Alexandra Popoff's Blog - Posts Tagged "stalin"

This spring, while in Moscow, I visited a central bookstore on Tverskaya Street. Shop windows displayed the familiar red and yellow jackets of J.K. Rowling’s "Casual Vacancy" in Russian translation. But upon coming in, I found myself face to face with Stalin’s flamboyant photographs gazing at me from the red covers of Soviet-style editions, prominently placed by the entrance. For a few seconds, I was baffled and lost in time. Stacks of Rowling’s book were further back in the store, and I recalled an advertisement on a Russian website saying that her book was read by the entire world.

Promoting "Casual Vacancy" alongside Stalin biographies is ironic. This March marked sixty years since Stalin died, and one hopes his death left no casual vacancies. But in the past decade, Stalin’s popularity in Russia has visibly grown. When it comes to popular novels, Russians read what the rest of the world is reading. But when it comes to Soviet history, they are encouraged to read books that tell a different version than what the rest of the world knows.

While Stalin biographers in the West have produced factual accounts, the tendency in Russia is to bring back the myth. This is why the comprehensive "Stalin and His Hangmen" by Donald Rayfield is hard to find; as far as I know the book was published only marginally in Russia. This also applies to Anne Applebaum’s famous book "Gulag: A History," which was translated into scores of foreign languages, but is barely accessible in Russian. Yet, one can easily find trashy editions that attempt to resurrect the myth of Stalin’s greatness.

Although millions died in Stalin’s mass purges, understanding the history of the gulag is still not believed to be essential. The dictator is celebrated with a new biography in the series of “Lives of Remarkable People” and such titles as "Stalin Won the War," "Stalin. The Military Genius," and a memoir "How I.V. Stalin Lived, Worked, and Raised Children." Over a recent decade, scores of obscure authors have created his sympathetic portrait and even suggested his martyrdom in "Krushchev Killed Stalin Twice" and "What Stalin Was Killed For?"

Articles emphasizing Stalin’s achievements abound on Russian websites. In 2010, a website, “Truth About Stalin,” was launched. The most amazing thing about it is that it provides entirely false information. Unlike with the Holocaust, which now cannot be openly denied in most countries, deniers of Stalin’s mass murders are functioning in the open. In the absence of full information about Stalin’s regime, there is still no consensus in Russia about mass repressions, forced collectivization, and the organized famine, which depopulated entire areas in Ukraine and the Northern Caucasus.
There is no shortage of books about the gulag in Russia, including Solzhenitsyn’s volumes, which are sold everywhere. In recent decades, scores of memoirs by the gulag survivors were produced. I’ve seen these editions in a kiosk at the entrance to the former Lenin Library (now the Russian State Library) where they are sold by volunteers. Over the years, I noticed fewer people were buying them.

This situation invites a parallel with China where no full account of Mao’s Great Famine has ever been published, while memoirs of victims, less damaging to the current leadership, are available. Thus, a recent book by a journalist Yang Jisheng, "Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine 1958–1962," is banned in the mainland China because of the author’s sweeping investigation. Mao’s disastrous policies were closely copied from Stalin’s and the reasons for historical amnesia and censorship in both countries are similar. But while in China is it no longer possible to openly admire Mao, in Russia, Stalin’s cult is being gradually resurrected and a school textbook discussing his accomplishments has been produced.

Russia has proclaimed 2015 the Year of Literature. Coming from the state where nothing happens without Putin’s personal approval, the initiative can only inspire scepticism, not pride.

Throughout Russia’s history, genuine writers were the main opposition to authoritarian regimes and were relentlessly harassed for speaking out. Sensing hypocrisy, Kommersant newspaper is publishing a calendar of Russia’s literary persecutions: e.g., February 24 marks Leo Tolstoy’s excommunication from the Orthodox Church and February 28 confiscation of Vasily Grossman’s famous novel, "Life and Fate."

If the Kommersant calendar of Russia’s literary harassments were comprehensive there would be enough cases of writers’ arrests, book banning, deportations, and murder to mark every day of a year. All literary celebrations in Russia begin with Alexander Pushkin, the national genius and the country’s pride. The poet, however, pursued his entire writing career under police surveillance. Censored by the Tsar himself and prohibited from traveling even within Russia, he needed a special permit to publish and to read his poems to friends.

Tolstoy lived under police surveillance for 50 years. Russia’s intellectuals were always watched; yet, there are more police reports on Tolstoy than on any other public figure. Three police departments maintained constant surveillance. Scrutiny was intensified during Tolstoy’s last decades, after he had denounced the authoritarian regime and its obedient Orthodox Church. Tolstoy accused the Church of endorsing all repressive government policies and war. Had Tolstoy lived today, he would protest Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the role of the official Church, which hasn’t changed. During Tolstoy’s life, his nonfiction circulated in underground copies. It was never reprinted in Soviet Russia; will it be celebrated today?

Back to the calendar of literary persecutions: April 23 will mark an anniversary of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s incarceration in Peter and Paul’s Fortress. In 1849, Dostoevsky was arrested for belonging to a group studying utopian socialism and narrowly avoided execution by firing squad. The day when his death sentence was commuted to hard labour in Siberia was the happiest in his life, he said: Dostoevsky was singing in his cell. Later, when he became loyal to the regime, the police still treated him as a former political convict, confiscating some of his manuscripts at the Russian border.

The fate of twentieth-century writers was far more tragic: under the Soviet dictatorship 2,000 were arrested and of those 1,500 perished in the gulags. Every Soviet republic lost its bravest and most talented. In Russia, Isaac Babel, Boris Pilnyak, and Osip Mandelstam were among those tortured and killed under Stalin. Mandelstam was re-arrested on May 2, 1938, for composing a satirical poem about Stalin; he died that year in a transitory camp in the Far East. As he had famously remarked, “Poetry is respected only in this country––people are killed for it. There’s no place where more people are killed for it.” Mandelstam’s spiritual legacy survives today only because his widow, Nadezhda, was heroically hiding it for decades from the authorities.
The Soviet state routinely persecuted writers, seizing their manuscripts, libraries, and archives in the course of arrests. There was one case though when a novel was “arrested” independently from its author.

On February 28, 1961, the writers’ community in Moscow, to which my family belonged, was shaken by the news that the KGB had searched Vasily Grossman’s apartment and confiscated the manuscript of his major novel, "Life and Fate." Depicting WWII, the Gulag, and the Holocaust this novel is compared today to "War and Peace"––both in scope and mastery. However, the author died without seeing his masterpiece published or his papers returned to him. Grossman was the first to compare, with clarity and depth, the Nazi and Stalinist totalitarian systems. Timely release of this novel would have had tremendous impact on Soviet Russia and would have changed what the nation knew about its Stalinist past. Sensing a threat to the regime, the authorities vowed to keep it suppressed for 200 years; in the event, they succeeded in postponing the book’s publication by three decades. In December 2013, the FSB released Grossman’s papers from its vaults, much to surprise and delight of the Russian State Archive for Literature and Arts. This archive had long petitioned the authorities to release all confiscated writers’ libraries and manuscripts, including Grossman’s.

Writers’ deportations should also be marked on the calendar, like feast days: along with freedom deportees were awarded world fame. Joseph Brodsky was put on a plane to Vienna on June 4, 1972; Alexander Solzhenitsyn was flown to West Germany on February 14, 1974. (A tradition of exiling Russia’s intellectuals to Germany is an old one.

In 1922, protesting Lenin’s deportations, the German chancellor quipped that “Germany was not Siberia.”)
The list of Russia’s literary martyrs is long and distinguished. Anna Akhmatova, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak, and Mikhail Bulgakov were not imprisoned, but they endured decades of persecution.

Bulgakov, to whom Stalin himself had repeatedly denied publication, died in obscurity on March 10, 1939. A brilliant satirical writer and playwright, he was destined for posthumous world fame. One of the finest poets of her generation, Tsvetaeva was driven to despair and took her own life on August 31, 1941. It should be noted that by the end of the Soviet era, the same Party officials who earlier prohibited Bulgakov’s and Tsvetaeva’s works were showing off the volumes in their own libraries––not because they came to value genuine literature, but because these editions were impossible to get.

During the Year of Russia’s Literature officials will make speeches, to be broadcast through state-controlled media. This strikes me as ironic, since writers succeeded despite government interference in their lives and work.
Today, the state is broadening its sphere of influence, and Soviet practices of controlling literature are being revived. Last December, Russia’s Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky said that Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment" and Tolstoy’s "Anna Karenina" should be excluded from the high school curriculum as inappropriate. The minister, whose previous responsibilities include the Federal Tax Police and the menacing Presidential Commission Against the Falsification of History, will determine the lists of books for patriotic reading. Will Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Akhmatova, and Grossman make it to the recommended lists?

In "One Hundred Years of Solitude" Gabriel Márquez tells how in Macondo three thousand workers are machine-gunned at the behest of a ruthless banana company. Their corpses are thrown into the sea and relatives are told that there haven’t been any dead bodies: “You must have been dreaming… Nothing has happened in Macondo, nothing has ever happened…This is a happy town.”
Residents accept the official account and dismiss the testimony of the only survivor. But subsequently the town sinks into ruin. Such is the story of Macondo, and of all world dictatorships, which leave a destructive, lasting, and demoralizing legacy.

The brutal Stalinist regime left Russia depopulated and suffering from collective loss of memory. Millions were destroyed in the Gulag and during the Terror Famine. But in Putin’s Russia, the history of Communist terror has been replaced with the myth of the country’s great past. There is no national monument to the numerous victims; instead, there are calls to restore monuments and museums honoring Stalin. Recently, in her Nobel lecture Svetlana Alexievich called Russia “a country without memory, the space of total amnesia.”

The loss of Russia’s national memory is the main theme in Sergei Lebedev’s insightful debut novel, "Oblivion." It belongs to a new generation literature examining the impact of Stalinism on Russia today. The novel is masterfully translated by Antonina W. Bouis, whose list comprises 80 titles––writings by famous Soviet and post-Soviet authors as diverse as Mikhail Bulgakov and the Nobel Prize Laureates Alexievich and Andrei Sakharov. Lebedev’s compressed metaphorical novel is the prose of a poet, and Bouis renders his original style effortlessly and artfully.

Lebedev’s writing benefited from his training as a geologist: he can read the story in a rock or the tundra permafrost. As a poet, he tells it through imagery, creating sensual portraits of objects: “It was through a break in the fog that I saw the barracks in a mountain pass… The barracks stood like plywood cargo crates in which people were stacked... The outlines felt like a long scream…” Having traveled widely in Siberia and Russia’s north, Lebedev had come across the many decaying barracks of the Gulag Archipelago. Soviet labor camps were constructed in desolate places with no witnesses, at the “limit of the inhabited world,” as Lebedev aptly puts it. Russia’s vastness helped conceal the existence of prison camps where conditions were similar to the Mauthausen. Scientists, philosophers, writers, dispossessed peasants, and international communists shared a single and horrible fate. Branded as “enemies of the people,” they were starved and worked to death in uranium and gold mines or constructing railroads and canals. Lebedev creates a collective portrait of the generation, which vanished without a trace, of people whose lives were “smashed” by the will of the state. His novel traces their experiences through visions and dreams––of people becoming prisoners instantaneously; of freight cars with barred windows; of a train engineer unaware he is transporting his own brother to the Gulag. Robbed of names, families, and freedom, multitudes were banished to places where everything from landscape to speech was meant to dehumanize. Their destruction was complete: branded as “enemies of the people,” they were crossed out of contemporary records and died in anonymity, so that “their deaths took place in geography, not in history.”

The Soviet State viewed its people as dispensable and their lives as subordinate to production targets. But the gigantic construction projects, devised by the Party and built by slave labor, such as the White Sea canal and railways constructed beyond the Polar Circle, proved useless. Lebedev alludes to this through the story of an abandoned railroad he saw in the mountains near the Arctic Ocean. He makes the reader feel the anguish of prisoners who cleared the rock with bare hands, only to realize futility of their labor. The railway line was left unfinished: “the ends of rusty rails hung over the emptiness.” The mountain, where prisoners toiled, opens a view to the lake with striking contours: “A mean trick of nature, a joke that had waited several million years: the lake looked like Lenin’s profile, which was imprinted on us by medals, badges, stamps, statues, paintings, and drawings in books.”

Numerous lives were sacrificed to the socialist dogma. Soviet history was a series of falsifications, its ideals were stillborn, and the end of the Soviet era spelled out their demise. Soviet textbooks and insignia with Lenin’s profile were discarded; paper money, too toxic to be burned, was dumped in plastic bags in a northern mine. But Stalinism did not end there: the old guard resisted the change.

"Oblivion" is a first person account, a meditation on the memory of millions, and on personal memory. The narrator recalls his family’s neighbor at their dacha, whom he had met in childhood and whom he named Grandfather II. The old man is hiding his past, so his story unwinds slowly, until it becomes apparent that Grandfather II was a warden in a Gulag camp where prisoners dug radioactive ore; he had “administered death through labor.” For this service the state rewarded him with a luxury apartment. Grandfather II is blind, and his secretiveness and blindness are suggestive of Russia’s suppression of facts about the past. Having outlasted his epoch, “dead inside,” the old man wants to continue living through the boy. The episode of Grandfather II saving the boy’s life by donating his “scrawny” blood is symbolic. The transfusion takes place in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the new era dawned. Grandfather II dies, and the boy, saved by his blood, grows “like a graft on old wood.” This is a fitting image for an embryonic Russian democracy, grafted on Stalinist stock.

The Stalinist legacy is pervasive in contemporary Russia: “There were barriers everywhere, warning signs, ‘no entry’ symbols, guard booths…Man … was not master in these lands, and the guard booths were the architectural descendants of prison camp guardhouses; this land was infected with a fungus, the fungus of the watchman, and all of this, the fences, wire, barricades, was like a single never-ending shout: ‘Stop or I’ll shoot!’”

The northern town, where Grandfather II had lived supervising prisoners in a nearby uranium mine, was built by slave labor. Every brick tells the story of working under duress. Love of labor has been destroyed here forever, which is why “the whole town drank,” its residents bent on self-destruction. The town’s self-isolation is a part of the Soviet legacy and of Russia’s present. The town “cut off its own path to the outside, destroyed the window to the big world.”
Russia’s failure to deal with its Stalinist legacy, to establish the truth by remembering the millions who died, has invited the past to return.

Lebedev’s imaginative novel is thoroughly pessimistic, as it’s meant to be: “This text is a memorial, a wailing wall, for the dead and the mourners have no other place to meet, except by the wall of words...” An insightful and soulful tale about Russia’s historical amnesia, "Oblivion" speaks of the need for us to remember and to renounce evil regimes with their man-made calamities.

This Q & A was compiled by the author herself.

Q. What prompted you to write Vasily Grossman’s biography?

A. If I had to answer in one sentence––Vasily Grossman’s subject matter. To use James Atlas’ words about Edmund Wilson, Grossman “offered a large canvas on which you could draw a map of the twentieth century––the ideal subject for a big, ‘definitive’ biography.” This line comes from Atlas’ memoir The Shadow in the Garden: A Biographer’s Tale. In fact, Grossman’s novels Life and Fate and Everything Flows capture the twentieth century along with its calamities brought about by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes––World War II, the Holocaust, Ukraine’s famine, and the Gulag. Each of these topics may take a lifetime to explore, but I felt I could approach them through Grossman. As Atlas remarks, a biographer’s biggest reward is a chance to educate yourself while reconstructing someone else’s world.

Q. Writing a book is a marathon. What kept you going?

A. I had a sense of personal connection to Grossman’s themes. My birth family of Russian Jewry had suffered under Stalin and Hitler. My mother’s family––her uncle, aunt, and cousin––were liquidated during Stalin’s Great Purge. Her other uncle was shot as a Jew in Nazi-occupied Kiev. Earlier, while living in Kharkov and Kiev in the 1930s, my mother and grandmother witnessed Ukraine’s famine.

World War II is also not a remote event for my generation. My father had fought on the Eastern front; his brother and cousin were killed in battle. After the defeat of German fascism, Stalin launched his own anti-Semitic campaign, so my father, a war veteran, was, as a Jew, denied employment. In Life and Fate, commenting on postwar Soviet politics of state nationalism and antisemitism, Grossman writes that Stalin raised over the heads of Jews “the very sword of annihilation he had wrested from the hands of Hitler.”

I grew up in Moscow where Grossman spent much of his life. My parents and I lived in the apartment building where Grossman had a studio and kept part of his archive. Our house was among the addresses where in 1961 the KGB confiscated copies of Grossman’s novel, Life and Fate. My father, the novelist Grigory Baklanov (Friedman), brought his first fiction about the war to Grossman and later studied in his creative writing seminar. During Gorbachev’s glasnost my father became editor of Znamya literary magazine and published Grossman’s splendid Armenian memoir and short prose, and also published his wartime diaries as a separate volume.

Q. Vasily Grossman died in 1964. Why are his works relevant today?

A. Grossman wrote about state nationalism, the rise of totalitarianism, and antisemitism, topics that today remain among the most discussed. In Life and Fate the Nazi officer Liss says, “Nationalism is the soul of our epoch.” We are now witnessing the rise of nationalism in America, Europe, Russia, and China, and these words can be read as a warning from history.

In the 1950s both Grossman and Hannah Arendt elucidated on the nature of totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union. As Timothy Snyder points out in Bloodlands, “The Nazi and the Stalinist totalitarian systems must be compared, not so much to understand the one or the other but to understand our times and ourselves.” We are observing a strong comeback of far-right populist governments in Europe and elsewhere; in her award-winning book, The Future Is History, Masha Gessen even argues that totalitarianism has reclaimed Russia.

Because Grossman was a banned writer, his major works have only appeared after much delay. In the past two decades interest in his ideas has been steadily rising. Grossman’s novels are now recognized as a valuable historical source, a testimony about the twentieth century and the global evil perpetrated by totalitarian regimes. His powerful 1944 article, “The Hell of Treblinka,” became part of the evidence at Nuremberg. Today it continues to provide insights into the Holocaust, which Grossman was among the first to fathom and to chronicle.

Q. Martin Amis referred to Grossman as “a Soviet Tolstoy.” Do you agree with this description?

A. Yes and no. As a war novelist Grossman had undoubtedly experienced Tolstoy’s influence: his research notes for Life and Fate reveal that he used the structure of War and Peace as a blueprint. Written with epic sweep, Grossman’s novel also includes war parts and peace parts. Like Tolstoy, he depicts historical figures alongside fictional characters; his narrative switches between global events and family occurrences. Grossman, however, was not imitating Tolstoy. He was leading a dialogue with his predecessor and, as he states in his notes, intended to show “how life changed over 100 years.” Grossman’s protagonists fight in Stalingrad; are marched to a gas chamber, and, like the physicist Victor Shtrum, work on the Soviet nuclear program.

Actually, it was not merely Tolstoy’s greatness as a novelist that had inspired Grossman to model his epic Life and Fate on War and Peace. He saw in Tolstoy an example of a writer who was driven by the moral imperative to tell the truth. Having testified about Nazi crimes in Treblinka, he realized the pressing need to also make the world aware of the crimes of Stalinism.

In 1952, after three years’ battling with Soviet editors, Grossman succeeded in publishing a censored version of the novel For the Right Cause (this was the first part of Life and Fate). The initial reaction was positive: critics hailed it as “a Soviet War and Peace.” A few months later, For the Right Cause was attacked in the Soviet press and a political campaign against Grossman was launched, nearly ending in his arrest. Unlike Tolstoy, Grossman lived and wrote in a totalitarian state and many of his topics were the strictest Soviet taboos. In 1960 Grossman produced his uncompromising anti-totalitarian novel, Life and Fate. His attempt to publish it in the USSR was an act of desperate bravery and defiance.

Q. How will your book affect what we know about Grossman?

A. This book will come out 23 years after a single English-language biography by John and Carol Garrard. It’s drawn from my archival research, published and unpublished memoirs, letters, and interviews. My biography amasses the latest information about Grossman and his subject matter. I read everything Grossman had produced, including his early works, which were usually dismissed by biographers. My research helped me discover, for example, that Grossman’s beliefs in freedom and democracy were lifelong and that the Jewish theme was also conspicuous in his early works. My biography traces his life and ideas from the beginning, and I show how the war and the Shoah moved him to openly oppose the state.

I’ve always tried to unveil myths in my books, and this biography dispels a number of myths. Ehrenburg’s remark that Grossman was born under the star of misfortune has been given too much attention. Although there was tragedy in Grossman’s life, he was fortunate to survive Stalin’s mass purges and the war––despite reporting from Stalingrad and Kursk, the site of the largest tank battle in history. When discussing the confiscation of Life and Fate we need to know that this violent action was not unprecedented in the Soviet Union. The epilogue of my book tells the story of Georgy Demidov, a writer and Kolyma survivor, whose manuscripts were seized by the KGB and who was also deprived of the means to complete his testimony about the Gulag. In contrast, Grossman was able to produce his most uncompromising novel, Everything Flows, which became his political testament. One needs to remember that the list of Soviet literary martyrs is extraordinarily long. It includes writers murdered by the regime––Isaak Babel, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pilnyak.

Q. It took you four years to produce this book. Any regrets?

A. It pains me to see the clichéd image on my book cover. This picture of Grossman, made in the burning Berlin in 1945, has been repeatedly published. I provided the publisher with a little known picture of Grossman in his study, but it was rejected “as not dramatic” enough. I believe a cover is important. It gives the first impression about the book. Regrettably, someone in the marketing department, who did not even read my book, decided the cover’s outcome.