http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/08/25/105.html
Harvard University Press
Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary Under Stalin
By Jochen Hellbeck
Harvard University Press
436 pages. $29.95
The Inner Revolution
Jochen Hellbeck's study of diaries from the Stalin era takes us back to a time
of epic hope, when the transformation of man seemed imminent.
By Richard Lourie
Published: August 25, 2006
The Soviet experiment is now so entirely a part of the past that it seems
slightly incredible that it was only 25 years ago that Leonid Brezhnev was in
power and it was Russian troops who were dying in Afghanistan. In a sense there
were two Soviet Unions, one extending from the Revolution to Josef Stalin's
death in 1953 and the other from 1953 until the fall of the Soviet Union in
1991. The two were roughly the same in duration, but it is of course the world
of 1953-1991 that is a vivid part of the memory of those alive now.
The principal service of Jochen Hellbeck's "Revolution on My Mind" is that it
transports us back to that earlier, impassioned revolutionary Soviet Union, a
time of epic hope and energy, when the transformation of man and history seemed
imminent. There were no limits to the possibilities. Justice would reign on
earth. In time, the state would wither away. And, as Leon Trotsky predicted at
the end of his book "Literature and Revolution," the "average human type" would
"rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx." Then, as if that
were not grandiose enough, he added: "And above this ridge new peaks will rise."
This would be the greatest transformation in human history, and of course no
one wanted to be left out. People kept diaries in the Stalin era for many
reasons, according to Hellbeck, who teaches history at Rutgers, but chief among
them was "a striving to inscribe their life into a larger narrative of the
revolutionary cause." Both the Soviet experience and the Soviet diary were of a
different order of magnitude from the bourgeois diary with its crabbed and
selfish world. Nor should the Soviet diary be confused with anything depicted
in dystopias like George Orwell's "1984," in which hero Winston Smith's
"diaristic 'I' turns against the goals and values propagated by the state."
Diaries were not refuges but instruments of transformation. By definition, no
one (except perhaps Stalin) had fully achieved the "rationalist zeal,
optimistic self-confidence, and creative energy" of the New Man. Some diarists
had subjective problems -- lack of will, enthusiasm, elan -- while others had
more objective problems, like wrong class origins. Stepan Podlubny, one of the
diarists whose writings are treated in detail, was a "wolf in disguise," in
other words, the son of a kulak. His diary was an attempt both to forge a new
identity and to conceal an old one. The tensions were high and the ironies
could be painful and perverse. In an effort to conceal his own class origins,
Podlubny became so zealous a Komsomol activist that the security police
entrusted him with the task of unmasking disguised class enemies. He himself
was finally outed in 1936 and expelled from the Komsomol.
For another diarist, Alexander Afinogenov, a wealthy and famous playwright
whose works were often personally critiqued by Stalin, expulsion from the
Writers' Union afforded him the opportunity to do what he always knew a writer
must: "to be a worthy engineer of souls, he must engineer his own soul." His
description of the anguish of ostracism, inner emptiness and regeneration
parallels classic accounts of religious rebirth. "I killed the self inside me
-- and then a miracle happened," Afinogenov wrote.
Marina Gavrilova
The hand-drawn title page of Stepan Podlubny's 1934 diary.
Afinogenov was at the same time aware that, when searching an apartment, one of
the first things the security police sought to confiscate was diaries. And so
he addresses the police in the pages of that selfsame diary, seeking to
forestall them with mind games: "But once I had already understood that you
wouldn't believe anything in any case and would only scoff as you read what I
had recorded, then I was immediately relieved of your presence during my work
on my diary and once again began to write freely and simply, as I had done
before, in years past."
But all such cunning and calculation was melted in the blast furnace of his
conversion, which left him overflowing with gratitude to both Stalin -- "Long
live He, to whom all my thoughts are now directed. Long may he live and rule
over us with his genius, the genius of Georgian passion, Russian reason,
American sweep, Leninist revolutionary principledness, and Human humaneness!"--
and the police: "And thanks also from the bottom of my heart to those, up there
at the Lubianka."
Russian State Archive of Literature and the Arts
The playwright Alexander Afinogenov sits at his typewriter.
Members of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia had problems that differed from
the difficulties of those who were of kulak origin or who had strayed from the
straight and narrow path of Bolshevism. Theirs tended to be an ambivalent
relationship to Soviet socialism. On the one hand, the system promised to
deliver on the old intelligentsia dream of social justice and an end to
alienation. And, on the other, that system was repellent in its brutality and
vulgarity. But failure to join in the great roaring parade meant a life of
loneliness, isolation, sorrow. The diary of Zinaida Denisevskaya charts a
soul's progress from that isolation to a point where the "world of her personal
life had been extended to 'at least the borders of the U.S.S.R.'; in her
thoughts and feelings she 'shared the interests, hopes, and dreams of the
U.S.S.R.'"
Insightful and intelligent, this book could have sometimes probed deeper into
the motivations and sincerity of the principal diarists. The style, devoid of
grace and wit, makes the material seem less interesting than it in fact is.
Occasionally, the author makes remarks of astounding silliness: "The purges
appear less grotesque, though, when seen as a large-scale project of
classification conceived for the pursuit of irrefutable truth regarding the
state of individuals' souls."
However, when Hellbeck confines his remarks to the texts themselves and to the
role that diaries played in Soviet life under Stalin, he delivers much that is
fresh and useful. It reminded me of an old Stalinist I knew who, though having
renounced Stalinism, still looked back fondly on the ardor of the days when he
was one of 40 workers who marched 5 miles, singing, to build a dam with
shovels, flattening the cement with their boots. "Our pride was immense," said
the old Stalinist. "Nothing can stain the purity of those memories!"
This book takes the reader back to those nearly unimaginable times, and for
that alone, its shortcomings are excused.
Richard Lourie is the author of "The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin" and
"Sakharov: An Autobiography."
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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