soviet service sector – which the author sees as conservative modernization. The necessity of providing excellent service to the foreign visitors to the 1980 Summer Olympics compelled Soviet authorities to address the development of the hospitality sector, especially hotels and catering companies, for the first time in its history. Olympic service was supposed to set the highest “Stakhanovite records” in the Soviet service sector and have long‑term positive dynamics. The aim was not only to build new projects, but also to update equipment, to train workers in the service professions, and even to borrow certain western technologies of service. These processes affected both Moscow and a considerable part of the Soviet territory. In addition, the authorities spent considerable amounts of foreign currency on importing specialized equipment and foodstuffs not produced by Soviet industry. However, in reality, the improvements in service quality and efforts towards plugging the gaps in food availability triggered by the 1980 Summer Olympics were of short duration and local extent. The modernization of Soviet services was carried out using the methods of centralized planned economy and did not envisage the introduction of the liberal market principles on which the Western hospitality industry was based. For this reason, the “Olympic marathon” of the Soviet service sector had no revolutionary consequences.

AUTEUR

ALEKSEJ D. POPOV

Крымский экономический институт, Симферополь, [email protected]

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Rencontres avec les mondes étrangers : l’impact des expériences vécues

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“Academic Détente” IREX Files, Academic Reports, and “American” Adventures of Soviet Americanists during the Brezhnev Era « La détente académique » : les dossiers IREX, les rapports académiques et les aventures « américaines » des américanistes soviétiques pendant l’ère brejnévienne

Sergei I. Zhuk

1 Soviet Americanists became participants in the important cultural dialogue between Soviet and American societies, opening both societies to each other and widening their intellectual and cultural horizons. At the same time the Soviet scholars’ actions were monitored by the Soviet intelligence and representatives of various US federal agencies. Both Soviet and American intelligence and various academic and government agencies collected numerous files of precious information about these visits. Comparison of this information gives us a unique picture of cultural dialogue during the academic exchanges in the era of détente from two different points of view. During the 1990s many Soviet Americanists emphasized another very important aspect of the academic exchange program – the creation of a new international community of scholars. As Marina Vlasova, a Russian expert in US political history, observed, the détente of the 1970s […] was not only the Beatles music on Soviet radio, ABBA and Smokey concerts on Soviet television, or new Western blockbusters in Soviet movie theaters. It was also the first attempts at integration by Soviet scholars, especially experts in US history, politics and culture, into the international academic community.2

2 Using the documents of the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) from the Manuscript Collection of the Library of Congress, Soviet travel reports, personal memoirs, correspondence, more than seventy interviews, and concentrating on personal stories of Soviet Americanists, this essay explores the cultural dialogue between Soviet and American scholars, and also the role of Soviet Americanists in the Soviet system of knowledge production during the Brezhnev era (1964‑1982).3

3 According to Michel de Certeau, in modern social systems of knowledge production such as communities of Soviet Americanists, “the imposed knowledge and symbolisms

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[by the Soviet ideologists] become objects manipulated by practitioners [the Soviet Americanists] who have not produced them.” In de Certeau’s interpretation, such practitioners usually subverted practices, and representations that were imposed on them from within, – not by rejecting them or by transforming them (though that occurred as well), but in many different ways. Practitioners of knowledge production “metaphorized the dominant order : they made it function in another register. They remained “other” within the system which they assimilated and which assimilated them externally. They diverted it without leaving it.”4 De Certeau’s ideas influenced recent scholarship about theories and practices of late socialism, and about discursive practices and identity formation in post‑Stalin Soviet society, especially works by Slava Gerovitch, Alexei Yurchak, and Juliane Fürst.5 As these scholars explained, in Soviet knowledge production “authoritative discourse coheres around a strict external idea or dogma […] and occupies a particular position within the discursive regime of a period,” while “all other types of discourse are organized around it.”6 Using ideas of this scholarship, especially a concept of interaction between authoritative and professional discourses, this essay explores how the participation in US‑Soviet academic exchanges programs affected various discursive practices of the Soviet Americanists. This essay gives also a new look at the problems of western‑Soviet cultural and academic dialogue after Stalin, offered recently by Robert English, Vladislav Zubok, and other scholars,7 concentrating on what English called the Soviet scholars’ efforts “to move their country toward broader integration with the liberal international community.”8

American Studies in the USSR and Academic Exchanges

4 Contemporaries noted that the Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union led to an intense “ideological offensive” when thousands of historians and social scientists in both countries became involved in area studies such as Soviet studies in the USA and American studies in the USSR. During the Cold War in the 1960s and the 1970s, the most important centers of the various area studies in the Soviet Union were those devoted to US history, economy, politics and culture.9 But in contrast to the American side of the Cold War story, where the US government and various corporations had funded college‑based centers for Soviet studies as early as the 1940s, the Soviet centers of American studies were organized much later and only in the Moscow‑based institutions of the USSR Academy of Sciences. From the early beginning, in the United States various Russian and Soviet research centers were spread all over the country in a de‑centralized fashion and were affiliated with different colleges and universities. All these American centers were professionally organized, well‑funded, and they immediately became integrated in a so‑called academic‑national security complex, especially during the late 1940s and the 1950s.10

5 Paradoxically, the first professional Soviet centers of American studies appeared much later, only after Stalin’s death, during the relaxation of international tensions and improvement of the US‑Soviet relations. Institutionalization of the Soviet centers of American studies according to the directives of the Soviet state and the KGB began in special research institutes of the USSR Academy of Sciences only in the 1960s and the 1970s. But the real peak of popularity and wide spread of American studies in the USSR during the late 1970s and the 1980s was the result of individual efforts by local college

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professors‑enthusiasts who created their own schools for studies of US history, politics, economics, and culture at the major universities in big industrial cities of the USSR.11

6 In 1953, the Soviet government created the first special center for the “studies of American countries” at the Institute of History of the USSR Academy of Science. From the beginning this center united the experts in Latin American and US history. After the division of the Institute of History in 1968 in two separate Institutes – of World History and USSR History – the center for the “studies of American countries” was also divided. All specialists in Latin American history left the center. After this division the center was transformed in a new “sector of history of the USA and Canada” at the new Institute of World History [hereafter – IVI] under leadership of a former KGB/ intelligence officer Grigorii Sevostianov. He was finally replaced in 1988 by Nikolai Bolkhovitinov, who was not connected to the KGB.12 This became the normal institutional practice for leaders of all centers for American studies in the Soviet Union to be approved by the KGB, or to have direct connections to this organization. The second Soviet center of the American studies was created in May 1967 as a special Institute of the USA at the USSR Academy of Science (it was re‑named in 1975 as the Institute of the USA and Canada [hereafter – ISKAN]) under the leadership of Georgii Arbatov.13 Many prominent Soviet experts in US economy and politics, including Nikolai Inozemtsev, the first Soviet expert in American contemporary economic history, were employed by IMEMO (Moscow’s Institute of World Economy and International Relations, the USSR Academy of Sciences), the old center of the Soviet economic theory, closed by Stalin in 1949 and re‑opened during the Khrushchev’s thaw. 14

7 In 1958 the Soviet government permitted the first exchange of Soviet students and scholars with the United States.15 Till 1968 the major American organization, which administered the scholarly exchanges with the Soviets, was called the Inter‑University Committee on Travel Grants (IUCTG). In 1968 it was replaced by the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), an organization established at the request of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) and the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) to administer academic exchanges with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. IREX conducted the exchange programs together with the USSR Ministry of Higher and Specialized Secondary Education, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences.16 According to these programs, after 1968, 40 Soviet graduate students or young faculty spent one or two semesters in the USA each year, and 10 or more Soviet professors conducted research for periods of two to five months each year. Although the overwhelming majority of Soviet students and professors, who participated in academic exchanges, represented sciences or engineering, IREX tried to involve Soviet experts in the humanities and social sciences in its programs as well. As a result, IREX supervised a special program of collaborative research, conferences and workshops between ACLS and the Soviet Academy under the bilateral Commission on the Social Sciences and Humanities, established in 1975. According to an administrator of these programs, about 80 Americans and 80 Soviets were exchanged each year under the Commission’s activities, usually for visits of about one week. Between 1958 and the end of 1985, some 2,000 Americans and 2,000 Soviets were exchanged under IUCTG and IREX programs.17

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8 The dynamics and frequency of the visits to the United States dramatically changed during the Brezhnev era, especially in the period of détente of the 1970s. As contemporaries observed : In 1961‑62 we usually knew only one or two rare fortunate candidates from either Moscow University or the Academy of Sciences who visited America ; by the end of the 1960s we had known at least five names among our colleagues not only from Moscow but also from Leningrad who traveled on a regular basis to the States ; but after 1974 it was already common practice to send our Americanists from all over the Soviet Union, hundreds of them, – to the United States and Canada.18

9 “Yes, it is true,” confirmed the Ukrainian Americanist Arnold Shlepakov, “thanks to détente in the 1970s the first Ukrainian scholars went to America.”19 More visits (almost 600 !) of Soviet Americanists were made during the Brezhnev era, especially during the détente period. One of these Soviet visiting scholars based at Columbia University, Aleksei Burmistenko, a young historian of American journalism from Moscow, even called numerous Soviet academic guests in the USA “the children of détente” in 1977.20

10 During the Brezhnev’s détente in the 1970s the new centers for American studies were organized at the Department of History of Moscow State University (hereafter, – MGU), in Leningrad and other industrial cities of the Soviet Union. According to the Soviet government’s decision in 1973‑74, the MGU department of history became a center for an establishment of Fulbright program in the USSR. In 1975, Nikolai Sivachev, from the same department, established the Scholarly Coordinating Council on American Studies at this university. In November 1978, under his leadership, a new Soviet center for American studies was organized there, a so‑called “laboratory of American studies” affiliated with a department of modern and contemporary history.21

11 In Kyiv, the capital of the Soviet Ukraine, under the leadership of Ukrainian scholar Arnold Shlepakov, a department of modern and contemporary history at the Institute of History of the Ukrainian Academy of Science was transformed into a new Soviet center of American studies during 1969‑1978. In 1978, this center overgrew its small department and became a new institute of the Ukrainian Academy : – the Institute of Social and Economic Problems of the Foreign Countries.22 In November‑December 1971, during the first All‑Union symposium of the Soviet Americanists, 10 of 130 experts in US history were from Ukrainian institutions. By 1980, Shlepakov’s center for American studies in Kyiv united 15 specialists in US history, politics and diplomacy. Ukrainian historian Semyion Appatov at Odesa University prepared at least 10 experts in contemporary US history and diplomacy. At the same time, more than 20 experts in US history (including graduate students) worked at the Institute of the World History. By 1980, ten doctors of historical science, who were specialists in US history, were employed there. An overwhelming majority of these historians were officially affiliated with this Institute’s sector of history of the USA and Canada. By the beginning of the 1980s, this sector had 20 members, and a few Americanists were affiliated with other sectors of the same Institute.23 Eleven specialists in the US political history worked under leadership of Sivachev at the laboratory of American studies at the Department of History of MGU. By 1976 the staff of ISKAN had grown to about 300 and by 1980 to more than 450. About half of these were researchers and half were support staff. Every year this institute accepted approximately 15‑20 new postgraduate students. By the late 1970s, the staff of IMEMO numbered about 800, and at least 200 were experts in American studies. From 1964 until the end of the 1970s almost fifty experts in US

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history had been awarded with a rank of doctor of historical science. In 1991, according to calculations of late E. Yaz´kov, at least 300 Soviet historians (all of them from Russia and Ukraine) studied US history. Technically speaking, more than half, 250 of the 400 Americanists at ISKAN in 1980 held degrees of either kandidat or doctor of historical science ; even those who studied US contemporary politics were historians by training. At the end of the 1980s, almost 70 % of all 1,000 prominent Soviet Americanists (including political scientists, economists, sociologists, philosophers, literary and film critics) were college professors who taught American studies in major universities of Soviet Russia and Ukraine, in big industrial cities such as Moscow, Leningrad, Kyiv, Odesa and Dnipropetrovsk. More than 60 % of the Soviet Americanists employed by universities and colleges were located in Russia, ‑ and almost 40 % in Ukraine. By 1991 it was the largest community of professional Americanists in the world outside the United States. The Chinese Americanists, the so‑called America Watchers, comprised the second largest, — after the Soviet community of America’s experts, with almost 700 specialists concentrating in 15 college centers.24

Soviet Preparation for Academic Exchange

12 From the beginning of the Soviet‑US cultural exchange of 1958 until the peak of perestroika, the Soviet side followed the same practices of selection of the Soviet participants. With a very few exceptions, all Soviet representatives in these exchange programs were members of communist party. They were cleared by the KGB and agreed to collaborate with the Soviet secret police. Some of these representatives were the “undercover” KGB officers. As a rule, the overwhelming majority of the Soviet visitors were experts in engineering and science, only few of them were historians or represented humanities. Even during the peak of academic exchange in 1977 among 40 Soviet nominations (for research trip to the United States) only three specialized in the humanities : all others were scientists.25

13 Officially, Soviet scholars went to America with the major goal to do their research and in some cases to teach, or deliver their lectures to American audiences. But to achieve this goal they had to follow a long, boring and humiliating process of application “for traveling abroad” and “thorough interviews” with so‑called “international departments” (mezhdunarodnye [Osobye]otdely) of their colleges and research institutions. The Soviet applicants who planned to travel to America had to be 1) “members of communist party, [this was especially required for historians and social scientists],” 2) approved by their employers (“with a research plan and an official recommendation, discussed by the department first, and then signed by their department chair, but also by the communist party and trade union chiefs”)26, 3) recommended for “the research travel abroad by their departments to the USSR Ministry of Higher Education and the international department,” and, finally, 4) cleared by the KGB through the above‑mentioned international departments, promising to submit their reports to the KGB officers immediately after their return from America. After this approval the names of Soviet candidates were sent to American organizations (like IREX, ACLS, Fulbright, etc.), which usually approved all Soviet candidates.27

14 Paradoxically, two communist “founding fathers” of American studies in the USSR, Aleksei Efimov and Lev Zubok, who taught (after the Second World War) the most

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popular undergraduate courses on US History at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (hereafter, – MGIMO) for their future Americanists students, were never cleared by the KGB and were not allowed to go abroad because of their background. As it turned out, Aleksei Efimov, a former Russian naval officer and representative of the Russian Orthodox nobility, who published Soviet pioneering studies on the early American history, specifically about the genesis of American capitalism through the Civil War and the Reconstruction, and also the first Soviet standard textbook on modern history for secondary schools, was connected to “the whites” during the Russian Civil War and participated in counter‑revolutionary activities in 1918‑1920. Lev Zubok, a Jewish communist, the author of the first Soviet studies on the history of US working class and the history of US diplomacy at the beginning of the twentieth century, came to Russia after the civil war in 1924 from Philadelphia as a representative of the American communist movement. Unfortunately, he became a victim of anti‑cosmopolitan, anti‑Semitic campaigns during 1948‑49. As a result of these “ideological sins,” the KGB denied the numerous applications for international travel by Efimov and Zubok during the 1960s.28 Meanwhile their former MGIMO students, such young Americanists as Arbatov, Bolkhovitinov and Ivanov, were communists without “any ideological deviations,” and they were cleared by the KGB for their travels in America.

15 The KGB usually approved the “clean” candidates’ research plans and itineraries (with the names of schools, library and archival collections in the United States.) Only after this approval could these candidates apply for foreign passports. The KGB officers from the international departments through the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs helped to get US visas and air tickets for the selected and approved candidates.29 The most important requirement for all travelers abroad was the submission of a special travel report to the international departments (for the KGB). Besides a traditional academic report to the department chair, all visitors to foreign countries reported immediately to the KGB officers of their institutes (or universities) in a month after their return. This practice of collecting reports ended in Moscow only during perestroika in 1987, while in provincial universities in Ukraine, the local international departments still requested the final travel reports even in 1993.30

16 Some Soviet candidates, being already approved by their departments for research travel, were rejected by the KGB, for their old “ideological crimes.” Another famous Americanist, Nikolai Yakovlev, a former student of Efimov and Zubok, the popular author of the Soviet biography of the first American president George Washington, was denied the privilege to travel abroad several times during the 1970s and the 1980s. As it turned out, during the late 1940s, Yakovlev was arrested together with his famous father, a Soviet marshal of artillery. Eventually Yakovlev was rehabilitated by the Soviet police, and he returned to academic work and joined the “American” sector at the Institute of History. Unfortunately for his academic career, the KGB began using him for their provocations, engaged him in writing books, glorifying the KGB struggle “with various anti‑Soviet intellectuals like Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn.”31 Despite this collaboration with the KGB, Yakovlev still was not allowed to travel abroad.

17 A younger colleague of Sevostianov and Bolkhovitinov from IVI, Sergei Burin, who was a grandson of the Soviet historian‑medievalist S.D. Skazkin, and studied a social history of colonial Virginia and Maryland, also became nevyezdnoi (without privilege to travel abroad). Being a MGU undergraduate student in the late 1960s, he used to draw various

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funny caricatures of the Soviet leaders such as Vladimir Lenin in his note book during the lectures. Once, by mistake, Burin left a page with his caricature picture of Lenin inside a book from the MGU library. A MGU librarian found this picture in the book, which Burin had just returned, and she immediately reported to the KGB about this. Burin was arrested, expelled from MGU and Komsomol. Only interference of his famous grandfather, academician Skazkin, saved Burin from the prison term. He was drafted into the Soviet army and only in the 1970s did he resume his academic career. After this experience, he was never allowed to travel abroad.32

18 Scholars from the Soviet provincial centers for American studies also had restrictions for their travels to America because of the limitations in the centralized distribution of the vacancies for obtaining American travel grants. Since 1958, usually the first positions in the official “travel lists to America” (raznoriadka na poezdku v Ameriku) by the USSR Ministry of Higher Education and Academy of Sciences had been sent to the representatives of Moscow. Arnold Shlepakov, a Ukrainian historian of the working class immigration to the United States, applied for a permission to travel to America many times during 1962‑64. Only in October of 1964, did he finally receive this permission. Meanwhile, during the same time, Muscovites from various Moscow centers for American studies, such as Sivachev, were included in the first positions in the “vacancy list” immediately after the KGB clearance.33 This “discrimination” of provincial scholars continued through the 1970s. By 1980, nine from ten doctors of historical science, who were experts in US history at Moscow’s Institute of World History, had already visited the United States, while in Ukraine during the same period of time, only three from six professors of US history at “Shlepakov’s Institute” in Kiev were invited to participate in academic exchange with Americans. Overall, according to IREX files, from 1968 to 1980 almost 80 percent (479) Soviet visitors to America came from Moscow, and all of them, except four, were men. Among 50 Soviet candidates for the trip to the USA in 1982, 38 (more than 70 percent) came from families of the Soviet party and academic elite (like Bolkhovitinov, Shlepakov and Vlasova).34

19 Another serious moral problem facing Soviet Americanists was collaboration with the KGB. Usually after the first travel abroad and submission of their travel reports, Soviet scholars were invited by the KGB officers for a “special conversation.” As some participants of these conversations recalled, Soviet Americanists had to play “various mind games” and follow their “strategies of survival” during these conversations accepting some KGB offers and rejecting others. The major goal of these games was to maintain good connections with the KGB to guarantee the future trips to America. Not everybody could follow the rules of such games. Breaking these rules could affect one’s entire academic career and, especially, plans for travel abroad.35 The most important part of the “strategies of survival” was a correct adherence to all ideological requirements in the travel report by the scholar. This report had to reflect the major research and teaching goals of the travel and describe the major research centers, personal and scholarly contacts abroad, and main activities during the travel. The KGB reports also required a certain description of the political, economic and ideological (and since the 1970s cultural) situation in American society. Trying to ignore these rules was considered to be a serious “deviation.”36

20 A typical case of such “deviation” from the “strategies of survival” was the story of Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, who joined communist party only in 1961, visited the USA for the first time in his life later than all his colleagues, from February through August of

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1968, when he had already published two highly acclaimed books in the US history about the Monroe Doctrine and a “cultural diplomacy” of early American Republic and Imperial Russia, based on the original documents from the Soviet archives. Unfortunately for Bolkhovitinov’s academic career at IVI, in 1968 he rejected a KGB recruiting offer. As he recalled later, before his first travel to the USA, in his interview during January of 1968, a KGB officer had already mentioned to Bolkhovitinov the possibility for future collaboration. Bolkhovitinov pretended that he did not understand a nature of this offer, and after his return in Moscow in September 1968, he “forgot” to submit his report to “this KGB officer,” reporting directly to the Institute’s international office instead.37

21 As a result of this strategic mistake, the KGB denied Bolkhovitinov’s access to any long‑term research grants funded by the US government, and Grigorii Sevostianov, who represented the KGB control in IVI, and who was Bolkhovitinov’s supervisor, never allowed Bolkhovitinov to visit America longer than one month during the 1970s. Moreover, during his short trip to Alaska to a conference about history of Russian America in 1979, one of the Soviet visitors, A.N. Martynov, an official of the USSR National Committee of Historians, denounced Bolkhovitinov to the KGB as “an intellectual with anti‑Soviet feelings” who had “unsanctioned secret meetings with American scholars.”38 As a direct result of this denunciation, Bolkhovitinov was not allowed to travel abroad until perestroika, when he went to the USA in late 1986. A few talented Soviet Americanists, like Bolkhovitinov or his young colleague from Odesa Vitaly L. Beloborodko, who rejected the recruiting efforts of the KGB, were punished by a ban to travel abroad.39 Those Soviet Americanists, who were KGB officers, like Sevostianov, or who collaborated with this organization had no problems with getting permission for their international travels from the KGB.

American Hosts about Soviet Guests

22 The “adventures” of the Soviet Americanists in America were closely covered by the US organizations, responsible for the reception of the Soviet guests. After many months of waiting for the KGB approval, and being closely monitored by this organization at home, Soviet Americanists finally arrived in America and became a focus of close attention by the officials from IREX and other agencies, including the US Department of State. According to IREX files, 480 (80 percent) Soviet participants in academic exchanges program during 1968‑1982, who represented the field of “American studies,” were official policy analysts of the Soviet government, and all of them came from the research institutes of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, such as ISKAN and IMEMO in Moscow. During the same period of time, almost 80 percent (483) of Soviet Americanists who visited the United States, using American research grants, were various official leaders (mostly academic apparatchiks) from the Soviet centers for American studies in MGU, ISKAN, IMEMO and IVI. Reflecting an obvious Cold War ideological bias, American observers were skeptical about the mission of these research centers, and characterized them in the IREX official reports as the “Spy Institutes.”40

23 Soviet officials expressed a similar skeptic and suspicious attitude toward Americans at the beginning of these contacts. As ISKAN director Georgii Arbatov wrote in his memoirs, a “majority of our specialists [in American studies]” had yet to overcome

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“pervasive ideology … [of] propaganda and fear.” Speaking for himself he recalled that, when named in 1967 the head of the USA Institute, [my] knowledge was insufficiently deep […] I had never been to the United States. I had no contacts or acquaintances among Americans […] [but] harder to acquire than acquaintances […] was a feeling for the country, a partly rational, partly intuitive sense that we could only acquire through regular professional contact with a wide variety of specialists from the United States and with representatives from government and business.41

24 American hosts, experts in Russian and Soviet studies, were always interested in collaboration with the Soviet scholars, trying to help them to integrate into the “improvised international community, created by the open opportunities of détente.”42 Sometime the American hosts even tried to ignore the “spy” background of their Soviet visitors, if they were official bosses from Moscow centers. American scholars flattered these guests in public, hoping to get official invitations to visit Russia or begin collaborative research projects with their Soviet visitors. Among various materials, some IREX files contain a very positive and sympathetic portrayal of Grigorii Sevostianov, a professional Soviet spy and intelligence/KGB officer, who during WWII conducted Soviet espionage in the Far East.43 Through his KGB connections, Sevostianov became the head of the first American studies center in Moscow in 1968, “trying to suppress any fresh idea” among his Soviet colleagues, punishing those “liberals” like Nikolai Bolkhovitinov, “for an expression of their open‑minded and too revisionist views on US history” in Moscow. As the head of this center, he became a popular Soviet guest in America. Paradoxically, this “KGB man,” and well‑known “enemy of American imperialism,” known for his “offensive brutal anti‑American” publications in the USSR, based mainly on communist propagandist clichés rather than on serious analysis of historical documents, suddenly, was introduced by American hosts in 1974 as “a distinguished Russian diplomatic historian” and as “a scholar of excellent background, a man of great integrity and seriousness.” Many American colleagues of Sevostianov, such as Norman Saul from the University of Kansas, characterized Sevostianov as “a serious scholar” who “was well versed in American published material relating to his topic, thus enabling him to use research time more profitably.”44 As it turned out, Professor Saul was interested in the Sevostianov’s immediate support for “expanding scholarly cooperation directly between the University of Kansas and the [Soviet] Academy of Sciences,” and “the possibility of joint conferences, joint publications, and teaching and research exchanges.”45

25 All American visitors to the USSR, especially the American experts in Russian/Soviet history, culture and politics, depended on the good relations with the Soviet officials from the “spy institutes,” and eventually, on their official invitations to visit Moscow. That is why the IREX officials always supported and promoted the visits of such famous Soviet academic officials, connected to the KGB, like Sevostianov, or Georgii Arbatov. It was the principle of “do ut des” – “we give you our permission to visit the USA and expect you allowing us to visit the USSR to do our research there,” or “we do not pay attention to your KGB and Communist connections, and expect (instead) that you would invite us to the Soviet Union any time we need it.”46

26 On August 27, 1973, IREX issued a special “Memorandum about Bilateral Travel Grant Request” to sponsor Arbatov’s to visit on January 9 through February 6, 1974 : The US Institute (ISKAN) has served as a useful intermediary in channeling visiting US scholars to other institutes within (Soviet) Academy hierarchy, but these visits

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have to date not provided satisfactory reciprocal opportunities for ‘”Russianists” and Soviet specialists. We should like to discuss with Arbatov an expansion of our range of contacts and the formation of a bi‑national agenda commission which would identify areas of mutual and parallel interest in order to facilitate consultation and collaboration.47

27 As a result, on September 13, 1973, Allen Kassof from IREX wrote Arbatov an official invitation from IREX and ACLS to visit the USA with his wife, and to deliver a special public lecture (with a promised honorarium) at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. After this successful visit on February 26, 1974, Cynthia Scott, IREX program officer, in her letter to Arbatov, reminded him about the successful results of his application for American funding for his trips, promised to support all his future visits to America and at the same time promised to bring in Moscow the list with nominations of American scholars for 1974‑1975 academic year, and asked for a meeting with him in ISKAN to discuss this list of the future American visitors in the USSR.48

28 The general evaluations of the visits by Soviet Americanists to the USA and discussions about pro and contra of this exchanges program were the major themes of IREX correspondence during the 1970s. The main idea of these documents was to justify the rationale for the exchange with the Soviet scholars. In some reports IREX officials were sincerely surprised with the rare cases of professionalism and academic honesty of Soviet Americanists.49 A good summary of the American hosts’ reaction to Soviet guests was expressed in a correspondence in 1976, by Eugene B. Skolnikoff, Director of the Center for International Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (hereafter, – MIT), who wrote to Julia Holm from IREX, [the Soviets] seemed to come with a very specific objective of learning about certain techniques in political science, and were relatively little interested in discussing anything else at all. Moreover, I did not have the impression that they were well‑grounded in those techniques themselves, though I cannot speak with certainty on that point. The impression certainly was that they were there to get information rather than to have broader discussions. It was not clear to me either that they were sufficiently well‑versed in the techniques they wanted to learn about to be able to assimilate very much of the information they seemed to be after… [p.2] I might add that my own recent experiences with Russian visitors have been so consistently unsatisfactory, and I have picked up enough similar comments from others, that I find myself increasingly less interested in receiving or meeting with Russian visitors unless I know them well and know that I can have a reasonable exchange of information with them. When Dr. Arbatov visited MIT recently for a small luncheon, I made this point very strongly to him and indicated that from my perspective US‑Soviet academic exchanges would deteriorate very rapidly if the Russians continue to carry out their side as seems to have been developing in the last couple of years. He said he ‘got the message’ and would carry it back but offered no other commentary.50 A month later, Julia Holm answered to Skolnikoff, explaining that […] of seven letters I received back (about Soviet visitors), five were positive. Those five letters came from professors who do not frequently receive Soviet scholars and thus might have more patience and lower expectations than scholars like yourself who see a regular parade of Soviets. There is also a feeling in much of the correspondence that [academic apparatchiks] serve as laboratory specimens – “so this is how a shishka acts, talks, and dresses in the mid‑70’s…” – but not as intellectual counterparts… Unfortunately the evaluations that came back this year [about Soviet vistors] were alarmingly poor – the majority of the Soviet scientists were quite obviously here as a reward and not to do research… I mention this

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because the problem of – let me be frank – hacks coming guised as scholars, plagues all three exchanges I run.51

29 In general, American hosts were very skeptical about intellectual potential and scholarly contributions of the Soviet Americanists who visited their country. Till mid‑1970s they called these Soviet visits “a kind of academic tourism,” and they expected that more serious Soviet researchers eventually would come to visit as well. Overall they were not interested in Soviet Americanists coming to American universities. As one expert in East Asian Studies from Harvard University complained to IREX in June of 1975 : The Academy of Sciences of the USSR has sent us a succession of people who ask questions, but have nothing to offer. They are not historians, but seem to be intelligence specialists, and are not of intellectual interest to us. Meanwhile, our proposal that an historian of interest to us should visit Harvard from their Institute of Oriental Culture of the Academy of Sciences has been bypassed and disregarded for three years past. If the Soviets expect intellectual interchange with us, they should send people competent for the purpose.52 Unfortunately, the majority of Soviet visitors were academic or college apparatchiks rather than serious researchers. IREX reports left many portrayals of such Soviet functionaries. All of them contain the similar characteristics : 1. Bombastic, 2. Arrogant, 3. Impolite (arrives without announcement to meet people), 4. Doesn’t pay hotel bill, 5. Doesn’t arrive for appointments made for him, 6. Speaking out of order, 7. Rejected a [American host’s] complaint that information in data sheets was not correct, 8. Rejected a complaint that Soviets ask for too much money, 9. Rejected complaints that Soviets participants only learn, bring little of value to American universities.53

30 More than 60 percent of all IREX reports during the Brezhnev era had direct complaints about bad English language and research skills of Soviet students of American studies. Usually American hosts could praise (in 40 percent of IREX files) Soviet Americanists, specialists in US economy, politics, diplomacy and culture from ISKAN and IMEMO, but very rarely Soviet historians, whom they “found [sometime] charming people,” but [they] could not “see that visits [of Soviet historians] accomplished any intellectual purpose,” because Soviet guests “prosecuted no significant research here [in America].” 54 Even Aleksandr Fursenko, a Soviet historian, the most respected by his American colleagues, was criticized in the IREX reports for the same reason. Thus in his letter from November 15, 1979, Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. from the City University of New York, wrote to IREX, answering to an inquiry regarding the visit of Fursenko and his research topic about “Evolution of US politics in the 1970s,” and complained at the end, I have seen him on his previous trips and suppose I will see him again this time. But I cannot forbear passing on to you my strong impression that these meetings are a total waste of time. Fursenko, though a nice fellow, is not a historian. He is a Soviet propagandist, totally impervious to evidence at odds with his stereotypes, and it is a misuse of money to send him (or for that matter any other Soviet “historian” of contemporary affairs) around the United States.55

31 Despite their constant complaints about “the ideological bias” and “preconceived notions” of Soviet visitors, American hosts always emphasized the political and cultural significance of these exchanges. In January 24, 1975, Marshall Shulman from Columbia University in his letter to IREX positively evaluated visits of two scholars, Yuri Mel ´nikov, a sector head at the Institute of the International Workers’ Movement, USSR Academy of Sciences and Vladimir Zolotukhin from ISKAN :

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I consider both visits to have been useful. As it happened, I met with both men in Moscow afterwards, and both expressed warm appreciation for their reception here, and said that the trip had been valuable for them. I have no doubt that their desire to reciprocate made my own trip more productive. I have known Dr. Mel ´nikov for many years. He is a thoughtful man, and a serious scholar. He has made several trips to the United States, and they are reflected in the differentiations he makes in his writings… Dr. Zolotukhin is the head of a section in the Institute of the USA, and he arranged for me to meet with members of his section in Moscow to discuss the role of the US Congress in the determination of foreign policy. From the discussion, I derived some valuable insights into their perceptions of US political life. The quality of his observations also reflected the value of his experiences in the United States. It is my belief that it is in the United States interest to have Soviet analysts of the US as knowledgeable as possible, to reduce the risk of dangerous miscalculations and unnecessary misunderstandings.56

32 According to the official American documents, the American hosts clearly understood the role of those Soviet Americanists from ISKAN, IMEMO and other Moscow and Kiev centers, who were the Soviet policy analysts and the official advisers of the Soviet leadership. For IREX administration and the US State Department, those Soviet “power people,” like Arbatov, were the “important connections” to the Soviet political leaders. During the 1970s, a majority of IREX exchanges, involving Soviet Americanists (almost 80 percent), funded the Soviet policy analysts with discussions of arms control, and other diplomatic issues in the US‑Soviet relations. Moreover, IREX administration supported those Soviet research projects, which could provide Soviet leadership with precious information about the situation in US politics, economy, society and culture, with the goal “to reduce the risk of Soviet dangerous miscalculations” in the “growing arms race.”57

33 According to the Soviet policy analysts, who were active participants in IREX programs, they tried to bring this message of “their American hosts” to Leonid Brezhnev and other Soviet leaders. Through their personal ties to leadership, Americanists from IMEMO and ISKAN gave Brezhnev realistic recommendations about careful and reasonable politics of reducing the risks of arms race. Unfortunately, after 1979 “their efforts to convince Brezhnev [to listen to their analysis after their visits to America] came to naught due to the latter’s near‑total mental incapacity and the attendant devolution of power to Defense Minister Dmitri Ustinov and the military.”58

34 A minority of Soviet Americanists (less than 20 percent), participants in IREX programs, were Soviet experts in US history. American hosts also supported financially this category of Soviet visitors. According to IREX reports, “this exchange of scholars, if it can be carried on more broadly, would be a great asset in building better [and closer cultural and intellectual] relations between the United States and Russia.”59 IREX administration tried to support the research projects of the Soviet historians, but also their “academic connections” to their American colleagues, American experts in Russian studies – “Russianists” and “Sovietologists.” From a technical point of view, establishing of such connections was important for helping the Soviet visitors with their adjustment to American realities. American Sovietologists, who knew Russian language and culture, became the first natural “interpreters” of American life for the Soviet guests, experts in US history. As a result, Soviet Americanists had more friendly relations with American Sovietologists than with the local US historians.60 Moreover, later on, the Soviet visitors became instrumental in obtaining the official invitations to the USSR for their former American hosts. It was the official policy of IREX

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administration ‑ “to encourage the involvement of both Soviet and American scholars in the international, mutually beneficial, academic projects.” This policy worked, and all Soviet Americanists, participants in the academic exchanges program, tried to “organize the official invitation for their former American hosts.”61

Soviet “Discursive” Discoveries of America

35 According to American documents, the most talented Soviet Americanists who spent major time of their visit working hard at the American libraries and archives were a few Soviet enthusiasts of US history, politics and culture who came to the USA already prepared for serious research work and “had already done their homework.”62 The American “experience” of these Soviet Americanists affected their entire academic career, shaping their research priorities, interests and discursive strategies in presenting material they discovered in the USA for publication in the Soviet Union.

36 One of these Soviet Americanists was Nikolai Sivachev, a graduate student from MGU’s department of history, who began his academic career as a participant of US‑Soviet student exchanges program during 1961‑1962. The American administrators of this program noted that this Soviet student of US history took classes at Columbia University, “through serious application, made even greater strides in English” and successfully studied the U.S. presidential election of 1936 under a supervision of his adviser, Professor Richard Hofstadter.63 This experience triggered Sivachev’s interest in political history of the New Deal and social history of US labor. Under influence of his advisor, a conservative American political historian, Sivachev concentrated on a history of the political elites in US during the 1930s. When he returned to Moscow, he added Marxist analysis to his archival findings, defended his Soviet kandidatskaia dissertation, and prepared his study of political struggle during the US elections in the 1930s, which was published as a book in 1966.64 During the same visit, using various American archival collections, Sivachev also collected the new material about the American working class movement during the New Deal reforms in 1933‑36. As early as September of 1964, he finished his new book manuscript, which was discussed and approved for publication by his colleagues from the MGU department of modern and contemporary history.65 In October of 1966, using his American materials, Sivachev delivered a report to his colleagues about his new research project, which opened a completely new topic for Soviet historiography : – “labor legislation in the USA.” I. Galkin, chair of the department, was so impressed by Sivachev’s report that he “immediately proposed to request a recommendation from the Ministry of Higher Education […] to send Sivachev again for a half a year research trip in America.”66 As a result of this recommendation, Sivachev visited the USA a second time in November of 1967 as a Soviet official in charge of the Soviet exhibition “Education in the USSR” supported by official letters of recommendation from the Soviet leadership, including one signed by his official “supervisor,” L. Bazhanov, a “KGB man” from the USSR Ministry of Education.67 Starting in late 1967, Sivachev visited the United States on regular basis ; eventually he became the most famous and the most respected Soviet academic visitor in America, especially during the era of détente. American scholars contrasted Sivachev as a talented researcher to other Soviet “not very interesting visitors, who were curiosities but not serious scholars.” As they reported to IREX, Sivachev “impressed everybody very much with his knowledge of American

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institutions.”68 After his American visits and intensive archival research, Sivachev prepared two book manuscripts about labor and government relations in US history before and during WWII.69

37 By 1975 Nikolai Sivachev became the best representative of Soviet Americanists in all the exchanges programs of the détente era. Sivachev also was a good scholar, a serious historian‑researcher, and a very good psychologist who understood very well what the American partners expected from the Soviet guests. In contrast to his image of a “pedantic boring university professor” and “orthodox communist ideologist” for his Soviet students and colleagues, Sivachev projected a very different image of himself for his American colleagues. For Americans he always looked optimistic, smiling, open‑minded, humorous and ready for discussions, trying to avoid any ideological debates and distancing himself from the explicit communist propagandist clichés.70 As one American host praised Sivachev’s research and communicative skills in 1975, […] Sivachev […] steers away from Sovietologists in general (his field is US internal politics) but has been good with me because I provided him with connections (with VIPs) he couldn’t establish otherwise – and took his pictures posing with these VIPs which he values a great deal. He is relatively young, ambitious, extremely hard working, especially for a teaching professor, in collecting archival and bibliographic data ; he knows what he wants and has a great deal of determination … on his part, he was very considerate in not taking too much of my time, and quite informative about general intellectual trends in Moscow. A stout Russian nationalist (although a Mordovian, ethnically), he was a curious contrast with the more ideologically oriented visitors … Since his first visit to the US he has developed rather broad connections (once he was a house guest of Eleanor Roosevelt, and knew my friend Henry A. Wallace) but remained a rather modest sort. There is an authentic strength in this fellow, and he will go far in my judgment.71

38 Using his new American connections during the 1970s, Sivachev obtained a contract with the University of Chicago Press to publish a book in English about the history of US‑Soviet relations. So he contacted Nikolai Yakovlev, another talented Soviet historian‑Americanist, nevyezdnoi, but very prolific writer, who collaborated with the KGB ; he invited him to be a co-author of the American book. Through this contact with Yakovlev, Sivachev received the official KGB permission for collaboration with this American publishing house. Then, using IREX funding, Sivachev spent six months in 1978‑1979 and two months in 1980 reading the proofs of their book and collecting material on American labor‑government relations. In 1980, Sivachev not only published the book in the USA, but also served as a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College.72 Moreover, Sivachev helped many his MGU students to establish the necessary connections in America and obtained official invitations and funding by American hosts. So Sivachev had supervised a research work of Vladimir Sogrin since 1967, assisting him with obtaining the new literature on the history of ideology of political elites in the USA. Finally, in 1979 Sivachev directed Sogrin to the topic of the American War of Independence and its ideology. He recommended his former student for IREX funding. As a result of Sivachev’s “American connections” and his research visits in the USA, Sogrin wrote his pioneering studies in a history of American ideology, which incorporated the original American material, suggested by Sivachev as early as the late 1960s.73

39 Another famous Soviet Americanist, Nikolai Bolkhovitinov, a historian of Russian‑American relations during the late 18th through the 19th centuries, began visiting the United States in 1968. Bolkhovitinov came to America with the established

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reputation of a serious historian, visiting the major research centers and archival collections on the East and West coasts, giving public lectures, meeting his American colleagues and impressing them with his erudition and knowledge of the material. Moreover, Bolkhovitinov was one of the pioneers of the concept of “people’s diplomacy” in the international history of diplomacy, which attracted American specialists in US diplomatic history. As Bolkhovitinov explained his concept in 1980, In the past historians of international relations very seldom studied socio‑political, scientific and cultural ties. Their attention was centered on inter‑state and, first and foremost, diplomatic relations, on the activity of prominent statesmen, famous generals and diplomats, tsars and presidents. This left out of the history of international relations the principal element, the people, as represented by the finest, most educated and active personages – scholars, public figures, men of letters, journalists. I see my main merit in trying to overcome this shortcoming and to study relations between Russia and the USA in their fullest dimension, comprehensively, including the history of trade, socio‑political, scientific and cultural ties, the history of Russian America, the business contacts of Russian “promyshlenniki” (fur traders) and Boston merchant‑sailors, and other connections.74

40 During Bolkhovitinov’s visit of 1968, the historians from Harvard University decided to translate his book in English and publish it in the United States, and Robert Webb, editor‑in‑chief of the prestigious American Historical Review, after attending Bolkhovitinov’s lecture about American studies in the USSR, decided to publish this lecture in his journal.75 Through the entire 1970s, American hosts expressed their respect for such a decent and competent historian as Bolkhovitinov, and kept inviting him to visit America. As Professor Jack P. Greene from Johns Hopkins University noted, “I think the only one serious Soviet scholar of modern US history, who visited the United States during the détente, was Bolkhovitinov.”76

41 Because of his conflict with the KGB, Bolkhovitinov was not allowed to spend more than a month annually visiting the United States during the 1970s. Despite this conflict, the KGB was unable to stop Bolkhovitnov visiting America. By 1976, in both Soviet and American archives, he collected rare important documents, illustrating the establishment of Russian‑American diplomatic relations over the course of 1807‑1809. Due to the diplomacy of détente, both Soviet and American diplomats and political leaders frequently referred to these documents about the beginning of Russian‑US relations. As a result, the US Department of State and the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned the official publication of these documents.77 Therefore, Bolkhovitnov’s research attracted the attention of Soviet and American diplomats, and he was invited to lead the project of these documents’ publication. Bolkhovitinov’s books were translated and published in English in the United States, and finally he became one of the editors of the documentary publication sponsored by the Soviet and American governments.78 Bolkhovitinov brought a huge collection of documents and American dissertations on various issues of US history, and deposited this collection in Moscow libraries. Moreover, he always tried to help his nevyezdnye colleagues, bringing the copies of important documents from US archives. In this way he brought copies of documents on the seventeenth century Virginia in 1976 to Sergei Burin, who was not allowed to travel abroad, and who was writing his dissertation about the social history of the English colonies Virginia and Maryland. Using his connections in the Library of Congress and other American libraries, Bolkhovitinov also organized a subscription of various American historical magazines for central Soviet libraries.79

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42 All the Soviet historians‑Americanists who were active participants of the academic exchanges not only incorporated the new findings of their American colleagues in their own scholarship, but also began the publication of their own analysis of the major developments in US history writing and of the contemporary trends in American historiography.80 Overall, during the 1970s, after their visits to America, Soviet Americanists‑historians produced a variety of new research topics in US history : a comparison of the 18th century American and French Revolutions and American revolutionary ideology (A. Fursenko and Sogrin) ; the agrarian question and farmers’ movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries (G. Kuropiatnik and E. Yaz´kov) ; the Civil War and Reconstruction (R. Ivanov and A. Blinov), American “Progressives” and liberal “reformers” (I. Beliavskaia and Sogrin) ; the anthropological history of American Indians (Yu. Averkieva and A. Vashchenko) ; history of immigration in America (A. Shlepakov and L. Leshchenko) ; the traditionally popular themes of American working class history (I. Krasnov, V. Mal´kov, B. Mikhailov and Sivachev) and “diplomacy and ideology of US imperialism” (I. Dementiev and A. Fursenko).81

43 At the same time, Soviet Americanists followed certain “discursive strategies” in publications of the results of their research in America. The Soviet state both tried to control professional Americanists and needed their expertise, and this resulted in a tangled and paradoxical structure of discourse. State and party officials promoted those practices that fit the contemporary political agenda, while Americanists sought legitimation and support from those in power. Tensions within both official political discourse and professional Americanists’ discourses produced a considerable room for maneuver and negotiation. According to Slava Gerovitch, Soviet Americanists developed their various discursive strategies […] in an attempt to adapt their knowledge to the current political, socioeconomic, and cultural situation, and to influence this situation at the same time. Such discursive strategies had to be flexible enough to take advantage of the tensions within public discourse. On the other hand, in order to keep up with sociopolitical changes, professionals would have to frequently modify these strategies.82 For many Soviet Americanists, who visited America, the safest discursive strategy in presenting their American findings was accepting the authoritative (ruling) discourse of orthodox Marxism, […] not searching for truth, but merely attempting to document a preconception [of Marxist ideology]. As some Americans noted, some of their Soviet guests visited libraries and archives [in the US] not for the kind of serious and prolonged study […] but basically to indicate in [their] preface that [they] had visited a large number of American libraries and archives. [Our] impression also was that [they] sought quotations, lists, and information of that kind to buttress conclusions [they] had already reached.83

44 This strategy, which I call “conformist,” became the most popular among a majority of Soviet Americanists. Unfortunately, the depth of understanding of the United States among the older generation remained very shallow. A majority of these first professional Soviet Americanists were burdened by the Marxist belief system, image structures, and categories of analysis. They suffered from a great deal of cognitive dissonance and simply looked for evidence to confirm their preconceived images of how the United States functioned.84

45 Another strategy was developed by Soviet Americanists who resented propaganda clichés of the Stalin era and the official Cold War discourse. These Americanists frequently turned to what some scholars called “internalist” historical narratives as a

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means of both analysis and self‑protection. That is, they tried to avoid any serious analytical approach that could be presented as non‑Marxist theoretical deviation by the ideological censors and instead emphasized the inner logic of the historical development of the United States.85 Some Americanists, like Bolkhovitinov, began to gravitate toward an internalist approach, their main concern became “objectivity,” meaning an effort to ground their narrative in hard facts from archival documents rather than in purely ideological or speculative interpretations.86 For this reason, Soviet Americanists took to filling their works with “factological” material and made little or no attempt to analyze and interpret it. This strategy was politically safe, and at the same time the author could demonstrate some personal intellectual independence by disregarding Marxist‑Leninist interpretive clichés. The ideological censors of the day could not point to “bias” in a research work, in which there was no explicit analysis and facts “spoke for themselves.” An attentive reader, however, could find the author’s “subjectivity” transferred from the analytical to the factological level, “revealed in the selection of evidence and construction of historical narrative.”87

46 Another discursive strategy, commonly practiced by the Soviet Americanists, was to use criticism of recent Western scholarship as an introduction of the new ideas to the Soviet reader. According to contemporaries, titles like “Criticism of Recent Concepts of Bourgeois Falsifiers” served more than once as an umbrella for discussion of scholarly ideas that would otherwise be inaccessible in printed form in the USSR. As Gerovitch noted, “this particularly paradoxical discursive strategy permitted Soviet historians to mask their disagreement (with one another) by the lack of criticism, while downplaying their accord (with some Western colleagues) by the presence of criticism.”88 During the 1970s and the 80s many young Soviet Americanists enjoyed reading various Soviet critical surveys of “bourgeois falsifiers,” published by Moscow scholars, including so‑called Referativnye sborniki INION [The Synopsis of the Recent Western Scholarship : Collections by the Institute of Scientific Information] , trying to find a precious information about modern theoretical approaches in Western historiography and social sciences. This “critical” discursive strategy became the most popular especially among Americanists from ISKAN and IMEMO. As contemporaries noted, Soviet intellectuals “benefited from a proliferation of Russian‑language reviews of Western scholarship. Continuing a practice begun in the early 1960s, an overall critical orientation permitted such works to pass the censors while conveying much about Western theory as well as the reality of Western political life.”89 Some Americanists still remember how, in the 1970s, they began a serious study of US political science with reading such “critical anti‑American” literature, written by the recent participants in IREX academic exchanges programs. For the class discussions about American political system, Sivachev and his students used different editions of such books, which eventually became the “Soviet classics of anti‑American political science.”90

47 The most important version of the “critical” discursive strategy was so‑called strategy of the “critical recommendations and advising.” In this way, Soviet Americanists used their criticism of the recent American scholarship and American realities with the goal to offer practical recommendations about Soviet historiography, social science, politics, culture, economy and diplomacy. During the 1970s and 80s, the researchers from ISKAN and IMEMO, who just recently returned from the USA, prepared published recommendations for Soviet political leadership about various economic, political and diplomatic problems, using American economic and political experience.91 After visiting America, Americanists‑historians, such as Bolkhovitinov and Sivachev,

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recommended Soviet scholars to study and use the new research methods of the recent American scholarship, especially the works by the representatives of so‑called “new social,” “new economic” and “new political” histories.92 The recent visitors to America organized the All‑Union conferences, promoting the new research methods of their American colleagues in the USSR, but also supported the academic career of their talented students like Sergei Stankevich, who studied US presidential campaigns, using the approaches of American “new political historians.”93

48 According to contemporaries, the most important advisers in the process of buying US films and commenting them for the Soviet audiences were those Soviet experts who worked in ISKAN. They not only published highly‑acclaimed books about US cinema during the 1970s, but also submitted their recommendations about the most popular and “progressive” American films to Soviet leadership.94 As a result of ISKAN Americanists’ “advising strategy,” in 1974 Soveksportfilm released six US films, in 1977 twelve American films among the 63 films released from socialist countries and 67 movies from capitalist countries ; and during 1979‑82 an average of eight US movies annually.95 In 1976, Soviet ideologists sponsored a special conference with a participation of ISKAN’s experts to discuss the problems of American cinema and US feature films, appropriate for the Soviet audiences.96 During this conference, Viacheslav Shestakov, a Soviet historian of US films, who was funded by IREX for his research trip in US in 1974‑75, delivered a special report about the recent “democratic progressive” trends in Hollywood and recommended the leaders of Goskino buy films by Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese and other “talented” American film directors. Yuri Zamoshkin and other Soviet participants of IREX programs joined Shestakov in his criticism of “lack of professionalism” of those Soviet film critics, who “rejected all, even anti‑capitalist progressive, American films as mere bourgeois propaganda.”97 After 1979 with an access to the new American video tape recording techniques, the experts in US cinema, such as A. Muliarchik and Shestakov, organized special shows of new US movies at ISKAN on a regular basis. These Americanists played an instrumental role in the mass release of the majority US movies in the Soviet Union during the Brezhnev era.98

49 Soviet Americanists employed flexible discursive strategies to convey the desired meaning without violating the constraints of the then politically acceptable language. According to some scholars, Soviet academic discourse was “not as a container of a particular ideology or theory, but rather as a mechanism for advancing a certain agenda via disciplinary knowledge.”99 In practice, Soviet Americanists mixed various discursive strategies together. But the strategy of “critical recommendations” usually became the most prominent in their discursive practices after their frequent research visits in America.

50 Overall, the longer Soviet Americanists stayed in US, the more positive impressions of America they developed and brought back in the USSR. They improved their English language speaking ability and communicative skills, and gained professional experience as experts in US history, politics and culture, “not only working at the American archives and libraries, but also participating in everyday life of ordinary Americans, going shopping, watching ‘sitcom’ series on American television, and the new Hollywood blockbusters in American movie theaters.” After frequent visits to the USA and long staying there in the 1970s, many Soviet Americanists recalled how they “developed great admiration for the West, for the United States […] respect for the

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country, its strength, its people.”100 All Soviet Americanists noted how important the personal contacts with Americans were for their own “discovery” of America and the construction of their mental images of American society and culture. Both Bolkhovitinov and Fursenko acknowledged that living with Americans, in their homes, in the student dorms influenced them more than just their business, academic, relations. Bolkhovitinov recalled how in 1968, staying in the dorm of Cornell University, he spent the nights talking with local students, discussing political and cultural problems such as the Vietnam War and music.101 He came to America “with preconceived notions about the internal crisis in American capitalist society,” and he eventually realized that these notions were wrong. He saw “how talented were these young members of American society” and “how they were capable of critical self‑analysis and self‑government.” “They were more self efficient and self‑reliable than our Soviet youth,” recalled Bolkhovitinov after witnessing American college students “organizing their own meetings, dancing parties and keeping order and respect for human dignity for everyone without any hierarchical distinctions, which were typical for Soviet society” in those days.102 Soviet guests were impressed not only with good conditions of life and research in America, but also with optimism, energy and individual initiative of ordinary Americans. Both their reports to their Soviet administration and the reports of their American hosts reflected this positive reaction. As one American host noted in 1973 that Soviet Americanist A. Fursenko was overwhelmed not only with research capacities in US colleges, but also with his cordial reception by Americans, which led to “mutual understanding” : The greatest mutual benefit, I would judge, came from Mr. Fursenko’s stay at my house. We have known each other for 16 years and corresponded on professional matters. He knows that I know something of the hidden aspects of Soviet life and treat them with some compassion ; he knows I will not be critical of his country. He also appreciated being taken into my family and receive an inside view of American society, without embellishment or ostentation. He in turn freely shared with us his family problems (though my wife did not convert him to women’s lib). At any rate, we managed to establish and to deepen a basic human trust between us which transcends all differences of nationality and ideology. He is a sincere person, genuinely interested in understanding American realities without ideological blinders, though a patriotic citizen of the Soviet Union and conforming to its politics. He considers it his mission to bring American realities closer to the Soviet public, rejoicing over the current détente in Soviet‑American relations.103

51 The discursive practices of Soviet scholars reflected not only their research work in America, but, first of all, their “face to face communication with American colleagues as well.” As some scholars noted later, “these personal ties and this intellectual cross‑fertilization, together with détente’s exposure to foreign life, powerfully abetted the rise of a global outlook during the era of stagnation.”104

Conclusion

52 Academic détente as the entire relaxation of the international relations during the Brezhnev era had a very limited and elitist character, especially for American studies in the USSR. According to the available documents, no more than 600 Soviet Americanists visited the United States during this time, and almost 80 percent of these Soviet academic visitors were representatives of academic and state officials, with only 4 female scholars (less than 1 percent). So it was predominantly male community of

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Soviet visitors. Sometimes, the talented and young Soviet scholars could manage to get to America as “supporting assistants” (soprovozhdaiushchie) of Soviet state apparatchiks. The most typical cases were the “American” visits of young Sivachev in 1967 as “an assistant” of the official from the USSR Ministry of Education, and of Shestakov, “assisting” V. Baskakov, director of the USSR Institute of Cinematic History and Theory of the State Committee for Cinematography during their official visit in 1974. The social background of Soviet visitors also reflected the elitist character of Soviet academic détente : – more than 70 percent of Soviet researchers in America came from families of Soviet intellectual and party elite, and almost 80 percent of them represented the research centers (such as ISKAN and IMEMO) from only one city – Moscow.

53 Overall, the discursive practices of Soviet Americanists fit the Soviet authoritative discourse. But after their American visits, many, especially young Soviet researchers, added to the prevailing “factological” discursive strategies their new scenario of “critical recommendations and advising.” They criticized their American counterparts, but at the same time, they advised Soviet leadership about American politics, economy and culture, and also popularized American realities, cultural products, theories and approaches among ordinary Soviet audiences. Unfortunately, Soviet Americanists’ “advising practices” also had limited and uneven character during the Brezhnev era. Soviet leaders used the ISKAN and IMEMO policy analysts’ advices and recommendations about US policy and diplomacy up to 1979. Not until perestroika did Americanists resume their active “advising” functions for Soviet politicians. Soviet leaders also ignored major recommendations of Americanists about dissemination of US cultural products in the USSR. Only limited number of US movies from the lists recommended by ISKAN experts was selected by Goskino for showing in Soviet movie theaters. The most recommended (by Americanists) films, like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, were never released in the Soviet Union. Soviet historians also had limited success in promoting the new theoretical approaches from America. Their publications were censored, and they were punished by bans for their travel to America for the slightest “ideological deviation.”

54 But in a longer historical perspective, Soviet participation in academic détente was successful. Soviet Americanists began their own participation in creation of an international community of scholars, becoming the partners in academic exchange with their American colleagues. They established good relations not only with American experts in US history, politics and culture, but also with American specialists in Russian/Soviet studies. To some extent, participation of Soviet Americanists in this international community would not only shape the development of American studies in the USSR, but also influence Russian studies in America. After visiting America, Soviet Americanists became hosts for American guests, experts in Russian studies, building strong personal connections with them – Bolkhovitinov with Norman Saul, Sivachev with Donald Raleigh, Vladimir Sogrin with Saul and Alfred Rieber, etc. Eventually, through these personal connections Soviet Americanists and their American colleagues created an important academic international network, which involved their students as well, and which survived the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Paradoxically, as a result of expanding this network during the 1990s, not only American Sovietologists benefited from these connections, but the entire field of Russian studies in America became influenced by former Soviet Americanists, students of Arbatov, Bolkhovitinov, Sivachev and Fursenko. Using this network, these former Soviet scholars, like Vladislav

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Zubok (an expert in Carter’s presidential campaign), Sergei Plekhanov (a scholar of American political science), Andrei Znamenskii (a specialist in history and anthropology of American Indians) and myself (an expert in social history of colonial New York and Pennsylvania) moved to North America and now teach Russian history and politics there.

NOTES

2. Interview with Marina Vlasova and Vadim Koleneko, Moscow, March 20, 1991. See also the memoirs : Georgii Arbatov, The System : An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics (New York, 1992), 289‑290, 292. Compare with the influences of cultural détente on provincial Soviet society in : Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City : The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960‑1985 (Baltimore, MD, 2010) ; idem, “The ‘Closed’ Soviet Society and the West : Consumption of the Western Cultural Products, Youth and Identity in Soviet Ukraine during the 1970s,” in Marie-Janine Calic, Sabine Dabringhaus, Dietmar Neutatz and Julia Obertreis, eds., The Crisis of Socialist Modernity : The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1970s, (Göttingen, 2011), 87‑117. 3. Besides Arbatov’s memoirs, I use Bolkhovitinov’s personal materials. The first attempt to analyze the origin of American studies in the USSR through his own autobiography was made by Bolkhovitinov in English in 1980 : Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, “How I Became a Historian,” Journal of American Studies 14, 1 (1980) : 103‑114. After this first attempt of writing his autobiography, in the late 1970s, Bolkhovitinov returned to writing his memoirs (now in Russian) only during 1990 at the end of perestroika. He kept writing his autobiography for many years, publishing some excerpts in various collections and journals. (See N.N. Bolkhovitinov, “O vremeni i o sebe : zametki istorika [About Time and Myself : Notes of Historian]”, Istoriki Rossii. [Historians of Russia] Vypusk 1 (M., 1997), 67‑80.) But the major text of his memoirs, which Bolkhovitinov proofread the last time in 2005, was never published. I use this text as a major source for this study : Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, Vospominaniia [Memoirs] (M., 2005) [unpublished, typewritten manuscript of 62 pages, which begins with the crossed title “Schastlivaia pora detstva” (The Happy Time of Childhood)] (hereafter ‑ Vospominaniia). 4. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA, 1989), 31. 5. See especially Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak : A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge, Mass., 2004) ; Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More : The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ, 2005), and Juliane Fürst, Stalin’s Last Generation : Soviet Post‑War Youth and the Emergence of Mature Socialism (New York, 2010). 6. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, 14. 7. Robert English, Russia and Idea of the West : Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York, 2000) ; Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire : The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC, 2007) ; idem, Zhivago’s Children : The Last Russian Intelligentsia (Cambridge, MA., 2009) ; Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More ; and Andrei Kozovoi, Par‑delà le mur : La culture de guerre froide soviétique entre deux détentes (P., 2009). See also the idealistic biographies of the major Soviet Americanists : B.D. Kozenko, “Igor Petrovich Dementiev,” in G. Sevostianov, ed., Portrety istorikov : vremia i sud´by [Portraits

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of Historians : Time and Fates],Vol. 4, (M., 2004), 143‑156 ; A. Manykin, V. Sogrin, “Nikolai Vasil évich Sivachev,” ibid, 422‑436 ; A.Yu. Petrov, “Bolkhovitinov Nikolai Nikolaevich (1930‑2008),” in Sevostianov, ed., Portrety istorikov, vol. 5, (M., 2010), 163‑177 ; B. Kozenko, I. Kurilla, “Ivanov Robert Fedorovich (1925‑2003),” ibid., 270‑283 ; R. Ganelin, V. Noskov, V. Pleshkov, “Fursenko Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (1922‑2004),” ibid., 555‑571. 8. English, Russia and Idea of the West, 126. Compare with the Soviet point of view in E.A. Dudzinskaia, Mezhdunarodnye nauchnye sviazi sovetskikh istorikov [The International Scholarly Connections of Soviet Historians] (M., 1978). 9. Christopher Simpson, “Introduction,” in Christopher Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire : Money and Politics in the Social Sciences during the Cold War, (New York, 1998), xvi. See also a good historical survey of development of the American centers for Russian and Soviet studies as the Cold War’s area studies centers in David Engerman, Know Your Enemy : The Rise and Fall of America’s Soviet Experts (New York, 2009). 10. See about this in Engerman, Know Your Enemy, and in Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire, xx. 11. See a growing literature about the Soviet area studies during the Cold War, especially : Tyrus W. Cobb, “National Security Perspectives of Soviet ‘ThinkTanks’,” Problems of Communism, 6 (1981) : 51–59 ; Rose Gottemoeller and Paul Fritz Langer, Foreign Area Studies in the USSR : Training and Employment of Specialists, (Santa Monica, 1983) ; V.M. Danylenko, Ukraina v mizhnarodnykh naukovo‑tekhnichnykh zvíazkakh (70‑80‑i rr.) [Ukraine in the International Scientific and Technical Relations, the 1970s – 1980s] (Kyiv, 1993) ; Marie‑Pierre Rey, “Le Département international du Comité central du PCUS, le MID et la politique extérieure soviétique de 1953 à 1991,” Communisme 74/75 (2003) : 179–215 ; Piotr Cherkasov, IMEMO. Institut Mirovoi Ekonomiki i Mezhdunarodnykh Otnoshenii. Portret na fone epokhi [IMEMO, The Institute of World Economy and International Relations. Portrait on Background of the Epoch] (M., 2004) ; Vladislav Zubok, “Sowjetische Westexperten,” in Bernd Greiner, Tim Müller, Claudia Weber, eds., Macht und Geist im Kalten Krieg (Hamburg, 2011), 108–135. 12. “Doklad akademika N.N. Bolkhovitinova,” Novaia i noveishaia istoria, 2003, No. 6, 185 ; “Yubilei I.A. Beliavskoi [The Anniversary of I. A. Beliavskaia],” Amerikanskii ezhegodnik [The American Year Book] [hereafter – AE] 1995 (M., 1996), 13, 15. In 1970 the sector began publishing its periodical Amerikanskii ezhegodnik. 13. See various editions of the memoirs, written by the first director of this Institute : G.A. Arbatov, Zatianuvsheesia vyzdorovlenie (1953‑1985 gg.) Svidetel´stvo sovremennika [The Delayed Recovery, 1953‑1985. The Testimony of Contemporary] (M., 1991), 381‑399 ; Georgii Arbatov, Chelovek sistemy : Nabliudenia i razmyshlenia ochevidtsa eio raspada [Man of the System : Observations and Reflections of the Contemporary of Its Dissolution] (M., 2002), 132‑147, and a chapter “The Institute : How We ‘Discovered’ America” in English in his, The System, 295‑328. ISKAN had its own monthly magazine SShA : ekonomica, politika, ideologiia. [The USA : Economy, Politics, Ideology]. 14. See how Arbatov described a role of a revived IMEMO : Arbatov, Zatianuvsheiesia vyzdorovlenie, 73‑74. Compare with Cherkasov, IMEMO, 81‑138, 139‑200, 201‑286. 15. See especially “Soglashenie mezhdu SSSR i SShA ob obmenakh v oblasti kul´tury, tekhniki i obrazovania [An Agreement between the USSR and the USA about the Exchanges in the Fields of Culture, Technics and Education],” Pravda, 1958, January 29, no. 29, p. 6. See about this and following U.S.‑USSR exchanges agreements in the books of those who organized these exchanges from the US side : Robert F. Byrnes, Soviet‑American Academic Exchanges, 1958‑1975 (Bloomington, IN, 1976), 46‑47, 48ff., and Yale Richmond, U.S.‑Soviet Cultural Exchanges, 1958‑1986 (Boulder, CO,1987), 2, 4ff. Compare with the Russian publications, especially A.S. Krymskaia, “K istorii nauchno‑obrazovatelńykh obmenov mezhdu SSSR i SShA v kontse

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1950‑kh – 1960‑e gg. [About a History of the Scietific and Educational Exchanges between the USSR and the USA at the End of the 1950s – 1960s],” Noveishaia istoriia Rossii, 2011, No. 2, 99‑106. 16. See about this in Byrnes, Soviet‑American Academic Exchanges, and. Engerman, Know Your Enemy, 139, 171, 246‑248. 17. Richmond, U.S.‑Soviet Cultural Exchanges, 1958‑1986, 32. 18. Interview with Robert F. Ivanov, Moscow, June 25, 1991. 19. Interview with Arnold Shlepakov, Kyiv, Ukraine, April 28, 1990. 20. Library of Congress. Archival Manuscript Collection. International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) [hereafter – LC. IREX]. RC 19 (1976‑77), F 7 ; The Milwaukee Journal, February 21, 1977. An essay about Burmistenko’s visit (“Soviet Critic Finds US Press Ruthless”) in this local newspaper quoted him, calling himself “I am a child of détente.” Compare with English, Russia and Idea of the West, 125. 21. A.A. Porshakova, “Laboratoria istorii SShA v MGU [Laboratory of the US History in MGU],” AE. 1989, 256‑265. In 1983 after Sivachev’s death, Evgenii F. Yaz´kov became a leader of this center. See also Yu.N. Rogulev, “Dvenadtsat´ let vzaimovygodnogo sotrudnichestva (o professional´nykh sviaziakh istorikov‑amerikanistov MGU s amerikanskimi kollegami) [Twelve Years of Mutaully Benificial Cooperation (About Professional Relations between MGU Historians‑Americanists and American Colleagues)] AE. 1986, 246‑250. Compare with A.S. Manykin, ed., Pamiati professora N.V. Sivacheva. SShA : Evoliutsia osnovnykh ideino‑politicheskikh kontseptsii, [In Memory of Professor N.V. Sivachev. The USA : An Evolution of the Main Ideological and Political Concepts] (M., 2004), see esp. 5‑16. 22. Leonid Leshchenko and Ihor Chernikov, “Vsesvitnio vidomyi vitchyznianyi uchenyi : Istoryk‑miznarodnyk, organizator nauky i diplomat. Do 80‑litia vid dnia narodzhennia akademika NAN Ukrainy Arnol´da Mykolaivycha Shlepakova (1930‑1996 rr.) [Internationally Famous Ukrainian Scholar : A Historian‑ Expert in International Relations, Organizer of Historical Scholarship and Diplomat. Celebrating 80‑years Anniversary of the Academician of NAN of Ukraine, Arnold Mykolaievych Shlepakov (1930‑1996)],” in S.V. Vidnians´kyi, ed., Mizhnarodni zv ´iazky Ukrainy : naukovi poshuky i znakhidky [The International Relations of Ukraine : Scholarly Research and Findings] Vypusk 19, (Kyiv : Institut istorii NAN Ukrainy, 2010), 27‑28. A majority of scholars affiliated with this Institute studied various problems of US and Canadian politics. 23. AE. 1972, 303‑306, interviews with Shlepakov and with Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, May 21, 2001. 24. Calculations were made according to data from Gordon S. Wood and Louise G. Wood, eds., Russian‑American Dialogue on the American Revolution (Columbia, 1995), 7 ; Barbara L. Dash, A Defector Reports : The Institute of the USA and Canada (Falls Church, VA, 1982), 7 ; Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, SShA : Problemy istorii i sovremennaia istoriografia [The USA : Problems of History and Recent Historiography] (M., 1980), 340 ; my interview with Bolkhovitinov, May 21, 2001, and with Shlepakov. See also David Shambaugh, Beautiful Imperialist : China Perceives America, 1972‑1990 (Princeton, 1991), 277‑278. 25. LC. IREX. RC 19 (1976‑77), F 39. 26. Arkhiv MGU, f. 9, op. 8, d. 1009, l. 13. 27. Citations are from Arkhiv MGU, f. 9, op. 8, d. 1009, l. 13‑14, and Vospominaniia, 48‑49. See also my interviews with former Soviet Americanists ‑ Bolkhovitinov, Fursenko, Ivanov, Shlepakov and Leshchenko, and the American organizers of their visits – Yale Richmond and Donald Raleigh. Soviet side usually rejected more American candidates, then US hosting institutions. The most infamous cases of Soviet rejection were the denial of David Goldfrank’s (because of his religious topic) and Frank Sysin’s (because of his Ukrainian nationalism) applications. 28. See B. Kozenko, “Lev Izraelevich Zubok (1896‑1967),” in G. Sevostianov, L. Marinovich, L. Mil ´skaya, eds., Portrety istorikov : Vremia i sud´by. vol. 2 (M., 2000), 359‑368 ; R. Ivanov, “Aleksei Vladimirovich Efimov (1896‑1971),” ibid., 369‑381. I described in detail the story of Zubok and Efimov in my article : Sergei I. Zhuk, “Inventing America on the Borders of Socialist Imagination :

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Movies and Music from the USA and the Origins of American Studies in the USSR,” REGION : Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia, 2013, 2(2) : 249‑288. 29. As Fursenko and Leshchenko recalled later, “before a travel to America, the number one ideological enemy of the Soviet Union, it was a normal practice to interview the selected candidate by the KGB representative at the candidate’s teaching or academic institution to remind him about some behavioral moments in the country of our enemies. Only after this prophylactic conversation, a KGB officer could offer to this selected candidate a contract for the future collaboration with the KGB. It was the candidate’s right to accept or ignore this offer.” Both Fursenko in 1991 and Leshchenko in 2013 used the same phrases. 30. See my e‑mail correspondence with Vladislav Zubok, June 9, 2013. He recalled that during his first travel to US in 1987, ISKAN’s administration stopped collecting travel reports. But I still remember that before and after my 1993 research trip to the USA, I was approached by the local former KGB officer, requesting a submission of my academic report to his office at Dnipropetrovsk State University. 31. See about a KGB’s treatment of young Yakovlev, when the Soviet police used him in their provocation against US Embassy in Moscow in 1949 in John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan : An American Life (New York, 2011), 456‑458. Compare with a very idealistic biography of Yakovlev in the essay by V. Pechatnov and S. Pozharskaia, “Nikolai Nikolaievich Yakovlev (1927‑1996),” in Sevostianov, ed., Portrety istorikov : vremia i sud´by, vol. 4, 522‑533. I quote his book commissioned by the KGB : Nikolai N. Yakovlev, TsRU protiv SSSR [CIA against the USSR] (M., 1976), 7. 32. Interview with Bolkhovitinov, May 21, 2001, and interview with Sergei Burin, September 3, 1998, Moscow. Compare with Arkhiv MGU, f. 9, op. 8, d. 1009, l. 91‑94. 33. See archival documents about these submissions in Arkhiv NAN Ukrainy, Opys 1‑L, Otdel kadrov, [hereafter, – ANANU] sprava 1277, l. 54 (Shlepakov’s papers), and Arkhiv MGU, f. 9, op. 8, d. 1009, l. 14 (Sivachev’s papers). 34. Bolkhovitinov, SShA : Problemy, 339‑340, and interviews with Ivanov, Bolkhovitinov, and especially with Leonid Leshchenko, June 26, 2013, Kyiv. In the files, I found the names of only four female Soviet visitors such as Irina Beliavskaia and Marina Vlasova from Moscow. 35. I use phrases from my interview with Marina Vlasova and Aleksandr Fursenko, March 19, 1991, Moscow. See also Nekrich’s memoirs about travels abroad of Soviet Americanists from his Institute of History, and especially about the case of Lev Slezkine, who was denied to travel abroad : Aleksandr Nekrich, Forsake Fear : Memoirs of an Historian, (Boston, 1991), 135, 201. Even the people who were close to the KGB, like Arbatov, had problematic relations with this organization, and sometimes experienced real persecution by the KGB officers. See Arbatov, Zatianuvsheiesia vyzdorovlenie, 269, 272‑274. 36. See a typical academic travel report by O.S. Soroko‑Tsiupa, a MGU Professor of Canadian History, in Arkhiv MGU, f. 9, op. 8, d. 1011, l. 11‑12, about his travel to Toronto, Canada during September 1966 – June 1967. Compare with ANANU, sprava 1277, l. 53‑54, 64, and sprava 1198, l. 31‑34. 37. Bolkhovitinov, Vospominaniia, 47‑48. 38. Ibid., 47‑48, 50, 53. 39. LC. IREX. RC 94, F 28, file of Vitaly Beloborodko. 40. LC. IREX. RC 237, F 13 (1977). See an IREX paper dated of September 20, 1977, with hand‑written description of ISKAN as “a Spy Institute.” As David Godfrank from Georgetown University recalled, the entire situation with Soviet‑American exchanges reminded him of the “Radio Erevan” joke he heard “about 35 years ago.” “Vopros : Are our academic exchanges with the United States reciprocal and equitable ? Otvet : Yes, our academic exchanges with the United States are reciprocal and equitable. They send us scholars, and we treat them like spies ; we send

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them spies, and they treat them like scholars.” Cited from Goldfrank’s e‑mail message to me, August 29, 2013. 41. G. Arbatov, The System, 289‑290, 292. Arbatov explained that as late as 1968 even he, director of the new USA Institute, still had not a single American acquaintance because “given the restrictions of the times […] I didn’t even have the right to initiate such contacts.” See also English, Russia and Idea of the West, 148. 42. Two colleagues from the Department of History at the Johns Hopkins University, who represented fields of Russian History (Jeffrey Brooks) and US History (Jack P. Greene) expressed similar thoughts almost at the same time, in April 1999 during a conversation with me. Alfred Rieber (in 1998‑99) confirmed this as well. As Norman Saul mentioned earlier, in 1975, “academic détente was part of [Soviet Americanists’] mission to this country.” See in LC. IREX. RC 228, F 18, p. 2. 43. See his publication where he describes his career in the Far East : G.P. Sevostianov, Ekspansionistskaia politika SShA na Dal´nem Vostoke, v Kitaie, i Koree v 1905‑1911 gg. [The US Expansionist Politics in Far East, China and Korea during 1905‑1911] (M., 1958). After this book, he stopped writing something original. But as head of “American” sector since 1967, he had mainly been editing the collective works of his sector’s colleagues. See an official Soviet publication, openly praising the professional background of Sevostianov as a Soviet spy/KGB intelligence officer before his academic career in 1950. It was published in the rubric “Nauchnaia zhizn´ [Scholarly Life]” in Amerikanskii ezhegodnik during perestroika. See S.N. Burin, “K 75‑letiiu akademika G.N. Sevostianova,” [Celebrating 75‑years Anniversary of the Academician G.N. Sevostianov] AE 1990 (M., 1991), 211‑215. After his “spy career,” in 1947 Sevostianov was sent by the KGB to the High Diplomatic School of the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which he graduated with a freshly written kandidatskaia dissertation. He defended this dissertation in 1950, when he was recommended by the KGB to be hired by the Institute of History. In 1960 he defended his doctoral dissertation and was appointed in September of 1967 as an acting head of the sector of history of the USA and Canada of the same Institute. In April of 1969 Sevostianov was officially approved as a chair of this sector. 44. LC. IREX. RC 21, F 17 (1974‑75), and LC. IREX. RC 228, F 18, citation from a letter by Allen Kassof, December 26, 1974. Compare with my interviews with Nikolai Bolkhovitinov, Robert Ivanov, Aleksandr Fursenko and Aaron Ya. Gurevich (March 19, 1991) and their very negative relations to the “KGB general” Sevostianov ; they characterized Sevostianov as “the worst enemy of American people,” as the “Soviet hawk of the Cold War.” 45. LC. IREX. RC 228, F 18, p. 2 : “After consultations with faculty and administration and subsequent conversations with Dr. Sevostianov in Washington by myself […], it was decided to extend a proposal for a joint Soviet‑American conference on World War II to be held in Lawrence in the fall of 1976, including a joint publication of papers. The State Department and American Historical Association were also consulted in regard to this project, which was presented to Dr. Sevostianov by Professor John T. Alexander in Moscow in May…” 46. These phrases were mentioned by Vlasova, compare with interview with Donald Raleigh, May 16, 2012. 47. LC. IREX. RC 161, F 25, IREX Memorandum, August 27, 1973, and letter of Cynthia Scott, February 26, 1974. 48. Ibid. 49. LC. IREX. RC 187, F 13 : Sergei Plekhanov’s file, praising his erudition. 50. LC. IREX. RC 228, F 45, letter by Eugene B. Skolnikoff, June 22, 1976, pp. 1‑2. 51. LC. IREX. RC 228, F 45, letter by Julia Holm, July 14, 1976, p. 1‑2. Another problem, which IREX officials began complaining after 1975 was the KGB trying to stop the serious researchers from going to the USA : “Support for dissidents among American scientists is growing steadily and I

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am very curious to see if their actions might not positively affect the quality of scholars coming here.” 52. LC. IREX. RC 228, F 54, letter by John K. Fairbank, June 27, 1975. On May 12, 1975, IREX Memorandum recommended to finance (from 3‑4 weeks) visit of talented Soviet sociologist, “which would promise to lead us beyond the kind of academic tourism which [existed in early years].” See in LC. IREX. RC 161, F 29. 53. LC. IREX. RC 91, F 1 (1963‑68). See Folder : “Trip to USA of P.I. Shitov, from Department of Foreign Relations, Ministry of Higher Education, March (4‑27) 1968”. He went to visit colleges and universities in the USA where Soviet students stayed. See a special hand‑written note with the complaints about Shitov’s visit from IREX representatives. 54. LC. IREX. RC 21, F 68, letter by Donald Fleming from Charles Warren Center at Harvard, April 6, 1976, about a visit by Igor Dementiev. The similar unenthusiastic report about E. Yaz´kov’s visit is placed in the same folder under F 85. 55. LC. IREX. RC 187, F 25, letter by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., New York, November 15, 1979. 56. LC. IREX. RC 228, F 17, letter by Marshall Shulman, January 24, 1975. 57. Look though the entire IREX file for the Year 1975 with recommendations to provide the Soviet analysts with all necessary information about US economy. LC. IREX. RC 228, F 17. I quote a phrase “Soviet powerful people,” from my interview with late Richard Stites, November 18, 2008, Philadelphia. 58. See Arbatov, The System, 202, and English, Russia and Idea of the West, 163‑164, 165. 59. LC. IREX. RC 31, F 26, p. 2. 60. Both Sevostianov and Bolkhovitinov (from IVI) became close friends of the American expert in Russian history, Norman Saul. Sivachev (from MGU) became a friend of the American historian of Soviet Russia Donald Raleigh. Sivachev’s student, Vladimir Sogrin (from IVI), still is a good friend of Norman Saul and has close friendly connections with Alfred Rieber, an American historian of Imperial Russia. 61. Interview with Yale Richmond, May 9, 2012. 62. I use the phrase coined by Professor Alfred Rieber from the University of Pennsylvania from : LC. IREX. RC 21, F 113, letter by Alfred Rieber, May 31, 1972, p. 1. 63. LC. IREX. RC 68, F 36, p. 25. 64. The result of this visit was the first (kandidatskaia) dissertation, published later as a book : Nikolai V. Sivachev, Politicheskaia bor´ba v SShA v seredine 30‑kh godov XX v. [Political Struggle in the USA in the Middle of the 1930s] (M., 1966). 65. Arkhiv MGU, f. 9, op. 8, d. 917, l. 2, 8. Even the Soviet policy analysts, who were present, praised this manuscript. 66. Arkhiv MGU, f. 9, op. 8, d. 1009, l. 14. 67. See about this in LC. IREX. RC 68, F 36, p. 23, 25, and letter of L. Bazhanov, November 28, 1967. Compare with my interviews with Bolkhovitinov, Yale Richmond and Donald Raleigh, and Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War : Raising the Iron Curtain, (University Park, PA, 2003), 43‑44. Sivachev’s colleagues spread rumors about Sivachev’s establishing official KGB connections during this visit to the USA in 1967. (Interview with Robert Ivanov and Igor Dementiev, March 21, 1991, Moscow, IVI, USSR Academy of Sciences). 68. LC. IREX. RC 21, F 113 (1972), p. 2. 69. LC. IREX. RC 21, F 39 (1976) ; Nikolai V. Sivachev, Pravovoe regulirovanie trudovykh otnoshenii v SShA [Legal Regulation of Labor Relations in the USA] (M., 1972), idem, Rabochaia politika pravitel´stva SShA v gody vtoroi mirovoi voiny [Labor Politics of US Government during WWII] (M., 1974). His major findings were summarized in his last book : SShA : Gosudarstvo i rabochii klass : (ot obrazovaniia Soedinennykh Shtatov Ameriki do okonchaniia vtoroi mirovoi voiny) [The USA : The State and Working Class : From the Origin of the United States of America to the Second World War](M., 1982).

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70. Various people, like his former MGU students Vladislav Zubok and Marina Vlasova, and his American colleague Donald Raleigh, noted this. 71. LC. IREX. RC 21, F 17, Vladimir Petrov’s letter of February 3,1975, p. 2. 72. LC. IREX. RC 180, F 66 (1978‑80). Nikolai Sivachev and Nikolai Yakovlev, Russia and the United States : U.S.‑Soviet Relations from the Soviet Point of View (Chicago, 1980). 73. LC. IREX. RC 187, F 48 (1979). See about a recommendation of Sogrin for MGU graduate program in Arkhiv MGU, f. 9, op. 8, d. 1009, l. 93. Among his books see : V.V. Sogrin, Istoki sovremennoi burzhuaznoi ideologii v SShA [The Roots of Contemporary Bourgeois Ideology in the USA](M., 1975) ; idem, Ideinye techenia v Amerikanskoi revoliutsii XVIII veka [The Ideological Currents in the American Revolution of the 18th Century] (M., 1980), and idem, Osnovateli SShA : Istoricheskie portrety [The Founders of the USA : Historical Portraits] (M., 1983). 74. Bolkhovitinov, “How I Became a Historian,” 111. 75. Nikolai N. Bolkhovitinov, “The Study of United States History in the Soviet Union,” American Historical Review, 74, 4 (1969) : 1221‑1242. See Bolkhovitinov, Vospominaniia, 47‑48, 50, 53. See also his official academic report about his visit in the USA in 1968 : N.N. Bolkhovitinov, “V arkhivakh i bibliotekakh SShA : nakhodki, vstrechi, vpechatlenia [In Archives and Libraries of the USA : Findings, Meetings, Impressions],” AE. 1971, 329‑340, compare with his essay : “O vremeni i o sebe” 73‑74. 76. Interview with Jack P. Greene, September 15, 1998, Baltimore. See how American historians praised Bolkhovitinov : Marcus Rediker, “The Old Guard, the New Guard, and the People at the Gates : New Approaches to the Study of American History in the USSR,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 1991 (October), vol. 48, 580‑597 ; John T. Alexander, “Catherine the Great and the Rats,” in Samuel H. Baron and Cathy A. Frierson, eds., Adventures in Russian Historical Research : Reminiscences of American Scholars from the Cold War to the Present (Armonk, NY, 2003), 54, 56, 58 ; Donald J. Raleigh, “A Journey from St. Petersburg to Saratov,” ibid., 145. See also the best biographical essay about Bolkhovitinov in Russian : B.N. Komissarov, “As otechestvennoi amerikanistiki (k 70‑letiiu N.N. Bolkhovitinova),” [Ace of the Russian American Studies (Celebrating 70‑Years Anniversary of N.N. Bolkhovitinov)] in A.O. Chubarian, ed., Russkoe otkrytie Ameriki : Sbornik statei, posviashchionnyi 70‑letiu akademika Nikolaia Nikolaievicha Bolkhovitinova, [The Russian Discovery of America : The Collection of the Essays Devoted to 70‑years Anniversary of Nikolai Nikolaievich Bolkhovitinov] (M., 2002), 8‑33. 77. See Bolkhovitinov, Vospominaniia, 50‑51, 52, 53. 78. Nikolai Bolkhovitinov, The Beginnings of Russian‑American Relations, 1775‑1815 (Cambridge, MA, 1975) ; idem, Russko‑amerikanskie otnosheniia, 1815‑1832 [Russian‑American Relations, 1815‑1832] (M., 1975) ; idem, Russia and the American Revolution (Tallahassee, Fl., 1975) ; Rossiia i SShA : stanovlenie otnoshenii, 1765‑1815 : Sbornik dokumentov [Russia and the USA : Formation of the Relations, 1765‑1815 : Collection of Documents] (M., 1980) ; N.N. Bashkina, N.N. Bolkhovitinov, J.H. Brown et al., eds., The United States and Russia : The Beginning of Relations, 1765‑1815 : Collection of Documents, (Washington, D.C., 1980). 79. Interview with Sergei Burin. Using the material, brought by Bolkhovitinov from America, Burin eventually defended his dissertation in 1978 : S.N. Burin, Sotsial´nye protivorechiia i konflikty v Virginii i Marilende (1642‑1676) : [Social Contradictions and Conflicts in Virginia and Maryland, 1642‑1676] Avtoref. dis. kand. ist. nauk (M., 1978). 80. The best study of the new trends in US historiography was written by Bolkhovitinov as a result of his research trips to the USA, SShA : Problemy istorii. 81. See the best summary of the Soviet history writing about US history in : Bolkhovitinov, SShA : Problemy istorii, 339‑378. Compare with another survey : N. Sivachev and I. Savel´eva, “American Labor in Recent Soviet Historiography,” Labor History, 18, 3 (Summer 1977) : 407‑432.

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82. Slava Gerovitch, “Writing History in the Present Tense : Cold War‑era Discursive Strategies of Soviet Historians of Science and Technology,” in Simpson, ed., Universities and Empire, 189‑228, 190. 83. LC. IREX. RC 229, F 15, Ivan M. Krasnov’s file, letter by Robert F. Byrnes, May 23, 1972. Ibid, RC 21, F 113. 84. Compare with the similar developments among Chinese Americanists in Shambaugh, Beautiful Imperialist, 283. 85. I follow here a logic of Slava Gerovitch, “Writing History in the Present Tense,” 199. 86. See the similar developments in American historiography in Peter Novick, That Noble Dream : The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession, (New York, 1988). 87. Gerovitch, “Writing History,” 199‑200. 88. Ibid., 200‑201. As contemporaries recalled that such “critical” reviews and analyses “served as a … means of familiarizing researchers with [Western thought and practice] […] In many cases such works were written for the purpose of disseminating this information, employing a critical orientation as a cover to obtain consent for publication.” See in Vladimir Shlapentokh, The Politics of Sociology in the Soviet Union (Boulder, CO, 1987), 16. 89. See in English, Russia and Idea of the West, 129. For many Americanists, like Arbatov, their work as translator‑reviewers of foreign‑language political and economic work for various Soviet reference editions was “instrumental in shedding dogmas about the West.” See Arbatov, The System, 34. 90. See the most popular among Moscow Americanists books, written by the Soviet participants in IREX programs : V.G. Kalenskii, Politicheskaia nauka v S.Sh.A. Kritika burzhuaznykh kontseptsii vlasti [Political Science in the USA : Criticism of Bourgeois Concepts of Power] (M., 1969) and Iu. Zamoshkin, ed., Amerikanskoe obshchestvennoe mnenie i politika, [American Public Opinion and Politics] (M., 1978). Marina Vlasova mentioned this fact in her interview. 91. I refer to Prognozy razvitiia avtomatizatsii proizvodstva v mashinostroenii v SShA [Prognosis of the Development of Automation of Production in Machine‑Building in the USA] (M. : ISKAN, 1978), and many other documents, such “the untitled internal institute document reviewing ISKAN’s main policy recommendations of 1968‑79,” provided by a former ISKAN Deputy Director Sergei Plekhanov to Robert English in July 1991, quoted in English, Russia and Idea of the West, 156. See also a detailed description of various “analytical reports,” submitted by ISKAN Americanists to the Soviet government in Barbara L. Dash, A Defector Reports, 10‑12. 92. See discussions of the new methods in Sivachev’s research in Arkhiv MGU, f. 9, op. 8, d. 917, part 1, l. 8, and Bolkhovitinov, SShA : Problemy istorii , 22, 23 ff. 93. See about this strategy of advising in the list of activities during the 1970s in L.V. Shut´ko et al., eds., Nikolai Nikolaevich Bolkhovitinov, (M., 2002), 4‑6, 44‑52. About Stankevich’s research see S. Stankevich, “‘Novaia ekonomicheskaia politika’ administratsii R. Niksona v 1971‑1974 gg.,” [New Economic Policy of Nixon’s Administration in 1971‑74] AE 1986, 5‑23. 94. Unfortunately, the recent scholarship about Soviet film consumption ignores the influence of détente and a role of the Soviet experts in foreign films’ acquisition in the USSR. See, e.g. Kristin Roth‑Ey, Moscow Prime Time : How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire That Lost the Cultural Cold War (Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2011), 115‑120, about coverage of foreign films and western movie stars in a magazine Sovietskii ekran [Soviet Movie Screen] from 1960 to 1965. And no mentioning of détente at all ! Compare with the most popular books about US cinema, prepared by the Soviet Americanists during that period : Viacheslav Shestakov, Amerika v zerkale ekrana : Amerikanskoe kino 70‑kh godov [America in the Mirror of a Screen : American Cinema of the 1970s] (M., 1977) ; Na ekrane Amerika [On the Movie Screen – America] Collection edited by I.E. Kokarev (M., 1978) ; A.S. Muliarchik and V.P. Shestakov, eds., Amerikanskaia khudozhestvennaia kul´tura v sotsial´no‑politicheskom kontekste 70‑kh godov 20 veka [American Artistic Culture in Social and Political Context of the 1970s] (M., 1982).

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95. Sovetskii ekran, 1971, No. 24, 19 ; 1972, No. 24, 17 ; 1974, No. 24, 17 ; 1977, No. 24, 17 ; 1979, No. 24, 15 ; 1981, No. 24, 15 ; 1982, No. 22, 15 ; Iskusstvo kino, [Art of Cinema] 1980, No. 6, 192. See about the influences of American movies on the Soviet audiences during the Brezhnev era in : Sergei I. Zhuk, “Zapad v sovetskom ‘zakrytom’ gorode : ‘chuzhoe’ kino, ideologiia i problemy kul ´turnoi identichnosti na Ukraine v brezhnevskuiu epokhu (1864‑1982 gody) [The West in the Soviet ‘Closed’ City : Western Films, Ideology and Problems of Cultural Identification in Ukraine during the Brezhnev Era (1964‑1982)],” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, [New Literary Review] 2009, No. 100 (6), 548‑565. 96. See about this conference in Valerij Golovskoi, “Amerikanskoe kino – “za” i “protiv” (konferentsia 1976 goda),” [American Cinema – pro and contra (A Conference of 1976)] idem, Eto bylo nedavno… Izbrannye publikatsii za 30 let [In Days of Yore : Selected Publications for 30 Years] (Baltimore, MD : Seagull Press, 2010), 156‑163. See also his essay, “Amerikanskie fil´my na sovetskikh ekranakh (1957‑1980) [American Movies on the Soviet Screens, 1957‑1980],” Golovskoi, Eto bylo nedavno, [In Days of Yore] 169‑177. 97. Golovskoi, “Amerikanskoe kino,” 161, 162‑163 ; LC. IREX. RC 228, F 43, “about visit of Viacheslav Shestakov (Nov. 1974‑April 1975) from the Institute of Cinematic History and Theory of the State Committee for Cinematography,” and RC 237, F26 : about visit of Iurii Zamoshkin from ISKAN, Nov.‑Dec. 1977. 98. See my e‑mail correspondence with Vladislav Zubok, May 28, 2013 and Golovskoi, May 8, 2013. Golovskoi recalled how a chair of the Goskino F. Ermash and other representatives of Soviet administration discussed a possibility of Soviet release of US movies The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, which were shown for the “selected audiences” in Moscow during the end of the 1970s. See in Golovskoi, “Amerikanskoe kino,” 158‑159. 99. Gerovitch, “Writing History,” 217‑218. 100. I quoted my Interview with Robert F. Ivanov, Moscow, June 25, 1991, and English, Russia and Idea of the West, 150. Another Soviet Americanist who became a diplomat noted, “You start to resemble the people, the country, where you work, and this was especially so for those who worked on the USA. It took a higher level of professionalism and culture, and such experience changes your outlook.” Ibid., 298. 101. See his official report : Bolkhovitinov, “V arkhivakh…” 329‑340, compare with his essay : “O vremeni i o sebe,” 73‑74. 102. Bolkhovitinov, Vospominaniia, 50‑51. See interview with Bolkhovitinov, June 2, 2001, Moscow. 103. LC. IREX. RC 21, F 109, letter by Theodore Von Laue, May 15, 1973, pp. 1‑2. “Poor man : his visit in the U.S. was so hectic, too much to be observed and digested ! I wonder how he feels now, back in Leningrad, with all his presents and his memories…” 104. Interview with Leshchenko, June 25, 2013, Kyiv ; English, Russia and Idea of the West, 128.

ABSTRACTS

Starting with three Soviet Americanists in 1959, the Soviet‑American academic exchange programs counted 600 Soviet experts in American studies traveling to the US on a regular basis by the 1980s. These scholars became participants in the important cultural dialogue between Soviet and American societies, “opening” both societies to each other and widening their intellectual and cultural horizons. At the same time the Soviet scholars’ moves were monitored

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by both Soviet intelligence and representatives of various US federal agencies. Comparison of the two different perspectives of Soviet and American intelligence information gives a unique picture of cultural dialogue during academic exchanges in the era of détente. This article explores the development of the cultural dialogue between Soviet and American scholars during the Brezhnev era, the so‑called academic détente. It draws on documents of the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX) housed in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Soviet intelligence travel reports, personal memoirs, diaries, correspondence, and more than 70 interviews, and concentrates on personal stories of Soviet Americanists such as Nikolai Bolkhovitinov.

En 1959, les programmes d’échanges universitaires soviéto‑américains ont débuté avec trois Soviétiques américanistes. Dans les années 1980, ce sont 600 experts soviétiques en études américaines qui se sont rendus régulièrement aux États‑Unis. Ces universitaires ont participé à l’instauration d’un important dialogue culturel entre les sociétés soviétique et américaine, « ouvrant » chacune d’entre elles à l’autre et élargissant leurs horizons culturels et intellectuels. Dans le même temps, l’activité des universitaires soviétiques était surveillée par les services soviétiques de renseignement et les représentants de différentes agences fédérales américaines. En exposant les deux points de vue, la comparaison des informations recueillies par les services de renseignement soviétiques et américains offre un tableau unique du dialogue culturel qui s’est établi par le biais des échanges universitaires soviéto‑américains durant cette période de l’ère brejnévienne dite de « détente académique ». L’article explore l’évolution de ce dialogue. Il s’appuie sur les documents du Bureau des échanges et de la recherche internationale (IREX) conservés à la division des manuscrits de la bibliothèque du Congrès, sur les rapports de voyage des services soviétiques de renseignement, sur des Mémoires, des journaux intimes, de la correspondance, et sur plus de 70 entretiens. Il accorde une attention toute particulière aux récits d’américanistes soviétiques, notamment celui de Nikolaj Bolhovitinov.

AUTHOR

SERGEI I. ZHUK Department of History, Ball State University, Muncie, [email protected]

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Mежду советской гордостью, политической бдительностью и культурным шоком Американские гастроли народного ансамбля танцев « Самоцветы» в 1979 году Entre fierté soviétique, vigilance politique et choc culturel : la tournée américaine de l’ensemble populaire de danse « Samocvety » en 1979 Between Soviet pride, political vigilance, and cultural shock : American tour of the folk dance band “Samotsvety” in 1979

Igor´ Narskij

1 В пятом томе шеститомной энциклопедии « Челябинская область», опубликованной по заказу областной администрации в 2006 г., есть небольшая статья о местном самодеятельном ансамбле танцев « Самоцветы». В ней говорится о том, что он создан в 1938 г. при дворце культуры Челябинского тракторного завода, имеет богатый танцевальный репертуар (который отчасти перечисляется) и объединяет около 250 человек. Названы все руководившие им в разные годы хореографы, двое из них, особо важные в контексте этой статьи, Наталия Николаевна Карташова (возглавляла ансамбль в 1948 – 1963) и Вера Ивановна Бондарева (1963 – 1988), удостоились отдельных биографических статей в челябинской энциклопедии. Примерно треть статьи была посвящена гастролям ансамбля по СССР и за его пределами : Состоялись выступления на заключит[ельном] концерте Всесоюз[ного] смотра художеств[енной] самодеятельности (1954), всемирных фестивалях молодежи и студентов (Москва ; 1957, 1985), 5‑м съезде профсоюзов (Москва, 1961), празднике, посв[ященном] 850‑детию Москвы (1997), на сцене Большого театра и др[угих] концертных площадках страны. Ансамбль гастролировал в Венгрии (1957, 1989), Японии (1960), на Кубе (1969), в Чехословакии (1971, 1973), Румынии (1977), США (1978), Дании,

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Норвегии, Финляндии, Швеции (1983), Италии (1996). Коллектив – лауреат фестиваля « Белые ночи» (Ленинград, 1965), 10‑го Рабочего фестиваля в Германии (1968, Большая золотая мед[аль]), Всесоюз[ного] смотра ЦК ВЛКСМ (1972), Всеросс[ийского] танц[евального] конкурса (Абакан, 1990), фестиваля им[ени] Карташовой (Чел[ябинск] ; 1994, 1996), Междунар[одного] фестиваля хореографич[еского] иск[усст]ва (Москва, 1997) и др.1 2 О гастрольной деятельности ансамбля « Самоцветы», точнее – о поездке небольшой группы его танцовщиков в США в 1979 г. (ошибочно датированной в энциклопедии 1978 г.), и пойдет речь ниже. Выбор столь незначительного события темой исторического исследования нуждается в пояснении. Система советской художественной самодеятельности сложилась в СССР в централизованный государственный проект во второй половине 1930‑х гг. Ее назначение изначально состояло в организации массового культурного досуга под присмотром государства, в воспитании подрастающего поколения в идеологически « правильном» духе, в развитии и сохранении советской « народной» культуры, в пропаганде советских достижений внутри страны и за рубежом. В хрущевскую эпоху, в рамках курса на « развернутое строительство коммунизма», интенсивное развитие самодеятельного творчества получило дополнительную функциональную нагрузку – приучать советских граждан к самостоятельности и инициативе2.

3 По ряду причин любительская хореография с самого начала заняла в этом государственном проекте привилегированные позиции, которые успешно сохраняла на протяжении почти всей советской истории, поскольку выполняла все перечисленные функции наиболее наглядно и убедительно. Во‑первых, наряду с фото и кино, (самодеятельный) танец позволял дополнять словесную пропаганду набором постоянных эмоциональных впечатлений – зрительных, слуховых, художественных3. Во‑вторых, « народный» танец весьма выигрышно обосновывал концепцию монолитной советской культуры, объединяя традицию и современную идеологию, фольклорное и профессиональное, сельское и городское, местное и национально‑имперское, будничное и праздничное4. К периоду, о котором пойдет речь, хореографическая художественная самодеятельность была представлена в СССР более чем 50‑тью тыс. хореографических коллективов, объединявших почти 700 тыс. участников5. 4 Вместе с тем, поздний брежневский период был отмечен для советского хореографического любительства некоторыми особенностями. Во‑первых, поездка челябинских танцовщиков в США пришлась на позднюю фазу Холодной войны, контекст которой оказывал определенное влияние и на советское самодеятельное творчество. При этом следует учитывать, с одной стороны, что глобальный и тотальный конфликт эпохи Холодной войны имел тенденцию к вездесущности… и пытался охватить каждый уголок общественной и частной жизни. Радикальные вовлечения и исключения и тяга к участию касались не только государств и союзов, но и общественных организаций и индивидов. <…> Холодная война в принципе создала для многих ее участников приемлемые смысловые структуры,

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индивидуальный и коллективный порядок, а также политически дисциплинировала.6

5 Наряду с другими институциями, советскую художественную самодеятельность позволительно рассматривать как явление, отражавшее, и, одновременно, рождавшее настроения, мироощущения, поведение и образы, специфичные для эпохи биполярного мира. С другой стороны, тотальность и вездесущность Холодной войны одновременно означает, что в ней были центр и периферия и « определенные политические, экономические, социальные или культурные тенденции скорее более отдаленно принадлежали к Холодной войне или лишь частично участвовали в ней»7. Советское хореографическое любительство не было порождением Холодной войны, и отдельные сферы его бытования – и прежде всего гастрольная деятельность за рубежом – имели большее отношение к глобальному противостоянию, чем другие.

6 Во‑вторых, советская самодеятельность, которая была построена на соревновательном принципе, воплощенном в ежегодных местных, региональных и центральных смотрах и конкурсах, в 1978 г. была потрясена в своих основах благодаря Постановлению ЦК КПСС « О мерах по дальнейшему развитию самодеятельного художественного творчества». Количество поездок на смотры, концерты и фестивали, составлявшие один из главных мотивов участия в самодеятельности, в целях экономии государственных средств было сокращено. В результате число танцевальных коллективов только в 1981 г. сократилось в РСФСР на 5718. 7 Кроме того, в то время Челябинск – один из центров советской военной промышленности – был закрытым городом, в котором иностранные туристы не появлялись до распада СССР. Снабжение города на рубеже 1970‑х – 1980‑х ощутимо ухудшалось : до введения талонов для нормированного снабжения продовольствием оставались считанные месяцы9. 8 Итак, группа танцовщиков из « Самоцветов» – одного из старейших советских любительских танцевальных ансамблей, финансировавшегося одним из крупнейших заводов СССР, осенью 1979 г. на две недели отправилась на гастроли в США. У многих участников поездки позади был опыт гастрольных выездов в социалистические страны, но в « капиталистическом» зарубежье никто из них не бывал. Для советского гражданина зарубежная поездка была почти неисполнимой мечтой, а на Запад – тем более. Для нормального гражданина поездка в западное зарубежье была возможна почти исключительно через систему самодеятельности, для чего, правда, группе уже нужно было продемонстрировать очень высокий технический уровень и известную идеологическую надежность.10 9 Возможности ездить по стране за счет участия в художественной самодеятельности после упомянутого Постановления ЦК КПСС 1978 г. резко сократились. Так что поездка челябинцев в США была трудно вообразимой в те годы экзотикой.

10 Сюжет, которому посвящена данная статья, служит, на мой взгляд, прекрасным поводом еще раз на конкретном микроисторическом примере

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задаться вопросом, как в СССР « большие» государственные проекты осваивались и присваивались « маленькими» людьми, как экстраординарные события встраивались в повседневную жизнь. Собранные мною сведения о гастролях « Самоцветов» в Америке (и других странах) представляют замечательный материал для ответа на этот вопрос. Во‑первых, мною были проведены интервью с руководителем ансамбля в тот период Верой Ивановной Бондаревой (1926 – 2013) и ее репетитором и помощником Юрием Ивановичем Основиным (1949 г.р., с 1988 по 2005 г. – руководителем ансамбля), принимавшими участие в поездке. Во‑вторых, в моем распоряжении оказались дневниковые записи Бондаревой, сделанные ею во время поездок в Румынию (1977), США (1979) и Северную Европу (1983). В‑третьих, имеется популярная литература (с вкраплениями газетных репортажей, которые в этой связи не анализируются отдельно) о предыдущих поездках челябинских хореографов‑любителей, принадлежащая перу прежней руководительницы ансамбля танцев Челябинского тракторного завода Наталии Николаевны Карташовой (1912 – 1994), при которой начались зарубежные гастрольные выезды, и ее мужу, известному челябинскому журналисту Рафаилу Фадеевичу Шнейвайсу (1910 – 2002), приложившему все силы для популяризации деятельности своей жены. Эта литература позволяет констатировать наличие устоявшегося дискурса о зарубежных поездках тракторозаводских танцоров, в рамках которого описывалась (и воспринималась) и американская поездка « Самоцветов». Записные книжки Бондаревой 1970‑х – 1980‑х гг. и устные интервью, взятые 30 – 35 лет спустя, свидетельствуют об устойчивости и живучести этого дискурса. Все эти источники позволяют рассмотреть дискурс о зарубежных гастролях челябинских танцовщиков и попытаться выявить под его оболочкой следы синхронных восприятий и впечатлений от посещения США, проблем их перевода в личный и групповой опыт – восприятий, впечатлений и проблем 35‑летней давности, погребенных в интервью не только под « скорлупой» официального дискурса, но и под многослойным покровом более позднего, постсоветского опыта. 11 В канон описания самодеятельных гастролей в советской публицистике 1950‑х – 1980‑х гг. входили трудная подготовка к поездке ; экзотика местных условий, особенно жизни в западных странах ; успешные выступления, которые сопровождались восторженным приемом, не исключавшим, однако, известной (политически обоснованной) подозрительности с обеих сторон ; профессиональная открытость и обмен достижениями с коллегами за рубежом. В моей статье описание американских гастролей будет предпринято в рамках этого же канона, (но с привлечением табуированных в советское время сюжетов – например, отношений с непременными в гастролирующей группе сотрудниками КГБ или культурного шока от столкновения с « тлетворным влиянием Запада») что, на мой взгляд, не только облегчит структурирование нарратива, но и поможет ответить на вопрос об освоении провинциальными самодеятельными танцовщиками централизованного государственного культурного проекта, о столкновении в их жизни экстраординарного и обыденного.

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Подготовка к заграничным гастролям, волнение и чувство ответственности

12 Согласно записи в записной книжке В.И. Бондаревой, « Самоцветы» были приглашены на гастроли американским обществом « Friendship ambassadors» и направлены в США с одобрения Челябинских обкомов КПСС и ВЛКСМ по линии комсомольско‑молодежной туристической компании « Спутник»11. Согласно версии Ю.И. Основина, « Самоцветы» ездили в Америку по профсоюзной линии. Как мы вышли на Америку – это вообще. Мы вышли на центральное телевидение, в оперном театре нас снимали и показали на центральном телевидении. И, главное, такое : 45 минут. Это редкость. Обычно 20 минут показывают, там, 25, а тут 45 минут, из оперного. И там они были в Москве, делегация эта тоже, они увидели и говорят : « Мы хотим вот этот коллектив». Как они вышли на ВЦСПС, ВЦСПС сразу заявочку нам прислали, и вот так мы оказались в Америке.12 Скорее всего, правы оба свидетеля, поездка стала результатом действий партийных, комсомольских и профсоюзных инстанций. 13 Однако без готовности руководства ЧТЗ раскошелиться на весьма дорогостоящую поездку своих танцоров в США она вряд ли бы состоялась. Как рассказывала В.И. Бондарева, « очень трудно было выехать. Мы впервые выехали»13. Согласно ее устному свидетельству, руководство завода не было готово оплатить гастроли « Самоцветов» в США. Положительно вопрос разрешился во время пребывания в Челябинске министра среднего машиностроения, которому подчинялся тракторный завод. В антракте концерта « Самоцветов» во Дворце культуры ЧТЗ высокий гость зашел за кулисы, чтобы поприветствовать В.И. Бондареву, с которой был знаком. В их разговор вмешалась директор ДК ЧТЗ Надежда Артемьевна Деда, пожаловавшаяся министру : « Денег нет. Пришел вызов на Америку, и ничего...» Тот вопросительно повернулся к генеральному директору завода Николаю Родионовичу Ложченко. Директор отреагировал моментально : « Все, Вера Ивановна, успокойся – поедешь»14. Таким интимно‑фамильярным способом, показательным для советских патрон‑клиентских отношений, в одночасье была решена судьба американских гастролей тракторозаводских танцовщиков. После этого началась тяжелая подготовка к поездке, описанная В.И. Бондаревой в устном рассказе : И вот мы стали готовиться. И когда мы стали готовиться – это такая была трудная работа. Я их так мучила. И чтобы уложиться в час десять минут, переодевание было жесткое между номерами. Поэтому я так все отработала : каждый имел два стула. В первом костюме он выступает. Уже стоит наверху положен тот костюм, который должен надеться. На пустой стул снимается этот костюм, чтобы потом этот порядок не терялся. ... И обувь стоит подряд. Жесткое было переодевание. Через пять минут они должны быть одеты в другом. И стоят за кулисами, уже готовятся на второй номер. Потому что один и тот же состав... Номер за номером. Как машины работали. Я их до того здесь вышколила, что они... язык у них на

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плечах. И вот когда не получалось, я сердце свое замыкала, я делалась таким жестоким репетитором. Я прошла сама через это... Поэтому : « Сначала !» Я не продолжала. Они возмущаются. Я им : « Будем возмущаться – раздеваемся, я делаю отказную и сидим дома. Хотите Америку – будете делать то, что я хочу». И они вынуждены, язык на плечах, они вынуждены сначала. Это моисеевская в общем‑то эта хватка. Вот. Я побыла не раз у него на репетициях, я знаю. И мы начинаем сначала. Раз не получилось, два, я опять сначала. А когда они уже готовы были меня разорвать на куски, в общем, у них получалось. И все. А потом шло как по маслу. Настолько механизм отрабатывался, настолько уже точно застежки, все... Они там конвейером стояли, значит, один более свободный там, из другого номера, из третьего, он мог ему застегивать там, застежки там такие у девочек, и замки, или застежки там такие, или корсаж, все моментально.15 14 В этом описании, наряду с индустриальными и брутальными телесными метафорами, интересна отсылка к авторитету Игоря Александровича Моисеева (1906 – 2007) – отца‑основателя советского проекта самодеятельного народного танца, действительно известного жестким отношением к своим подопечным. Этот эпизод наглядно свидетельствует о распространенных в советской хореографической самодеятельности авторитарных, жестких, на грани жестокости, отношениях между руководителем и исполнителями, а также о суровой системе тренажа и ориентации на победу, взятых самодеятельностью на вооружение из профессиональной хореографии и спорта.

15 Серьезное отношение к подготовке зарубежных гастролей свидетельствует об их восприятии как чрезвычайно ответственного дела государственной важности, как масштабного государственного проекта. Не случайно этот сюжет является обязательным и в текстах о более ранних поездках « Самоцветов» и их предшественников. Вот как, например, описывает муж Н.Н. Карташовой подготовку к самой первой зарубежной поездке танцоров ЧТЗ : Весной 1957 года танцевальный коллектив тракторного завода получил радостную весть : он включен в состав делегации, которая посетит Венгрию. На подготовку к поездке дается два месяца. И одна весть огорчительная : надо отобрать всего лишь шестнадцать танцоров. Это из шестидесяти ребят коллектива. Но ничего не поделаешь. Наташа отобрала восемь работниц завода и восемь парней – рабочих и мастеров. Начали готовиться к поездке. Из обширного репертуара выбрали пять танцев и плясок с таким расчетом, чтобы показать разнохарактерное народное творчество нашей страны. В состав делегации, кроме танцевальной группы тракторного завода, входили участники художественной самодеятельности Москвы, Ленинграда, завода « Ростсельмаш», Грузии, Азербайджана. Перед отъездом из Москвы состоялся сводный концерт. Программа была обширной и красочной. Номера следуют один за другим в хорошем и слаженном ритме. […] Все это свидетельствовало не только о хорошем вкусе исполнителей, но и о направленности, жизнерадостности нашей самодеятельности.16

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Аналогично выстроен и пролог к поездке челябинцев в составе большой советской делегации в Японию в 1960 г. в описании Н.Н. Карташовой в литературной обработке Р.Ф. Шнейвайса : Итак, мы летим в Японию. Позади – недели очень напряженной подготовительной работы. Непростое это было дело – за месяц подготовить и, что называется, отшлифовать до блеска шесть танцевальных номеров, совершенно разных по рисунку, характеру, темпу. Русский танец « Вышел гусь гулять» и уральская « Семера», украинский « Гопак» и молдавский « Жок», белорусская « Лявониха» – вот репертуар, который мы собирались показать японским зрителям. Нам говорили : японцы любят медленные, лирические танцы. А наши танцы и пляски – огневые, темпераментные, быстрые… Как их встретят в Японии ? Мы долго раздумывали : какой готовить репертуар, что показать в далекой стране ? Однако задача была поставлена совершенно ясная : показать танцы народов нашей страны во всем их многообразии, во всей красоте. Но просят еще и лирический русский танец. Такой танец (« На гулянье») поставил заслуженный артист РСФСР В. Арсеньев. В составе делегации, вылетевшей в Японию, было десять челябинцев. […] Кроме нашего танцевального коллектива, в ансамбле песни и пляски советских профсоюзов, выезжавшем в Японию по приглашению Генерального совета японских профсоюзов, были музыканты, певцы, танцоры из Москвы, Ленинграда, Горького, Луганска, Уфы, Подольска. Возглавлял делегацию редактор журнала « Художественная самодеятельность» Дмитрий Николаевич Анастасьев.17 16 В обоих текстах – о подготовке к поездкам в Венгрию и Японию – присутствует некий стандартный набор содержательных секвенций : радость и волнение по поводу предстоящей поездки, трудный отбор исполнителей и танцев, упорная подготовка, перечисление состава гастролеров, известность которых повышает статус челябинских участников. Однотипность этих текстов объясняется не только общим авторством. Р.Ф. Шнейвайс был известен повышенной чуткостью к актуальной политической и идеологической конъюнктуре. Его тексты о гастролях танцоров ЧТЗ содержат эксплицитные или имплицитные указания на гордость советской культурой, ответственность и сознательность советских граждан, убежденность в превосходстве социализма и ущербности капитализма, неизбежность победы СССР в соревновании с США.

17 В целом, газетные тексты Карташовой‑Шнейвайса, пользовавшихся большим авторитетом в Челябинске, безусловно, читавшиеся всем составом « Самоцветов», поспособствовали представлению гастролеров о доверенной им высокой миссии. Не случайно В.И. Бондарева, описывая в разговоре со мной свой гардероб, обмолвилась : Ехать за границу – вызывают тебя в обком или куда – экипировка должна быть, по большому счету. Мы едем как полпреды, значит, надо быть одетыми.18

18 Уверения в высокой миссии советских самодеятельных гастролеров приходили и от других авторитетов. Так, в записной книжке В.И. Бондаревой о поездке в Румынию в 1977 г., за два года до американских гастролей, есть эпизод о том, что на заключительном банкете в Бухаресте 22 ноября 1‑й секретарь ВЦСПС Людмила Андреевна Землянская, « обойдя все столы,

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лично благодарила ребят за выполненную миссию»19. Отправляясь в неизвестное, самодеятельные танцоры должны были чувствовать себя полномочными представителями своей страны, взявшимися за выполнение крайне почетного и ответственного дела. Вероятно, не только индоктринация гастролеров идеей мирного соревнования двух систем как содержанием Холодной войны, но и неизбежный в условиях « железного занавеса» информационный вакуум о стране, в которую им предстояло ехать, усиливало у участников поездки волнение и чувство ответственности.

Выступления челябинцев, зрительский восторг и недоверие публики

19 Итак, 30 октября 1979 г. « Самоцветы» вылетели из аэропорта Шереметьево‑2 в США. В состав группы входили 17 танцовщиц, 12 танцовщиков, 5 оркестрантов, руководитель ансамбля В.И. Бондарева, 5 деятелей профсоюзов, партии и комсомола, 3 переводчицы. Концертная программа включала в себя 11 хореографических номеров, преимущественно – танцы народов СССР, 3 вставных музыкальных номера : дуэт баянистов, дуэт домристов и соло на балалайке. Концерт состоял из двух отделений и был рассчитан на 1 час 20 минут20.

20 За 15 дней гастролеры дали 8 концертов в школе, колледжах, университете, на ферме, в доме престарелых. География поездки включала Вашингтон, Атланту, Феникс, Нью‑Йорк. Концерты перемежались культурной программой – экскурсиями по городам, посещениями музеев, исторических архитектурных комплексов, учебных заведений. Принимали челябинских танцоров тепло, с воодушевлением и восторгом. Вот записи за разные дни в записной книжке В.И. Бондаревой : Публика – 14, 15, 16, и 18‑летние школьники, очень много преподавателей. Концерт прошел сверх всех наших ожиданий, настолько великолепно – что наших ребят буквально это ошеломило». – Концерт прошел с большим успехом. – Утром дали после завтрака концерт в доме престарелых. Приезжала жена мэра – негритянка. Снимало телевидение. Концерт прошел также с неизменным успехом. Подарили нам календарики, коврик. Оставили в этом доме сувениры. – Публика была разная – дети, юноши, взрослые. Прием был огромный успех сверх всех ожиданий.21 С особыми почестями встречали челябинских гастролеров в штате Джорджия 3 ноября 1979 г. По дороге остановились в городе Мейк, штат Джорджия. Нас встретили люди на площади. Любительский коллектив квадратного танца22 – юношеский – станцевал нам ритмы прямо на дороге. Ребята ответили русской « Барыней». Молодой мэр города (36 лет) вручил нам личные грамоты о том, что мы являемся почетными гражданами гор. Мейк, затем нам предложили расписаться в книге почета города.23 21 Американские зрители, которые в условиях Холодной войны вряд ли были больше осведомлены о том, что им предстоит увидеть, чем их советские

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гости накануне поездки в США, вероятно, были ошарашены несоответствием увиденного расхожим клише о « русских». В свою очередь, бурные позитивные реакции « буржуазной» публики представлялись накрученным советской антиамериканской пропагандой гостям чем‑то настолько неожиданными, что действовали ошеломляюще. Восторженный прием, например, во время гастролей танцоров с ЧТЗ в Японии в 1960 г. был гораздо понятнее и объяснялся в публикациях Карташовой‑Шнейвайса антивоенными и антиамериканскими настроениями японцев : В Токио мы прилетели ночью. Но, несмотря на поздний час, в аэропорту Ханэда было много встречающих – представители японских профсоюзов, самодеятельной организации « Поющие голоса Японии», общества « Япония – СССР», журналисты и фотокорреспонденты, работники советского посольства. Слова привета, огромные букеты ярких цветов. Фотографы ослепили нас вспышками. Десятки людей не спускали с нас любопытных глаз. […] Мы чувствовали большой интерес общественности столицы к нашему коллективу и, откровенно говоря, не понимали, чем это вызвано. Ответ на этот вопрос получили во время встречи с руководителем общества « Поющие голоса Японии», лауреатом Ленинской премии мира Акико Секи. Это общество является не только замечательным пропагандистом хорового искусства, но и горячим, страстным пропагандистом мира, активным борцом за мир и дружбу между народами, смелым агитатором за запрещение атомной бомбы. Ячейки общества имеются по всей стране и пользуются большим общественным влиянием.24 Не случайно фурор челябинских танцоров на первом же концерте описывается как дипломатическая и политическая победа : Первый наш концерт состоялся 4 мая в зале « Бунке коккайдо», вмещающем около трех тысяч человек. Зал был переполнен, люди стояли в проходах. Начали концерт « Поющие голоса Японии», потом сцену предоставили нам. Ирина Черкашина на японском языке приветствует зрителей. В ответ – буря аплодисментов. Очень тепло встречают наших пианистку и ленинградскую балетную пару. И, наконец, мы вышли плясать « Гусачка». Наши танцоры только‑только, что называется, начали растанцовываться, а уже понеслась и все разрасталась буря аплодисментов. Кончали пляску под такой шум рукоплесканий, что и музыку не было слышно. С каждым очередным номером успех все возрастал. В антракте к нам за кулисы пришел советский посол в Японии Николай Трофимович Федоренко и громко, радостно закричал : – Так держать ! Знай наших ! Вы, други дорогие, покорили японцев… Добро !25 22 Советские самодеятельные танцоры ощущали себя посланцами доброй воли, языком танца преодолевающими границы и взаимное непонимание, готовыми к мирному диалогу, открытыми для сотрудничества. Вероятно, поэтому обмен знаниями, обучение друг друга родным народным танцам составляет одну из устойчивых смысловых секвенций описания зарубежных гастролей и контактов с иностранными коллегами.

23 Этот сюжет есть и в записных книжках В.И. Бондаревой. « После обеда занимались с Халевасом26 постановкой румынского танца» – записано за

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23 ноября 1977 г. в ее румынском блокноте27. А в американскую записную книжку за 5 ноября 1979 г. она внесла такую пометку : « Поехали в клуб квадратного танца. Учились квадратным танцам. Подарили нам подковки, пластинки»28. Эта тема дружеского обмена опытом неизменно присутствует и в описании зарубежных гастролей эпохи Н.Н. Карташовой : С участниками художественной самодеятельности Японии у нас установилась тесная дружба. Геннадий Клыков, Анатолий Шиховцев, Валя Порядина, Александр Резепин разучивали с ними русские пляски. Да и сами мы постигали мастерство японского народного танца. Японского языка мы не знали. Поэтому уроки шли « под переводчика». Собственно, язык танца всем понятен, это – международный язык, он сближает людей. И нам было радостно, что танцы дали возможность подружиться со многими японскими юношами и девушками. Это – главный итог нашей поездки.29

24 В соответствии с советскими антиамериканскими стереотипами гораздо более естественным, чем воодушевление и радушие американской публики, челябинцам казалось любопытство американцев, воспринимавших русских артистов как диковинку. В блокноте В.И. Бондаревой есть такая, например, запись : « « Концерт в колледже для изысканной публики. Приходили за кулисы, смотрели костюмы, рассматривали ребят как что‑то диковинное. Концерт прошел с огромным успехом»30. В интервью от 22 января 2010 г. В.И. Бондарева расшифровала эту запись : […] там за кулисы приходили русские, вот, а здесь еще у меня нервы выматывали, сидят обязательно молодежь, прямо заходят такие красивые видные девахи, но они сидят и смотрят, как девчонки мои раздеваются. Они все видели : какой бюстгальтер чтоб был, какое белье, какое что. И поэтому… это хорошо, что экипировка была, сразу нас в такой импортный магазин. Обком партии дал команду – одеть с ног до головы, белье такое, такое‑то, чтобы все было по большому счету.31 25 Показательно мимолетно оброненное свидетельство В.И. Бондаревой об озабоченности областного комитета КПСС тем, чтобы русские танцоры не ударили лицом в грязь при встрече с классовым и политическим противником, чтобы даже их белье выглядело достойным « культурных» людей.

26 Об удивлении американцев по поводу несоответствия челябинских гастролеров расхожим клише о « русских» помнит и Ю.И. Основин. Изготовленная принимающей стороной афиша для концертов « Самоцветов» была украшена надписью « Русские идут» и рисунком, на котором артисты были изображены раскосыми и в валенках. Удивленные американцы открыто рассматривали гостей, внешне совершенно не соответствующих ожиданиям, трогали их за косы, « заглядывали в зубы», как диковинным животным32. 27 Такая смесь искреннего восхищения с некоторым недоверием к увиденному была челябинским танцорам не внове. За два года до американских гастролей на прощальном приеме в Бухаресте В.И. Бондарева сделала в блокноте следующую запись : Было даже неудобно – настолько высоко оценили наше искусство. Очень тепло говорил профессор хореографии. Спрашивал, сколько лет

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занимаются ребята, сколько дней в неделю, часов. Как меняется программа ? Кто они по специальности ? Очень тепло простился, пожелал большого творчества.33 28 Со сложными реакциями публики тракторозаводские танцоры конфронтировали с самого начала зарубежных поездок. Так было в 1957 г. после их выступления на Чепельском заводе в Будапеште : После концерта, во время товарищеского обеда, один рабочий сказал : – Кое‑кто говорит, что вы – артисты, а не рабочие ребята. Но я не верю болтунам. И на это ответил молодой парень : – Вон та черненькая, – и он показал на Нину Наумову, – была у нас в цехе. Она станок знает не хуже, чем ты и я. Видно птицу по полету. Наши ребята, наши рабочие люди.34 29 Но наиболее драматичная история восторженно‑недоверчивого отношения западного иностранца к самодеятельным танцам произошла в Челябинске. Она настолько ярко описана в книге Н.Н. Карташовой, что стоит привести ее целиком : Мне хотелось бы рассказать одну историю, которая, несомненно, вызовет интерес у читателей. Мы готовились к концерту в нашем Дворце культуры. Зрительный зал был переполнен. Ждали гостей. Здесь должна была состояться встреча заводчан с членами профсоюзной делегации одной из капиталистических стран. Возглавлял эту делегацию Андрэ Брюссов, высокий, элегантно одетый седой мужчина. Ко всему, что ему показывали на тракторном заводе, он относился с какой‑то непонятной подозрительностью, словно во всем ожидал подвоха. Гостей встретили цветами. Начался концерт. Гости слушали музыку и песни, охотно аплодировали. Но вот конферансье объявил, что заводские танцоры исполнят уральскую пляску. Словно вихрь ворвался на сцену ! И с первых же секунд темп пляски увлек зрителей, заставил их забыть обо всем на свете. В пляске было столько огня, столько жизни, задора и лихости, что никто из зрителей не остался равнодушным. Андрэ Брюссов восхищенными глазами смотрел на пляску. И среди этого вихря Брюссов заметил девушку, которая, как ему показалась, была особенно прелестна в пляске. Ее грациозность, зажигающий темперамент, необыкновенные руки, искрящиеся глаза не могли не привлечь внимание. Когда пляска закончилась и весь зал, как один человек, поднялся с места и бурно аплодировал, Андрэ Брюссов тоже вскочил, кричал « браво». И вдруг, видимо, неожиданно у него мелькнула странная мысль о том, что его и всю их делегацию вот сейчас, в эту минуту, обманули. Не может быть, чтобы так танцевали не профессиональные танцоры. Это русские нарочно привезли сюда один из известных профессиональных ансамблей, может быть, даже из Москвы, и выдают его за художественную самодеятельность завода. Эта мысль мгновенно овладела Брюссовым, и он не смог удержаться от возгласа : – Это обман ! – Он резко выбросил руку в стороны сцены. – Это – профессиональные артисты, а вы их выдаете за рабочих и работниц. Идемте на сцену, я вам докажу… Брюссов резко повернулся и пошел за кулисы, размахивая на ходу

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букетом цветов. За ним шли смущенные члены делегации и ничего не понявшие работники завода. Как только Брюссов поднялся по ступенькам за кулисы сцены, он столкнулся с девушкой, одетой в яркий костюм. Она еще не успела отдышаться после бурной пляски, капельки пота, словно бусинки, светились на ее лице. Девушка держала в руках пеструю косынку и помахивала ею. Это была та самая танцовщица, которой Брюссов восхищался во время пляски. – Спросите‑ка у этой девушки, кем она работает ? – сказал он переводчику резко и зло. Девушка недоумевающее, смущенно посмотрела на этого высокого седого человека. Она спокойно ответила. – Я работница, доводчица. – Руки, покажите руки ! – нервно, раздраженно сказал Брюссов. Девушка не рассердилась. Она только улыбнулась, повесила косынку на плечо и протянула к Андрэ Брюссову свои красивые, крепкие руки работницы. – Скажите господину или товарищу, не знаю, как его назвать, что сегодня мы уже беседовали с ним в цехе. Меня зовут Ниной. Егорова Нина… Брюссов своей большой рукой взял обе руки девушки и пытливо взглянул на ладони. На ладонях были ясно видны маленькие янтарного цвета бугорочки мозолей. – Нина, – смущенно проговорил Брюссов, – так это вы, оказывается…– Вот где он видел эти красивые руки. Они порхали там, в цехе, у станка. Как же я не узнал вас ! Простите меня, простите, – виновато шептал он. Андрэ Брюссов порывисто поцеловал Нинины руки, а потом вложил в них букет цветов.35 30 Контраст между истерично подозрительным седовласым « господином или товарищем» и молодой, открытой, снисходительно приветливой советской девушкой живописуется, скорее всего, бойким пером профессионала. В этой истории мастерски выписаны типичные элементы дискурса о столкновении « народного» танцевального искусства СССР с « буржуазным» зрителем : амбивалентное отношение « декадентской» публики к советскому искусству – ожидание подвоха с советской стороны, невозможность противостоять обаянию, жизнерадостности, непосредственности и чистоте « народного» танца», посрамленное желание разоблачить советскую « подмену» любительских танцовщиков профессионалами и торжество « подлинного» советского искусства.

31 С помощью ряда типичных дискурсивных единиц, связанных с проблематикой столкновения с чужим, описывали свою встречу с американской повседневностью и челябинские артисты. Некоторые из этих элементов – например, ощущением гордости за достижения СССР – входили в советский официальный дискурс, другие – восхищение западными техническими новинками и бытовым комфортом или подконтрольность всевидящему оку спецслужб – относились к неофициальным ощущениям, позднейшим воспоминаниям и государственно табуированным темам. Хотя все они не являлись дискурсивными секвенциями, характерными исключительно для описания гастрольных выступлений советских артистов за рубежом, а наличествовали в дискурсе о советском зарубежном туризме, они занимают так много места в воспоминаниях и рассказах участников поездки « Самоцветов» в США, что я не счел возможным искусственно отсечь

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их из изложения в этой статье как неспецифические для танцевальной художественной самодеятельности.

Советская подозрительность, гордость и комплекс некультурности

32 В письменных и устных описаниях поездки « Самоцветов» в США немало внимания отведено американской экзотике – изобилию, разнообразию и техническим достижениям, вызывавшим у советских гостей смешанные чувства восхищения, подозрительности и собственной неполноценности. Вот весьма примечательный эпизод из американских гастролей о знакомстве со старым дорогим вином, описанный Ю.И. Основиным : Ну, в Америке, удивление там было, конечно. Мы еще глупые. Нас пригласили там в монастырь, в подвал такой темный, старое, старое здание. Столы там, вино. Идем. А еще не понимали – ну я‑то, может быть, еще знал. А ребята говорят : “Да что же они обнаглели ? Бутылки‑то лежат все в пыли. Не могут протереть, что ли ?” […] А Вера Ивановна еще тоже : ”Что же они не могут бутылки протереть ?” […] Вера Ивановна – и то не знала.36

33 У В.И. Бондаревой тема конфликта между американским прогрессом и собственной недоразвитостью также присутствует – и тоже с оттенком иронии, как и у Основина. В одном из интервью она рассказала о знакомстве 7 ноября 1979 г. с итальянской кухней, в частности, с пиццей, воспринятой как « большие открытые пироги», которые им подали под концерт на электрооргане, из которого летели мыльные пузыри : Ребята впервые… ну честное слово, дикари все‑таки… Так было нам интересно. Даже мне тоже было интересно. Мы сидели, ели, слушали, ну в полном смысле ребята просто, вот, обалдевшие были... И очень‑очень глубокое впечатление осталось у нас.37 34 Интересно, что в обоих случаях интревьюируемые подчеркивают « некультурность» товарищей и несколько смягчают собственную некомпетентность.

35 Одной из табуированных, но чрезвычайно актуальных для советских граждан на выезде за рубеж была тема покупок дефицитных или просто недоступных в СССР товаров при крайне ограниченной разрешенной к провозу за границу сумме в валюте. Как следует из незаписанного рассказа В.И. Бондаревой, в США она невольно стала участницей « гешефта», который вызвал в ней смешанные чувства. Во время прогулки по Нью‑Йорку она якобы случайно обнаружила меховую лавку старого еврея с весьма выгодными ценами38. Она привела туда и своих танцоров, которые охотно приобрели за бесценок искусственные шубы. Торговец хотел вознаградить В.И. Бондареву за посредничество с покупателями шапкой или муфтой, от чего она, по ее словам, твердо отказалась. « Совсем я тогда была дикая», – примерно так прокомментировала она эту историю. 36 О жгучем желании извернуться, но купить на жалкие валютные средства как можно больше свидетельствует запись в блокноте В.И. Бондаревой, который

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она заполняла во время поездки « Самоцветов» по Скандинавии в 1983 г. Дневник начинается с сообщения о том, сколько рублей обменяли гастролерам на валюту – 50 рублей на 426 датских гульденов – и что на эту сумму можно было приобрести : Фирма « Монтана», торгующие польские евреи, предложившие нам товары : 1. Платье из ангорской шерсти 150 гульденов 2. Платье вельветовое 150 г. 3. Платье джинсовое 125 г. 4. Юбка джинсовая 88 г. 5. Куртка из шотландской шерсти 160 гульденов. 6. Вельветовые брюки 88 г. 7. Мохер упаковка 42 гуль.»39 37 В описании В.И. Бондаревой, которой во время гастролей в США было 53 года, американские впечатления часто описываются как морально развращающие, тлетворные. В своих записях и рассказах она им стойко противостоит, как и положено советской женщине ее лет. В ее записных книжках есть немало записей об американском телевидении, произведшем на нее сильное впечатление : Реклама, реклама, реклама – по телевидению, журналам, проспектам, дороге, до одури, об одежде, напитках, машинах, об интимной жизни. Вечером смотрели телевидение. Боевики о каких‑то убийствах, воровстве – организация, состоящая из бандитов‑женщин. На протяжении боевиков – все время реклама. Спала первую ночь тревожно, часто просыпалась. Включила в 4 часа ночи телевидение – работало. Вечером долго смотрели по разным каналам телевидение. Вечером по телевидению боевики и реклама, реклама до одурения ! Дали еще по 5 долларов на кинофильм по выбору. Оставили на сувениры, достаточно телевидения. Насмотрелись многого, что никогда не забудется. Город‑вертеп.40

38 Американским достижениям В.И. Бондарева с гордостью противопоставляет российско‑советские успехи. В ее записной книжке от 31 октября 1979 г. есть наивно‑горделивое восклицание : « Закончился рейс по Вашингтону музеем – галереей искусств. Архитектурно прекрасное здание, но наш Эрмитаж лучше !»41 Прогулка по Нью‑Йорку вечером 10 ноября укрепила ее стереотипы о тлетворном влиянии Запада, контрастах американского мегаполиса и преимуществах советского строя : Я иду с ребятами. Еще помню здесь один Валера такой у меня красивый мальчик был, он сейчас уже артист, двое детей, уже годы набрал, такой живот, такой толстый. Ну, вот он : « Ой, Вера Ивановна, смотрите, публичный дом !» Он мне. Ну, смотрю : реклама, публичный дом, там, действительно. Показывают таких красоток, они как на ролике прокатываются, прокатываются. Ну, да, я обиделась прямо, говорю : « Валера !» А мы только ему паспорт получили, еле его… еле прошел по картотеке по возрасту. « Вместо того, чтобы смотреть, Валера, на что‑то, вот ты увидел публичный дом ! Больше ты ничего не увидел». « Ну так красиво, я думал, что такое это там написано». В десятом классе, закончил, конечно, читал. […] Только прошли немножко еще, помню, иду и перешагнула. Котомки какие‑то лежат, я чуть‑чуть об них не споткнулась, а потом, значит, раз и … перескочила. И оглядываюсь вот

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так – смотрю : человек лежит, ноги. Укрылся, на картонке, картонкой укрылся. Бомжик. Для меня тогда это было дико. Вот там какая ни была … Советская власть, но мы не видели нищих. Никто не валялся. Где они были спрятаны, как они прятались, но их не было, и я понятия не имела, что [это] такое. И для меня это такая была дикость, что я увидела человека лежащим под картонкой, что я остановилась вот так, рот раскрыла и стою‑смотрю. Вот. Смотрела долго‑долго. Потом дальше идем. Контейнера вот такие, как у нас сейчас мусорки, все повторяем, что за границей, только в худшем варианте, и, значит, … роется, приличный человек, хорошая на нем шапочка, хорошая курточка, роется в этой мусорке, вытаскивает, прямо здесь разрывает что‑то, ест. Мне тоже так дико, так дико. Было дико. А сейчас я из окна наблюдаю : подходят нищие, бомжи, роются в наших контейнерах, ищут себе то же самое. То же самое.42 39 В этом рассказе ясно читаются различные слои опыта интервьюента : воспоминания содержат типичное для СССР нарративное клише о советской гордости, которое сочетается с постсоветской горечью по поводу повторения страной западных примеров (бомжи, спящие на улицах или копающиеся в мусорных баках), « только в худшем варианте».

40 Подобное столкновение собственного опыта с чужим и враждебным во время зарубежной поездки было для В.И. Бондаревой не новым. За 11 лет до посещения США она впервые выезжала с челябинскими танцорами на зарубежные гастроли в ГДР. От первого впечатления о Берлине ей стало не по себе : А когда приехали, на вокзале заехали под купол стеклянный этого как бы ангара огромного, поезд вошел и вот сразу же там сильный такой голос диктора говорит : « Achtung ! Achtung !» И вот так страшно стало, и бегут по коридору немцы, и « Закройте двери, закройте двери !» И, значит, нас всех, чтобы мы в купе, потому что обливали же, чтобы инфекцию не привезли. Поезд облили, нас всех просмотрели. Потом каждое купе отдельно просмотрели, чтобы не дай Бог ничего не провезли, чтобы никакой заразы не было. […] Так грубо, властно, Achtung ! Achtung ! Так захотелось домой ! Только приехали ! И никакой Германии не захотелось. Я хотела домой быстрей. И так жестко сделалось, что‑то ассоциация сразу на войну. А только‑только по сути дела, это недавно было. А тогда что, какие были мы все запуганные.43 41 В.И. Бондареву на протяжении всей поездки по Америке не покидало чувство тревоги, замешанное на ответственности за своих подопечных и советских клише об опасностях пребывания в капиталистической стране. Ей везде мерещились потенциальные провокации и происки спецслужб. Приведу несколько записей из ее американского блокнота : Ребят поселили в шахматном порядке. Разбросали по всем этажам. Экскурсию вел работник секретной службы, великолепно владеющий русским языком. По городу сопровождали нас Катерина и Лери – явные советологи (великолепно владели русским).44 Согласно дневнику В.И. Бондаревой, в гостиницах ей и ее танцорам все время что‑то подбрасывали и каким‑либо способом провоцировали : Утром в среду (31.10.79 г.) обнаружили, что Сайме45 подброшен был порнографический журнал. Вечером обнаружили порнографию и были звонки к нашим молодым

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девушкам Задворных, Васильевой – приглашали их придти по адресу. Звонок был по‑русски. Поздно вечером вернулись к себе в мотель и обнаружили подкинутую кожаную куртку в 600 долларов. Вернули хоз.[яину] гостиницы. Вернувшись нашла у себя подкинутый портмоне Утехина46 с паспортом и деньгами (долларами). Решила об этом сказать утром. Ибо было поздно. Решила, чтобы глава делегации Лобанова отдохнула. Пропал чемодан.47 42 Ю.И. Основин, в целом подтвердив факт подбрасывания порнографии в номера, несколько релятивизировал драматизм этих происшествий, равно как и непримиримое отношение к запретной полиграфической продукции со стороны В.И. Бондаревой, правда, уже применительно к скандинавской поездке 1983 г. : Подкидывали… Ну, в Швеции мы сами брали. Когда с Тоней48 мы ходили, Вера Ивановна забрела, потому что мы зашли, где порнофильмы показывают. Там на полках книжки порнографические. Вера Ивановна смотрит и говорит : « Тьфу, какая гадость !» А сама смотрит.49 43 Страх В.И. Бондаревой по поводу возможных провокаций со стороны западных спецслужб в США связан с другой, запрещенной в СССР для обсуждения темой – с работниками советской госбезопасности, сопровождавшими советских граждан во время зарубежных поездок.

Советские чекисты, превышение полномочий и выкручивание рук

44 Представители КГБ сопровождали танцоров из « Самоцветов» во время всех гастрольных поездок как в социалистические страны, так и на Запад. Накануне полета в США для гастролеров была организована учеба при « Спутнике», во время которой « международники» в течение 12 часов, с 9 часов утра до 9 часов вечера, инструктировали отъезжающих, помимо прочего, вероятно, и о « правильном» поведении50. Среди пяти представителей руководства в группе челябинцев двое – представленный группе как « профсоюзный работник» майор КГБ Александр Михайлович Редкин и парторг Челябинского политехнического института Сергей Иванович Кубицкий – отвечали за политическую грамотность, сознательность, бдительность и безопасность участников поездки. В.И. Бондарева подробно рассказала, какие проблемы создавали для нее эти сопровождавшие в связи с ее превышением, по их мнению, полномочий и недостаточной политической бдительностью : А иногда так выкручивали мне руки в поездке, что я заходила, включала душ, лился он изо всей силы, становилась под него, рыдала, вот, обязательно тошнило – не выдерживали нервы, и плакала, выла, как волчица, но дело в том, что меня никто не слышит, душ…, а выхожу, как будто все нормально. Это в каждой поездке, она просто не давалась, в Америке было так же. А я выходила, например, опять‑таки со своей доверчивостью, потом… я не знаю. Я приехала, меня принимают хорошо, я принимаю это за истину. Я говорю, например : Дорогие господа там ! Такие и такие и товарищи, ну

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всех перечисляю, дохожу до господ : « От огромной нашей страны России низкий Вам поклон, Вашему великому народу». Ну и там конечно и прочее и прочее… Готовлю, конечно, там, чтобы не долго, но броско. А потом выпускаю ведущую. Такой чекист был, и он то же самое, парторг из политехнического, представили его как « парторг из политехнического», Кубицкий. Не знаю, уже забыла имя‑отчество… А он потом… Помню, Редькин был, Александр Редькин, чекист, и он и Кубицкий, они отводят меня на голое место, ничего близко нету, ни строения, голая земля, и они меня так отчитывали. […] « Это Вы что ? Вышли, распинались. Великая… Великий народ великой Америки, от великого…» (смеется) Ну, в общем, они мне там по большому счету мозги вправили. Я : « Ну как же, как я могла не сказать, если действительно столько лет стоим… Ну извините меня, но я же тоже не в лесу выросла, и читала, Боже мой, и американских классиков, и всех…» Тем более что такая была книгочейка в свое время... А Кубицкий говорит : « Приедете в Челябинске будете отвечать перед Советской властью за каждое свое слово». Ну и все. Я прихожу в номер и, конечно, я вою. Телевизор включаю, там вечная… меня это страшно… реклама вечно, и все едят они вечно, едят, вот, меня это раздражало. Я привыкла к нашим фильмам, от начала до конца фильм покажут и все. Это сейчас вот точно так же. И вот включу телевизор полностью, включу душ, залезу, наплачусь, навоюсь, намоюсь…(смеется) Вечером надо выходить к столу. Шик‑брик, чтобы никто не узнал. Глаза только боюсь поднять. Потому что думаю : « Выдадут меня глаза‑то». Столько ненависти у меня к ним было… Ну сказали бы они мне : « Вера, вот такие‑то вещи чтоб ты не говорила, чтоб ты помнила : вот так надо, так». А то они меня как бы и проверяют, и как бы наставляют, и в то же время потом по мне прокатываются. […] Наука все время была. Например, уже потом, когда я научилась, как себя вести за границей, я вот так садилась за стол, вот, и бокалы наливают там, вина хорошие, конечно, белые, столовые, и такие‑всякие, вплоть до крепких вин, сидят… целую ночь сидеть ведь надо. Вот я говорю : « Как только руку я положу, вы сразу же прекращаете пить, сразу же собираемся и едем домой». Они сидят‑сидят, а сами посматривают, хоть бы Вера Ивановна не положила руку на бокал. Потому что иначе нельзя было остановить. Я ж не могла ни кричать, ни делать замечаний… Только могла уже делать как‑то так, чтобы они меня понимали с полуслова.51 45 Обращает на себя внимание, что В.И. Бондареву угнетали не столько наставления « чекистов», сколько то, что преподанный ими и, по ее мнению, полезный урок « правильного» поведения за границей был облечен в недостойную форму шантажа, « выкручивания рук» за ошибки, которые они могли и должны были предотвратить.

46 Тема конфликта между неясными ожиданиями и неопределенными сигналами представителей госбезопасности, с одной стороны, и пониманием своей миссии и, в более широком смысле, определением собственной идентичности специалистом самодеятельного творчества, с другой, выводит нас на ключевую проблему в истории советской художественной самодеятельности – проблему учебного процесса по согласованию государственного проекта творческого любительства с интересами его участников.

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Бриколаж, учебный процесс и присваивание государственного проекта

47 Филипп Герцог описывает танцевальную художественную самодеятельность в Эстонии с привлечением концепции бриколажа Мишеля де Серто : […] хотя повседневность определяется институциональными и идеологическими структурами, установленными теми или иными правителями, внутри них – как правило, неосознанно – развиваются повседневные практики, которые вовсе не обязательно должны совпадать с содержанием, предусмотренным власть имущими. При этом обязательные структуры так оформляются или интерпретируются, что становятся приемлемыми в повседневности и допускают известную свободу. Они трактуются таким образом, что с ними можно жить и они могут быть восприняты как « собственные» и допускают личную идентификацию, не нарушая заданных « правил игры».52 48 Концепция бриколажа действительно позволяет пластично описать советскую систему самодеятельного творчества как государственную рамку, достаточно определенную, чтобы обеспечить контроль над исполнителями и рядовыми участниками проекта и, одновременно, достаточно просторную, чтобы не отпугнуть их излишним стеснением свободы действий.

49 Однако эта концепция применительно к советской самодеятельности описывает результат, но отнюдь не процесс, который может быть понят как учебный процесс. В ходе этого процесса акторы присматриваются друг к другу – как по вертикали, между власть имущими и « маленькими» людьми, так и по горизонтали – и в ходе коммуникации приспосабливаются друг к другу.

50 Именно так и функционировал государственный проект художественной самодеятельности. Примеры договоренности в ходе тяжелого переговорного или учебного процесса, сопровождавшегося рисками и ошибками, известны в массовом масштабе в период формирования советской самодеятельности в сталинский период53, а также на индивидуальном уровне, как читатель мог узнать на примере В.И. Бондаревой во время американских гастролей. Государство желало контролировать формирование « правильной» идентичности и массовый досуг, иметь под рукой впечатляющий инструмент пропаганды советских достижений. Участники самодеятельности желали с ее помощью самореализоваться, расцветить жизнь праздничными красками, создать дружеский круг, путешествовать, в том числе и за рубеж54. « Если бы я в самодеятельности не занимался, разве бы я увидел столько стран зарубежных, столько городов нашего Советского Союза объездить. Конечно, заинтересованность»55, – признается Ю.И. Основин. 51 И государственным, и приватным, и коллективным, и индивидуальным намерениям соответствовала установка самодеятельности на соревновательность и успех, на преодоление себя и воодушевление публики. В.И. Бондарева с удовольствием вспоминала о своей первой зарубежной поездки – в ГДР. По поводу концерта в Рудольштадте она рассказывала :

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И как пошло с первого номера « на ура». Это восемь номеров и каждый номер обязательно два раза. Это невозможно было ! А второе отделение ! Уже все мокрые, рубашки мокрые, а когда уже снимают, вешают на вешалки, и машина такая за нами идет, мы в автобусе, а за нами машина. И в фургоне палки, на них висят костюмы. И они не просыхали от города до города. Такие были мокрые костюмы. И говорят : « Мы не выдержим второе отделение». А не танцевать – там на ушах стоят. Значит – надо танцевать.56

52 Танцуя в яркой одежде в полную силу под рукоплескания переполненного, эмоционально наэлектризованного зала, танцоры входили в состояние упоения. Именно такой случай описала В.И. Бондарева, правда, объяснив происшествие силой собственного авторитета, а не экзальтированным состоянием танцовщицы : Я помню, в Германии зеркало одно, Пелевина Вера с Основиным Юрой одеваются, что‑то она сдвинула – и разбивает зеркало. Осколки попадают в обувь. Она не проверила, из обуви льется кровь, зритель видит, она танцует. Она не ушла. Она танцует, потому что Вера Ивановна стоит за кулисами.57

53 Советский проект самодеятельности оказался успешным для всех участников – и для советского государства, и для низовых руководителей и членов самодеятельных коллективов. 22 января 2010 г. В.И. Бондарева поделилась со мной весьма характерной обидой, свидетельствующей, что государству удалось убедить участников самодеятельности в их особой культурной миссии : Вот грамоту мне дали, Макаров, министр новоиспеченной этот, такую дурацкую, что… Мне дали такую грамоту, как будто я… как бы Вам сказать, что я массовик‑затейник. Да. Благодарим Вас, что Вы проработали… за многолетнюю работу, что Вы досуг… зрителей… значит, это… развлекали. Досуг зрителей… концертами. И я хотела… я оскорбилась вначале… Боже мой ! У меня почти не было таких концертов. Они были правительственные : то в оперном, то для министров, то в Москве, то в ЦК, то в министерстве. А здесь я по городу не выступала. Выступали мои подготовительные группы. Вот. Выступали детские коллективы. И вот, я, конечно, это, очень, как‑то, вот, очень обиделась и думаю, вот при встрече я ему скажу.58 54 В свою очередь, рядовые участники самодеятельности доместифицировали проект государственной культуры, подобно челябинским танцорам подчинив мягко контролируемое сверху самодеятельное творчество своим собственным интересам, в том числе поездкам на Запад, где они могли собирать новый – и совершенно несоветский – опыт.

55 Западная повседневность, увиденная лично, и по горячим следам, и десятилетия спустя, после гибели СССР, описывалась в советских пропагандистских категориях, как проявление бесчеловечности, жажды наживы, социальной несправедливости, морального разложения и пр. Ей противопоставлялись советские социальные достижения, что свидетельствует об устойчивости и успешности советского дискурса о советских преимуществах в противостоянии двух мировых систем. Преимущества же Запада в бытовой и культурных сферах репрезентировались

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в нарративах об американских гастролях с благоговением и оттенком комплекса собственной неполноценности. Там, где жители капиталистической страны, вопреки ожиданиям, вместо классового эгоизма и буржуазного высокомерия проявляли радушие или приходили в восторг от советских народных танцев – советские клише и вовсе переставали действовать и (бывшие) гастролеры испытывали культурный шок. Экстраординарное по возможности вписывалось в привычное, понятное и повседневное, либо, в случае дефицита объяснительных матриц, напротив, могло в перспективе расшатывать обыденность и заставить по‑новому смотреть на себя и свою страну.

NOTES

1. Н.В. Полетаева, « Самоцветы», Челябинская область. Энциклопедия, под ред. К.Н. Бочкарева (Челябинск : Энциклопедия, 2006). Т. 5, 739. 2. О развитии художественной самодеятельности в СССР и трансформации ее задач в период « оттепели» см. : Самодеятельное художественное творчество в СССР : Очерки истории. Т. 1 – 3 (Спб. : Дмитрий Булавин, 1999‑2000) ; P. Jones, ed., The Dilemmas of Destalinization : A Social and Cultural History of Reform in the Khrushchev Era (London : Routledge, 2006). 3. А.Л. Сокольская, Танцевальная самодеятельность, Самодеятельное художественное творчество в СССР : Очерки истории. Т. 2, 130 – 131. 4. С.Ю. Румянцев, А.П. Шульпин, Самодеятельное творчество и государственная культура, Самодеятельное художественное творчество в СССР : Очерки истории, Т. 2, 27. 5. Т.В. Пуртова, Танец на любительской сцене : ХХ век, достижения и проблемы (M. : ГРДНТ, 2006), 140. 6. Bernd Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg. 1947 – 1991 : Geschichte eines radikalen Zeitalters (München : C.H. Beck, 2007), 464, 465. 7. Stöver, Der Kalte Krieg, 25. 8. Пуртова, Танец на любительской сцене, 139, 140. 9. Талоны на продовольствие были введены в Челябинске в 1981 г. 10. Philipp Herzog, Sozialistische Völkerfreundschaft, nationaler Widerstand oder harmloser Zeitvertreib ? Zur politischen Funktion der Volkskunst im sowjetischen Estland (Stuttgart : Ibidem‑Verlag, 2012), 108 – 109. 11. В.И. Бондарева, Дневник 2 : США. 30.10. – 13.11.1979 (архив автора), 2. 12. Интервью с Ю.И. Основиным, Челябинск, 21.11. 2010, 01 :05 :05. 13. Интервью с В.И. Бондаревой, Челябинск, 04.01.2010. 2 :25 :35. 14. Там же, 02 :24 :23. 15. Там же, 02 :24 :46. 16. Н. Карташов (Р.Ф. Шнейвайс), Натали‑Я (Челябинск : Межрайонная типография, 1996), 48 – 49. 17. Карташов, Натали‑Я, 53. 18. Интервью с В.И. Бондаревой, Челябинск, 22.01.2010. 7 :16.

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19. В.И. Бондарева, Дневник 1 : Румыния. 12. – 23.11.1977 (архив автора), 52. 20. В.И. Бондарева, Дневник 2 : США, 2 – 4. 21. Там же, 13, 16, 20, 26, 22. Имеется в виду square dance, народный американский танец, в основе которого лежат фигуры европейских танцев, в том числе кадрили. 23. В.И. Бондарева, Дневник 2 : США, 16 – 17. 24. Карташов, Натали‑Я, 53 – 54. 25. Там же, 55. 26. Румынский хореограф. 27. В.И. Бондарева, Дневник 1 : Румыния, 54. 28. В.И. Бондарева, Дневник 2 : США, 19. Имеются в виду металлические набойки на подошве обуви, необходимые для исполнения ударов в степ‑танцах. 29. Карташов, Натали‑Я, 56. 30. Там же, 18 – 19. 31. Интервью с В.И. Бондаревой, Челябинск, 22.01.2010. 02 :50 : 06. 32. Интервью с Ю.И. Основиным, Челябинск, 21.11. 2010, 01 :02 :52. 33. В.И. Бондарева, Дневник 1 : Румыния, 42 – 43. 34. Н.Н. Карташова, Воспитание танцем : Заметки балетмейстера (Челябинск : Южно‑Уральское издательство, 1976), 43 – 44. 35. Там же, 41 – 43. 36. Интервью с Ю.И. Основиным, Челябинск, 21.11. 2010, 01 :19 :55. 37. Интервью с В.И. Бондаревой, Челябинск, 22.01.2010. 02 :11 : 20. 38. В случайности этой встречи позволяет усомниться то обстоятельство, что она произошла на хорошо известной советским посетителям Нью‑Йорка « Яшкин‑стрит», на которую в 1960‑е – 1970‑е гг. наведывались в поиске дешевых покупок туристы из СССР. Нью‑йоркская Орчард‑стрит получила это неофициальное название благодаря популярному магазину Яши из Барнаула. В меховом магазине на Яшкин‑стрит в середине 1970‑х гг. можно было купить искусственную женскую шубку за 25 долларов. За покупками сюда не гнушался заезжать в те годы ни известный ученый Жорес Алферов, ни знаменитый сценарист и кинорежиссер Георгий Данелия. См. : Г.Н. Данелия, Тостуемый пьет до дна (М. : Эксмо, 2009), 179 ; Жорес Алферов – вице‑президент РАН, http://www.acapod.ru/227.html, 27.12. 2013. 39. В.И. Бондарева, Дневник 3 : Северная Европа. 19.10. – 5.11.1983” ((дневник автора), 1. 40. В.И. Бондарева, Дневник 2 : США, 7, 8, 13 – 14, 28 – 29. 41. Там же, 12. 42. Интервью с В.И. Бондаревой, Челябинск, 22.01.2010. 02 :26 : 36. 43. Там же, 02 :38 : 23. 44. В.И. Бондарева, Дневник 2 : США, 7, 9, 10. 45. Танцовщица « Самоцветов». 46. Танцовщик « Самоцветов». 47. В.И. Бондарева, Дневник 2 : США, 8, 12, 17, 19 – 2, 21. 48. Жена Ю.И. Основина. 49. Интервью с Ю.И. Основиным, Челябинск, 21.11. 2010, 01 :21 :30. 50. В.И. Бондарева, Дневник 2 : США, 3, 5. 51. Интервью с В.И. Бондаревой, Челябинск, 22.01.2010. 02 :48 : 45, 02 :51 :58, 02 :57 :25. 52. Herzog, Sozialistische Völkerfreundschaft, 27. 53. И.В. Нарский, « Заряд веселости : С(т)имуляция радости в дискурсах о советской танцевальной самодеятельности 1930‑х – 1970‑х гг», И.В. Нарсикй и др., От великого до

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смешного : инструментализация смеха в российской истории (Челябинск : Каменный пояс, 2013), 112 – 125. 54. Аналогичным образом согласовывались в гастрольной деятельности интересы государственных проектов самодеятельной « народной» хореографии и ее рядовых участников и в других странах. Подробнее об этом : Anthony Shay, Choreographic Politics : State Folk Dance Companies, Representation, and Power (Middletown : Wesleyan University Press, 2002) ; Cècile Stephanie Stehrenberger, Francos Tänzerinnerinnen auf Auslandstournee : Folklore, Nation und Geschlecht im “Colonial encounter” (Bielefeld : transcript Verlag, 2013). 55. Интервью с Ю.И. Основиным, Челябинск, 21.11. 2010, 10 :44. 56. Интервью с В.И. Бондаревой, Челябинск, 22.01.2010. 02 :45 :15. 57. Интервью с В.И. Бондаревой, Челябинск, 04.01.2010. 02 :38 : 16. 58. Интервью с В.И. Бондаревой, Челябинск, 22.01.2010. 47 :25.

RÉSUMÉS

L’article étudie les tournées de l’ensemble de danse amateur « Samocvety » de Čeljabinsk et prend pour exemple le voyage effectué aux États‑Unis d’Amérique en 1979 par un petit groupe de ses danseurs. Il analyse les constantes du discours des danseurs sur leurs tournées à l’étranger, constantes que l’on retrouve aussi dans la description de la tournée américaine. Même s’ils en avaient une perception personnelle, les artistes interprétaient le quotidien occidental à l’aune des critères soviétiques de la propagande et lui opposaient les réalisations sociales soviétiques. Pourtant la supériorité de cet Occident dans l’organisation du quotidien était appréhendée avec vénération et un léger sentiment d’infériorité. Il suffisait que les clichés soviétiques n’aient plus de prise ou que le comportement de leurs hôtes capitalistes les défient pour que les danseurs subissent un choc culturel.

The article deals with Cheliabinsk amateur dance band “Samocvety” and focuses on the 1979 United States tour by a small group of its dancers. It analyzes the constants in the Cheliabinsk dancers’ descriptions of their international tours including the tour in the US. Even though they perceived Western daily life as individuals, they interpreted it in terms of Soviet propaganda categories, contrasting it with Soviet social accomplishments. However, they apprehended the West’s superiority in the organization of daily life with veneration and a slight feeling of inferiority. Setting themselves free from their Soviet preconceived ideas or having them challenged by their capitalist hosts was a cause for culture shock.

AUTEUR

IGOR´ NARSKIJ

Центр культурно‑исторических исследований, Южно‑Уральского государственного университета, Челябинск, [email protected]

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Au‑delà des étoiles Stars Wars et l’histoire culturelle du socialisme tardif en Bulgarie Beyond stars : star Wars and the cultural history of late socialism in Bulgaria

Nadège Ragaru

L’auteur souhaite remercier Liljana Dejanova, Galia Valtchinova et les évaluateurs anonymes pour leurs remarques précieuses sur une version antérieure de ce texte.

1 L’arrivée de Stars Wars en Bulgarie suscita un vaste engouement, les trois premiers volets de la double trilogie venant habiter les imaginaires, les univers ludiques et les pratiques collectionneuses de publics souvent adolescents1. Une étude de la réception de l’œuvre de George Lucas pourrait dès lors se prêter à des conclusions convenues sur la fascination exercée par les produits culturels occidentaux et leur rôle dans la délégitimation ultime des socialismes est‑européens. Le cinéma2 a d’ailleurs été volontiers envisagé comme une facette de la « guerre froide culturelle »3. Les défenseurs d’une telle sensibilité historiographique ont accordé une attention privilégiée au genre de la science fiction, lui qui aurait offert une allégorie des errements du présent et/ou une projection des accomplissements futurs au temps de la rivalité spatiale et nucléaire américano‑soviétique4. Les États‑Unis l’auraient érigé en pilier de leur diplomatie culturelle5, tandis que les pouvoirs publics soviétiques et est‑européens lui demandaient d’offrir la vision d’un avenir socialiste rationnel et optimiste6. Film‑culte oscarisé, Star wars s’expose d’autant plus volontiers à une analyse en termes de diplomatie culturelle de guerre froide que l’Initiative de défense stratégique (SDI) lancée par le président Reagan en mars 1983 fut d’abord raillée (par des parlementaires démocrates), puis connue sous le nom de « guerre des étoiles ». Ordonnée autour d’une opposition entre le bien (la liberté) et le mal (l’Empire), la narration filmique pourrait même évoquer une actualisation fictionnelle de la bipolarité.

2 Dans le cadre de la présente enquête, les vies sociales de Star Wars en Bulgarie seront envisagées dans une autre perspective, en tant que fenêtre sur l’histoire sociale du socialisme tardif et sur les arts de faire loisir et sens de spectateurs aux appartenances générationnelles et sociales plurielles, aux sensibilités esthétiques et politiques contrastées. Les facettes du quotidien qui nous intéressent au premier chef concernent,

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d’une part, les articulations entre le national et des « Ailleurs » situés – ou non – sur une rose des sables Est‑Ouest et, d’autre part, les expériences individuelles et collectives du temps.

3 Trois hypothèses sous‑tendent la réflexion. Premièrement, l’on ne saurait adhérer au postulat selon lequel à l’Est les fictions filmiques auraient été prioritairement déchiffrées « en creux », à travers ce qu’elles révélaient d’un monde occidental désiré ou comme paraboles politiques dont la vision aurait été structurée autour de l’alternative entre évasion et contestation. Outre qu’elle présume de l’ubiquité d’un déchiffrage « politique » du cinéma, une telle lecture omet l’existence de conventions de genre ; elle néglige de même les définitions individuées des plaisirs visuels et sensoriels. Supposer l’exceptionnalité des réceptions « est‑européennes » de Star Wars ne fournit pas davantage un instrument de repérage : succès mondial, la trilogie pourrait aussi bien s’offrir à une lecture des circulations culturelles globales – suggérant que les découpages géopolitiques fournissent de faibles prédicteurs des pratiques sociales – qu’à une interprétation en termes de concurrences Est‑Ouest. Construit sur le mode d’un voyage initiatique interrogeant la filiation, Star Wars puise dans un fonds mythologique qui transcende ces partitions7. L’enjeu consiste alors, sans anticiper l’existence de similitudes ou de différences, à identifier les paramètres ayant informé les ressentis propres à chaque univers social et culturel. Pour ce faire, il convient d’interroger les opérations de traduction à travers lesquelles l’œuvre de G. Lucas prit sens en Bulgarie socialiste.

4 Deuxièmement, si dans certains segments du public la fascination pour Star Wars a pu participer de la recherche d’un Ailleurs, celui‑ci ne fut pas toujours situé en un présent occidental. Aux yeux de certains spectateurs, la trilogie illustra la puissance créative et technologique d’un Ouest inaccessible ; d’autres apprécièrent l’échappée hors des canons esthétiques et moraux du socialisme. La recherche d’utopie vint cependant plus souvent brouiller les démarcations Est‑Ouest que les confirmer. Le succès du film doit en effet être mis en relation avec la popularité d’un genre, la science‑fiction, dont l’historicité et la topographie ne se laissent pas réduire aux délimitations de la guerre froide. Sous le socialisme tardif bulgare, la science‑fiction a également été investie comme un lieu d’où interroger les fondements métaphysiques du contemporain, au‑delà des clivages Est‑Ouest.

5 Enfin, de l’histoire du socialisme, les réceptions de Star Wars nous parlent par un dernier truchement : la diffusion de la trilogie coïncide avec un moment du socialisme bulgare caractérisé par un épuisement du croyable et par un ressourcement – en partie encouragé par les élites politiques – dans une science abordée à travers ses « mystères », l’épuisement du croire et l’adhésion à l’incroyable (sur‑naturel ou para‑normal) se nourrissant mutuellement. Cette quête, diversement déclinée selon les univers sociaux, a traversé des cercles éduqués sofiotes en prise sur les recherches spirituelles de l’intelligentsia soviétique des années 1980. Afin d’étayer ces arguments, l’importation de la trilogie sera d’abord resituée dans un marché du film institué au croisement entre des finalités et contraintes politiques, économiques et culturelles mouvantes. L’attention se déplacera ensuite vers les modes d’appropriation de l’œuvre de G. Lucas.

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Le marché du film sous le socialisme tardif

Une programmation entre visions concurrentes de la culture, quête de rentabilité et attentes diversifiées des publics

6 À l’instar des autres cinématographies est‑européennes8, au lendemain de la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la jeune industrie bulgare se vit assigner une triple mission : contribuer au façonnage idéologique du « nouvel homme socialiste », démocratiser la culture et offrir aux travailleurs un « délassement mérité »9. De cette définition de la culture ont résulté une nationalisation de la branche, un investissement prométhéen dans la cinéfication (promotion et diffusion du cinéma) et l’introduction d’une planification thématique, esthétique et en termes de genre. Assurément, la césure entre l’avant et l’après‑1944 s’effrange si l’on quitte les injonctions centrales pour envisager l’ordinaire de salles de projection citadines ou rurales où l’offre filmique jongla volontiers entre la rediffusion de comédies à succès de l’entre‑deux‑guerres, la thésaurisation de « films trophées » et l’application inquiète de consignes publiques au déchiffrage malaisé10. Entre la fin des années 1940 et le milieu des années 1950, la politique du répertoire repose néanmoins sur deux piliers, un soutien à la production nationale et la diffusion d’œuvres soviétiques édifiantes.

7 Au cours de la décennie suivante, alors que les mondes filmiques irriguent peu à peu jusqu’aux hameaux les plus reculés grâce aux pérégrinations de cinémas ambulants, la programmation connaît une progressive diversification. Le nombre des œuvres importées de l’Ouest s’accroît, une attention méticuleuse étant toutefois prêtée à la « rectitude idéologique » des cinéastes présentés et à l’équilibre entre pays fournisseurs. Le désir de rentabilité financière, l’ambition des professionnels du cinéma de promouvoir leur art en faisant découvrir les grandes œuvres du répertoire et l’insertion internationale croissante de la Bulgarie contribuent à cette inflexion. Les statistiques officielles – bien que n’épuisant pas la variété des canaux d’approvisionnement et des expériences filmiques – suggèrent que la part des fictions occidentales dans la fréquentation grimpe de 15,63 % en 1955 à 41,11 % en 1968. Durant la première moitié des années 1970, les films produits dans les États capitalistes assurent environ un tiers des entrées (voir tableau 1). Cette ouverture va de pair avec une prise en compte croissante, par les responsables de la culture, des attentes de spectateurs entrés dans l’ère des loisirs11.

Tableau 1 – Origine et box‑office des longs‑métrages projetés en Bulgarie entre 1949 et 1972

Films Films Films des démocraties Films Année Total bulgares soviétiques populaires occidentaux

Nb %

1949 ‑ 19 426 000 3 923 000 ‑‑ 23 349 000

1950 942 000 26 386 000 4 726 000 ‑‑ 32 054 000

1951 2 100 000 28 699 000 7 789 000 ‑‑ 38 588 000

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1952 2 498 000 38 874 000 7 460 000 715 000 0,14 49 547 000

1953 4 655 000 40 677 000 11 088 000 2 397 000 4,07 58 817 000

1954 4 307 00 39 462 000 11 744 000 6 126 000 9,94 61 639 000

1955 5 875 000 40 036 000 16 175 000 11 502 000 15,63 73 588 000

1956 6 713 000 35 132 000 19 034 000 21 025 000 25,67 81 904 000

1957 9 760 000 32 693 000 15 917 000 26 366 000 31,12 84 736 000

1958 10 285 000 38 038 000 18 299 000 24 181 000 26,63 90 803 000

1959 7 359 000 48 926 000 19 397 000 24 366 000 24,34 100 118 000

1960 12 501 000 49 719 000 20 565 000 27 097 000 24,66 109 882 000

1961 13 427 000 54 313 000 31 121 000 18 151 000 15,51 117 012 000

1962 15 572 000 48 086 000 31 585 000 22 960 000 19,43 118 148 000

1963 14 226 000 40 600 000 37 543 000 24 964 000 21,28 117 333 000

1964 13 523 000 34 763 000 43 660 000 26 202 000 22,18 118 148 000

1965 10 695 000 27 353 000 38 043 000 43 515 000 36,38 119 606 000

1966 10 040 000 23 845 000 38 480 000 44 501 000 38,08 116 866 000

1967 9 679 00 26 229 000 38 640 000 37 399 000 33,41 111 947 000

1968 9 032 000 25 148 000 28 248 000 43 576 000 41,11 106 004 000

1969 11 202 000 26 056 000 30 109 000 37 500 000 35,82 104 687 000

1970 11 529 000 25 660 000 31 857 000 37 607 000 34,93 107 653 000

1971 13 520 000 26 128 000 26 602 000 40 030 000 37,66 106 280 000

1972 17 426 000 26 130 000 25 843 000 35 426 000 33,80 104 825 000

555 676 2152 866 Total 216 866 000 822 376 000 357 984 000 25,81 000 000

Source : Georgi Stojanov‑Bigor, « Novoto Bălgarsko kino », Kino i vreme, 5, 1973, p. 15.

8 La visée d’une « effectivité économique », une notion longtemps jugée étrangère aux rationalités des cinématographies est‑européennes, est fondamentale pour notre propos. En 1970, le monopole public D.O. Kinematografija acquiert une comptabilité propre : dorénavant, même si les subventions étatiques ne sont pas complètement supprimées, l’industrie doit financer l’extension de la production nationale, le réseau des salles et les innovations technologiques (tel le passage à la couleur). Il lui faut

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accroître la fréquentation alors même que le grand écran est concurrencé par l’irruption de la télévision dans les foyers. Pour ce faire, les responsables de la distribution misent sur le développement d’une sociologie quantitative des publics et sur une différenciation de l’offre en fonction des segments de clientèle ciblés12. Un tel choix commercial traduit incidemment la reconnaissance du fait que tous les spectateurs ne détiennent pas les mêmes capitaux culturels et sociaux, quand bien même le socialisme viserait à terme une égalisation des conditions et une éducation du goût. Il suppose également la programmation de genres plus « légers » et d’œuvres susceptibles de toucher un vaste public. Si toutes les productions occidentales projetées ne relèvent pas de cette catégorie13, nombre d’entre elles sont des blockbusters délassants, à l’image des comédies de Louis de Funès.

9 Au détour des discussions consacrées au répertoire transparaît ainsi l’existence de définitions concurrentes du cinéma ‑ en tant qu’art et/ou divertissement14. En témoigne le rapport soumis par Hristo Santov, alors directeur de D.O. Kinematografija, au responsable du département Agitation et Propagande près le Comité central, Krum Vasilev, en juin 1969 : En ce qui concerne les films capitalistes, les opinions sont contrastées. Certains sont enclins à jeter sur eux un opprobre systématique. Il leur importe peu de connaître le réalisateur du film, sa thématique, les problèmes qu’il traite et la manière dont il les traite. Il suffit qu’un film soit occidental pour être rejeté. […] Une autre catégorie de personnes accepte en principe la projection de films occidentaux à la condition que celle‑ci intervienne selon des règles définies par nos soins […]. D’autres camarades pensent que si nous importons moins de films capitalistes, nous améliorerons la fréquentation de nos écrans. Or cette thèse est erronée. Les chiffres montrent que lorsque le nombre des films occidentaux à l’écran est peu élevé (10‑12), ces derniers rencontrent un succès beaucoup plus important […]. L’autre thèse est celle défendue par certains de nos critiques de cinéma. Ceux‑ci ne cessent de reprocher à la Cinématographie de ne pas importer de films relevant de ce qu’il est convenu d’appeler le « cinéma intellectuel » ; ils considèrent que ne devraient être diffusés sur nos écrans que de tels films. Ils pleurent pour Fellini, Antonioni, Godard, Truffaut, Alain Resnais etc. Nous aussi, nous apprécions une partie de l’œuvre de ces cinéastes, mais il convient de reconnaître que leurs films ne répondent pas toujours à nos exigences idéelles.15

10 De fait, associée au débat sur les vertus d’un cinéma élitaire ou populaire, l’importation d’œuvres occidentales continuera à voir sa légitimité contestée à échéances régulières dans les cercles conservateurs du Comité central. La prudence avec laquelle Nikola Nenov, vice‑président du Comité à la culture, sollicite en 1980 une augmentation des devises allouées à l’achat d’œuvres « non socialistes » est à cet égard éloquente : Le répertoire des films de fiction se répartit comme suit : bulgares, 20, soviétiques, 50, socialistes, 65, capitalistes et pays en voie de développement, 35‑40. D.O. “Bălgarska Kinematografija” propose chaque année 160 nouveautés contre 250 en USSR, 240 en Pologne et 220 en Tchécoslovaquie. Il est nécessaire d’accroître ces achats afin de diversifier le répertoire, d’offrir une approche différenciée des publics et ainsi d’augmenter la fréquentation. L’industrie cinématographique reçoit actuellement un budget de 280 000 leva convertibles pour l’achat de films des pays capitalistes (1976, 200 ; 1977, 170 ; 1978, 170) ; de tous les pays socialistes, elle est l’institution qui en distribue le moins. Il nous faut porter les moyens financiers à 1 million de leva, soit au même niveau que la RDA (si l’on tient compte de la hausse des prix internationaux). Soyons clairs quant aux films importés depuis des pays capitalistes. La sélection en est assurée par une commission spéciale composée de spécialistes et de figures publiques hautement qualifiées. Les films à l’effet idéologique négatif sont bannis. Si nous excluons quelques œuvres de

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divertissement – comédies musicales, films d’aventure, thrillers…nécessaires en termes de genre, particulièrement l’été – l’attention porte essentiellement sur les fictions de réalisateurs progressistes mondialement connus.16 Dans la Bulgarie du socialisme tardif, la programmation se dessine ainsi à l’intersection toujours labile entre exigences idéologiques, recherche de performances économiques et définitions des préférences des publics.

Star wars sous le regard des prescripteurs de normes

11 C’est dans ce contexte que Star Wars arrive en Bulgarie, cinq ans après sa diffusion aux États‑Unis. Pour trois raisons au moins, il convient de s’arrêter un instant sur les recensions qui en furent proposées. Si l’on peut être tenté de classer le médium filmique parmi les « arts autographiques » dont l’existence matérielle, à la différence des « arts allographiques » (la musique par exemple), n’est pas conditionnée par les performances à travers lesquels il est donné à voir17, la réception cinématographique n’est pas moins jalonnée par une chaîne d’intermédiations entre œuvre et spectateur. De ces médiations les critiques sont un des acteurs‑clé. Le rôle qui leur fut conféré dans des ordres socialistes où la culture avait pour mission d’éduquer le goût et d’assurer une socialisation politique rend cet examen d’autant plus indispensable. Enfin, univers de passeurs à la jonction entre milieux littéraires et artistiques, les critiques cinématographiques éclairent les intrications complexes entre définitions de la valeur, entretien d’un sentiment de soi élitaire et arts d’une écriture interstitielle. Tout en levant un voile sur les définitions « légitimes » du médium filmique à la lisière des années 1980, les recensions de Star Wars donnent ainsi à voir une pluralité de sensibilités esthétiques et culturelles. Elles mettent également en exergue l’existence de charnières temporelles : au climat de détente des années 1970 s’oppose ainsi le durcissement de l’antagonisme Est‑Ouest consécutif au lancement par le président Reagan de la Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) en mars 198318.

12 En 1977, dans la presse généraliste comme spécialiste, la sortie du premier opus est accueillie avec un silence assourdissant. Il faut attendre février 1978 pour que Filmovi novini, une édition de l’Union des professionnels du cinéma et du Comité à la culture destinée à un large public, donne le ton : Le cinéma américain ne s’est jamais autant éloigné de la réalité qu’aujourd’hui. Les sociologues expliquent ce phénomène par le fait que la population s’est lassée de l’engagement politique et des vérités terribles auxquelles elle est perpétuellement confrontée. D’après moi, cette fatigue est largement manipulée par en haut, à travers des media de masse qui font croire au spectateur qu’après le Vietnam et le Watergate, le temps du repos psychique et de la distraction insouciante est venu. Le cinéma américain doit se garder de prendre position sur les maux de son époque en parlant de monstres fantastiques, d’anges et de diables enchanteurs. […] La science fiction est le genre qui se prête le plus aisément à la création de belles fantasmagories déconnectées de la réalité. C’est pour cela qu’[elle] est de nouveau à la mode aux États‑Unis.19

13 À l’été 1978 – après l’attribution de six Oscars au film –, la couverture médiatique s’élargit : la stigmatisation du triomphe de l’évasion est alors associée à une dénonciation du caractère commercial de Hollywood où les réalisateurs auraient succombé aux plaisirs faciles de l’argent20. D’un capitalisme consumé par la recherche du profit résulteraient des fictions où la vacuité morale est compensée par une sophistication technologique croissante21. En contrepoint se dessinent les missions que

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le cinéma devrait remplir – des missions ici résumées dans un courrier de lecteur de Narodno Delo‑Varna en 1984 : De la projection d’un film, ne devons‑nous pas sortir enrichis ? Grâce à la compréhension de vérités nouvelles, à une prise de conscience de facettes de la vie. Voilà, la séance est terminée, je sors du cinéma et me demande : quelle est la valeur de ce film, que nous a‑t‑il apporté ? Des robots, des vaisseaux spatiaux, des étoiles artificielles et un Skywalker dont on ne saurait affirmer qu’il pourra remplacer Hamlet…22

14 Les critiques filmiques ne s’épuisent cependant pas dans la réitération d’une litanie. Certes, la trame narrative obéit aux conventions d’un genre imposant l’insertion de formules routinisées (hommage à la pensée socialiste ou à celle du leader bulgare…) le plus souvent en introduction et en conclusion d’article. Entre ces figures de style s’insinuent toutefois des appréciations qui vont de la condamnation du matérialisme occidental à la reconnaissance, non dénuée d’admiration, de la créativité des réalisateurs américains. Dans le très populaire hebdomadaire Orbita [Orbite], l’on peut ainsi lire quelques développements laudatifs sur l’inventivité visuelle et technologique de George Lucas : George Lucas a travaillé sur le scénario et sa réalisation pendant près de quatre ans. Il est clair qu’il a dû mobiliser toute son habileté, son énergie et son enthousiasme pour mettre en scène ce “conte supergalactique”. Parce que Mežduzvezdni vojni n’est rien d’autre qu’un divertissement pur du début à la fin. Il s’agit d’un film absolument fantastique. Un opéra “féerique” sur la lutte entre le Bien et le Mal où se mêlent intelligemment l’invention, l’aventure et la tension.23

15 Petăr Kărdžilov, lui‑même amateur et auteur de science‑fiction, décrit avec une méticuleuse précision les quatre semaines de montage nécessaires à la composition de plans d’une durée de deux secondes par superposition d’une soixantaine d’images, avant de conclure : « le succès éblouissant des films de la saga est un phénomène sociologique qu’il reste à expliquer »24.

16 Plus fondamentalement, la palette des condescendances et enthousiasmes illustre l’existence de guerres culturelles portant sur les périmètres d’une « haute culture » dont la science‑fiction fut longtemps exclue, ainsi que les désaccords relatifs au type de science‑fiction à privilégier. Plusieurs recensions, notamment celles parues dans les publications sofiotes consacrées à la culture, déploient avec jubilation un art de la distinction professionnelle et sociale à travers des jeux de références lettrés ; elles dénoncent aussi les facilités d’un cinéma de masse en des termes qui ne sont pas sans rappeler les réticences d’une certaine critique occidentale envers le divertissement populaire. Ainsi, le critique Grigor Černev, après avoir déploré que Star Wars ne puisse soutenir la comparaison « en termes de profondeur problématique et artistique » avec 2001. A Space Odessey de Stanley Kubrick (1968) et Solaris de Tarkovski (1972), conclut‑il : L’on peut débattre de la question de savoir si le film est destiné à un public d’enfants ou à un public d’adultes chez qui somnoleraient des pulsions enfantines inaccomplies. Je ne sais ce qu’il en est pour les autres spectateurs, mais, pour ma part, j’ai initialement regardé ce film avec curiosité ; ensuite, l’ennui s’est insinué en moi et à la sortie de la projection je me suis dit qu’il n’y avait aucune raison pour que je le regarde une deuxième fois.25

17 Vers 1983, s’observe toutefois, indépendamment des auteurs, une multiplication des références à « l’impérialisme américain » sur fond de « seconde guerre froide ». Cette inflexion géopolitique coïncide avec une reprise en main de la culture consécutive au décès en 1980 de Ljudmila Živkova, la fille du dictateur, ancienne responsable du

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Comité à la culture26. À l’occasion du lancement en salles du Return of the Jedi, Narodna mladež avance ainsi laconique : [Le film] vise principalement un public d’adolescents et d’enfants, mais même les plus âgés le regarderont avec intérêt en raison du fait que l’administration des États‑Unis prépare des plans de militarisation du cosmos – une vraie menace pour la paix sur notre planète.27 Dans les colonnes du mensuel Anteni, une édition du Comité central de l’organisation de la jeunesse communiste (DKMS), la traductrice Marijana Melniška conclut de même : [G. Lucas] pense poursuivre sa saga cosmique avec quelques récits filmiques concernant les événements antérieurs à Mežduzvezdna vojna. Rien d’étonnant à ce que ses héros rencontrent des barbares. Pour le moment, il est suffisamment inquiétant que les projets de « guerres des étoiles » existent non seulement dans les studios de Hollywood, mais aussi dans les dossiers d’hommes politiques américains influents.28

18 Que sait‑on cependant de la manière dont les appréciations de la critique furent appréhendées par les lecteurs ? Deux esquisses de réponse nous sont fournies au sujet du public adolescent : la première est contemporaine des événements ; la seconde participe d’une relecture rétrospective opérée depuis l’âge adulte et la période post‑communiste. Le 12 mars 1985, l’hebdomadaire destiné à la jeunesse, Srednoškolsko zname, consacre une page entière à Star Wars sous le titre « De la guerre des étoiles et d’autres guerres ». Sur la colonne de gauche, sont proposés des commentaires de collégiens et lycéens adressés à la rédaction. À droite, la parole est donnée à Atanas Slavov, responsable artistique du renommé Club représentatif de fantastique, d’heuristique et de pronostic “Ivan Efremov” de Sofia : Nous sommes très déçus par l’intervention du camarade Ljuben Dilov29 à la télévision dans l’émission “Vsjaka Nedelja” [Tous les dimanches]. Il s’est prononcé contre le film de George Lucas “Mežduzvezdna vojna”. Signé : des élèves de 9e et des milliers d’autres qui pensent comme nous.30 Dans sa réplique, Atanas Slavov évoque des extraits du courrier « anonyme » non repris par la rédaction, jetant un éclairage complémentaire sur les représentations lycéennes : Ici précisément, je vais me permettre de ne pas être d’accord avec le groupe de « élèves de 9e » (qui ont signé anonymement) lorsqu’ils affirment que “nous n’avons pas la technologie et l’imagination de George Lucas”. Pour ce qui est de la technique, le fait est avéré, aucune cinématographie socialiste ne dispose de moyens comparables à ceux de l’immense industrie du cinéma de Hollywood. Mais pour ce qui est de l’imagination, seul quelqu’un qui ne lit pas de littérature de science‑fiction peut avancer une telle assertion.31

19 Faut‑il lire dans ces propos l’explicitation d’une déception par rapport au socialisme réellement existant ou l’expression des hiérarchies symboliques instaurées entre des grands États au vaste rayonnement technologique et culturel et une modeste Bulgarie ? Quoi qu’il en soit, l’examen des écritures écolières suggère la variété des paramètres ayant pu informer les réceptions de Star Wars – parmi lesquels une inventivité visuelle et une conception des personnages humains et non‑humains sur lesquels nous reviendrons.

20 Une seconde piste nous est offerte par les arts du braconnage32 de deux spectatrices qui reviennent en 2011 sur leurs appropriations adolescentes des articles consacrés à Star Wars33 : J’aurais souhaité partager avec vous les destinées de mes coupures de presse de BTA Paraleli. Je dois d’abord préciser que tout ce que le magazine publiait sur ce film devenu pour moi une religion était découpé méticuleusement, montré à tous, plié,

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déplié, lu et relu sans fin avec une grande fierté. À tel point qu’au bout de quelques années les coupures de presse s’usèrent littéralement et s’élimèrent jusqu’à devenir illisibles en certains endroits. En 1991, alors que j’étais déjà grande (précisément en début de seconde) et que Mežduzvezdni vojni n’occupait plus la première place dans mon existence, j’ai décidé de recopier les articles dans un petit cahier, de coller les photographies à côté d’eux et de jeter les coupures élimées.34

21 Le petit cahier – un agenda strié de lignes gris‑perle dont chaque page couvre deux journées à la datation typographiée en vert – est juxtaposé à cette évocation : la sage scansion alternée entre images et textes fait saillir l’écriture cursive soignée dans laquelle les critiques disparues ont été recopiées. Réminiscences des leksikoni, ces journaux intimes dans lesquels les enseignants de l’ère socialiste invitaient leurs élèves à noter leurs goûts et expériences culturelles (lecture, musique, cinéma, etc.), la pratique ici relatée suggère combien l’appropriation du message des prescripteurs de normes a pu transiter par le corps matériel du texte, papier froissé et défunt dont un travail de copiste et de réinvention visuelle assura la pérennité. En réponse à cette première intervention, un autre amateur de Star Wars évoque ses propres techniques d’attribution de la valeur : Tout comme Freja, je garde (pour ma part dans un petit cahier spécial) des extraits de Paraleli consacrés au thème “Star Wars”. Soit exactement ce que vous voyez, à la différence près que les articles n’ont pas été recopiés. L’article le plus précieux que je garde de cette époque‑là (en fait, il ne s’agit pas d’un article, car l’article lui‑même était propagandiste et stupide) provient du magazine Anteni. Sur la quatrième de couverture étaient reproduites des photographies du film EN COULEUR et sur PAPIER GLACE (notamment le croiseur s’approchant de l’Etoile de la mort à demi‑construite).35

22 Le propos vient opportunément rappeler que les recensions de la trilogie ne firent nullement l’objet d’une intériorisation passive, la thésaurisation des images venant se substituer dans maintes pratiques enfantines à un déchiffrage appliqué des enseignements délivrés par les critiques, a fortiori lorsque les jugements de ces derniers entraient en dissonance avec les appréciations des jeunes spectateurs. Si l’on souhaite appréhender l’éventail des réceptions de Star Wars dans la Bulgarie des années 1980, il convient de revenir plus avant sur ces arts de faire sens et plaisir.

Star Wars et les médiations des sens

23 Avant d’explorer les réceptions du film, deux remarques liminaires s’imposent : premièrement, en l’absence de données chiffrées, le succès de Star Wars doit être inféré indirectement. En ce début des années 1980, le cinéma reste en Bulgarie un loisir très prisé, qui attire annuellement 95 millions de spectateurs ; un dense réseau de salles (3 453 dont 511 en milieu urbain et 2 942 à la campagne) maille le territoire36. Le profil générationnel des spectateurs a toutefois évolué depuis la fin des années 1960, confirmant la prépondérance du jeune public ; les générations plus avancées préfèrent désormais les plaisirs domestiques de la télévision37. Cette pyramide des âges n’est pas indifférente à la résonance rencontrée par la saga de George Lucas. En 1985, un rapport d’inspection technique du cinéma Serdika de Sofia se fait l’écho de l’insatisfaction des caissières devant l’alourdissement de leur charge de travail – un alourdissement proportionnel à l’allongement des files d’attente pour les blockbusters : La rétribution matérielle des vendeuses ne correspond pas à la pression et à la responsabilité croissantes associées à la projection fréquente des films à grand

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succès dont la production a commencé ces dernières années [la référence porte ici sur les épopées historiques bulgares réalisées sur commande du Comité central]. (…) A Serdika, la charge de travail est très élevée. Cela s’explique principalement par les difficultés d’entretien du cinéma le plus grand de Sofia, le nombre élevé des spectateurs (en particulier pour des films comme Mežduzvezdni vojni) et le travail de pose d’une moquette sur une surface aussi vaste. On le sait, les rotations rapides des personnels nuisent à l’accomplissement du travail et ne permettent pas de doter le collectif de traditions ‑ sans parler des périodes où les départs ne sont pas remplacés, faute de candidat38.

24 Les bilans annuels des cinémas offrent également un instrument d’approximation de l’engouement pour la trilogie. En 1983 – année au cours de laquelle The Empire Strikes back est diffusé au cinéma Serdika –, le pourcentage des spectateurs ayant regardé des fictions « non socialistes » atteint 55,2 %, soit un chiffre très supérieur à la part (environ un tiers) des œuvres occidentales dans la programmation (voir tableau 2).

Tableau 2 – Box‑office du complexe cinématographique Serdika pendant les dix premiers mois de l’année 1983

Origine des films Nombre de spectateurs Pourcentage

Bulgare 347 497 17,9

Soviétique 244 865 12,6

Du camp socialiste 241 950 12,5

Pays en voie de développement 34 800 1,8

Non socialiste 1 074 175 55,2

Source : DA Soﬁa, F 1.769, o. 3, ae. 26, l.7.

25 Deuxièmement, l’estimation des entrées ne fournit qu’un indicateur imparfait des appréciations du film. En entretien, presque tous les enquêtés39 concèdent un émerveillement visuel devant les effets spéciaux et l’inventivité graphique (la figure si humaine du robot R2D2, par exemple) de G. Lucas. Cet émerveillement n’est toutefois pas exclusif de sentiments d’ennui ou d’exaspération. Y compris parmi les amateurs de science‑fiction, l’épreuve du regard ne fut pas univoque. Le jugement sans appel du responsable artistique du Club “Ivan Efremov” de Sofia, Atanas Slavov, vient rappeler que ne saurait être imputé à l’ensemble des spectateurs la fascination d’un noyau de « fans » : “Star Wars” est un féodalisme cosmique. Nous sommes profondément critiques envers ce modèle de futur dans son ensemble. Il s’agit d’un conte médiéval drapé dans des vêtements cosmiques. Lorsque j’ai vu le film pour la première fois, ma première réaction a été : « Quelle absurde débauche de bêtise ! ». Voyez avec quel luxe cette idiotie absurde a été mise en scène. Tout l’accomplissement du film réside dans le décor. D’après moi, le vrai succès de George Lucas est d’avoir atteint cette évidence naturelle dans une construction de la réalité fantastique. Mais, nous, nous avons créé notre club et notre mouvement pour des raisons complètement différentes. Le fantastique était à nos yeux une manière de traiter des problèmes sérieux de la réalité. Il ne constituait pas une évasion vers je ne sais quel féodalisme

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inventé. Le féodalisme est un passé de l’humanité qui ne redeviendra jamais un futur.40

26 Nonobstant ces limites interprétatives, trois types de médiation seront ici envisagés : les séductions exercées, dans de larges segments de la société, par les mystères d’une science (fiction) inscrite dans un récit futurologique ; la quête d’une utopie alternative, parfois située au‑delà du clivage Est‑Ouest, et enfin l’appropriation de l’œuvre à travers des techniques du corps, des jeux de conversations et de références en amont comme en aval du spectacle cinématographique. Au croisement entre ces trois entrées, l’on souhaiterait avancer l’hypothèse suivante : Star wars constitua non un lieu d’effacement des clivages politiques, sociaux et culturels traversant la société bulgare, mais plutôt le site d’une mise en évidence de l’ampleur des contrastes entre trajectoires familiales, attaches sociales et univers de sociabilité. Plus encore, sa diffusion en Bulgarie participa de la confirmation des hiérarchies sociales du socialisme.

Les mystères de la science (fiction) : l’ad‑venu du futur

27 On ne saurait déchiffrer les résonances de Star Wars sans considérer les séductions de la naučna fantastika, un genre situé à la croisée entre science‑fiction, fantastique et fantasy41, et son dialogue avec les mystères de la science et du futur. En l’occurrence, deux évolutions surviennent au tournant des années 1970‑1980 qui dessinent un moment spécifique du socialisme bulgare et dont on peut faire l’hypothèse qu’elles ont influencé la réception de Star Wars. La première concerne les discours publics, imaginations collectives et pratiques sociales du temps, plus spécifiquement les articulations entre passé, présent et futur. La seconde tient, à partir du milieu des années 1970, à l’émergence d’une sensibilité pour l’incroyable, le paranormal, parfois aussi l’ésotérisme affectant l’investissement des Ailleurs spatio‑temporels.

28 Dès leur installation, les pouvoirs communistes bulgares avaient défini la construction socialiste comme un projet de modernisation par la science inscrit dans un ordre du progrès humain. En ce petit pays des confins européens, les nouvelles élites dirigeantes s’imaginaient en continuateurs de l’intelligentsia du XIXe siècle ayant lutté pour une émancipation de la tutelle ottomane et pour l’édification d’un État‑nation moderne. Vécue ailleurs en Europe centrale et orientale comme un détour ou une aliénation de l’identité européenne, l’alliance avec l’Union soviétique y était envisagée non comme une négation du projet de modernité européenne, mais comme l’instrument d’une accélération du temps et d’un rattrapage du « retard » balkanique. Même à l’heure du lyssenkisme triomphant, l’adhésion à une scientificité européenne fut plus euphémisée que contestée. A partir de la fin des années 1940, en un mouvement qui n’est pas sans rappeler l’URSS des années 1920, la Bulgarie se dote de publications de vulgarisation scientifique (à l’image de Nauka i tehnika na mladežta, fondé en 1948) chargées de diffuser les acquis de la science socialiste, de stimuler l’inventivité et d’accompagner la formation de futures élites scientifiques42. Une décennie plus tard, l’accent sur la contribution de la jeunesse est renforcé : en 1967, le Komsomol bulgare (DKMS) lance un Mouvement pour la création technique et scientifique de la jeunesse (Dviženieto Tehničesko i naučno tvorčestvo na mladežta, THTM) ramifié en une arborescence de clubs locaux où fleurissent enseignements et concours pour inventeurs amateurs43.

29 À ce projet de modernité scientifique, la conquête spatiale confère une aura exceptionnelle. En 1961, enfants et adultes contemplent émerveillés les images

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télévisuelles (médium magique s’il en est) de Jurij Gagarin à bord de la navette Vostok [Est]. En Bulgarie ‑ comme dans le reste du monde – l’ouverture du cosmos introduit une césure irréversible. Bien que sa place dans le programme cosmique ait été modeste aux côtés d’une Union soviétique à la puissance rayonnante (première navette spatiale, premier chien, premier homme, première femme dans l’espace…), la Bulgarie aussi voit grandir une « génération Sputnik » convaincue que la concurrence entre les économies morales du capitalisme et du socialisme se joue sur le terrain de l’avenir44. Contemporain d’une période de libéralisation politique et du développement de la société de consommation, le rêve spatial tient de l’utopie sur le point de s’accomplir. Il représente moins une alternative à un présent décevant qu’une promesse d’actualisation du futur. Alors que les autorités bulgares orchestrent la célébration des héros de l’exploration spatiale – soviétiques pour la plupart45 – à la faveur de tournées, d’initiatives commémoratives ou d’une politique de l’onomastique parant les rues et écoles des noms de scientifiques et cosmonautes soviétiques, le projet cosmique vient habiter les représentations du monde et les attentes envers le socialisme46.

30 C’est dans le cadre de ces relations intimes entre rêve et réalité du futur, connaissance et imagination que l’apologie de la science se pare des couleurs d’une naučna fantastika [littéralement : fantastique scientifique]. Aux côtés d’articles dédiés à la raison des sciences, les publications de vulgarisation multiplient les récits de science‑fiction, unissant socialisations scientifique et fantastique. De cette filiation attestent la démarche et le succès non démenti47 du « magazine scientifique‑artistique pour les pionniers » Kosmos, lancé en mai 196248. La revue est fondée alors que la Bulgarie vient d’achever la construction de son premier réacteur nucléaire ; le futur semble être à la portée de chacun : Regardez dans la calme nuit sans lune le ciel étoilé. Des étoiles innombrables clignotent dans le trou noir de l’Univers. Quels mondes lointains se cachent parmi les espaces infinis ? Ressemblent‑ils à notre Terre ? Y a‑t‑il sur eux de la vie, des êtres raisonnables ? Ou sommes‑nous, hommes, seuls dans l’Univers sans fin ? (…) L’esprit humain ne connaît pas de limites ; la volonté humaine – d’obstacles insurmontables, les rêves humains – de frontières ! Et nous sommes témoins des accomplissements les plus hardis dans le domaine de la science et de la technique. Non seulement l’homme a volé dans l’espace cosmique, non seulement il a dominé à travers l’atome le feu déchaîné, dans les entrailles ensoleillées, mais il a créé à l’image de sa raison des machines pensantes (…). L’homme est grand de ses rêves, de ses idéaux. Ils ont donné aux esclaves la force de se battre pour leur liberté, au révolutionnaire de se sacrifier pour le bien‑être de l’humanité. Rêvez ! Des rêves audacieux, orientés par les idéaux du communisme, vous emmèneront vous aussi vers des mondes merveilleux – vous transporteront vers la société du futur, vous montreront des planètes inconnues et des animaux jamais vus, vous feront rencontrer d’autres habitants raisonnables de l’Univers. N’ayez pas peur, chers jeunes lecteurs, de la grandeur de l’univers éternel et infini, n’ayez pas peur de ses éléments indomptés, des animaux et plantes inconnus, des mondes lointains, jamais vus. Avancez avec audace. Vous portez le fier nom d’Humain ! Derrière vous se dressent des milliers de penseurs, de lutteurs, de scientifiques et d’inventeurs. Ils vous viendront toujours en aide dans les moments difficiles avec une pensée sage et à travers l’exemple de leur vie.49

31 Entraînant le lecteur du pays des sciences à celui des récits fantastiques, cette première livraison invite plusieurs auteurs de science‑fiction soviétiques, dont les frères

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Strugackij, à décrire le monde tel qu’ils l’imaginent dans vingt ans. Deux traits caractérisent cette entreprise éditoriale : aucune discontinuité n’est introduite entre la science et la science‑fiction, ces deux modalités de projection dans un avenir ouvert ; l’existence du futur se fait garante de la possibilité d’une vie ici et maintenant. Le rêve est le moteur du présent. Ce sont précisément ces deux caractéristiques qui se délitent au fil des années 1970.

32 Au moment où Star Wars investit les salles obscures bulgares, l’espoir a en effet cédé la place à une ère d’intranquillité. Les jonctions entre passé, présent et futur sont désarticulées : le futur collectif s’est rétréci, comme écrasé sous un présent sans fin. À bien des égards, la configuration bulgare ressemble à la « nostalgie pour le futur » décrite par Asif Siddiqi au sujet d’une Union soviétique qui, après l’euphorie nationale des prouesses spatiales, a vu les héros du cosmos décéder (Korolev puis Gagarin) et le coût de la conquête spatiale révélé sur fond de crise économique et de stagnation politique50. Elle s’en distingue toutefois par le calendrier, ainsi que par les entreprises publiques de façonnage du temps. Si elles sont parfois vécues comme une ère de compromis, les années 1970 bulgares sont contemporaines de l’avènement d’un quotidien enfin prévisible, un quotidien plus confortable aussi : scandée par la réitération de slogans compassés et l’exhibition de médiocrités bureaucratiques substituées à la révolution espérée, la vie de tous les jours connaît aussi les bénéfices de voyages à l’étranger plus fréquents, de vacances en bord de mer et de villas en retrait des grands centres urbains. Une évolution en ciseaux sépare le temps du projet collectif socialiste (vol arrêté) des expériences de larges couches de la société ayant bénéficié de la mobilité géographique et sociale des décennies précédentes. Dans les cercles de la culture, la décennie 1970 est en outre vécue comme un « âge d’or » : au Comité à la culture, Ljudmila Živkova s’entoure d’un cénacle d’intellectuels, impulse traductions et grands projets internationaux51 ; la Cinématographie accède à un certain rayonnement sous la direction de Pavel Pisarev. En Bulgarie, il faut donc attendre le début des années 1980 pour voir converger les frustrations relatives à l’avenir suspendu du socialisme et au blocage des destinées privées.

33 La seconde originalité réside dans la stratégie adoptée par les pouvoirs publics : face à l’épuisement du croire socialiste, les élites amorcent un ressourcement dans l’histoire nationale qui ancre les destinées socialistes en un passé médiéval et antique. La célébration du 1300e anniversaire de la création d’un État « bulgare » (681) sert de prétexte à une prolifération de projets filmiques, littéraires et festifs destinés à doter le futur socialiste d’antécédents glorieux au prix de dépenses somptuaires. Tout se passe comme si, au fur et à mesure que l’avenir s’étiolait, l’avant s’étirait jusqu’à occuper la totalité de l’horizon temporel. En parallèle, le temps national creuse les entrailles de la terre. Si cette politique a fait l’objet d’une riche historiographie52, rares sont les auteurs qui l’ont envisagée à l’aune des transformations survenues dans les constructions politiques et expériences sociales du temps. Elle le mériterait sans doute, comme en témoigne l’évolution de la revue Kosmos, de son iconographie et de son contenu : à partir des années 1970, l’exploration de l’Ailleurs, autrefois confiée à la lumineuse conquête spatiale, s’y déplace vers une quête des origines où l’archéologie reçoit la mission de penser aussi bien l’enracinement de la nation que son avenir. Par un étonnant jeu sur les espaces‑temps, un lien est désormais instauré entre l’« en‑dessous » (les profondeurs de la terre) et l’« au‑delà » (cosmique).

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34 La fin des années 1970 ne correspond toutefois pas seulement à une antiquisation du futur ; elle coïncide également avec le développement d’une sensibilité pour l’incroyable qui irrigue jusqu’aux publications de vulgarisation scientifique53 et aux cours de « communisme scientifique » de l’Institut d’étude de la jeunesse près le Comité central de DKMS. Corrélation ou concomitance ? Au moment même où la croyance dans l’idéal socialiste s’épuise, la science s’entoure de mystères. De cette évolution, Antonija Koleva a proposé une interprétation stimulante. À ses yeux, le développement de l’incroyable serait constitutif d’une entreprise visant à entretenir la possibilité du croire (au présent) à travers l’accomplissement (au futur) de l’incroyable aujourd’hui : Les hypothèses et les pronostics proposés par Kosmos passaient pour nécessairement réalisables dans un avenir indéterminé. Ainsi l’improbable était déplacé dans la progression du temps […]. Lorsque l’on affirme que l’incroyable est déjà actuel, il commence à fonctionner comme un maillon reliant le présent au moment où il constituera un fait ordinaire. La frontière entre le présent et le futur est refaçonnée par la formule « incroyable mais vrai »54.

35 Les présences du paranormal revêtent une pluralité de formes : jusqu’à son décès en 1980, Ljudmila Živkova cultive un goût pour les sciences ésotériques. Les savoirs de la voyante aveugle Baba Vanga reçoivent une onction publique ; consultée par les dirigeants bulgares, leurs hôtes soviétiques et un foisonnement de dignitaires et citoyens ordinaires du monde entier, elle se voit consacrer un institut de recherche destiné à rendre raison de ses liens avec un au‑delà impalpable55. Au même moment, certains milieux lettrés s’initient aux recherches spirituelles teintées du mysticisme de l’intelligentsia soviétique56. Certes, les voies du mystère n’échappent pas à une cartographie sociale : à la campagne, l’adhésion à l’incroyable médiatise certaines des mutations associées à l’industrialisation et à l’exode rural. Dans les univers urbains éduqués, les mystères alimentent surtout des expériences de pensée métaphysiques. Mais, par‑delà cette constellation, force est de constater l’ubiquité d’un phénomène qui confère à la dernière décennie du socialisme une atmosphère singulière. K., 41 ans, traducteur originaire de Sliven, se souvient de cette époque : Dans mon quartier, c’était surtout les filles qui racontaient des histoires de ce genre, des histoires de dauphins habitant le triangle des Bermudes ou de boules de feu tournoyant dans le ciel. On pouvait en lire de semblables dans Paraleli. Et l’on y croyait avec cette manière étrange que l’on a parfois de croire, en sachant que c’est faux tout en y croyant. En 1980, il y avait eu à Sliven une histoire d’apparition de la Vierge sur la vitrine d’un supermarché. Certains croyaient à un effet d’optique lié à la physique du verre ; d’autres pensaient qu’il s’agissait vraiment d’une apparition. Les gens s’attroupaient devant le magasin. […] un proche de ma famille, haut placé dans l’administration locale, aurait déclaré lors d’une fête que des Polonais vivant en Bulgarie étaient responsables du phénomène. 57

36 De rumeurs en apparitions, Star Wars est alors investi comme un support à travers lequel interroger les relations de gémellité entre sciences et mystères. Aux yeux d’une partie des spectateurs, l’asserté et le croyable y sont reliés par les fils du temps en une formule imprégnée de socialisation scientiste socialiste. Témoin cette jeune lycéenne pour qui l’œuvre de G. Lucas illustre, en 1985, la véridicité d’un impossible‑maintenant‑mais‑croyable‑au‑futur : Ce film est‑il un conte ? Oui, mais n’est‑il pas un conte vrai ?… Même dans notre galaxie nous avons étudié trop peu d’étoiles pour pouvoir affirmer qu’il n’existe pas en dehors de nous d’autres êtres doués de raison. Ne se pourrait‑il pas que sur certaines planètes vivent des êtres pensants parvenus à un niveau technologique

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supérieur qui disposent des cadres nécessaires, de vaisseaux cosmiques… et se battent pour défendre leurs idéaux ? C’est bien évidemment possible ; telle est la raison pour laquelle je pense que ce film montre ce que pourrait être notre éventuel futur cosmique… Encore une chose. Je ne pense pas que le film ait un but politique, parce qu’il montre qu’en dépit de tous les obstacles et de toutes les difficultés, le bien l’emporte toujours sur le mal. Signé : Daniela Babačeva, élève au lycée 130 ECPU, Sofia.58 En d’autres configurations, la trilogie rencontre un désir d’élévation empreint de mysticisme que P., nouvel urbain éduqué de 49 ans, décrit en ces termes : Mežduzvezdni vojni, c’était une forme de liberté, des forces totalement autres. Il y avait l’espoir qu’existe un monde plus grand, doté d’autres dimensions. Celui dans lequel nous vivions n’était pas total, il ne pouvait te contrôler totalement. Ailleurs existaient des mondes plus développés technologiquement, quelque chose au‑dessus de nous. À l’époque, j’étais déjà croyant. Pour moi, ce film était comme une sorte d’expérience mystique.59

37 La recherche d’un Ailleurs temporel et d’un ressourcement spirituel ne constituent pas les seuls modes d’investissement symbolique de Star Wars. Partir sur les traces des usages sociaux de la science‑fiction en Bulgarie socialiste nous conduira cependant à voir que, loin de traduire la seule force de séduction d’un Ouest rêvé, l’engouement pour la trilogie a aussi participé de la production d’une utopie située au‑delà du socialisme réel et de la logique bipolaire.

Un “Ailleurs” au‑delà de la bipolarité Est‑Ouest ?

38 Dans les colonnes d’une populaire revue de science‑fiction Fep, à la question : « Rêvez‑vous de voler dans le cosmos ? », l’illustrateur Ivan Kirkov répond en avril 1988 : « Je n’ai pas l’intention de voler dans le cosmos. Je rêve que les États ouvrent leurs frontières et de pouvoir me rendre où je le désire »60. Lorsque les mobilités sont cadenassées, l’utopie n’a‑t‑elle d’autre issue que de se convertir en hétérotopie située à l’Ouest ? Une fois encore, l’examen des réceptions de Star Wars suggère une réponse‑gigogne où les engagements contradictoires s’emboîtent plus qu’ils ne s’excluent et où le profil des acteurs sociaux diffracte les vécus.

39 La première observation serait triviale n’était la fréquence des écrits sur le socialisme tardif tendant à attacher une intentionnalité politique à la consommation des biens culturels occidentaux : même les spectateurs adultes de Star Wars furent loin d’y quérir systématiquement une allégorie politique. À la fin des années 1970, le genre de la science‑fiction jouit en Bulgarie d’une popularité dont attestent notamment le développement d’un réseau de clubs amateurs, le succès des revues et collections de SF, ainsi que l’existence d’émissions radiophoniques et télévisuelles. Longtemps marginale61, la science‑fiction a acquis ses lettres de noblesse à travers des maisons d’éditions spécialisées (la collection Galaktika fondée à Varna en 1979) et la publication de grands classiques par de prestigieux éditeurs généralistes. La création littéraire ne relève plus seulement d’ingénieurs récemment élevés par le socialisme, dont l’entrée dans le monde des belles lettres aurait été opérée par ce truchement. Le lectorat n’est plus cantonné aux seuls adolescents, même s’il continue à revêtir un profil générationnel et genré marqué.

40 La production nationale de science‑fiction reste cependant cantonnée aux mondes scripturaux. À la différence de l’Allemagne de l’Est qui se dota au début des années 1970 d’un studio spécialisé DEFA‑Futurum62, la Cinématographie bulgare se hasarde rarement

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dans l’univers de la science‑fiction, offrant tout juste une poignée de contes à motifs fantastiques63. Star Wars représente dès lors un choc visuel dont N., producteur de télévision de 39 ans, se souvient en ces termes : Il y avait une dimension romantique dans les héros, ou plutôt les anti‑héros, du type de Vador avec ses vêtements noirs. Là je te parle d’une situation, notre réalité, dans laquelle il n’y a absolument aucun cinéma de ce type, je veux dire dans les pays socialistes. Mais même en Occident ce film a constitué une vraie révolution […]. À notre âge, nous n’avions pas de réflexivité sur le monde dans lequel nous vivions, cependant Star Wars nous a aidés à développer un goût esthétisé et aventurier que nous n’aurions jamais pu cultiver sinon. Nous avions bien des collections de science‑fiction mais il s’agissait d’une science‑fiction très intellectuelle, pas du tout iconographique. Elle ne suscitait aucune image en toi. Je me souviens que l’un de mes amis peintre a commencé à forger son style à ce moment‑là ; il reproduisait des motifs empruntés à Star Wars, des uniformes des soldats fantasy, des machines, des armes, des villes cosmiques. Cela lui a même valu d’être exclu du lycée pour les arts parce qu’il était trop influencé par la bande dessinée et les mondes fantastiques et ne dessinait pas de façon académique.64

41 Loin d’être exclusivement soumise à une lecture interstitielle, la trilogie a apporté un souffle de liberté ludique à une classe de spectateurs désireuse de s’émanciper des attentes « responsables » placées envers une jeunesse à qui l’on avait donné pour mission de faire advenir le futur scientifique. Un internaute raconte : Quand nous avons regardé ce film, nous avons été surpris qu’il soit construit comme un conte. Je ne sais pas pourquoi cela nous a plus impressionnés que les effets spéciaux. Etait‑ce parce qu’à l’époque on parlait sur un ton sérieux, semi‑professoral, et qu’il était rare que soient autorisées des activités légères ?65

42 Revenant sur l’éblouissement visuel associé au spectacle de Star Wars, N., 38 ans, qui découvrit la saga au milieu des années 1980 dans un bourg de la montagneuse région du Pirin, va plus loin : pour elle, non seulement la vision ne se fit pas instrument de scrutation d’une Amérique découverte en fraude, mais la projection sur la trilogie d’une cartographie Est/Ouest échoue à rendre compte des mécanismes d’un enchantement associé au dessin des personnages : Star Wars était différent de tous les films que nous avions vus jusqu’alors. La grenouille d’abord, elle me fascinait. Et puis, j’aimais que la plupart des héros ne soient pas des êtres humains. Je n’avais jamais rien vu de tel. A mes yeux, cela n’a jamais eu la moindre importance que le film soit américain ; j’ai toujours adoré le cinéma russe. Ce contexte‑là n’avait aucune importance. Pour tous les gens de ma génération, il s’agit d’un film‑culte.66

43 La remarque est également intéressante en ce qu’elle lève le voile sur une seconde médiation des réceptions de Star Wars : à savoir la révérence envers de « grandes œuvres » dont la distribution spatiale et temporelle dessine une carte étrangère aux découpages de la guerre froide culturelle. L’Ailleurs revêt ici la forme d’une planète dont les deux moitiés conversent à travers une définition de la valeur culturelle. Il suffit pour s’en convaincre de relire les réponses des lecteurs aux enquêtes sur les « livres que vous emporteriez lors d’un voyage cosmique » réalisées dans des magazines de science‑fiction tels que Fep : lectures socialistes et capitalistes, « conformes » et « contestataires », contemporaines et nourries d’une longue durée féérique s’y mêlent joyeusement, ordonnées selon des préférences individuelles, générationnelles et sociales. Dans les rayonnages de maintes bibliothèques privées des années 1980, un Jules Verne du XIXe siècle français jouxte les écrits de Karel Čapek, auteur d’un entre‑deux‑guerres où la Tchécoslovaquie faisait partie des démocraties européennes,

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tandis que Ray Bradbury et Clifford Simak dialoguent, au‑delà même de la diversité des conceptions littéraires, avec le Polonais Stanislaw Lem et les Soviétiques Boris et Arkadij Strugackij. Qui songerait à s’étonner qu’il fût loisible d’aimer Edgar Allan Poe et Pavel Vežinov (un écrivain, scénariste et réalisateur bulgare parfois considéré comme « conformiste ») ou encore de lire à tour de rôle H.G. Wells et Ljuben Dilov ? La grille de lecture opposant fictions socialiste et capitaliste ne saurait épuiser les manières d’éprouver les œuvres. Cette irréductibilité contribue à expliquer qu’il ait été possible d’aduler Star Wars tout en croyant aux vertus du socialisme, tout comme on pouvait écouter de la musique rock sans aspirer à subvertir l’ordre politique67. Comme le rappelle L., 59 ans : La mentalité scientifico‑fantastique de notre génération constitue un mélange, un bricolage entre les auteurs les plus différents et en son sein les récits des frères Strugackij et de Stanislaw Lem ne se différencient guère dans la conscience de masse de ceux d’Isaac Azimov et d’autres auteurs massivement édités. Les héros de ces romans étaient des êtres réflexifs, libres penseurs et libres d’aimer, insoumis.68

44 Ce commentaire invite à se démarquer de deux postures fréquentes dans les écrits dédiés à la science‑fiction en régimes socialistes : la première, soulignant les réserves des pouvoirs socialistes envers un genre associé à un Occident suspect, confère à l’appréciation de la science‑fiction une essence « oppositionnelle »69 ; la seconde examine presque exclusivement les usages politiques d’une SF socialiste associée à une « science du futur », la prognostika, qui se voulait une alternative à la « futurologie » occidentale70. D’autres logiques de classement – en termes de hiérarchie des sous‑genres par exemple – semblent offrir des descripteurs plus fins des pratiques sociales de l’époque socialiste. À la condition, bien sûr, de ne pas oublier que spectateurs et lecteurs purent en un éclectisme vivifiant goûter autant la science‑fiction d’évasion que les réflexions sur le devenir humain.

45 Si l’on admet que les plaisirs sensoriels ne relèvent pas seulement d’un art du déchiffrage des métaphores politiques et que la science‑fiction jouit d’une historicité antérieure et en partie extérieure à la guerre froide, est‑ce à dire que toute recherche d’utopie alternative fut absente des appropriations de la naučna fantastika durant les années 1970‑1980 ? Nullement. Une certaine prudence s’impose toutefois dans le traitement de ces usages sociaux. Au cours de cette période, les clubs de science‑fiction des grands centres urbains attirent en Bulgarie une variété de lettrés et de scientifiques trentenaires séduits par ce qu’ils voient comme une atmosphère de libre‑pensée, désireux aussi de se confronter à des défis contemporains dont ils estiment qu’ils concernent l’ensemble de la planète. Qu’il s’agisse de réfléchir aux menaces (nucléaires notamment) pesant sur la survie du monde ou d’étudier les effets sur l’homme de la mécanisation à outrance, l’échelle pertinente englobe une terre et un ciel qui ne penchent pas à l’Ouest. La recherche d’utopie fait ici retour avant tout comme alternative à une vision matérialiste du monde. L., sociologue de 60 ans, a remarquablement capturé cette atmosphère des années 1980, critique de la routinisation d’un socialisme sans âme plus qu’adhésion à un modèle occidental : Dans ce genre de films [comme Star Wars], il n’y avait pas, à tout le moins pour moi, le reflet d’une influence américaine ; en revanche, il y a une opposition claire à l’Est. Chaque film, y compris Solaris, nous l’avons vu comme une alternative à l’utopie socialiste, à l’avenir radieux de la construction du communisme. Mais, quand je dis qu’il s’agissait d’une autre utopie, c’était une utopie qui ne divisait pas le monde entre eux et nous, entre la société bourgeoise‑moderne et la société alternative‑moderne. Il y a dans ces œuvres une lutte contre l’ultratechnologisation

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de la société qui détruit l’air et les villes, déforme les êtres humains, les transforme en consciences robotoïdes. Ces films nous parlaient des problèmes plus fondamentaux, qui n’avaient rien à voir avec la ligne de démarcation entre communisme et anti‑communisme ou même entre l’Est et l’Ouest. Plutôt avec la possibilité de penser autrement ce monde technologique. On comprend mieux dans cette perspective l’ampleur de l’engouement suscité par ces genres fictionnels, le nombre des intellectuels à Sofia qui ont publié dans des journaux comme Orbita.71

46 L’universitaire spécialiste de littérature américaine, Miglena Nikolčina, qui évolua dans les cercles du Club “Ivan Efremov” à Sofia, le confirme : l’enjeu concernait moins l’aspiration à rejoindre l’autre côté du Mur qu’à trouver un médium à travers lequel penser les défis d’une modernité partagée. Y compris lorsque l’Ailleurs recherché se situait à l’Ouest, il fut imaginé « comme une utopie intellectuelle (plutôt que consumériste) » transcendant les frontières géopolitiques et se nourrissant d’une commune histoire intellectuelle72. Dans l’appréciation de la science‑fiction comme un lieu où dénoncer l’immobilisme d’un socialisme embourgeoisé résident sans doute quelques traits de la réception singulière de Star Wars en Bulgarie. Faute d’études comparatives, il convient d’en rester à l’esquisse d’une hypothèse : si tant est que l’on puisse voir dans les « films‑institutions » des lieux où les spectateurs projettent leurs interrogations, l’angle que Star Wars nous offre sur la société bulgare donne à voir un pays dans lequel, à la différence peut‑être de la Pologne ou de la Hongrie, une frange significative des élites rêvait encore dans les années 1980 un monde au‑delà des blocs plus qu’une absorption dans le capitalisme occidental.

47 Là où une partie des intellectuels investissait la science‑fiction afin de dénoncer un monde subjugué par les charmes de l’accumulation matérielle et de la consommation ostentatoire, les adeptes de Star Wars mobilisaient réseaux de connaissance et marché noir pour se procurer les produits dérivés de la trilogie de G. Lucas. On pourrait voir dans cette conjonction un paradoxe révélateur des tensions intrinsèques au socialisme bulgare et, plus largement, aux ordres communistes. Dans un ouvrage récent, Sergej Zhuk a retenu cette thèse. Restituant le rôle de cadres du Komsomol et du parti dans l’accès aux biens culturels et matériels occidentaux dans la ville fermée de Dniepropetrovsk, sous Brežnev73, il y a vu le reflet d’une occidentalisation de la jeunesse soviétique vecteur d’érosion du socialisme. Avant de clore les pérégrinations à travers Star Wars en Bulgarie, un retour sur les vies sociales de l’œuvre nous permettra de tester cette hypothèse. Deux facettes de la « biographie culturelle »74 de cette saga « “co‑inventée” avec ses publics »75 serviront notre propos : la première porte sur les prolongements matériels et ludiques de la trilogie, la seconde sur l’incorporation de motifs iconographiques dans l’espace de la culture bulgare. L’une comme l’autre suggèreront le rôle de l’économie de la rareté (occidentale) dans l’énonciation des statuts sociaux au sein de l’ordre socialiste et, partant, dans sa routinisation.

Les vies sociales d’une œuvre

48 Si l’accès aux figurines, tee‑shirts, casquettes et autres biens matériels associés à Star Wars était limité en Bulgarie, maints jeunes déployèrent ingéniosité et solidarités interpersonnelles en vue de se procurer des fétiches d’une valeur symbolique proportionnelle à leur rareté. Sur un site de forum consacré à Star Wars, R. évoque ces stratégies d’acquisition : Les enfants dont les parents travaillaient hors de Bulgarie étaient privilégiés, ils se donnaient des airs. Leurs parents rapportaient des biens de « l’Ouest », des dollars

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et ils pouvaient acheter beaucoup plus de choses dans les Korekom [magasins en devises]. Nous mourions pour des paquets de cigarettes occidentales ou de la bière. […] Après sa retraite, ma grand‑mère a travaillé dans l’hôtel local. Comme il s’agissait d’une ville industrielle, beaucoup de spécialistes étrangers y venaient pour des séjours plus ou moins longs. C’est comme cela que j’ai pu avoir accès à un manga japonais. Des magazines énormes, en noir et blanc. J’ai aussi pu me procurer divers cadeaux‑souvenirs de l’Ouest – des stylos, des porte‑monnaie, des autocollants, des magazines et évidemment des paquets de cigarettes et des packs de bière […]. En 1987‑1988, j’ai réussi à me procurer un tee‑shirt Star Wars, environ dix ans après la sortie du premier film. Le tee‑shirt a rencontré un succès immense. Je me promenais à travers la ville et des garçons m’arrêtaient à chaque coin de rue pour l’examiner sous toutes les coutures, enchantés et admiratifs. Hélas, au bout d’un certain temps il est devenu trop petit ; je n’avais plus de quoi « épater ». J’ai pensé à le découper pour le recoudre sur un autre tee‑shirt.76

49 En ces années 1980 qui voient l’arrivée progressive des vidéocassettes en Bulgarie – ce vecteur‑clé d’émancipation par rapport à la programmation du réseau de la Cinématographie – la détention d’un magnétoscope offrant la possibilité de voir et revoir à satiété Star Wars constitue une source d’aura non moins remarquable que la possession de modèles réduits des décors et personnages du film : En 1983, en première, j’avais un camarade, Iceto, qui possédait un magnétoscope. Ce que j’ai ressenti en regardant la trilogie [de G. Lucas] sur son magnétoscope ne saurait être décrit avec des mots. Ajoutons à cela que Iceto avait aussi un grand constructeur Lego d’Allemagne qui reproduisait, à l’échelle, les vaisseaux, héros et stations spatiales du film.77

50 De fait, tel n’est pas le moindre des effets induits de la circulation (contrainte) des biens occidentaux dans la Bulgarie du socialisme tardif : en une société présentée par les pouvoirs publics comme tendant à une égalisation des conditions, une société où les critères de stratification sociale ante communistes, quoique transmis dans l’entre soi des familles, étaient officiellement disqualifiés, l’économie de rareté a favorisé l’émergence de définitions de la valeur fondées sur l’accès (aux biens occidentaux notamment) plus que l’opulence ou le lignage. Et c’est précisément au regard de cette économie morale que la collection de produits associés à Star Wars doit être envisagée en tant qu’instrument de façonnage des hiérarchies sociales du communisme : l’utilisation de ces biens au service de stratégies de distinction sociale ne saurait en effet être tenue pour une marque d’opposition au régime, pas même pour une entreprise de contournement de l’ordre établi : elle en fait partie intégrante. En s’imposant comme l’une des aunes de mesure du prestige social, la consommation de biens culturels occidentaux a fourni l’un des sites où énoncer – fût‑ce de manière euphémisée – une hiérarchie sociale dont les enfants des élites dirigeantes étaient les héritiers et à travers lesquelles leur identité sociale avait été modelée78.

51 Les citations reproduites plus haut suggèrent toutefois une cartographie des statuts sociaux dont la complexité excède l’opposition binaire entre descendants de la nomenklatura et citoyens ordinaires, voire même entre milieux urbains et ruraux. Dans le contexte bulgare, l’organisation du système social sur la base de connexions (vrăzki) et d’échanges de faveurs (uslugi) a contribué à renouveler au moins en partie les hiérarchies d’influence et de révérence : l’économie de rareté a conféré une utilité inédite à des professions telles que chauffeurs de camion ou marin qui, au même titre que l’expatriation des cadres ou les spécialisations à l’étranger, ouvraient l’accès aux biens occidentaux. Dès lors, les détenteurs de ces niches professionnelles ont joui de réseaux sociaux plus vastes et socialement plus diversifiés que cela n’aurait été le cas

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dans une économie sans déficit. Assurément, leur statut de relation « utile » ne signifiait pas qu’ils aient occupé dans la société bulgare une place au prestige égal à celui des médecins, ingénieurs, hauts cadres administratifs ou descendants de lignées anciennes. Toutefois, ce que les modes de consommation de Star Wars donnent à voir est une situation dans laquelle la réification des produits étrangers déficitaires a fondé des échelles sociales entrelaçant de manière originale une pluralité de critères de valeur.

52 Au‑delà de la reproduction de vaisseaux spatiaux ou de héros, l’inscription de l’œuvre de G. Lucas dans les répertoires filmiques et culturels bulgares dévoile de même des modalités d’appropriation du socialisme bulgare nourries d’ambivalences et d’effets d’évidence. L’exemple le plus éloquent en est sans doute la citation de Star Wars insérée en 1987 dans La 13e fiancée du prince, un conte en costumes dû à la réalisatrice Ivanka Grăbčeva : l’intrigue relate la lutte d’un jeune paysan, Bojan, contre un ordre monarchique inique. Au cours d’un combat, Bojan se voit miraculeusement doté d’une épée laser dans laquelle il est impossible de ne pas reconnaître celle de Skywalker. Comment élucider la présence de ce motif dans une fiction socialiste ? Trois interprétations s’offrent au spectateur et à l’historien. Première hypothèse, l’épisode apporte une énième preuve de la licence particulière accordée aux enfants de l’élite communiste (la mère de la réalisatrice était une figure connue du mouvement partisan). Deuxième possibilité, l’insertion aurait eu vocation à démontrer l’impuissance des fétiches occidentaux, puisque le pouvoir de l’arme se révèle éphémère et que le héros triomphe finalement grâce à son cœur vaillant. Dernière interprétation : la reproduction de l’épée ayant été obtenue au moyen d’une technologie bulgare originale, elle aurait été insérée afin de démontrer que les effets spéciaux « socialistes » n’avaient rien à envier à ceux de leurs homologues américains. Fructueuse indécidabilité, l’exemple suggère simultanément combien serait erronée une lecture autarcique du socialisme bulgare, que certaines œuvres occidentales constituèrent des référents par rapport auxquels les acteurs politiques et culturels se situèrent et que ces signifiants culturels purent accueillirent une variété de signifiés.

Conclusion

53 Au terme de ce voyage à travers les espaces‑temps de Star Wars, trois conclusions peuvent être dégagées. La première concerne l’intelligence du socialisme tardif. Le moment que la diffusion de la trilogie intergalactique capture – grossièrement la fin des années 1970 et la première moitié des années 1980 – correspond en Bulgarie à la condensation de frustrations devant l’immobilisme d’une élite politique vieillissante qui refuse de céder sa place à d’ambitieux trentenaires. L’étude des réceptions de la saga est ici heuristique en ce qu’elle offre un prisme sur la stratification générationnelle des expériences du socialisme. Bien qu’elle ait antérieurement ressenti l’existence d’un décalage entre ambitions proclamées et réalités quotidiennes, la génération Sputnik avait jusqu’alors conforté dans un embourgeoisement consumériste les parcours de mobilité sociale amorcés par ses parents. Les plus jeunes, cependant, ceux nés au tournant des années 1960‑1970, ont le sentiment de grandir dans une société où le futur s’étiole devant la réitération inlassable du même. Socialisés dans l’intranquillité d’une planète aux lendemains incertains, ils aspirent à vivre ici et maintenant. Leurs investissements des mondes de la science‑fiction, qu’ils soient

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littéraire ou cinématographique, se nourrissent du désir de développer une « pensée non standard » quelques années avant que la perestroïka soviétique ne donne son onction à cette démarche. Les collégiens qui frissonnent encore à l’évocation d’un avenir mystérieux, associé au cosmos comme aux profondeurs terrestres, viendront d’ici quelques années rejoindre la cohorte des citoyens avides de changement – un changement généralement imaginé plus comme renégociation de l’ordre établi que comme renversement du socialisme.

54 En deuxième lieu, dans le sillage d’une historiographie récente qui s’est attachée à restituer la variété des échanges et circulations ayant façonné les univers culturels des États socialistes79, l’étude de Star Wars nous offre de la Bulgarie une image fort éloignée de la figure de terne satellite soviétique qui lui fut longtemps attachée. Si certaines sensibilités historiques, des proximités linguistiques aussi ont favorisé le tissage de relations étroites entre intelligentsias bulgare et soviétique, les mondes de l’art y apparaissent insérés dans une pluralité de cercles étendus pour certains à l’Europe centrale, pour d’autres à l’ensemble de l’Europe. L’examen des goûts des amateurs de science‑fiction suggère de même l’obsolescence d’une lecture des pratiques culturelles s’organisant autour de la seule opposition Est/Ouest. Il fait saillir a contrario l’existence d’une notion d’héritage culturel européen partagé, volontiers dissocié du duo États‑Unis/Union soviétique. Tout comme elles se jouent des catégorisations « socialiste » et « capitaliste », les définitions individuées des plaisirs imagés savent s’émanciper des jugements de prescripteurs de normes opposant une science‑fiction « noble » (car imprégnée d’anti‑utopie) à une science‑fiction ayant cédé à la facilité des technologies merveilleuses du cosmos.

55 Ce qui nous conduit au troisième et dernier point : plutôt que de penser les exportations/importations Est‑Ouest sur le mode de l’offensive diplomatique culturelle, il convient d’interroger les opérations de traduction localisées des œuvres. Ce déplacement du regard exige en retour que soient réincorporées dans le récit les historicités ante communistes ayant conféré sa singularité à chaque ordre socialiste et que soient explorées les stratifications sociales des vécus du socialisme tardif. En l’occurrence, la société bulgare apparaît infiniment plus polyphonique qu’on ne l’a souvent dit. Dans cet État ordonné avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale autour d’une majorité rurale de petits propriétaires terriens et artisans, d’une part, et d’une étroite bourgeoisie, d’autre part, le projet socialiste d’égalitarisation des conditions semblait riche en promesses. Dès les années 1970 cependant, les élites dirigeantes ont renoncé à façonner des sensibilités et goûts univoques ; prenant acte de l’irréductible stratification des pratiques culturelles, ils produisent des enquêtes sur les publics qui révèlent la persistance de cloisonnements sociaux et s’emploient à offrir une programmation cinématographique à la croisée entre art et divertissement. S’arrêter sur la réception d’une œuvre singulière permet d’observer la palette de ces différences ; elle invite de même à traiter avec prudence l’hypothèse selon laquelle la consommation de biens culturels occidentaux aurait partout et toujours décrédibilisé le socialisme. De la même manière que les voyages à l’étranger des citoyens soviétiques avaient dans les années 1960 conforté l’ordre existant à travers l’exhibition et la mise en circulation des biens rapportés d’Occident80, films occidentaux et produits dérivés participent dans la Bulgarie du socialisme tardif d’une énonciation des structures d’inégalité et, indirectement, de l’inscription dans la durée du socialisme vécu.

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NOTES

1. Le premier volet, sorti aux États‑Unis sous le titre A New Hope en mai 1977, fut diffusé sur les écrans bulgares à partir du 2 août 1982, The Empire Strikes Back (1982), le 11 juillet 1983 et The Return of the Jedi (1983), le 14 janvier 1985 (Source : cartothèque de la Filmothèque bulgare, Sofia). Notons qu’avant sa distribution dans les salles du réseau de la Cinématographie, certains spectateurs sofiotes avaient pu découvrir le premier opus au cinéma Družba – dont la programmation dépendait de la Filmothèque – à l’occasion de la célébration des vingt ans du vol de Jurij Gagarin dans l’espace. Janko Terziev se souvient d’une copie sous‑titrée en polonais, prêtée par la Filmothèque polonaise ; Petăr Kărdžilov, d’une version en tchèque. Entretien avec Petăr Kărdžilov, 01.03.2012, Sofia ; Janko Terziev, « Silata na slabite » [La force des faibles], Kapital, 13.12.2007, à l’adresse : http://www.capital.bg/light/istorii/ 2007/12/13/407331_silata_na_slabite/ [consultée le 7 octobre 2013]. 2. « The Cold War in Film » (dossier), Cold War History, 9 (4), novembre 2009 ; Tony Shaw and Denise Youngblood, éds., Cinematic Cold War : The American and Soviet Struggle for Hearts and Minds, Lawrence : University Press of Kansas, 2010 ; Tony Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War, Amherst : University of Massachusets Press, 2007 ; Stephen Norris and Zara Torlone, éds., Insiders and Outsiders in Soviet Cinema, Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2008 ; Andreï Kozovoï, Par‑delà le mur : La culture de guerre froide soviétique entre deux détentes, Bruxelles : Complexe, 2009. 3. Jessica C.E. Gienow‑Hecht, « Culture and the Cold War in Europe », in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, éds., Origins, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2010 ; Patrick Major and Rana Mitter, « Culture », in Saki Dockrill and Geraint Hughes, éds., Palgrave Advances in Cold War History, London : Palgrave, 2006, p. 240‑262 ; David Caute, The Dancer Defects : The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2005 ; Yale Richmond, Cultural Exchange and the Cold War : Raising the Iron Curtain, University Park : Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003 ; Jean‑François Sirinelli et Georges‑Henri Soutous, éds., Culture et guerre froide, P. : Presses de la Sorbonne, 2008. 4. David Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War : Literature and Film, Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, 1999 ; Patrick Major, « Future Perfect ? Communist Science Fiction in the Cold War », in Patrick Major and Rana Mitter, éds., Across the Blocs : Cold War Cultural and Social History, London : Franck Cass, 2004, p. 71‑96. 5. Joyce A. Evans, Celluloid Mushroom Clouds : Hollywood and the Atomic Bomb, Boulder : Westview Press, 1998 ; Cyndy Hendershot, Anti‑communism and Popular Culture in Mid‑Century America, Jefferson : MacFarland & Co., 2003 ; Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing : How Hollywood taught us to Stop Worrying and to Love the Fifties, New York : Pantheon, 1983. 6. L’historien Patrick Major résume ainsi : « nous pouvons lire la science‑fiction à la fois comme une pierre angulaire de la relation de l’Union soviétique avec l’“Autre“ de la guerre froide, dans la mesure où le genre était perçu comme intrinsèquement occidental, et comme une fenêtre sur les prévisions du communisme concernant son propre futur ». Major, « Future Perfect ? », p. 71. 7. Pour une lecture en ces termes, voir Frédéric Vincent, « Le sacré et le fan. Étude sur l’univers science‑fictionnel de Star Wars », Sociétés, 113 (3), 2011, p. 49‑61. Pascal Ory a consacré à Star Wars un stimulant essai d’histoire culturelle : Pascal Ory, Une histoire culturelle de Star Wars : mythes et réalité, P. : Cité des Sciences et de la Villette, 2005. 8. Dina Yordanova, Cinema of the Other Europe : The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film, London : Wallflower, 2003.

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9. Sur l’histoire du cinéma en Bulgarie, voir Aleksandăr Janakiev, Cinema.bg. 100 godini filmov proces [Cinema.bg. 100 ans de processus filmique], Sofia : IK Titra, 2003, particulièrement p. 166‑261. 10. Antonela Capelle‑Pogăcean et Nadège Ragaru, « La culture habitée aux frontières du socialisme (Gorna Džumaja, 1944‑1948) », Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales, 68 (2) 2013, p. 391‑427. L’enchâssement des temporalités ante communistes et communistes transparaît également dans l’histoire du théâtre, ainsi que l’a montré Violeta Dečeva, Reflecting National Identification by the Communist Regime in Bulgaria, 1944‑1950, Sofia : Center for Advanced Studies, 2011. 11. Sur l’émergence en Europe d’un temps du délassement distinct de la temporalité ouvragée, voir Alain Corbin, éd., L’avènement des loisirs (1850‑1960), P. : Champs Flammarion, 1995. 12. Voir l’argumentation développée par le secteur « Izkustvo i kultura » du Comité central dans CDA, F. 1, o. 40, ae. 164, l.9‑16 et Nadège Ragaru, « Screening the Publics : Movie‑Going and Audience Research in Late Socialist Bulgaria », Communication présentée lors du colloque international « Small Cinemas », Timişoara, 1‑3 juin 2012. La Bulgarie ne constitue pas le seul pays est‑européen à avoir (re)découvert les enquêtes sur les publics à la fin des années 1960. Sur la trajectoire soviétique, voir l’excellent Joshua First, « From Spectatorship to “Differentiated” Consumer : Film Audience Research in the Era of Developed Socialism (1965‑1980) », Kritika, 9 (2), 2008, p. 317‑344 ; Alexandre Sumpf, De Lénine à Gagarine : Une histoire sociale de l’Union soviétique, P. : Gallimard, Folio histoire, 2013, p. 721 et suiv. 13. Rappelons que la Bulgarie s’est dotée à partir de 1972 d’un réseau de cinémas d’art et d’essai, une initiative vivement soutenue par les artistes et la critique. Maintes œuvres occidentales y firent les délices d’un public éduqué et sélectif. 14. Nadège Ragaru, « Les écrans du socialisme : micro‑pouvoirs et quotidienneté dans le cinéma bulgare », in Nadège Ragaru et Antonela Capelle‑Pogăcean, éds., Vie quotidienne et pouvoirs sous le communisme : Consommer à l’Est, P. : Karthala & CERI, 2010, p. 277‑348 (esp. p. 301‑348). 15. CDA, F. 1, o. 40, ae. 164, l. 2‑8. 16. CDA, F. 405, o. 9, a.e. 273, l. 21. 17. La distinction entre arts allographiques et autographiques a été introduite par le philosophe Nelson Goodman, Langages de l’art, Nîmes : J. Chambon, 1990 (1re éd. 1968). Nathalie Heinich a récemment démontré l’usage que l’on peut en faire dans le domaine des arts graphiques : voir Nathalie Heinich, Faire voir : L’art à l’épreuve de ses médiations, Bruxelles : Les impressions nouvelles, 2009. 18. Le film est sorti en Bulgarie sous le titre « Mežduzvezdna vojna », alors que les premières recensions emploient l’appellation de « Zvezdni vojni ». Certains critiques ont suggéré que la re‑labellisation, inspirée par le critique de cinéma Todor Andrejkov, aurait visé à éviter une association trop étroite avec l’Initiative de défense américaine (« Zvezdni vojni » en bulgare). Cette interprétation pourrait être anachronique, le premier opus ayant été diffusé avant l’annonce de la « guerre des étoiles » américaine. Le déchiffrage du titre en termes d’antagonisme Est‑Ouest reflète cependant la prégnance de ces grilles d’analyse dans la Bulgarie des années 1980. Voir Terziev, « Silata na slabite ». 19. Marija Račeva, « Novite prevăplăštenija na naučnata fantastika » [Les nouvelles réincarnations de la science fiction], Filmovini novini, 24 (6), 1978, p. 9. 20. Il n’est pas rare que la presse bulgare, quotidienne ou mensuelle, reproduise des articles de la presse internationale. L’accent est toutefois placé sur les textes dépeignant le succès commercial de l’œuvre : voir, par exemple, Ben Bova, « Kosmičeskijat biznes na Holiwud » [Le business cosmique de Hollywood], Černomorski front‑Burgas, 12.07.1978. Journaliste, Ben Bova était lui‑même auteur de science‑fiction et travailla comme consultant technique auprès de G. Lucas. 21. Atanas Svilenov, Otečestvenijat front, 04.08.1982.

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22. Le courrier est signé : Galin Stoev, ul. Karamfil 14, Varna. Il paraît dans une rubrique des lecteurs dont le titre suggère assez l’ampleur de l’intérêt suscité par Star Wars : « Meždu Skywalker i Hamlet : razgovor za mladežkata publika i izkustvoto » [Entre Skywalker et Hamlet : conversation sur le public jeune et l’art], Narodno Delo‑Varna, 26.09.1984. 23. Stefan Vlaskov, « “Zvezdni vojni”. Navlizane v utrešnija den ili bjagstvo ot dejstvitelnostta » [« Star Wars ». Entrée dans le jour de demain ou fuite hors de la réalité], Orbita, 32 (501), 12.07.1978. 24. Petăr Kărdžilov, « Zad kulisite na fantastičnoto zrelište. Zavrăštaneto na džedaite » [Dans les coulisses d’un spectacle fantastique. Le retour du Jedi], Studenska tribuna, 16 (1237), 08.01.1985. Cet article fait partie d’une série : Petăr Kărdžilov, « Tehničeski podrobnosti okolo snimaneto na edin fantastičen film‑prikazka : “Imperijata otvrăšta na udara” » [Détails techniques autour du tournage d’un film‑conte fantastique : “The Empire Strikes Back”], Orbita, 28 (757), 09.07.1983 ; Petăr Kărdžilov, « Božestvoto s tri lica : kino, tehnika i fantastika » [La divinité aux trois visages : cinéma, technique et fantastique], Orbita, 19 (853), 11.05.1985. P. Kărdžilov consacra également trois articles à la trilogie dans Novi filmi, la publication du Centre pour l’information, la propagande et la réclame de la société de distribution filmique. Destinée aux employés de la Cinématographie, la revue tirait à 400 exemplaires. 25. Grigor Černev, « Păstru čudesa v Kosmosa » [Miracles bigarrés dans le cosmos], Narodna mladež, 04.08.1982. 26. Ivan Elenkov, Kulturnijat front [Le front de la culture], Sofia : Siela, 2008, p. 413‑473. 27. « Zavrăshtaneto na džedaite – treti film ot kosmičeskata trilogija “Mežduzvezdna vojna”» [The Return of the Jedi, troisième film de la trilogie cosmique “Star Wars”], Narodna Mladež, 19.1.1985. 28. Marijana Melniška, « Zad paravana na infantilnoto » [Derrière le paravent de l’infantile], Anteni, 77, 1984, p. 131‑138. 29. Ljuben Dilov était alors l’un des auteurs de science fiction bulgare les plus connus. À plusieurs reprises il s’est démarqué d’une conception de la science‑fiction où l’émerveillement devant les inventions techniques l’aurait emporté sur la critique sociale : Ljuben Dilov, « Bravo na tehnicite, no kakvo poveče ? » [Félicitations aux techniciens, mais qu’y a‑t‑il de plus ?], Trud, 09.08.1982. 30. « Za mežduzvezdnite i drugi vojni » [De la guerre des étoiles et d’autres guerres], Srednoškolsko zname, 12.03.1985. 31. Ibid. 32. Michel de Certeau, « Lire : un braconnage », in Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien : Arts de faire, P. : Folio essais, 1990 (1re éd. 1980), p. 239‑258. 33. Deux publications de l’Agence de presse bulgare (BTA) reproduisaient des articles de la presse étrangère, ce qui en faisait aux yeux des lecteurs une fenêtre sur le monde : LIK (Literatura i izkustvo), revue lettrée, et Paralleli, plus populaire, qui tirait à 120 000‑140 000 exemplaires. Paralleli a traduit trois articles dédiés à Star Wars parus respectivement dans Time (23‑29.06.1983), Ciné Revue Paris (1‑7, 12, 1983) et Le Point (7‑13.03.1985). Tous abordaient le film à travers un prisme pécuniaire (recettes et marchandising). 34. Voir la discussion « “Mežduzvezdni vojni” v BTA Paraleli », à l’adresse : http://detstvoto.net/ index.php?newsid=3835 [consultée le 2 octobre 2013]. 35. Ibid. 36. Données collectées par Aleksandăr Janakiev, citées à l’adresse : http://www.titra.net/news/ statistic.htm [consultée le 2 septembre 2012]. 37. En 1986, une vaste enquête sociologique intitulée « Gradăt i seloto – 86 » [La ville et le village – 86] offre de la fréquentation la description suivante : 75,88 % des enquêtés déclarent préférer regarder des films à la télévision, 15,85 % au cinéma et 2,39 % sur vidéocassette (une technologie encore peu accessible). Alors que seulement 7,26 % des moins de 28 ans affirment ne pas aller au cinéma, le pourcentage s’élève à 81,41 % pour les plus de soixante ans : Empirično sociologičesko

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izsledvane « Gradăt i seloto – 86 » [Enquête empirique‑sociologique « La ville et le village – 86 »], Sofia : CCU pri MS, 1988, tom III (Sociologičeski analizi i obobštenija), p. 217‑218. 38. CDA, F. 1769, o. 3, ae. 26, Kinoobslužvane i materialno‑tehničeska baza na kompleksa, l.12 (l. 10‑17, fin 1985). Parmi les autres fictions occidentales diffusées dans ce cinéma en 1984 et 1985 figuraient Return of the Jedi (1983), Androïd (1982, EU), Tootsie (1982, EU), Flashdance (1983, EU) et Shaolin Temple (1982, Hong Kong). 39. Entre 2010 et 2012, 22 entretiens ont été réalisés à Sofia et Blagoevgrad sur les réceptions de Star Wars. À défaut de pouvoir prétendre à une représentativité, ils aident à cerner la palette des lectures de l’œuvre proposées. 40. Entretien avec A. Slavov, Sofia, 01.03.2012. 41. Sur l’archéologie de cette notion, voir Matthias Schwartz, « Nauchnaia Fantastika was Made : The Debates about the Genre of Science Fiction from NEP to High Stalinism », Slavic Review, 72 (2), été 2013, p. 224‑246. L’expression est née dans l’Union soviétique des années 1920 dans un contexte où éditeurs et écrivains spécialisés dans les romans d’aventure à trames scientifico‑surnaturelles tentaient de négocier la survie d’un genre jugé mineur par l’intelligentsia, mais très prisé des lecteurs. Au même moment, les élites dirigeantes dénonçaient les traversées rêveuses hors d’un réel industrieux ; elles n’en aspiraient pas moins à populariser les découvertes scientifiques soviétiques et à rivaliser avec la science‑fiction bourgeoise (Jules Verne, George Orwell, etc.). Fluctuants dans le temps, les périmètres du « genre » ont souvent compris des récits d’aventure à intrigues merveilleuses. Le nom donné en Bulgarie à la collection lancée en 1959 aux Éditions Narodna mladež [Jeunesse populaire], « Priključenija i naučna fantastika [Aventures et science‑fiction] », suggère assez les liens longtemps établis entre aventure, science‑fiction et littérature pour la jeunesse. 42. Sur la contribution des revues de vulgarisation scientifique à la diffusion des images et imaginaires de la conquête spatiale, voir Matthias Schwartz, « A Dream Come True : Close Encounters with Outer Space in Soviet Popular Scientific Journals of the 1950s and 1960s », in : Eva Maurer, Julia Richers, Monica Rüthers and Carmen Scheide, éds., Soviet Space Culture : Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies, Basingstoke : Palgrave McMillan, 2011, p. 232‑250. 43. La centralité conférée à la jeunesse dans la conquête scientifique de l’espace a été amplement étudiée dans le contexte soviétique : Monica Rüthers, « Children and the Cosmos as Projects of the Future and Ambassadors of Soviet Leadership », in Maurer et alii, Soviet Space Culture, p. 206‑228. 44. L’expression est empruntée à Donald J. Raleigh, ed., Russia’s Sputnik Generation : Soviet Baby Boomers Talk about their Lives, Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 2006. 45. Il fallut attendre mai 1979 pour qu’un cosmonaute bulgare, Georgi Ivanov, effectue son premier vol dans l’espace à bord de la navette spatiale Soyouz 33. Le voyage fut retransmis en direct à la télévision bulgare. 46. Sur les relations nouées entre science du ciel et visualisation de nouvelles découvertes en art, voir Asif Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare : Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1957‑1967, New York : Cambridge University Press, 2010 ; Iurri Gerschuk, « The Aesthetics of Everyday Life in the Khrushchev Thaw in the USSR (1954‑1964) in Susan E. Reid and David Crowley, éds., Style and Socialism : Modernity and Material Culture in Post‑War Eastern Europe, Oxford : Berg, 2022, p. 81‑99 ; Peter Nisbet, « The Response to Science and Technology in the Visual Arts », in Loren R. Graham, éd., Science and the Soviet Social Order, Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 341‑358. 47. Dans les années 1970, la revue jouit d’un tirage d’environ 120 000‑140 000 exemplaires. 48. Kosmos, 1, juin 1962, p. 81. 49. Ibid., p. 1‑3.

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50. Asif Siddiqi, « From Cosmic Enthusiasm to Nostalgia for the Future », in Maurer et alii, Soviet Space Culture, p. 283‑306 ; voir aussi Svetlana Boym, « Kosmos : Remembrances of the Future », in Adam Bartos, Kosmos, Princeton : Princeton Architectural Press, 2001, p. 84‑99. 51. Sur l’œuvre controversée de Ljudmila Živkova, voir Ivanka Nedeva Atanasova, « Lyudmila Zhivkova and the Paradox of Ideology and Identity in Communist Bulgaria », East European Politics and Societies, 18 (2), 2004, p. 278‑315. 52. Voir Tchavdar Marinov, La Thrace ancienne dans l’imaginaire moderne. Aspects idéologiques de la construction des études thraces en Europe du Sud‑Est (Roumanie, Grèce, Bulgarie), Mémoire de 3e année présenté à l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles‑Lettres, Athènes : École française d’Athènes, 2013, 145 p. et Tchavdar Marinov, « “Dobre došli v rodinata na Orfej” : trakijskoto nasledstvo meždu konstruirane i komersializirane » [“Bienvenue dans la patrie d’Orphée” : l’héritage thrace entre construction et commercialisation], Kritika i humanizăm, 39, 2012, p. 11‑29. 53. Nous sommes loin ici de l’époque où conquête spatiale et rationalité de la science étaient placés au service de campagnes anti‑religieuses : Victoria Smolkin‑Rothrock, « The Contested Skies : The Battle of Science and Religion in the Soviet Planetarium », in Maurer et alii, Soviet Space Culture, p. 57‑80. 54. Antonija Koleva, « Za prognostika, dinozavăra i Kosmosa [Du pronostic, du dinosaure et du cosmos] », Liternet, 1999, à l’adresse : http://liternet.bg/publish/akoleva/progno.htm [consulté le 6 mai 2013]. 55. Galia Valtchinova, « Between Ordinary Pain and Extraordinary Knowledge : The Seer Vanga in the Everyday Life of Bulgarians during Socialism (1960s‑1970s) », Aspasia, 3, 2009, p. 106‑130. 56. Sur cette quête spirituelle, voir Alexandre Arkhangelsky, Žara (Russie, 2011) à l’adresse : http://www.tvkultura.ru/news.html?id=805290 [consulté le 4 juin 2013]. 57. Entretien avec K., Paris, 12 janvier 2012. 58. « Za mežduzvezdnite i drugi vojni ». 59. Entretien avec P., Blagoevgrad, 04.10. 2011. 60. « Letjašto stolče na Ivan Kirkov », FEP, Fantastika, Evristika, Prognostika, 4, 1988, p. 18. 61. Si les découvertes et inquiétudes scientifiques de la fin du XIXe siècle ont, en Bulgarie aussi, reçu une expression littéraire imprégnée de références merveilleuses (pensons aux écrits de Svetoslav Minkov, Vladimir Poljanov, à certains textes d’Elin Pelin et de Čavdar Mutafov), le développement de la science fiction y est largement contemporain du socialisme et a reçu une impulsion à la fin des années 1950. 62. Sonja Fritsche, « East Germany’s Werkstatt Zukunft : Futurology and the Science Fiction Films of Defa‑Futurum », German Studies review, 29 (2), 2006, p. 367‑386. 63. Cinq long‑métrages sont généralement rattachés au genre : Treta sled slănceto [Troisième après le soleil] de Georgi Stojanov (1972), le seul à offrir des voyages spatio‑temporels, Barierata [La barrière] de Hristo Hristov (1979) et trois œuvres d’Ivanka Grăbčeva : Prišestvie [Avènement] (1981), 13ta godenica na princa [La 13e fiancée du prince] (1987) et Karnavalăt [Le carnaval] (1989). Voir Petăr Kărdjilov, « Bulgarian SF Films : An Unsuccessful Attempt to Escape from Reality », in Marian Ţuţui, éd., Escape from the Balkans : Papers of the symposium organized during the 3rd edition of Divan Film Festival, Cetate, n.d., 2012, p. 33‑58. 64. Entretien avec N., Sofia, 01.03.2012. 65. http://www.capital.bg/light/istorii/2007/12/13/407331_silata_na_slabite/ [consulté le 13 septembre 2013]. 66. Entretien avec N., Blagoevgrad, 02.06.2012. 67. Ces remarques rejoignent la perspective développée au sujet de l’URSS par Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More : The Last Soviet Generation, New York : Princeton University Press, 2005. 68. Entretien avec L., courriel, 12.01.2012.

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69. Telle est par exemple la position défendue par Petăr Kărdžilov : entretien, Sofia, 01.03.2012. 70. Sur la production d’une science‑fiction alternative, voir Fritsche, « East Germany’s Werkstatt Zukunft ». La futurologie a fait l’objet de recherches stimulantes ces dernières années : voir, entre autres, le dossier « Histories of the Future », American Historical Review, déc. 2012 et notamment Jenny Andersson, « The Great Future Debate and the Struggle for the World », American Historical Review, déc. 2012, p. 1411‑1430. Cette nouvelle historiographie a notamment démontré l’existence, dans les milieux du pronostic et de l’anticipation, de questionnements globaux adossés à des réseaux d’échanges trans‑blocs. 71. Entretien avec L., Sofia, 12.01.2012. 72. Miglena Nikoltchina, « The West as Intellectual Utopia », in Maria Todorova, éd., Remembering Communism, New York : Social Science Research Council, 2010, p. 110‑111. 73. Sergei I. Zhuk, Rock and Roll in the Rocket City : The West, Identity and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960‑1985, Washington : Woodrow Wilson Center Press & Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. 74. La notion de « biographie culturelle » est ici empruntée à Igor Kopytoff, « The Cultural Biography of Things. Commoditization as Process », in Arjun Appadurai, éd., The Social Life of Things : Commodities in Cultural Perspective, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 64. 75. Emmanuel Ethis, « De Kracauer à Dark Vador, prises de vue sur le cinéma et les sciences sociales », Sociétés, 96, 2, 2007, p. 9‑20 (p. 16). 76. Commentaire disponible à l’adresse : http://hardwarebg.com/forum/showthread.php/99763- %D1 %81 %D0 %BE %D1 %86 %D0 %B8 %D0 %B0 %D0 %BB %D0 %B8 %D0 %B7 %D1 %8A %D0 %BC/ page2 [consulté le 4 octobre 2013]. 77. Commentaire disponible à l’adresse : http://detstvoto.net/index.php? cstart=3&do=lastcomments&userid=4247#comment [consulté le 1er octobre 2013]. 78. Cette approche rejoint l’analyse de la consommation culturelle des films américains en termes de status commodity proposée dans Sergei Kapterev, « Ilusionary Spoils. Soviet Attitudes Towards American Cinema during the Early Cold War », Kritika, 10 (4), 2009, p. 779‑807 (p. 782). 79. Voir à cet égard le remarquable dossier « Imagining the West in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union », Kritika. Exploration in Russian and Eurasian History, 9 (4), déc. 2008. 80. Sur les expériences du tourisme soviétique, voir Anne E. Gorsuch, All this is your World : Soviet Tourism at Home and Abroad, Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2011.

RÉSUMÉS

L’article envisage les vies sociales de Star Wars en Bulgarie en tant que fenêtres sur l’histoire culturelle du socialisme tardif. À travers l’étude des appropriations d’une œuvre‑culte, placée en regard de la politique du répertoire des responsables de la culture, il s’agit d’éclairer certaines facettes des quotidiens socialistes, ainsi que les imaginaires spatio‑temporels auxquels ils s’adossent. Fondée sur un travail d’archives et d’entretiens, l’enquête se démarque d’interprétations de la consommation de films occidentaux en tant que formes de résistance et/ ou comme quête d’un Ailleurs ancré à l’Ouest. Elle prend également ses distances avec le postulat selon lequel la distribution de biens occidentaux rares aurait contribué à l’érosion du socialisme. L’examen des réceptions de Star Wars éclaire par contraste la pluralité des circulations culturelles

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(lesquelles dessinent, au‑delà du seul clivage Est‑Ouest, une notion d’héritage culturel européen partagé), l’existence d’un « moment » 1970‑1980 (marqué par un épuisement du croire dans le projet socialiste et un ressourcement dans une science[‑fiction] abordée à travers ses « mystères »), ainsi que la stratification sociale et générationnelle des expériences du socialisme tardif. La consommation de biens culturels et produits dérivés occidentaux, investis comme marqueurs sociaux, s’y inscrit dans des stratégies de distinction venant conforter les hiérarchies sociales du socialisme plutôt que les subvertir.

The present article examines the social lives of Star Wars in Bulgaria as a window onto the cultural history of late socialism. Through an exploration of the appropriations of this cult film – set against the repertoire policies of cultural officials – the purpose is to highlight some facets of daily life during socialism, as well as the spatial and temporal imaginings that underpin them. Based on archival research as well as on interviews, the investigation breaks with an understanding of the screening of Western movies as practices of resistance or as evidences of a longing for a Western alternative. The study also departs from the assumption that the circulation of (shortage) Western goods would have contributed to the demise of socialism. By contrast the examination of Star Wars’ cultural biography suggests the existence of patterns of global cultural circulation – beyond the East‑West cleavage – that drew upon a shared European heritage. The selection of this case study also allows us to capture a specific moment in the history of socialism, characterized with a loss of belief in the socialist project and a correlative investment in the “mysteries” of science (fiction). Finally, setting light on the increasingly socially and generationally stratified experiences of socialism, the article argues that, far from undermining the social hierarchies of late socialism, the use of Western cultural goods and merchandising products as social markers did paradoxically comfort the prevailing moral economy.

AUTEUR

NADÈGE RAGARU

Sciences Po (CERI‑CNRS), [email protected]

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17 GRETCHANAIA Elena, « Je vous parlerai la langue de l’Europe… », la francophonie en Russie (XVIIIe‑XIXe siècles), Bruxelles : P.I.E. Peter Lang (Enjeux internationaux, 26), 2012, 411 p., index, bibliogr.

18 GRETCHANAIA Elena, STROEV Alexandre, VIOLLET Catherine, éds., La francophonie européenne aux XVIIIe‑XIXe siècles : Perspectives littéraires, historiques et culturelles, Bruxelles : P.I.E. Lang, 2012, 276 p.

19 HILLIS Faith, Children of Rus´ : Right‑Bank Ukraine and the Invention of a Russian Nation, Ithaca – Londres : Cornell University Press, 2013, 329 p., index, bibliogr., ill.

20 HORNSBY Robert, Protest, Reform and Repression in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2013, 313 p., index, bibliogr.

21 JONES Polly, Myth, Memory, Trauma : Rethinking the Stalinist Past in the Soviet Union, 1953‑70, New Haven – Londres : Yale University Press, 2013, 362 p., index, bibliogr.

22 KIVELSON Valerie, Desperate Magic : The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth‑Century Russia, Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2013, 350 p. + 16 hors texte couleur, ill., index, bibliogr.

23 KURMIYA Hiroaki, Conscience on Trial : The Fate of Fourteen Pacifists in Stalin’s Ukraine, 1952‑1953, Toronto – Buffalo – Londres : University of Toronto Press, 2012, 212 p., index, ill.

24 MANNHERZ Julia, Modern Occultism in Late Imperial Russia, DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press, 2012, 275 p., index, bibliogr.

25 « Moscou, Caucase, Été 34 : Lettres de Marguerite et Jean‑Richard Bloch », Cahiers Jean‑Richard Bloch, 19 (2013), coordonné par Rachel Mazuy, Paris : Association études Jean‑Richard Bloch.

26 MEDVEDKOVA Olga, Kandinsky ou la critique des critiques : Ẻcrits russes de Kandinsky (1899‑911), Dijon : Les presses du réel (Œuvres en sociétés), 2013, 232 p., index, ill.

27 MÛCKE Lukas, Die allgemeine Altersrentenversorgung in der UdSSR, 1956‑1972, Stuttgart : Franz Steiner Verlag (Quellen und Studien zur Geschichte des östlichen Europa, 81), 2013, 565 p., index, bibliogr.

28 MUSTAFAEV Shahin, ESPAGNE Michel, GORSHENINA Svetlana, RAPIN Claude, BERDIMURADOV Amridin, GRENET Frantz, eds, Cultural Transfers in Central Asia :

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before, during and after the Silk Road – Kul´lturnyj transfer na perekrestkah central ´noj Azii : do, vo vremja i posle Velikogo Šelkogo puti, Paris – Samarkand : IICAS, 2013, 312 p.

29 PORTNOV Andriï, Istoriï dlja domašn´ogo vžitku : Eseï pro pol´s´ko‑rosijs´ko‑ukraïns´kij trikutnik pam´jati [History for Home Use : Essays on the Polish‑Russian‑Ukrainian Triangle of Memory], Kiïv : Kritika, 2013, 344 p., index.

30 SCOTONI Giorgio, Il Nemico Fidato : la guerra di sterminio in URSS e l’occupazione alpina sull’Alto Don, Trente : Panorama, 2013, 447 p., bibliogr., documents, photos, cartes.

31 SHRAYER Maxim D., I Saw It : Ilya Selvinsky and the Legacy of Bearing Witness to the Shoah, Brighton, MA : Academic Studies Press, 2013, 326 p., index, bibliogr., ill.

32 SLAVESKI FILIP, The Soviet Occupation of Germany : Hunger, Mass Violence, and the Struggle for Peace, 1945‑1947, Cambridge – New York : Cambridge University Press, 2013, 168 p., index, bibliogr.

33 SMITH Jeremy, Red Nations : The Nationalities Experience in and after the USSR, Cambridge – New York : Cambridge University Press, 2013, 391 p., index, bibliogr.

34 STEPANOFF Charles, FERRET Carole, LACAZE Gaëlle, THOREZ Julien, éds., Nomadismes d’Asie centrale et septentrionale, Paris : Armand Colin, 2013, 288 p., cartes, nombreux schémas et photographies.

35 VERDÈS‑LEROUX Jeannine, Des signaux avant la ruine : l’Urss vue par ses écrivains (1954‑1991), Paris : Éditions du Félin (Coll. Les marches du temps), 2013, 328 p., index.

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