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Home , Gulag, Khrushchev Thaw

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 ’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 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 . 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 Patrician” and “Eeldrop and Appleplex” and unpublished sources with an exquisite are only two of the hundreds of fascinating While seeming austerely learned, these sen- eye for telling detail, Zubok shows how prose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-­. 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 , n his bestselling novel Fatherland, pub- Khrushchev’s Cold Summer Dobson has mined from Soviet archives the lished in 1992, the British writer Robert Returnees, , and the Fate of fragmented voices of a wide range of Soviet Harris imagined a postwar 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 , is engaged in a The Last Russian Intelligentsia. of Today” and “Generalissimo” had defiled protracted with the , 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 , 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 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 may be a mistake to reduce the tensions of the Imperial . 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 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 , 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 —if Sakharov and , 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 ’s proudest claims was true: had materialized. Conservatives in the party elite, Jewish), did cross pens over the fate of Soviet the abolition of private property succeeded Iagos eager to exploit the anxieties of their Jewry, but they quarreled over many other in eliminating the division of society into Othello, preyed on Khrushchev’s inferiority issues too—from democracy and relations antagonistic classes, as Marx had predicted? complex about intellectuals, which because with the West to technology and the Russian Was the USSR a fundamentally new kind Khrushchev had never attended university Orthodox Church. None of this, inciden- of society, in which social origins no longer was acute. In one memorable encounter in tally, deterred the KGB from planting rumors governed life chances, lifestyle and attitudes? the fall of 1962, Khrushchev berated a group that Sakharov’s and Solzhenitsyn’s real names Was the Soviet world truly “flat,” perhaps of abstract artists during a special tour of were Tsukerman (a play on “sakhar,” Russian marking the end of social history? their paintings and sculptures, calling them for “sugar”) and Solzhenitsker, or from issu- The answer from Cambridge: not really. “faggots” and their work “dog shit” and “ass­ ing visas to Israel to non-Jewish dissidents While it’s true that conventional Western hole art.” A year later, at a gathering of the who sought to leave the USSR. hierarchies of income and occupational status “creative intelligentsia” inside the Kremlin, Whatever the sources of the growing rifts carried far less weight in the USSR, and that Khrushchev denounced members of the au- among Soviet intellectuals, and despite his the dream of a propertyless egalitarianism still dience: “They think that Stalin is dead and unmistakable admiration for their high ­ideals held sway over much of the population, dif- anything is allowed.” Barely hidden beneath and civic engagement, Zubok finds their col- ferences in cultural capital, and specifically in such outbursts was the simmering resent- lective endeavor deficient, a conclusion that levels of education, still acted as an enduring ment of what Zubok calls “simple, popular, reflects his stark neoliberal skepticism. “The social classifier within the Soviet populace. working-class Russia” against the “young, dream of with a human face,” he Such differences helped preserve the intel- cosmopolitan, elitist, and Westernized cul- writes, represented an attempt “to marry the ligentsia not just as an “imagined community” tural vanguard.” Soviet project to freedom without a return but as an actual stratum of society, and they A series of sham trials against members to private property and capitalism,” and was help explain why different segments of the of the vanguard in the mid-1960s carried therefore fatally marked by “political and Soviet population experienced Khrushchev’s out by Khrushchev’s successors signaled the moral sterility.” If measured by its unin- Thaw in radically contrasting ways. Thaw’s approaching end. Lingering hopes tended consequences, of course, that dream for the flowering of a Moscow Spring were was anything but sterile: the belated attempt ladislav Zubok began his academic ca- crushed when Soviet tanks rumbled into by , Alexander Yakovlev reer in Moscow as a specialist in Amer- Prague in August 1968 and put a halt to a and other -era reformers to bring ican political history, only to move to popular program of political liberalization. it to fruition led the Soviet superpower to a the United States in the mid-1980s, This was the moment that “set in motion the miraculously peaceful demise. where he became an internationally group of many intellectuals and Vrenowned scholar of Soviet cold war foreign cultural figures from the Soviet communist he contrast between Zubok’s warm policy. With Zhivago’s Children Zubok has project,” writes Zubok. But the splintering of (and repeated) evocation of the “intel- reinvented himself yet again, this time as an the intelligentsia­ was by no means the result ligentsia ethos” and his chilly verdict accomplished cultural historian of his native of external pressures alone. Well before the on its utter lack of historical viability land. His book is an elegiac account of the end of the Thaw, Zubok argues, fault lines comes to a head in his discussion of final chapter in the history of the Russian in- had begun to appear within the intelligentsia, theT ethos’s ultimate avatars: . telligentsia, a group that survived revolution, particularly with regard to the “Jewish Ques- They were “living the intelligentsia’s ideals,” civil war, Nazi onslaught and Stalinist repres- tion” and its pertinence to the identity of the he tells us, but those same ideals, he argues, sion, only to succumb to the supreme solvent intelligentsia itself. As a xenophobic Russian (continued on page 34) 34 The Nation. September 26, 2011

(continued from page 32) the hero of ’s novel, whose n Khrushchev’s Cold Summer, Miriam led them to cloak themselves in the mantle name stems from the Russian word for Dobson unearths the voices of hundreds of civic virtue, forming an elitist milieu de- “living.” It is an odd choice, given how of otherwise anonymous Soviet citizens, tached not only from the Soviet state but frequently Zubok’s own evidence points to Zubok’s “simple, popular, working-class from Soviet society. Their vocal support for the stark differences between Zhivago’s pre- Russia,” and with them a very different oppressed minorities (, Jews, ­revolutionary sensibilities—“frozen music,” Isense of the dynamics of the Thaw. Drawing , Western Ukrainians, Cath- as Pasternak put it—and those of the Thaw- on multiple archival troves of letters to Soviet olics and evangelical Christians), along with era intelligentsia. Even figures like Andrei leaders, she reconstructs the ambivalence of their reliance on Western media to spread Siniavsky, a Pasternak scholar and a pall- the popular response to Khrushchev’s Secret their message (including shortwave radio bearer at his funeral in 1960, drew a clear Speech, which hardly remained secret once its stations like the Voice of America), certainly distinction between old-school “heretics” contents were transmitted to millions of party stoked suspicion among the majority Russian such as Pasternak (and and members. “What’s to be done with portraits population. Zubok’s claim, however, that by ) and younger dissident of Stalin?” asked one correspondent, sensitive 1975 “the struggle for the right to emigrate writers such as himself, offspring of the to the sacral qualities of Soviet iconography. Other letter-writers, unable to shed the Man- ichaean instincts honed by Stalin’s purges, were keen to learn whether their onetime Ozymandias should now be considered an “.” Among the most poignant documents are petitions from Gulag inmates amnestied after Stalin’s death. By 1960 the Gulag population had shrunk to a fifth of its former size, with millions of zeks (slang for zakliuchennye, or prisoners) spilling back into Soviet society and facing enormous barriers to reintegration, not to mention for- mer acquaintances whose (sometimes false) testimony had helped send them to the camps in the first place. Many ex-zeks were determined to tell their story, not only to come to terms with the trauma they had experienced but also to assert their innocence and possibly improve their chances of . Dobson analyzes

Me m orial, Moscow in fascinating detail the emergence of an of- Poet Joseph Brodsky (left of the driver) in in the Russian North, 1964 ficially privileged narrative of Gulag survival, from the Soviet Union had become the pri- Soviet system and its revolutionary values. in which loyal communists unjustly sent to the mary goal of human rights activists” falls wide More than a few of the people Zubok art- camps nonetheless keep faith with the party of the mark. It was Western observers who fully brings to life referred to themselves and and, after years of suffering, are rewarded with greatly magnified the issue of emigration, their generation as children not of Zhiva- reinstatement into the party’s sacred mission. especially with regard to the plight of Soviet go but of the Twentieth Party Congress, Some versions of this script were genuinely Jews, even as the Soviet dissident movement that historic moment when Khrushchev moving—the first volume of Eugenia Ginz­ continued to champion a wide range of attempted to cleanse the USSR of the fa- burg’s memoir Journey Into the Whirlwind civil and human rights. And while there is ther’s sins—without revealing his own. The offers unforgettable accounts of the intense considerable truth in Zubok’s observation postwar episode of Soviet history is haunted relationships forged among the zeks as well as that dissidents became a self-marginalizing by a kind of paternity suit, as if a gen- of belief systems sustained under extraordi- community, much the same could be said eration metaphorically (and often literally) nary mental pressure. of various subgroups in late Soviet society, orphaned by purges and war were asking But of the hundreds of Gulag memoirs from artists and writers who took jobs as itself: Who’s our daddy? The lineages they written by survivors during the Thaw, when boiler-room operators and night watchmen cultivated matter, and more so than ever memories were still fresh, only a tiny fraction in order to escape the ritual obligations of today, as Russians and their leaders struggle were approved for publication in the USSR. Soviet public life, to “in-system reformers” to fashion a usable past from their country’s Ginzburg’s, smuggled out of the country and who sequestered themselves in “oases” of bloodstained twentieth century. They also published in English in the United States progressive thought within the Communist matter insofar as the human drama of the in 1967, was not among them. The rest Party apparatus. Beyond its highly uniform post-Stalin intelligentsia involved men and languished in desk drawers, gathered dust official public sphere, late Soviet society women who were fed, clothed and housed in the file cabinets of journals like Novyi mir was a vast patchwork of face-to-face micro- by the socialist fatherland, but who yearned (New World) or accompanied petitions to communities, each bound by unusually close not to be treated like children, to be consid- party officials. As Dobson shows, those with ties of adult friendship. ered just as mature as the “mature socialism” a redemptive plotline played a significant role Zubok refers to his protagonists as they had helped build. They were adults in in the delicate balancing act undertaken by “Zhivago’s children,” the spiritual heirs of search of their own voices. Khrushchev as he sought to expose selectively September 26, 2011 The Nation. 35 the monstrous of his predecessor (and Dobson argues that, far more than the Nikita Khrushchev attempted to undertake his living rivals like Molotov) while reaffirm- regime’s fear of a too rapidly liberalizing a limited version of that process long be- ing the innocence of the party and the glory intelligentsia, the harsh popular reaction to fore his country’s self-induced implosion, of its historical mission. What better way to the amnesties helped curtail the attempt to only to panic at the Pandora’s box he had damn the father but preserve the family than reform the Soviet legal system in the late opened regarding the Soviet Union’s his- to recount the patient triumph of dutiful 1950s, thereby derailing the effort to create tory, and his own. For the next thirty years, sons and daughters who had been unjustly safeguards against the state-sponsored ter- the Communist Party kept a close eye on punished? And so some of the earliest stories rorism of the Stalin era. One of the strengths the box, responding to periodic attempts of the camps, attached to petitions read by of Dobson’s explanation of the Thaw era’s to pry open its lid by tightening the screws Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders, were zigzags is that it incorporates influences from yet again, until the threads had all but eaten knitted into the Secret Speech, thereby estab- below, much as the Russian historian Vladi- away the wood housing them. Today, nearly lishing a template for other survivors to follow mir Kozlov has done in his work on how a quarter-­century after the Soviet Union when arranging their Gulag memories. food riots and other popular disturbances began to come apart, the box is mostly Many ex-zeks, of course, had never joined paved the way for the unsustainable terms open, despite President Dmitri Medvedev’s the party; if they had, they did not leave the of the Brezhnev-era welfare state. By the creation in May 2009 of an ominous Com- camps with renewed faith in the Soviet system. time Gorbachev came to power, reducing the mission to Counter Attempts to Falsify His- Some of their stories would eventually make USSR’s costly cradle-to-grave entitlements tory to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests. their way to Western readers on the wings proved even more difficult than containing Russians now watch excellent TV dramas of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973) its bloated military budget. based on Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag novels along or ’s less well-known but It took Germany—or rather, West Ger- with documentaries glorifying Stalin’s role far more subtly crafted Tales (1980). many—nearly a quarter-century after its as an “effective manager” of the Soviet (These and other masterpieces of literary crushing military defeat to begin in earnest Union’s industrial revolution and the Great testimony, every bit as powerful as their Holo­ the job of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, master- Fatherland War against Hitler’s Germany. caust counterparts, are superbly analyzed in ing or coming to terms with the Nazi past. The process of coming to terms with its Leona Toker’s Return From the Archipelago: In an extraordinary but deeply flawed act, contents has only just begun. n Narratives of Gulag Survivors.) Unlike the handful of officially sanctioned accounts of redemptive suffering by loyal communists, they offer an unflinching portrait of the Gu- Break Their Hearts lag’s moral chaos: lethal physical deprivation, wanton cruelty and sexual exploitation. by Aaron Thier Official censorship as well as unofficial social taboos kept contemporary Soviet read- he problem with most funny stories Abbott Awaits ers largely quarantined from such texts—but is that they’re funny. How can we By Chris Bachelder. not from the returning inmates. The most take them seriously? If a funny story LSU Press. 180 pp. $18.95. original aspect of Dobson’s book is her ac- is to be meaningful in itself rather count of the reactions of ordinary citizens to than an example of an already familiar conditions is the only subject of the stories. the influx of ex-zeks, the “politicals” as well genre—one-of-a-kindT rather than one-of-a- But they can be pushed to such an extremity as those convicted of crimes like murder, type—it needs another dimension or a larger only because they’re comic characters. We rape, robbery and assault. The Soviet system resonance. The novels of P.G. Wodehouse, don’t expect them to think clearly about their rarely made formal distinctions between the exceedingly wonderful as they are, are writ- circumstances, and they aren’t real enough two groups, because antisocial behavior of all ten according to an endlessly reproducible or relatable enough to inspire sympathy of kinds was thought to be proof of ideological formula, with the result that we are more the kind that would make their humiliation deviance. For much of the Soviet population, likely to say we like P.G. Wodehouse himself too much to bear. Beckett is funny, and only the Gulag amnesties were the first and most than any one of his books. The greatest comic because he’s funny are we willing to follow visible effect of the Thaw, and they hardly novels—books like Saul Bellow’s The Adven- him down his awful rabbit hole. Comedy is inspired the kind of hopes for revolutionary tures of Augie March, Samuel Beckett’s Molloy a means to an end, like any other literary renewal championed by Zubok’s intellectu- and Malone Dies, Italo Svevo’s Confessions of device. “What must wacky modes do?” asked als. On the contrary; one Moscow trolley-car Zeno—are the kind we might hesitate to call Donald Barthelme. “Break their hearts.” driver wrote in her letter to party leaders, “We “comic” in the first place, because humor is Like any young writer with an inclination conquered Germany when it was armed to the not what makes them linger in the mind and toward wackiness, Chris Bachelder has been teeth, can it really be that our state is without quicken the heart. trying to figure out how his wackiness might the strength to conquer these parasites?” A Beckett is an extreme example. The single be employed to greatest effect. Bachelder has worker in a car factory in Kalinin, contemptu- fixation throughout his vast output is the many talents, but his obvious talent for comic ous of the humanism he assumed to be behind absurdity of our continuing existence in the writing has tended to eclipse his other gifts. the decision to amnesty so many of Stalin’s context of the pain our existence will cause us. He first appeared in 2001 with Bear v. Shark, a prisoners, noted, “For the working man, it His characters are pushed to absurd levels of variety show of a novel about the media fren- certainly doesn’t make things easier that there degradation and misery—blind, deaf, apha- zy associated with a computer-animated pay- are these swinish gangs of bandits who com- sic, immobilized—and the anguish of their per-view fight between a bear and a shark. In mit hooligan acts and refuse to contribute to 2006 he published his second novel, U.S.!, in our enormous work.” Aaron Thier is a freelance writer. which a very elderly but resolutely optimistic