Self-conscious reflection on the state of Russia and the shape of a future Russia was a mainstay of Russian intellectual and political life throughout the nineteenth century, Russian intellectuals oscillating between the philosophical and material worlds for their answers. A year after the 1861 Emancipation, the writer Nikolai Chernyshevsky imagined in his novel What Is to Be Done? a secular collective paradise on earth, fought for by selfless, ascetic, and dedicated revolutionaries. The famous novelist Leo Tolstoy asked the same question in 1883, but imagined a quite different paradise based on the renewal of the religious and moral responsibility of the individual. Vladimir Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? in 1902 envisaged a political organization—the Communist Party—capable of ushering Russia’s working classes toward the secular promised land. Leon Trotsky, political outcast since the mid-1920s, saw in Soviet Russia in 1926 a country on the road to economic stability, although ten years later he mused on a Soviet future in which a new workers’ revolution would cast off the repressive Soviet bureaucratic machine and its cynical rulers. “Where Is Russia Going?” academics continue to ask about post-Soviet Russia.Footnote ¹

Even given his uncompromising belief in the inevitability and finality of the class struggle in Russia, Lenin could scarcely have imagined the sheer scale and viciousness of European history in the twentieth century. For its part, Russia’s political history in that century was seismic even by European standards, bringing enormous human suffering, much inflicted by the state on its own people, much inflicted by foreign states. Through revolution and civil war, the Bolsheviks intentionally fractured Russian society, turning the traditional order on its head, physically destroying or exiling—and politically marginalizing—the formerly dominant elites. Old modes of peasant life were broken by the internal exile and persecution of millions of “rich peasants” (the political anathematization of the so-called kulak) and the forcing of farmers into collective farms into the 1930s and beyond. Rapid, heavy industrialization telescoped a century and a half of European industrial and urban development into a few decades—with the attendant brutalization of man and environment. Through the gates of the Soviet corrective labor-camp system, the gulag, streamed millions, many to die, many to languish for decades, and some to riot against their captors. Millions were dumped unceremoniously back into a society wholly unprepared to accommodate them, their experiences and their memories. In two world wars, millions of citizens of the tsarist empire and Soviet Russia experienced modern total war firsthand, as soldiers, citizens, refugees, deportees. Experience garnered during these wars—not only of the limits of lives brutalized, but also of the possibilities of lives triumphant—generated future social and political changes scarcely conceivable to either Tsar Nicholas II or Joseph Stalin.

In the twentieth century, the very idea of Russia was fractured, as four waves of emigration washed across its borders: the up to 3 million people who fled revolution or hunger in Soviet Russia between 1918 and 1922; the involuntary emigration of Soviet citizens as national borders were ruptured by World War II between 1941 and 1944, maybe 700,000 of them never returning to the Soviet realm again; the “Cold War” emigration from 1948 to 1989, numbering some half a million people, some deported against their will, some emigrating legally; the present—and continuing—fourth wave of “economic” emigration from post-Soviet Russia.Footnote ² Disparate communities formed abroad to challenge Soviet Russia with their own claims to be Russia’s true heirs.

THE GREAT STORY

Throughout this fragmentation of the political and social body, intended and unintended, Soviet Russia’s leaders aspired to produce a coherent metanarrative, a Great Story, to explain these upheavals and to justify the unique role being played by their revolutionary new state in world historical development.Footnote ³ With their eyes cast back at the revolutionary precedents and symbols of the bourgeois French Revolution, Russia’s revolutionaries had seen history fail to turn in 1848, and again in 1871. They would make sure that in 1917 it had turned irrevocably.Footnote ⁴

Like all Great Stories, it was a legitimizing exercise. Iconoclastic and millenarian, the Bolshevik leaders deployed enormous resources in an attempt to ensure that their revolution would survive, and that a new Soviet civilization with man’s soul remade would eclipse both the Tsarist Empire and Western civilization. The manichean worldview of the Bolsheviks ensured that this would be an insistent telling of the Great Story. It was told loudly and with silences, clumsily and artfully. It was told through symbol and ritual and through routinized commemoration and celebration. It was told with revolutionary terror and violence. Socialist ideology had to eclipse bourgeois ideology—the two could not coexist—and it would do so under the stewardship of the Communist Party. The banning and persecution of the nonsocialist press followed logically from the October events, with little objection from the moderate socialist press. So too did the mass exodus of the most educated and wealthy of tsarist Russia’s population in that first wave.

The closure of the moderate socialist press by mid-1918 spoke to an ever-narrowing definition of acceptable Soviet socialist orthodoxy through the 1920s, as leading Bolsheviks, Trotsky among them, found themselves beyond the pale for actions or statements that were now deemed to challenge that orthodoxy. Excommunications continued throughout the 1930s, culminating in the public show trials for sins against Communism and the party, as the body politic continued its self-purification. The Great Patriotic War offered proof for the storytellers of the internal ideological strength of the Soviet state in the face of German aggression, and was the “crucial, integral link in the ongoing Bolshevik revolutionary enterprise.”Footnote ⁵ Nikita Khrushchev’s famous destalinization speech to the closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956 intended to preserve the narrative thrust of the Great Story. In Khrushchev’s retelling, Stalin was cast as the deus ex machina, personally guilty of crimes against the people, party, and the state.Footnote ⁶ In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev launched his policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) in the service of a revitalized October, and in defense of the party’s role as primary storyteller.Footnote ⁷

THE POLITICS OF PROSCRIPTION

Scholars earn their keep arguing about the significance of what is included and excluded from the metanarratives fashioned by nation-states and empires. More unusual in the case of Soviet Russia, though, was the wholesale rejection by some scholars in the West both of the Great Story the Bolshevik leaders sought to fashion for Soviet Russia and of their moral right to tell that Story. In 1977, the political scientist Stephen F. Cohen saw this as a largely political problem, arguing that “the less empathy a historian has felt for the revolution and Bolshevism, the less he has seen meaningful distinctions between Bolshevism and Stalinism.”Footnote ⁸ Historian Martin Malia later identified a fundamental leitmotif of the entire political historiography of Soviet Russia, namely, that “the old debate about whether October was a proletarian revolution or a coup d’état . . . was really a debate about the legitimacy of the Soviet system.” Malia himself harbored no doubts that “October was indeed a coup d’état” (with all this implied for his own view of the legitimacy of Soviet Russia).Footnote ⁹ Indeed, scholars of Soviet Russia frequently fell into two camps: those who saw Soviet Russia in its essence as a state defined by proscription and those who saw it as a realm of possibility.

Those who argued a politics of proscription echoed the distaste and existential presentiments of the highly politicized judgments of Soviet Russia’s very first foreign eyewitnesses. At the time, diplomats and journalists saw in the events of 1917 a threat to the world, if Russia should leave the war, and if the Bolshevik “German agents” should hold on to power. Bolshevik power was both unnatural and illegitimate, they believed, and defined by its reliance on popular disorder and arbitrary repression.Footnote ¹⁰

Foreign scholars found much in this system and its policies deserving of their opprobrium, whether political, moral, ethical, social, or cultural. Their narrative of modern Russian history emphasized the democratic shoots that emerged—in spite of the backward patrimonial tsarist state—under the fledgling constitutional monarchy ushered in by the 1905 revolution. These shoots were nurtured by the agrarian reforms of Russia’s Prime Minister Peter Stolypin, by an economic prewar boom, and by the exposure of the inadequacies of Nicholas II’s regime during World War I. The “days of revolution” of February 1917 were hopeful signs of the possibilities of mass action. For these scholars, the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917 rendered this guardedly optimistic scenario a “constitutional and revolutionary interlude.” What followed under the Bolsheviks was an initial reassertion of a kind of pre-1905 autocracy that would soon develop, as a result of the terror practices inherent in Communist (and in Lenin’s) ideology, into full-blown vicious totalitarianism, which placed it squarely in the company of Nazism.Footnote ¹¹ As Peter Kenez argues in his critical review of the oeuvre of Richard Pipes, a key “prosecutor” of Soviet history, Pipes believed that the source of much of the trouble in the modern world was the intellectuals who were driven by a craving for power and a conviction that “humanity could be improved by changing material circumstances.”Footnote ¹²

The universalist pretensions explicit in Communist ideology made the forced reconstitution of the Tsarist Empire—in the form of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics—and the subjugation of its subject peoples inevitable.Footnote ¹³ Similarly, the campaigns of forced collectivization and rapid industrialization that began in the late 1920s seemed to flow from the arrogance of intellectuals, as did the often uncritical embrace of Soviet Communism by leading Western intellectuals even at the height of the purges of the 1930s. Critics of Soviet Russia found it wholly unsurprising that the camps of the Gulag soon filled up with citizens apparently deserving of such “improvement.”Footnote ¹⁴

This narrative of human suffering seemed in stark contrast to the dryly objectivist, eschatalogical narrative produced inside the USSR. The sterility and narrowness of much of the USSR‛s own scholarly inquiry into its system was axiomatic.Footnote ¹⁵ Many historians in the USSR, argued one Western scholar, had served “a mistress less worthy than Clio.”Footnote ¹⁶ The local narratives they had produced, usually opening with the obligatory quotes from the founding fathers of Communism and Bolshevism, slavishly echoed the Soviet metanarrative. Historian George Enteen even questioned whether those scholars who had engaged in writing the history of the CPSU, and who made up almost half of all historians in the Soviet Union, even constituted a true historical discipline.Footnote ¹⁷ The essentially prescriptive—and thus proscriptive—nature of Socialist Realism in the arts seemed to many scholars in the West yet one more “fraud” that had little to do with a new cultural or literary “aesthetic.”Footnote ¹⁸ In 1934, the Soviet state demanded that Soviet literature and literary criticism be the “truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development.”Footnote ¹⁹ Socialist Realism had to reflect an accessible reality, where good ultimately triumphs; it should not ironize; it should be instructive and practical, convey uplifting qualities, and be thematically familiar to readers. The imaginative flights of Isaak Babel and Boris Pasternak were sacrificed on the altar of intellectually stunted Socialist Realist writers like Fedor Gladkov and Nikolai Ostrovsky. The depressingly clumsy removal of former Bolshevik leaders from photographs and movies seemed an extension of this “airbrush history in the Soviet style,” as one author put it.Footnote ²⁰

Such prescriptions of conformity told Western observers all they needed to know about the nature of Soviet socialism. This view did not begin with the Cold War, although it was reinforced ideologically and institutionally by it. Seminal works of political analysis published in the 1950s provided a modeled ideological critique of the dictatorships of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia arguing that not only were “mass terror, thought control, collective responsibility, and secularization of values” specifically Soviet practices, but they worked by “reinforcing the traditional Russian subjugation of the individual to the state.”Footnote ²¹ Such attitudes undergirded the funding, particularly in the United States, of popular and scholarly efforts to institutionalize the study of Soviet Russia, creating the subdisciplines of “Sovietology” and “Kremlinology” that were intended to study the Soviet threat.Footnote ²²

The politicization of the study of Soviet Russia was fostered by the ready availability of “true” Russia in the form of the exiles forced out of Soviet Russia into the major metropolitan centers of Europe, Asia, and eventually America. In political terms, “true” Russia meant the exiled moderate socialists, not least the Menshevik Internationalists, who sustained an incessant political critique of the legitimacy of Soviet Russia and who helped shape the categories in which the USSR came to be conceived in the West, helping to make the terms “gulag” and “totalitarian” part of the dominant political lexicon, and to develop Kremlinology to “become the tool of an entire profession.”Footnote ²³ Many people undoubtedly saw in the emigration the continuation of a kind of subjectivity (the victim-individual at the mercy of history) so under attack inside collectivist, communist Russia.Footnote ²⁴ In cultural terms, the Emigration represented for many in the West an unbroken continuity with the prerevolutionary past that had been so rudely fractured by the Bolsheviks, and of course a continuation of the time-honored tradition of critique of Russia from the Emigration. Some émigrés consciously constituted themselves already in 1926 as “Russia Abroad [Zarubezhnaia Rossiia],” a move consecrated by prominent Western scholars who argued that the Russian Emigration represented a “large part of the nation [natsiia].”Footnote ²⁵ The Emigration was, for these, a “genuine, albeit not perfectly complete, society,” because first it comprised “most social classes of prerevolutionary Russia,” and second because these émigrés “were committed to carrying on a meaningful Russian life . . . even in a foreign environment.”Footnote ²⁶ By this was meant a meaningful cultural life. By contrast with the literati, the political groups were regarded as “eclectic, muddled, and rather shallow” in nature, and without “any practical impact on Russia Abroad’s daily and cultural life.”Footnote ²⁷

For those who were deeply critical of Soviet Russia’s pretensions, the revelations of glasnost and the futilities of perestroika were incontrovertible proof of the moral and political vacuity of the entire system, and vindication of the historical correctness and moral rightness of their own views.Footnote ²⁸ After all, were not eminent Soviet scholars themselves now leveling sharp criticism at the punishment of senior Soviet scholars who had departed from the “norm” in their work under Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev?Footnote ²⁹ Had not Gorbachev himself publicly spoken of the “erosion of the ideological and moral values of our people,” of the problems generated by the Soviet state’s “presentation of a ‘problem-free’ reality” that had bred “public passivity and disbelief in the slogans being proclaimed?”Footnote ³⁰ For Malia, these kinds of admissions from leading Communists would have been but further proof that the “Socialist Myth,” which had brought the “extraordinary transformations of high Stalinism,” had been transformed into the “Soviet Lie,” and that Soviet Russia had indeed been in the grip of this “Myth-Lie” perpetrated by the party and state on its people.Footnote ³¹ Where scholars conceded that even leading dissidents like the physicist Andrei Sakharov had admitted to being under the “hypnotic spell” of Stalinism, they saw this as a spell of force, of “enduring psychological distortions,” that needed to be ‘‘exorcized.” The spell would always be countered, they believed, by individuals’ “urges to mental autonomy, and to truth.”Footnote ³²

Such views could be descried in Western media views of post-Soviet Russia as a “disastrous failure.”Footnote ³³ The uncompromising condemnation of Communism has most recently taken the form of efforts to catalogue Soviet crimes.Footnote ³⁴ Focus on the early political violence in the 1920s and 1930s, on the myths (for myths, read lies) of the Soviet period, and the cataloguing of the legions of the repressed under Stalin has filled multiple volumes.Footnote ³⁵ Joint Western and Russian scholarly enterprises to document the activities and histories of the repressed socialist and nonsocialist political parties after 1917 have given sustenance to the old idea of a Social Democratic path not taken in Russia in 1917, an imagined alternative narrative of twentieth-century Russian political history.Footnote ³⁶ Alongside such scholarly efforts, though, a more virulent condemnation of the Soviet past has also been seen inside Russia, leading to “grotesque revisionism,” for example, of instances of collaboration with the Nazis during the war.Footnote ³⁷

That few analysts predicted the imminent demise of Soviet Russia should not be surprising, given the fact that, as one scholar put it, “both the Left and the Right made judgments about the Soviet system that derived from their political beliefs.”Footnote ³⁸ Robert V. Daniels observed in 1985, on the cusp of glasnost, that Soviet Russia’s freedom from “moral scruple” from the very moment of its beginnings had fostered its evolution into a bureaucracy answerable to no one, and unlikely to see “dramatic change.”Footnote ³⁹ Views of the Soviet system as morally and intellectually bankrupt—and best symbolized by the gerontocratic stagnation [zastoi] of the Brezhnev period—and as devoid of any real investment by Soviet society in it, led these scholars to focus on the institutions that kept the entire, hollow edifice erect: the Communist Party, the security apparatus, and the military. A year later, political scientist Seweryn Bialer saw little prospect of change in a state and society inextricably intertwined in a state of paralysis, describing the USSR as “one of the few societies where the cultures of the mass and elite are almost inseparable. The vocabulary, the idiom, the accent in which officials address one another and the public are identical to those used by the public.”Footnote ⁴⁰

Why bother, then, trying to study anything beyond the political institutions of an essentially immutable Soviet Russia? “Civil Society,” “The Social,” and “The Cultural,” as these were increasingly being studied in the context of the rest of Europe’s history, had no corollary in Soviet Russia (or so went the argument), and thus did not merit serious scrutiny.

THE POLITICS OF POSSIBILITY

Notwithstanding his lifelong satirizing of the Soviet system, the exiled dissident writer Andrei Sinyavsky argued in the early 1980s that Soviet Russia should be viewed as nothing less than a “civilization” [tsivilizatsiia]. It was “a durable, stable . . . structure, . . . [which] arouses the interest and attention of the world as, perhaps, the most unusual and awe-inspiring [groznoe] phenomenon of the twentieth century. It is awe-inspiring because it makes claims to the future of all mankind and . . . considers itself as an ideal and as the logical conclusion of the development of world history.”Footnote ⁴¹

In 1995, historian Stephen Kotkin examined this civilization in microcosm in his study of the city of Magnitogorsk, built during the 1930s in the Urals as part of Stalin’s rapid industrialization program. Taking his cues from an earlier radical rethinking of the French Revolution by historians of France, he called for a shift in the study of Soviet Russia “from what the party and its programs prevented to what they made possible, intentionally and unintentionally.”Footnote ⁴² His call threw into vivid relief the sharp contours of the different approaches to the study of Soviet Russia.

Like those first ardent critics of the revolution, Soviet Russia also had its ardent defenders from the outset. A generation of Western intellectuals, journalists, and political activists were inspired by the utopian imaginings of nineteenth-century Western thought and outraged by the inequities of industrialization so vividly exposed by Marx and Engels. Famous journalists like the American Communist John Reed, Louise Bryant, and Albert Rhys Williams went to Russia to watch revolution unfold. They accepted the Soviet Great Story as humankind’s Great Story, illuminating the “grey horizon of human existence.”Footnote ⁴³ Those Western intellectuals who continued to praise Soviet Communism even through the 1930s saw their choice between Communism and Fascism rather than between Communism and democracy.Footnote ⁴⁴

The generation of Western scholars who asked different questions of the Soviet system than those traditionally asked of it were not wide-eyed naïfs who were blind to the crimes of the state. Still, some senior colleagues believed that even asking such questions was immoral for their implicit legitimization of the Soviet regime. The caricaturing of both camps into “totalitarian” and “revisionist” was often a personal and mean-spirited process.Footnote ⁴⁵ In 1961, the political historian Robert Tucker noted that studies of early Soviet political history had tended to replicate Soviet categories of analysis, namely, the emphasis on the Communist Party as the prime mover and on the “unbroken continuity of political development from the October revolution through the Stalin period and beyond.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Inspired by the heady politics of the 1960s, a younger generation of Western scholars of Soviet history sought to transcend these categories by applying social history methodologies to the early Soviet Russia in particular, seeking evidence of large-scale worker, peasant, or soldier support of the revolutions of 1917. They argued that the “more fundamental social and economic structures and conflicts in Russian society” had for too long been underestimated in the study of Soviet Russia.Footnote ⁴⁷ Surely, they asked, the enormous social and political upheavals that marked this state from its inception did not only close down its citizens’ encounters with it, but opened up myriad new possibilities as well? As historian Sheila Fitzpatrick expressed it most uncompromisingly in 1982, the revolution was about “terror, progress and upward mobility.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Some twenty years after Tucker, however, Ronald Grigor Suny implied that historians of the revolution were still imprisoned by the revolutionary discourse.Footnote ⁴⁹

More recent attempts to transcend the revolutionary discourse have taken scholars outside the Soviet chronologies that defined not only temporal but conceptual limits to inquiry. Approaches that placed 1917 into a continuum of social and political crisis spanning World War I and Russia’s Civil War, or tracked issues such as food supply over these years, raised questions of the Russian and Soviet experience that broke across the events of 1917 and the politics of the center.Footnote ⁵⁰ The mythic structures constructed by the state, including the October Revolution and later the Great Patriotic War, were examined as structures intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, to individual and collective identities in Soviet Russia.Footnote ⁵¹

In short, scholars asked what it meant for citizens to experience Soviet Russia from the inside, by which they meant not merely to be subjected to Soviet reality but to live as part of it, to derive from it a “sense of political possibility,” even power.Footnote ⁵² Post-Soviet scholars have begun to examine the psychology of mass resistance to early Communist rule, charting a path from revolutionary activism to mass conformism that occurred for the most part outside the Communist Party.Footnote ⁵³ In the West, perhaps inspired by more utopian strains of belief, scholars studied the experimentation of the revolutionary avant-garde and the mass spectacles and revolutionary festivals of the 1920s and 1930s that drew in large numbers of participants and spectators. They were attracted not only by these fascinating and grandiose examples of the new state’s efforts to create a “secular sacred” and to shape public reception of the Communist state, but also by the spaces they created in which citizens might encounter this new regime.Footnote ⁵⁴

Access to newfound troves of unpublished personal diaries from the Stalinist period and of retrospective reminiscences of Soviet life available only since the fall of the Soviet Union has begun to open up Soviet inner life to scrutiny.Footnote ⁵⁵ Some historians see these new sources as windows onto a hitherto hidden private sphere of Soviet inner life, an integral part of the “double lives” they had fashioned in response to the pressures of the Soviet regime.Footnote ⁵⁶ Others have posited a specifically Soviet subjectivity as a legitimate object of desire among citizens, one that cut across the dichotomy of state and society so prominent in the West’s traditional understanding of Soviet Russia. In this view, the Russian Revolution’s destruction of prerevolutionary “conventions of self-presentation” forced citizens to “reinvent themselves” for the postrevolutionary society.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Soviet (or Stalinist) subject could then exist “as an ideological agent in its own right,” not merely as a “state-prescribed identity.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Historian Jochen Hellbeck examines diaries as the individual’s self-conscious efforts to draft a “language of self,” a process that, while it took place in the quickened conditions of Stalinist Russia, in fact had its roots in a “commitment to self-improvement, social activism, and self-expression in concert with history which predated the Russian Revolution by many decades.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Such fevered and highly personal commitment to the Communist cause by some Soviet citizens undoubtedly waned in the wake of World War II. Scholars who see Soviet Russia as a realm of possibility argue that this waning of true belief among many during “late Stalinism” allowed for a period of both “striking mismanagement and repression, yet equally striking innovation and achievement.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Khrushchev’s destalinization speech was not as important for its limited revelations of crimes in the Stalin era as for its stretching of the limits of unbelief in postwar Soviet Russia. By allowing the publication of a limited number of banned artistic works, and triggering a range of semilegal cultural events, it fueled what the dissident writer Andrei Amalrik called a “Cultural Opposition.” This “Opposition” persisted in the form of illegally distributed self-published works (samizdat), works smuggled abroad for publication (tamizdat), and works written for the desk drawer (v stol) and intended for publication in a less constrained future Russia that was now within the bounds of conceivability. Amalrik could even imagine in 1969 the demise of the USSR sometime in the early 1980s.Footnote ⁶¹

Still, more of a threat to the Soviet state than the political dissidence so trumpeted in the West was a less directly confrontational turning away from socialism and the socialist state. Vladimir Kozlov argues that mass uprisings in the years after Stalin’s death were directed at the failure of socialism to deliver on its promises. Only when popularly held socialist ideals gave way under the weight of the “conformism, consumerism and individualism” of the Brezhnev years did these uprisings stop.Footnote ⁶² Some elites engaged in their own “internal defection” from socialism through privileged access to the fruits of capitalism abroad.Footnote ⁶³ Others became disillusioned with the USSR’s interventions in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, Afghanistan in 1979. Many more people, though, according to anthropologist Alexei Yurchak, experienced “late socialism” in more complex ways, accepting the ideological certainties of the strong Soviet state while at the same time creating their own discrete realities that sometimes conformed to, sometimes opposed, and sometimes subverted the state’s objectives. This explains why they could not imagine the end of the USSR, but had little problem accepting it when it did occur.Footnote ⁶⁴

The reform efforts of Khrushchev and Gorbachev, and even Yuri Andropov’s short-lived efforts to stem internal corruption, had clearly been responses to the periodic and quite devastating internal reports being produced by party and state bodies on the parlous condition of the Soviet economic and political system.Footnote ⁶⁵ The litany of quixotic, halfhearted, or outright disastrous efforts to cure Soviet Russia’s social, economic, and political ills were responses to the old question “What Is to Be Done?” with Russia. Brezhnev’s sense of urgency had been attenuated somewhat by the Siberian oil boom in the 1960s and 1970s that helped insulate Soviet Russia from both the structural rigidities of her economic and political system and from the world oil crisis that devastated Western heavy industry in the 1970s, although it had only, as Kotkin points out, “delayed the inevitable.”Footnote ⁶⁶

WHAT IS TO BE DONE NOW? THE PAST WITHOUT GUILT OR IRONY

Neither Khrushchev nor Gorbachev could imagine the inevitable, their revelations about the Soviet past always constrained by a mixture of ideological belief and political calculation. They each launched their respective reform efforts as renewals of October, as attempts to re-revolutionize the revolution.Footnote ⁶⁷ To the very end of their political lives, neither could imagine life without the USSR or without the Communist Party. On his ouster in 1964, Khrushchev praised the fact that the CPSU had instituted a change of leadership without any Stalin-era reprisals. In 1991, Gorbachev defended the purity of the Communist Party against Boris Yeltsin’s accusations of complicity in the August coup attempt.

Memorial, a prominent human rights organization in Russia, called for a public accounting—a Soviet Nuremberg or a South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission perhaps—of the actions of the CPSU, after Yeltsin had banned it in the wake of the August 1991 coup attempt. In a partial fulfillment of this, and in one of history’s ironies, the CPSU experienced its own “show-trial” of sorts from May to November 1992, triggered by communist efforts to overturn the ban. Gorbachev refused to take part, asking what the purpose was of “putting in the dock 70 years of our history?”Footnote ⁶⁸ As Gorbachev feared, the trial indeed became a political battle over the Soviet past. Defenders of the party stressed its members’ sacrifices during the Civil War and World War II, its successes during the space race, and the self-reform it launched by its denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress, noting that most of Stalin’s victims were Communists. Critics of the party equated the history of the CPSU with the history of Stalin’s gulag, emphasizing its repressive role from the Cheka to the KGB, and its adventures in countries like Afghanistan. The Constitutional Court equivocated in its judgment, upholding Yeltsin’s ban on the central party structures, but not the ban on local party organizations or the confiscation of their property.Footnote ⁶⁹

The competing narratives of CPSU history and the dickerings of the arbiter of these histories threw into sharp relief the standoff in the post-Soviet state in 1992 over what to do with the Soviet past. “A euphoric and total repudiation of the Soviet past” dominated the media in the early 1990s.Footnote ⁷⁰ Today’s leaders, as one scholar put it, are more intent on creating a “new myth of unity,” which is antithetical to the “democratic and liberal ideas” that accompanied perestroika.Footnote ⁷¹ More often, this reluctance to address the Soviet past in the 1990s has given way under President Vladimir Putin to a (in)curious nostalgia, variously described as history without guilt or pain. It attempts to yoke, if uncomfortably, various idealized aspects of the tsarist, soviet, and émigré pasts “in an effort to achieve an unproblematic historical legitimacy.”Footnote ⁷²

In 2000, on a state visit to France, Putin visited the Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois cemetery outside Paris, the site of some ten thousand graves of Russian émigrés. Ignoring the irony of his presence there, this former KGB officer placed flowers on the graves of the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, the exiled writer (and Nobel Laureate) Ivan Bunin, White Army officers who had fought the Bolsheviks in the Civil War, and Russian exiles who fought in the French Resistance during World War II. “We are all children of the same mother,” he said, “who is named Russia. Many countries have lived through difficult periods in their history and survived them.” The French newswire noted that Putin had “turned the page on the Soviet era,” and the French mayor called Putin’s visit “a reconciliation for the pre-1917 and post-1917 Russia.”Footnote ⁷³ Putin was offering a narrative of modern Russian history in which the turbulences of Russia’s past served merely as a backdrop to recent progress, an offer of reconciliation without truth. Like the early Bolshevik metanarrative, Putin’s can be either a politics of hope or a politics of despair, a politics of possibility or a politics of proscription, depending upon one’s viewpoint.

Post-Soviet Russia—and, it should be said, the now-independent states of the former Soviet Bloc—has only tentatively scratched at the complex problem of dealing with its problematic pasts. Scholars from these parts of the world may well eagerly embrace the example of recent similar projects in the West, including the U.S. Library of Congress’s “American Memory,” or UNESCO’s “Memory of the World,” which now includes a “Memory of Russia.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Yet as critics of Pierre Nora’s much-vaunted and much-imitated Les Lieux de Mémoire have implied, such projects may have much to do with fashioning a usable and acceptable narrative from the disharmonies of the past, a narrative haunted by the “Ghost of Nation Past” and impelled by a “nostalgie de coeur.”Footnote ⁷⁵ It is in response to such developments perhaps that Memorial, the same organization that had earlier called for a legal reckoning of the CPSU, has recently proposed a broad historical forum aiming toward a loosely organized “collective image of the past,” capable of accommodating the dissonant jangle of national histories audible since the end of the Soviet Bloc and the formal collapse of the USSR.Footnote ⁷⁶ This should be used not to promote one national history over another, it wrote, but instead to understand the variations in evaluations of the past, variations that it is “senseless and dangerous to try to blur.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Such a move would undoubtedly roil Lethe’s waters in Putin’s Russia.