THE RUSSIAN FRONT

Vladimir Putin provided the readers of World War II magazine his suggestions for what to read about the Soviet Union. Given the ongoing debates about falsification of history (see here, here, and here, for example), Putin’s comments are instructive. The English version is here; the Russian version is here.

Putin condemns “any falsifications, any distortions of the history of World War II” as “a personal insult, a sacrilege.” As has become increasingly clear, though, these ritual denunciations of falsification don’t ever actually name individual falsifiers or specify what exactly it is that they have falsified. What had me excited about this message from Putin was the chance to get his sense of who’s doing good history. Sad to say, that opportunity was missed. Putin didn’t name any actual historians, Russian or Western, who are working on the war.

Instead, he suggests novels, all written under the Soviets. This isn’t necessarily bad advice, and he’s not suggesting bad books: Russians certainly know how to write novels, and even the Soviet Union couldn’t quash that. Nonetheless, the authors and books he recommends are quite instructive.

The names Putin gives us are standard figures in the Soviet pantheon of literature, who wrote books on the war that were perfectly politically correct: Konstantin Simonov, Mikhail Sholokhov, Boris Vasiliev, Konstantin Vorobiev, and in particular Vladimir Bogomolov. Bogomolov was a veteran of Soviet military counterintelligence (though there’s some controversy over his military service), and the book that Putin recommends (Moment of Truth, also known as In August 1944) glorifies the work of Smersh (Death to Spies) in restoring Soviet rule in liberated territory.

Two names leap out by their absence: Viktor Nekrasov and Vasilii Grossman. I’ve done no survey, but my sense is that if you asked people who really know literature about the best work to come out of the Great Fatherland War, Nekrasov and Grossman would be the first mentioned. So why doesn’t Putin mention them? I can’t speak for him, but Nekrasov ended up expelled from the Soviet Union and stripped of his citizenship, while Grossman couldn’t get his masterwork Life and Fate published because of the uncomfortable parallels he drew between Nazism and Stalinism. It certainly seems as though Vladimir Putin isn’t comfortable with writers who aren’t comfortable with the Soviet system.

The good folks at englishrussia.com have lots of great photo galleries on life in today’s Russia. Here’s one that’s more historical: a wonderful collection of Soviet work safety posters. The style of art and text is identical to posters covering more familiar political and propaganda themes, but without any sort of political content. Their gruesome explicitness is quite striking, and they offer a nice look at the physical processes of Soviet industrial production.

Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan had an excellent piece in the January 6 Yezhdnevnyi zhurnal (hat tip to Johnson’s Russia List; discussed by Paul Goble here) on the activities of the Federal Security Service in 2010. Along the way, they provide some striking figures on just how bloody the North Caucasus continues to be, sixteen years after the start of the First Chechen War.

In 2010, 242 security service personnel were killed in the North Caucasus Federal District (population nine million). By contrast, in the United States (population 300 million), 162 police officers were killed in the line of duty in 2010. Many of those line-of-duty deaths were accidents; 77 perished from hostile action.

Doyenne of Soviet historians Sheila Fitzpatrick has written a charming essay for the London Review of Books on her experiences as one of the very first outsiders to gain access to Soviet archival sources (Hat tip: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria). Reading her, it’s clear that much has changed, but to a surprising degree things have remained precisely the same.

Bureaucracy and lines are the obvious ones, but there’s more. We now have access to archival catalogs, but we are still subject to the whims and affections of archivists when it comes to the documents we can see, or perhaps even more important, where we ought to be looking for them. As Fitzpatrick remembers, the archivists were quite choosy about whom they might assist: “after a while, if they thought you were a hard worker and therefore a real scholar (not a spy), the archivists would cautiously begin to help you.”

This is precisely my experience, which is why I was so fortunate to be funded in 1994-1995 in a way that let me go to Moscow and stay for sixteen months, long enough to really establish my iron-assed credentials as a serious researcher. Fitzpatrick also was lucky enough to burst into tears at the right moment to get some additional material. I didn’t do that, but I did unwittingly benefit from the pitying maternal instincts of archivists who couldn’t imagine how a poor boy, all alone in Moscow, might manage to keep body and soul together.

Fitzpatrick also notes how historians can’t help to some degree identifying with the worldview and priorities of the people and institutions they study. Tongue-in-cheek, she remarks that the secret police would have been better off to

give Western scholars access to the most taboo of Soviet archives, the NKVD’s, so that the scholars would stop slandering this fine institution and see things from its perspective: the Central Committee cadres department reassigning any Gulag officers who showed signs of competence and sending the Gulag administration nothing but duds, the difficulties in setting up native-language kindergartens for Chechen deportees to Kazakhstan, and so on.

I found the same thing–going native–happening to me. It wasn’t that I decided that Stalin was a good guy (I didn’t), but that I began to sympathize with Stalin’s bureaucrats. They had tough jobs, and worked hard to solve real problems. Sergo Ordzhonikidze, Stalin’s minister of industry, was quite the cold-hearted bastard when it came to the politics of his native Georgia. I studied him, though, when he was trying to build steel mills and tractor factories amidst shortages of everything. He drove himself and others mercilessly, built real esprit de corps, and finally killed himself in despair over Stalin’s Great Purges. I couldn’t help liking him.

In the Red Army, Stalin’s long-time minister of defense Kliment Voroshilov never struck me as anything but an idiot far out of his depth. I likewise never warmed to the ostensible genius Mikhail Tukhachevskii. He was happy to persecute those with suspect pasts, was quite out of his mind on a number of questions related to tank production and military technology, and popularized the ideas devised by brighter minds junior to him. But lesser-known figures like Ieronym Uborevich and Innokent Khalepskii–they were bright, hard-working, and effective. Stalin had them killed, of course.

To be sure, there are limits to going native. I was looking at industrialists and military men. All modern societies have and need armies and industry, and so I could look at them to some degree independently of the regime they served. If, on the other hand, I had been studying those who carted kulaks and their families off to Siberia, I doubt I would have been quite so sympathetic.

Thanks to Johnson’s Russia List, we confirm once again that the wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine. RIA Novosti tells us that “Russian prosecutors drop charges against businesswoman who died in custody.”

Vera Trifonova died in April 2010. What makes her case noteworthy is not that charges were dropped once she was dead, but that “new charges were brought against Trifonova in October, five months after her death.”