Fruits of Glasnost
Woll, Josephine
For the past two years Soviet newspapers and magazines have used the unexpected freedom made available by glasnost. Once, editors had to clear all questionable material with the censors;...
...We aren't the ones who should alter our tastes...
...Kunayev, D. A...
...Among them was N.I...
...Questions to a Historian Let me say right away that there is quite a lot in the article that is correct and generally acknowledged...
...With Trotsky, there's an absolute paradox: "Trotskyism" is there, but Trotsky isn't...
...There was still no evidence against the accused, no verdict...
...Incessant radio broadcasts affirmed that there was no other country in the world "where man breathes so freely...
...The phrase comes from a popular song dinned into Soviet ears...
...Yezhelev, Izvestia, "The Stifling Summer of '46," May 21, 1988, p. 3; CDSP XL, 23/1988, pp...
...It is that deformed society and not the path we traveled after October that we are rebuilding...
...After all, the situation was very complex and in many ways unclear...
...My comments are in italic...
...For views incompatible with that "new line," he was expelled from the Party...
...Proponents of the established model . . . shifted the debate to the ideological sphere: If you condemn this model, you're against socialism...
...The "Zhdanovshchina" targeted primarily, though by no means exclusively, intellectuals and writers, and two of the most prominent were the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko and the poet Anna Akhmatova...
...His letter closes: P. Kuznetsov can think what he likes, but I, after seventy years of progress toward socialism (not away from it) according to "Lenin's guidelines," see the rationing system in 1988 and Russians in remote areas populated by many millions of people dreaming of an adulterated cooked sausage...
...An entire period of the country's literary culture is on the verge of extinction...
...The answer, I think, is provided by George Orwell, whose novel 1984 will soon be published in our country: For every person, even the most steadfast, a torture can be found that will break Glasnost Watch him...
...Apparently, the editorial board of the SED thinks that the importance of the question will disappear if someone's name is not printed...
...They themselves constructed the bonebreaking time bomb that pulverized them...
...23/1988, p. 22...
...One of the major pockets of counterrevolutionary activity in the Academy was in the Institute of the History of Science and Technology, which was headed by Bukharin...
...Pyotr Petrov is reacting to an article by the writer Ales Adamovich, "The war was won by the people" (Moscow News, 911988...
...The author himself considers, and rightly so, that we will not be able to move forward if we now pin all the responsibility for our misfor tunes on Stalin alone...
...But that would also mean missing the very nub of the problem, evading the question of how far Stalin was the creator and at the same time the product of a system which was consolidated during his period in power...
...The following three-way discussion, appearing in Pravda last summer, exemplifies some of the problems they touch on, particularly the "camouflaged" apologias...
...Thus the question is asked but left unanswered...
...35 Glasnost Watch course, is not forbidden—and asks questions which again he does not answer and to which perhaps he has no answers...
...Us," "we" . . . is that not charming...
...It simply reported that Kamenev, Zinoviev, and others were being brought to trial...
...kuna...
...b) Was there a historical alternative to "Stalinist socialism," or was Lenin with his NEP [the New Economic Program], which he envisaged as a serious and long-term policy, tragically mistaken—so that the result of October could not have been anything other than a bloody, dictatorial regime...
...Five Russian and Baltic historians participated, as did Valentin Falin, former ambassador to West Germany, former chairman of Novosti Press Agency, and now head of the International Department of the Central Committee...
...Two of their comments follow: V. Lukin, Problems of Peace and Socialism It seems to me that many of Czechoslovakia's economic problems were attributable to the country's uncritical adoption of our own model of development at the time...
...It is good that the new edition will contain the names of everyone who has been rehabilitated...
...But independent of this, his works should be accessible...
...Adamovich wrote about Stalin's role as head of state during the Second World War, a particularly sensitive subject for many Soviet citizens, and the losses sustained because of his errors and misjudgments...
...Bukharin...
...Millions] worked, overcoming the difficulties created by the atmosphere of repressions and lawlessness, the overcentralized command-and-administer system, and various kinds of deformations and deviations from socialism, which caused cruel losses...
...I...
...But what about the guilty ones...
...Let's think about it and try to understand...
...2. To submit to the general meeting of the . . . Academy . . . a proposal calling for the abrogation of the May 21, 1937 resolution...
...I wanted to compare them...
...yet the "masses" were already aflame with malign enthusiasm...
...That subject, too, was presented in the Soviet press in a manner by now uncharacteristically distorted...
...His response is that, "in using Lenin's guidelines for building socialism . . . we were unable to be entirely consistent, we did not know how, and moreover external conditions did not give us that opportunity, . . . and as a result we got a deformed socialist society...
...The editors held a discussion with six journalists who were in Czechoslovakia when—as the introduction explains—"troops from five Warsaw Treaty member-states entered Czechoslovak territory . . . to put an end to the growing political crisis in that fraternal country, to avert the threat to the Czechoslovak people's socialist gains and to prevent the strategic stability and security of world socialism from being undermined...
...8-9 In Moscow News (28/1988) Mikhail Gurfinkel published a piece entitled "Who Was Repressed...
...it can unite a hundred people in an instant and can break up just as quickly, but it is also capable of unlimited growth and a long life span...
...Afanasyev's reply was published a month later, "unabridged and unedited" according to the Pravda editors, and was followed by an editorial commentary...
...I...
...For example, Yagoda, Yezhov, Glasnost Watch Beria, Bagirov and company...
...And we should call upon them to perform an act of civic courage by preparing a series of articles for use in the schools, articles that could be published in the form of a brochure or carried in the periodical press...
...An anti-Soviet counterrevolutionary group, headed by the enemy of the people Bukharin, seized leadership posts in the Academy and, with the full connivance of the former Presidium of the Academy, influenced the . . . work performed by this scientific body...
...This question grates, not without reason, among those who have retained Stalinist illusions...
...A prefatory editorial note describes the rallies and concludes: WINTER • 1989 • 33 Glasnost Watch . . . Decades of hushing up the "blank spots" in our history, while not deciding anything in fact, only promoted deformations in the historical memory of the Soviet peoples and other countries...
...That means that they themselves have been teaching children for two decades...
...A: There is such a thing as civil rehabilitation, and L. Trotsky deserves such rehabilitation...
...But why did the accused persons confess...
...Vasily Zhuraysky [Pravda correspondent] and I asked him: "Leonid Ilyich, what are we to do, what are we to write...
...Levonevsky describes the meeting, attended by six Leningrad authors and editors, Zhdanov— then head of the Leningrad Party organization and "commissar" of ideology—and Stalin...
...On August 15, 1936, a succinct report headed "In the USSR Prosecutor's Office" appeared on page two of Izvestia, in the upper right-hand corner...
...kuna...
...N. Afanasyev thinks...
...But, of course, we have not taken that path in the way that Lenin saw it...
...Old ways die hard, however...
...Consequently, the monkey is an example for human beings...
...Once, editors had to clear all questionable material with the censors...
...Can one be ironic about the feat accomplished by the people in these highly difficult conditions, can one forget that...
...Of all the corners of Soviet life into which the press has probed, the rediscovered history of the Soviet state has been a source of constant interest—and frequent amazement—to readers domestic and foreign...
...My "subjective hypotheses" .. . are that (a) "Despite tremendous sacrifices, we did not get socialism in the form in which Lenin and the Leninist guard envisaged it in the twenties," hence the need for revolutionary, that is, profound, structural restructuring...
...Lenin in developing a concept of socialism causes nothing but bewilderment...
...Yevgeny Ambartsumov concentrated on the psychology of the victims: A Venomous Fog Lifts . . . Stalin's terror using judicial falsification began, strictly speaking, in the late 1920s with the so-called Shakhty Affair and the "Industrial Party" trial, in which the old engineering intelligentsia was assigned the role of scapegoat for the natural interruptions in forced industrialization...
...We need to issue a call to the historians, social scientists, and economists who, through their fierce social and political journalism, have already proven their independence from the ingrained formulas, clichés, and concepts...
...How does my opponent, who so heatedly rejects any "untruths or half-truths," respond to this—I hope, sufficiently clear—point of view...
...The people should know the names not only of their heroes but of those who dealt harshly with them...
...Other topics, such as the Czech invasion and the Hitler-Stalin pact, are discussed, but often with substantial distortions, a few examples of which are included here...
...But there is also political rehabilitation—reinstatement in the Party...
...Let's compare the Central Committees elected at the Seventeenth (1934) and Nineteenth (1939) Party congresses: in 1939, only twentyfour of those who had been elected to the Central Committee in 1934 were again elected...
...But the eras bracketing Stalin's are also under scrutiny: Khrushchev's fall from power and Brezhnev's policies in Eastern Europe, the transition from Lenin to Stalin, even the Romanov dynasty...
...Time for Quest and Hope," Komsomolskaya pravda, July 30, 1988...
...40-42...
...I see that thirtyfive years after Stalin's death we are only just "learning democracy" like backward fifteenyearolds in the primary grades and only achieving average grades at that...
...How long and assiduously we gauged our understanding of phenomena in social life by Stalin's Talmudic "first, second, third" and by his definitions...
...N. Afanasyev at the same time denies the existence of the concept of socialism in Lenin too...
...I already had the first edition (1981...
...Yet the scholar had taken issue not with socialist principles but with the distortion of socialism and with a course that led to stagnation, corruption, and a new cult...
...The true Bolshevik," he added, "dissolves his personality in Party collectivity" and therefore can renounce "any personal opinion or conviction...
...It does, however, reflect genuine pain...
...For we are only feeling our way along the approaches to this most complex subject—the building of socialism in the USSR...
...Some people were unwilling to realize that real successes were achieved not in the name of, but in spite of, Stalin...
...Because they write something that's like an emetic...
...It is evident that no one is going to write any serious textbooks .. . in the two summer months...
...The truth is, we must stop keeping silent on his role in the organization of our army, his participation in the construction of the Party...
...now, if they ask, they are told to decide for themselves...
...Historically the question was different: As the trailblazers of socialism, equipped with Lenin's guidelines for building socialism, we were unable and did not know how to be completely consistent, and external circumstances denied us that opportunity...
...Eighteen months ago V. Tsaplin, director of the Central Archives of the USSR National Economy, sent department heads a letter recommending that henceforth archivists' performance be evaluated according to the extent that archival documents are actually used in historical scholarship...
...The first edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia describes Bukharin not only as one of the leaders of the All-Russian Communist party (Bolsheviks) and the Communist International and one of the leading participants in the October Revolution...
...For the past two years Soviet newspapers and magazines have used the unexpected freedom made available by glasnost...
...After all, in a state seventy years old, Stalin's reign accounts for one-third of its past...
...In our country a magazine . . . has no right to accommodate itself to the tastes of people who do not want to recognize our system...
...If the originals are found, they will be assessed...
...Yuri Afanasyev, rector of the State Archivists Institute in Moscow, comments bitterly that no country has falsified its history as consistently, and as grossly, as the Soviet Union...
...And Dmitri Likhachev, an eminent medieval scholar who has been instrumental in the popular movement to restore Russian cultural monuments, refers to memory as "the conscience of a nation...
...Even if a researcher gets permission to examine documents under "restricted access," he cannot cite them...
...How on earth did it come to pass that all these years, lesson after lesson, even the best and most inquisitive teachers, even those not too lazy to read, to learn, and to try to find things out . . . presented the history of our homeland in a monstrously distorted and unrecognizable form...
...But I think that something cannot be disputed: Whether it was socialism or "regimented socialism" (that is, "on the one hand" half in clover, "on the other hand" half in a wretched plight), we will find out only five or ten years from now...
...Certain subjects—Lenin's justification of terrorism, the antireligious campaigns of the early Bolshevik period—are still out of bounds, although given the pace at which sacred cows are being gored, a wise reader must add the caveat: for the moment...
...The full list of the members of the Party's leading organ who were repressed has never been published...
...We must remember that Stalin repealed the NEP, turned the Bolshevik party (no, not single-handedly, but as head of a whole social stratum) into an "order of knights," broke off the alliance with the peasantry, subjected the workers to regimented discipline, suppressed or destroyed the intelligentsia, and made blood and terror the foundation of the state because he "was unable to be entirely consistent" with regard to "Lenin's guidelines" . . . and in fact, this "inconsistent" transformation of socialist guidelines into totalitarian and terrorist ones was historically inevitable...
...it was recently denounced in a newspaper letter as "revolting humbug...
...otherwise there would be no socialism in the world...
...But no — that's not enough...
...But we must also not forget that he repeatedly came out against Lenin and against the general Party line...
...There are so many questions, to historians and to politicians...
...Many would like to sacrifice Stalin so as to save Stalinism...
...Falin's comments contribute little by way of "real insight:" Much is being said about the "secret protocols to the Soviet-German Pact of August 23, 1939...
...It turns out that the "restricted access" to archival documents that was imposed during the years of stagnation [a phrase commonly Slam* Watch used to designate Brezhnev's time in power] is still in effect...
...From the Editorial Office So, the questions have been asked and the answers given...
...It's not difficult to work out that 115 people were replaced...
...This whole campaign took place at a time when the country was discussing a draft Constitution, which was already being called the "Stalin Constitution...
...The question is: Why does this article, which claims to be the program of a modern approach to historical knowledge, consciously leave unanswered the question of whether the society created in our country is or was truly socialist...
...Let the discussion continue, and we will listen with awe and fascination.—I.H...
...And let there be no sullying of our glorious past...
...Memory—individual, societal, institutional— has been reactivated in the Soviet Union, and the layers of falsification are, sometimes painfully and unevenly, being stripped away...
...I raised him like a human being' [the boy in the story says...
...You look in vain here for an answer to the question of how far those deviations were the result of subjectivist tyranny and how far they were dictated by objective economic reality and were the direct or indirect result of the triumph of the Bukharin and Stalin bloc during the struggle against the opposition in 1925...
...The next social victim, in the 30 • DISSENT early 1930s, was the Russian peasantry, against which outright genocide was committed during forcible collectivization (the approximate number of victims was between five million and ten million...
...And they have covered it quite well...
...WINTER • 1989 • 29 Wasnoat Watch —Kim Smimov,, Izvestia, May 11, 1988, p. 3; CDSP XL, 19/1988...
...V...
...It comes as no surprise that Deputy People's Commissar of Internal Affairs Zakovsky, a former criminal who had been convicted of murder before the Revolution, boasted that he would have been able to make Marx himself confess to working for Bismarck...
...We have all read of his doings in Kazakhstan and of their deplorable consequences...
...The censor who regularly used to sit in on editorial meetings is not to be seen...
...Thank you for an explanation so far removed from anything dubious or untruthful...
...But as a result of the trials of the 1930s, some of the most prominent leaders of the Party and the government, former members of the Politburo and the Central Committee and Lenin's comrades-inarms from the first revolutionary battles, whom he had mentioned in his Testament, were condemned to death...
...Now, despite their wide circulation, publications from the first years of Soviet power, as well as the subsequent period, exist only in individual copies...
...it's not up to us to accommodate our thoughts and feelings to Zoshchenko and Akhmatova...
...At a recent national conference M. Stegantsev, director of the Central Archives of the Soviet Army, angrily dressed down the prominent historian V. Polikarpov for requesting documents that, under a 1981 Defense Ministry directive, it was forbidden to show without special authorization...
...The first writer, Pobisk Kuznetsov, is responding to an article by Yuri Afanasyev, rector of the Archivists' Institute, on perestroika and historical knowledge...
...You don't take into consideration the inertia and resistance of the peasants to the country's rapid advancement...
...M. Tukhachevsky, CO of the Volga Military District, I. Yakir, CO of the Leningrad Military District, and I. Uborevich, CO of the Byelorussian Military District, all on June 12, 1937 . . . . In May Izvestia printed forty-year-old notes taken by a Leningrad writer, D. A. Levonevsky, at a historic encounter...
...If there's no person, there's no problem...
...Ban Lifted By November of 1988, six thousand book titles that have remained until now in libraries' special collections will be made available to the reading public...
...Among other initiatives, a group of young historians and scholars won the support of the Komsomol Central Committee to set up a professional association of historians...
...Saving it is the top priority of the 26 • DISSENT Current Digest of the Soviet Press (CDSP) and the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS...
...We" —that means millions of prisoners under the leadership of Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria...
...Society had turned into a mob...
...Pravda, June 25, 1988, p. 3; FBIS July 11, 1988, pp...
...Taranov, Izvestia, April 3, 1988, p. 6; CDSP XL, 14/1988, pp...
...Rashidov and Shchelokov [other high-level political figures convicted on criminal charges] have "disappeared" in exactly the same way—they aren't there...
...We have the chance to revive Leninist principles under new conditions, conditions that are in part more favorable than in the late twenties and the thirties and in part far more difficult, because we are dealing not with the threat of the emergence of an inhuman, regimented "socialism," but with the consequences of the prolonged dominance of that system...
...I don't know, I can't confirm anything...
...The times demand these books...
...We hope that Soviet readers, too, will soon be able to acquaint themselves with the works of Roy Medvedev, their uncompromising fellow countryman—works that are incisive and controversial, that appeal to the voice of conscience in each of us, that are surprisingly truthful and sincere...
...Access Restricted Historians complain that officials in charge of archives are more concerned with protecting the documents than with making them available...
...Even so, as if contradicting Orwell, some held out for a long time...
...its substance is clear from his comments...
...Too many sibyls have choked on their own "impossibles" and "nevers" to exclude any topic out of hand...
...In February of 1968, I recall, Leonid Brezhnev flew to Prague...
...And he answered: "Write the truth...
...This means that a historian who wants to look at such a file has to get permission from the appropriate agency—it might be the USSR State Construction Committee or the USSR Ministry of Ferrous Metallurgy...
...Kunayev, A. M...
...Perhaps we could have left it at that and allowed the readers to judge whether the viewpoints presented are right or wrong...
...Thinking about this, I would be ashamed to talk about "enforced inconsistency" and "deformations" along an invariably glorious path...
...The Moment of Truth Is Inescapable By Decision of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Title of Academician Has Been Restored to N. I. Bukharin...
...They included J. Stalin, V. Molotov, K. Voroshilov, L. Kaganovich, M. Kalinin, and others...
...You have to explain the complicated personality of Stalin and the complex situation...
...It gives one renewed hope in the capacities of serious men and women to reach for the truth...
...But at once "the wrath of the working people" appeared in all the newspapers: "No mercy for the enemies," "Destroy the vermin," and so on...
...The social ills which have struck society can be cured only by relying on the historical experience accumulated by the USSR peoples and all mankind...
...Levonevsky was present at the August 14, 1946 meeting at which the Party Central Committee adopted the resolution "On the Magazines Zvezda and Leningrad...
...History is irreversible, you cannot rectify it or rework it—it is necessary to interpret it profoundly and responsibly and learn its lessons, which is what the party and people are doing today...
...The principle of selection is simple and clear: "Open up" all books except those containing appeals that incite war or conflicts between nationalities, or pornography...
...Yury Feofanov focused on the transformation of Soviet society: Return to the Truth . . . After 1934 an epidemic of a disease that can be called the "mob syndrome" appeared in society...
...There are limits...
...In my opinion, this will not occur...
...In the fourth I read: "Kun...
...And there and then they demanded that "the vermin be destroyed," although the trial had not yet begun...
...The new mode of thinking presupposes, among other things, the need to avoid the extremes, inherent in the past, which doomed us to incorrect and imbalanced judgments divorced from reality...
...But these feelings are mixed—there is also a very great sense of shame...
...Interdepartmental Commission for the Transfer of Literature from Special Collections to General Use...
...Pravda, July 26, 1988, p. 3, FBIS, July 27, 1988, pp...
...The fate of another two thousand is to be considered by November of this year...
...In the first edition, for example, I read the entries: "Kun...
...Preobrazhensky, the works of P. Kropotkin, L. Trotsky, B. Savinkov and P. Milyukov, . . . the text of the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II—all this and much more is the living history of the Revolution and invaluable testimony to the fierce political struggle of that era...
...and (b) The counterrevolutionary path of Stalin and his enormous apparatus was not historically inevitable and therefore justified, hence the opportunity in the course of restructuring to build on the unrealized, curtailed, alternative economic, political, legal, and sociopsychological potential of our country...
...But which of them were repressed...
...certain of the country's most prominent citizens signed individual and collective letters expressing their devotion to Comrade Stalin...
...Washington had full information about the talks on the SovietGerman Pact...
...Voices have begun to be heard: "Perhaps that's enough...
...They seem astonishingly like the things we wrote over the last fifty years, often to the disdain of those who had yielded themselves to the falsehoods of Stalinism...
...This can hardly be a question of forgetfulness...
...J.W...
...Most of the articles on the end of the Prague Spring focused on the Czechs' "triumphant choice" of socialism and alliance with the USSR in 1948, the "antisocialist" and "antidemocratic" forces within the Czech Communist party in 1968, and the "propaganda harvest" (as one Izvestia commentator described it) that the West was trying to reap from the anniversary...
...It was clear in my interview with Vaganov that he had no interest whatsoever in changing the way archives are operated...
...having no convictions, it nonetheless is in the grip of a single impulse...
...How sincere were all these resolutions calling for the defendants to be destroyed...
...Just after the forty-ninth anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland there were massive demonstrations in the Baltic republics commemorating their loss of independence...
...The following letter—from a historian—is by no means atypical...
...When I asked Vaganov whether the wartime orders of the Supreme Commander in Chief, about which historians had raised questions, would be published, he retorted: "In what connection is there such an interest...
...It must be expressed without fail in the form of a catechism...
...He then enumerates, one by one, the names, posts, and dates of death (or approximate dates) of each of the 104 people repressed between 1936 and 1941, such as G. Pyatakov, deputy People's Commissar for Heavy Industry, February 1, 1937...
...They proceed to analyze aspects of Stalin's domestic policies, based in part on marginal notes scribbled by Stalin into books found in his library...
...Either we will become a completely different country, an unrecognizably different and flourishing society . . . or we will continue our profound arguments about a certain "inconsistency" of socialism, without freedom and without bread and butter...
...It is no use "merely seeking" it in Lenin's work, he says...
...The decision to cancel the test was the only possible sober and honest one...
...Even old time-servers like Aleksandr Chakovsky, member of the party's Central Committee and the Writers' Union board and until recently editor of Literaturnaya gazeta, take advantage of expanded opportunities to print articles both startling and fascinating, while editors appointed by Gorbachev, like Vitaly Korotich (Ogonek) and Yegor Yakovlev (Moscow News), are often ahead of him in what they perceive the press can and should do...
...Until then, judging from experience, the "copies of copies" should be handled with the utmost caution...
...Zavgorodnyaya, Crimea province, letter to Izvestia, August 17, 1988, p. 6; CDSP XL, 33/1988, p. 18...
...This was announced by V. Solodin of the collegium of the Chief Administration for the Protection of State Secrets in Print at a briefing at the Novosti News Agency...
...19-20...
...You should explain everything...
...But isn't a mob sincere in its savage impulses...
...It was hardest of all for the special correspondents who were given orders from above...
...It stems from the totality of Lenin's works...
...Noting that it was Stalin himself who inspired the "pogrom campaign against the creative intelligentsia," the Izvestia author adds that such "metastases of authoritarian thinking are hard to get rid of" and cites some recent examples of "administrative inter ference, absurd prohibitions, and fear of the truth...
...Ovchinnikova, Izvestia, June 10, 1988, p. 1; CDSP XL, No...
...To this day it has not been eradicated to its foundations, and it is in no hurry to give 36 • DISSENT Glasnost Watch way voluntarily to true socialism, that is, democratic socialism...
...It is quite strange to read [Afanasyev's] claim that the existence of two systems—capitalism and socialism—in our era was in no way envisaged by the classic Marxist-Leninists...
...Stalin: "And what about the author...
...Petrov replies: . . . By destroying Stalin you are wiping out all the successes and achievements of that period...
...Every day we watched events intensify and contradictions mount, but we couldn't publish anything...
...But who today believes that Lenin's legacy must "merely" be studied mechanically, rather than in dialectical interaction with the present day...
...Not every reader agrees...
...The first catalog of V. Lenin's works, compiled by L. Kamenev, The ABCs of Communism by N. Bukharin and Ye...
...Stalin defended the socialist course adopted by the Party, and he advanced a culturally and economically backward country...
...There was even mention of a "habeas corpus act" —the document that had substantiated the presumption of innocence for many centuries...
...What use are the subsequent phrases about the "bitter errors and tragic crimes of the past," phrases which nobody dares do without today, if "we" (including P. Kuznetsov) do not dare to think anything at all through to its conclusion...
...On the whole, however, historical inquiry, for so long steeped in lies blocked entirely, is rampant...
...Kunayev, A.M...
...You are insulting the memory of our people, reducing everything to the name of one man, but remember that people did a great deal for the country...
...To answer this question we have to study all 115 biographies...
...What happened to the "Soy...
...A person writes something beautiful, and that's all...
...I have tried, when excerpting from longer texts, to avoid betraying the sense (or flavor) of the whole piece...
...And when Zinoviev and Trotsky had considered their widely known ruthlessness during the Revolution to be valor...
...Can Yu...
...Don't come to me without a confession from Kamenev," said Stalin threateningly to the investigator, Mironov, who would soon, of course, meet the same fate as the people he was investigating, as would Zakovsky...
...There will be no final exam in history and social studies in the nation's schools...
...To the question of P. Kuznetsov's article as to whether the society created in our country is (or was) a socialist society, Professor Afanasyev declares quite clearly and categorically: "I do not consider the society we have created to be a socialist society, even a 'deformed' one...
...Seeking to prove that it is necessary to start all over again, to create a contemporary theory of socialism anew "with Lenin's help," Yu...
...And the answers are diverse and contentious...
...workers...
...Society is depicted in a ridiculous way...
...Can we tolerate having people in leadership positions who allow this to be published...
...The historian had no intention of accommodating himself to it, though Grishin, then First Secretary of the Moscow City Party Committee, had told him bluntly, "We now have a new line on Stalin...
...FBIS, July 1, 1988, pp...
...For example, 730,000 personal files held in the Central Archives of the USSR National Economy are under "restricted access...
...In reply, Pyatakov referred to what he termed the true Bolshevik's lack of any restraints— moral, political, even physical...
...For people like myself—those who over the decades participated in the often lonely and painful struggle of the anti-Stalinist left—there is something tremendously moving in reading some of these excerpts...
...He was not a spy, nor a killer, nor did he commit any criminal offenses...
...Us" —that means the people who accomplished the great revolution and were deceived and thwarted in their enthusiasm, in their unreasoning faith, in their distrust that grew up over sixty years, in their spiritual aridity and degeneration, the long-suffering Soviet people—together with those who unrestrainedly and habitually ordered them around...
...Ironically, although the archivists' overriding concern is with protecting documents, they are protected poorly...
...Although this question has already been examined with the utmost clarity in party documents published in connection with the seventieth anniversary of the Great October Revolution, the author clearly has his own particular opinion on this score—which, of WINTER • 1989...
...We read, for example: "Recently another method has appeared and is being tried out—an attempt to create in the Soviet people's social consciousness a kind of hybrid image—a Shchedrin-like symbiosis of two parts: 'On the one hand, on the other hand.' On the one hand, mass repressions and crimes, on the other hand daily happiness and the achievement of records...
...They were collected—in attics, basements, and galleries— by Moscow bibliographile V. Maryash...
...L. Trotsky was removed from the Party not in 1937 but ten years earlier...
...Gamarnik, deputy People's Commissar for Defense, May 31, 1937...
...Oh, Comrade P. Kuznetsov...
...From Goering personally...
...Moscow News appears in an English-language edition as well as in Russian and other languages...
...Then he thought another moment and said, pointing to an aide, "And send it to him...
...They are also a part of our history...
...Fragile document paper is crumbling and texts are fading...
...An objective definition of his role in our history will not lead to L. Trotsky's political rehabilitation...
...Western journalists have recognized the "story" of the Soviet rediscovery of its past...
...12-13...
...Moscow News, 14/1988, p. 2. Apart from distortions of fact and erroneous inferences, Petrov's letter is unpleasantly sanctimonious...
...But these "protocols" are known to experts only as "copies" of "copies...
...Stalin ordered Yagoda to pin the assassination of Kirov on former members of the opposition—the Trotskyist and the so-called "new" (Zinoviev-Kamenev) opposition...
...An exhibit of publications that just yesterday were "off limits" is displayed at the entrance to the news agency's Blue Hall...
...The concept of socialism is constituted by a determinate aggregate of ideas...
...What it boils down to is: Either Lenin is no longer considered a classic source, or we are asked to forget that we owe to him the idea of the peaceful coexistence of two systems...
...A historian, he has concerned himself with little-known pages of our past...
...It's just like Stalin's mentality: "If there's a person, there's a problem...
...Only by mastering the wealth of humanitarian culture and the ethical and aesthetic values created by many generations of people will it become possible to build on our planet, together with other countries, a new humanitarian community...
...leader, three-time Hero of Socialist Labor, etc., etc...
...Still, a list could be compiled from the available literature...
...The summer's other "anniversary" marked twenty years since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia...
...At present, archive employees' performance is evaluated on the basis of the number of documents in their charge...
...The rehabilitations are not confined to the dead, or to victims of Stalinist repressions alone...
...To what order of animals does he belong...
...But it also contains assertions that give rise to puzzling questions...
...Or: London knew all about the SovietGerman talks...
...71-74 The Historian's Answers 1 July 1988 . . . Let us go on to the . . . most important "puzzling" question, which, in turn, consists of two questions: (a) Is it possible to say that under Stalin and his successors a socialist society, albeit insufficiently socialist, was indeed built...
...It became a flood...
...Our country is only beginning to get a real insight into this past of ours...
...WINTER • 1989 • 31 Glasnost Watch —Izvestia, June 14, 1988, p. 3; CDSP XL, 24/1988...
...A...
...This means that stopgap measures are needed...
...That is why, the further we went, the more we deviated from Lenin's concept of socialism and thus produced a deformed socialist society...
...It began slowly, with the publication of an interview with Bukharin's widow and the text of her letter requesting reconsideration of her husband's case...
...The original Soviet source follows each excerpt...
...This is why, for example, so few individual names are mentioned in histories of the Civil War, even though thousands of soldiers and officers were decorated for service in the Red Army at that time...
...the "index" of taboo subjects has shrunk drastically...
...Much has changed in the last three years—and we can no longer bear to give up hope...
...Sometimes the facts were tailored to fit those orders...
...A report from Leningrad was published in Izvestia on January 13, 1929: The general meeting of the USSR Academy of Sciences had elected new Academicians...
...Oppositionists had been subjected to repression—exile and imprisonment— even earlier...
...For example, in 1939-1940, when the threat of war was growing, there were many slovenly people— some soldiers and factor...
...And what about old what's -his-name...
...Millions of sheets are already , illegible, even under a magnifying glass...
...Any attempts to find the originals have proved unsuccessful both here and in the West...
...A special responsibility is borne today by the humanitarian intelligentsia and historians, and the knowledge of history is being transformed from 28 • DISSENT a purely academic pursuit into a universal social need...
...16-18...
...Let library visitors themselves judge the merits and authenticity of the memoirs of A. Kerensky, Ataman P. Krasnov or [White Guard] General A. Denikin, for example...
...Why did the subject of the "protocols" arise only in 1946...
...Meanwhile our literature already deals quite thoroughly with the way Stalinism and the personality cult arose, the role played by the character of Stalin, and the role played by objective circumstances...
...In midJuly a meeting was held to discuss creating this organization...
...A mob, as is known, lives according to the laws of a perverted dialectic: It is uncontrollable, but at the same time it is easily directed by a single exclamation—"Sic him...
...N. Afanasyev's opinions...
...Within days of the USSR Supreme Court's decision to rescind the sentences of the persons falsely convicted in the major show trials of 1936 and 1937, articles appeared everywhere...
...In the article under review the search for the causes of these deviations is in no way correlated with the real course of events or the policy of the period 1928-1929...
...Sotsialisticheskaya industria, June 23, 1988, pp...
...If that is "inconsistency," a "deviation" justified, moreover, by "circumstances," if "we," even in the camps into which we (and you too) were thrown, "did not turn aside from the path opened up by October," then, for heaven's sake, what kind of idea of that path, of October, of Lenin, lies behind these incantatory formulas that are still so widespread among us...
...On May 10, 1988, the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences adopted a resolution: "In connection with the full rehabilitation of N. I. Bukharin by the USSR Supreme Court . . . and with the clearing of his name, which was criminally besmirched during the years of the J. V. Stalin personality cult, the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences resolves: 1. To restore posthumously to Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin the title of full member (Academician) of the USSR Academy of Sciences...
...Moscow News, 36/1988, pp...
...As a result of the bans, the "secret" literature was not sold in secondhand bookstores and was not reprinted for many decades...
...To this day we are still the "heirs of that time," horrified by unorthodox thinking, allergic to opinions that are at variance with primers and reference books, apologists (often now camouflaged as a "well-considered" and "principled approach") for what, in the guise of socialism, did indeed constitute a gross distortion of Leninist ideas about that society...
...Is it not because the article is trying to "inculcate" these doubts and the conclusions that arise from them in the masses, and not just among historians...
...There is mold on the walls...
...You don't understand and did not see the enthusiasm with which people built socialism and defended their country in Stalin's name...
...But what about history and the young people who don't remember that...
...FBIS...
...Unfortunately, similar distortion comes, with far less excuse, from well-placed sources...
...And most important, in this and other articles by Yu...
...Party and goy...
...Moscow News, 35/1988, pp...
...kunar...
...Us" —that means the enslaved, robbed, unhappy peasant who was annihilated as a class under the leadership of Stalin and the Stalinist "cohort...
...Thus begins an article by Professors 0. Volobuyev and S. Kuleshov, both on the faculty of the Moscow Higher Party School...
...Can that fool, 32 • DISSENT glasnost Watch that farcical story teller and hack writer Zoshchenko, possibly educate people...
...It is impossible to eliminate these distortions with one stroke, just as it is impossible to make people believe that the past is of no concern to those of us living today...
...The hope of socialism, of labor freely undertaken, prosperity, and democracy...
...Pozdnyakov, Izvestia, August 3, 1988, p. 6; CDSP XL, 31/1988, p. 24...
...That is how murderous and suicidal the moral nihilism was that was passed off as revolutionary spirit was...
...Some 180 books and brochures written by N. Bukharin, nearly seventy works by A. Rykov, works by A. Rozengolts, M. Chernov, etc., have been "rehabilitated...
...Reclaiming the Past Restructuring has already uncovered many layers of the difficult Stalinist past...
...N. Afanasyev's witting or unwitting attempt to "repudiate" V.I...
...It is not hard to see that [Afanasyev's] "platform" differs strikingly from the party assessments and conclusions elaborated collectively, with a sense of historical responsibility and on the basis of historical truth, and from the objective, dialectical picture of our achievements and failures, severe tests, and undoubted gains on the path of socialist building and its heroic and dramatic aspects...
...When I asked Doctor of History F. Vaganov, director of the USSR Council of Ministers' Chief Archives Administration, what he thought of Tsaplin's proposals, he called them "contrived...
...V...
...Moscow News, June 19, 1988, p. 10...
...Let anyone who does not want to change, such as Zoshchenko, go right to hell...
...On May 21, 1937, a general meeting of the USSR Academy of Sciences stripped N. I. Bukharin of his title of Academician and expelled him from the Presidium...
...He is also described as an outstanding economist, sociologist, and theoretician of communism...
...Participants issued a call to their colleagues, blending—in the tradition of the Russian intelligentsia—moral and intellectual categories: To the Country's Young Historians We appeal to you today to back the idea of creating in our country a professional association of young historians, pedagogues, creative and museum workers, and archivists—in short, of all who had adopted creative labor in the sphere of history as the goal and meaning of their lives...
...Could Zinoviev have waged a principled struggle against Stalin when Zinoviev himself, together with Kamenev, had violated Lenin's dying will by preventing Stalin's removal from the post of General Secretary...
...It is in the past that we must seek the answers to very many current questions...
...The years—and crimes—of Stalinism have received particular attention...
...In April 1988 Sobesednik published a wide-ranging interview with Roy Medvedev, preceded by an explanatory note on Medvedev's "fate...
...CDSP XL, 34/1988, pp...
...Yu...
...kunachestvo...
...The monkey feels bored among people and their stupid ways...
...I. Aleksandrov, a senior archivist, explains that staff members receive a 15 percent salary increment for being in charge of "secret" documents...
...His article deals with members of the Party Central Committee purged in the second half of the 1930s, and begins: . . . Can we now name people instead of just quoting the figure [of those repressed...
...High on the list of priorities was rehabilitating victims of the Great Terror, whose names and histories had remained clouded even after the partial rehabilitations of the Khrushchev years...
...Can Anna Akh matova really educate people...
...The story ["Adventures of a Monkey"] is about the distribution of food in stores and about policemen...
...The buildings of the depositories that make up the archives complex on Pirogovskaya Street in Moscow have no air conditioning and no humidity regulators...
...Molchanov, Pravda, June 1, 1988, p. 4; CDSP XL, 22/1988...
...But there is one thing about history: The moment of truth is inescapable (it is a bitter fact that one sometimes has to wait decades for it...
...Garfinkel eliminates the handful who "died their own deaths" (or, in Bertram Wolfe's words, died that most unnatural of deaths for a Bolshevik, a natural death) between 1934 and 1939...
...Let's tackle the present...
...On July 29, 1936, a month before the first trial, a secret instruction on the admissibility of employing any methods of investigation against "spies, counterrevolutionaries, White Guards, Trotskyists and Zinovievites" was adopted at Stalin's initiative...
...It is time to give up hiding the truth from the people...
...Even worse than the physical torture, probably, was the moral torture—the threat of reprisals against family members...
...What appears here can only suggest the range of subjects, degrees of passion, and points of view represented on these issues...
...In one year the commission has returned roughly four thousand publications to the reader...
...The author asks: Why did we build things in such a way that they must now be restructured...
...Kunayev, D.A., convicted on criminal charges, was expelled from the party and removed from all official posts.] They were dealt with properly in the newspapers...
...June 28, 1988, p. 1. CDSP XL 26/1988, p. 31...
...People read the article...
...N. Afanasev have "forgotten" that in our country we have not "proclaimed" but created a socialist economic system based on social ownership of the means of production, that we have no class of exploiters and no unemployment, that from the very first steps of socialism in the USSR such features as the absence of the exploitation of man by man and the fundamentally new objectives of socioeconomic progress have been asserted and remain unchanged...
...CDSP XL, 24/1988, p. 18...
...Naturally, the very fact of its cancellation attests to the victory of common sense and ordinary conscientiousness...
...Why didn't the United States use this information in 1939 when Soviet-American relations were tense and President Roosevelt was considering severing diplomatic relations with the USSR...
...If out of inertia we start painting Stalin as all black and call everything associated with him harmful or even criminal, I don't think that we will be doing service to the objective truth...
...Why don't I particularly care for people like Zoshchenko...
...Writers think that they are not concerned with politics...
...Even Trotsky, though still awaiting serious study, is no longer demonized, as is clear from the following response given by Otto Latsis, deputy editor-in-chief of Kommunist (the theoretical organ of the CPSU), to reporters from Komsomolskaya pravda during the Nineteenth Party Conference: Q: Will L. Trotsky be rehabilitated in the future...
...translations, modified where necessary, are drawn from the The first problem to be widely recognized was the corruption of history as a discipline...
...Moscow News published a two-page discussion of Soviet policy at the start of the war...
...Without access to archives, drawing instead on facts published at various times and on the testimony of participants in the events and the recollections of old Bolsheviks, he gradually pieced together, over a period of nearly a decade, the mosaic of his life's main work—the book Let History Judge...
...Clearly, the author prefers the assertion that during the 1920s there existed a Bukharinist alternative which was undoubtedly more attractive...
...Here's why...
...Rallies of workers, collective farmers, scientists, and cultural figures adopted resolutions, as did Party aktivs and general meetings...
...How can the "blank spots" of Soviet history be filled when books are unavailable, teachers uninformed, and archives inaccessible...
...38 • DISSENT...
...After the troops entered, 34 • DISSENT Glasnost Watch there were a lot of inaccuracies in our press, some intentional, some not...
...The teachers who started teaching after the Twentieth Party Congress [1956] are already past forty...
...But how much time will history leave us for this intoxicating casuistry...
...A close friend of Pyatakov's, the Menshevik émigré Valentinov (Volsky), met him in Paris in 1928, soon after the capitulation of the oppositionists, and reproached him for his lack of moral courage...
...The book was largely completed in 1969...
...FBIS, pp...
...That is why the decree had to be adopted, under which anyone twenty minutes late to work was sent to prison...
...It was recommended that we remove the documents of the Twenty-second through the Twenty-sixth Party Congresses from our shelves and tell any patrons who ask for them that they are currently in use...
...42-44...
...Stale, formulaic bombast vies with plain speech, but the plurality of opinions is a remarkable feature of the debate that continues WINTER • 1989 25 glasnost Watch in nearly every issue of nearly every newspaper and magazine...
...Afanasyev then refutes the specific points raised by Kuznetsov...
...An article in Izvestia . . . said that judges and prosecutors must "investigate first, then arrest," that "sooner or later, the question should be raised of admitting the defense to the preliminary investigation...
...A great deal has been done, as it is, to demean the significance of our great victory over fascism...
...A few quotations are especially revealing: Zhdanov: ". . . M. Zoshchenko's work about a monkey who jumps about on the shoulders and heads of people standing in a line is absolutely, extraordinarily harmful...
...Sobesednik 18, April 1988, pp...
...Stalin's third blow fell on the Party, on its old guard...
...The Test Is Canceled, History Remains...
...Doesn't this mean that, while granting access to the archival documents of fifty years ago, we are creating new "blank spots" in our most recent history...
...Just recently we, the employees of city public libraries, were summoned to a special seminar and, after being told that these were the instructions of higher authorities, were ordered to remove from our collections the works of Brezhnev, Grishin, Suslov, Chernenko, and a number of other authors, as well as all the political and economic literature published prior to March 1985, as material that is outdated and no longer relevant...
...I am sure all the readers of Dissent will join in thanking Josephine Woll for her excellent sampling from Soviet writers and thinkers as they try to face the past honestly and critically...
...The archive guardians show open hostility toward historians, who, in the formers' view, try to poke their noses into places where they don't belong...
...We have not turned away from the path begun by the October Revolution, as Doctor of Historical Sciences Yu...
...But there are bad, harmful places in that writing, ideas that poison young people's minds...
...In the spring of 1940, London planned military strikes at the USSR, but the idea of using the "secret protocols" to discredit Moscow never came up...
...In April 1935, about three hundred oppositionists from whom investigators had beaten confessions were brought together in the cellars of the Lubyanka Prison, and by May about fifteen relatively "plausible" confessions had been obtained...
...Libraries destroyed books, and private book owners, fearing the consequences, also disposed of them...
...And what a sharp contrast—like night and day—one sees in the newspaper report about that same person published in 1937: "The reorganization of the USSR Academy of Sciences was hindered by the subversive efforts of enemies of the people...
...1984 has already been printed in a Latvian journal and is due to appear in Novyi mir soon.] There was also—and this must be remembered— a certain social and psychological basis for the "cooperation" of the accused with the prosecution...
...The "captive minds"—at least some of them—shook off their captivity as soon as they could...
...This dark page cannot be erased from the glorious history of our Academy the way Bukharin's name was erased from the list of Academicians and members of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences and, less than a year later, from the list of the living...
...Even Moscow News, the most consistent standard-bearer of glasnost, twisted itself into knots trying to reconcile what happened with "what happened...
...But by then a different climate had taken hold in society...
...This old tendency—to make the presence of a given name in encyclopedias dependent on the leadership and its attitude to the name— should be made a thing of the past...
...Putting the question this way effectively asserts that our initial path was mistaken in advance...
...After all, many of the convicted persons had gone through tsarist and White Guard torture chambers without giving in...
...But dipping into the Soviet press itself has a power of its own...
...I have read that the next edition of the dictionary is ready to go to press...
...It was the erosion of moral foundations, of those immutable values, common to all mankind, to which we are turning today...
...But the newspaper cannot remain silent on WINTER • 1989 • 37 Glasnost Watch some of Professor Yu...
...46-49...
...A. Didusenko, Trud Journalists were in a very difficult position...
...And how hard it is for these guilty, but blameless, teachers to open the latest newspapers and carefully read the searing lines and realize that they cannot teach children either Shall I give you the text-book version or the real one...
...More, much more remains to be said, more of the terrible truth, more about the time of murder and repression...
...N. Afanasyev and in his numerous speeches and interviews, where the author does not mince his words and even seems to be deliberately making them sharp and challenging, it is difficult, if indeed possible, to find a constructive approach, a serious scientific analysis of concrete facts and documents...
...And what can one say about Pyatakov and Radek, who publicly joined—nor were they the only ones—in the awful general chorus of demands for the death penalty during the trial of Zinoviev and Kamenev...
...A letter-writer, V. Pozdnyakov, complained to Izvestia about the mulish, all-too-prevalent mentality that cannot abandon familiar patterns: No Person, No Problem . . . I obtained the fourth edition of the Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary (1987...
...The decree was formally revoked by the Politburo on October 20, 1988...
...Vasily Alexandrov/MOSCOW NEWS WINTER • 1989 • 27 Glasnost Watch today, tomorrow, or any other day unless they reeducate themselves...
...In connection with this decision, no one—neither teachers, parents, nor students— can experience anything but a sense of relief and gratitude toward those who had the courage to say no to this test...
...Then he thought a moment and added: "One copy of it...
Vol. 36 • January 1989 • No. 1
