Book Review: Inside the Stalin Archives, by Johnathan Brent (2009) // Books from "Annals of Communism Series", Yale University Press
INSIDE THE STALIN
ARCHIVES, Discovering the New Russia
By Jonathan Brent
Reviewed By
In January 1992,
Jonathan Brent, the editorial director of Yale University Press, flew to the
newly re-established nation of Russia in a bid to secure the rights to publish
selected material from Soviet archives for the Annals of Communism project of
his press. The previous month, Russia’s new leader, Boris Yeltsin, had declared
that the hitherto secret party, state and K.G.B. archives would be opened, and
scholars and publishers from around the world were eager to explore and exploit
this potential bonanza. There was even heady talk of a Russian version of the
Nuremberg trials, with the Communist Party in the dock.
It did not quite work
out like that. There was no trial. The K.G.B. archives have been selectively
closed, and many obstacles have been placed in the path of researchers;
Vladimir Putin’s Russia began reimposing the power and prerogatives of the
state in a way that owed as much to czarist as to Soviet traditions. Despite
this, Yale University Press, along with the Hoover Institution and some other
scholarly enterprises like the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International
History Project, have done extraordinary work and fundamentally changed many
orthodox views of the Soviet era.
Brent’s engaging
memoir, “Inside the Stalin Archives,” reveals as much about the grim realities
of post-Soviet life and bureaucracy as it does about the archives themselves.
Equipped with little Russian and few contacts, but with an almost palpable sense
of decency and honest intentions that illuminate his book, Brent explains for
the general reader as well as for specialists how he went about his work in the
new Russia. In gloomy offices and run-down party buildings, and even in the old
office of the secret police chief Lavrenti Beria, he offered fair contracts to
Russian editors and researchers; they were paid as much as their Western
counterparts, and promised respect and academic recognition as well.
Illustration from “Inside the Stalin Archives”
Through Yeltsin’s
wretched early years of poverty and dislocation in the 1990s and through the
sleeker but more menacing times of Putin’s oil-enriched restoration of
traditional authority, Yale University Press has published more than a score of
important books. It has recently published newly discovered stenographic
records of some 30 Politburo meetings in the 1930s and ’40s, and it is working
on Stalin’s personal archive.
Brent is among the first to stress that none of this could have been achieved without the brave and honest work of Russian archivists and scholars in the Soviet period and after. He relates one haunting anecdote of a respected and elderly historian who just two years ago published a straightforward study that included the historically true statement that Red Army troops had occupied Lithuania even before Hitler’s invasion of 1941. Officially threatened with the loss of his apartment and pension, and retaliation against his daughter’s career if he dared repeat such allegations, he tells Brent: “It is a return to the 1970s. There is nothing to do about it.”
Brent is among the first to stress that none of this could have been achieved without the brave and honest work of Russian archivists and scholars in the Soviet period and after. He relates one haunting anecdote of a respected and elderly historian who just two years ago published a straightforward study that included the historically true statement that Red Army troops had occupied Lithuania even before Hitler’s invasion of 1941. Officially threatened with the loss of his apartment and pension, and retaliation against his daughter’s career if he dared repeat such allegations, he tells Brent: “It is a return to the 1970s. There is nothing to do about it.”
That is a telling
point. Russia is not going back to the Terror of the 1930s or to the gulag, but
to a softer and greedier form of power that has echoes of Leonid Brezhnev’s
years and of prerevolutionary czarism. There will be no return to the period of
Lenin’s 1922 memorandum, unearthed by Brent’s Yale project and published
in The
Unknown Lenin, which explains that it was only now “when in the
starving regions people are eating human flesh . . . that we can (and therefore
must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and
merciless energy, not stopping [short of] crushing any resistance.”
The Yale project has
established beyond doubt that the Soviet authorities knew exactly what kind of
social hell they were inflicting. Andrei Vyshinsky, the chief prosecutor during
the purge trials of the 1930s and later the Soviet ambassador to the United
Nations, wrote a memorandum on his 1938 inspection tour of the gulag: “These
prisoners have deteriorated to the point of losing any resemblance to human
beings. . . . Somebody — obviously hostile — is arranging for people to die en
route and to die upon arrival.” That is the classic Stalinist response; for any
flaws in the system, sabotage must be responsible.
Among the gems in the
archive, Brent tells us, is a cache of pornographic cartoons, idly sketched by
Politburo members during their meetings. Stalin drew one graphic scene that
illustrated his accompanying note: “For all the sins, past and present, hang
Bryukhanov by the testicles. If the testicles hold out, consider him acquitted
by trial. If they do not hold, drown him in the river.” Bryukhanov, a commissar
of finances, was shot in 1938.
We know a lot about
Stalin now, including his fondness for musicals (he even tried his hand at
lyrics). After exploring his personal library with its copious annotations,
Brent concludes that Stalin was as much intellectual as brute and calls him “an
idealist in the sense that he believed completely in the primacy of ideas.”
Brent has a point; Stalin believed in his ideas to the death, or as he put it:
“mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts — yes, by his
thoughts — threatens the unity of the socialist state.”
If one hero emerges
from “Inside the Stalin Archives” it is Aleksandr Yakovlev, a former Columbia
University graduate student and Soviet ambassador to Canada, and perhaps the
real intellectual author of glasnost and perestroika. Yakovlev, badly wounded
in the Nazi siege of Leningrad, was a traditional Russian intellectual who had
a bumpy career in the party until Gorbachev brought him onto the Politburo to
be its most liberal voice. After Gorbachev’s fall, Yakovlev continued to
campaign for full disclosure of the Soviet past, and he tells Brent of one of
the pivotal moments in the last days of the Soviet regime. In the winter of
1991, when Lithuanian crowds began demonstrating against Soviet rule, Gorbachev
asked Yakovlev, “Should we shoot?” If a single Soviet
soldier fired a single bullet on the unarmed crowds, Soviet power would be
over, Yakovlev replied. Bullets were fired, almost certainly not on Gorbachev’s
orders, and the Soviet Union collapsed seven months later.
What Yakovlev did
not tell Gorbachev, although he thought it as he left the room, was that if the
troops did not shoot, Soviet power would also be over. Its time had passed; the
game was up. And the documents from the archives that Brent has managed to
publish go a long way to explaining why.
Jonathan Brent: Inside the Stalin Archives
Books from "Annals of Communism Series", Yale University Press
Annals of Communism is a multivolume documentary history, spanning the entire seventy-five year history of the Soviet Union. Leading Western and Russian scholars present never-before-seen, historically significant, documents from former Soviet state and party archives, along with informative introductions, incisive commentary, and comprehensive notes. Available in English and Russian languages, the series as a whole constitutes a new, comprehensive, and essential guide for the study of Soviet history and the rise and fall of international Communism. The Annals of Communism series is part of the Stalin Digital Archive... 29 books to browse
http://yalebooks.yale.edu/series/annals-of-communism-series
Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History
