CHAPTER 1: THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF THE COMMUNIST

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Every student who wanted to become a Party member had to submit

an autobiography. In addition to cover letters and

questionnaires, the personnel files kept by the university

primary cells contained a considerable number of handwritten

autobiographies, one to five pages in length -- these are

unquestionably the centerpieces of the Party application

dossier.1 Autobiographies allowed students to retranscribe their

selves, Communist style. A well executed autobiography

testified to its author's Communist world outlook and

contributed greatly toward convincing authorities that he was

worthy of induction. If we insert the right keys into the

poetical doors of these documents, foreshortened and

intensified by their authors to maximum effect, many of the

turbulent and intense beliefs of the revolutionary era will

tumble out.

The pages below explore the texture of the

autobiographical discourse -- the Communist practices of

writing, reading and interpreting. In the act of

autobiographical composition, the barrier between narrated self

and narrating self was broken. The Communist autobiographer was

not only creating himself, but was creating even as he was

being created. The perception of the Self not just as an author

but also as a product obviates the need to establish the

veracity of the autobiographical content, its correspondence to

the life it purported to describe. While the Communist

autobiography may be problematic in terms of what individuals

really were, it tells us something about what they hoped to

-2-

become. So my goal here is to figure out the system of coding

on which the autobiography was based.2 Even as I sidestep the

question of the historical facticity of the autobiography, I am

trying to heed Tzvetan Todorov's suggestion to "replace the

opposition between literary and nonliterary by a typology of

the various types of discourse."3 I do not assume there to have

been a problematic fusion of identity and discourse, according

to which the autobiographer's discourse expresses, more or less

accurately, his real, authentic self. While every Communist

autobiography discloses a particular dimension of the self, no

autobiography articulates a complete portrait. At the other

extreme, I do not want to postulate an equally problematic

radical separation between identity and discourse against which

an author is constantly dissimulating. The forces that shaped

the New Man did not operate from top to bottom (the approach of

the totalitarian school), or from bottom to the top (reflecting

the revisionist emphasis on social support and resistance), but

constituted a field of play delimited by a set of Communist

beliefs and practices. Each autobiography tells us something

about the way in which authors assimilated, manipulated and

challenged the officially prescribed identity blue-print.4

Since I am principally concerned with the

"epistemological context" within which the Communist Self was

produced, the analysis below is instructive only regarding the

subject as the text constitutes him. Just as autobiography is

not a sequence of acts, but the notion of act is that of a

moment in an autobiography so the autobiographer is not a real

historical actor but the protagonist abstracted from an

autobiography. Still, a certain disjuncture has to be posited

-3-

between the way the author is presented and the way he wanted

to appear -- otherwise the autobiography will be repeated, not

analyzed. My understanding of how a text produces meaning leads

me to emphasize a symptomatic reading -- what is sometimes

called "reading against the grain" -- that interprets

omissions, distortions and insinuations. Trying to pin down the

narratological strategy employed by an author is always

interesting because a Communist autobiography seems always to

reveal certain slippages in identity. The intention behind

students' self-fashioning was always subverted, because the

rules of poetics could not be manipulated without taking

decisions out of the hands of the storyteller.5

There was no shortage of blueprints for would-be

autobiographies. Through political rallies, lectures, wall

newspapers and "evenings of reminiscences," Soviet students

were exposed to stylized revolutionary lives, moral tales

instructing the students in the Communist virtue. The Party

constantly cited Old Bolsheviks and the fallen heroes of the

Civil War as examples of men who had lived pure and blameless

lives worthy of emulation.6 A Communist publicist named

Fil'dshinskii wrote in 1924 that "explicit directives were not

always given as to how the Party applicant was supposed to

write his autobiography. Many were written spontaneously."7 On

occasion, however, students were given hints about what sort of

text was acceptable. Students at Sverdlov University were

enjoined to think about the following in constructing their

autobiographies:

(1) General background. (2) The social and financial

status of my parents. (3) The modes of thought and

-4-

opinions of the elder members of my family. (4) In what

kind of atmosphere did I spend my childhood?; Was it happy

or joyless? (5) Studies. (6) Profession, occupation,

secondary job.

Clearly the Communist autobiography was much more than

a random collection of statements about the applicant's past.

And the truth-value of the text was something more than the

truth or falsity of a heap of assertions taken separately. As

Mink shows, the difficulty with logical conjunction is that it

produces that blandest of narratives, the chronicle. The only

ordering relation a chronicle knows, "the and then . . . and

then . . . and then . . .," cannot do justice to the Communist

autobiographical narrative, which claims truth not merely for

"each of its individual statements taken distributively, but

for the complex form of the narrative itself."8 Rather that

telling a detailed and seamless individual chronicle, the

student-autobiographer carefully selected and ordered a set of

events from his past, typically presenting a complex narrative

which can be unraveled only if the text is examined as a whole.9

Spiritual development was the crux of the Communist

autobiography. Facts and events mentioned by student Party

applicants were significant not in themselves but as indicators

of the presence or absence of consciousness. Fil'dshinskii's

scheme continued thus:

(7) What were the especially important moments and events

in my life? (8) How was my worldview (mirosozertsanie)

formed: gradually, in a checkered way, or under the impact

of a spiritual break? (9) When and how had I become a

revolutionary and a Communist? What had been the influence

of my milieu, close friends, books and important events?

-5-

(10) When and how had I extricated myself from religious

superstitions. (11) Were there any clashes with members of

my family because of differences in convictions? (12) What

was the extent of my participation in the Civil War?

Clearly the point was not an exhaustive tally of facts but the

applicant's conversion to Communism, its timetable and its

instigators. Applicants who limited their narrative to dry

facts, no matter how accurate, were rejected -- clearly they

were unable to comprehend the meaning of their life experience.10

Each autobiography had to be supplemented with a

"declaration" (zaiavlenie), a cover letter of sorts. Whereas in

his autobiography the applicant tried to capture his spiritual

development, in the declaration he made a statement regarding

the present state of his consciousness. In an autobiography,

the story of spiritual growth had to speak for itself; nothing

was supposed to overshadow the narrative element in the life

account. In the declaration, on the other hand, the applicant

constructed an abstract argument justifying a place in the

Party. The declaration was meant to outline a portrait rather

than to reconstitute a life narrative. Declarations were both

preambles and morals for the story told in the autobiography.

The 1926 Party application file of Bubnov, a student

from Leningrad State University, has survived intact.11 This

student's masterful self-presentation permits us an excellent

view of the interrelationship between the various components of

the application dossier. Short and succinct, Bubnov's

declaration lay on the top of his file: "Coming from the depths

of the peasant mass, steeped since youth in hatred of those who

enslaved the toilers, I identify with the Revolution. I believe

-6-

I can act shoulder to shoulder with the Party." The author

stressed his present, developed state of mind: he wanted to

become a Communist since he and the Party thought the same

thoughts. To unite their efforts, Bubnov had to find his place

in the ranks of the Party.

In order to show how he had arrived at such a position,

Bubnov granted history a prominent role in the following text,

the life story he told at some length on a separate sheet of

paper. At the outset one learns that Bubnov, born in 1896 and a

"member of the intelligentsia" by social position, had worked

as a journalist and was able to read French, German and

Georgian. His replies to the personal data questionnaire

indicate that Bubnov's parents were "peasants," but his social

background was not discussed at any length. The autobiographer

moved at once to the account of his education: "When I studied

at the Vologda realschule, I was granted a tuition waiver."

Dissociating himself from the rich peasant children, Bubnov was

eager to convey his impecunious origins. "The war began soon

after I graduated. [. . .] It was at a loss as to what to do

with myself and, bowing to the proposal of the military

authorities, I enrolled in the Vladimir Military School. Thus I

became a corporal." By suggesting that his career choice was

forced on him, Bubnov was attempting to empty it of all

meaning. No less significant were the additional reasons he

cited for enrolling in the tsarist army: "an excess of youthful

energies and a desire to gain personal autonomy." The

implication is clear: independence from reactionary parents,

albeit through a dubious mechanism, is to be understood as the

result of an instinctual drive to distance himself from his

-7-

background and begin his search for true consciousness. And

thus: Bubnov became an officer in the old army, and as such an

oppressor of the international proletariat. No wander he

hastened to note that his promotion "due to the death of all

commissioned officers in the course of the war" was a matter of

happenstance.

As we read, the telos of Bubnov's development gradually

emerges. At the start his Bolshevism was limping -- his

revolutionary consciousness was held hostage by the world in

which he dwelt. But when World War I -- referred to by Bubnov

as "the Imperialist War" -- developed into the Revolution, a

path to enlightenment opened up. And so the "false patriotism,

inculcated into me by the tsarist school" came to be contrasted

with the joy Bubnov felt as the army of Nicholas II came apart

at the seams. Projecting this Leninist interpretation of the

war (referred to as "defeatism") back onto his former self, and

ignoring the ideological incompatibility of the Bolshevik

desire to turn the "Imperialist War" into "Civil War" with his

own the chauvinist career as an officer in the tsarist army,

Bubnov the autobiographer was clearly anticipating the future.

Bubnov had described his earlier outlook only to

disavow it immediately. The existence side by side of two

Bubnovs -- patriot (Bubnov in 1914) and defeatist (Bubnov in

1926) -- becomes possible as the protagonist's subjective

reality is bifurcated into two levels: phenomenal and ephemeral

patriotism vis-a-vis essential and enduring defeatism. Based on

the distinction between essence and appearance, Marxist

analysis served as Bubnov's objective vantage point, and from

there "false consciousness" could be diagnosed as such.12 Unless

-8-

he knew what particular transgressions he had committed by

joining the tsarist army, he would not have known what to

recant.

Had the autobiography concluded with Bubnov fighting in

the ranks of the tsarist army, the insertion of a Communist

rationale into the description of a set of choices far from

doctrinaire would have been absurd and doomed. But no story is

judged prior to its completion. By collapsing time and

inserting intimations of the future into the present, Bubnov

was betting that his later deeds would absolve his youthful

blunders.

The story continues. We learn that Bubnov was injured,

demobilized and sent to "recover from a head wound in a

military hospital." This period of recuperation allowed Bubnov

to skip the otherwise obligatory autobiographical chapters

organized around the themes "Me and the February Revolution"

and "Me and November 1917" -- he saw none of the events

firsthand. During these momentous events Bubnov was literally

unconscious. The crucial omission was acceptable -- those who

were recovering from serious injuries were somehow superior to

unforgivable cases of petit-bourgeois vacillation and

absenteeism.

When the autobiography resumed, taking the reader to

1918, Bubnov reemerged as the secretary of a "poor peasants'

committee" (kombed) and a delegate to the First Congress of

Peasant Poor Committees in Petrograd. The wound he had

suffered, and it was, after all, a head wound, clearly worked

miracles on his soul. Upon recovery, Bubnov was performing only

good Bolshevik deeds: organizing a workers' cooperative for the

-9-

improvement of agricultural equipment, serving as its delegate

to the VSNKh (supreme economic planning agency) and, most

importantly, joining the Red Army. At the time of writing,

Bubnov was a member of a workers' education section and a

prolific contributor to Communist journals such as Village Poor

and Red Star. His recent activities proved that he was in full

possession of Communist consciousness. Conbributing little to

1 The student autobiographies which comprised the source base for this study are located in personal files of individual students, local Party cell application dossiers and files containing purge related materials. The "standart Party card," a personal booklet of thirty-three pages all Communists had to carry in the 1920s, included basic details of the holder's autobiography. Izvestiia TsK RKP(b), August 18, 1920; Spravochnik partiinogo rabotnika, vyp.1, (Moscow, 1921), pp.69-70; PATO. f.17, op.1, d.631, l.5.

2 J. Harris, "Autobiography: Theory and Praxis," Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, (Princeton, 1990), pp.16-17.

3 T. Todorov, "The Notion of Literature," New Literary History, vol.5, (1973).

4 G. C. Spivak, "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography," Selected Subaltern Studies, (Oxford, 1988), pp.3-32.

5 This methodology is outlined in, C. Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, (Berkeley, 1987), p.8.

6 See, for example, L. Lezhaeva and G. Rusakov (eds.), Pamiatnik bortsam proletarskoi revoliutsii, pogibshim v 1917-1921 godam, vol.1-3, (Moscow, 1920s); G. & M., Geroi i mucheniki proletarskoi revoliutsii, vyp.1, (Moscow, 1924); 12 biographii, (Moscow, 1924).

7 A. Fil'shinskii, "Priemnye ispytaniia v Sverdlovskom universitete," Zapiski kommunisticheskogo universiteta imeni Sverdlova, vol.2, Moscow, 1924, p.300.8 L. Mink, "Narrative Form as a Cognitive Instrument," in The Writing of History: Literary Form and Historical Understanding, in R. Canary and H. Kozicki, eds. (Madison, Wis. 1978), pp.143-414; The merit of the poetical reading of historical documents are is defended in the two following classics, H. White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," in, On Narrative, ed. W. Mitchell, (Chicago, 1981), and, R. Barthes, "Historical Discourse," in Introduction to Structuralism, (New York, 1970).

-10-

an already perfected political mind, those action’s were only

important in corroborating autobiographer’s claim of being a

loyal Bolshevik. Strictly speaking, however, these events were

superfluous, included only to appease a skeptic who sought to

make sure that Bubnov did indeed convert and that his

conversion took place when he claimed it did.

9 In this context a brief comparison of student Communist autobiographies with student supplications and letters of appeal may be instructive. Usually addressed to Narkompros (the Soviet equivalent to the ministry of education), student letters of appeal defended the author's title to a place in a proletarian university. More often than not these letters included mini-biographies. Yet, such mini-biographies and Communist autobiographies proper remained distinct genres, separated by their attitude toward the student's subjectivity. Letters of appeal presented life stories with the sole purpose of proving that the author's class position was proletarian. If addressed at all, questions of consciousness were dealt with only in a perfunctory manner. Whatever biographical information the appeals contained, it was given in a list form, reminding us more of a life's chronicle than a life's story. Since a chronicle (unlike a story) could remain open ended -- and the mini-biographies we are talking about were more often than not fragmented and unfinished peaces of writing -- the reader was free to draw his own conclusion as to whether the author was, or was not destined to attain full proletarian consciousness at some future point in time. In the final instance, this question was immaterial -- having no pretension to prove he was worthy of being a Communist, the appelant only wished to remain a student in a proletarian university. Consequently, the letter of appeal was judged solely on the basis of the truth value of the facts it reported. As long as the reader was led to believe that the student was a proletarian, "objectively speaking," that is, that he was immersed in a proletarian milieu, his errors in interpreting his life were not held against him. A "worker," even if shrouded in darkness remained a "worker," a creature capable of salvation. On the other hand, that student biography that was submitted as a part of the Party application merited the full name of an "autobiography" because its author had to be self-reflective -- a proletarian, "for himself," as Marx would put it, and not merely objectively, "in himself." Whereas the author of the letter of appeal had only to show a promise of a future proletarian consciousness to be retained in the university, a successful Party applicant had to be already self-conscious, and able to prove through his

-11-

What Bubnov accomplished in his autobiography was, to

use Hayden White's terminology, "a displacement of the facts

onto the ground of literary fictions." The autobiographer

brought to bear a "process of transcodation," in which the

events of his life that were originally recorded as chronicle

were now retranscribed in literary code.13 To dismiss the

analysis of the organizational principle of Bubnov's

autobiography that that indeed was the case. To be "objectively" a proletarian was a matter of a student's position in production and/or his social origins; no student, however, was a Communist "objectively speaking." It was his subjectivity that the autobiographer put on trial.

10 In assigning Party applicants with the task of writing autobiographies the Party cell had a dual goal -- to expand student's mastery of the Russian language, (while illiterates were not allowed into the Party Bolsheviks were aware that many students came to the university directly "from the bench" or "from the plough" and were barely literate), and to teach students the mastery of Communist self-narrativization. Spravochnik partrabotnika, no.3, (Moscow, 1923), p.81.

11 TsGA IPD, f.984, op.1, d.188, ll.18-23, 29.

12 The autobigrapher's position on World War I was captured in the following contemporary song celebrating the contrast between the student's past defeatism and present patriotism:

Pravda prezhde, pri tsarizme, Before, under the tsar, Dezertirom pomniu byl, I recall I was a deserterNo zato pri Kommunizme, Under Communism, however,Prezhnii sol'-khelb otplatil. I paid off my bread and

salt.

"Iz tsikla rabochikh pesen," Znamia rabfakovtsa, nn.3-5, (1922), p.50. In his autobiography Osinskii proudly recalled how he abandoned the South-Western front and went to do some writing for revolutionary Moscow press. When the army begun to search for him Osinskii returned to the army quarters. The way the narrator justified his surprising compliance is noteworthy: “I did not wish to be counted with the deserters thus giving an additional amunition to the then ongoing Bolshevik baiting.” Deiateli SSSR, p.572.

-12-

autobiography as a quixotic curiosity, an inquiry into, as it

were, the text's embellishments, is to miss completely the

Communist notion of the Self. (Incidentally, the Communist

poetics strictly forbid stylistic ornamentation; the Party

applicant was summoned to be "simple like the truth [prost kak

pravda].)"14 Its poetics is not just ancillary, not just part of

the presentation or simply an aesthetic response to an

ideological dictate which could be specified in other terms.

Bubnov's autobiography is interesting precisely for its tropes

and figures of thought, without which the autobiographer would

not have been able to narrativize the real events of his life

and transform them from a chronicle into a story.

What made an autobiography a Communist autobiography

was the careful separation of the morally meaningful -- which

the text highlighted -- and the morally neutral -- which was

trivial and thus had to be left out. What gave the series of

discrete autobiographical incidents unity was the application

of Communist value judgment. Ethical inquires usually take a

narrative form. "Orientation in moral space," Charles Taylor

maintains, "turns out to be similar to orientation in physical

space. We know where we are through a mixture of recognition of

landmarks before us and a sense of how we have travelled to get

there."15 Their ethical quality made Communist autobiographies

resemble the stories of the Old Testament. The ancient

13 H. White, The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, (Baltimore, 1987), pp.47-48.

14 Clark, The Soviet Novel, p.52.

15 C. Taylor, The Sources of the Self. The Making of Modern Identity, (Cambridge Mass., 1989), pp.91-92.

-13-

historian, Josephus, explained that "the main lesson to be

learned from history is that men who conform to the will of

God, and do not venture to transgress laws that have been

excellently laid down, prosper in all things beyond belief;

whereas, in proportion as they depart from the strict

observance of these laws [. . .] things they strive to do end

in irretrievable disasters."16 What Josephus said of the biblical

heroes can be applied to Communist autobiographies; both sets

of narratives went beyond a motley compilation of individual

exploits to form a larger whole, united by the idea of moral

judgment. Whatever precipitated the awakening of the Communist

autobiographer was right; whatever obstructed it was wrong.

Instead of charting all the peaks and troughs of his past, we

have seen that Bubnov dedicated space only to those events

which enhanced his ability to distinguish between the

proletarian and the bourgeois (the touchstone words Bubnov used

were "class conscious" and "unconscious," meaning good and

evil). The rest fell, one may almost say literary, by the

wayside.

Having crossed the ontological gap between the here and

now and the eternal proletarian consciousness, the Communist

autobiographer fell out of time. A comparison of Bubnov's

autobiography with Augustine's Confessions may be revealing in

this regard. The first nine chapters of the Christian classic

consist of a narrative which describes the protagonist's sins

prior to seeing God. As soon as Augustine attains the light,

however, the diachronic dimension of his memoirs disappears;

16 Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 1.14. (Thackeray's translation in Loeb Classical Library).

-14-

the succeeding chapters were metaphysical, entirely lacking any

temporal dimension.17 Like Augustine Bubnov gave very little

space to specific life events that took place, after his

conversion -- somehow his life had transcended narrative. If

any later events were mentioned at all, they were merely

adduced as proof that his conversion was full and sincere,

nothing more.

The manner in which the Communist autobiographer

contrasted his subjective states before and after conversion

also suggested that his spiritual itinerary had been

accomplished. Before he had been unhappy with himself,

impatient and restless, had always been reaching for something

just beyond his grasp; now the convert was "radiant" (svetlyi)

and "calm" (spokoinyi). His "even" (rovnoe) keel evinced his

inner mastery. Balance arose from the equanimity with which the

autobiographer faced both past and future, a past from which,

no matter how checkered the course, an emancipatory trajectory

could be descried and a future which held the Revolution's

final victory.

Bubnov had begun his autobiography by implying that his

class position no longer mattered and was calling on the Party

to recognize that since he had arrived, since his spiritual

evolution was essentially complete, the starting point of his

voyage to the light did not matter all that much. Here the

autobiographer was inspired by Lenin, who maintained that due

to the professional revolutionaries' supreme consciousness,

17 W. Spengelmann, The Forms of Autobiography. Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre, (Yale, 1980), pp.25, 31-32; E. Vance, "Augustine's Confessions and the Grammar of Selfhood," Genre, no.6, (1973), p.24.

-15-

"all distinction between workers and intelligentsia must be

utterly obliterated."18 The IX Conference was emphatic: “Party

members may be distinguished solely on the basis of the level

of their consciousness, loyalty, temperance, political

maturity, revolutionary experience and their readiness for

self-sacrifice. No other basis of discrimination between

Communists will be tolerated.”19 Iakovleva explained at the X

Party Congress (1921) that “the division into classes,

obligatory to us, Marxists, outside the Party, is impermissible

and illegal when transferred into the Party itself. If we

accepted someone into the Party, one must have equal rights

with everybody else whatever one’s class origins are.”20 Finally

the Central Committee returned to the issue in July 1923: “It

is absolutely intolerable that after his admission into the

Party a comrade who proved equal to all the trials and ordeals

would continue being mistrusted on account of his social

origins. [. . .] A decisive struggle must be conducted against

the slightest attempt to create an atmosphere dividing comrades

into those who enjoy full membership rights and those who do

not.”21 Drawing conclusions from this set of premises, the Party

secretariat stipulated in 1925 that the "transfer of a Party

member from one sort of work to another cannot alter his social

position."22

A Confession and a Conversion

To write a student autobiography was to embed into the moral

schema of Communism a thoroughly Christian style of self-

narrativization. Recanting Communist sins, those anti-Party

-16-

acts that the applicant had come to regret resembled nothing so

much as confession. Indeed, it is striking that despite the

fact that in writing autobiographies Party applicants affirmed

their new Selves, their narratives usually took the form of

apologies, and were laced with numerous statements of bitter

self-criticism.23 Only he whose autobiography hid nothing, who

had "spoken from his heart," was accepted. To confess usually

means to admit, to acknowledge improper actions fully, to

"speak fully about the trial of self under the active guidance

of the interior conscience."24 The Russian for "to confess" --

soznat'sia -- conveys the additional sense of attaining self-

transparency and consciousness. Such phrases used by students

as "accept my purehearted testimony" (chistoserdechnye

zaverennia) and "I sincerely and self-critically admit and

condemn my political mistakes/sins" typify confessional motifs

in the autobiographies. The confessional resonance is all the

stronger since the act of autobiographical self-presentation

was carried out before the Party buro or the Party meeting; the

use of the word "before" (pered) indicated spiritual deference,

such as one showed before a confessor.

18 Lenin, "What is to be Done?" Selected Works, vol.1, book 1, p.233.19 KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh I resheniiakh …, vol.2, p.189.

20 Desiatyi s”ezd RKP(b), p.281.

21 Dvenadtsatyi s”ezd RKP(b), p.704.

22 TsGA IPD, f.3, op.1, d.841, ll.1-12.

-17-

While the exploration of this homology is certainly

worthwhile, it is important to state at the outset that even

when Communist poetics borrowed directly from Christian models

of self-narrativization, its accents remained in many ways

unique. The literary critic George Gusdorf was among the first

to call attention to the affinity between the modern, Western

autobiography and the traditional, Christian confession. Both

genres tell their stories as the soul's drive for moral

perfection: "Confession takes on the character of an avowal of

values and a recognition of self by the self. Under the guise

of presenting myself as I was, I exercise a sort of right to

recover possession of my existence now and later." In writing

their autobiographies, student Party applicants had to move

their refractions on the prerequisites for conscious awareness

"back to the stage of the event itself."25 The Party applicant

could not indulge in a passive contemplation of his private

being; he had to set out to discover himself through the

recollection of his life. This may seem paradoxical when one

considers that what was at stake in the Communist confession

was not so much the recreation of the writer's past as the

interpretation of his present. But so long as the consciousness

23 J. Harris, "Autobiography: Theory and Praxis," Autobiographical Statements in Twentieth-Century Russian Literature, (Princeton, 1990), p.32.

24 "Confession," Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary, (Various editions).

25 G. Gusdorf, "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," in J. Olney, ed., Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, (Princeton, 1980), pp.41, 44.

-18-

of the autobiographer-confessor directed the narrative, it

appeared incontestable that he had also directed his life.

Authors who had achieved class consciousness often

seemed to have felt estranged from their imperfect pasts. When

Trotsky sat down to write his autobiography, for example, he

found it difficult to imagine how his petit-bourgeois Jewish

childhood could have had anything to do with his Communist

adulthood. Barely recognizing himself in his younger form,

Trotsky could barely bring himself to use the first person

singular for those passages. "In writing this memoir," he

admitted, "I felt that I was describing not my own childhood

but an ancient journey in a faraway country. I even tried to

write about myself in the third person singular."26 Such

difficulties beset all those who set out to write their

confessions. They were obliged to recognize themselves in the

(unconscious) other they once were, own up to the faults of

this other, and at the same time maintain a sense of radical

break with that resolutely superseded former self. The

Communist autobiography was the record of values overcoming

error. Repentance entailed the assimilation of past sins by the

narrator's consciousness as sins and the assumption of

responsibility for resistence to the Party. A consistent use of

"I" and "me" in the Communist autobiography "is the index of

this permanent responsibility, since the `first person'

embodies both the present reflection and the multiplicity of

past states. Identity changes are marked by the contamination

-19-

of the discourse by traits proper to history, that is by

treatment of the first person as a quasi-third person."27

Communists had to tell and retell their life stories

with a particular emphasis on wrongs committed in the past.

Each Communist had a duty to know who he used to be, to

acknowledge faults, to recognize past temptations and, when

necessary, to bear public witness against himself. Transparency

was equated with virtue, opacity with evil. "Gossip," Lenin

explained, "loves darkness and annonimity."28 This was how Soviet

official press described a counterrevolutionary meeting: "They

are speaking slowly, under their breath. [. . .] It is

impossible to hear their conversation. If you get close to

them, they will immediately become silent with suspicion and

stare frigidly straight at you."29 The insistence that hiding

negative information was worse than the sin itself indicates

that it was the health of the Communist's interior Self, not

his external behavior, which was primarily monitored through

the rituals associated with Party admission. Autobiographical

self-narration was invested with an alembic power. Why is

confession able to assume this hermeneutical role? The

difference between good and evil thoughts, Foucault maintains,

"is that evil thoughts cannot be expressed without difficulty,

for evil is hidden and unstated." By praising some actions and

26 L. Trotskii, Moia zhizn'. Opyt avtobiographii, (Berlin, 1929, reprinted in Moscow, 1991), p.24.

27 Gusdorf, p.41.

28 M. Foucault, Technologies of the Self, (Amherst, 1988), pp.39-49.

29 Lenin, PSS, vo.52, p.224.

-20-

condemning others, Communists reestablished the cosmological

difference between light and exorcised the dark. Verbal

articulation was the key, carrying with it the mark of truth.30

What might be called the "Communist conversion" was the

centerpiece of the autobiographical narrative.31 While its

specific formulations varied, conversion both capped the story

of the birth of the corrected self and presented its moral

lesson. In conversion, according to the classic definition of

William James, a hitherto divided self became "unified and

consciously right, superior and happy, in consequence of its

firmer hold upon doctrinal realities."32 The Party applicant shed

his old bourgeois self and embraced the new Communist truth.

Party applicants referred to the experience of conversion both

by isolated words such as "transformation" (prevrashchenie),

"transition" (perekhod) or "remolding" (perekovka); and by

longer expressions, e.g., "spiritual break" (dushevnyi

perelom), "reversal in worldview" (mirovozrencheskii povorot)

or "alteration of political beliefs." "Under the influence of

events," a typical autobiography would announce, "I, so and so,

have radically altered my views. I have departed from class

alien ideas and have embraced the Bolshevik position."33

While the element of confession was essential to the

Communist autobiography in that it provided the self with a

sense of continuity, the element of conversion was equally

important. Those who had been converted had experienced the

contradictory-yet-complementary sense of a radical rapture in

30 Belomorsko-baltiiskii kanal imeni Stalina, (Moscow, 1934), p.42.

-21-

their spiritual evolution. Since one could not disclose his

inner self without, in a sense, renouncing it, Communist

autobiographical self revelation meant the refusal of the self

and a sort of self-destruction.34 Starobinski insists that those

who had failed to being anew, to experience a rebirth, might as

well not write an autobiography: "If such a change had not

affected the life of the narrator, he could merely depict

himself once and for all, and new developments would be treated

as external historical events." Ultimately, he explains, "it is

the internal transformation of the individual that furnishes a

subject for the autobiographical discourse in which `I' is both

subject and object. [. . .] The personal mark -- the first

person of the `I' -- remains constant. But it is an ambiguous

constancy, since the narrator writing today differed from his

earlier self."35 The moment of conversion supplied the

autobiographical plot with a closure: the unconverted state of

the soul at the beginning of an autobiography bespoke a certain

basic flaw in the nature of things; a reversal, whether in the

31 Ignazio Silone, among others, explicitly compared the act of joining the Communist movement with a "conversion." R. Crossman, (ed.), The God that Failed, (New York, 1992), p.163.

32 W. James, Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, (Harmondsworth, 1983), p.189; A. Nock, Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine from Hippo, (London, 1933), p.7.

33 For related characterizations of the aquisition of revolutionary consciousness by Russian workers as something like a conversion see, among others, R. Zelnik, "To to Unaccustomed Eye: Religion and Irreligion in the Experience of St. Petersburg Workers in the 1870s," Russian History, vol.16, nn.2-4, (1989), pp.316-318; D. Pretty, "The Saints of the Revolution: Political Activists in 1890s Ivanovo-Voznesensk and the Path of Most Resistence," Slavic Review, vol.54, (1995), p.300.

-22-

soul of the autobiographer or in the structure of external

reality brought about a conversion which was usually coupled

with a realization that the new configuration had somehow been

implicit in all prior configurations.36

While conversion to Communism was certainly a natural

event, it also had mythical overtones. Party admission

represented a dying and a rising, and the rising brought with

it a new life. "The individual dies in the lower class and then

wakes up in a higher class," wrote Elias Canetti. "Between the

classes stands death -- a very serious dividing line."37 Suffused

with mystical symbolism, Communist conversion rituals

underscored the boundary between the impure, petit-bourgeois

society and the brotherhood of the elect. They sharply

dramatized the discontinuity between the world the student was

leaving and the world he was entering. Indeed, the rituals of

Party admission may be counted among the classic rites of

passage. When he enrolled in the Party, the student shed his

individualistic self, died as a rank-and-file citizen and was

reborn as a member of the brotherhood of the elect.38

Often the break with the bourgeois past was sharp, as

when Bubnov experienced a revelation that transformed him from

a tsarist officer into a Bolshevik. In William James's classic

34 Foucault, Technologies of the Self, pp.46-49.

35 J. Starobinski, "The Style of Autobiography," Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, pp.78-79.

36 R. Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, (London, 1980), p.294.

37 Quoted after Kozlova, "Zalozhniki slova," Sotsialogicheskie isledovaniia, nn.9-10, (1995), p.130.

38 Van Geneep, The Rites of Passage, (Chicago, 1960).

-23-

typology, this type of conversion is known as a "crisis

conversion." Alternatively, the break might have been presented

as gradual, a natural conclusion to an incremental process, as

was the case with those who presented themselves as proto-

Bolsheviks almost from birth. For them, the road to Bolshevism

was seamless and their conversion little more than the formal

registration of the political inclinations they had always

held. Such a process was referred to by William James as "lysis

conversion," a conversion that "develops," or that "concludes."39

While the crisis conversion flung mud at the denigrated and now

abandoned image of the self; the lysis converts, by contrast,

minimized such self-flagellation, providing instead a

consistently positive portrait of the author-convert, and

extrapolating it to cover his entire life.

If we try to see things from an eschatological

perspective, however, the importance of James's dichotomic

typology diminishes somewhat. When life had involved tremendous

disturbances, ups and downs, regresses and advances, losses and

victories, a Communist had to find a way to combine dramatic

transformation with continuous development. Enter the Marxist

dialectic. Intrinsic to the interpretative framework Marx had

borrowed from Hegel was the same dichotomy of continuity and

rupture firmly contained by transcendence the autobiography

needed. Developing "dialectically," the Communist life could

now make sense of the two periods divided by conversion; the

converted self was a "transcended version" of the former,

39 The distinction between the two types of conversion appears in W. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p.189; for a useful elaborated of this theme see, A. Hawkins, Archetypes of Conversion, (London, n.d.).

-24-

unconscious self -- the two were at once identical and

radically distinct. When the tensions in the autobiographer's

existence reached a boiling point, conversion brought about a

"qualitative leap forward" (kachestevnnye skachok) of his soul.

Since continuity and break were tightly woven together within

such dialectical narratives, it was a matter of poetical choice

whether it was the continuity of individual biography that was

stressed (thus conforming to the "lysis conversion" formula) or

the obstacles that had to be overcome in heroic leaps (coming

closer to the "crisis conversion" formula).

Socialist Realism -- a Communist literary genre clearly

in gestation already during the 1920s -- would appear to have

been specially designed to highlight the break that conversion

effected in the autobiographer. The realistic was to the heroic

literary style as the pre-conversion part of an autobiography

was to the post-conversion part. Socialist Realism should not

be confused with what is generally called Realism. Anything but

gloomy, the upbeat heroism of the 1920s literature had little

to do with the humdrum, gray tone of the nineteenth-century

Realist novel. What Communist literary theory called "Heroic

Realism" was an attempt to construct an ideal world, "purged of

old-fashioned (bourgeois) nuances in mood and permeated instead

by a single powerful emotion -- stern zeal, radiant exultation,

heroic resistance, a world where nature appeared only in the

form of a building site or the scene of combat."40 Within the

nineteenth-century context, the Realist Self is a Self that is

controlled by its social and physical environment. In

40 Quoted after I. Golomstock, Totalitarian Art, p.44.

-25-

Bultmann's formulation, such a Self is shaped "only by

historical, economic and social conditions, by his milieu, and

that not only with regard to his fate, but also with regard to

his thoughts and volition and morality. All this is at bottom

nothing but fate, and man himself is not a stable and constant

person. What is constant is only his bodily nature, with its

impulses and passions and its striving for earthly welfare."41

Such matters had to be treated in the Party applicant's initial

depiction of "formative influence of his milieu." At this

stage, the narrative was informed by the Marxist materialistic

determinism -- the autobiographer described the unpleasant but

necessary starting point of his story as an unfortunate state

of mind resulting from an adverse environment. To substantiate

his claim, the autobiographer employed Realist tropes, creating

the impression that the Self renounced responsibility for the

actions which were attributed to it. Typically, he was

"floating" (dreifovat') or "carried by the stream" (plyt' po

techeniiu).

While consciousness and action were emphasized, the

Communist autobiography had a strongly pronounced Romantic side

as well. According to Romanticism, to cite Bultmann again,

humans are able to change the world: "Man is not seen as

qualified by his past. The future is thought of as being at the

disposal of man."42 The Romantic individual has the power to

improve and even to perfect humanity through an act of will.

With the Realist aspect of Socialist Realism in mind, Maxim

41 R. Bultmann, History and Eschatology, (Edinburg, 1957), pp.103-109.

42 Preobrazhenie mira, (Moscow, 1980), p.357.

-26-

Gorky talked about the individual's ability to express the

"basic meaning of reality."43 But Gorky went on to point out that

if we distill from the Realist picture "the probable and the

desirable, and develop the image, we thus obtain Romanticism."

Such Romanticism promotes revolutionary attitude toward reality

that "practically changes the world." The self itself,

according to Gorky, undergoes a change here: "The Bolshevik's

faults are rooted in the past, which he is tirelessly

destroying. His virtues, however, are rooted in the present, in

the work of building the future. [. . .] We have to train

ourselves to appraise the past and the present from the vantage

points of our future goals."44

A split between "what is" and "what ought to be" was

the quintessence of the Communist autobiography.45 And when the

writer crossed the border and entered the land of "what ought

to be," the Romantic side of Social Realism always asserted

itself. Then the author extricated himself from bourgeois

influences and stated asserting his revolutionary will. At the

moment of conversion the autobiographer was supposed to

penetrate into the secret of reality. The understanding that

his environment was a social construct and not a natural given

somehow released him from what had been the reality of that

environment and he thereby became capable of changing it. We

43 Bultmann, loc. cit.

44 Gor'ki i sovetskie pisateli. Neizdannaia perepiska, (Moscow, 1963), p.34. For discussion see, V. Todorov, Red Square, Black Square. Organon for Revolutionary Imagination, (Albany, 1995), pp.116-117.

45 R. Mathewson, The Positive Hero in Russian Literature, (Stanford, 1975), p.5.

-27-

have seen that the crux of Bubnov's text resided in the

contrast between volunteering for the working class army -- a

self-motivated and conscious act which led to conversion -- and

enrolling reluctantly in the ranks of the tsarist Army, "out of

nothing better to do." Before his conversion, Bubnov was

passive and sinful; immediately thereafter he became active and

pure. His ability to act as a conscious Romantic hero was

contingent upon the appearance of an active Self eager to mold

reality in the Communist image.

It was a crucial feature of the poetics of the

Communist autobiography that the description of conversion

involved a shift from the Realist to the Romantic literary

style. While a break in the life of the writer prompts the

reader to look for changes in narrative style, the narrative's

shift from a Realist to a Romantic poetics helps us locate that

pivotal moment in the life story, a moment the autobiographer

sometimes underemphasized for fear of overdoing the contrast

between his present purity and his past sins. It is important

to note here that the moment of conversion is not dictated

solely by the contents of the life; the rupture in the

applicant's life was less a contingent event than a poetical

necessity. The very notion of the autobiographer's journey, in

itself and without any necessary recourse to objective reality,

necessitated a transition from Realism to Romanticism.

The earlier the conversion of the protagonist to

Bolshevik defeatism, the sooner the Romantic tropes made their

appearance. The autobiography of a Communist University student

named Shumilov revolved around revolutionary defeatism, much as

did Bubnov's.46 Wretched living conditions precipitated the

-28-

autobiographer's conversion. Born into the household of an

impoverished village priest, Shumilov labelled himself a "poor

peasant" and construed his early life as an apprenticeship to

opposing the old order. Bubnov's boyhood in a wealthy peasant

household had produced nothing but conformism. Unlike him,

Shumilov, born in Karaksh in Kazan' Province in 1892, spent his

childhood "in a village environment living in a big family of

seventeen. Only shortly before the war did my parents break

away from grandfather's household and establish a household of

their own." Shumilov's dry realistic style is evident in such

sentences as this: "Having become accustomed to agricultural

labor at a young age, at the age of twelve I knew how to handle

a plough."

Shumilov's eschatological journey started very early on

in his life. The autobiographer takes great care to point out

that he was not an illiterate peasant. "I was sent to school at

the age of six and a half." Shumilov claimed to have exhibited

a certain independence of thought already at the study bench.

"Because of my naughty nature, the teacher called me

intransigent," implying that seeds of Bolshevik steadfastness

had been planted in him already during childhood. In 1906, "I

was expelled from the church school in Cheboksary, which came

as a punishment for my participation in a student strike."

Shumilov made himself out to have been a Bolshevik of sorts

from very early on, quite capable of resisting his environment

while still a child; he explicitly identified his school years

as crucial to his revolutionary development: "The institute

46 TsGA IPD, f.197, op.1, d.71, ll.55-56.

-29-

passed on to me nothing but a proclivity to struggle against my

environment and a desire to damn once and for all religious-

spiritual-moralistic edification." In all likelihood, the word

"proclivity" (povadka) was used here in order to connote

animalistic behavior. Describing himself at this stage as

instinctually but not yet consciously revolutionary, Shumilov

employs Realist tropes. The autobiographer stated that "the

recollection of my adolescence made me sad for many years," but

hastened to add, "I did not lose spirit." An early rebel,

Shumilov was also an early romantic.

Expelled from school, Shumilov returned to his village

for the sake of reviving "everyday life and agricultural work."

There he "subdued" his zeal for a time. Still, he was

independent enough to break away from his backward father "who

was selfish by nature, and often took me to task for my

irreverence to authority"; apparently father viewed son as

"almost a lost soul." Shumilov's mother was his "sole

defender." Renouncing religious education -- another sign of

arrival at the Communist consciousness -- Shumilov did not

completely neglect his studies, which would have precluded his

arrival at Bolshevik consciousness. "My motto was to learn at

all costs." So he ultimately graduated from a pedagogical

institute, but life gave him "no chance to become a teacher."

In 1913 Shumilov was drafted into the tsarist army, where he

served until August 1914.

At first, much like Bubnov, Shumilov was subdued in the

face of military discipline: "My will and my mind were taken

into alien hands. Everyone who was in the old army knows how

severe and inhuman it was. Soldiering immediately suppressed my

-30-

youthful impulses." Like Bubnov, Shumilov mentioned his

"youthful impulses," but function of this phrase differed in

the two narratives. Bubnov's natural impulses were selfish and

reactionary, the impulses of a peasant member of the

intelligentsia, and they served to explain his collaboration

with the reactionary camp. Shumilov's natural impulses, since

he had allegedly been born into a poor peasant household, were,

on the contrary, proletarian. Their "suppression" by the

tsarist army, not their "expression," came to explain

Shumilov's participation in the imperialist war. Bubnov the

soldier had to experience a radical change of values before

joining the Bolsheviks, Shumilov the soldier was a slightly

misguided radical who from very early on rebelled against the

tsarist army. Shumilov's reference to the start of the war --

"the manslaughter has begun" has the same anarchonistically

defeatist tone we have encountered in Bubnov's autobiography.

Shumilov depicted himself back in 1914 as cannon fodder for

tsarist imperialism. "Even before we completed drill we found

ourselves on the East Prussian front. During our advance, they

shot at me as if I were a rabbit."

A prisoner of war after only a month on the front,

Shumilov begun an accelerated ideological transformation. With

deep roots in physical labor, and steeped in secular education,

Shumilov turned against the war much faster than did Bubnov,

who, after all, was promoted to the rank of officer. "In the

face of the adversity I experienced, this period of my life was

a landmark in my spiritual revival," Shumilov averred. While

held by the Germans in Bessarabia: "I passed through an ordeal

and experienced a spiritual rebirth. The camp, and the many

-31-

prisoners from all of the allied powers, exercised a profound

influence on both my will and my mind. [. . .] As early as my

second year of captivity I experienced the revelation of the

essence of Being. Until that point, I had been a believer, but

now I lost my faith in religion, which I saw to be foolish. In

the camp, I read plenty of illegal literature. Marxist books

were sent to us from Switzerland. Some said Lenin himself sent

them." Shumilov boasted that he attained a Communist

consciousness "in spite of cold and hunger" (kholod i golod).

Here he clearly styled himself after the extraordinary warrior

of the Russian epic tales -- the mythical knight (bogatyr') who

frequently and effortlessly "goes through fire and blood,"

demonstrating his superiority to destructive natural forces.47

Indeed, thenceforth the presence of Romantic conventions in the

autobiography became unmistakable: Shumilov recounted, for

example, a series of marvelous escapades to show that he was a

Bolshevik who acted on reality rather than being molded by it.

The autobiographer's metamorphosis would become complete after

a stay of five and a half month in infirmaries and another two

years with Bavarian peasants. Shumilov refers to these last as

"these hard-working laborers, who meshed in my mind with

Bavarian mountains and towers." If for Bubnov the Civil War was

the key transformative experience, for Shumilov, who had gotten

a head start, the spiritual turning point had occurred already

during World War I. By 1917, Shumilov was prepared to join the

Revolution. In his words, "when the Russian Revolution erupted,

47 Clark, The Soviet Novel, pp.73-74.

-32-

our dreams -- to be free, to go to a now liberated Russia --

came true."

Another autobiographer, Anfalov, a student at Leningrad

Communist University, was a revolutionary almost from birth. A

model of conscious resistance to the imperialist war, Anfalov

could claim Bolshevik credentials superior to Shumilov's, and

certainly to Bubnov's. Once he has mentioned his birth into a

peasant family in 1896 Vologda province, this petitioner is

very chary of other details about his childhood and

adolescence. All we get to know is that Anfalov graduated from

a one-year zemstvo school, and worked in his father's household

until 1915. Sent in February 1917 to the front, he took an

active anti-war stance, and in March 1917 joined the ranks of

the Bolshevik Social Democratic Party, where he was admitted to

the cell of the sixteenth special regiment. Since it amounted

to finding and embracing the party that expressed the views he

had always held, Anfalov's conversion followed naturally from

those stages in his life that preceded it.

Anfalov converted early. While Bubnov fought in the

ranks of the Imperial army and Shumilov marked time in German

captivity, Anfalov was already consciously executing the

directives of the Bolshevik Party. A good defeatist, Anfalov

subverted the war effort of the Provisional Government: "At the

behest of our cell, I engaged in agitation against Kerenshchina

among the soldiers of my regiment. Kerenskii insisted upon the

military offensive and the officers corps supported him. I

distributed Bolshevik leaflets and our newspaper, The Truth of

the Trenches. Later I took an active role in conducting the

elections of the commanders and the organization of regiment

-33-

and company soldier committees." Spirited and bustling with

activity, Anfalov describes himself in the Romantic key

practically throughout his account. His anti-war agitation made

Anfalov so popular among the soldiers that they

enthusiastically elected him to the company's committee. Later

he was sent to participate in the Army Congress in Dvinsk.

Having grown accustomed to Anfalov's unending parade of

exploits, the reader is hardly be surprised to learn that the

autobiographer credited himself with helping demobilize the old

army, with working on behalf of the provincial Party

committee's military department at the provincial executive

committee and with assisting in creating the Red Army.48

The Illiberal Self

Autobiographies served not only to reassert the Communist

identity of their student authors but also to guide the

multitude still in darkness. According to Marx's famous

scenario, the proletariat was to develop from an implicit,

unreflective mode of existence as an objectively given economic

category, a "class in itself," to its explicit and self-

conscious state as a revolutionary subject, a "class for

itself." In the Communist autobiographical writing the

attainment of adequate self-understanding was tantamount to the

acquisition of "consciousness" -- a crucial word in the

Communist lexicon. While the meaning of "consciousness" in the

autobiographies under study was multifaceted thanks to its

48 TsGA IPD, f.197, op.1, d.71, ll.69-71.

-34-

importance to the Western tradition, it is clear that in the

Communist usage "consciousness" did not have the highly

individualistic overtones sometimes attached to that term in

liberal discourse. In Communist autobiographies, the Christian,

ethical and subjective meaning of consciousness, based on the

notion of consciousness as "conscience," a trial of the

interior self, was fused with the other sense of consciousness

which, after Descartes, came to denote an awareness of

something objective outside of the self. Reviving the original

duality of the Latin conscientia, which had both an ethical and

an epistemological sense, the Communist "consciousness"

combined the sense of knowledge of the external world and the

sense of a moral imperative residing in the internal soul.

While the Party believed that a Communist became aware of the

world only when he purified his consciousness, the inverse also

held: the Communist's comprehension of his own soul was the

fruit of his insight into the ways of the world. Self and the

world, the subjective and the objective, the two aspects of the

same reality. The boundary separating the subjective and the

objective was porous -- the "objective world" was nothing but

the reification of laboring humanity.49

Communist poetics posited an intricate relation between

universal history and autobiographical narrative. The universal

epic of human emancipation and the individual life-story

converged when the author was indeed a specific manifestation

of the proletarian movement. But how could such a state of

things be realized? Was the relation between the

49 H. Hepworth and B. Turner, Confession. Studies in Deviance and Religion, (London, 1982), pp.85, 93.

-35-

autobiographer’s self, with its limited perspective on life and

its unavoidable idiosyncrasies and the objective truth so dear

to scientific Marxism not necessarily contradictory? In other

words, how could Communist autobiography somehow remain true to

science? In a preamble to his autobiographical essay from 1925

Bogdanov asked himself whether his voice could be removed from

his narrative and whether he should strive to that end.

I used to dream that, toward the end of my life’s journey, I

will write a book which will describe everything I

experienced objectively. My Self was not supposed to be

present in this narrative, only the socially real and the

socially significant. Later I realized that this naive,

illusory dream, is based on two mistakes: first, it is wrong

to think that one can remove one’s Self from the narrative;

second, it is wrong to think that objectivism demands

anything of the sort. To be sure, one can refrain from

mentioning oneself. But nothing except needless

difficulties, artificially and falsehood will come out of

that. By necessity, one can write only about what one saw

himself and about how one understood what one saw; what one

saw one saw with one’s own eyes and what one understood one

understood in accordance with one’s own way of comprehending

things. Neither the one nor the other can be removed even if

one meticulously crosses out the particle “I” from

everywhere in the narrative. [. . .] The memoirist is not

precluded from being an impartial observer and a scientific

interpreter. Doubtless, he has a point of view, he operates

with his own methods. But in what sense are these his own?

In so far that he himself belongs to a collective – a class

or a social group [. .. ] -- his personality is only a small

point of application of various social forces, one of the

zillion points where these forces intersect – and in so far

-36-

that his point of view and mode of apprehension belong to

these forces, embody and express them, it would be more

correct to say that his personality belongs to these forces

than the other way around.50

When then an autobiographer’s point of view could be described

as scientific? “When it was inspired by the most progressive

collective armed with the widest experience.” Because Bogdanov

believed the autobiography he produced voiced the perspective

of the only class that had custody over science he had no doubt

his personal, inner truth and the truth of the Marxist science

were one and the same. Having recognized himself in the story

of Communist emancipation, a Communist autobiographer shifted

the center of gravity of his personal identity. What became

fundamental to his self-description was not his concrete,

individual being, but his contribution, no matter how small, to

universal emancipation. Every person who applied for admission

to the Party had to embrace the idea that the Party embodied

the truth about his own self and that his life was meaningless

outside it.

This emphasis on collectivism and objective truth meant

that Communists had to reject the liberal ethos of

individualism, with its validation of open-ended personal

growth. A Party autobiography was very different from a liberal

autobiography precisely because it had a predetermined goal --

the light of Communism. Since the Communist Self was openly and

deliberately set up in opposition to the liberal Self the

50 A. A. Bogdanov (Malinovskii). Stat’I, doklady, pis’ma I

vospominaniia, 1901-1928, N. S. Antonova and N. V. Drozdova

(eds.), (Moscow, 1995), vol.1, pp.23-24.

-37-

latter merits a brief examination. The liberal conception of

the Self, as Karl Weintraub demontrates, “is apposite to a

belief in society as a highly differentiated social mass.”

Liberalism thinks much of the features that distinguish one

individual from another presenting them not as accidental

variation from the norm but as a precious aspect of human

existence. “For when a man concludes that his very self

represents one unique and unrepealable form of being human, it

becomes the perceived task in life to `fulfill', to actualize

this very specific individuality.” Man, Weintraub goes on to

say, will commit a terrible crime against the human cosmos “if

he neglects to fulfill his individuality or if he falsifies it,

for if he does, he impoverishes humanity in leaving one of its

variants forever unexpressed.”51

Such liberal values were of course anathema to any

decent Communist. Nothing could be more remote from the system

of values he held dear. "Will I really be different from the

others?” was an oft repeated anguished cry. “The mere idea of

it makes my hair stand on end and my body shiver."52 When a

Communist autobiographer dwelt on the autonomous aspect of his

life, he referred to it as "my illicit existence" (moe

nelegal'noe sushchestvovanie). True, when he described the pre-

revolutionary period, he could be boasting of having been

unmoved by official ideology. But when turning to the period

after 1917, the autobiographer had to become quite willing to

surrender in the contest between Party influence and his inner

51 K. Weintraub, "Autobiography and Historical Consciousness," Critical Inquiry, vol.1, (1975), pp.838-839.

52 Kozlova, p.134.

-38-

self. An autonomous self was an imperfect self. He who kept a

part of himself to himself "failed to write himself into the

new order," "got himself torn off" (otorvalsia), “became a

dissenter" (otshchepenets). Consider the venom which

Manuil’skii directed at Skrypnik’s supposed ego mania at the XI

Party Congress (1922): “We know Skrypnik as a seasoned and

distinguished revolutionary, but we also know him as one who

has, if you please, his own, special view (svoe, svoeobraznoe

mnenie) on each and every issue.53

The January 1924 declaration by a Leningrad State

University student named Lopatnikov bewails the loss of a sense

of complete fusion with the Party. Lopatnikov contrasted his

Civil War sense of belonging to his vacuous present.

During my service in the Red Army I made various

contributions to the cultural front. At that time I had the

orders and advice of my comrades and commissars to follow.

At present I can hardly do any good. After my

demobilization, I became an isolated being, longing to

contribute to a larger whole but unable to. This tiny unit

-- myself -- is a subject of distrust by Communists. [. . .]

I need somebody who will lead me. Only the Party collective

can effectively guide my work. I am familiar with the

program of the Communist Party and this program corresponds

to my political convictions. I have a great longing to take

part in the rebuilding of the Soviet Union.

53 Odinnadtsatyi s”ezd RKP(b), p.115.

-39-

Lopatnikov bewailed the gulf that had opened between him and

the collective. Emphasizing that he had no masters but the

Party, Lopatnikov promised "to carry out all the decisions of

the Party organs."54

If History was the Communist grand narrative,

autobiography was its application to a particular life. While

the promise of universal emancipation inspired each

autobiographical story, the Communist's individual conversion

foreshadowed the proletarian emancipation as a whole. Such

parallels explain the resemblance between the outcome of

History and the conclusion of Communist autobiographies.

Communist self-realization was absolutely impossible without

the attunement of the individual self to the general course of

History. The drama of the Communist autobiography hinged on the

author's recognition that the life story of a singular and

autonomous individual had to be shattered and recreated as the

story of a life lived for the sake of the proletarian movement.

Converted to Communist collectivism, the autobiographer

typically placed his life experience within the broad

metaphorical structure the Party was advancing, thereby

suggesting that the Communist story was relevant to his own

self-understanding and everyday conduct.

Acutely aware that admission to the brotherhood of the

elect depended on his capacity to identify with the Communist

narrative and accept this narrative as his own, Belokosterov, a

student at Smolensk Institute, recapitulated in his

autobiography the basic layout of the Communist master story.55

54 TsGA IPD, f.984, op. 1, d.72, l.17.

-40-

And from the very beginning, Belokosterov's life and the

political process were closely linked. The autobiography opened

thus: "My father, a peasant, was a victim of the conditions the

[old] regime created in the army. After his death my mother

went to the city to earn a living, leaving me with my

grandparents." Since his summers were spent laboring and his

winters studying, the narrator quickly learned that he who does

not work shall not eat. "Upon arriving in the city, I knew that

I must either look for a job or starve." Though the situation

on the city's labor market prevented his holding any job but

being at "the back and call of another," Belokosterov left no

doubt in the reader's mind that he had experienced the class

struggle from the workers' side of the barricade. The

concomitant class resentment soon appeared: "It was in the city

that I first encountered the most shameless exploitation. It so

insulted my not-yet-strengthened soul that I started to loathe

the existing order with every bit of my soul. In the meanwhile,

the Revolution was ripening." Carefully following the poetic

prescriptions, Belokosterov made it clear that objective

development and his subjective transformation could not be

separated. As the objective economic relations between

capitalism and labor sharpened, the autobiographer's

proletarian identity crystallized.

Belokosterov's autobiography is exceptional in its

sensitivity toward the phenomenological aspects of the

protagonist's development. Eloquent descriptions trace the

injuries to a young, impressionable soul by bloodsuckers,

55 Smolensk Archive (henceforth, WKP), 326, ll.61, 124-126.

-41-

prompting the growth of an immeasurable hatred toward the

tsarist order. While objective conditions are certainly part of

the narrative, the accompanying inner movements of

Belokosterov's soul are carefully detailed. The autobiographer

begins by experiencing life "unconsciously," then with the

growth of the revolutionary movement his deep-seated worker

identity blossoms. The parallels between the move of the

proletarian class from potentiality to actuality on the

objective, universal level as well as on the subjective,

particular level was the pivot around which Belokosterov's

narrative revolved. Nowhere in his autobiography did the author

celebrate either himself or his own autonomy. Discovering his

personal self was only a vehicle to a higher end, which was the

celebration of the Communist movement. When the Revolution

erupted, Belokosterov opened his eyes, came to know who he

really was, and applied to the Party. Thus, the revolutionary

consciousness of one man and the consciousness of the entire

Russian working class evolved in tandem. His fate and the fate

of the Revolution became one: "When the ominous time came, when

the circle of our foes -- Kolchak, Iudenich, Denikin,

surrounded the workers' republic from all directions -- I,

together with my Party cell, volunteered to go to the front."

The fusion of the autobiographer with the Party community was

now complete: as soon as he saw that the republic was in

danger, Belokosterov went to wage the Bolshevik war "together

with his comrades."

It is tempting to read Belokosterov's autobiography in

the psychological key, interpreting the text as a symptomatic

composition by an exceptionably vulnerable young individual.

-42-

Desperate to overcome his insecurity and find an firm anchor in

life, so this reading goes, Belokosterov was urged to embrace

the Party which promised him the sense of warmth and belonging

he lacked so badly. This sort of emphasis on the supposedly

immutable psychological features of the individual, however,

turns the tropes that went into the construction of the

autobiographer's self-image into psychological truisms. Whereas

for the psychologist the psyche is an immutable given that

adapts only slightly to its environment, for the Communist the

self is open to a radical deconstruction. With Paul Jay, I

contend the inevitable difference between identity and

discourse "disrupting the smooth transposition of the

psychological subject of an autobiographical text (the author)

into its literary subject (its protagonist)."56 Belokosterov's

needed Communist poetics to construct his neurosis. His

autobiography tells us little about the psychological

deficiencies of Soviet men and women and a great deal about the

core Communist assumption that no individual could possibly

feel fulfilled outside the proletarian community.

The Party expected its members to submerge themselves

in the Communist community without any residue of

individuality. It was the collectivity that would provide the

model for individual self-construction, and the official

discourse never praised loners, no matter what their

contribution to the defeat of the bourgeoisie. Since the

autobiographer willingly sacrificed his autonomy, the model

Communist self can be described as profoundly "Illiberal." The

56 P. Jay, Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes, (Ithaca, 1984), p.29.

-43-

central values of liberalism -- all tied to the Romantic

celebration of the individual -- were the despised sins of

student autobiographies. To cite Weintraub again: "He need not

ask himself whether this or that is fitting to him, fitting his

personal nature. [. . .] His striving will not give him a

feeling of being hemmed in by a prescriptive mold; there is no

occasion to lament not being permitted to `be himself'."57 There

was no sense of falsifying one's own nature. "Every Communist,

every participant in the Revolution," wrote Viktor Serge,

"feels himself to be the humblest servant of a limitless cause.

The highest praise that can be bestowed on him is to say that

he has `no private life', that his life has fused totally with

History."58 Or, as Trotsky put it, "Great events taught us to

subordinate our subjectivity to the objective rhythm of

History."59

It is little wonder that the Communist autobiographies

are so conspicuously uniform. Uniformity should be expected

when the Self is conceived as something that develops according

to rational laws so that what was present in nuce from the very

beginning of life gradually unfolds by a necessary,

predetermined sequentiality. The Communist individual was a

part of a predestined historical process designed to enable him

to regain his proper, authentic relation to society. The

protagonist of the autobiography functioned according to his

historical role. Naturally the Communist autobiography was

57 Weintraub, p.837.

58 V. Serge, The Year One of the Russian Revolution, (New York, 1972), p.367.

59 Biulleten' oppozitsii, nn.68-69, (1938), p.19.

-44-

depersonalized. What counted was not the individual as such but

the active presence of the Communist light in the individual.

Since the Communist message was one, the more conscious the

Party member, the less individualized he was.

Gorky's autobiographical stories of the 1920s were

written as a reaction against Rousseau's celebration of unique

individuality. A subject of much ridicule among Bolshevik

literary critics, Rousseau's Confessions opened thus: "I am

constituted in a special way, differently than anybody I have

ever met. I dare to think that there is no one like me under

the sun. Though I may not be better than others, I am certainly

unlike all others." Calling Rousseau the "apostle of

individualism [. . .] with its odious cult of social

alienation," Gorky preferred to see himself as someone "born

from within the popular mass." Criticizing all "illusion of the

independence of individual consciousness from the conditions of

the epoch and the influences of class environment," he shied

away from the notion that he was a "unique" (iskliuchitel'nyi)

and totally "original" (original'nyi) creature. Gorky was proud

to have fashioned himself upon the "collective worldview of

Communism, with its scorn for a Self which considers itself a

pinnacle of the enormous pyramid of popular experience." His

multiple autobiographical narratives "tried to substitute for

the lyrical accent of the autobiographical genre an epic one,"

dedicating much space not just to Gorky's own, "individual

self," but also to the description of "the world around me."60

60 E. Tager, "Avtobiograficheskie rasskazy Gor'kogo 20-kh godov," Gor'kovskie chteniia, (Moscow, 1954), pp.283-286. Gorky's autobiographical stories were published in, Krasnaia nov', nn.1-6, (1923).

-45-

That the liberal quest for personal uniqueness was

completely alien to the Communist notion of the Self does not

mean, however, that all sense of individualism was absent. Two

out of the three notions of individualism discussed by

Foucault, namely, "the positive valuation of private life" and

"the degree of independence conceded to the individual vis-a-

vis the group," were indeed alien to the Party ethics. But the

third notion of individualism Foucault mentions, "the intensity

of the relations of self, that is, of the forms in which one is

called upon to take oneself as an object of knowledge and a

field of action, so as to transform, correct, and purify

oneself and find salvation," was certainly affirmed by the

Party and was even held to be extremely important.61 Since each

Party applicant would find his own way to the light,

particularizing his life story, Communist autobiographies were

never absolutely identical. As we shall have plenty of

opportunity to see, some room for variation within the genre

always remained. Insofar as no model for the Self could ever be

filled out to the last detail or provide guidelines for every

single aspect of human existence, the Communist writer could

always find room for his idiosyncrasies in the spaces unfilled

by the basic structure of the autobiographical genre. In fact,

students whose self-presentations mechanically reproduced

official schemes and turns of phrase without enriching these

with inner substance risked the accusation of "dissimulation,"

"hiding behind formulas," and, ultimately, of shielding from

the public eye a Self hostile toward Communism.

61 M. Foucault, The Care of the Self, p.42.

-46-

Was the autobiography not a genre that was supposed to

enable the individual to break loose from the crowd? And was

Communist autobiography not anomalous in that it had the

opposite effect of strengthening the bond between the

individual and the collective? Gusdorf has proposed a

distinction between "public" and "private" autobiographical

types. The confessional, "private" type of autobiography,

Gusdorf claims, appears only in cultures that possess a self-

consciousness due to a phenomenon akin to the Christian ascetic

tradition of self-examination. Suggesting Augustine's

Confessions as the locus classicus of the private

autobiography, Gusdorf points out that in confessional

Christianity each man was accountable for his own behavior, and

intentions weighed as heavily as acts. Inversely, in cultures

with a taboo even on viewing one's own image in a mirror, the

"public autobiography" developed. Here the perspective was

external to the Self and the autobiographical text centered not

on self-exploration but on making an impression on posterity.

The autobiographer recorded the events of his own life as a

biographer would and the text he produced was a public document

which projected a certain positive image of its author as an

actor on the historical stage. Gusdorf's example of a public

autobiography was the memoir of the Cardinal de Retz, who

reconstructed all of the battles he had actually lost as

victories.62

What has been said so far of the illiberal self

suggests, however, that Communist autobiographies did not lend

62 G. Gusdorf, "Conditions and Limits of Autobiography," p.33.

-47-

themselves easily to this kind of typology. Communist

autobiographies cannot be described as belonging to either the

private or the public autobiographical type because they

straddled both types. The substantial degree of elision of the

boundaries between the public and the private in defining the

Self sets the Communist autobiography apart from traditional

autobiographical writing. Unlike "private" autobiographers, the

Communist autobiographer's notion of individual emancipation

was strongly related to the larger political project defined by

Communism. Distinguishing and integrating the Self in History

were two basic functions in a permanent state of tension. This

tension, to paraphrase on John Marcus, was one of the primary

forces behind the `activism' characteristic of the Communist

autobiography, behind the sense of its protagonist's direct

personal involvement in the course of events. In its function

of giving relevance to the particular and of providing a sense

of individuality, the Communist myth gave a prominent role to

the individual Self as the agent of History.63

The demand placed on the Party applicant that he link

his individual conversion with the proletariat awakening forced

him to compose an autobiography that transcended his individual

history and pertained to the history of the revolutionary

movement in general. "My work after February," stated Skrypnik

in his autobiography, "like that of every Party member who

participated in all the events of the revolutionary struggle,

was so closely bound up with the Revolution that if I were to

describe it, I would have to write the history of the

63 J. Marcus, "The World Impact of the West," H. Murray ed., Myth and Mythmaking, (Boston, 1968), p.225.

-48-

Revolution itself."64 Shliapnikov concluded his autobiography

with a similar elision of all distinction between his private

self and the history of the Party. “This is the tally of my

activities up to 1920: to get into details would mean to number

a large part of events that have to do with the Revolution,

events in which I participated.”65

In such an autobiography, the most intimate events had

to have a public significance because every personal

tribulation either facilitated conversion or retarded it.

Inversely, it was impossible to omit world historical events

concurrent with the autobiographer's private life because they

could not but influence his consciousness in one way or

another. Contingent historical events were never presented as

insignificant or external or as a force that interfered with

inner transformations; rather, they had to be built into the

life story as enriching elements. Bourgeois victories propelled

the autobiographical plot forward by awakening the author's

class anger and proletarian victories did the same by filling

his soul with enthusiasm. The flow of History was a central

formative element in the life of an admirable individual.66

The Communist "practice of the self," we can say by way

of conclusion, has two aspects: on the one hand, it corresponds

to a movement toward the interior, private self: a Communist

64 Makers of the Russian Revolution. Biographies of Bolshevik Leaders, G. Haupt and J.J. Marie, (eds.), (London, 1974), p.232.

65 Deiateli SSSR, p.770.

66 Weintraub, pp.832-833.

-49-

liberates oneself from the externals of the bourgeois world,

from idle attachment to sensual objects and to the philistine

pleasures which these can offer; he seeks to be his own master,

to possess himself, to find his happiness in internal

resoluteness and freedom. However, this movement of

interiorisation is inseparably linked to another movement in

which a Communist, having raised oneself to a higher level of

consciousness, rediscovers another type of exteriorization,

another relationship with the exterior which consists in being

aware of oneself as a part of the movement, as a particle of

messianic class. A Communist, then, lives no longer in the

conventional and usual human world but in the proletarian world

of the future.67

Guarding the Party Gates

Without the context of an eschatological narrative, the statute

that guided the operation of the cells of the Communist Party

does not make much sense. Every narrative enacts a community

structure that corresponds with its basic values: just as the

Homeric epic produced ancient aristocratic "heroes" who thought

of themselves as potent protagonists of a magnificent saga and

just as the Sophoclean tragedy gave birth to the "citizens" who

defended their values in the public arena of the polis, so the

Communist tale of universal emancipation created "comrades" in

the omniconcious "brotherhood of the elect (izbrannye)."68

67 For a related discussion see, P. Hadot, "Reflections on the notion of the `cultivation of the self'," in, T. Armstrong, (ed.), Michel Foucault, Philosopher. (New York, 1992), pp.229-230.

-50-

Admission to the Party was viewed by no one as mundane and

routine. Certainly it was not a rote mechanism for filling the

ranks of the nascent Soviet bureaucracy. No matter how

technically skilled an applicant might be, the Party would not

hesitate to reject his application if it meant protecting the

"purity (chistota) of the Communist ranks." Imbued with deep

symbolic significance, initiation into the brotherhood of the

elect was construed as a liberating countercultural formation

of the New Man, a human being on a totally new spiritual

plateau. And those who won the right to a Party card were held

to high standards. "When a Communist misbehaves ordinary

citizen will evaluate his actions in a totally different

light."69

Moral iconoclasm directed at the humdrum, petty

realities of the transitional period was built into the

structure of the Communist autobiographical narrative. In their

self-presentations, Party members drew on the long tradition of

revolutionary ascetics who left their comfortable lives behind.70

Trotsky wrote that "preparing for the future each revolutionary

easily reconciles himself to the deprivations of the present."71

Membership in the Party meant a new set of standards for

viewing one's self. One might call these standards the

commandments of a sect in which a brotherhood of the elected

68 "Politicheskie partii posle oktiabria," Molodaia gvardiia, no.1-2, (1922), pp.103-104.

69 TsGA IPD, f.566, op.1, d.255, l.19.

70 B. Mazlish, The Revolutionary Ascetic: Evolution of a Political Type, (New York, 1976).

71 Biulleten' oppozitsii, 1937, nn.62-63, p.5.

-51-

assisted novices through instruction in a set of social

attitudes -- all of this the prelude to classless paradise.72

To sharpen the contrast between its own values of

sacrifice, equality and commonality and the values familiar to

the student from the profane and unregenerate world he had just

abandoned, Communism introduced unique symbols -- revolutionary

songs, triangular stars, the hammer and sickle, etc. In

addressing each other with "Comrade," (tovarishch), Party

members stressed both the fraternity they currently enjoyed and

the gulf between their world and the world of "masters and

slaves" they had abandoned. Laying stress on the militarized

aspect of the Bolshevik spirit, Trotsky said in 1919 that in

the face of Communist commissars we have a "new Communist order

of samurai."73 Two years later Stalin similarly presented the

Party as a “Soviet order of sword bearers (mechenostsy)."74

Another important set of practices transmitted to those

who entered the Party involved stealth and secrecy. The

conversion of the population, after all, was as yet incomplete

and class enemies still abounded, so the perpetuation of

practices developed during the underground period was

unavoidable. "In carrying their policy through," one

contemporary reported, "the Party relies primarily on its

cadres -- the sole recipients of political communiques and

special instructions. The least significant members know much

72 E. Francis, "Towards a Typology of Religious Orders," American Journal of Sociology, vol.55, (1950); R. Stites, Revolutionary Dreams, (Oxford, 1989). Among civilians, only Party members were permitted to carry arms. TsGA IPD, f.24, op.2b, d.1015, l.15.

7367Trotsky, Sochineniia, vol.17, p.326.

7468Stalin, Sochineniia, vol.5, p.71.

-52-

more than any among the unaffiliated."75 Only those students who

could "preserve conspiratorial regulations" (sobliudat'

konspiratsiiu) and discreetly handle top secret materials could

apply to become Communists. Politically sensitive Party

meetings were conducted behind closed doors and "information

leakages" (utechka informatsii) were severely punished. As soon

as a secret meeting ended, classified correspondence was

"returned to sender" via special GPU convoys. Personnel

records, such as alphabetical cards and registration books,

were kept in special fireproof safes; some Party documents were

burnt "immediately after reading."76 "It is natural that

classified documents are not available to all," explained Party

record-keeping regulations. Only highly placed Communists in

the regional Party committees could decide who might see what

material and when.77

But in many ways the Party was not a cabal at all.

Although the initiated broke away from the ordinary citizenry,

nothing could be more alien to their sense of self than the

idea of belonging to a secret society. At the XI Party Congress

Zinoviev stated: “We have to use our entire apparatus to teach

the working class youth not to be self-enclosed, not to look at

the Party as a privileged estate, an aristocracy of sorts, but

as a Party with which the mass has to be linked at all times.”78

The basic Communist ethos was extroverted, not introverted; and

7569Kozlova, pp.105-106.

7670TsGA IPD, f.566, op.1, d.288, l.11.

7771TsGA IPD, f.566, op.1, d.268, l.8.78 Odinnadtsatyi s”ezd RKP(b), p.229.

-53-

conversion was never restricted to a chosen elite. As world-

redeemers, the converts spoke not only against society but also

for it; it all depended on whether it was the old or the new

society that was meant.

The Communist conversion has to be understood within

the context of a historical, dynamic view of society, a society

that undergoes a radical conversion of its own. The bourgeois

social order that was passing and the proletarian social order

that was shaping up were stretched, in the Communist

imagination, along the same temporal and spatial continuum; a

new society was to hatch directly from the old. Rather than

waiting for the messiah, Communists were to become messiahs in

their own right, messiahs who revolutionize the society in

which they lived. Even as they decried the moribund bourgeois

world as incomplete, depraved, at times even wicked, Party

members had to hold their breath and dive into it to save their

brothers.

If some aspects of the Party seemed sectarian and

others assimilationist, one may plot university Party cell

midway between the two extremes. Supposedly free from ties of

kinship and local roots -- "nepotism" (semeistvennost') was

regarded as a grave sin -- Party members were expected to be

active in other arenas. Alongside their responsibilities in the

cell, they had to serve on the various boards of university

government or in the state administration. Neither entirely in

society nor out of it, Party members combined the role of

spiritual pastors with the responsibility of state

administrators.79

-54-

The Communist convert who was admitted to the Party

acquired something like angelic attributes. This in two senses,

one cognitive, the other pragmatic. That conversion enhanced

epistemological capabilities and closed much of the gap that

separated the subject and the ideal realm was not a new idea.

When Christ taught the chosen to imitate God -- "You therefore

are to be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect"

(Matt. 5:48) -- he came close to asserting that men could leap

into the transcendental.80 The duty of mediating between the

ideal and the real constitutes the second way Party members

executed angelic functions. (Communists clearly did not

resemble the saints, those religious virtuosos who often had

little commerce with the world outside, since Communists were

not permitted to bask in the light of the perfection they have

attained.81) American Puritans, according to Bercovitch, believed

they were on a "historical mission of mankind." This sense of

mission combined the conviction that they were elect with a

determination "not to withdraw from the world but to reform

it."82 A similar attitude prompted Lenin to look for a "militant

7972"Praviashchaia partiia ostavalas' podpolnoi," Istochnik, vol.5-6, (1993), pp.88-94.

-55-

organization of agents" that will mediate between citizens and

their salvation.83

What was it that ultimately bound together those

fortunate enough to join the community of the elect? Was it

something we might call "Communist culture"? By culture

historians usually mean the expression of what a particular

8073According to Geza Vermes, the elect in the ancient Jewish Dead Sea communities believed that they were transformed into angels. "Knowledge and grace [and] rigorous separation from the world of the wicked," they claimed, "enabled the Community to be part, even in life, of the fellowship of the Sons of Heaven" able to join their voices to those of the "Angels of the Presence." G. Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, pp.39-42.

8174On nomenklature see, T. Rigby, "Staffing USSR Incorporated: The Origins of the Nomenklatura System," Soviet Studies, vol.40, (1988); T. Korzhikhina and Iu. Figatner, "Sovetskaia nomenklatura: stanovlenie, mekhanizmy deistviia." Voprosy istorii, no.7, (1993).

8275S. Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, (Madison, 1978), p.38. Puritans, whom Walzer compares to Communists, "tended to praise the angels not for their purely intellectual being, but for [. . .] `the quick dispatch of the angels in their business'." Walzer, pp.155, 162-163.

8376Klinghoffer, pp.97-99. L. Coser, "The Militant Collective: Jesuits and

Leninists," Social Research, vol.40, (1973), 112-117. When closely inspected,

it is clear that the source of authority within the Party was spiritual and not

bureaucratic. The Bolshevik nomenklatura system was less a bureaucratic table

of ranks than a spiritual ladder. The "scale" (mashtab) of the position one was

assigned to depended on one's "level of consciousness" (uroven' soznaniia) and

not on administrative expertise. Who could best carry out the duties of a

Communist proselytizer -- that was the question that preoccupied the special

Party commission which came to Tomsk in 1925 to evaluate the students at the

local university. On that particular occasion, the balance sheet was

disappointing -- most of the comrades "were deficient in terms of their

personal development." Only every sixth student was "capable of agitating on

-56-

community or social group has in common -- a totality of

socially transmitted behavioral patterns, institutions and

beliefs that maintain order, meaning and social cohesion.

Communism was certainly a cultural system in the sense that it

possessed a certain unanimity of conceptualization reinforcing

ties among the initiated. And yet there were bitter conflicts

within the brotherhood of the elect over procedure and meaning.

To be sure, Party admission procedures presumed a shared set of

assumptions regarding the purity of the Communist brotherhood

of the elect; however, they were also a zone of bitter

contestation over what model of purity had to go into the

construction of Communist identity. What constituted an

appropriate model was something worth fighting over, since the

results could show that one's own group most fully deserved

membership whereas one's opponents deserved nothing better than

being purged. Patterns of spiritual activism, to paraphrase

Suzanne Desan, were not a conciliating and consensus-creating

cultural system but an ambiguous and contested ritual that

sowed insecurity and discord. It is debatable whether the

obsession with purity central to Communist culture set limits

on intra-Party violence (this aspect is examined in the first

part of the book), or whether the struggle over the definition

of purity eventually tore the Communist community apart (as the

final chapter dedicated to the Great Purge will show).84

the district level, and only a total of two were seen as fit to agitate on the

regional level." Izvestiia TsK RKP(b), nn.97-98, June 22, 1925; PATO, f.17,

op.1, d.631, l.57.

-57-

The distinction between "us" and "them" was

particularly inflammatory in the universities, where

"proletarians" and "petit-bourgeois" studied side by side.

Suspecting that many students were alien elements, the Party

made admissions to the academic Party cells more complicated.

No student could hope to enter the Party without strong

recommendations. The status of the recommenders was crucial,

and after he had received the candidate's autobiography and

opened a "personal file" (lichnoe delo) on the applicant, the

secretary of the Party cell carefully recorded the

recommenders' names, Party card numbers and Party standing.85

Students coming directly from the factory were obliged to

provide three recommendations from Communists with at least

three years of Party standing. Students classified as

"employees" and "youngsters who had no occupation before

commencing studies" somehow had to come up with five letters of

recommendation from Party members with at least five year

standing.

While students were expected to take the initiative in

gathering recommendations, conscientious Communist were duty

bound to "lure" (vovlekat') the uninitiated into the

brotherhood of the elect. The Party expected members to cast

their gaze on the student body and single out the most

deserving. Those who chose to support an application had to

assume a considerable responsibility: the recommender had to

8479S. Desan, "Crowds, Community and Ritual in the Work of E. P. Thompson and Natalie Davis," The New Cultural History, L. Hunt, (ed.), (Berkeley, 1989); R. Chartier, "Texts, Symbols and Frenchness," Journal of Modern History, 57, (1985), pp.689-690.

85 Izvestiia TsK RKP(b), no.45, September 1922.

-58-

aver that the "personal qualities of the student were

absolutely indispensable for the work of the Party

organization." Additionally, the recommender had to answer the

following questions:

How long have you known the applicant?

How well do you know him?

Did you meet the applicant at work or on a social

occasion?

What are the applicant's merits and what are his

shortcomings?

What are the applicant's motives for applying?

Is the applicant motivated by a genuine desire to be a

Party member, follow Party directives and abide by Party

ethics?

In what way has the applicant demonstrated his commitment

to Communism in practice?86

At the end of his letter of support, the recommender signed his

full name and specified his Party standing, position, Party

card number and occupation.

Throughout the 1920s, Party authorities took measures to

insure that recommendations were serious and sincere, not

merely written "out of politeness (iz liubeznosti)." Bukharin

noted at the X Party Congress (March 1921) that, “those who do

not issue recommendations cautiously deserve to be purged.87 Few

months later Lenin proposed that letters be accepted only from

persons who had observed the work of the applicant for at least

86 TsGA IPD, f.984, op.1, d.126, ll.158-162.

-59-

one year; the suggestion was accepted and entered into the

Party statute.88

Toward the end of the twenties, authorities continued to

exhibit anxiety that letters were ill-founded or insincere.

After a secret circular from the Siberian Control Commission

informed the Tomsk Technological Institute that local

Communists had "recommended socially alien individuals to the

Party," the buro demanded notification regarding each and every

recommendation issued.89 And it was officially stipulated that

recommenders "carry full responsibility for their proteges,"

and that cases of "irresponsible support of a candidate" would

lead to recommenders being either reprimanded or even purged

from the Party, "depending on the severity of their mistake."90

This was not just bluster, as was demonstrated in the

case of Ershov. On April 10, 1924 a student from the Petrograd

Agricultural Institute was arrested. After nearly three months

of detention GPU released the student, whose name was Ershov,

on the condition that he not return to Petrograd. Ershov found

this stricture unjust: "My conviction was obviously based on a

misunderstanding or on malignant libel." Announcing everybody

who would listen that he planned to take his appeal as high as

VTsIK, if necessary, Ershov requested a recommendation that

87 Desiatyi s”ezd RKP(b), p.232.

88 Lenin, PSS, vol.44, p.123. This suggestion was accepted in 1922 and entered the Party stature. O. Obichkin, Kratkii ocherk istorii ustava KPSS, (Moscow, 1986), pp.73-74

89 PATO, f.17, op.1, d.1065, ll.6-7.

90 O. Obichkin, Kratkii ocherk istorii ustava KPSS, (Moscow, 1986), p.83.

-60-

would "say the truth about my work in the student organizations

as well as my general political profile." Three of the

institute's Communists obliged, submitting recommendations that

Ershov's case be reevaluated. In so doing they committed an

elementary mistake: individual views, no matter how strong and

self-confident, were not likely to outweigh GPU's appraisal of

a student. With an audacity he was bitterly to regret, Ermolov,

the most outspoken among Ershov's supporters, wrote:

The fact that Ershov had the civic courage to question

several truisms was interpreted by some as an anti-Soviet

stance. But we should beware of citizens who unthinkingly

accede to Party directives; they are as bad for the Reds

as they are for the Whites. [. . .] In my view, the

groundless arrest of Ershov and his expulsion from

Petrograd are unfair. Better to let two criminals free

than to convict one innocent person, let alone a worker or

a peasant.

This sort of remonstrance was nipped in the bud. Ermolov was

promptly summoned to the Party buro of the Agricultural

Institute where he was severely reprimanded "for defying GPU."

He had questioned the authority of "the scourge of the

counterrevolution" and this was duly noted by the local Party

district committee; an entry to that effect was made in

Ermolov's personal file. Furthermore, Ermolov was deprived of

the right to recommend anybody else in the future.91

Writing a recommendation letter was an art. An astute

recommender had to anticipate and preempt potential

counternarratives. Since consciousness had superseded class as

91 TsGA IPD, f.258, op.1, d.29, ll.10, 17.

-61-

the principal criterion for admission to the Party, those who

wrote letters emphasized, first and foremost, that their

recommendees had completed the journey toward the light.

Working class origins alone were enough to guarantee admission

to the proletarian university but were, by themselves,

insufficient to ensure enrollment into the university's

Communist organization. As the following sample drawn from

recommendations written for Party applicants at Leningrad State

University suggests, only after political trustworthiness was

ascertained could mention be made of the applicant's class

background: (1) "carefully carried out all Komsomol missions,

disciplined, a peasant." (2) "was wounded during the Civil War,

comes from a poor peasant family." (3) "a member of the

Komsomol since 1922 who served as a volunteer in the Red Army.

Now active in public work; recently contributed to the work of

our purge committee. Has a drawback -- mediocre political

preparation." The author of the last extant has made it, of

course, nearly impossible neatly to disentangle class and

consciousness. By carefully limiting his praise of Limberik, a

student in Leningrad, to a few words -- "from the

intelligentsia, self-disciplined" -- this rather laconic

recommender implied that his protege had overcome the imprint

of petit-bourgeois background, gained Communist consciousness

and was now worthy of the Party card. The ease with which

Limberik's new consciousness overrode her imperfect class

origins in this letter makes clear that the two concepts were

constantly engaged in dynamic interaction.92

The recommender who supported the membership

application of Smirnov to the Party cell of the Leningrad

-62-

Agricultural Institute in 1927 excelled in playing class and

consciousness against each other to the applicant's benefit:

"Having known Smirnov since 1921, I recommend him to the Party.

Smirnov's dedication to his work as a tailor, as well as his

proletarian psychology are so obvious that they illuminate his

public life and his everyday conduct. Smirnov's proletarian

convictions surface constantly in his contacts with his clients

and in his family life, often leading to bitter disagreements

on questions of religion."93 Though the recommender could not

entirely dodge the issue of Smirnov's petit-bourgeois vocation,

he ingeniously diverted attention away from the applicant's

economic activity, portraying the applicant as a person with a

"proletarian psychology." This flexibility was built into the

Bolshevik discourse: the recommender had to decide whether to

emphasize the economic activity of his protagonist or dwell on

the applicant's ideological purity.

Soldatenkov's 1923 recommendation suggests that it was

absolutely crucial to establish the applicant's political

loyalty. In this case, the recommender alluded to the

proletarian social origin of his protege only in passing. The

bulk of the text was dedicated to Soldatenkov's active

engagement in the struggle for Communist political supremacy in

the university: "In 1921 and 1922, when Mensheviks, SRs and

Anarchists sabotaged student gatherings, Soldatenkov assisted

our tiny Party cell in pushing through its resolutions. Today

Soldatenkov works at Zinoviev University and spends his time

only with Communists."94

Later in the decade consciousness would be equated more

strictly with loyalty to the Central Committee majority. It was

-63-

mostly for this that a student from the Leningrad Engineering

Institute named Riabikov was commended: "Throughout his stay in

our cell [. . .] Riabikov always knew how to assert the

Leninist line in the face of the various Oppositions. In his

ideological struggle against the deviators he drew on the

lessons in political economy he received."95

To counterbalance recommendations, the Party cell

solicited "compromising material" (kompromat) against those

whom it suspected of being Communist "pretenders." A

denunciation against Gets, a Leningrad student, was suggestive

in this regard: "Gets's philistine upbringing is foreign to us.

He comports himself like an old master. By no means should Gets

become one of us."96 Subsequent to prominently posting the list

92 TsGA IPD, f.984, op.1, d.28, ll.17-18. The recommendations appended to the 1923 files on Communists students in the Siberian Communist University are interesting in that they not only demonstrate to what extend the Communists' class affiliation was improvised and unstandardized in the early 1920s but also in so far that they show that recommendors normally went beyond issues of class and addressed political attitudes as well. The Communist student Malashkin, for example, was characterized as a "worker who is consistently expresses a proletarian psychology and never deviates from Marxism." The recommendor stressed that "no philistine or petit-bourgeois inclinations were recorded in Malashkin's physiognomy." The "estate affiliation" of Malashkin's grandfather was taken down as a "worker"; not only that estate denomination was irrelevant to the determination of class position but Malashkin's grandfather could not be of "workers' estate" (rabochee soslovie) for the simple reason that such estate category did not exist in Imperial Russia. The class position of another student, a certain Sergeev, was meticulously defined in close accordance with the book. Sergeev was described as a "peasant" by social position and as a "poor peasant" by income. Ruling out the possibility that the applicant was a kulak the recommender added that though a peasant, Sergeev was a Bolshevik in spirit. "Sergev has a good command of proletarian psychology," he wrote, "and he draws the right conclusions from questions of economy." PANO, f.2, op.1, d.261, ll.200-201; d.330, ll.52, 58, 60, 96.

-64-

of fresh Party applicants on its announcement board, the buro

appealed to all who knew the students in question "to advance

oral or written statements against them." Admissions protocols

always specified whether any denunciations against a given

applicant were had been received, and if so, how many. Those

who spoke up could even choose not to reveal their names to the

Party cell. The contents of the letter, however, had to be made

available, both to the applicant and to the cell.97

While the recommendation was designed to measure the

applicant's purity, denunciation, which in the official

Communist language was called "derailment" (otvod), unearthed

the dark side of his biography. Making perfect sense within the

framework of the Bolshevik eschatology, the literate sense of

the term "derailment" suggested that the applicant had been

"derailed," led astray or diverted from the normal progression

to the light and that he therefore did not deserve to join the

Party. Gusev, a secretary of the Central Control Commission

stated during the XIV Party Congress (December 1925): "I do not

suggest we institute a Cheka within the Party. The Central

Commission and the Central Control Commission should suffice;

but I do think that every Communist should be engaged in

derailing the untrustworthy. If we have a problem it is not too

many derailments but too few."98

93 TsGA IPD, f.258, op.1, d.111, l.43.

94 TsGA IPD, f.984, op.1, d.125, l.12.

95 TsGA IPD, f.1085, op.1, d.101, l.149.

96 TsGA IPD, f.138, op.1, d.34, l.93.

97 TsGA IPD, f.138, op.1, d.1g, l.1; d.11, l.2; PATO, f.17, op.1, d.470, ll.12-36.

-65-

Submitting a derailment was perceived neither as an

ignoble betrayal of a colleague nor as an illegitimate

tampering with someone else's private affairs. It was common

for Communists to be called on to comment not only on the

public but also on the personal behavior of their peers. (The X

Party Congress stipulated that denunciations against Communists

may be accepted not only from Party members but also from non-

Party.)99 Not that the negative meaning of denunciation was

absolutely foreign to Communism. There were special terms for

unfounded accusations -- "libel" (donos, nagovor), "slander"

(kliauza) or "calumny" (kleveta) were negative acts because

they created "squabbles" (skloka) that undermined the

collective. The Party press periodically criticized such

destructive practices as "dismembering Party applicants"

(raznosy) and "deprecating people." Lenin demanded to "punish

false denunciations with death."100 But derailment letters, when

coming from the right people, were seen not as sources of

discord within the Party cell but as remedies to discord.

(Below I will use "derailment" when a Party applicant is

targeted and "denunciation" when the victim is already a

Communist.)

To be effective, a letter of derailment had to be

written by a proper Party member and aimed at a political

alien. That many such letters were signed by anonymous

98 XIV s"ezd vsesoiuznoiv Kommunisticheskoi partii(b). Stenograficheskii otchet, (Moscow-Leningrad, 1926), pp.600-601. Refraining from denunciation was a counterrevolutoinary crime since 1927 (aticle 58-12 of the RSFSR Penal Code).

99 Izvestiia TsK KPSS, no.5, (1990), p.116; no.4, (1991), p.223.

100 Lenin, PSS, vo.37, p.535.

-66-

"Communists" attests to the general understanding that only

members in the brotherhood of the elect were experienced

hermeneuticists of the soul.101 The outcome of the contest

between denouncers and recommenders depended on the reception

of derailment efforts by the purge commission. If the detractor

had made a convincing case in his accusation, his derailment

was deemed truthful and he was declared a "loyal comrade."

Conversely, if his charges were overturned, the detractor stood

the risk of emerging as a class alien, his letter automatically

classified as "libelous wrecking."

Schematically speaking, letters of derailment were

inverted recommendations. Where the latter saw Communist

universalism, the former found only petit-bourgeois

narrowmindedness. An anonymous derailment letter had "unmasked"

a Leningrad student named Burdanov, who was vying for Party

membership: Burdanov's consciousness resembles the

consciousness of a callous and uneducated kulak. When I asked

him for a piece of bread (Burdanov had plenty back then) he

rudely refused me. He is a negative type, aloof and vain." The

narrative so carefully constructed by the applicant's

recommenders -- that their peasant protege worked first as an

"unskilled laborer in the wood industry" and then in a "private

smithy," that he had tasted exploitation firsthand and

therefore had recognized the Communist truth -- was completely

shattered and Burdanov was rejected as "someone who has not

demonstrated his worth."102

101 Pravda, October 13, 1921; GANO, f.288, op.1, d.104, l.102; Leningradskaia pravda, May 25, 1924.

102 TsGA IPD, f.138, op.1, d.34, l.72.

-67-

The surest way to doom an application was to frame the

applicant as one who sought admission because he wanted to

undermine the brotherhood of the elect from within. The case of

Pervutana, another applicant to the Leningrad State University

cell, points in this direction.103 Written by Maslenkov, a

student at Leningrad Mining Institute and "a Party member since

1918 who had realized that writing this letter is my Communist

duty," the derailment letter stated: "We have to be especially

cautious with Pervutana. Last year this daughter of a merchant

tried to take advantage of my position as a secretary of the

Party History Commission, repeatedly asking me for all kinds of

papers [. . .] which she intended to use for personal gain." If

Pervutana possessed any awareness, the letter implied, it was

an awareness of her selfish, petit-bourgeois interest.

Charges against Party applicants' consciousness

transcended the specificity of this or that concrete case; this

sort of change was intrinsic to the derailment genre. Two

Novorosiisk detractors had been amazed to hear that their

acquaintance Breslov expresses doubts as to whether the Party

represented the working class: "The applicant holds a negative

view of the Party of the trade union policies. According to

him, industrialization is promoted on the backs of the workers.

During several trade union meetings, Breslov even made the

claim that the situation of the union members deteriorates each

year because trade union organizations are indifferent to the

fate of their members." Nor were Breslov's ethics above

suspicion: he was described as someone who "practices religious

103 TsGA IPD, f.984, op.1, d.58, l.39.

-68-

rites" and who "does no public work." Here too the derailment

letter targeted not what the student was doing but how he was

thinking. "Breslov is insincere. His entire being is motivated

by self-interest (shkurnichestvo)."104

The public nature of the derailment process is evident

in the strongly worded derailment against Chumakov, sent by the

Kostroma Party organization to Leningrad Agricultural

Institute, accusing the applicant of being an anti-Soviet

element. "Although Chumakov comes from the peasantry he, as

somebody who graduated from a teachers seminary, is clearly a

member of the intelligentsia in terms of his social position.

He displays gruff attitude toward workers." What makes this

letter of derailment especially interesting is the threat with

which it concluded: "When considering Chumakov's application

please take our letter into account and consider inviting us to

send a delegation to the meeting of the institute's cell at

which Chumakov's candidacy will be examined. In case you decide

to do without us please promptly inform us of your decision so

that we will have ample time to protest in front of the highest

Party organs." Although the outcome of Chumakov's application

is not available, one can safely assume that this letter could

not go unnoticed. The Party cell of the Agricultural Institute

did not exist in a vacuum. If enrolled, Chumakov would have had

to be approved by the Leningrad district and provincial

committees which would have had to be attentive to derailment

letters signed by eight Communists, two of whom with

considerable Party standing.105

104 TsGA IPD, f.258, op.1, d.14, ll.84-86.

-69-

Although derailment practices continued throughout the

1920s, their focus was subject to important changes. toward the

end of the decade, Oppositionists were added to class aliens as

the denouncer favorite targets. "Lialikov, a Party candidate in

your organization," argued a derailment letter from 1927, "came

home during a school vacation to solicit a recommendation

letter from one of our local Oppositionists, a certain

Shchekoldin. He needed the recommendation to apply for transfer

to full Party membership."106 That Shchekoldin had conspired with

the student in writing the recommendation because of his belief

that Lialikov shared his Oppositionist opinions was adduced as

evidence to show how deeply involved Lialikov was with elements

unworthy of the Party. The attack on Lialikov is of an

additional interest in that it exposes the assumption implicit

in the application procedure that every time an applicant was

denounced and derailed those who had recommended him were also

to be investigated. It seems that both the ethics and the sins

of Communists were taken to be contagious.

The events at Leningrad State University surrounding

the case of Knut illustrate what happened when an application

procedure degenerated into an all-out showdown between

recommenders and derailers.107 On November 24, 1926, the local

Komsomol organization turned down Knut's application. The dry

phrasing of the rejection -- "Knut failed to attend the three

105 TsGA IPD, op.1, f.########, d.101, l.219.

106 TsGA IPD, f.258, op.1, d.46, ll.28-29.

107 TsGA IPD, f.984, op.1, d.188, ll.38-45.

-70-

cell meetings during which her application was heard and her

case was therefore dismissed" -- hints that in this case the

balance of power between benefactors and detractors may have

predetermined the upshot of the case. Indeed, the candidate's

public hearing was in some cases entirely dispensed with (when,

for example, the buro received too much negative material) and

in others rendered brief and automatic (when the letters of

support were very strong) -- it all depended on the credibility

of those who stood behind him. Knut was a daughter of an

employee, and occupationally classified a "student." Two strong

recommendations maintained that Knut "had proved to be

dedicated to public work" and that she could be "only of

benefit to any Party cell." A third recommendation, signed by

Stepanov who was a sometime member of the local cell, said that

Knut was an "energetic comrade who can positively contribute to

our work." But after the passage of a few months Stepanov

withdrew the recommendation he had written on Knut's behalf.

Now he believed that Knut was "ideologically immature. She does

not want to participate in the political circle." Another

rumor, that Knut "told the non-Party students that public work

is carried out there by the least capable and the most stupid

Party members," confirmed Stepanov's belated suspicions.

Finally, Knut was rejected thanks to a letter of

derailment signed by a certain Volkova; this especially

extensive text flipped the applicant's "How- I-reached-

Communist-consciousness" narrative on its head:

Having received the news that Knut is trying to infiltrate

the ranks of the Party, I feel it is my Party and Komsomol

-71-

duty to forward some information to the local Party cell

which shows the person under discussion to be one whose

place is not in our proletarian family. I have known Knut

since 1923. There is no need to explain here in detail,

what our universities were like in those years. [. . .]

You all know the creative work our Party carried out in

order to reform the universities [. . .] and you know that

it encountered staunch resistance from the conservative

bourgeois professors and their right arm, the White

students. Part of this White scum populated our faculty of

chemistry headed by Fainbergs and Verasovs and including

students like Knut. It was at this time, when a small

Komsomol group did its best to implement Party policy,

that these Knuts, Verasovs and Co. committed their

counterrevolutionary deeds. When we attended student

gatherings in our capacity as Komsomol representatives

they would yell, "spies!" at us. They would call the

Party's cell "Party's dog" [pun on "komiacheika" and

"komiashcheika"]. Most of this putrescence (gnil') is now

outside the university. I say "most" because bits of this

largely vanquished body are still with us, Knut being a

case in point. To be sure, in 1924 she and her gang were

purged from the university [. . .] but thanks to their

persistence they have had found a way back.

Needless to say, this sort of accusation, when credible, made

it quite hard for an applicant to insist that she belonged to

the proletarian commonwealth. Her denouncer went on to describe

the period of organizing Party political groups from 1924 to

1926. "Guess what Knut did at the time? She pretended to take

part in our work while all the time trying to undermine it from

within. Each time Knut showed up at the circle she would say,

"Why the hell do we need all that, we students? Our business is

-72-

to take from the university all professors have to offer and

not to deal with Bolshevik politics." Knut's declarations

supposedly contributed to the creation of a "sense of passivity

among students."

The above letter of derailment was a sort of anti-

biography, an inverted eschatological narrative. Volkova

carefully preserved the codes of the eschatological genre but

her aim was just the reverse: to prove that Knut's life

demonstrated that she could never be a conscious Party member

but in fact was, and would forever remain, a conscious

counterrevolutionary. The letter's conclusion was particularly

harsh: "Knut needs Komsomol membership with which to mask her

alien face." Knut was so totally discredited that Stepanov, who

must have been fairly close to Knut to risk recommending one

stigmatized as the "daughter of an employee," had to repent in

writing. Knut's fate was sealed -- following an abortive

attempt to join the brotherhood of the elect, she underwent the

humiliation of seeing her status changed from that of non-

affiliated individual to counterrevolutionary. The cell now had

a file with incriminating details against her that would be

consulted whenever she attempted to reenter public life.108

Once a student had been accepted into the Party,

"personal evaluation" (kharakteristika), essentially a

108 Impressed by admission battles, the Party apparatus noted that "buro members are often under the erroneous impression that they have to be unanimous in their decisions on Party admissions and that presentation of minority opinions before the Party cell is prohibited. Cases were brought to out attention where the buro's majority erroneously denounced the buro's minority for infringement of Party discipline dealing with dissenting buro members as factionists." Obichkin, pp.74-75; PATO, f.17, op.1, d.631, l.3.

-73-

reference letter, replaced the recommendation letters. In May

1924, Moscow stipulated that an updated personal evaluation on

each student Communist had to be sent to the district committee

each year.109 As if these students had been reborn, the date of

entry into the Party was usually mentioned in the personal

evaluation before the actual date of birth. In 1925 it was

suggested that the following themes form the core the

description: ""How did the student reveal himself politically?

Was the student disciplined and loyal?"; "Did the student know

how to approach the masses?"110 By the mid-1920s, "ideological

stability" was firmly ensconced as the key component of the

personal evaluations.111 "Comrade Gaitskhoki has been fully

tested by the Party" opened the 1924 personal evaluation of a

Leningrad State University student. "Disciplined in public and

private, Gaitskhoki orients himself quickly to new situations.

He is subtle and tactful in handling the masses, always takes

the correct political line and enjoys the respect of

proletarian students. No deviations were observed in his work."

Ironically, Gaitskhoki became a leader of the Leningrad

Opposition only one year later and had to be removed from the

university.112

Personal evaluations made it easier for the cell to

discuss and establish the "political face" (politicheskoe

litso) of its individual members. This could be amplified at

109 TsGA IPD, f.138, op.1, d.1g, l.27.

110 TsGA IPD, f.197, op.1, d.208, l.32.

111 TsGA IPD, f.197, op.1, d.732, l.1.

112 TsGA IPD, f.1085, op.1, d.24, l.197.

-74-

such crucial moments as the 1923 "auto-purge" (samo-chistka)

that took place at Sverdlov Communist University by "mutual

evaluation." Urging students to formulate "balanced personal

evaluations," the cell's "elder" also invited two

representatives from other cells to participate so that the

process would not degenerate into personal vendettas.113 Upon

learning that his characterization presented him as a

disseminator of heterodoxy, a Communist University student

named Davydov protested: "I deny any guilt. I spoke only among

comrades and only during classes; I was uninhibited because I

assumed that when I erred I would be immediately corrected and

edified. But no one responded to what I said." While Davydov

believed that he could have been brought into line with the

collective if only his comrades had patiently corrected him,

those comrades insisted in the personal evaluation they wrote

that "Davydov is an accidental person in the Party -- a

reputation he earned in a very short time. We have spent a

great deal of effort on his reeducation, but in vain."114

Autobiographers Interrogated

Whether they read their life stories aloud or presented them to

the Party cell in written form, applicants were obliged to

enter into a dialogue with their audience of judges. The two

sides were pressed into dynamic relationship structured by the

fundamental premise that the conversion of one individual was

113 F. Shablonskii, "Chistka v vyshei partshkole," Sverdlovets, (1923), no.4.

114 TsGA IPD, f.197, op.1, d.725, l.272.ob.

-75-

meaningless outside of a collective conversion. What is

normally considered one of the more private genres became the

political Communist autobiography because of the public nature

of the application process. Autobiographical interrogation was

a ritualized procedure designed to evaluate the consciousness

of the applicant. A certain presentation of the self could

always be "unmasked" and rejected as "phony" (nepravdivaia).115

It is possible, of course, to dismiss the battle over

the interpretation of autobiography as a thinly concealed power

struggle which had little to do with the lofty ideals that

supposedly motivated them. In this interpretation, debates over

the personal qualities of this or that student were couched in

eschatological language because of political anxieties. But

since personality clashes and competition for spoils exist in

all social organizations, preoccupation with ulterior motives

is not likely to deepen our insight into the specifics of the

Communist experience. A close look at how identity battles were

waged and how personal ambitions were justified to the outside

world -- and possibly to the historical actors themselves --

ultimately tell us most about the politics of Communist

identity.116

115 S. Fitzpatrick, "Lives under Fire. Autobiographical Narratives and their Challenges in Stalin's Russia," Die Russia et d'alleurs. Melanges Marc Ferro, (Paris, 1995), p.225.

116 See, N. Tnetler, "The Summa For Confessors as an Instrument of Social Control," The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, (Leiden, 1974), and, B. Nelson, "Self-Images and Systems of Spiritual Direction in the History of European Civilization," The Quest for Self-Control, (London, 1967) as well as, Hepworth and Turner, pp.14, 43.

-76-

It was not human nature with its petty personal

interests, I suggest, but the ideological critique of "private

life" that made the examination of the Communist autobiography

so momentous an issue. The distinction between the public and

the private spheres itself, according to the sacred official

dogma, was nothing but a fetish produced by the bourgeoisie. By

dissolving society into atoms, Soviet class analysts argued,

capitalism erected the myth of the individual in his private

domain. This mythologizing concealed on otherwise obvious

truth, that production, the basis of all social life, was in

fact a collective and not an individual endeavor. According to

Marx the "conscious absorption of society by the individual,

the free recognition by each individual of himself as bearer of

the community, is the way in which man rediscovers and returns

to himself."117 Inspired by this analysis, the critic Tretiakov

condemned any celebration of personal privacy: "Everything

known as `private affairs' or `personal interest' should come

under the control of the collective. Each member of the

collective has to see himself as a tool, necessary to the

collective, which must be looked after in the interests of

everyone."118 Since the life of the individual did not concern

him alone but affected all members of the Communist

brotherhood, it was a matter of principle, the Party declared,

that private affairs had to be open to public scrutiny.

Prishvin's diary dwells on the effects of this ethos: "Nothing

is beyond us any longer, everything has become our business.

-77-

Huge efforts are thrown these days into the eradication of the

private, so that the worker will look for happiness only in the

public. Constantly visible, social x-rays rendering him

absolutely transparent, the worker can no longer hide by

retreating into the private sphere."119

In pleading his case, the applicant had to contend with

very strict requirements of truth, dogma and canon. The

smallest lie or omission, immediately apparent to his reader or

listener, could have destroyed all chance of admission and

stained the Party applicant forever. Ideally, the applicant's

encounter with the Party cell was to resemble a legal

confession. He was put under oath and forced to give a solemn

promise that his "testimony" (the Russian "pokazaniia" has the

same juridical connotation as does "testimony" in English) will

contain only the truth. When the public interrogation of the

Communist autobiography is examined, it is crucial that we

notice who was speaking and when. Who, among the individuals

who were present at a Party meeting, was accorded the right to

use the Communist language and with what authority? What voice

was the applicant accorded and how did he exploit his right to

speak the last word? Hermeneutical diagnosis could not be

dissociated from the statutorily defined individuals and

institutions who had the authority to claim that they spoke the

truth. The exercise of hermeneutics of the soul involved not

only criteria of competence and knowledge but also the

117 Kolakowski, Main Streams of Marxism, vol.1, p.127.

118 S. Tretiakov, "Standart," Oktiabr' mysli, (1924), no.2, p.33.

119 "Dnevnik Prishvina. 1930 god," Oktiabr', no.7, (1989), p.164.

-78-

existence of the Party statute, ideological texts, ethical

imperatives and procedural norms. The division of roles within

the cell, hierarchical subordination based on function and

Party seniority and the exchange of information concerning the

applicant with the state representatives, GPU and the judiciary

all played a role in determining what happened at a Party

meeting.

Construed as omniscient and omnipotent, the audience

for a Communist autobiography was supposed to strip all

coverings from the autobiographer's consciousness. The case of

Bushinskii, a student at the Smolensk Institute, is a good

example of the emphasis often placed on the sincerity of the

applicant's Communist convictions. Bushinskii's autobiography

portrayed the protagonist as a convinced and loyal Communist,

but when a letter of derailment was received in 1921 claiming

that at the first sight of trouble Bushinskii had withdrawn his

application materials, storm clouds began gathering. The chief

denouncer, Nikiforov, stated: "During the days of the uprising,

Bushinskii used to come to me and ask `How are things with

Kronstadt?' He begged me to report to the cell that his

application had been handed in `by accident'. I was supposed to

say that it was I who had sent in his application and that he,

Bushinskii, had initiated nothing." Nikiforov was supported by

other Communists who recalled that "during the Kronstadt days

Bushinskii was in hiding, avoiding the military alert

regulations."

Even a rumor of such a step by Bushinskii generated

considerable anxiety. It would not be so terrible had he been a

simple coward who did not want to fight; but no one was ready

-79-

to dismiss the possibility that Bushinskii was a real traitor,

someone who identified with the cause advanced by the

rebellious fortress. After all, students could not be unaware

of the mass departures from the Party, difficult as the

information flowing out of Kronshtadt might have been. Let us

take a brief look at the phrasing of such applications, filling

the island’s press in March 1921. Shisheleva, a worker at the

Kronshtadt artillery shop, petitioned “not to be considered a

Party member any longer because I came to realize that

“Communists are akin to bloodthirsty beasts who, eager for

people’s blood, take no pity on their pray.”120 Requesting “not

to be considered a Communist any longer” another worker, a

certain Chistiakov, explained: “I, together with many others,

had been deceived into enrolling during the 1919 Party Week.

Now, however, I believe it disgraceful (pozorno) to remain in

the Party ranks. Like always, I remain with the people ready to

die the death of the righteous.”121 Because the Communist slogan,

“Everything for the People” captured the imagination of the

teacher Shate’l she applied to the Party in February 1920. “But

following the first salvo at the peaceful Kronshtadt population

[. . .], I, dreading at the thought that I can be considered a

participant in spilling innocent blood I sensed that I can no

longer consider myself a Party candidate.”122 In a curious

inversion of the official poetics soldiers in Kronshtadt

-80-

justified their ill advised enrollment in the Party by “lack of

consciousness” (nesoznatel’nost’) and “inability to grasp a

thing” (nerazobral’sia ni v chem). Following another

conversion, this time a genuine one, having found the “truth

about the injustices of the Party” they sought to exit its

ranks.123

Eventually, Bushinskii's detractors proposed a

reconstruction that presented him as a vacillator, not a

counterrevolutionary:

Bushinskii never left the city. He hid in his apartment

waiting to see which way things would go in Kronshtadt.

When Soviet power emerged victorious, he resurfaced,

grasped his rifle and went to the Cheka detachment to push

Party application forward. Bushinskii resolved to join the

Party not during Kronstadt but about ten days after the

uprising had already been put down, when we had already

returned [from fighting against the rebel fortress].

What counted, when all was said and done, was Bushinskii's

state of mind. It seems as though "Bushinskii wanted to become

a Communist only in order to get closer to the source of

power." Bushinskii put up a meek resistance declaring, "I 120 Kronshtadt. 1921. V. P. Naumov and A. Kosakovskii eds., (Moscow,

1997), p.153.

121 Kronshtadt. 1921., p.153.

122 Kronshtadt. 1921., pp.152-153.

123 Kronshtadt. 1921., pp.151-152.

-81-

remained in the barracks [for the duration of the Kronstadt

mutiny] and slept there embracing my rifle." When questioned,

however, he could not come up with the names of his commanding

officers. He was also forced to admit that the conversation he

was reported by Nikiforov to have had at the climax of the

Krostadt days was "a fact." Yet, he pleaded, "I could say back

then things I would not say now. Comrades, I have been reborn

(pererodilsia)!" Bushinskii hoped to pass off his mistakes as

part of a learning process. In this case, however, his claims

were rejected. By admitting that he had waited for the

Kronshtadt mutiny to end before committing himself, Bushinskii

revealed that his application had nothing to do with

ideological beliefs, revolutionary or counterrevolutionary.124

In a separate case, more care was taken to find out

whether a conversion had been sincere or convenient. This was

the main task facing the members of the cell who discussed the

autobiography of Klein, a student at the Tomsk Technological

Institute (November 23, 1925).125 Time and again, the discussion

of Klein's credentials came back to the period of the Civil

124 Conversely, Sobolev, another student at the Smolensk Institute, was promoted to full Party membership due to his "voluntary service in the Red Army" and his "participation in putting down the Kronstadt rebellion." WKP, 326, ll.8, 11.

125 PATO, f.320, op.1, d.7, ll.26-27. See also Shergov's case, PATO, f.115, op.2, d.11, ll.28-29. Former Whites were meticulously "checked out" even before the general purge of 1921 by special reregistration trios (pereregistratsionnaia troika). Siberian Party organizations composed a list of "all Party members who were officers, military clerks or cadets in Kolchak's camp." The questionnaires presented to these comrades, regarded as highly suspect, addressed the character and length of their service in the White Army, their whereabouts at the time of Kolchak's defeat, and the timeand place of their enrollment into the Party. PATO, f.17, op.1, d.43, ll.8, 22.

-82-

War. The stand taken by the applicant at that time was crucial.

If during NEP individuals stood to benefit from expressing

Communist sympathies, and their actions, therefore, could not

be taken at face value, their relation to the Soviet Power

during the Civil War was a litmus test of political

orientation. At that time, Siberia had been occupied by the

Whites from 1918 to 1920, so Bolshevik sympathizers were a

brave group. The buro would have been impressed had Klein

applied for Party membership at that time. Once it transpired

that Klein had not, the buro became determined to understand

why he had failed to help the Party at the hour of its greatest

ordeal:

Q: Why had you not applied then?

A: Because I could not tell left from right and regarded

myself as unprepared to enter the ranks of the Party.

Q: Your sister is a major underground worker. How could

you fail to learn about things from her?

A: I was drafted during the Imperialist War, and was a

prisoner of war. I returned home in 1917 and departed to

study in 1920. [Thus I was barely in touch with her.]

Q: What party did your sister belong to?

A: As far as I know, in 1917 she was a Social Democract

[i.e., Menshevik]; but in 1918 she left.

Klein declared that he had been devoid of any political

consciousness in 1919, the year which tested ideological

loyalties in Siberia. But many remained unpersuaded. Since the

trajectory of Klein's political evolution was in doubts someone

suggested from the floor, "`Let us have his Tomsk study bench

peers say what they make of Klein'." While one such individual,

-83-

Comrade Mal'gin, evaluated Klein's past record favorably

("`Klein consistently followed our strategy regarding the

professoriate, studied well and quickly graduated'") Epifanov

advanced a succinct but well thought out derailment: "`Taking

into account Klein's mature age and his sister's own

activities, I cannot accept that he knew nothing. Klein belongs

to the category of people who wat out put us on trial. "If

Soviet Power prevails I will join it, otherwise I remain

clean," they say to themselves'." Epifanov emphasized that he

has nothing against Klein's personality. "`Actually, he is

charming. Still, we have to reject his application." According

to Epifanov, Klein did not apply to the Party during the Civil

War because he sympathized with its enemies, not because he was

unaware of the truth of Communism.

Klein's best friend, Goliakov, then came to his rescue:

"`People like Klein can unite with the Party only after

climbing many stairs'." One could hardly expect a member of the

intelligentsia to become a Communist overnight. Fixing 1919 as

an early stage in Klein's eschatological journey and thus

scaling back the applicant's political consciousness at the

time, Goliakov attempted to rehabilitate his political

identity. Klein's defenders recognized that their protege was

eschatologically retarded by comparison with real workers, but

they still thought it best to accept him: "`Epifanov is

mistaken. We cannot expect Klein to have applied to the Party

right away. Since he had not received the education available

at a production site, how could he find out about the Party? [.

. .] More recently, through his work for our public

-84-

organizations, Klein has proved to be sound in his

convictions'."

The seesaw of opinion took another swing with comrade

Popko: "`Back then the Party needed activists, especially those

with proper educations. Yet Klein did not join the Party.

Furthermore, concerning his spiritual evolution, I think he was

obviously already developed before he begun studying." The

reference to "spirit" went to the crux of the issue.

Ultimately, the cell had to pronounce not on Klein's actions,

which were open to opposing interpretations, but on his

consciousness. Popko did not reject the application outright,

but he believed that before he could be admitted Klein could

only be purified and made ready for Party membership in the

factory: "`He should go into production, prove himself and

apply to the Party there'."

But there were those who were determined to do Klein in

once and for all, and one of his numerous detractors, Gavrilov,

pulled out a trump card: "`I dimly recall that Klein handed in

a Party application questionnaire back in 1920'." If verified,

this act would have condemned Klein for adjusting his Communist

sympathies to the vicissitudes of the political situation.

Worse, Klein's failure to mention that he had already applied

to the Party could be seen as proof that he had tailored his

autobiography to suit his current needs. In this case, the

description of recent conversion to Communism would have been

given the lie and its writer would have been irrevocably

discredited. Recognizing the danger, Klein hastened to respond

to the latter charge: "`Yes, I did try to apply then but the

district committee procrastinated and I was automatically

-85-

expelled'." To judge by the clamor from the bench, many

comrades were not satisfied with this justification: "`Why is

that not [mentioned] in your questionnaire?'" Klein answered

that "`there is no paragraph for that'." This was clearly not

satisfactory: "`And what about "comments"'?!" "I did not notice

it," was all Klein could say in replay. One Communist

articulated what many by now suspected: "I think Klein did not

take a Party card in 1920 because the situation was tense. I

remember that in those days many tore up their cards and left

the Party." The discussion had gone on far too long, and the

chairman thought it time to put an end to it. Klein used his

right to a final word to reiterate that he had not concealed

anything in his questionnaire, and that his recommenders knew

about his 1920 application to the Party. Although the final

vote was in Klein's favor (59 for; 23 against; 31 abstained),

his admission was vetoed by the district committee. The

lingering suspicion that Klein was not a true Communist could

not be dispelled.126

In the universities, Party applications were processed

painfully slowly. Marked on the candidate's questionnaire, the

resolution of the cell's buro -- "to accept" or "to decline" --

was only a recommendation. The ultimate decision, to be made by

the general meeting of the Party cell, could take quite a bit

of additional time since a quorum had to be present to give the

verdict a binding force (this usually meant two-thirds of the

cell's membership). And the procedure did not end there:

stamped with the seal of the cell, the applicant's personal

126 TsGA IPD, f.197, op.1. d.734, ll.30-31.

-86-

file and all the "accompanying materials" (which normally

included application forms, recommendations, denunciations,

excerpts from the debates of the buro and the cell on the

merits of the candidate and an indication of the number of

voters for and against the candidate as well as abstentions)

was moved up to the district committee, and, in the case of

third category applicants (i.e., non-proletarians) the

provincial committee. Most of the authority in matters of Party

personnel was vested in these bodies, which had the power to

ratify or reverse the original decision. Students could wait up

to four years from the moment they applied to the Party until

they became Communists. At one point, the local Leningrad Party

organization begged the Party leadership to make sure that "no

more than six Party organs review a single student Party

application."127 The movement of the case of Filatov from

Leningrad State University shows how long the processing of an

application could take.

Filatov submitted an application on April 5, 1924The buro of the Party cell at Leningrad State Universitydiscussed Filatov's application on October 22, 1924The cell’s general meeting declined his application on November 10, 1924The buro discussed his appeal on April 14, 1925The general meeting of the cell accepted the buro's recommendation to accept Filatov on April 16, 1925Vasilevsk Island Party district committee ratified the decision of the Leningrad State University Party cell on August 19, 1925The Leningrad provincial committee asked for additional personal evaluations on Filatov on November 2, 1925Leningrad State University Party cell submitted additional personal evaluations on the applicant on December 15, 1925The district committee approved Filatov's candidacy on March 17, 1926The provincial committee finally vetoed Filatov's application on June 7, 1926

127 TsGA IPD, f.984, op.1, d.148, l.148.

-87-

It took over two years to reject Filatov. Had he been admitted,

he would have remained on the waiting list for another two

years before becoming a full Party member. For the sake of

comparison, it is worth noting that the status of full Party

members was conferred on industrial workers (who were relegated

to the first category, barred before students) after six months

only.128

The class category into which a successful student was

assigned was recorded on his Party card, which in turn

determined the length of time that had to elapse before he

became a full Party member. The 1922 Party statute recognized

three membership categories: (1) workers and peasants who were

Red Army veterans; (2) peasants and handicraftsmen; (3) others

(white collar employees, professionals, artisans, etc.).

Students occupied the lower echelons of this class hierarchy.

"`Vania, do you know what social category we are relegated

to?," one student quizzed another in a contemporary short

story: "`To "others," along with all the riffraff'!"129 Those

students who were relegated to the second category could apply

for transfer to full Party membership after one year of

probation. The least fortunate students who found themselves in

third category (the majority) had to wait for an additional

year before they could do so.130

128 TsGA IPD, f.188, op.1, d.188, l.11.

129 V. Strel'nikova, "Son professora Mal'kova," Krasnoe studenchestvo, no.1, (1927-28), p.10.

130 See the "Instructions of the Petrograd Party Provincial Committee to all Primary Party Organizations" issued on March 29, 1923. TsGA IPD, f.138, op.1, d.1g, l.1.

-88-

The so-called "Party quarantine" was treated as a

period of time required to permit "the neophytes to be properly

tested." Without reaching the very end of his intellectual

odyssey, no student could become a full Party member. Having

been put "on trial" -- the Russian for "trial" (iskus;

ispytanie) has the same connotations of a religious ordeal as

-89-

it once had in English -- successful applicants were officially

designated Party candidates. A statute issued by the Central

Committee's organizational department stated that "Party

candidacy is not a `reformatory battalion', (ispravitel'naia

rota) but a time during which the Party examines the personal

qualities of the applicant." Concomitantly, the probational

-90-

period was supposed to be used by a near-Communist to complete

his self-purification -- an observation that brings us back to

the concept of the Party admissions procedure as rite of

passage. In the rite of passage, anthropologists tell us, the

preparation of the initiate was a "transitional" or "liminal"

phase, involving a symbolic retrogression into chaos.

131 Spravochnik partrabotnika, no.3, (Moscow, 1923), p.81; The idea that the Party should put its candidates on "trial" evolved gradually during the Civil War. The institute of Party "sympathizers" (sochustvuiushchie), formed in 1918, was the first to mediate between the general population and the brotherhood of the elect. In December 1919 almost half the Party force consisted of sympathizers (16,669 sympathizers to 39,131 full members). Sympathizers had full voting rights only regarding issues of local relevance. When issues of more general significance were debated they enjoined only an "advisory vote." At first, admission to the ranks of sympathizers was easy; only one recommendation was required and, what is more, even disagreements with "specific items" on the Bolshevik agenda did not constitute real stumbling blocks on the road to promotion into this category. Not all Party members had to be "sympathizers" first; proletarians who were deemed especially "trustworthy" were allowed to skip that stage. In late 1918 and 1919, however, local Party organizations begun adopting sporadic resolution limiting admission to the ranks of sympathizers to those who "proved sufficient familiarity with the Party program." Heeding to Lenin's advise that the Party should trial non-proletarian applicants with particular care the Petrograd Party organization closed the ranks of sympathizers before "non-workers" in March 1919. "Party candidacy" gradually supplemented and finally replaced the institute of "Party sympathizers." At first, Party sympathizers and Party candidates were nearly interchangeable categories. Gradually, in some Party organizations a three tier system of Party admission evolved during the Civil War: one begun as a "sympathizer," became a "candidate" next and only then could hope to join full Party members. In November 1918 the membership rolls of the Petrograd Party organization included, alongside 5,000 "members" also 5,000 "sympathizers" and 3,000 "candidates." Finally, the VIII Party Conference (December 1919) brought some uniformity into these procedures. The Conference introduced mandatory Party candidacy "geared to allow the Party an opportunity to study the individual qualities of the applicant" and abolished the institute of sympathizers (which, as we shall see, will be revived in the 1930s). Pravda, September 3, 1918, November 24, 1918 and December 8, 1918; Izvestiia TsK RKP(b), December 2, 1919. Lenin, PSS,

-91-

Similarly, if the student was to be created anew, he needed

time to annihilate the old within him first. Helping the Party

to asses whether he was ready, the candidate himself was

supposed to engage in prolonged introspection, double-checking

his suitability to become a member of the Communist

commonwealth. "I tortured myself over this question (pytal

vol.37, p.46; vol.39, p.361. Vos'maia konferentsiia RKP(b), (Moscow, 1961), p.140. TsGA IPD, f.1, op.1, d.332, ll, 1-2.

-92-

sebia)," a self-doubting Party candidate would routinely say; I

wonder whether "I am strong enough in my Communist convictions

(dostatochno krepok)."131

The student who was found to be "alien" to Communism

was turned down flat. His futile attempt to win admission was

carefully recorded and generally functioned as a guarantee that

other Party organizations would also reject him. Those students

seen as on the right track but still requiring considerable

spiritual development, the Party counseled to reapply at a

later date. In such cases, it was said that "the applicant is

not fully developed" -- the soil was fertile but the fruit had

not yet ripened. Thus, for example, the Leningrad State

University Party organization rejected Burdanov as someone who

"has not yet demonstrated his worth (sebia ne proiavil)."

Student applicants knew they were expected to apply to the

Party only when their inner self was completely ripe for

Communism. Although Konstantinovskii, a student at Leningrad

Communist University, acted as a Bolshevik early on and in 1918

sided with the Reds during the Ukrainian Civil War campaigns,

he joined the ranks of the Communist Party only when "`I put

myself into the my final shape'" (okonchatel'no

oformirovalsia). The timing of Konstantinovskii's admission --

the November 1919 Party Week which coincided with the

transporting of fresh Communists to the front -- proved that he

was truly conscious. Only conscious Communists, so the

assumption went, would risk their life for the embattled

proletarian republic.132

132127TsGA IPD, f.197, op.1, d.71, ll.59-60; Lenin, PSS, vol.39, pp.225-226.

-93-

The date of one’s admission to the Party – what would

become the basis for the calculation of one’s “Party standing”

(partiinyi stazh) was very important. Communists with a

substantial Party standing, especially one harking back to the

years of the underground, enjoyed a special prestige. Certain

sensitive responsibilities, for example, serving on purge

commissions, were assigned based on a Party standing. The pride

involved could get out of hand. So much so that Zinoviev felt

obliged to cull comrades a bit at the XI Party Congress:

“Seasoned Party members can be more tactful and refrain from

rubbing it in with, `I can work better than you; look how long

my Party beard is!` Naturally upset by such taunting, younger

comrades retort with, `Do not push you beard in my face!’133

133 Odinnadtsatyi s”ezd RKP(b), p.399.