Rosalind Marsh

Soviet fiction since Stalin : science, politics and literature

No one with an interest in Soviet writing of the last thirty years will want to ignore this book.

Lenin and Leninism

In the early years of glasnost, the subject of Lenin and his years in power after the Bolshevik Revolution remained a most sensitive issue which hardly received any public discussion until the end of 1987.1 Although Gorbachev had condemned both Stalin personally and various aspects of the Stalinist system, Lenin’s theory and practice were still regarded as the essence of true socialism, subsequently distorted by Stalin; and Lenin as a human being was held up as a model to emulate. Gorbachev was fully aware that a Soviet Communist leadership professing Marxism-Leninism would lose all legitimacy if faith in Lenin and the October Revolution were undermined. In his book Perestroika (1987) Gorbachev presented his own philosophy as a return to true Leninism.2

Women in Russia and the Former USSR: Politics, Society and Culture

Seven years after the fall of the Soviet Communist Party, which had the emancipation of women as one of its overt aims, it is time to take stock of the contemporary situation of women in post-communist Russia and the former USSR. This chapter will propose a theoretical and historical framework within which the experience of post-Soviet women can usefully be analysed, then provide an overview of some key issues affecting women in Russia and the Soviet successor states, focusing particularly on women’s role in politics and the economy, and the social position and cultural representation of women, notably the increase in pornography, prostitution and violence against women. Other important issues, such as nationalism and the women’s movement, will be referred to only briefly, since they have been extensively discussed elsewhere (Funk and Mueller, 1993; Bridger et al., 1996; Marsh, 1998b; Konstantinova, 1994, Kay, forthcoming). The discussion presented here makes no claim to be comprehensive, but simply to complement and update previous research (Buckley, 1992; Corrin, 1992; Posadskaya, 1994; Marsh, 1996; Rule and Noonan, 1996), and to stimulate debate on some vital questions.

The Second Phase of Glasnost: the Year 1987

While some of the major literary works of 1985–6 had been predominantly concerned with topical problems of the present, such as ecology and drug dealing,l in 1987 the focus moved very explicitly to an intense preoccupation with the past, and particularly with the Stalin era. The boldest works on an anti-Stalin theme to appear in early 1987 were by writers safely dead, who were less controversial than the living; but by the spring of 1987 previously censored works by writers living in the USSR, such as Rybakov, Dudintsev and Pristavkin, which were unknown even in the West, had begun to appear. It soon became obvious that writers and critics were taking their criticisms of the Stalin era much further than during the Khrushchev ‘thaw’, engaging in a more independent critique of history and society, with a less upbeat tone than during the thaw period. Works of historical fiction published in 1987 grew in frankness, moving gradually from an isolated view of the repressions of the year 1937 to a much broader perspective. Many new subjects were aired in literature almost simultaneously, suggesting that ‘campaigns’ may have been organized from above by the party, or initiated from below by new liberal editors.

Collectivization and the Repression of the Peasantry

The vital role of literature in bringing new subjects to public attention was again demonstrated by fiction on the subject of collectivation and the repression of the peasantry published in the years 1987–81 Some outspoken works on this theme had appeared before Gorbachev’s accession,2 but since 1982 there had been a clampdown on further works on collectivization until early 1987, when the publication of Part Two of Boris Mozhaev’s Peasant Men and Women again brought this subject before the reading public.3 The aim of Mozhaev’s novel, set in two fictional villages in Mozhaev’s native Ryazan province, is to register ‘the last months in the life of the peasant community, and the destruction of its thousand-year-old way of life’.4 The controversial nature of Mozhaev’s work, completed in 1980,5 is demonstrated by the fact that even when it finally achieved publication in the USSR, it appeared only in the provincial journal Don, which had a relatively small circulation and was not easily available in the country at large, except in public libraries.6 Moreover, the journal also felt the need to include an introduction by Academician Tikhonov of the Lenin Agricultural Academy, who endorsed Mozhaev’s novel as ‘valuable’ and ‘useful’, confirming that the events depicted are based on fact, and that Mozhaev does not exaggerate the extent of the tragedy.7

The February Revolution and the Provisional Government

The subjects of the October Revolution and Civil War could not be investigated adequately without some analysis of the activities and failure of the democratic political forces which took power after the revolution of February 1917. Before Gorbachev’s accession the activities of Lenin and the October Revolution had been the main focus of academic study; very little had been known about the personalities involved in the February Revolution and Provisional Government, and the reasons for their failure. The fact that the Provisional Government was one of the last historical subjects to receive attention after the introduction of glasnost suggests that it was one of the most sensitive issues, not only for the Communists, who were not particularly eager for Russians to become aware of the plurality of views represented in their political heritage, but also, when by 1990 the Communist. Party began to lose its grip on power, for the new democratic political leaders, who did not wish to confront the reasons for the failure of democracy in 1917. This subject has been touched upon in fiction and press debates, and is beginning to be investigated by historians in the 1990s, but has still not been fully or objectively researched in Russia. There is still a significant degree of public ignorance about these events.

The Years 1985–6: Reassessment of History Begins

The first major historical subject to be treated in literature published in Russia after Gorbachev’s accession was a mild revisitation of the subject of Stalin and Stalinism which had been suppressed in Russia since 1966, and some of its first exponents were prominent ‘men of the 1960s’ who had played a major role in the ‘thaw’ period under Khrushchev or the late Brezhnev era.1 Since Stalin’s death, fiction on the theme of Stalinism had played a significant political role in promoting discussions about the legacy of the past and the possible future development of society, affording valuable insights into the persistent conflict between ‘anti-Stalinists’ and ‘pro-Stalinists’ in Soviet society.

The Background: History and Literature in Contemporary Russia

Literature on historical themes and the debates it has engendered should be viewed against a background composed of the broad political issues, the changing approach to historical subjects and the condition of Russian literature. The political and historical aspects will be discussed later in connection with specific themes. In this chapter, however, it will be useful to give a brief survey of the condition of Soviet history before Gorbachev’s accession, and of literary politics and the cultural scene in Russia since 1985, in order to understand the wider context in which historical fiction should be set.

The Civil War and the Revolutionary Period, 1917–22

In the early years of glasnost, there was no explicit questioning of official interpretations of the February and October revolutions of 1917, or of Bolshevik theory and practice in the early years of Soviet power. Gorbachev and his supporters viewed the revolutionary period, from the turn of the century to the 1920s, as all of a piece. The vital role of Lenin and the Bolshevik Party continued to be emphasized; it was repeatedly claimed that Bolshevism had brought down the Russian monarchy, turned the workers and peasants against the Provisional Government, and formulated admirable decrees after the Revolution. The period 1917–22 continued to be seen as a period of heroic revolutionary struggle, when, despite bitter resistance by the old ruling classes and the whole capitalist world, the Bolsheviks had emerged victorious and started to construct a humane socialist society. Gorbachev’s speech in 1987 on the seventieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution made no reference to the negative side of Bolshevism: the creation of the Cheka, the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in 1918, the Red Terror, the curbing of the power of the soviets and trade unions, the banning of factions within the party or the suppression of the Kronstadt Revolt in 1921. Gorbachev passed cursorily over the period of the Civil War and said nothing about the ruthlessness of the Bolsheviks either before or after the Revolution.1

The Stalin Terror: Prisons and Camps

If ‘returned literature’ of 1987 had opened up the subject of Stalin’s repressive regime, the year 1988 marked a new phase in which Stalin’s terror could be depicted with much greater frankness in the USSR.1 One new development was that by 1988 it became possible to admit that torture, both physical and mental, had been used in interrogations by Stalin’s secret police. Harrowing descriptions were permitted to appear in the press and literary journals: for example, the horrific torture of the famous theatre director Meyerhol’d and his wife, which could not be revealed in the Soviet press in 1987,2 was publicly disclosed in May 1988.3 Another taboo broken in 1988 was the depiction of the worst prison camps in Stalin’s system, the camps of Vorkuta, Taishet and Kolyma in Eastern Siberia, which do not even figure in Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.4 Whereas in the autumn of 1987, the American scholar John Glad had told Sergei Zalygin that the value of glasnost was questionable if Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales still could not be published,5 the change which had occurred by June 1988 was evident when Zalygin published a selection of Shalamov’s stories in Novyi mira.6