Sheila Fitzpatrick

Cultural revolution in Russia, 1928-1931

Cultural revolution, as defined by contemporary Soviet historians, is a necessary part of the transition to a socialist society. Its occurrence conforms to a general law governing the development of socialism. Its prerequisite is the political revolution by which the Marxist-Leninist party takes power. The party, having taken power, is the initiator of cultural revolution whose characteristics are democratization of cul-

Signals from Below: Soviet Letters of Denunciation of the 1930s

DENUNCIATION (donos). A weapon of war of reactionary forces of the bourgeoisie and Black Hundreds against the revolutionary movement-information [given] to the Tsarist or other reactionary government about revolutionary acts that were secretly being prepared. [Examples] Acting on a denunciation from a traitor, Tsarist gendarmes broke up an underground Bolshevik organization. Fascists threw a group of Komsomols into prison on the basis of a provocateurs denunciation.

Russia in the era of NEP : explorations in Soviet society and culture

Preface I. Introduction: NEP Russia as a Transitional Society William G. Rosenberg II. The Problem of Class Identity in NEP Society Sheila Fitzpatrick III. Class and Consciousness in a Socialist Society: Workers in the Printing Trades during NEP Diane P. Koenker IV. Labor Conflict in Moscow, 1921-1925 John B. Hatch V. WorkersO Artels and Soviet Production Relations Hiroaki Kuromiya VI. Private Trade and Traders during NEP R.E. Johnson VII. Family Life in Moscow during NEP VIII. Working-Class Women and the Withering Away of the Family: Popular Responses to Family Policy Wendy Z. Goldman IX. Razmychka? Urban Unemployment and Peasant In-migration as Sources of Social Conflict Douglas R. Weiner X. Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship: From Defending the Revolution to Building Socialism Mark von Hagen XI. Policing the NEP Countryside Neil Weissman XII. Insoluble Conflicts: Villiage Life Between Revolution and Collectivization Helmut Altrichter XIII. The Quiet Revolution in Soviet Intellectual Life Katrina Clark XIV. The Press and Its Message: Images of America in the 1920s and 1930s Jeffrey Brooks XV. Popular Literature of the 1920s: Russian Peasants as Readers Regine Robin XVI. Popular Song in the NEP Era Robert A. Rothstein XVII. Bolshevik Ritual Building in the 1920s Richard Stites XVIII. Conclusion: Understanding NEP Society and Culture in the Light of New Research William G. Rosenberg Selected Bibliography Lori A. Citti Contributors Index

Culture and Politics Under Stalin: A Reappraisal

Much is known about Soviet cultural life under Stalin. It has been described in a large memoir literature which, whether published in the Soviet Union or the West, basically expresses the viewpoint of the old Russian intelligentsia and tends to be a literature of moral protest, either against the Soviet regime as such or against the abuses of the Stalin period. There is an equally impressive body of Western scholarly literature analyzing the syndrome of “totalitarian control” of culture, with its characteristics of arbitrary repression, destruction of traditional associations, enforced conformity, censorship, political controls, and injunctions to writers and artists to act as “engineers of the human soul” in the Communist transformation of society. The concept of totalitarianism—developed in the postwar years, which were also the formative years of American Soviet studies—incorporated its own element of moral condemnation, making the scholarly literature strikingly similar in tone to the memoir literature of the intelligentsia.

The Soviet Union in the twenty-first century

The subject of this article is how historians and others have understood Soviet history since the demise of the Soviet Union. It is argued that, despite the opening of archives, changes in interpretation have been driven as much by external political and disciplinary developments as by greater availability of data. Important external considerations have been the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991. The main historical schools examined are the totalitarian (whose heyday was the 1950s); revisionist (1970s); and post-revisionist (1990s). Interpretations of the Soviet Union in the Russian media and popular opinion, ranging from condemnation of communism to nostalgia, are also discussed.

Celebrating (or Not) The Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution has long been a subject of controversy among Russian/Soviet historians, both in the West and Russia/the Soviet Union. Now that the centenary has arrived, conferences are being held widely in Europe and the Americas, but less widely in the Russian Federation. For Putin’s regime, with its ambiguous relationship to the Soviet past, the centenary of the Russian Revolution is something of an embarrassment. An attempt to celebrate under the slogan of ‘reconciliation’ may or may not succeed.

Vengeance and Ressentiment in the Russian Revolution

Arno Mayer’s The Furies turns our attention to vengeance and ressentiment as part of the complex of practices and discourses of revolutionary violence. Following Mayer’s lead, this essay explores the phenomena of vengeance and ressentiment in the context of the Russian Revolution, which is broadly defined as the four decades of upheaval in Russia/the Soviet Union starting in 1917. It argues that vengeance/ressentiment in the Russian Revolution was not a fixed constant but something that changed over time, notably with respect to its targets: prerevolutionary (“bourgeois”) elites in the early revolutionary period, the Russian intelligentsia at the end of the 1920s, the Communist administrative elite in the Great Purges of the late 1930s, and Jews in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Finally, it suggests a comparable question for French historians: Is there a history to be written of vengeance/ressentment in the French Revolution?

Displaced persons: from the Soviet Union to Australia in the wake of the Second World War

Introduction to a special feature which focuses primarily on the history of one particular group of DPs: people who had been exposed to Soviet rule during the war – either as Soviet citizens, or deportees and refugees from Poland and elsewhere – and who subsequently found their way to Australia in the late 1940s and early 1950s, mainly under the DP mass resettlement scheme administered by the International Refugee Organization (IRO).

The Question of Social Support for Collectivization

There was support for the Soviet project in the Russian village (as well as opposition to it) in the 1920s. But then came collectivization, and all internal support apparently vanished – at any rate, it finds no reflection either in the historiography or in recently-published archival documents. This essay argues that support for collectivization did indeed exist in the Russian at the end of the 1920s, but that much of that support had a built-in self-liquidating mechanism once collectivization and rapid industrialization were pursued simultaneously. Peasants of “Soviet” inclinations, especially the young and the so-called bedniaks, tended to approve of the kolkhoz, but at the same time to be strongly attracted to the towns, where opportunities for work and education were opening up on an unprecedented scale. Thus, it was exactly those peasants who were most favorable to the kolkhoz who were the most likely to leave the village for the town during the period of collectivization and the First Five-Year Plan.

A World War II Odyssey: Michael Danos, En Route from Riga to New York

Michael Danos was one of the millions of Europeans whose war began in one country (Latvia) and ended in another (Germany), and who within a few years had left Europe altogether for a third (the United States). But, like every one of those millions, his story was particular, and it was that particularity — the sense of himself as an individual, not just a pawn of fate and part of a faceless crowd of refugees — that was essential to him, surviving the experience, and to me, writing his story.1 In this chapter, I will try to explore its meaning, but first I must identify my relationship with my subject, which is different from that of any of the other chapters in this book: he was my husband for the last 10 years of his life.2 This is not my story, for we didn’t meet until more than 40 years after his departure from Europe in a troop ship packed with seasick DPs (displaced persons), but it is a story about someone I love, and I am writing it because I want to bring him back to life in the only way I can. At first I thought that made this writing different from any other I had done as a professional historian, but now I am not so sure. Historians have so many ways of explaining what they are doing with the past and why it matters that they sometimes forget the simplest and oldest: it’s their job to remember, in other words to raise the dead.