The Relaunch of the Soviet Project, 1945-64 || Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories? Terror, Trauma and Survival in Soviet Culture of the Thaw

Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories? Terror, Trauma and Survival in Soviet Cultureof the ThawAuthor(s): Polly JonesSource: The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 86, No. 2, The Relaunch of the SovietProject, 1945-64 (Apr., 2008), pp. 346-371Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School ofSlavonic and East European StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25479203 .

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SEER, Vol. 86, No. 2, April 2008

Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories? Terror, Trauma

and Survival in Soviet Culture

of the Thaw POLLY JONES

Introduction

In 1964, Glavlit censors reported to the Central Committee on several

examples of Soviet literature's 'incorrect illumination of questions linked to the cult of personality'. They singled out Sergei Bondarin's story, Valentina Vasilievna, in which they alleged that the eponymous heroine

is completely crushed not only by the arrest of her husband but by the whole atmosphere of life around her. The condemnation and liquidation of the consequences [.

. .] of the cult of personality, the posthumous

rehabilitation of her husband do not bring her relief. [...] She doesn't

experience any satisfaction from the awareness that the truth of the party

has triumphed, and only traumatically [boleznenno] suffers from the fact that people are again asking her about her husband, and bringing back

memories about the difficult time that she suffered.1

Caught before publication, the story was rejected for failing to show

the heroine's recovery from her husband's arrest, particularly after the

'triumph' of rehabilitation.2 In the same year as Glavlit's report, the

journal Moskva received a harrowing letter from the wife of a man

arrested in 1938, pleading for help with ongoing psychological and practical problems whilst also offering her autobiography to the

journal.3 In his reply, the editor advised:

You, Anna Nikolaevna, have suffered so much in your life that you don't need to despair now. Banish from yourself any kinds of gloomy thoughts

Polly Jones is Lecturer in Russian at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies.

The author is grateful for the helpful comments and suggestions offered by the two

anonymous reviewers for SEER, and by Juliane F?rst, Susan Morrissey, Katerina Clark,

Jason File, Julian Graffy, Thomas Lahusen, Lyn Marven and Faith Wigzell.

1 Apparat TsKKPSS i kul'tura, igj8-ig64. Dokumenty, Moscow, 2005 (hereafter, Apparat TsK),

PP- 732-35 It is absent from the published collection: S. Bondarin, Grozd' vinograda, Moscow,

1964. RGALI (Russian State Archive of Literature and Art), f. 2931, op. 1, d. 69, 11. 44-53.



POLLY JONES 347 [gonite proch

' ot sebia vsiakie mrachnye rnysli\, look after your health and nerves,

in order to live out your old age in peace: you fully deserve this.4

Rejecting the traumatic memories of this survivor of terror, the editor o? Moskva, like Glavlit, indicated the need for control to be exerted over

'gloomy thoughts', preventing them from dominating and distorting narratives of the past.

Both women exemplified the predicament described by Cathy Caruth: 'the traumatized [. ..] carry an impossible history within them or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot

entirely possess.'5 Their difficult lives hinted at the impossibility of ever healing the damage inflicted by terror, and the 'haunting and

possessive influence' of its memories.6 As numerous accounts of the Great Terror eloquently demonstrate, the arrest of a relative was indeed a shattering event, made worse by the persistent ostracism

meted out to those 'enemies-by-association' left behind.7 Psychiatric and anthropological studies of the effects of terror have shown that

victims, both direct and proximate, often exhibit tenacious symptoms or 'sequelae'. These range from a psychological fixation on terror as a ubiquitous 'frame' for experience, to the inability to 'process' the trauma of arrest and ostracism, and the failure either to integrate

memories of terror into one's own personality or, in turn, to integrate oneself into wider society.8 Trauma can give rise to fragmented selves, as survivors struggle to control and articulate 'unspeakable' and

'pathogenic' memories.9

4 Ibid. 1. 54. 5 C. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, Baltimore, MD, 1996

(hereafter, Unclaimed Experience), p. 5. 6 A. Whitehead, Trauma Fiction, Edinburgh, 2004, p. 3; see also C. Caruth, 'Violence and

Time: Traumatic Survivals', Assemblage, 2, April 1993, pp. 24-25. 7 For example, RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Social and Political History), f. 560,

op. 1, d. 6, 11. 11, 12. See also, R. Thurston, 'Fear and Belief in the USSR's "Great Terror":

Response to Arrest, 1935 1939', Slavic Review, 45, 1986, pp. 213-34. 8J. Lindy, R. Lifton (eds), Beyond Invisible Walls: The Psychological Legacy of Soviet Trauma,

New York, 2001, pp. 23, 31, 208; M. Suarez-Orozco, 'Speaking of the Unspeakable: Toward a Psychosocial Understanding of Responses to Terror', Ethos, 18, September 1990, 3, pp. 353^83 (hereafter, 'Speaking of the Unspeakable'); M. Kenny, 'Trauma, Time, Illness and Culture' (hereafter, 'Trauma, Time'), in P. Antze, M. Lambek (eds), Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory, London, 1996 (hereafter, Tense Past), pp. 151-71; A.

Kleinman, Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia and Pain in Modern China, New Haven, CT, 1986. On relatives' trauma, see P. Gray, K. Oliver, The Memory of Catastrophe, Manchester, 2004 (hereafter, The Memory of Catastrophe), p. 11; D. Bar-On, The Indescribable and the Undiscussable: Reconstructing Human Discourse after Trauma, Budapest, 1999, 210-11.

9 Suarez-Orozco, 'Speaking of the Unspeakable', and Kenny, 'Trauma, Time', p. 154.

Compare title of Bar-On, The Indescribable and the Undiscussable. On the narrative form of testimony, see also S. Felman, D. Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History, New York, 1992, and L. Kirmayer, 'Landscapes of Memory. Trauma, Narrative and Dissociation', in Antze, Lambek, Tense Past, pp. 173-98. For a

critique of this pessimistic view of survivors, see A. Hass, The Aftermath: Living with the

Holocaust, Cambridge, 1996.



348 TERROR, TRAUMA & SURVIVAL IN THAW CULTURE

Caught between an incomprehensible event in the past, and the

predicament of survival in the present, these Soviet victims of the Great Terror predictably exhibited the symptoms of post-traumatic stress.10 Whilst unsurprising, their problems raised some imponderable questions, especially amidst the turmoil of de-Stalinization; the intrac

tability of these questions sealed the fates of the two manuscripts. Would the Terror, and its victims, come to dominate the political and cul tural agenda of the Thaw? Could the flood of testimony be controlled, and could memories of terror be remembered without 'gloom'? Was it possible to overcome the experience of 'the cult of personality', as

mandated by the optimistic doctrine of Socialist Realism and by Soviet eschatology more broadly? In short, could the 'wounds' of Stalinism ever be healed and redeemed?11

The rejection of these two manuscripts and the traumatic memories that they documented was grounded in some key anxieties of the late

Thaw period, when the discussion of the Stalinist past and its literary representation was at its height.12 This article will examine how the traumatic effects of terror were silenced ? as with the rejection of these two manuscripts

? yet also, at other times, tentatively explored,

vigorously debated and, ultimately, 'healed' in Soviet literature of the late Khrushchev period. Following the very public de-Stalinization of the 22nd Party Congress in 1961, numerous literary works showed their

protagonists reflecting on their experiences of repression. In staging post-Stalinist retrospection, these works proposed memory practices ranging from forgetting the past to fixating on it, as in the above

unpublished narratives.13 These narratives interacted with party discourse about memory, which emphasized the importance of

non-traumatic, healthy remembrance, and with the Soviet literary community's impassioned debate about its commemoration of terror.

In tracing these intertwined discourses of trauma and memory, this article refocuses attention on the tensions, anxieties and ambiguities

10 For a sceptical view on PTSD in Soviet culture, see C. Merridale, Night of Stone: Death

and Memory in Modern Russia, London, 2000 (hereafter, Night of Stone), esp. pp. 23, 303, 369, 421. 11

On healing the 'wounds' of past catastrophe, see D. LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust:

History, Theory, Trauma, Ithaca, NY, 1994, and especially L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The

Ruins of Memory, New Haven, CT, 1991 (hereafter, Holocaust Testimonies). 12 On the historical and literary dimensions of de-Stalinization see, for example, R.

Markwick, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, Basingstoke, 2001; M. Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia i vlast' v ig50-e i ig6o-e gody, Moscow,

1996 (hereafter, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia)', P. Jones (ed.), The Dilemmas of De-Stalinization: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era, London, 2006.

13 On Soviet literature and memory in the Thaw, see also D. Kozlov, 'The Readers of

Novyi mir, 1945-1970: Twentieth-century Experience and Soviet Historical Consciousness',

unpublished PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 2005 (hereafter, 'The Readers of Novyi mir,

1945-1970'), especially chapter 4.



POLLY JONES 349 expressed in Soviet literature and literary relations of the late Thaw.

Published literature about Stalinism, with few exceptions, has often

been viewed in binary opposition to the thousands of rejected manu

scripts, soon to become samizdat, which told the 'real' story of the grief and damage caused by Stalinism.14 However, a lack of detail and

clarity in the emerging historiography of Stalinism exposed fault-lines in the re-imagining of the past and permitted divergent visions of it to

appear in print. Moreover, the Soviet authorities' encouragement of

ambiguity was not merely inadvertent; literature was supposed to heal the wounds of the past by narrativizing them.15 This article will reveal how a narrative of healing emerged to compensate for, and ultimately to redeem, the 'gloomy' memories that could now be shown in Soviet literature.16 In so doing, it suggests that the post-Stalinist engagement

with trauma was more complex than the forthright rejection that Catherine Merridale traces throughout Soviet and post-Soviet culture.17 The form, content, and ultimately the importance of memories of the Stalinist past were contested throughout the Thaw.

Survivors, 'remnants of the pasT and memory during de-Stalinization

'Human souls are the final frontier in the fight against the consequ ences and encrustations of the period of the Stalin cult', intoned one

Soviet newspaper solemnly at the end of 1962.18 The imagery framing the 'struggle against the cult of personality' during the late Thaw's

public critique of Stalinism pictured it as a chronic illness in need of a

cure, with 'human souls' the ultimate object of medical intervention.19

Party propaganda and the Soviet press used medical, psychological and even spiritual imagery to promote de-Stalinization, suggesting a keen concern with exposing and repairing Stalinism's damage to people's hearts and minds. At the 22nd Party Congress, Khrushchev himself

14 L. Kopelev, R. Orlova, My zhili v Moskve, ig5?~ig8o, Ann Arbor, MI, 1988, p. 84; A.

Solzhenitsyn, The Oak and the Calf: Sketches of Literary Life in the Soviet Union, London, pp. 18, 20; L. Toker, Return from the Archipelago: Narratives of Gulag Survivors, Ithaca, NY, 2000

(hereafter, Return from the Archipelago), pp. 49-52; D. Tolczyk, See No Evil: Literary Cover-ups and Discoveries of the Soviet Camp Experience, New Haven, CT, 1999 (hereafter, See No Evil), pp. 184-253. On the exceptional status of Novyi mir, see D. Spechler, Permitted Dissent in the USSR: Novy mir' and the Soviet Regime, New York, 1982 (hereafter, Permitted Dissent). 15

A. Krylova, '"Healers of Wounded Souls": The Crisis of Private Life in Soviet

Literature, 1944-1946', Journal of Modern History, 73, 2001, pp. 307-31 (hereafter, '"Healers of Wounded Souls'"). 16

K. Clark, The Soviet Novel. History as Ritual, 3rd edn., Bloomington, IN, 2000 (hereafter, Soviet Novel).

17Merridale, Night of Stone, pp. 20-21, 303-06, 320, 344- 51 (on the Thaw period), 361,

4Irt2?' Literaturnaia gazeta, 22 December 1962, p. 2. 19 On the Stalinist discourse of the soul, see I. Halfin, Terror in My Soul: Communist

Autobiographies on Trial, Cambridge, MA, 2003 (hereafter, Terror in My Soul).




made the starding claim that, 'remnants of the past are a formidable force which, like a nightmare, weigh on the minds of the living'.20 His statement placed the haunting trauma of Stalinism at the very centre of the political agenda, and references to psychology and memory consequently proliferated in the Soviet press. One article typically praised young writers for the 'very determined work that [they were] carrying out to uproot the remnants of anti-Leninist ideology and to overcome the consequences of the cult of personality in the psychology and souls of people'.21 Other analyses claimed ominously that 'the

psychological fall-out of the cult of personality lay like a dead weight on

people's souls'.22

However, important limits to the articulation of psychological damage also emerged. At the same congress where Khrushchev had

spoken, other speakers expressed the hope that those guilty would be 'persecuted by nightmares, made to hear the sobs and curses of

mothers, wives and children of innocent comrades put to death'.23 In other words, memories of terror would haunt Stalinists more than they would Stalin's victims. The secondary role of victim testimony here, and the foregrounding of Stalinists' 'haunting', affirmed that

psychological problems and painful memories should affect not the victims of Stalinism, but rather 'Stalin's heirs'.24

The prevailing focus in descriptions of de-Stalinization was on those 'remnants of the past' [perezhitki proshlogo) who remained 'infected' by Stalinist practices (arbitrariness, cruelty, deceit) and could not exorcize them from their 'souls' or amputate them from their bodies. The contrast between the stubborn 'remnants of the past' and Khrushchev's

Utopian Soviet project became especially glaring in the early 1960s, after the adoption of the Third Party Program.25 Stalinist 'remnants'

(ostatki, sometimes oskolki) in the individual and collective psyche were demonized in the Soviet press of the 1960s.26 In JVovyi mir, a

journal that battled 'Stalinists' throughout the 1960s, one such article

20 XXII s'ezd KPSS: stenograficheskii otchet, Moscow, 1962 (hereafter, XXII s'ezd), vol. 1,

P-2!23 Komsomol'skaia Pravda, 27 January 1963, p. 2 (my emphasis). 22 Ibid., 31 January 1964, pp. 3-4; 'O nastoiashchem i pokhozhem', Iunost', 4, 1962,

pp 70-76. XXII s'ezd, vol. 2, p. 404. 24 E. Evtushenko, 'Nasledniki Stalina', Pravda, 21 October 1962, p. 1.

25'V plenu blagodushiia', Teatral'naia zhizn', 8, 1963, pp. 26-27; S. Fitzpatrick, 'Social

Parasites: How Tramps, Idle Youth, and Busy Entrepreneurs Impeded the Soviet March to Communism', Cahiers du Monde Russe, 47, 2006, 1-2; M. Dobson, 'Refashioning the

Enemy: Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of De-Stalinization', unpublished PhD thesis,

University of London, 2003. 26 RGASPI, f. 599, op. 1, d. 163, 1. 55 [Kommunist editors explain return to de-Stalinization

in terms of perezhitki).



POLLY JONES SOI lambasted the cruelty and cowardice that had let the Terror assume

such proportions, and indicated the endurance of distrust in post Stalinist society.27 Another criticized the unreconstructed Stalinist of Vsevolod Kochetov's notorious 1961 novel, The Obkom Secretary, for

mouthing the message of de-Stalinization even though it 'had not

got to him at all'; the target of this critique was also, of course, Kochetov himself who remained, aesthetically and bureaucratically, a

Stalinist.28

However, Kochetov's journal, Oktiabr\ also engaged with these

psychological tropes. In one striking piece, the journal explored the difficulties endured by a former henchman of the regime as he tried to

adjust to the renunciation of Stalinism: 'he's confused, disappointed, and feeling powerless as a result of what's happened, but he's learned

nothing, repented of nothing and has not morally condemned himself or his past.' The article concluded that he, like many others, was still infected by the 'moral metastasis' and 'bacilli of the Stalin cult'.

De-Stalinization, therefore, was not just a matter of showy iconoclasm; it needed also to 'ventilate thoroughly the souls and minds of people

who have been polluted for decades'.29 Such discourse evaded the

painful memories of Stalin's victims and focused attention instead on Stalinists' pathological 'memorization' of past attitudes.30

The curiously Stalinist dynamic of 'unmasking' the endurance of Stalinist psychology also played out in Soviet theatre of the time.31 The blockbuster Soviet play of 1962, Samuil Aleshin's The Ward, pitted an honourable writer, the elderly cardiac patient Novikov, against the odious 'fragment of the cult of personality', Prozorov, in the same

hospital for an appendectomy.32 Reviews pointed out that the task of removing the cult from Prozorov's mind was infinitely harder than the removal of his appendix, since his 'fearsome innards' remained infected by 'all th[e] trash that had accumulated in his soul during the

years of Stalin's cult'.33 By contrast, Novikov's physical weakness was

27 'Doverie', Novyi mir, il, 1962, pp. 229-41. 28 'Snariazhenie v pokhode', Novyi mir, 1, 1962, pp. 219-39; see also 'Sekret?r' obkoma',

Literaturnaia gazeta, 16 December 1961, pp. 2-3 and Apparat TsK, pp. 486-90. 29'Seiianie i veianie', Oktiabr', 3, 1963, pp. 164 70. 30

'Sut' poiska', ibid., 8, 1962, pp. 195 209; see also RGANI (Russian State Archive of

Contemporary History), f. 5, op. 32, d. 43, 1. 9; f. 5, op. 32, d. 45, 1. 62. 31

S. Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia, Princeton, NJ, 2005; 'Cherty novatorstva', Oktiabr', 9, 1962, pp. 185-93; 'Vremia, liudi, dramaturgi', Sovetskaia kul'tura, 7 February 1963, p. 3; 'Niva i sorniaki', ibid., 24 September 1963, pp. 2-3.

S. Aleshin, 'Palata', Teatr, 11, 1962, pp. 14-36. 33 Komsomol 'skaia Pravda, 22 February 1963, p. 3; 'Zatianuvsheesia ozhidanie', Sovetskaia

kul'tura, 8 August 1963, pp. 2-3; 'Ne vintiki, a liudi', ibid., 27 December 1963, p. 3; 'Fantaziia, pitaiushchaia rezhissera', Teatral'naia zhizn', 3, 1963, p. 7; 'Razoblachenie

Prozorovshchiny', ibid., 4, 1963, pp. 12?13.




amply compensated by his moral fortitude and 'immunity' from the Stalinist mentality; ultimately, he was less in need of healing than his Stalinist opponent.

How easy, then, was it to remove Stalinism from the Soviet body politic, and from the individual bodies of its citizens? The medical

imagery associated with de-Stalinization at once served to pathologize unrepentant Stalinists, whilst also representing the 'exposure of the cult of personality' as a simple operation that excised the tumour of Stalinism ('an alien growth on the body of our society'), and left the Soviet body politic in perfect health for the future.34 The press celebrated 'the new feelings associated without a doubt [...] with the

healing of the whole atmosphere of our people's life [ozdorovlenie vsei

atmosfery zhizni naroda]\35 In line with this 'surgical' view of the disease of Stalinism, primers for local agitators optimistically emphasized the 'broad space' opened by de-Stalinization.3 The Stalin cult was nothing

more than an obstacle on the road to the radiant future: in the revised

history of the party, the repressions were said to have 'slowed but not

stopped' forward progress.37 Party ideologists likewise stressed that, while perhaps 'putting the brakes on' development, the cult had not

fundamentally damaged the party.38 As Khrushchev was able to boast in late 1961: 'Our forward movement on the road to Communism has accelerated. Now we straighten our chests more freely, breathe more

easily, gaze more alertly and clearly.'39 The bright, ventilated spaces of Khrushchev's idyllic vision, and the healthy body of the post-Stalinist citizen striding through them, suggested the irreversibility of the 'cure' enacted by de-Stalinization, and the stability of the new orientation to the future rather than to the past.

Although victims of terror were overshadowed by this urgent yet ultimately optimistic focus on the mental perestroika of 'Stalin's heirs', their 'personal memory' was not however entirely marginal to the new Soviet 'public history'.40 Both the Secret Speech and the public

34 'Sluzhenie narodu', Literaturnaia gazeta, 5 December 1961, pp. 1-2; 'Snariazhenie';

RGASPI-m (Komsomol archive), f. 1, op. 2, d. 423,1. 361. On corporeal conceptions of the state see, for example, A. Weiner, 'Nature, Nurture and Memory in a Socialist Utopia:

Delineating the Soviet Socio-Ethnic Body in the Age of Socialism', American Historical Review, 104, 1999, 4, pp. 1114-155-.

'Otkrytie mira', ^namia, 7, 1962, pp. 201-17. 36 N. Samushkin, 0 kul'te lichnosti i avtoritete, Moscow, 1962, pp. 32, 37; Komsomol'skaia

Pravda, 31 October 1962, p. 3. 37 B. Ponomarev (ed.), Istoriia KPSS, Moscow, 1959.

38RGASPI, f. 599, op. 1, d. 220, 11. 12-15; ibid., d. 194, 1. 101. See also Pravda, 22 June

1963, p. 1; Sovetskaia kul'tura, 19 June 1963, p. 1. 39

XXIIs'ezd, vol. 1, p. 102. For a similar health metaphor in Sholokhov's speech, see ibid., vol. 2, p. 72. 40

As argued of survivors of China's Cultural Revolution. See R. Watson (ed.), Memory,

History and Opposition under State Socialism, Santa Fe, NM, 1994 (hereafter, Memory, History and

Opposition).



POLLY JONES 353

speeches at the 22nd Party Congress featured detailed accounts of

high-ranking victims of terror, and this discursive emphasis percolated down to the localities, where local propagandists used speeches by rehabilitated terror victims, and to the Komsomol, where survivors

were generally seen as lively and trustworthy contributors to propa

ganda directed at young people.41 Whilst the revised Soviet and party histories still contained only glancing, generalizing references to terror, the oral testimony at the emotional climaxes of de-Stalinization was

rich in personal detail and sentiment.42 The public narration of terror was not only supposed to cure

stubborn pro-Stalinists, however. It also aimed to contrast the health of non-traumatic memory to the pathological resentment of dysfunc tional survivors such as the two wives in our introduction.43 Nanci

Adler has argued that many survivors of repression had 'traumatized

psyches', and were in need of therapy that doctors could not or would not provide, given the still very poor reputation of psychiatry in the

USSR.44 However, as Adler, Leona Toker and Dariusz Tolczyk have also shown, the public face of the survivor of terror was very different.45

If, as Khrushchev claimed of terror victims, 'every individual represents a whole story', survivors' 'stories' were carefully orchestrated to ensure

the health of the memories that they publicly articulated, and to shame other victims out of pathological attitudes to past trauma.46

At the 22nd Congress, where Khrushchev made this claim about

personal testimony, the year '1937' formed a recurrent trope in

delegates' speeches. In its brutal decimation of the party's highest ranks, 1937 represented for many local politicians the most traumatic moment of the Stalin era.47 The Great Terror killed off innocent victims, ruin

ing the lives of those left behind. 'Not only workers were subjected to

41 RGANI, f. 5, op. 32, d. 174, 11. 202-03; TsDNIVO (Centre for Documentation of

the Contemporary History of the Volgograd oblast'), f. 113, op. 65, d. 76 (entire). See also TsDNIVO, f. 119, op. 28, d. 38, 11. 16, 23; TsDNIVO, f. 116, op. 1, d. 603, 1. 187; RGASPI-m, f. 1, op. 5, d. 815, 11. 13, 23, 101; RGASPI, f. 599, op. 1, d. 230, 11. 9-10. For concern about excessively negative testimony, see RGANI, f. 5, op. 30, d. 378, 11. 39-46. 42

Istoriia SSSR. Epokha sotsializma, Moscow, 1957, pp. 489-90; Istoriia SSSR, Moscow, 1963, pp. 483, 650; Istoriia KPSS, Moscow, 1962, p. 504. On their editing, see RGASPI, f. 71, op. 42, d. 9; J. Keep, Soviet History in the Contemporary Mirror, London, 1964, pp. 43-82. 43

On survivor resentment, see N. Wood, Vectors of Memory, Oxford, 1999 (hereafter, Vectors

of Memory), pp. 61-77. 44 N. Adler, The Gulag Survivor: Beyond the Soviet System, New Brunswick, NJ, 2002 (hereafter,

Gulag Survivor), p. 116, pp. 113-15. For a contrary argument, see Merridale, Night of Stone, p. 266.

45 Adler, Gulag Survivor, pp. 183-84; Toker, Return from the Archipelago, esp. pp. 49-52;

Tolczyk, See No Evil. 46

XXII s'ezd, vol. 3, p. 585. 47 Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 284, 291-92; vol. 2, pp. 214, 234, 403; vol. 3, pp. 54, 114.




repressions', one speaker claimed, 'but also their families, even

absolutely innocent children, whose lives were broken [nadlomena], in this way, right at the very start.'48 This reference to irreversible damage

was, however, immediately counteracted by the optimistic narrative of

recovery of the rehabilitated old Bolshevik Dora Lazurkina. 'In 1937 I suffered the same fate as many other people,' she began. Yet her story

was exceptional for the mental fortitude it revealed. During imprison ment, Lazurkina's rational mind struggled courageously with the senselessness of the purges.49 Mental health became not the victim of the Terror, but rather the tool that helped terror victims to survive.

Dariusz Tolczyk argues that, 'as presented by Soviet late-thaw

literature, the camp experience, while appearing as a test of values, is in reality a test of the victim's unconditional loyalty to the totalitarian

system in hope of a reversal of fortune'.50 Lazurkina's performed autobiography likewise showed both her partiinost

' and the undamaged

mind through which she expressed it after rehabilitation. The cultural authorities used survivors in the same way. The writer

Galina Serebriakova, who had been a prominent historical writer in

the 1930s before her arrest and imprisonment, promoted her life story

throughout the early 1960s as a specifically literary model for writers to

follow in managing their memories of a difficult past. Rehabilitated in 1956, Serebriakova immediately returned to the work interrupted by her arrest, a historical epic based on the life of Marx, whilst also

writing in the conservative literary press about her experience of terror

and rehabilitation.51 She cemented her fame as a literary survivor with a speech at the infamous meeting between the party authorities and the artistic intelligentsia in March 1963: 'despite the fact that we were

beaten, and our human dignity was destroyed in all sorts of ways,' she affirmed, 'we always remained Communists.'52 Serebriakova's

exemplary psychological and creative state was contrasted at this

meeting to the fixation on the 'dark sides' of the cult of personality in some other literary works.53 Khrushchev later praised her 'heartiness

of spirit' (bodrost' dukha) and the fact that she 'immediately after

rehabilitation had involved herself in creative life, picked up her

weapon and is creating works necessary for the people and party'.54

48 Ibid., vol. 3, p. 114. 49 Ibid., pp. 119-21. 50

Tolczyk, See No Evil, p. 242. 51 Literaturnaia Rossiia, 2, 1963, p. 5; ibid., 42, 1963, p. 3; ibid., 16, 1964, p. 3.

52 RGASPI-m, f. 1, op. 5, d. 887, 11. 89-90. 53 Literaturnaia gazeta, 12 March 1963, pp. 1-2; A. Rothberg, The Heirs of Stalin, Ithaca,

NY, 1972, pp. 64-65; M. Hayward, E. Crowley, Soviet Literature in the Sixties, London, 1965,

PP-^ 197-99

Literaturnaia Rossiia, 42, 1963, p. 3.



POLLY JONES 355 The warning to cleave to Serebriakova's upbeat approach to

memory was timely. The 'situation in writers' circles has become

noticeably more strained', noted a Central Committee observer in

early 1962, very soon after Lazurkina's speech.55 Khrushchev's and Serebriakova's interventions a year later pointed to the deepening crisis in Soviet literature. The irruption of the trauma of 1937 into the party's narrative of the past divided the Soviet literary community as it debated how Soviet literature should remember terror.

Debating memory in late Thaw literature

In summer 1961, several months before the sensational revelations of the 22nd Congress, Viktor Nekrasov's novella, Kira Georgievna, detonated a minor scandal in the literary press that anticipated the fierce struggles over the form and content of memory in the late Thaw. The work, published in Novyi mir, tells the story of a returnee from the

Gulag, Vadim, who is reunited with his wife in 1956, for the first time since his arrest during the Great Terror.56 Since Vadim's arrest, his wife, the eponymous heroine, has fared remarkably well for an

'enemy-by-association', carving out a career as a Soviet sculptor. Kira's

biography presents a stark contrast to the ruined lives of the two wives examined at the start of this article. Although Kira and Vadim rekindle their former relationship, it runs aground as Vadim realizes that Kira

will not acknowledge his arrest or imprisonment. Emigr? literary critics were delighted by the novella's innovative

portrayal of the difficulties that faced survivors of the Gulag as they re-entered society.57 Domestic critics, meanwhile, were far more critical. Perhaps because of the touchiness of the theme of the Gulag, they largely ignored Vadim and focused instead on Kira's frivolous and immoral conduct, only rarely displaying any sympathy for her as a

Terror victim.58 However, the controversy surrounding Nekrasov's novella ignored the novella's principal challenge to Soviet mores. Kira's story should be read as a critique not only of Stalinist morality, but of post-Stalinist anxiety about memory, especially prior to the 22nd

Congress.

55 Apparat TsK, p. 489. 56 'Kira Georgievna', Novyi mir, 6, 1961, pp. 70-127 (hereafter, 'Kira Georgievna'). 07

For example, 'Moral'noe bankrotstvo sovetskikh konformistov', Grani, 53, 1963, pp. 118 28; 'Zatianuvsheesia', Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, October 1959, pp. 189-91; see also Adler, Gulag Survivor, pp. 139-51. 58

'Iz kriticheskogo dnevnika', Moskva, 1, 1962, p. 200; 'Za novogo cheloveka', Oktiabr', 6, 1962, p. 199; 'O svobode liubvi i svobode ot ser'eznogo v liubvi', %yezda, 10, 1962,

pp. 193-99; 'Sovremennaia poprygun'ia i "pravo'1 avtora na neitralitet', Molodoi kommunist, 2, 1962, pp. 123-26.




In the work the heroine's refusal to remember the Terror or to be

traumatized by it is initially seen as a healthy approach: Did all these events leave any kind of imprint on Kilya? Yes and no.

Carefree, living as it were on the surface of life, happily skidding along, Kilya suddenly understood that, apart from noisy parties and poetry readings, apart from dear little drawings, hung up on the walls, there's

something more complicated, important, not always comprehensible and,

alas, not always pleasant. But she had an enviable character, she was able

to forget quickly about things that complicate life. Possibly this is not the best character trait but for Kilya herself and those around her this trait made life easier [....] in short, Kilya learned not to feel dejected.59

When he reappears, Vadim instantly complicates this approach to

memory; he plunges Kira back into thoughts of their past together.60 However, this confrontation of past memories is limited. Kira merely retreats to the halcyon early days of the marriage, hoping to resume

their relationship where it was interrupted by the arrest, without

confronting the arrest itself. Kira and Vadim also have diametrically opposed views on the

question of Gulag testimony. She opposes it as unhealthy: These stories return him to the past, which he needs after all to distance himself from, try to think less about it, and think about the future, look ahead [...] At this point Vadim interrupted her and said 'OK, from tomorrow I'm going to look ahead' ? and turned to face the wall.61

Kira pictures Vadim's memories of the camps as a 'fresh' wound that

'has not had time to heal', literally a trauma.62 Yet the text as a whole

problematizes this reductive reading of Vadim as a dysfunctional survivor by showing him to be both sociable and intellectually curious.63

Ultimately, it is a profound difference in memory practices ? the

gulf between repression and confrontation of the Stalinist past ? that

drives the two main characters apart. Nekrasov develops the point still

further by linking Kira's dysfunctional attitude to the past with that of

Soviet culture. When Vadim finally leaves Kira she again 'started to

sculpt'.64 The rejection of Vadim's approach to memory is thereby

directly connected to the 'blissful optimism' practised in official Soviet

art.65 Vadim and his memories have exposed the lacunae of official

59 'Kira Georgievna', pp. 73-74. 60 Ibid., pp. 96, 84. 61 Ibid., p. 101.

62 Ibid. On the definition of trauma as wound, see Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, p. 4.

63 'Kira Georgievna', p. 85. 64 Ibid., p. 103. 65 Ibid., p. 88.



POLLY JONES 357 culture, pointing out its silences and deceptions, and Kira's next

sculpture turns out a failure.66 Kira Georgievna sounded a warning about the dangers of Soviet

culture's evasion of trauma, smoothing memories away as Kira does the flaws in her sculptures. Ironically, Vadim is a much more adept 'survivor' than his wife, capable of synthesizing both happy and painful

memories into his autobiography. Kira, though apparently free of the

stigma of arrest, has stunted her own growth by repressing the trauma of 1937. Memory, therefore, far from retarding development, is seen as essential for the emergence of a truly authentic, integrated and mature

post-Stalinist personality. Kira's botched sculpture is symbolic of the crisis that Soviet art will undergo in failing to confront painful episodes from the Stalinist past. Nekrasov's subtle attack on personal and institutional amnesia anticipated the more public and protracted disputes about memory that developed in response to the 22nd Party Congress' call for victims' 'stories'. Soviet literature entered a debate about how to remember the Stalinist past where Nekrasov's constructs of 'blissful optimism'

? repression of trauma ? and traumatic

memory both played a part. One literary approach to memory and trauma, epitomized by

Kochetov and by the conservative FLSFSR Writers' Union, openly expressed contempt for those whom Kochetov had described at the 22nd Congress as 'dig[ging] around in the rubbish heaps of their unreliable memories'.6 Exasperated even by the very limited treatment of the Stalinist past in Soviet literature and memoirs before the end of

1961, Kochetov's speech set the tone for years of sarcastic critique.68 His polemic implied that such a pre-occupation with tragic memories was pointless as well as damaging to the 'ideological health' of Soviet literature.69 His fellow Union member Leonid Sob?lev signalled his

agreement with a speech to the Union in April 1963, which concluded with the quatrain: Tve also lived through it/the 20th century, the year 1937/I know it's also a subject for a poet/but my voice is concerned

with other matters'. Describing the Stalinist past as a 'cruel memory [which] often puts pressure on our imagination', Sobolev summarized the strictly limited effect of 1937 on his own life and work.70 Like

Kochetov, Sobolev expressed disdain towards those who were incap able of overcoming the 'pressure' and 'cruelty' of terror; he instead

urged writers to select themes freely from their memories, rather than

being overwhelmed by 1937 as the sole point of return.

66 Ibid, p. 126.

67 XXII s'ezd, vol. 3, p. 183 (directed at Ilia Ehrenburg and his memoirs). 68 Responses to Kochetov's 'Stalinist speech' documented in, for example, RGALI,

f. 1702, op. 8, d. 728, 11. 9-11.

64XXIIs'ezd, vol. 3, p. 183. 70 RGALI, f. 2938, op. 2, d. 1, 11. 48-51.




Another like-minded participant of the same meeting, the ultra conservative playwright Anatolii Sofronov, had just published a play, Look After the Sons Who are Alive!, which dramatized this impatience with traumatic memory.71 The play stages the confrontation between two

men of the same generation, one a senior manager (Kovalev) struggling to cope with accusations of being a 'Stalinist', and the other (Goll') a

victim of Stalinism who considers the exposure of the cult his primary duty. The contrast between them is apparent from the opening exchange:

Kovalev: Enough of all this talk about tragedies! I'm sick of it! The cult of personality, the cult of personality... don't you have any other theme? Goll': One must talk about the cult of personality [...] After a long silence, people want to

speak.72

However, the balance initially set up between these competing points of view is not maintained. The work ultimately privileges the victimhood of the maligned 'Stalinist' Kovalev over Goll"s hysterical fixation on suffering [stradaVchestvo). As Kovalev drafts his autobio

graphy, he finds that he has a strong record of party achievements; his overall 'memory' of Stalinism is positive. By contrast, Goll"s

insistence on 'opening old wounds' long after his prison term is satirised

throughout as unproductive and pathological.73 As far as Sofronov was concerned, airing memories about the past

was as good (or bad) as picking at a scab; better to leave 'old wounds' as they were, healed over and invisible and irrelevant to the present.

Although couched in the language of trauma (which means, literally, a

wound), these references to wounds in fact promoted the belief that trauma would heal itself, given enough time. The damage that could result from the needless re-opening of wounds in the present was

far more considerable. The presentation of testimony and memory in terms of past wounds and present pain, a trope visible in other countries' attempts to deal with difficult pasts, was not new in the

Soviet context either.74 For example, editing One Cannot Live Otherwise,

71 For Sofronov's speech at this meeting, see RGALI, f. 2938, op. 2, d. 1, 11. 85-91. Play

published as 'Beregite zhivykh synovei!', Teatr, 2, 1963, pp. 162-92 (hereafter, 'Beregite

zhivykh synovei!'). On Sofronov's conservatism, see, for example, Ideologicheskie komissii TsK

KPSS, igj8-ig?4, Moscow, 1998 (hereafter, Ideologicheskie komissii), pp. 419-21 and Apparat TsK, pp. 84-86. 72

'Beregite zhivykh synovei!', p. 162. 73

Ibid., p. 163. Increasingly positive reviews in 'Poidem v teatr!', Literaturnaia Rossiia, 9,

1963, pp. 18-19; 'Beregite drug druga', Teatral'naia zhizn', 16, 1963, pp. 6-7; Teatr, 9, 1963,

pp. 25-27; 'Vremia, chelovek, teatr', Literaturnaia Rossiia, 46, 1964, pp. 2-3. 74

H. Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since ig44, Cambridge, MA,

1991 (hereafter, Vichy Syndrome), esp. pp. 58, 123; C. Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust and German National Identity, Cambridge, MA, 1998 (hereafter, Unmasterable Past),

p. 163.



POLLY JONES 359 Vera Kedinskaia's novel about the industrialization and purges of the 1930s, editors and censors referred to the excessive focus on the 'wounds and offences of the past' to justify their significant cuts to the

manuscript before its publication in i960. 5

The way in which the debate over remembering the Stalinist past developed after the 22nd Congress suggests the continuing power of this conservative caution about re-opening 'old wounds', alongside an

alternative interpretation of past trauma as a chronic wound that could

only be healed by public exposure. Contemporary trauma scholars insist that 'a period of speaking of the unspeakable is a sine qua non

for overcoming past traumas', representing the only way to heal the

'festering wound' of painful individual and communal memories.76 Soviet calls for the past to be confronted and narrated were necessarily articulated in vaguer and more primitive terms, but nonetheless

expressed an analogous belief in the therapeutic benefits for both individual and nation of 'working through' trauma. For instance, at the 22nd Congress, Tvardovskii called for literature to recount the 'whole truth' about past 'difficulties and losses', whilst another local leader claimed that 'although that stage is now behind us, one can't keep silent about such incidents'.77 Bolstered by the Congress's renewed commitment to de-Stalinization, and by the (short-lived) prestige attached to Ivan Denisovich, the more liberal literary press later made

explicit its commitment to healing, rather than concealing, trauma: 'Old healed wounds do not pain. But a wound that still bleeds must be

healed and not cravenly hidden from sight. And there is only one cure ?

truth.'78 Soviet writers' new, party-mandated vocation, then, was to act as witnesses to their country's

? and often their own ?

'enormous

tragedy', and their works flooded into Novyi mir and the other major literary journals.79

Nonetheless, all editors were aware of the acute need to monitor

the proportions of 'tragedy' to the party's ideal of 'life-affirming' literature.80 Some works depicting terror did appear in print in the

75 RGANI, f. 5, op. 37, d. 82, 1. 118; RGALI, f. 618, op. 17, d. 358, 11. 94-174; published

as 'Inache zhit' ne stoit', ^namia, i960 (hereafter, Ketlinskaia, 'Inache zhit' ne stoit'). 76 Suarez-Orozco, 'Speaking of the Unspeakable', pp. 370, 375; Wood, Vectors of Memory,

pp. 61-77. Henri Rousso also argues that repression of the true memory of Vichy crippled French society for many decades (Rousso, Vichy Syndrome). On the 'blocked analysis' of the Nazi past in Germany, see Maier, Unmasterable Past, p. 160.

77 XXII s'ezd, vol. 2, pp. 531; vol. 3, p. 116.

78 Literaturnaia gazeta, 22 November 1962, p. 3, quoted, translated in N. Heer, Politics and

History in the Soviet Union, Camberidge, MA, 1971, p. 139. 79 Apparat TsK, pp. 486-90; Lakshin, Novyi mir vo vremena Khrushcheva, p. 49 and passim;

Spechler, Permitted Dissent; Zezina, Sovetskaia khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia. 80'Zhizneutverzhdaiushchaia sila sotsialisticheskogo realizma', Druzhba narodov, 11, 1963,

PP- 234-5?




1960s, but many more were rejected.81 Regretfully declining Evgeniia Ginzburg's memoirs for publication in 1964, Tvardovskii commented that in many works sent to him 'the 'theme of the year 1937 [...] in recent times has been included already as a kind of obligatory element'.

Mindful that he 'did not have the right to give preference to such

material', Tvardovskii turned down Ginzburg's work as he already had done many works dealing with 'the dark year' of 1937.82 His actions

typified the quantitative and qualitative controls imposed on this mountain of manuscripts, by editors as well as censors.83

Nevertheless, even this limited emergence of Stalinist terror into Soviet literature generated criticism that caricatured and pathologized Soviet literature's supposed obsession with 'dark' and 'gloomy' memories. For instance, a petition printed in Komsomol 'skaia Pravda in late 1962, signed by Iurii Gagarin amongst a host of Soviet luminaries, called on authors to:

Correctly evaluate the facts and phenomena of the past [...] surely one cannot, for example, understand the 1930s without Dneprgas and

Magnitka [...] At the same time, remembering this period now, some writers speak above all about arrest and searches, and the atmosphere of

fear and terror is sometimes represented as the main aspect of people's

psychology.84

Gagarin's letter connected psychological health with a well-rounded

approach to 'remembering this period now', capable of recognizing and representing heroism as well as tragedy. This connection between 'balanced' memories and psychological stability appeared in another

contemporary article which claimed that some writers:

Have started to blow out of all proportion the sense and significance of the facts of 1937, speculating on feelings of irritation and sadness and asserting from now on that the main thing in this era will be only criticism, criticism, criticism of the cult of personality. Such works, gathering in one big clump their discontentment and resentments, cut off the wings of the soul, deprive it of the happy festival of thought.85

Here a direct line was drawn between the excessively pessimistic representation of the cult, and the excessively 'resentful', 'unfestive'

81 For example, I. Stadniuk, 'Liudi ne angely', ^namia, 1963; lu. Dombrovskii, 'Khranitel'

drevnostei', Novyi mir, 1964; L. Zorin, 'Druz'ia i gody', Teatr, 8, 1962; Ketlinskaia, Tnache

zhit' ne stoit'.

82RGALI, f. 1702, op. 9, d. 141, 11. 4-5. See also, ibid., 11. 8-10; ibid., d. 70, 11. 8-9; V. Lakshin, Novyi mir vo vremena Khrushcheva: dnevniki i poputnoe (igjj-ig?4), Moscow, 1991

(hereafter, Novyi mir), pp. 89, 242. 83 RGALI, f. 2931, op. 1, d. 55, 11. 252, 64, 134-42; K. Chukovsky, Diary, igoi-ig6g, New

Haven, CT, 2005, p. 479; RGASPI-m, f. 1, op. 32, d. 1080, 1. 33. 84 Komsomol 'skaia Pravda, 21 December 1962, p. 3. 85 'Samye nasushchnye zaboty', Druzhba narodov, 9, 1962, pp. 254-73.



POLLY JONES 361 state of mind of writers who chose this distorted perspective. It was

repeatedly alleged that their warped perspective, 'concentrating all attention on instances of illegality', contributed to anxiety in readers and prevented 'the happy festival of thought' that remained the central

purpose of the public culture of the 1960s.86 The problem was historio

graphical, since such literature misrepresented the 1930s, and also

psychological, as it caused depression in readers and writers alike. After printing Gagarin's letter, Komsomolskaia Pravda continued its

campaign, citing inspiring real-life examples of young people from the

1930s who had lost parents in the purges, such as the diarist Nina

Kosterina, 'who withstood not only the difficult test of war but also the

terrifying test of the end of 1930s'.87 Yet some of the artists targeted by this campaign defied the minimization of personal trauma that Nina's resilience apparently exemplified. The young film-maker Lana

Gogoberidze and the writer Vasilii Aksenov both criticized Gagarin's letter at the December 1962 meeting with the Central Committee,

claiming that it was precisely through detailing their personal suffering (both, like Nina, had fathers arrested in 1937) that they might fulfil their 'civic' duty, as the party was demanding.88

The ambiguities of party policy on the cult exacerbated these

disagreements. Khrushchev repeatedly alternated between Kochetov's and Tvardovskii's incompatible stances, giving encouragement to the

exposure of suffering yet also erupting in unpredictable attacks against certain works for being unbalanced or 'unhealthy' in their commemo

ration of the cult.89 However, the 'pathologization' of the memory of

suffering remained the default position of Soviet culture after the 22nd Congress; its commitment to curing the 'wounds' of the past was

weaker than its concern for the 'health' of Soviet literature.90

86 'Tvorit' dlia naroda', Kommunist, 4, 1963, pp. 86-94; 'Obshchestvennoe prizvanie

teatra', ibid., pp. 66-73; Ideologicheskie komissii, p. 392; Komsomol"skaia Pravda, 29 March 1963, p. 1; 'Grazhdanstvennost' avtora i geroia', Moskva, 6, 1963, pp. 197-205; 'Zhizneutverzh daiushchaia sila sotsialisticheskogo realizma'; 'Delo za nami', ^namia, 2, 1963, 193-200; 'Teatral'noe iskusstvo ? vazhnoe ideologicheskoe orudie', Sovetskaia kul'tura, 5 December

1963, p. 2; P. Vail', A. Genis, 60-e. Mir sovetskogo cheloveka, Ann Arbor, MI, 1988. 87'Dnevnik Niny Kosteriny', Novyi mir, 12, 1962; Komsomol'skaia Pravda, 6 March 1963,

p. 4; ibid., 27 November 1963, pp. 2-3; ibid., 31 January 1964, pp. 3-4. 8 Ideologicheskie komissii, pp. 318, 323. 89 N. S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev on Culture, London, 1964; Apparat TsK, pp. 474-83.

Emotive references to the trauma of terror, especially that suffered by victims' relatives, resurfaced forcefully at one of the tensest moments of the confrontation with China ('Ask the people whose mothers and fathers fell victim to repression in the period of the cult of

personality, what it means to them that it has been recognized that their mothers, fathers and brothers were honest people, and that they were not outcasts in our society, but

worthy sons and daughters of the socialist motherland.' Quotation from the party's open letter to the Chinese authorities, cited in Voprosy istorii KPSS, 10, 1963, p. 82). 90

See Lakshin, Novyi mir, p. 252. On pathologization, see D. Beer, 'The Medicalization of Religious Deviance in the Russian Orthodox Church (1880-1905)', Kritika, 5, 2004, 3, pp. 451-82.




cWorking through' trauma in Soviet literature of the ig6os This debate over how the literary community should 'remember' terror in turn affected the representation of memory in the lives of Soviet

literary characters. How did they remember terror? Could they surmount the trauma of the past and regain perfect health? For many victims of terror, especially in literature before 1961, the experience of

1937 represented a tragic, yet ultimately constructive, phase of their

biographies; the memory of injustice did not 'bend' them and in fact spurred them on to perform heroic feats.91 For instance, IuFian Semenov's novella Fulfilling Service Obligations told the story of the son of a Soviet aviation hero repressed in 1937.92 His father's tragic demise motivated his son to perform a daring polar mission. The text's review ers admired the way in which the fatherless youth 'didn't break, remained lively and bright as a person' and was 'unbroken by his

suffering'.93 However, Soviet literature after the 22nd Congress did also

depict people who were, unlike this hero, 'broken' by the experience of terror. Bogachev's determination and courage stand in stark contrast to the heroes of two other contemporary works, both also 'sons of 1937',

whose traumatic memories were explored in greater depth, before

eventually being 'healed'. The novella, A Man Survives, by the young writer Vladimir Maksi

mov, first rejected by a wary Novyi mir, benefited from the more

conservative reputation of Oktiabr', and was published there in

mid-1962.94 Set in a hospital ward, the narrative consists of fragments of the eponymous, anonymous hero's autobiography, recalled by the feverish patient, a son of an 'enemy of the people'. The experience of his father's arrest in 1937, and the instant social ostracism that he faced, is in both narrative and psychological terms the originary point for the breakdown of his bond with the Soviet collective.95 The hero deepens his sense of exclusion by running away and falling into a life of crime which earns him periodic terms in the Gulag. The early experience of terror leads to the disintegration of the hero's personality and, in his last escape from prison, the breakdown of his physical health. The man

in the hospital bed represents the extreme damage wrought by terror, the wounds manifest on his body and within his tortured mind.

91 For example, K. Simonov, 'Zhivye i mertvye', ^namia, 1959. On the film adaptation,

see Komsomol'skaia Pravda, 5 January 1964, p. 4; 'Reporta o groznom 1941-g.', Literaturnaia

Rossiia, 8, 1964, p. 10. 92

lu. Semenov, 'Pri ispolnenii sluzhebnykh obiazannostei', Iunost', 1-2, 1962. 93 RGALI, f. 2924, op. 2, d. 65, 1. 15; ibid., d. 86, 11. 138-45; RGASPI-m, f. 1, op. 32,

d. 1083, 1. 162. 94'Zhiv chelovek', Oktiabr', 10, 1962, pp. 89-119 (hereafter, 'Zhiv chelovek'). See also

Lakshin, Novyi mir, pp. 46, 170. 95 'Zhiv chelovek', pp. 90-93.



POLLY JONES 363 The hero's disordered consciousness, fixated in the mire of his

memories, allows the reader only episodic glimpses of the hospital's potential to function as a place of physical and emotional healing. Just as all hope seems to have faded, a surgeon arrives, but the hospital messenger sent for him has died in the extreme cold. Humbled, the man speaks his name to his nurses for the first time. His concluding act of self-identification becomes symbolic of his desire to be reborn within the Soviet collective and is likened to 'a stone rolling off [his] shoulders'.96 The novella's conclusion confidently anticipates the full restoration of the hero's physical and psychological health and the

beginning of a new future rather than endless, burdensome reflection on the past.

The work's exploration of its hero's traumatised memory, 'involun

tarily jump [ing] from the present to the past, resurrecting some torn

fragments of life' was well received in the Soviet press.97 Novyi mir

praised Maksimov's portrayal of 'this tragedy of fatherlessness' and his

portrayal of 1937 as a 'disharmonious', 'unnatural' event with serious

psychological consequences. The trauma endured by the central

protagonist effectively excused his 'ever-deeper moral decline', yet the reviewer was delighted by his ultimate recovery.98 Conservative

journals, meanwhile, tended to elide the disturbing deviance of the

hero, and indeed the 'traumatic form' of his narrative, and posited his 'return to humanity' and the optimistic conclusion of the work as inevitable.99 All emphasized that the terror was an 'outside' event

incapable of destroying the inner goodness of the hero. By analogy, the

presence of the theme of '1937' had not destroyed Maksimov's work, and terror had not destroyed the Soviet system.

Iurii Trifonov's 1963 novel, The Slaking of Thirst, also charted its bereaved hero's road to recovery and r?int?gration.100 Trifonov's first

full-length novel to appear after Stalin's death built upon his recent sketches about the Turkmen desert, yet also represented the first of his many attempts to confront his father's arrest during the Great Terror.1

l On one level, the work dramatised the conflict between a

Turkmen irrigation project's inspired managers and their opponents in

96 Ibid., p. 119. 97 'Pobedil chelovek', Novyi mir, 4, 1963, pp. 253-55. 98 Ibid.

99'Novoe, kommunisticheskoe v literature', Oktiabr', 4, 1963, pp. 178-92; ibid., 5, 1964, p. 221; 'Bol'shie ozhidaniia'; 'Spor veka', ^yezda, 4, 1963, pp. 195-200; 'Molodye sily nashei

literatury', Kommunist, 17, 1962, pp. 73-80. 100 lu. Trifonov, 'Utolenie zhazhdy', ?fiamia, 1963 (hereafter, 'Utolenie zhazhdy'), 4,

PP. 81-119; 5, pp. 3-40; 6, pp. 3-69; 7, pp. 3-89. J. Woll, Invented Truth and the Literary Imagination of lurk Trifonov, Durham, NC, 1991,

pp. 20-23 and passim', D. Gillespie, Iurii Trifonov: Unity Through Time, Cambridge, 1992, pp. 28-45 and passim.




the Soviet bureaucracy, in a staging of the 'struggle against the cult of

personality' familiar from many novels of the late 1950s and early 1960s.102 On another level, like Maksimov's story, the novel stages the

battle against the cult of personality within the mind of the work's hero, Koryshev, an aspiring journalist haunted by memories of his father's arrest in 1937.

As he arrives in the desert, Koryshev signals the importance of

memory: T was travelling to the desert because I had no way out. I didn't love it, I didn't think about it, and I didn't remember it. I remembered something else.'103 Alternating with chapters about construction are extracts from Koryshev's diary, showing that the

'something else' that he 'remembers' is the experience of terror. Like the hero of Maksimov's novella, Koryshev experienced the arrest of his father as a traumatic break in time:

Real life didn't go on for long, till I was about 11, childhood was real life, and then everything got turned upside down [...] All my life I've tried with all my might to undo what cannot be undone. And thousands of others were concerned with doing the same

thing.104

The novel presents some of the hero's compulsive memories sympa thetically, as in the contrast drawn between one frivolous woman's

memories of the weather in 1938, and Koryshev's searing memories of

waiting for news of his father outside a Moscow prison at the same

time.1 However, though elements of the 'cult of personality' still endure in the management of the newspaper, the hero's propensity to attribute all his problems to his father's arrest is depicted as

mistaken.106 Like the victims of terror cited at the start of this article, Koryshev interprets his entire life through the prism of terror:

Two years ago, in the summer of 1955, my father was rehabilitated [...] The hassles [volynka] should have stopped and maybe they have, but

perhaps they've only just quietened down a bit. But they've continued inside me: they loom up everywhere! I've gotten so used to living side

by-side with them that I'm powerless to forget them. And now: maybe there's no reason to be worried any more, but I can't do anything with

myself. This cursed insecurity. It sits inside me like bacteria.107

If the progress of the construction project is hampered by natural and human impediments, Koryshev's maturation into a successful chronicler of the 'conquering of the desert' is constantly retarded by

102 For example, G. Nikolaeva, 'Bitva v puti', %namia, 1957; V. Dudintsev, 'Ne khlebom

edinym', Novyi mir, 1956; D. Granin, 'Idu na grozu', Oktiabr', 1962. 103 'Utolenie zhazhdy', 4, p. 81.

104 Ibid., 5, p. 36. 105 Ibid., p. 10.

?07 !bid-'6' PP" 35~4?' 42"45' Ibid., 4, p. 95.



POLLY JONES 365 his compulsive retrospection. As with Maksimov's hero, traumatic

memory is identified with illness. In Maksimov's case, the obsessive return to the past was linked to the hero's feverish state, and its destruc tive effects conveyed in both the content and form of his narrative. For

Trifonov's hero, the illness is not physically manifested, and the form of his narrative is far less disturbed, but his dysfunctional memory still merits comparison with 'bacteria'. In both works, the pathologization of trauma underscores the necessity of healing.

The process of recovery begins as Koryshev is sent by his newspaper to cover the conflict between the project's various overseers, but then becomes personally involved in it. Calling at a party meeting for an end to the 'cult of personality', Koryshev cites the 20th Congress as a 'massive recovery [ozdorovlenie] of the people'.108 This is the first time that he has seen de-Stalinization as a 'healthy', future-orientated

project, rather than as a traumatic exploration of the past. The speech in turn brings him closer to one of the progressive managers, Ermasov, also a victim of 1937. Koryshev's second major speech, when he recounts his experience of repression to Ermasov, completes the

'working through' of his past: I'd never shared this with anyone, never been open about it and generally I don't like to talk about it [...] yet suddenly with this old man, whom I

was seeing for the second time in my life, I got it. I started to talk about

my father, about my life without him and without my mother [. . .] I couldn't stop myself.109

Ermasov responds by urging Koryshev to get involved with 'something bigger than himself as a way of overcoming the past.110 Koryshev's work-rate suddenly increases exponentially.11 Koryshev's narrative of

self, unencumbered by traumatic memories, is finally merged into his and the novel's epic narrative of the conquest of the desert: 'ahead a new life beckons, and the old life remains, as it were, behind a glass door.'112 Thus narrated and compartmentalized, his memories no

longer impede the forward progress of the project or of his narrative. The novel ultimately subsumes the victim-centred narrative of 1937 into the 'master plot' of the 'overcoming of the cult of personality' conceived as a public process of reform and innovation. The denoue

ment of the work shifts attention from the frustrations of exploring personal memory to the fulfilment of making public history.113

108 Ibid., 7, p. 69. 109 Ibid., p. 79. 110 Ibid.

"'Ibid. 1

Ibid., p. 88. 113

For an illuminating reading of two similar 'irreconcilable' discourses in Azhaev, see T. Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia, Ithaca, NY, 1997, pp. 36-40.




However, this final version of Trifonov's work only emerged after two fractious years of revision. The characterization of Koryshev

was the cause of the 'biggest objections' in the prolonged editorial discussions at ̂ namia.114 Ignoring the damage done by terror, reviewers

reproached Koryshev for being 'passive and passionless, indifferent to

evil', and for lacking the necessary 'will' to be a hero.115 A man of his

generation, shaped by the ? implicitly positive ?

experiences of his

era, should be 'more serious'.116 Holding this view of the 1930s, the readers were also anxious about whether his:

Memories [were] very much seen from one perspective, so to speak, through the prism of 1937. But surely in the country, and indeed in the life of

Koryshev himself, there was something else more prominent and significant to which his memory might return. The mentions of 1937 sound too insistent.117

Koryshev therefore 'remember [ed] 1937 too often' for a Soviet

positive hero.118 The normative view of Stalinist history, as replete in 'significant' episodes, was thereby linked to a normative view of human psychology and its capacity to recover from trauma, to select 'memories' at will and not to be preoccupied with a tragic past.

Trifonov repeatedly re-wrote the novel to answer these criticisms,

transforming Koryshev into 'a firm and active personality', but he also

grew increasingly frustrated.119 In its final incarnation, presented for the Lenin prize that year, the novel was said to recount the 'victory of the new'.1 Many reviews completely ignored the 'personal' storyline in favour of the epic battle against bureaucratic 'inertia', or the

modernization of the 'ancient earth' of Turkmenistan.121 A more

nuanced review described Koryshev 'torturing himself with thoughts of 1937, about his father's arrest, and about his difficult life' but still

prioritized the hero's progress toward 'civic maturity'.122 Only Novyi mir

preferred Koryshev's 'other memories' and criticized his readiness to

forgive and forget past injustices.123

114 RGALI, f. 618, op. 17, d. 334, 1. 2.

115 Ibid., 11. 7, 24. 116 Ibid., 1. 30. 117 Ibid., 1. 97.

118Ibid.,l.95. 119 Ibid., 11. 1, 15, 81-93. After three drafts, Trifonov threatened to pull out of the contract

with Zjiamia. Ibid., 11. 110-15. 120 RGALI, f. 618, op. 17, d. 336, 1. 112.

121 Oktiabr', 1, 1964, pp. 212-15; 'Vremia rabot?t' vslast", Literaturnaia Rossiia, 43, 1963,

pp. 14-15; Turkmenskaia Pravda, 18 October 1963, p. 4. Izvestiia, 11 October 1963, p. 4. 123

Novyi mir, 11, 1963, pp. 235-40. The novel was then defended in, for example, 'Zhivaia

zhizn' i normativnost", Moskva, 7, 1964, pp. 192-99; 'Iskusstvo geroicheskoi epokhi', Kommunist, 10, 1964, pp. 25-48.



POLLY JONES 367 The editing of the novel at ^namia, and the critical responses to the

novel that further marginalized the novel's trauma narrative, typify the constraints on the narration of trauma that continued to be enforced even at the height of de-Stalinization. These constraints operated at a micro-level: to limit the importance and sympathy accorded to

Koryshev's traumatic memories in Trifonov's manuscript. However, these micro-practices were in turn shaped by larger pressures on

literature not only to testify to trauma but also to emplot society's recovery from it. This narrative of healing, whose emergence can

be traced through the 'curing' of memory in both Maksimov and

Trifonov, exerted a consistent influence on Soviet literature, despite the hectic succession of'freezes' and 'thaws' that the early 1960s witnessed.

Well before the end of the Thaw, it had become apparent that

surviving Stalinism was simply not enough; the experience had also to attest to the strength of a specifically Soviet strength of mind. Personal

suffering and traumatic memories of that suffering could not be

insuperable, since, according to Soviet metonymy, the nation and the Soviet system would also thereby appear to be incurably wounded.124 For both the individual self and the body politic, 1937 was a 'drama

[.. .] which a tragic exceptional accident could give rise to but which

only a great people could survive and overcome'.125 The individual,

overcoming the past and even thriving, epitomised in microcosm the belief that society could, and must, do the same.

Conclusion

'Suffering can be overcome, beaten, just like all the other inconveniences,

ulcers and illness of the old world ? such is the position of a true humanist.'126

For the many thousands of survivors of 1937, the Khrushchev era held out the promise of r?int?gration into mainstream society after decades of ostracism from a culture that silenced the trauma of terror.127 The project of de-Stalinization appeared to recognize victims' trauma and invite their testimony. However, recent trauma theory has drawn attention to the historical contingency of definitions of trauma

124 On identification between the individual self and the state, see E. Naiman, 'Discourse

Made Flesh: Healing and Terror in the Construction of Soviet Subjectivity', in I. Halfin

(ed.), Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities, London, 2002, pp. 286-316. 125'Za krasotu vremen griadushchikh', Oktiabr', 2, 1962, pp. 200-08.

126'Samye nasushchnye zaboty'. 127 S. Sandier, 'The 1937 Pushkin Jubilee as Epic Trauma', in Kevin M. F. Platt

and David Brandenberger (eds), Epic Revisionism: Russian History and Literature as Stalinist

Propaganda, Madison, WI, 2006 (hereafter, Epic Revisionism), pp. 193-213; J. Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin, Cambridge, MA, 2006 (hereafter, Revolution on My Mind), pp. 285-345.




and the multiplicity of 'national styles of theorizing trauma'.128 As the above extract from the Soviet press made clear, it was the 'humanism' of Soviet literature, and tenacious Soviet ideas about the self, that

shaped and limited Soviet public memory's recovery of past suffering; as something that was essentially incompatible with the 'new world', trauma had to be 'overcome, beaten'. Although a desire for redemp tion is often observable in narratives of catastrophic pasts, this

tendency was particularly pronounced in post-Stalinist Soviet culture.129

The public management of trauma in the Khrushchev era betrayed continuities with Stalinist attitudes to both trauma and memory.

Despite the claims of party propaganda in the 1950s and 1960s, Stalinist culture did engage with trauma to a certain degree, especially in its confrontation of the epic damage wrought by World War Two.

As Anna Krylova has argued, the need to heal war trauma motivated the representation of some physical and psychological harm in post-war Stalinist literature, whilst Lisa Kirschenbaum reveals the state's 'evocations of personal trauma as a means of establishing the emo

tional authenticity of the national struggle' in commemorations of the

siege of Leningrad.130 Physical trauma was an extremely prevalent trope in Soviet literature of the 1930s and 1940s (and indeed into the 1950s and 1960s), since the overcoming of disability provided a

very powerful narrative of mental strength triumphing over physical limitations.131 For this very reason, however, mental trauma was almost

completely absent from Stalinist culture. What was new in the Khrushchev era was not the emergence of

trauma per se, but the greater ?

though not total ? willingness to

explore mental, rather than physical, trauma and the deeper, more

prolonged debate about healing. The privileged role accorded to

literature in this process of narrativizing trauma speaks to the endur

ance, and even strengthening, of the 'cult of literature' in Thaw-era

culture.132 As Irina Sirotkina argues, the development of psychiatry

128 R. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, Chicago, IL, 2000; M. Micale, P. Lerner, Traumatic Pasts:

History, Psychiatry and Trauma in the Modern Age, i8yo-igjo, Cambridge and New York, 2001,

P- 14 129 For a critique of redemptive narratives, see Maier, Unmasterable Past; D. LaCapra,

Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, Ithaca, NY, 1994, and especially Langer, Holocaust Testimonies.

130Krylova, '"Healers of Wounded Souls'"; L. Kirschenbaum, 'Commemorations of the

Siege of Leningrad: A Catastrophe in Memory and Myth', in Gray, Oliver, Hie Memory of

Catastrophe, pp. 106-07. 131 L. Kaganovsky, 'How the Soviet Man was Unmade', Slavic Review, 63, 2004, 3,

PP-577-96. N. Condee, 'Cultural Codes of the Thaw', in A. Gleason, S. Khrushchev, W. Taubman

(eds), Nikita Khrushchev, New Haven, CT, 2000, pp. 160-76.



POLLY JONES 369 in Russia in the late nineteenth century depended crucially on the

fledgling science's interaction with literature; 'sharing the values of the

Russian intelligentsia, psychiatrists regarded literature as both an

indicator of the nation's mental health and an integral part of its

wellbeing.'133 The importance of literature at the time of psychiatry's emergence boosted the status of both literature and psychiatry as

healing arts. In the Khrushchev years, the cult of literature revived

through the 'thick journals', especially Novyi mir, and its renewed sense of purpose and legitimacy derived partly from its exploration of the past, and also from its curative powers.134 In a society where

psychotherapy had not and would not recover from the mauling of the 1930s, the therapy offered by literature was once again seen as a

panacea.135 The acknowledgement of trauma and the use of narrative to 'work through' a difficult past hinted at a limited re-engagement

with ideas of trauma and therapy, vilified under Stalin. Yet, by displac ing therapy into the traditionally capacious domain of literature, the

party authorities also sidestepped the need to explore trauma and its treatment in more depth.

The ultimate outcome of literature's involvement with trauma and

therapy was, moreover, not so very different from Krylova's assessment of post-war literature, in which 'injuries of the soul, instead of being articulated and healed, tended to disappear'.136 To apply Krylova's terminology to the Thaw, whilst psychological damage did at least

'appear' in Khrushchev-era literature, its 'articulation' was still conditional upon its ultimate 'healing', or 'disappearance'.

In allowing past experiences of terror and victimization to be discussed in public for the first time, the party and the Soviet literary community also had to confront diverse perspectives on the workings of memory. Although this debate was richer than had been possible under Stalin, Stalinist attitudes to memory still found their reflection in the overriding belief that memory could and should be manipulated, both by the state and by the individual.

As recent studies have demonstrated, the active 'remembering' in which the Soviet regime always engaged should be highlighted alongside its well-known commitment to 'forgetting' and iconoclasm.137

1331. Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, i88o~igjo, Baltimore, MD, 2002.

134 An argument also advanced in Kozlov, 'The Readers o? Novyi mir, 1945-1970'. 135 M. Miller, Freud and the Bolsheviks, New Haven, CT, 1998; C. Merridale, 'Revolution

aries on the Couch: Freudianism, Bolshevism and Collective Neurosis', Journal of Contemporary History, 36, 2001, 2, pp. 373-82; Merridale, Night of Stone, pp. 149-55.

136Krylova, '"Healers of Wounded Souls'", p. 320. 137 F. Corney, Telling October: Memory and the Making of the October Revolution, Ithaca, NY, 2004

(hereafter, Telling October); Brandenberger, Platt, Epic Revisionism.




The authorities' desire not only to repress certain aspects of history, but also to shape an inspirational and mobilizational 'public memory'

meant that commemoration presented both a danger and an opportu nity.138 Precisely because memory had such mobilizational power, it also necessitated intensive, intrusive state controls to ensure its 'health'; the party's management of de-Stalinization reaffirms the privileged, yet vulnerable, position of memory in Soviet culture.

The anxiety about memory in the culture of the 1960s stemmed from the fact that the commemoration of purge victims was a very different, and potentially much more hazardous, enterprise than the celebration of the heroic victims of the revolution or Civil War.139 In admitting the damage done by the state to its people, post-Stalinist memory

politics edged closer to post-Nazi Germany's and post-Vichy France's

Vergangenheitsbew?ltigung, or to the 'post-traumatic culture' of America after Vietnam.140 Yet party authorities along with many writers resisted and pathologized this approach to memory politics, most characteristic of Novyi mir, as obsessive and morbid. They succeeded in striking a balance between victimhood and survival, which suggested that no

lasting damage had been inflicted on either the Soviet person or the Soviet system, thus obviating the need for continued remembrance or

repentance. The traditionally 'avaricious public past' of Soviet culture therefore

resurfaced in the heavily controlled 'personal memory' of the literary and real-life survivors of Stalinism publicised in the Thaw period.141 Khrushchev's promised monument to the victims of terror never

materialized, whilst Soviet literature only partially rendered the trauma of Stalinism, transforming victims into survivors, and memories into dreams of the future.142 The Thaw's 'master plot' of trauma consisted, like that of the Stalinist novel, of 'not only suffering but the transcen dence of suffering'.143 In life and in literature, survivors promoted the

principle of the malleability of memory. They insisted that traumatic

memory could be diagnosed and then cured through resolute 'work on

the self. The belief that the self, or 'soul', could be 'engineered' into

138 S. Yekelchyk, Stalin's Empire of Memory: Russian-Ukrainian Relations in the Soviet Historical

Imagination, Toronto, 2004 (hereafter, Stalin's Empire of Memory). Corney, Telling October.

140 Wood, Vectors of Memory, esp. pp. 6-10, 199-201; Antze, Lambek, Tense Past, esp. pp. vii,

xxii-xxiv; K. Farrell, Post-Traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties, Baltimore, MD, 1998. 141

V. Schwarcz, 'Strangers No More: Personal Memory in the Interstices of Public

Commemoration', in Watson, Memory, History and Opposition, p. 50. See also Wood, Vectors

of Memory and Yekelchyk, Stalin's Empire of Memory, esp. pp. 7-10. 142 XXII s'ezd, vol. 2, p. 587. 143 Clark, Soviet Novel, p. 178.



POLLY JONES 371

good health clearly perpetuated Stalinist ? and perhaps even

traditionally Russian ? ideas of mind, memory and body.144 Tracing these anxieties surrounding trauma in literature therefore permits a new perspective on the limits of de-Stalinization, and the entanglement of the post-Stalinist 'relaunch' with older cultural practices.

144 Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, esp. pp. 67-115; Halfin, Terror in My Soul; Merridale,

Night of Stone praises 'forgetting [...] a strategy that millions, a majority of Stalin's people had to use to get on with their lives' (p. 233); see also pp. 148, 155, 415.



Documents

The Relaunch of the Soviet Project, 1945-64 || Memories of Terror or Terrorizing Memories? Terror, Trauma and Survival in Soviet Culture of the Thaw