Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union

2007; Oxford University Press; Volume: CXXII; Issue: 498 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/cem187

1477-4534

John Keep,

Soviet and Russian History

GEOFFREY HOSKING's account of Russia's fractured history in the twentieth century probes more deeply than any other. Delving beneath the surface phenomena of political structure and socio-economic change, he explores the shifting tectonic plates, so to say, of national identity: a notoriously elusive substance with many different aspects, ‘ethnic, imperial, civic and cultural’ (p. ix). Although the Soviet Union is customarily seen as a Russian artefact, this book makes it clear that the empire's core nation was as much victim as perpetrator of Communist excesses. Lenin's and Stalin's teachings deformed their subjects' natural sense of nationhood; yet, after several decades spent in the service of utopia, the more perspicacious Russian intellectuals realised that the pursuit of supra-national goals was incompatible with the national interest. Even so, nostalgia for past imperial greatness remains a major component of the popular psyche. In substantiating his subtle argument, Hosking makes good use of recently published documents on everyday life, as well as memoirs and literary works, here building on his earlier studies of the ‘village prose’ school of the 1960s and the national awakening that it stimulated. Its roots go back to the late tsarist era, when conservative nationalism came of age among one segment of the educated public, while the peasant masses clung to their communal traditions. Among these was that of krugovaia poruka or ‘mutual guarantee’, whereby neighbours sought to guard against adversity by exchanging favours. This collectivist outlook survived the revolution in perverted form, for instance in the cliency networks that made dictatorial government possible or in the life-style of urban residents crammed into tiny communal apartments; even in the Gulag, prisoners largely ‘policed themselves’ (p. 127), for each convict in a labour brigade tried to ensure that his fellows worked—or cheated—with equal vigour. The tenacity of traditional popular mental habits explains why the Communist rulers achieved only partial success in destroying Russians' ‘social memory’ and substituting their own symbols and values. People preferred the age-old rituals of the Orthodox church to synthetic secular ones. Former patterns of thought and behaviour survived in hidden corners of Stalin's realm, for instance among professionals who managed to preserve their old home, perhaps with a library containing nineteenth-century literary classics. In this way the Zhurnalistov family of Starodub (Chernigov province) could ‘reposition itself without losing all inherited cultural and social wealth’: grandfather Dmitry had been a zemstvo statistician; his son Ivan became a senior economic administrator in Moscow; and he in turn found a promising job for his daughter (p. 169). They were among the lucky ones: countless other families were of course broken up by war, repression, and social dislocation. Hosking supplements the now familiar litany of suffering under Stalin with harrowing details of the impact of collectivisation, the Great Terror, and the maltreatment of the five million or so Soviet citizens who were repatriated after the Second World War: even those who escaped incarceration were left ‘with a permanent black mark on their identity documents, at the mercy of local police and party officials’ (p. 217).