Robert Dale

Divided we Stand: Cities, Social Unity and Post-War Reconstruction in Soviet Russia, 1945–1953

This article explores the divisions created by the Great Patriotic War, its aftermath and the reconstruction of Russian cities in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It examines the conflicts created by rebuilding housing, infrastructure, restoring communities and allocating resources in cities where wars painful legacy continued to be felt. The wars impact varied enormously between cities on the frontlines and in the rear. Contrary to official propaganda rebuilding was a protracted process, which created divisions rather than unity.

Rats and Resentment: The Demobilization of the Red Army in Postwar Leningrad, 1945—50

This article reassesses the myth of the heroic homecoming and successful reintegration of Red Army veterans returning to Leningrad after 1945. Soviet propaganda created an official version of demobilization, which presented veterans as exemplary citizens who returned to civilian life with relative ease. This myth created the impression that ordinary Leningraders welcomed home returning veterans as heroes. Throughout the twentieth century the demobilization of mass conscript armies generated tensions and difficulties. Across Europe the experience of demobilization in the wake of industrialized warfare created resentment, disaffection and anger. In contrast to official myths, Leningrad’s veterans were little different from their counterparts elsewhere. Reports based on veterans’ letters intercepted by the military censor reveal that many ex-servicemen were deeply resentful of the reception they received in postwar Leningrad. The frustrations of demobilization were blamed on ‘rear-line rats’, a term of derision for officials believed to have shirked front-line service in favour of safer administrative jobs. These problems were not imagined by disaffected veterans. Other documents confirm that corruption and bureaucracy were widespread problems. Despite these simmering resentments, the myth of a successful demobilization has remained remarkably durable and continues to be accepted by historians and the general population.

“No longer Normal”: Traumatized Red Army Veterans in Post-war Leningrad

On 10 February 1946, Maria Golubeva wrote to her sister in Simferopol describing the difficulties and disappointments of life in post-war Leningrad. Maria was living in one room with five family members. In November 1945, her son Andrei joined them, following his demobilization from the Red Army. His living space had been occupied by other people during the Siege of Leningrad, and he was now attempting to reclaim it through the courts. Andrei was working as an artist in a state institution, although he wasn’t receiving a ration card. He had been granted permission to enter university at the start of the next academic year. Andrei’s transition to civilian life was anything but smooth. As his mother wrote, “He is after all an invalid and worse still, he is psychologically abnormal.”1

Stalinist City Planning. Professionals, Performance, and Power

under new leadership already in the post-war period (p. 172). The book concludes with a discussion of patrimonialism in contemporary Russia (especially corruption, one-man rule, clientelism and the Putin cult); Getty hypothesises that these ‘deep structures’ may be present for a long time yet. The book is based on remarkably wide and thorough research of Communist Party archives. Building on his previous work, Getty makes manifest the hidden relationships in the Stalinist system of governance, constructing a convincing model. He then applies this analytical machinery to major events of the Stalin period, providing unique and powerful accounts of the defeat of the Right and Left opposition, the motives behind the 1936 Constitution, and the logic behind the Great Terror, all of which are placed in the context of clan struggles. This vantage-point also invites further empirical application, and Getty must be credited with developing a serious and promising historiographical angle on Stalinist history. At the same time, Getty’s attempt to situate Stalinist political practice in the ‘timeless’ Russian patrimonial system may be on shakier ground. Indeed, Getty’s thorough, critical and nuanced analysis of the Stalin period stands in stark contrast to his brief and sweeping generalisations about Tsarist and Russian politics. These generalisations and selective claims create the impression of fixed, ‘traditional’ political practices. One important issue that Getty overlooks is the emergence of a discourse of legality and rational politics. While he notes the importance of legality as a propaganda cover for patrimonial practices, the question of how this normative expectation developed, and whether it progressively imposed constraints on patrimonial rule is ignored. More importantly, ‘patrimonialism’ is defined in an overly broad way, being gratuitously applied to political phenomena in the Tsarist and Putin periods. Getty sees all instances of power-maximisation as clan struggles, but these may have other, more appropriate interpretations. The siloviki and reformers in the Presidential administration may be better seen as policy groupings; Getty labels them clans. At another point, Getty characterises the conflict between the FSB and the Federal Narcotics Control Service in 2007 as an instance of clan warfare (although, somewhat confusingly, he previously suggested that they belong to the same siloviki clan). However, verbal sniping and even criminal investigations into rival officials could also be seen as routine bureaucratic squabbles. These assessments are complicated by the necessary opaqueness of such backroom dealings, which Getty admits, but nonetheless he goes on to reference the speculations of the most hostile Russia watchers. If placing patrimonial political action in continuity from Muscovy to Putin’s Russia requires too much ‘broadening’ and interpretative liberties, there is a risk that the analytical utility of such comparisons will decline. That the book opens itself up to such a critique is a tribute to the ambitiousness of the argument. If it remains standing, it offers an important meta-narrative for Russian history. Nonetheless, even if we do not find evidence for such a position, a diminished form of the argument as it applies to the Stalin period offers us many major insights, and welcomes further research.

The Great War in Russian Memory by Karen Petrone

HISTORIANS OF EUROPEAN SOCIETIES HAVE LONG EXAMINED THE MEMORY, myth, commemoration and remembrance of World War I after 1918. In contrast, historians of Soviet Russia have argued that the Great War disappeared from official, public and popular memories. The rejection of an ideologically suspect ‘imperialist war’ in favour of myths built around Revolution and the Russian Civil War made the Soviet Union unique amongst combatants in ignoring, forgetting and marginalising the memory of World War I. Karen Petrone’s excellent book attempts to ‘integrate the Soviet Union into the pan-European history of the memory of World War I’ (p. 13) by challenging the traditional understanding of the erasure of the Great War from Russian memory. The goal of this groundbreaking study is to explore the existence, and analyse the shifting boundaries, of a discourse of World War I remembrance on the margins of Soviet culture. Petrone argues, ‘that the absence of official commemoration did not mean the absence of war memory itself’ (p. 6). Indeed, given the scale of wartime mobilisation, death, disfigurement, displacement and suffering, it is surprising that scholars have so often accepted that World War I memory disappeared from official and popular consciousness. In the book’s eight chapters Petrone demonstrates how a complex and varied remembrance of war experience occurred regularly in Soviet interwar culture. The memory of the Great War did not disappear as the result of official edict, but developed and evolved ‘over decades through thousands of individual bureaucratic, personal, or institutional contests in which memory of the war was both intentionally and unintentionally protected or undermined’ (p. 8). This analysis of the public representation of World War I rests on a wide survey of Soviet cultural products, including films, the visual arts, museum exhibits, official military histories, published document collections, journalism and memoirs, produced between 1917 and 1945. However, Petrone’s most important source materials, in terms of both their impact on popular perceptions and the attention she devotes to them, are literary fiction and memoirs. At the centre of this book is a close textual analysis and study of the reception of Soviet World War I literature. Some of these works, most notably Sholokhov’s Quiet Flows the Don, will be familiar to many readers, others less so. Yet, many of these works were popular in the interwar decades, and were published in numerous editions. Petrone’s insightful reading of these sources reveals much that is surprising, and even shocking, about what could be expressed publicly about the violence, brutality and horror of World War I. Four key themes are at the heart of the contested World War I discourses on which Petrone focuses: religion, heroic masculinity, violence and patriotism. These conceptual reference points, all common analytical tools for historians of European World War I memory, allow Petrone the opportunity to demonstrate the Soviet Union’s relationship to wider trends in interwar Europe. Faith, contested masculinities, the brutalising effects of wartime violence, and the nature of competing national and international identities, although they took different forms, were as much part of Russian as European debates about war memory. Chapter One begins by exploring the Moscow City Fraternal Cemetery, one of the most visible war memorials created during World War I. The cemetery serves as a metaphor for World War I memory in Russia, abandoned and neglected but never completely erased. The book concludes by bringing the

Little Soldiers: How Soviet Children Went to War 1941-1945 by Olga Kucherenko

Cold War divisions balanced against personal rivalries and domestic power struggles played out across Eastern Europe after the communists gained power. The extent of Soviet influence and Stalin’s own role as a driving force during the terror is addressed by all of the authors to a greater or lesser degree. There is a general consensus that the Soviet–Yugoslav split of 1948 had an impact on shaping subsequent purges, both across the Soviet Bloc and within Yugoslavia itself, as Jerca Staric highlights. Having considered the available evidence, Jordan Baev believes that, in the Bulgarian case, terror and repression was orchestrated by the Kremlin with ‘scenarios written and directed by Moscow’ (p. 190). Dennis Delatant argues that in Romania ‘Stalin provided the models and sharpened the instruments’ while acknowledging that personal conflicts also came into play, as communist leader Gheorghiu-Dej used terror to remove any potential political rivals and secure his own dominance (p. 149). Matthew Stibbe demonstrates that in the case of the GDR, ‘the purges had as much to do with power struggles in Berlin as with pressures from Moscow’ (p. 70), while Aldis Purs’ study of the Baltic states concludes that while terror may have been based on prior practice in the Soviet Union, its content and execution depended largely on indigenous factors (p. 20). Kevin McDermott perhaps summarises it best when he states that, although Stalin ‘bears ultimate responsibility’ for the repressive campaigns in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere, nevertheless ‘even if we accept that the purges were initiated and coordinated in Moscow, they often fell on fertile soil, were adapted for domestic purposes and were not always amenable to strict party control from above’ (p. 104). While the speed, timing and intensity of repression also varied from country to country, a depressingly familiar pattern soon emerges, with initial campaigns focused against external enemies (commonly including any surviving political opposition, religious groups or nationalist elements) before the communists turned in on themselves, rooting out internal enemies or ‘enemies with a party card’. Overall, a variety of ideological, political, socio-economic and cultural motivations lay behind the purges, however the evidence presented here suggests that the widespread communist use of terror had three broad aims: firstly to remove, crush or subordinate any actual or potential opposition to the consolidation of their power in Eastern Europe; secondly to identify scapegoats for political and economic failings; and thirdly to act as a propaganda tool, educating and intimidating wider society in equal measure, to ensure their compliance. The breadth of scope and scale demonstrated within this collection is impressive, with newly available archival evidence adding much to our understanding of events, although at times the ‘broad brush approach’ adopted precludes the development of slightly more detailed analysis. However, this is an informed and insightful collection, which provides a much needed addition to the historiography of the Stalinist-era terror in Eastern Europe.

Studying effects of capillary flow on membrane proteins by time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy

We wish to develop a biophysical understanding of the structure-function relationship of Tissue Factor (TF), the membrane-bound protein that triggers hemostasis and arterial thrombosis by essential activation of the enzyme Factor VIIa (VIIa). Catalysis by TF-bound VIIa occurs in the blood stream, and flow-dependent shear affects its enzyme kinetics. From the known structure of the TF:VIIa complex, the catalytic domain of VIIa could be as close as 1 nm or as far as 12 nm from the membrane surface depending on geometry under the influence of shear. As models of blood vessels, we use glass capillary tubes coated on the inside surface with a lipid bilayer containing TF. This setup permits two types of measurements as a function of flow: enzyme kinetics of TF:VIIa by a colorimetric assay; and analysis of the spatial and dynamic relationship of TF:VIIa with respect to the membrane surface. Time-resolved depolarization and resonance energy transfer are measured via a microscope using either direct or evanescent wave excitation. We demonstrate the feasibility of these experiments by using rhodamine-labelled phospholipids at probe densities down to approximately 300 molecules/micrometer2 in the presence or absence of the acceptor malachite green and by the emission anisotropy decay of probes in glycerol.