I've had my hands full as of late trying to get my dissertation prospectus polished enough for a presentation back in Seattle a week from today, so I've been a little distracted. Also, as I'm sure you all have been able to tell, I've been incredibly preoccupied by this election, and while I would have loved to deliver a write-up on getting to see Sanders stump at the Douglas County Fairgrounds this Thursday or my impressions of the Kansas Democratic caucus on Saturday, I'm going to try to get back to the original intent of this blog. In that vein, without further ado, here is the project that I plan to spend the next 4-6 years of my life on:
De-Stalinizing Soviet Civilization: From
Stalingrad to Volgograd, 1943-1961
Stephen
Kotkin, in his influential Magnetic
Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization, proposed that in examining at the
steelworks town of Magnitogorsk, a city built from the ground up during the
course of the first two Five-Year Plans, he could “demonstrate that the
distinctiveness of Stalinism lay not in the formation of a mammoth state by
means of the destruction of society but in the creation, along with such a
state, of a new society—manifest in property relations, social structure, the
organization of the economy, political practice, and language.” His study,
which intertwined narratives of the building of the city with the parallel
story of the construction of a new type of social order, argued that “Stalinism
signified the advent of a specifically socialist civilization based on the
rejection of capitalism,” and that its “appreciation … is perhaps best
approached through a sharply focused case study.”[1]
This formulation, including the value of a “sharply focused case study,”
provides much of the groundwork for my own dissertation. I propose to give the
city of Stalingrad—the city which bore the name of the Soviet leader until 1961—a
similar treatment, in order to look at how “Stalinism as a Civilization” became
a civilization de-Stalinized.
At
the time of his death, Joseph Stalin had been at the helm of the Union of
Socialist Soviet Republics for a quarter of a century. From the start of the
First-Five Year plan in 1928, Stalin’s name had stood for the vanguard
leadership of the communist party and the rightness of its historic role. The
Revolution begun by Vladimir Lenin was given form by Stalin. One of the very
pillars of this civilization was the mythical figure of Stalin himself: official
doctrine held him responsible for all the good of all Soviet citizens: for the
“worker’s state,” for the mechanization of industry, for the bread which graced
their tables, and for their survival against the Nazi menace. What would happen then, if this central pillar
of the Soviet state was revealed to be little more than a hollow shell?
On
the evening of 24 February 1956, in a secret address to the gathered delegates
of the Twentieth Party Congress, preeminent Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev
attempted to do just that. Speaking late into the night to the stunned and
silent hall, Khrushchev launched the first fusillade in his barrage of
denunciations against Stalin. This was the first time any member of the party,
let alone a member of the Central Committee, had dared to speak openly and in
an official capacity about Stalin’s abuses of power. His speech marked the
beginning of an extremely turbulent time in the political and cultural
development of the Soviet Union, and indeed unleashed a wave of upheaval that
would be felt by communist governments worldwide. Hitherto held as the
infallible leader of the Soviet communist party in its historic role in world
affairs, Stalin was suddenly revealed to be a tyrannical, egomaniacal despot,
as well as the primary orchestrator of multiple instances of state-directed
mass murder. This attack on the Soviet leader, coming from the highest levels
of the party, carried tremendous implications against not only the man, but also
the political and social systems of which he had been the chief architect. The
campaign of de-Stalinization, which dominated Soviet cultural and political
discourse from 1956 to 1961, prompted citizens to reconsider their own past and
the very nature of the state in which they lived.
This
project aims to examine the seismic impact that the campaign of
de-Stalinization would have on all aspects of everyday life in the Soviet
Union. I suggest that the iconoclastic attack on Stalin would be felt on a
civilizational scale, effectively reshaping the way Soviet citizen’s daily
lives and their understanding of the nature of the Revolution of which they
were a part. How did the Soviet people react to the party’s sudden denunciation
of the mythical Stalin, and how did it affect their perception of the
post-Stalin Soviet leadership? How did the cultural “thaw” unleashed by
de-Stalinization effect the way people regarded past traumas as well as their
hopes for the future? How would the shift away from Stalinist economic policies
impact Soviet citizens’ well-being and their expectations of what the
revolutionary state should be able to provide? How would their lives be changed
as some of the core values of their society were called into question?
To
explore these questions, I intend to examine how de-Stalinization was experienced
by the people living in the city (and region) which bore his name—this itself a
seemingly simple aspect of their world which would be upset as de-Stalinization
reached its final crescendo in 1961. Through the study of day to day life in Stalingrad
as it underwent the transition to Volgograd, I will contend that the attack on
the Cult of Personality effectively transformed Soviet civilization—from the
built environment of the city, to the ways its denizens would interact with one
another, and even the ways in which they thought. The primary goal of my
research will be to understand the mechanisms behind this process, as well as to
explore the social tensions it produced.
METHODOLOGICAL
INFLUENCES
This
dissertation will build off of the approaches and analyses of many distinguished
scholars of Soviet history, whose insights on both the nature of Stalinism and
de-Stalinization have directly informed my own study. In this section I will
try to outline the current state of the field, and where I hope to situate my
project within it.
For
nearly as long as “Sovietology” has existed as a historical subject, the topic
of Stalinism has attracted the most scholarly attention. Early interpretations
of the totalitarian school, which held that Marxism-Leninism as an ideology at
its most basic level sowed the seeds for dictatorial rule and the suppression
or “atomization” of civil society.[2] However, this interpretation of power
dynamics was rightly challenged by a wave of revisionist historians, who re-centered
discussions of Stalinism on the social forces unleashed by the Revolution, and
thereby greatly expanded the conversation on the period.[3]
Over
the last two decades, the ongoing debate about the nature of Stalinism has
produced some important works that used methodological approaches that I
believe are ripe for export into my own study. The first, already mentioned
above, was Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain.
In his case study of Magnitogorsk, Kotkin applied the theories of Michel
Foucault in an attempt to better reveal the layers of discourse that produced
Soviet power and maintained “Stalinism as a civilization.”[4] His
incorporation of the built environment and his focus on the evolution of a
single bounded space over time are two innovations that, to my knowledge, have
never been reproduced in a study of de-Stalinization. I aim to do just that,
with Stalingrad the focus.
While
Kotkin’s work was a landmark for its time, it has not been without critique. Magnetic Mountain, with its emphasis on
discourse in the shaping of social and political values of Stalin’s
revolutionary society, opened up a new dialogue on “Soviet subjectivity.”
Perhaps the most influential critiques came from Eric Naiman, Jochen Hellbeck,
and Igal Halfin, who argued that Kotkin’s treatment of Soviet subjects was far
too simplistic, portraying them as passive receptors of the discourse initiated
by the state, rather than complex individuals capable of critical thought. Hellbeck
in particular pushed back against this narrative by examining Soviet citizens
most intimate thoughts, in their dialogue with themselves rather than their
neighbors, through an almost microhistorical treatment of diaries—perhaps best
well-known is his “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi
(1931-1939),” which tracks one man’s attempt to reconcile his class background
with his own revolutionary persona. To properly tell the story of the impact of
de-Stalinization, especially how it was internalized on an individual level, I will
search for diaries and other personal accounts of Soviet citizens who experienced
it firsthand.
Compared to the period of Stalinism,
de-Stalinization has received much less scholarly attention. Members of the
totalitarian school saw the period as one of incomplete reforms that were
incapable of reconciling the core contradiction between Marxist-Leninist ideology
and reality. Martin Malia, who we might use to characterize the rationale of
the old guard Sovietologists, argued that “it is no exaggeration to say that
the remaining four decades of Soviet history would be dominated by one
overriding problem: how to bury Stalin.”[5] As
a result of this assumption, the school’s adherents essentially glossed over de-Stalinization
as a period of failed or incomplete reform, as another top-down initiative of
the state that failed to resolve the paradox of the Revolution before the conservative
forces of the Brezhnev era reasserted Stalinist principles (that are, again,
supposedly inherent in Marxist-Leninism). However, again revisionist
interpretations have followed, and in the last two decades there has been a
remarkable growth in cultural interpretations of de-Stalinization and the
“thaw” that have greatly enhanced our understanding Soviet life during this
period.
Since
state control of culture and political speech were significantly loosened
(albeit haltingly) as a part of de-Stalinization, scholars have had little
trouble finding sources that tap into Soviet public consciousness. Works like Elena
Zubkova’s Russia After The War: Hopes,
Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957 used a wide range of non-state
sources, such as memoirs, diaries, letters, oral histories, and even svodki (reports compiled by the state
security forces) in an attempt to gauge “public opinion” in the Soviet Union
leading up through the opening salvos of the de-Stalinization campaign.[6] Western
scholarship has also capitalized on the dynamic range of the cultural sphere
during the “thaw” that accompanied de-Stalinization. Literature under
Khrushchev became yet another vehicle for the campaign of de-Stalinization, and
the reception of major works like A Day
in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Not
by Bread Alone generated well-documented conversations central to the
nature of de-Stalinization as the Soviet public attempted to interpret their
message and situate them within the political directive of the day.[7] Often
the public’s response to these conversations went far beyond, or even directly
contradicted, the aims of those who initiated them, and all of these authors
drive home the fact that while de-Stalinization introduced the same questions
among all Soviet citizens, various segments of the population could interpret
and answer them differently.
This
focus on the realm of culture has helped shape to one of the most sophisticated
understandings of the period as expressed by Polly Jones, editor of the
landmark collection of essays on the period, The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization. Jones characterizes
de-Stalinization not as a period, but as an evolutionary process that can by no
means be characterized as universal. She argues that rather than speaking of
the period as “the Thaw”—which was the common term for the period of relative
cultural and political openness that accompanied and in many ways was ushered
in by de-Stalinization—“it is more apt to speak of several ‘thaws,’ of varying
origin, duration, and temperature.”[8]
While there was a directive to “de-Stalinize,” there was also the competing
trend of reactionary “re-Stalinization” both within the party and among Soviet
citizens. Jones further urges us “not to reduce the dynamics of
de-Stalinization to either a bottom-up, or a top-down, explosion of reform, or
even a series of swings from left to right. Rather, they indicate that the
cardinal dilemma of de-Stalinization, and what remained the focus of
negotiation throughout the Khrushchev era, was the prerogative to direct and
control social change.” While Jones concedes that this prerogative had belonged
solely to Stalin until his death, it was disputed among his successors—whether
to maintain it within the grip of the party, or to grant it in whatever limited
forms to Soviet society. It is my hope that Stalingrad will provide a space where
I can illustrate the places these diverse and competing impulses came into
contact with one another, and thereby track these narratives of social change
in much greater detail.
THE
STALINIST CITY AND DE-STALINIZATION
There
are many reasons beyond just the name of the city that have lead me to believe
this will be an ideal space to look at the de-Stalinization of Soviet
civilization. Time and again, the history of the city places it at crucial
moments in the revolution, and its connection to Stalin is anything but superficial.
The city known as Tsaritsyn—originally
taking its name from the Tsaritsa river, which meets the Volga from the West—grew
from a frontier stronghold established on the banks at the turn of the 17th
century to a major river port and commercial center. The city grew into a hub
of culture and trade, becoming connected to the empire’s central rail network
in 1862 and even becoming one of Russia’s first provincial cities to install
electric streetlamps in 1913. Tsaritsyn would become a major battleground in
the Russian Civil War, as White forces besieged, captured, and were eventually
driven out of the Red-controlled city in 1918-20. It would be Stalin who served
at the head of an armed expedition to procure grain from the region in his
capacity as a member of the Council of People’s Commisars, and eventually take
command of the defense of the city. The battle for Tsaritsyn was a protracted
and bloody affair, yet it was also a crucial strategic victory for the Red
Army. According to Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Stalin, “no locale better
encapsulated the class warfare revolutionary dynamic” of the Civil War.[9] It
was here that Stalin really made his name, and just a few years later in 1925
when the Soviet authorities deemed the name “Tsaritsyn” unacceptable (for
obvious reasons), it would be Stalin’s name given to the city which he had held
in defense of the revolution.[10]
Under Stalin, Stalingrad would
become a key site in his revolutionary transformation of the region. Thanks to
its strategic location within rail and river-based infrastructure, as well as
its preliminary trappings of local manufacturing established during the
late-imperial era, Stalingrad was to become a center of heavy industry in the
Stalinist vision of Soviet state socialism. The massive tractor factory complex
which broke ground in 1930 would become central to the city’s economy as well
as to the collectivization and mechanization of agriculture (which would be
grouped around centralized “tractor stations), and even produced some of the
first Soviet tanks. While the city was not raised from the bare Russian steppe
like Magnitogorsk, there was a clear directive to transform tsarist Tsaritsyn
into Soviet Stalingrad, another site in the vast network of what was becoming a
“Stalinist civilization.”
The defense of the city in Second
World War would further cement Stalingrad’s central place in the history of the
revolution. As the German armies advanced toward the oil fields of Baku, the
taking of the city bearing the name of the Soviet leader became a personal and
ultimately fatal obsession of Hitler’s. While the city was raised to the ground
in the process, in the end Stalingrad’s battered defenders held back General
Paulus’s advance to the Volga, enough time for Marshal Zhukov’s forces to
organize a massive counter offensive that would dramatically shift the balance
of the global conflict with Nazi Germany. Stalingrad, for nearly 6 months, was
the focus of the entire world. In 1945, it was named one of thirteen “hero
cities” of the Soviet Union.
It
is worth noting, however, that compared to studies on Stalinism as a period (or
a political system, or as social phenomenon, or even as civilization) focus
primarily on the 1930s and stop their discussion before the upheavals of the
Second World War.[11]
One of the main challenges I will face in illustrating this transformation will
be to definitively establish Stalingrad in the postwar (pre-1956) as a
distinctly “Stalinist” city. Many core aspects of Stalinism persisted and were
even strengthened after the Wermacht had been driven from Soviet soil: tight
control over literature and the arts, the impulse to perfect and purge the self
and the party, the emphasis on eminent struggle and the focus of the economy on
heavy industry, and the ever-looming presence of the police state all closely
resembled prewar Soviet policies.
Yet
while the two periods seem to share many characteristics, official Soviet
political discourse underwent several important shifts that must be identified
and their impact addressed. For instance, ethnicity superseded class background
as the core standard at the heart of a Soviet citizen’s legal standing within
the state, even as the war was still being fought. After being used as a
powerful rallying cry during the war, state-sanctioned Russian nationalism (and
an increased distrust for “alien” elements within the Soviet polity) had a
profound impact on the social order of the postwar years. Tied to this, which
seemed to very much stem from the personal beliefs of Stalin himself, are the
increasingly virulent attacks on “cosmopolitanism” (in essence state-sanctioned
anti-Semitism) within the Soviet state.[12]
It seems that, by the time of Stalin’s death in 1953, the latter trend was to
be used to justify another wave of purges and terror, but was ultimately
unraveled following the Soviet leader’s demise.
An
implicit challenge in the course of my argument, then, will be to prove that
the city was returned to a “Stalinist” modus
operandi after the upheaval of war, which in turn will enable me to demonstrate
how the postwar system was in turn challenged by de-Stalinization. I plan for
my first chapter—tentatively conceptualized as “Rebuilding the City of Stalin”—to
prove that Stalingrad was in fact a representation of a Stalinist civilization,
but the particular aspects of this trend as they pertain directly to other
subjects will be an intrinsic part of the other chapters as well.
However, the core of this study will
be directed at the years following Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech, the
moment when the de-Stalinization campaign was launched in earnest and would
have massive cultural and political implications. I am inclined to look at
de-Stalinization as a sort of revolution within the Revolution: while the
mechanisms of state power remained firmly within the hands of the communist party,
the entrenched power structures that had become manifest within party politics
had been shaken to their very foundations. Khrushchev’s denunciation of the
Cult of Personality had a ripple effect, as it laid the groundwork for other
debates about every facet of Soviet life. When the name of Stalin was desacralized,
his vision of the Revolution was called into question. Everything from his economic
vision of socialism to the way he had managed foreign policy[13]
came for the first time under open scrutiny by the party and the public. For a time, however limited or constrained,
even the core principles of Marxist-Leninist doctrine were opened once more to
interpretation, and it ignited a vigorous and dynamic debate about the nature
of the communist party, Soviet socialism, and the world revolutionary movement.
If we take de-Stalinization as a
revolutionary moment in Soviet history, then it reasons that we must understand
the changes it brought on as broad a scale as possible. The existing scholarship
on the period of de-Stalinization has remained compartmentalized; scholars have
focused on the political dynamics within the party, or have focused on the realm
of culture that attained such fascinating depth as a result of the Thaw, or on
various social phenomena that manifest during the period. No encompassing
narrative of the period in all its complexity (I feel) yet exists. My
dissertation will attempt to tie all of these themes together by looking
adopting Kotkin’s “civilizational” framework, looking at all the various
aspects of Soviet life during de-Stalinization simultaneously within the city
of Stalingrad.
In doing so, I hope to offer
insights into the ongoing discussions on the core nature of de-Stalinization
and its impact on the greater course of Soviet history. While my periodization
establishes de-Stalinization as essentially tied to the political life-span of
Khrushchev,[14]
I believe that the scope of its impact extends far beyond its apparent end. I
will aim to shed light on some of the questions that remain central to the
discussion of de-Stalinization to this day: Was the process of de-Stalinization
ever truly “completed?” Can we rightfully speak of a “re-Stalinization” with
the downfall of Khrushchev, or did the policies of his successors seek to
create a whole new civilizational model? Did the conversations unleashed by de-Stalinization
contribute to the Soviet Union’s downfall nearly a quarter of a century later? It
is my hope that this study will further contribute to these debates.
ARCHIVES
AND APPROACHES
To canvass effectively the
“civilizational” scale that I aim to cover in this dissertation, I will need to
amass a wide array of archival sources as well as personal collections. I of
course expect to conduct research in Volgograd, but also hope to visit archives
in Moscow and even some housed here in the United States. In this section I will
outline the collections that will be of particular value to my project, as well
as go into greater detail as to some of the questions I believe they will help
to answer.
So
far while browsing the lists of fondy
it has been my primary goal to identify within my archives potential “sites” of
de-Stalinizing discourse. These sites range from concrete spaces—for example,
the war memorial complex at Mamaev Kurgan, or the city’s prized Tractor
Factory—to more abstract ones—such as within the local Stalingrad party
apparatus, among the city’s various planning committees, and in the classroom.
By focusing on the conversations happening with each of these various sites, I should
be able to bring a multi-layered perspective to the process of
de-Stalinization.
First
and foremost, the Volgograd State Archive houses be my primary resource for
documenting this project, as it houses collections that are crucial to telling
the history of both the Volgograd (formerly Stalingrad) administrative oblast
and the municipality itself. This will be my primary resource for raw data on
the city, as well as the political administration and oversight of day-to-day
affairs. The organization of the archive’s collections should lend itself well
to this endeavor.
In
terms of the city administration, there are extensive collections from the
meetings and resolutions of the city’s Council of People’s Deputies. As the
political imperatives of de-Stalinization rolled in from Moscow, the city
administration would be the first to try to interpret, and eventually
implement, the local variant of Khrushchev’s reforms, and the documents in
these collections should allow me to answer a host of important questions: What
tensions emerged between the center and the provincial leaderships as
de-Stalinization began to play out on the ground? Who played the more prominent
role in the implementation of policy? How did the city’s leadership react to
the forces of de-Stalinization as they began to manifest “from below?”
While Stalingrad was a provincial
city, it was still a major industrial urban center in the Volga region (another
aspect that makes Stalingrad an ideal “Stalinist” city). The collection on the
city’s industry is already broken down on a site-by-site basis. The city’s
largest industrial enterprises—such as the Volgograd Hydroelectric Plant (also
known as the 22nd Party Congress Power Station), the Red October
Steelworks, and of course, the city’s prized Tractor Factory (which, until 1961,
bore the name of Felix Derzhinsky, first director of the Cheka)—have their own fondy detailing the oversight and
day-to-day workings of their respective enterprises. These sites, I suspect,
might become important battlegrounds of de-Stalinization, since it is well
documented that in many places the attack on the Cult of Personality was in
turn used to attack “little Stalins,” or vozhdy,
who had abused their position of authority at the workplace for personal gain.[15]
How did rank-and-file workers interpret and incorporate the message of de-Stalinization
into their daily lives? How did it impact their perception on the party that
was supposed to be the chief advocate for their interests?
Khrushchev
also used de-Stalinization to push through a series of economic reforms that
shifted the former regime’s focus away from heavy industry and toward consumer goods,
as well as toward a significant expansion of the agricultural sector. How did
the shift to light industry effect the city’s major enterprises? What would be Stalingrad’s
place within the larger Soviet planned economy? Were new factories built? Khrushchev’s
new economic policies made the measure of a “standard of living” a battleground
in proving the potential of socialism versus capitalism, to the point of engaging
in the now famous “kitchen debates” with then U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon
in 1959. While the Soviet premier promised his country’s consumer economy would
soon overtake that of the West, how did these grand initiatives play out on the
ground for average Soviet citizens? Did the flow of consumer goods translate
into new shops and stores accessible by the city’s working population? In her 2002
article “Cold War in the Kitchen” Susan Reid argued that this initiative would
also have a profound impact on the sphere of Soviet gender relations, as women
were further expected to become model homemakers in addition to productive
workers and mothers.[16] Her
approach suggests that a study of consumer cultures might reveal much in the
discourse of daily life within the city.
Reconstruction
of the city that had been razed to the ground was a massive undertaking, and
one that was carefully planned and laid out by urban planners, architects, and
economists. The Volgograd State Archive contains fondy specifically relating to planning and construction, as well
as keeping track of the city’s housing. A major undertaking of this project
will be determining just what was Stalingrad was built, and for whom? How were
Khrushchev’s massive housing initiatives funded? In addition to looking at the
different types of housing and workspaces that made up the built environment of
new Stalingrad, answering this question means looking into the makeup of the
city’s postwar population. Were the people who came back to help lift the city
of Stalin from the rubble more or less ethnically diverse than those who lived
there before the battle? With the rise of ethnic nationalism predicated by the
war, were ethnic Russians given access to preferential treatment or conditions?
This will be another line of questioning to pursue on either side of the 1956
divide. Ultimately, what would be the significance of Khrushchev’s economic
imperatives in shaping a de-Stalinized Soviet civilization?
While
the city itself will serve as the main stage for this story, to best cover a
“civilizational” scope I hope to include a number of side-lights from the
surrounding area. Stalingrad was both the administrative center and economic
hub for the region, and examining its place within a broader latticework of
Soviet society should only enhance this study’s goal to look at the broad scope
of the Soviet experience of de-Stalinization, especially in relation to
Khrushchev’s renewed focus on agriculture and the increased availability of
foodstuffs, particularly meat, milk, and butter. I hope to make use of the
archive’s collections on the oblast’s collective farms, in order to address a
rural perspective of Soviet kolkhozniks
within the immediate vicinity of the city.
One
of the collections I am most excited to delve into is that of the
“socialist-cultural sphere,” which includes files dedicated to “the People’s
Education” as well as developments in the realm of the city’s Arts and Culture.
Here I will try to explore how leisure activities and public space became part
of the discourse of de-Stalinization. Did the cultural thaw allow for a
resurgence of Soviet “civil society,” or voluntary associations outside of the
realm of politics? What new forms of community engagement emerged during this
time? Were certain clubs or activities given preference over others? How did
the government try to oversee, curtail, or encourage these developments? In
addition, I will take a closer look at forms of “the people’s education”
directed at Soviet youth. How did de-Stalinization change the way students
learned about their country’s past? How were the effects of the campaign
understood by the Komsomol, which would help shape the next generation of
Soviet leaders and citizens?
In
a subset of this collection, there is an entire fond dedicated to the city’s museum culture. Volgograd as it stands
today is essentially a museum city, as memorialization is a key aspect of the
city’s built environment. Even while rebuilding a city from the rubble,
planners were careful about their efforts to preserve Old Stalingrad as it had
once stood, as well as to memorialize the cataclysmic struggle that had taken
place on its streets. I hope to dedicate extensive time to the processes behind
the city’s monument culture and historic preservation efforts. How did planners
and citizens attempt to navigate the political imperatives of de-Stalinization
while attempting to preserve their understanding of the part their city played during
the war? These monuments in turn became central spaces within the greater
cultural life of the city, especially in the practice of welcoming important
persons and tourists to the city. Volgograd became a common “destination” for
foreign dignitaries visiting the USSR, including visits by Yugoslav president Tito
in 1956, and Fidel Castro in 1963. These visits constituted occasion for mass
spectacle throughout the city, which I also hope to examine in further detail.
In
addition to Volgograd, I hope to spend some time in the Central State and Party
Archives in Moscow in order to better understand the course of events as it was
understood from the center. In addition to transcripts of correspondences between
the two cities, I would be interested in finding the records of the central
security organs about local matters in Stalingrad, and how they were reported
to the party leadership. While in Moscow, I would also have the opportunity to
visit Memorial, a non-profit organization with a crowd-sourced collection of
the victims of terror and state violence. Much of Memorial’s collection
consists of personal sources, and its library might prove valuable in
understanding both the postwar repressions of the Zhdanovshchina as well as the lives of survivors of the camps as
they returned to society following the amnesties granted by the post-Stalin
leadership. If sources exist, I would like to devote significant discussion to
the social impact of former
However,
in the meantime there are several other resources available in the United
States that I hope to access. The collection of the foreign press at the
Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. houses collections of both the Stalingradskaia and Volgogradskaia pravda. These local iterations of the main Soviet
press organ should help not only to establish a timeline of major events and
milestones within the city, but also to illuminate the official party narrative
through the transition of de-Stalinization, which would have been the primary
source that citizens would have used to try to decipher what was expected of
them in the new political climate. I plan to use newsprint as a starting point
for many of the dialogues that I hope to uncover during the course of this study,
as I expect many personal accounts of this period will have been indelibly
shaped by their day to day interaction with the media.
I
am also interested in exploring representations of the city and its history in
film—there are many are focused on the city’s role in the Great Patriotic War,
and many still pertaining to the heroic reconstruction of Stalingrad—to explore
the question of how the story of the city was used to convey a message to a
wider Soviet (and even international) audience.
I
also hope to travel to the Hoover Institute at Stanford to search for any
personal collections it might house from people who have either traveled to or
lived in Volgograd during my timeframe. While far from their source of origin,
the Hoover houses one of the most diverse collections on life in the Soviet
Union anywhere in the United States, and I hope to at least get a sense of the
types of sources I might be working with and how I might use them before
reaching my main archives in Russia proper. Of all the sites of
de-Stalinization I hope to examine, none will prove as difficult to examine as
that of the consciousness of the individual Soviet subject. I will attempt to
shed light on this aspect of the story through the incorporation of personal
biographies of as many Stalingradtsy as
possible. If I can establish a narrative that also reflects the personal
stories of key characters representative of different walks of life in the city
it will help me track the impact of de-Stalinization on their daily life over
time. The more I can personalize the experience of de-Stalinization, the more
complete the story I hope to tell will be.
TIMELINE
TO COMPLETION
At the moment, I am working on
compiling the existing secondary literature on the period, as well as working
through the Russian language historiography on the city itself. In addition, I
have been reading up on the predominant methodologies in urban studies and
further familiarizing myself with the theories of discourse that were central
to the works on which this project was based. My chief concern for the upcoming
year is to secure funding for an extended trip to Russia to visit my archives
in Volgograd and Moscow by the end of 2017. In addition to applying for outside
travel funding and working on research grant proposals for Fulbright or IREX, I
hope to begin to visit collections housed here within the United States so that
I might better direct my efforts when the opportunity to travel to Russia does
arise. By 2018, I plan on returning to Seattle to work, translate, and write.
It is my hope at this time to defend my dissertation by the Spring of 2020.
(Last edited 3/11/16. I would like to thank Drs. Glennys Young and Kurt Shultz for all their comments and editing prowess, as this draft has improved drastically with their help!)
[1]
Steven Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain:
Stalinism as a Civilization (2005), 3.
[2]
See Hannah Arednt, The Origins of
Totalitarianism (1951), Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, (1971), or Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy (1994). Note here, too, that most discussions of
Stalinism are centered around its initial manifestation in the late-1920s
through the 1930s, when the greatest revolutionary policies were undertaken and
that saw the bloodiest instances of state terror.
[3]
See, for instance, Arch Getty, Origins of
the Great Purges (1985); Shelia Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism (1995);
[5]
Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: The
History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991, (New York: The Free Press,
1994), 315.
[6]
Elena Zubkova, Russia After The War:
Hopes, Illusions, and Disappointments, 1945-1957, translated and edited by
Hugh Ragsdale, (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998).
[7]
See Denis Kozlov, “Naming the Social
Evil: The Readers of Novyi Mir and
Vladimir Dudintsev’s Not by Bread Alone,
1956-59 and Beyond,” in Jones, ed., Dilemmas
of De-Stalinizatio: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev
Era (2006); or Miriam Dobson, “Contesting Paradigms of De-Stalinization:
Readers Responses to One Day in the Life
of Ivan Denisovich” in Slavic Review,
64:3, (2005), 580-600.
[8]
Polly Jones, Dilemmas of De-Stalinization,
11.
[9]
Steven Kotkin, Stalin (Vol. 1): Paradoxes
of Power, 1878-1928. New York: Penguin Books, 2015. The Battle for
Tsaritsyn was a protracted conflict, during which time Red authority in the
city was enforced through means of extensive terror at the hands of the local
branch of the Cheka, which Stalin also took command of. Many of the tactics
that Stalin would later resort to on a much wider scale have eerie parallels
with the strategies he employed to hold off the forces of counterrevolution at
Tsaritsyn. In addition to the campaign of terror, even as early the winter of
1921-22, the grain requisition policies put in place by Stalin had left this
fertile region of the Russian steppe facing a devastating famine. It is also
here where it might be pointed to as the start of Stalin and Trotsky’s historic
rivalry, as Trotsky as acting head of the Red Army often favored tactics
different to those implemented by Stalin, who due to military circumstances was
acting with relative autonomy—each would appeal to Lenin for the other’s
removal from command as early as 1918.
[10]
Note, this was before Stalin was the undisputed leader of the communist party,
and I have yet to uncover the full saga of the city’s initial name change. I
hope to explore this event more thoroughly in my opening chapter on the
“Stalinization” of the city.
[11] There are a few noteworthy exceptions to this. See
Amir Weiner’s Making Sense of War: The
Second World War and the Fate of the Revolution (2002), and, in similar urban,
case-study based approachs Serhy Yekelchyk’s Stalin’s Citizens Everyday Politics in the Wake of Total War (2014)
and Qualls, Karl D. From Ruins to Reconstruction: Urban Identity in Sevastopol after
World War II. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009.
[12]
Vasily Grossman, the city’s war-time biographer, makes this a central theme of
his epic treatment of the Battle of Stalingrad and the Soviet Union during the
war. Life and Fate, which was written
during the Thaw, was never published because its message was seen as too
radical even for the time, which further fueled Grossman’s dissident views.
Still, his intimate knowledge of the city and its inhabitants’ experiences
during the war make his works extremely useful in a discussion of postwar
Stalingrad, and I will attempt to find ways to incorporate him accordingly.
[13]
In my own paper, “Marshaling Tito: The Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and the Crisis
of International Stalinism,” I argue that Khrushchev attempted to use
de-Stalinization to shift Soviet foreign policy focus away from Europe and
toward competing for influence with the West in the emergent Third World.
[14]
Khrushchev was removed for a number of reasons, not exclusively contained to
the realm of his policy initiatives (his personality and Soviet prestige in the
eyes of the world were also major factors). Regardless, the “apex” of
de-Stalinization can be said to have been reached much earlier—1961 saw both
one of the most monumental “Thaws” (both the release of Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich and the change of the name from Stalingrad to
Volgograd happened at this time), the freeze that followed would prove largely
permanent.
[15]
Susanne Schattenberg, “‘Democracy’ or ‘Despotism’?: How the Secret Speech was
Translated into Everyday Life,” in Jones, ed., Dilemmas of De-Stalinization, pp. 64-79.
[16] Reid,
Susan. “Cold War in the Kitchen: Gender and the De-Stalinization of Consumer
Taste in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev” in Slavic Review 61:2, (2002).
