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Uncertainty and Anxiety Metaphor, and for Good Reason: Optimism Didn’T Brighten Her Protagonists’ Experience by Benjamin Nathans of the Khrushchev Years

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Uncertainty and Anxiety Metaphor, and for Good Reason: Optimism Didn’T Brighten Her Protagonists’ Experience by Benjamin Nathans of the Khrushchev Years September 26, 2011 The Nation. 31 poem seems to me the most quintessentially interpretation, reaching back to the work ing a portion of the mass murder committed Eliotic of all the poet’s performances, at once he’d abandoned in the Harvard philosophy on orders signed by the dictator’s own hand. excessive and curtailed, irresistibly charis- department; but he nowhere acknowledges Yet as Khrushchev privately confessed near matic yet forever elusive, its power immedi- that the author of Savonarola is his mother, the end of his life, he was himself “up to the ately apparent yet very difficult to describe. Charlotte Eliot, who at 83 was publishing elbows in blood” shed by the victims of com- It is the achievement toward which all the her first book of poems: munist purges and forced collectivization. letters in Volume 2 point, and yet the poem The Khrushchev era ended in 1964 The role played by interpretation has is scarcely mentioned: careening between (the year that would have marked Hitler’s often been neglected in the theory of turpitude and revelation, the letters lay out seventy- fifth birthday), and it was the first knowledge. Even Kant, devoting a the tensions and obsessions of the poem in great attempt to stabilize the Soviet project lifetime to the pursuit of categories, broader brush strokes, not so much elucidat- and make it a going concern fully competi- fixed only those which he believed, ing as embodying its energies. tive with the capitalist West. For Vladislav rightly or wrongly, to be perma- Future volumes of the letters will per- Zubok, the author of Zhivago’s Children, nent.… Some years ago, in a paper on form the same service for Ash-Wednesday Khrushchev’s “Thaw” inaugurated a period The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual, I (1930) and Four Quartets, and, perhaps even of tremendous optimism, a Soviet-style New made an humble attempt to show that more crucially, so will the long-awaited edi- Deal following the deep freeze of postwar in many cases no interpretation of a tion of Eliot’s complete prose. “A Sceptical Stalinism. Surveying a vast array of published rite could explain its origin. Patrician” and “Eeldrop and Appleplex” and unpublished sources with an exquisite are only two of the hundreds of fascinating While seeming austerely learned, these sen- eye for telling detail, Zubok shows how prose pieces that remain uncollected in any tences constitute one of Eliot’s most deeply the optimism of the era drew deeply on the form, and another is Eliot’s introduction to felt exchanges with his mother. They are classical inheritance of Marxism- Leninism. a long historical poem called Savonarola, a gift to the woman who, when he threw Contrary to assessments by foreign observ- published around the same time as The Hol- over an academic career in favor of poetry, ers eager for signs of anticommunist fer- low Men. Eliot offers here his most incisive admitted that “I have absolute faith in his ment, the ’60s intellectuals of the USSR remarks about the relativity of historical Philosophy but not in the vers libres.” n were inspired by the dream of fulfilling, not transcending, the ideals of 1917. As the title of her book suggests, Miriam Dobson keeps her distance from the thaw Uncertainty and Anxiety metaphor, and for good reason: optimism didn’t brighten her protagonists’ experience by BENJAMIN NATHANS of the Khrushchev years. Unlike Zubok, who is primarily interested in the intelligentsia, n his bestselling novel Fatherland, pub- Khrushchev’s Cold Summer Dobson has mined from Soviet archives the lished in 1992, the British writer Robert Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of fragmented voices of a wide range of Soviet Harris imagined a postwar Europe in Reform After Stalin. citizens, for many of whom Khrushchev’s which a victorious Germany prepares By Miriam Dobson. denunciation of Stalin provoked feelings of to celebrate Hitler’s seventy-fifth birth- Cornell. 264 pp. $45. profound uncertainty and anxiety. It was not Iday. It’s the early 1960s, and the Third just a matter of waking up to the news that Reich, having annexed vast territories from Zhivago’s Children the man previously heralded as “The Lenin the defeated Soviet Union, is engaged in a The Last Russian Intelligentsia. of Today” and “Generalissimo” had defiled protracted cold war with the United States, By Vladislav Zubok. Lenin’s sacred legacy and nearly botched the Harvard. 453 pp. $35. even as rock ’n’ roll and other corrupting war against Hitler. Even more upsetting was Western influences are seeping into Ger- power to emerge intact from World War II. the Soviet leadership’s decision to reduce Sta- man society and a younger generation of As British historian Miriam Dobson writes lin’s Gulag population by roughly 80 percent, Germans are starting to question the brutal of Stalin’s successors in Khrushchev’s Cold thereby releasing into Soviet society some 4 silence surrounding the darker aspects of Summer, “unlike many other countries em- million concentration camp prisoners, in- the country’s Nazi past. Harris’s stunning barking on the process of transitional justice cluding people who only yesterday had been counterfactual history asked its many readers theirs was not a new regime, but a continu- branded “enemies of the people.” That mass to ponder what Europe might have become ation of the party-state system which had amnesties of Gulag inmates were followed by had the fortunes of war turned in another been responsible for the atrocities they now a dramatic spike in crime only served to stoke direction—as they very nearly did, especially sought to rectify.” Imagining a post-Hitler the fears of ordinary citizens: for them, what on Germany’s eastern front. Germany run by Rudolf Hess or Albert was melting under Khrushchev’s Thaw was Fatherland could also serve as a mirror to Speer helps to cast in sharp relief the quan- not only the received moral order of things, a history that wasn’t virtual: the post-Stalin daries faced by Nikita Khrushchev and other but public order itself. era of the Soviet Union, the sole totalitarian Communist Party leaders as they confronted How are we to make sense of these a lethal legacy of state- sponsored terror starkly opposed views of the post-Stalin era? Benjamin Nathans teaches at the University in which they too were deeply complicit. Khrushchev was famous for his zigzagging of Pennsylvania and is the author of Beyond Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” at the Twen- domestic and foreign policies, but it would the Pale: The Jewish Encounter With Late tieth Party Congress in February 1956 may be a mistake to reduce the tensions of the Imperial Russia. He is writing a history of the have instigated Stalin’s oedipal dethrone- Thaw to the temperament of one man, or Soviet dissident movement. ment (in effect, his second death) by reveal- even to the volatility of competing inter- 32 The Nation. September 26, 2011 est groups within the closed world of the of its life-ways: the free market. Driven by nationalism percolated just below the surface Communist Party leadership. Rather, the a vision of itself as “a civic community that of Soviet public discourse, the educated class tensions are best understood as hints of could become a moral and cultural vanguard increasingly split into a philo-Semitic “left” something that was supposed to have long for society,” the post-Stalin intelligentsia and an anti-Semitic “right” (insofar as tradi- since vanished from the Soviet landscape: the combined a “profound hunger for personal tional spatial metaphors of political contesta- hierarchy of class. freedom” with unquestioned faith in “the tion still made sense in the Soviet context). Just over half a century ago, on the eve Holy Grail of collectivism.” There was good The resulting schism, according to Zubok, of the Khrushchev era, a group of Harvard reason to believe in its collective strength: made it difficult for the intelligentsia to find scholars undertook a large-scale study of by the time the Sputnik satellite was thrust “an acceptable ‘national’ form and acquire a Soviet society, which at the time was nearly into orbit from a launching pad in the Soviet mass following among Russian people.” as opaque to the outside world beyond its republic of Kazakhstan in October 1957, the While it certainly is true that a remarkable borders as North Korea is today, but of ex- USSR could boast over a million university proportion of the leading representatives of ponentially greater consequence. Based on graduates, marking a roughly tenfold increase the intelligentsia were of Jewish origin, it hundreds of interviews with Soviet citizens during the preceding three decades. Having is doubtful that antagonisms over the Jew- who found themselves in the West after the emerged from the Armageddon of the Great ish Question were primarily responsible for war—former POWs, slave laborers from Fatherland War, the postwar generation was disagreements within their ranks. For one Nazi Germany, émigrés—the Harvard Refu- aglow with youthful revolutionary romanti- thing, disenchantment with revolutionary gee Interview Project marked the first social- cism, and poised to play a key role in Khrush- romanticism all but guaranteed the turn to a scientific attempt to analyze public opinion chev’s plan to move the country from social- wide range of alternative worldviews. Andrei and the structures of daily life inside the ism into the bright future of communism—if Sakharov and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, iconic socialist superpower. A key item on the re- not in his lifetime, then surely in theirs. figures of the emerging “Westernizing” and search agenda was to determine whether one The alliance of optimists, however, never “Slavophile” opposition (neither of whom was of Moscow’s proudest claims was true: had materialized.
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