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Confessing to Leviathan: The Mass Practice of Writing Autobiographies in the USSR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2018

Yury Zaretskiy
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Abstract

Yury Zaretskiy's article examines the mass practice of composing formal autobiographies by Soviet citizens. The major part of the study covers the period from the 1950s to the 1980s when the Soviet records management protocol requested this type of document from individuals belonging to different social groups and to different occupations. Zaretskiy reviews the concrete social circumstances in which the narrative structure of formal autobiographies was fashioned before moving on to argue that their final addressee was the Soviet state, that their content changed in line with political and ideological changes in the USSR, that the practice of writing them had much in common with Christian confession, and that the spread of this practice among millions of people functioned as a mechanism of subjectification aimed at “making them Soviet.”

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Slavic Review , Volume 76 , Issue 4 , Winter 2017 , pp. 1027 - 1047
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Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2018 

State and ministerial archives of the Russian Federation and other countries of the former Soviet Union hold millions of documents that bear the same title of Avtobiografiia (Autobiography). As these autobiographies were an obligatory part of the processing of documents in most institutions, organizations, and enterprises, they can be accurately grouped together under the term of “file autobiographies.”Footnote 1 In contrast to the established literary genre of autobiography, these texts are usually short (from one to three pages), factually-based, and similar in their narrative structure. Descriptions of emotional experiences, reflections, and doubts on the basis of which we could speak about the personalities of their authors are generally lacking. An important distinguishing feature of these autobiographies is that people wrote them due to external necessity, namely the requirements of Soviet documentation protocol. However, to a large extent similarities with literary autobiography are also glaring: in both cases we are dealing with chronologically-organized retrospective accounts of an individual about his or her life journey, written from the first person singular, which include details of their origins, studies, work, family, and other traditional autobiographical topoi.

Scholars are familiar with Soviet file autobiographies mostly in connection with the lives of Soviet scientists, writers, members of the military, industrial elite, and state officials. Much less attention has been directed at the file autobiographies of ordinary citizens, which are for the most part still the domain of local historians and non-academic genealogists. Relatively recently, this type of document, among other personal writings, has been addressed by historians of Soviet subjectivity in their studies of Soviet party cadres of the 1920–30s.Footnote 2

This article intersects with these recent subjectivity studies, though its boundaries and methodology involve significant differences. First, it is concentrated on one specific type of document labeled above as “file autobiographies.” Second, it approaches these documents not as representations of the Soviet collective self, but as the result of a particular social practice that was widespread in the USSR. Third, the study covers a much broader period of history and traces the key moments in composing file autobiographies from early to late Soviet times with emphasis on 1950s–70s. Although reading this type of document is mainly grounded in empirical analysis, it rests upon the following general premises: a) authors composed these texts not for us, in order to tell us about their lives, but for state officials, in order to present themselves before the state in a particular way; b) in each case their composition was an act that was carried out in concrete sociopolitical circumstances; c) these circumstances to a significant degree shaped the structure and content of the narrative; d) the act of composing file autobiographies functioned as a mechanism through which the state exercised control over the individual.

These considerations are to a large extent in line with the insights of Michel Foucault that link subjectivity with governmentality, in particular with his claim that the way people are governed goes hand in hand with subjectification. This strand of Foucauldian methodology is far from a novelty among historians of Soviet Russia. Oleg Kharkhordin grounded his study of relations between the collective and the individual in Russia in Foucault's proposition that power creates subjects, as well as in the Foucauldian concept of practices.Footnote 3 Resting upon these two pillars, Kharkhordin analyzes normative discourses on selfhood in different types of communist nonfiction literature, mostly pedagogical and psychological. Yet, maybe the most well-known usage of Foucauldian methodology in the field is Stephen Kotkin's book about Magnitogorsk, which centers on the notion of the subject in the Stalin era.Footnote 4 In his examination of different types of numerous sources, Kotkin draws a broad picture of how in the course of economic, social, and political transformations in the USSR a new man with a state-prescribed identity was born.Footnote 5

While this article overlaps with this corpus of scholarship conceptually, it does not intend to provide a broad picture of Soviet subjectification or to use the Foucauldian concept of governmentality in a general sense. It singles out one segment of the process of subjectification and one particular Foucauldian intuition. This segment, as already articulated above, is the practice of writing file autobiographies, which nearly all adult Soviet citizens were subjected to from the 1950s. The Foucauldian intuition that the article follows is his emphasis on the embeddedness of texts in social life. Starting from the premise that the linguistic is inseparable from the social, Foucault argues that every discourse is inseparable from concrete institutions, cultural norms, symbols, and patterns of general behavior. In line with this premise, the act of composing file autobiographies is further viewed as a particular discursive practice through which power relations between the individual and the state were exercised.

Backstory

The beginning of the practice of writing file autobiographies in Russia is yet to be studied, though it seems evident that it did not originate in the Communist Party milieu in the 1920s, as some scholars seem to have suggested.Footnote 6 There is sufficient evidence to claim that it came into being long before the October Revolution in the course of Russian imperial modernization.

Systematically, composing file autobiographies, at that time known under the name of skaska (or skazka), was first implemented during the Petrine state-building reforms of the early eighteenth century, which mirrored the general trends of the emergence of the modern bureaucratic state in Europe.Footnote 7 A few decades later, the reforms of Peter's successors inspired the birth of the questionnaire, labeled formuliarnyi spisok (or posluzhnoi spisok), the second constituent element of the early Russian file self. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the structure of formuliarnyi spisok underwent substantial transformations and developed into a printed form that included up to fourteen questions, some being split into sub-questions.Footnote 8

The two most lucid examples of early file autobiography belong to the greatest Russian military commander Aleksandr Vasil΄evich Suvorov. He wrote the first one in 1786, submitting it together with other credentials to the Moscow Assembly of the Nobility in order to enlist Suvorov's name in the Genealogical book of the nobility of Moscow province.Footnote 9 Suvorov wrote the second in 1790, addressing it (together with supporting documents) to the Office of Heraldry to consider awarding him the title of count.Footnote 10 Of course, the narrative structure and data provided in these two examples differ from the file autobiographies of the Soviet people further discussed in this article. Nevertheless, the similarity between both types of self-narratives is also evident: in the same way that his Soviet descendants later would do, Suvorov describes his origin, presents a comprehensive description of his professional career, informs his readers about his educational background, gives them a list of national awards received, and confesses his loyalty to the state. It is also evident that the data of these two autobiographies was consistent with the submitted documents and questionnaires that he had composed previously.

Mostly common among military officers at first, by the end of the nineteenth century the practice of composing these documents on the state's demand spread on a relatively mass scale to other estates and social groups of Russian society. At this point they became common not only among government and local officials of different levels, but also among clergy.Footnote 11 After October 1917, this early imperial practice was reconfigured by the communist authorities and widely used to fit their aims. After most of the population of the USSR in the course of Soviet modernization had become literate, the state reinforced it and spread it to millions of people. This is how file autobiographies became a tool for the construction of the new Soviet subjectivity in the former Russian empire.

Examples from the 1950s–1970s

From 1950s onward, file autobiographies were written virtually by every adult citizen of the USSR, sometimes on repeated occasions: upon starting a new job, receiving work attestations, joining the CPSU (Communist Party of the Soviet Union), filing criminal cases, being presented with a state award, filling in documents for an exit visa to travel abroad, and so forth.Footnote 12 According to their structure, these texts are remarkably alike. The main data that Soviet people wrote about themselves were: family name/ name/patronymic, place and date of birth, origin, education, career, party status, police file, trips abroad, social work, government awards, and family members. Differences in their narratives mostly relate to the degree of detail: if, for example, the author was a scientist, writer, composer, or state official, then he or she would report on their career path with painstaking thoroughness. In other cases differences are minimal: the organization of the autobiographical narrative remains practically the same. These characteristics can be clearly seen from the following four examples of file autobiographies written by people of diverse social groups and occupations.

The first one, of a party worker composed in 1955, is quite detailed and includes numerous dates and biographical facts that mostly relate to the author's political and administrative career. As requested by the “genre,” it begins with providing the date and place of the author's birth and naming his family members:

I, XXX Andrei Ivanovich was born on December 1, 1904 in the village Velikaia Berëzka … My father, XXX Ivan Kuprianovich, worked as a machine worker in various factories. … He died in 1932. My relatives: my brother, Sergei, works as a machine worker at a munitions factory, … my sisters Elena XXX and Ol΄ga XXX and my mother live in the town of Seredino-Bud, Sumskaia oblast.Footnote 13

After this, Andrei Ivanovich switches to his working career that started at a local sugar plant when he was fourteen. Then we learn about the first turning point in his life that happened two years later when he entered the VLKSM (Leninist Young Communist League). Since then he started taking “an active part in the social life of the village” and was soon elected chairman of the village soviet. The second turning point was his entering the ranks of the Communist Party in May 1926. As a party functionary for several years, he accomplished different tasks in different regions of his native Ukraine, moving up the party ladder. In July 1938, he was elected the second secretary of the Roven΄kovskii district party committee and in September 1939 appointed the manager of its agricultural department. In this position he worked until the day of the Nazi occupation of Voroshilovgradskaia oblast in 1942, after which worked as the instructor of the agricultural department of the Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) [TsK VKP(b)]. Soon after the liberation of Voroshilovgrad, he was elected third secretary of the oblast party committee. After the end of the war, the author's career advancement accelerated and reached its peak: “At the Sixteenth Congress of the Communist Party of Ukraine,” continues Andrei Ivanovich, “I was elected as a member of the TsK. I was elected a delegate of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (1946–50), and delegate of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic during its second, third, and fourth convocations.” The final record names major government awards he received: “I was awarded the order of Lenin and the order of the Patriotic War of the first degree.” Then follows the date of its composition, June 20 1955, and the author's signature.

The autobiography of a twenty-two-year old peasant (1960), for obvious reasons is much shorter and has much less factual data, though it covers the same main topics: date and place of birth, social origin, education, work experience, Komsomol/CPSU membership, and family members.

I, XXX, Vasilii Andreevich, was born on December 30, 1938 in the family of a collective farmer in the village of Tur΄ia in the Krasnopol΄sk region of Sumskaia oblast. In 1946, I entered school, which I finished in 1953. After school I worked in the kolkhoz at my birthplace, where I entered into the VLKSM in 1955. In 1957 I was called up by the Soviet army, where I served until October 2, 1960. After my demobilization I went to Noril΄sk following a call from the enterprise.

My father—XXX Andrei Ivanovich died in 1940 after a heavy illness.

My mother—XXX Tat΄iana Alexandrovna lives in the village Tur΄ia, and is now no longer capable of work.

My brother—XXX Ivan Andreevich serves in the Soviet army.

My sisters—Varvara, Galina, and Dar΄ia are married, and Vera and Nadezhda are studying.

None of my relatives have a criminal record.

31/X-1960. SIGNATUREFootnote 14

The 1971 file autobiography of a renowned composer is comprehensive and detailed again, and is quite similar to the previous two examples in its narrative structure.Footnote 15 The author writes that he was born in a village of Riazan΄ oblast on February 10, 1935 and the next year his parents moved to Moscow, where they worked at a factory. Then he discusses his education and the beginning of his career as a musician: he received qualification as a locksmith, but at the same time mastered playing the button accordion at a children's musical school, which he finished in 1954. After this the author informs readers about his three years of service in the Soviet army, where he became a Komsomol member, and turns in detail to the main theme: his professional path. Here we find out that his first songs were written during his years in the army and that they were a great success; we also learn that after demobilization he studied in one of the most prestigious musical colleges in Moscow. After this follows what may be called a success story of a Soviet composer:

I have been awarded the medal “Distinguished frontier guard,” the medal “For distinction in defense of the state borders of the USSR,” the medal “Miner's glory of the third degree,” the medal “For the reclaiming of virgin lands,” and two golden stars from the TsK of the Revsomol (Revolutionary Youth Movement) of Mongolia.

For my patronage activities in the armed forces and among student youth and workers I have approximately 150 (one hundred and fifty) distinguished awards, diplomas, and laureate medals. From 1954 my compositions have entered the repertoire of many Russian folk choirs, ensembles and individual singers. More than 500 songs have been written.

It is remarkable to notice that the author concludes his autobiography with a list of foreign countries he visited (including “capitalist” ones) and seems to be proud of it, although at the same time he providently does not forget to mention that he travelled abroad not by himself but as a group member, as a participant of official delegations: “As a composer with creative groups I have visited many times GDR, Mongolia, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, and other countries. December 1971. Composer XXX.”

The autobiography of fifty-four year-old worker of a higher education institution Aleksandr Petrovich, written in 1972, does not differ much from the previous example in its construction and amount of data.Footnote 16 As with all texts of this specific type, it begins with the date of birth and social origin, then provides information about the author's educational background, finally turning to the main part that describes his professional activities. After two years of compulsory military service, the Great Patriotic war began and he was sent to the front, where he served in various divisions of the Soviet Army. After demobilization a new period in his work history began: as a Komsomol and Soviet functionary in Kemerovo. Then the text reveals another career shift, from Soviet official to library director and then professor in the local institute of higher education:

In 1956 I transferred to work as the director of the scientific-technical library of the Kemerovo mining institute, where I worked until June 1960. … In the 1969–70 academic year, I first worked as a senior lecturer of Kemerovskii Institute, and then in August 1970 was chosen for the position of associate professor and acting head of the department of library studies and bibliography.

Then, Aleksandr Petrovich mentions that he became a member of the CPSU in March 1946 and for participation in battles received two awards and five medals. Finally, the text once again refers to the author's current academic accomplishments and laconically informs us about his participation in public activities. At the end of the document appear the date and personal signature as in all examples of the genre.

Autobiography and Questionnaire (Anketa)

The likeness of the narrative structure of these documents is really striking. In order to grasp the origin of this likeness, further attention will be directed to the circumstances in which file autobiographies were written as specific acts by individuals in concrete social conditions and aimed at achieving particular goals. As its format remained unchanged over decades, I will take the work admission process as the most representative case.Footnote 17 Admission to a new place of work usually occurred in three stages.Footnote 18 First, having learnt of a vacancy, the candidates addressed their prospective direct manager. After an interview, the manager most commonly invited them to write a claim addressed to the name of the head of the enterprise/institution, then confirmed the statement and counter-signed it.Footnote 19 In the second stage, individuals already de facto accepted at the place of work visited the staff department to draw up their personal file. To do this, they had to complete a questionnaire “The Personal List for Staff Records” (in everyday parlance—anketa), compose their autobiography and provide the necessary documents. In the last stage a directive to enlist the individual in the collective of the enterprise/institution was issued with the signature of the director, and the candidate became considered accepted de jure.

Let us set out the three most significant factors in this type of autobiographical act:

  1. 1) The file autobiography was written after the worker was practically already hired; it did not play a significant role in the hiring process. This, however, did not mean that its writing was a pure formality. Everybody was well aware that the staff department had special status among other divisions of the enterprise/institution: its function included the checking of documents of those applying for work there, as well as liaising with the organs of internal affairs and state security. Rather than playing a role in the hiring process, the role of the composition of file autobiographies was to control the behavior of employees by the state, in a clear example of Foucault's analysis of discursive practices.

  2. 2) When a person came “to sign up” in the staff department, he or she first had to complete the questionnaire, then compose an autobiography and afterwards submit these two pieces of writing to an official together with supporting documents. According to the most common ritual, these autobiographies were written by hand “in a free form.”Footnote 20

  3. 3) It is important to emphasize the order in which documents were completed. Typically the questionnaire, the most important document of the personal file from the point of view of data precision, was filled in first and then the autobiography was written. Authors of file autobiographies were therefore aware that information they supplied in the autobiographies could be checked against the details of the questionnaire, passport, and other documents provided in the process.Footnote 21 It was also clear that all the information supplied could be also checked again by “the competent organs” according to other sources.

Familiarity with more than a hundred personal files from the late 1940s to the 1980s, published in print and online, does not leave any doubt regarding the direct connection between file autobiographies and the answers to the questionnaires, which structured the autobiographical narrative and to a significant degree determined its content.Footnote 22 After providing the truth about oneself in the form of answers to questions asked by the state, individuals should “come clean” with it themselves, “in their own voice” and from the first person, thereby turning it into their truth. It is clear that between both truths there should not be any discrepancies.

The extent to which the content of the questionnaire determined the structure and content of file autobiographies is illustrated by the effect that changes in the questionnaire over the course of the decades had on them. The overall direction of these mutual transformations can be traced through the analysis of three types of questionnaires that relate to three different periods in the history of the USSR. The first, and most detailed, dates from the second half of the 1930s—the time of mass repressions and show trials. This questionnaire was not used across the board but only by those being accepted to a position as a middle or higher level official.Footnote 23 The form, printed on four pages, began with the remark: “The answers to all the questions in the form should be given exactly and in detail. Crossing out is not permitted.” On the right in a box was placed “Space for a photograph,” followed the official name of the document, “The questionnaire form,” and two margins: “The full name and address of the institution” and “The occupied position.” After that came numerous questions, many of which resembled political accusations.Footnote 24 On the fourth and final page it was necessary to state “The places of work from the start of independent life,” the date of the completion of the document, and to confirm the information supplied with a signature. When the information had been checked by the staff department, the individual was invited on that very page to sign a vow not to disclose state secrets. At the very end again followed the signature of the individual and the date.

The anketa from the second half of the 1940s had the same title, “The questionnaire form,” and the same beginning, but its “questioning” was somewhat shortened and changed. The strict initial warning at the beginning and the promise of keeping state secrets at the end disappeared. This type of questionnaire form was used in Soviet institutions for quite a long time, at least until the mid-1960s.Footnote 25

The third form of the anketa, which became most commonly known as “The personal form for staff records,” had an even longer life—from the end of the 1960s right up to recent times.Footnote 26 Its questions clearly show a shift in the interests of the state from the political to the professional sphere in the life of an individual: educational institutions attended, academic degrees, knowledge of foreign languages, scientific publications, and technological inventions. The questionnaire is followed by the date of its completion, the personal signature, and at the very end a reminder: “The worker, completing the personal form, is obliged to communicate all subsequent changes (education, party status, receipt of academic qualification or academic title, impositions and removals of all party penalties and so on) at their place of work for the inclusion of these changes to their personal file.”Footnote 27 In this way, if in the 1930s the state was still concerned with the struggle with “spies” and “class enemies,” during the phase of “developed socialism” information about education, professional abilities, and social activity became more relevant in its eyes.Footnote 28 To illustrate, if in the 1930s foreign trips were treated with suspicion, by the 1970s they could be a source of pride, provided that the individual traveled as part of an official delegation, as in the case of the musical composer discussed above.

In general, the narrations in file autobiographies follow the changes in the questionnaire outlined above. Thus, the texts of the 1930s emphasize the class and ideological “purity” of their authors; those of the late 1940s and 1950s highlight their activities during the Great Patriotic War; and those of later decades tell for the most part about their participation in building communism and about their professional qualifications. The “free form” of the document as well as writing it several times anew in the course of a person's life, however, allowed some deviations from the general tendency.

Individual Strategies

It does not follow from what has been said above that writing file autobiographies should be conceived as a mechanical repetition of the answers already given in the questionnaires. The situation was more complicated. The composition of the file self, which functioned as a face-to-face encounter with the state, allowed for a certain amount of freedom—to a far greater extent, of course, in compiling an account of one's life than in entering personal details in a questionnaire. In the autobiographical account there was greater opportunity to portray oneself in the best light: to emphasize something, to skate over something, to leave out some questions from the anketa or, on the contrary, to add some additional details. This was one of the situations when the individual directed by self-interest could play with the state what Stephen Kotkin labeled as the “identity game.”Footnote 29

For example, reading autobiographies from the 1960s and 1970s, it is possible to find their authors mention their nationality (the famous fifth point of the questionnaire) quite rarely, but almost always mention their social status. This placing of accents was aligned with certain peculiarities of state and Party policy of the time. The consistent propaganda of internationalism made referring to one's nationality in one's autobiography irrelevant. In particular, the adoption at the Twenty-second Congress of the CPSU of a new Party program (1961) that proclaimed the gradual dissolution of national distinctions in the USSR, and especially the adoption at the Twenty-fourth Congress, ten years later, of a special resolution that declared that a new community of people—“the Soviet people”—had formed in the country.Footnote 30 Nationality was connected with the birth of the protagonist, not with their newfound status. The officially-proclaimed state policy at that time principally refused to draw distinctions between citizens of the USSR according to their national background. In these conditions mentioning that you were a Tartar, a Lithuanian, or a Ukrainian could be viewed as an inappropriate declaration of your nationality and serve as evidence for suspicion of nationalism.Footnote 31

In contrast to nationality, social background in the official discourse of the time continued to occupy an important place. The policy of the creation of a “new historical community,” which was conducted through various mechanisms for social uplifting, demanded the presence of this marker in entering university, joining the CPSU, in being appointed to leading or creative positions, and so on. It was furthermore clear that in order to benefit from these lifts it was pragmatic to underline that you came from the family of a worker or peasant, or failing that, from a clerk, and not from a kulak, merchant, or aristocrat. But how to portray yourself before the state in the best possible way? The feasible strategies, of course, depended on the concrete circumstances of the person's life, but in all cases their choice was an individual act. Three examples of the realization of different strategies in the file autobiographies of leading Soviet physicists are examined below.

In 1960, the eighty-year-old academician and “father of Soviet physics” Abram Fedorovich Ioffe wrote an autobiography that evidently was dictated by the need for him to be put forward as a candidate for the Lenin prize (awarded posthumously in 1961). Here is its beginning: “I was born in the town Romna in Poltava guberniia in 1880. In 1888, I entered Romenskoe real΄noe uchilishche [Realschule], which I finished in 1897. In that year I entered the St. Petersburg technological institute …”Footnote 32 The lacuna here is glaring: the author did not say a word about his social origins and did not even mention the names of his parents. It is not difficult to guess why if we bear in mind that the father of the academician—Faivish (Fedor Vasil΄evich) Ioffe—was a merchant of the second guild. It was better to keep silent about that: it would clearly have sounded jarring that an outstanding Soviet academician was the son of class alien (although for the all-knowing NKVD/KGB his origins did not count as a secret, of course).

However, thereafter, as though compensating for the “sin” of his origins, the academician stressed at every opportunity his participation in socialist construction:

In October 1918, following the suggestion of Lunacharskii, I founded the physico-technical department of the Radiological Institute. In December I organized a consultation in Moscow and in January 1919 a congress of physicists in Petrograd, whose task was to place all-Russian physics at the service of the socialist construction of the Republic.Footnote 33

Another strategy is found in the autobiography of Nikolai Nikolaevich Semenov, Nobel laureate and a founder of chemical physics, which he wrote in 1940 (in 1975 he added to it a short listing of his later academic achievements). The author did not keep silent about his origins (his grandfather—“was from the bourgeois,” his father—“had the rank of state councilor and received for his lengthy service the title of ‘life aristocrat’”), but after that he spoke in detail about two episodes of his biography from the period of the civil war.Footnote 34 Here he insistently strove to persuade the reader that he found himself together with the enemies of Soviet power not due to ideological considerations, but for other reasons, including chance circumstances; that he did not take part in military actions against the Red Army; and that his connection with the white army was short-lived. The dry factual nature of the document and its generally restrained discourse changes here to a confessional autobiographical tone: the reader learns about life-changing events in his past, his internal worries, doubts, his assessments of the surrounding world. And in some places the tone of narrative becomes repentant. In severely condemning those who opposed the Soviet authorities, the author admits his own mistakes:

Being absorbed in academic work, I was little interested in politics and understood events poorly. In spring 1918, I left to visit my parents in Samara, where the Czechoslovak rebellion took me by surprise.Footnote 35 Under the influence of the petit bourgeois milieu that surrounded me and a certain trust that the petit bourgeoisie nurtured at that time for the Mensheviks and SRs (as is known, who then led the Samara Komuch), I entered voluntarily in the middle of July into the so-called “people's army” of the Samara “uchredilka.”Footnote 36

It is clear that in contrast to an ordinary industrial or white collar worker, keeping quiet about one's anti-Bolshevik past was impossible for such an important scientist. For the NKVD/KGB, all the details of his biography were old news and rather than skating over them indirectly or without reflection, the state demanded from him his current assessment, the expression of his current attitudes towards them. And in answer to that clear demand, which was nowhere expressed directly, there appeared in the autobiography the following passage:

… I acquired a deep aversion to Kolchakovshchina, which together with the Mensheviks and the SRs sold out our motherland to foreign powers….On the contrary, having arrived in Petrograd, I saw that Soviet power and the party of the Bolsheviks were creating a new life in the most difficult of conditions, were building an independent socialist fatherland… .This glaring contrast of these two worlds brought me at once into the camp of the intelligentsia that was helping the Bolsheviks build our country and then, in accord with my political growth, into the camp of conscious fighters for socialism.Footnote 37

Of course, it is impossible to read the document without a grain of salt, and to question whether everything the author wrote here corresponded to reality, that is, that his re-birth from apolitical young man to burning defender of Soviet power. Furthermore, the emotional character of the declaration of his loyalty to the state at the end of the document, wholly in the spirit of the editorial columns of Pravda, provides grounds to doubt his sincerity.Footnote 38

Portraying oneself to the state in the best light could be done with different means. For example by saying half-truths about one's origins, as Evgenii Fedorovich Gross, a laureate of Stalin and Lenin Prizes and corresponding member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, did. In his 1970 autobiography he wrote that his father “both before and after the revolution until his death in 1919 worked in factories.”Footnote 39 The reader can easily assume that his father was a worker (proletarian origins, as is well known, were highly valued by the Soviet state) or, at the very least, an engineer. It is unlikely that anyone (apart from, of course, well-informed officials) could guess that Fedor Christoforovich occupied the position first of Director of the Admiralty Izhorskii factories, then from 1911 was chairman of the board of the Baltic and Admiralty ship-building factory and had the rank of general-lieutenant.

However, a half-truth in a file autobiography was not admissible in cases when the narrator had been subject to administrative or criminal investigation—it was necessary to write with absolute exactness and openness about all such compromising circumstances. Gross continued accordingly: “In March 1935, I was sent to Saratov in an administrative decision. The reason for this remained unknown to me.Footnote 40 Following a ruling by the Special council of the NKVD in Moscow on August 6, 1936, my exile was repealed and I returned to Leningrad (notification of the Prosecutor's office of the USSR from August 22, 1936).”Footnote 41

File Autobiography as Confession: The Soviet Present and the Imperial Past

With the exception of form (in one case—verbal, in the other—written) and the addressee (in one case—the Almighty, through the intercession of a priest, in the other—the state through the mediation of the staff department), writing file autobiographies by Soviet people has a lot in common with the practice of Christian confession.Footnote 42 This general comparison becomes all the more glaring if we take a look at the confession in the Russian Orthodox Church historically, particularly at its control by state authorities.

An important turning point in this control took place during the reign of Peter the Great when the Church became subordinate to the state, which resulted, among other things, in a series of governmental regulations on confession. According to Peter's decree of February 8, 1716, all citizens of the Russian Empire under penalty of a fine had to confess to their local priests at least once a year.Footnote 43 Soon after this, parish priests were requested to maintain two lists of their parishioners and regularly submit them to state authorities: those who confessed and those who evaded confession.Footnote 44 A few decades later Catherine the Great reinforced and specified the state's control over the regularity of confessional practice. According to her decree of September 30, 1765, each individual from every estate of Russian society (apart from the nobility) had to pay a fixed fine for evading yearly confession, which increased in geometric progression for each year of evasion. The amount of the fine differed in accordance with the individual's social status, and those who were not able to pay had to be punished by correctional labor.Footnote 45 Scholars believe that this effort by the state to control religious confession had a weak connection with upholding the purity of the faith of citizens: until the February Revolution of 1917, the “confessional lists” submitted by clerics mostly functioned as registers used for fiscal purposes.Footnote 46 This was how the confession shifted from a dialog between the individual and God, who threatened him or her by hellfire, to a dialog between the individual and the state, which threatened them with repressive actions. Keeping this historical perspective in mind, let us now return to the specific Soviet confessional practices under discussion.

A compulsory general requirement of both Soviet file autobiography and Christian confession is truthfulness. Since information supplied by the author could be checked by the all-seeing NKVD/KGB at any moment, truthfulness in the eyes of the state meant the absence of discrepancies with other records. In the event of any inaccuracy or, still worse, conscious deceit, the individual would face serious consequences, above all during the second half of the 1930s. Sheila Fitzpatrick cites an example relating to 1936 when officials from the NKVD doubted the truthfulness of the details concerning the proletarian origins purported in a file autobiography of Petrograd District Soviet Chairwoman Anastasiya Plotnikova.Footnote 47 The matter, most likely, only went as far as the sacking of Plotnikova from her high position, but the fact of the investigation by the NKVD of possible state deception in such a document is itself illuminating.

In the following year, in the famous “Trial of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyist Center,” accusations of falsifying file autobiographies sounded much more venomous, and their consequences for the accused were far more dramatic. The state prosecutor, proceeding from the fact that one of the accused, the Deputy People's Commissar for Heavy Industry of the USSR, Stanislav Antonovich Rataichak, stated different nationalities in two of his autobiographies, drew conclusions that went very far:

Rataichak is either a German or a Polish spy, but that he is a spy, of this there can be no doubt, and as is appropriate for a spy, [he is] a liar, a deceiver and cheat. A person who has, according to his own words, an old autobiography and a new autobiography. A person who depending on circumstances falsifies and recomposes these autobiographies.Footnote 48

The question of deception in an autobiography arose in the same trial during the interrogation of another accused, Valentin Vasil΄evich Vasil΄ev (Arnol΄d), who had been in charge of the Garage and Department of Supplies Unit in the mines of the Kuzbass:

Vyshinsky: Well, were you subjected to party discipline in connection with this?

Arnol΄d: I survived three purges.

Vyshinsky: Successfully?

Arnol΄d: Successfully. I was able to camouflage myself; only I got my autobiography darkened.Footnote 49

The requirement that was formulated here in such an unambiguous manner for a single and unchanged truth throughout all file autobiographies affected millions of people: the shorthand reports of the trials were at first published in huge print-runs in the central press, and later came out with additional material in books. It is unsurprising that awareness of the danger arising from inaccuracy in the information they provided remained in the consciousness of Soviet citizens for a long time, passed down from generation to generation.Footnote 50

The second most important characteristic of the confession concerns its content, namely as an account of transgressions that leads to repentance. Precisely such a modus was constituted in file autobiographies by the many questions in the questionnaire that had an openly accusatory intent: did the author find himself in occupied territory, was he brought to trial or under investigation, had he been abroad, did he have relatives there and so on. Of course, in the simplest of cases these questions could be answered with hearty negative replies: no-no-no, and then the same would be repeated in the autobiography. Authors had to reply in the affirmative to some questions, however, and accompany their answers with clarifications in a way that justified them (as, for example, in the above cited fragments of the Soviet physicists’ autobiographies). Even if in the life of the individual himself such situations had not arisen, then in the life of the relatives of the “confessor” any one of those “sins” determined by the state could well be present. But even when the author was clean from the side of the family, they could not consider him or herself absolutely blameless: the list of potential transgressions of a Soviet person was too wide. If, for example, someone wrote that they were not a member of the CPSU, then that also to a certain extent involved an admission of guilt, if not a serious one: why were they not in the party? Surely a genuinely Soviet person as an active builder of communism should be.

In relation to content, a Christian confession is associated with a confession of faith. In our case, this was belief in communism and in the ideal Soviet person: first a member of the VLKSM, then of the CPSU, without a criminal record, who had not been abroad (other than as part of an official delegation), and did not have any relatives there. In narrating about him or herself in line with the schema given by the state, the author of the file autobiography, even without wishing to, confessed this new faith.Footnote 51

The confessional essence of Soviet file autobiographies becomes particularly evident if we compare their structure and content to those of surviving Christian confessions, such as the confessions Father Ioann of Kronstadt received from Russian believers at the end of the nineteenth century, which Nadiezda Kizenko has recently published.Footnote 52 The narration in these confessions follows the common pattern from the prayer book known to everybody, which lists general categories of sin. Correspondingly, authors of most of the texts admit “pride, envy, hatred, despair, miserliness, and ‘bearing a grudge’ (zlopamiatstvo).”Footnote 53 Nevertheless, their confessional stories are far from being just formal acknowledgments of listed wrongdoings: they possess clear personal traits and demonstrate, as Kizenko accentuates, “an astonishing ability of their authors to make the template fit their own purposes.”Footnote 54 Thus, while following the general Christian pattern, correspondents of Father Ioann, the same way as Soviet file autobiography writers, made individual choices. As in the file autobiographies of Soviet people, their confessions resulted in them internalizing a given pattern also. As Kizenko concludes, “the individuality of the themes they chose to emphasize, the sins they felt they needed to mention, the way they wrote their stories—all this suggests that the confession, far from being an externally imposed form of control … could also be a way for people to rethink both their lives and their life stories.”Footnote 55

Transformations of Narrative

Over the decades the normative characteristics of the Soviet person underwent substantial transformations in accordance with Communist Party policy changes. The basic directions of these changes were reflected in the questions of the anketa that significantly differed from the 1930s to the 1980s, and the autobiographical narratives of Soviet people largely followed these changes. Thus, one and the same person, in spite of the unambiguously declared requirements of the 1930s to have one unaltered truth about him or herself, could later modify their life stories anew. For example, if Soviet citizens wrote file autobiographies in the 1940s–1950s, then they would state information about the social origins of their parents (father and mother—“from the families of the working intelligentsia”) and speak in detail about their type of work (father—“a railway engineer” sent to battle against chaos in the transport system after the war and contributed to establishing its stability and effectiveness). If in listing relatives from their father's and mother's lines and speaking about their work a compromising example arose (“my uncle was an organist in a crematorium and was sent to Siberia for connections with the clergy”), then they would necessarily add that their other two uncles were active supporters of Soviet rule: one worked as the director of a big Stalingrad factory, the other was a member of the Red Army throughout the civil war, when he defended the Soviet Republic from interventionists and Whites.

As already noted, in the 1960s–80s it was not required in this type of narrative to refer to the social origins of one's family at all, but it was common to speak in detail about professional and especially social activity: as a local party organization leader, as a member of the election commission, as a political agitator, and as a trade union activist. The class struggle disappeared from the agenda of state politics, making way for other tasks: the building of communism, perfecting developed socialism, and thereafter engaging in Perestroika and Uskoreniye.

The recent study of about 300 file autobiographies written from the late 1920s to the 1990s by 160 Soviet people from the Tomsk region supports and elaborates upon these general claims.Footnote 56 It analyzes two file autobiographies of one and the same person that were composed in 1943 and in 1955. In the first autobiography, in his list of family members the author does not mention his brother at all, but in the second one he not only writes that he has a brother called Ivan, but also that Ivan was arrested in 1937 and that the reason for his arrest is unknown to the author. It is clear that in 1943, in the course of the Great Patriotic War, only a few years after the mass repressions of 1937–38, mentioning a family member presumably involved in anti-Soviet activity could have serious consequences, while after Stalin's death and after the War, referring to a brother's arrest was much less risky.Footnote 57

The study also discusses a case when a person writes three autobiographies one after another: in 1946, 1954, and 1955. In each of them he refers to his parents and indicates their job positions in detail. From these texts one learns that his father is an engineer at a particular plant, a member of the Communist Party, and that his mother is a doctor at a particular hospital. But strangely enough, he does not mention their names. A look into the questionnaire filled out by this person, where mentioning first names and patronymics of both parents, as well as the mother's maiden name, was mandatory, gives a clue to the lacuna: we discover that his mother's first and maiden name were distinctly Jewish. Even the Soviet state's more tolerant position towards Jews—which replaced years of anti-Semitic policies—provided enough reason for this Soviet person not to reveal his Jewish origins.Footnote 58

As a whole, the analysis of the file autobiographies from the Tomsk region demonstratively proves the general narrative shift in file autobiographies during the late Soviet epoch: their authors placed more emphasis on their professional competence and social activism than on their political loyalty. The study also points to a remarkable tendency: file autobiographies of this period become less personal, more formal, and shorter than those of 1930s–40s.Footnote 59 It would appear that after the state lost interest in tracing the major political sins of its citizens that the confessional element of file autobiographies gradually declined.Footnote 60

After the USSR

After the collapse of the USSR the specific genre of file autobiography, which was earlier tightly bound with ideology and state control over the individual, came into dramatic decline. The significant changes that since then have taken place in the political, economic, and social life of Russia have affected different spheres of social reality. In particular, the market of labor now demands that the candidate presents an autobiography of a type previously unknown to Soviet citizens, namely the CV/Resume. In the majority of cases, the employer conducts the initial selection of candidates on the basis of this new document. Consequently, the current documentation protocol attributes minor importance to file autobiographies. In accordance with the recent governmental regulations, the file self of the state civil servant should consist of two mandatory hand-written papers: the job application and the filled-out questionnaire.Footnote 61 In private business the structure of the file self is not specified by the state at all, as it is regulated exclusively by the HR department of the company.Footnote 62 The new documentation protocol has not pushed out the Soviet-era file autobiography entirely, however. One website that describes “the main tendencies of work in the sphere of paperwork and the upkeep of an archive in strict accordance with normative requirements” provides a vague justification for its presence in contemporary Russia: this document may be requested from a person on certain occasions.Footnote 63

In practice, the file autobiography is required from Russian citizens today quite rarely and mainly not for the hiring process but in some other situations. For instance, until recently such a document was mandatory for entering a PhD program and before the final dissertation defense. Unsurprisingly, in the 2000s young people not familiar with the Soviet habitus experienced difficulties here. What is the difference between an autobiography and a resume? What should be written in it? Why is it needed?Footnote 64 It is clear that in our days the file autobiography has vanished almost completely and for many has turned into a scarcely understood rudimentary ritual that is barely connected with state control, social realities, or the emerging new Russian identity. It is worth adding, however, that it is still required on a comparatively wide scale by the Russian Orthodox Church, particularly in its educational institutions.Footnote 65 Can its survival in Church documentation protocol not serve as evidence of the historic kinship between the Christian confession and the writing of file autobiographies, as discussed above?

The practice of writing file autobiographies in the USSR, which from 1950s onwards was common to the majority of the adult population of the country, functioned as a specific tool through which power relations between the state and the individual were exercised. Together with many other discursive practices of different kinds, it operated as a particular mechanism of subjectification of the people aimed at “making them Soviet.” The requirement of this practice to tell about one's life from the first person singular in accordance with the factual data given in the anketa promoted the reproduction of the Soviet normative self in the minds of people while its demand for absolute truthfulness made it conform to the pattern of Christian confession. The same way as the Christian confessional practice resulted in confirming and internalizing religious identity, the practice of composing file autobiographies in the USSR resulted in confirming and internalizing Soviet identity. Independently of however seriously or responsibly a person approached the writing of their file autobiography, or however sincerely he or she related themselves to the Soviet state or to communist ideology, they actualized their self-account together with the questionnaire and other documents from their personal file, kept in the staff department in their every meeting with the state. And these meetings were regular and diverse in their form. The state appealed to their Soviet identity through newspapers, radio, television, educational institutions, and visual means of agitation. It also required the active reciprocity of this identity at public gatherings, such as Mayday and November demonstrations, Party, trade union, and workplace meetings. These meetings were the habitus that continuously resurrected “the file self,” moments in which the person in one way or another tailored themselves to the state's demands. Such was the mechanism that made the practice of writing file autobiographies a means by which the Soviet Leviathan molded people's subjectivity.

Translated by Thomas Rollings

References

1. The neologism “file autobiography” was suggested to me by the term of “file self” first introduced into Russian studies by Sheila Fitzpatrick in her book Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton, 2005), 14–18 Google Scholar.

2. See Naiman’s, Eric discussion of this area, “On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them,” The Russian Review 60, no. 3 (2001): 307–15Google Scholar; and the interview with Hellbeck, Jochen and Halfin, Igal, “Interv΄iu s Igalom Halfinym i Iokhanom Hell΄bekom,” Mogil΄ner, M., trans., Ab Imperio, no. 3 (2002): 217–60Google Scholar. Scholars working in this field analyze various personal testimonies of the early Soviet period: diaries, letters, autobiographies, and memoirs. In a few cases they also address file autobiographies: see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks!, 102–13; Halfin, Igal, “From Darkness To Light: Student Communist Autobiography During NEP,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. Folge, Neue, Bd. 45, H. 2 (1997): 210–36Google Scholar; Halfin, Igal, Terror in My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge, Mass, 2003), 43–49 Google Scholar; Hellbeck, Jochen, Revolution on My Mind. Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 26–27 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Studer, Brigitte and Unfried, Berthold, Der stalinistische Parteikader: Identitätsstiftende Praktiken und Diskurse in der Sowjetunion der dreissiger Jahre (Köln: Böhlau, 2001), 18 Google Scholar; and Unfried, Berthold, “Ich bekenne”: Katholische Beichte und sowjetische Selbstkritik (Frankfurt am Main; New York, 2006), 285–308 Google Scholar.

3. Kharkhordin, Oleg, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley, 1999)Google Scholar.

4. Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar.

5. Kotkin’s Foucauldian stance thereafter served as an inspiration for some of the works on Soviet subjectivity named in note 2.

6. See Igal Halfin, “From Darkness To Light”: 210–36, esp. 210–11; Jochen Hellbeck defines these texts as “the most widespread type of formalized self-representation of the Soviet system,” which arose in the party environment and were driven by the necessity to assess the political consciousness level of the candidate: Hellbeck, Jochen, “Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-Era Autobiographical Texts,” The Russian Review, 60, no. 3 (2001): 342 Google Scholar.

7. See the most recent publication: Tatarnikov, Kirill, Ofitserskie skazki pervoi chetverti XVIII veka. Polevaia armiia. Sbornik dokumentov, Vol. 2. (Moscow, 2015)Google Scholar.

8. See Brockhaus, F.A. and Efron, I.A., eds. Entsiklopedicheskii slovar΄ (St. Petersburg, 1898)Google Scholar, 24a:684.

9. First published: “Biografiia Aleksandra Vasil΄evicha Suvorova, im samim napisannaia v 1786 godu,” Chteniia v Obshchestve istorii i drevnostei Rossiiskikh (ChOIDR), no 9 (1848): 534–52Google Scholar.

10. First published in: Vasilii Alekseevich Alekseev, Pis΄ma i bumagi Suvorova (St. Petersburg, 1901), 3–22 Google Scholar.

11. For an overview of this type of document and a guide to corresponding archival resources see: Svetlana Romanova and Irina Glukhovskaia, “Ukazatel΄ vidov dokumentov, soderzhashchikh genealogicheskuiu informatsiiu (XVI v.—1917 g.),” Vestnik arkhivista, 46–49 (1998–99), available online at www.familytree.ru/ru/vniidad/pointer.htm (last accessed September 19, 2017).

12. In enrolling in the workplace, unqualified workers (if they were not applying to a defense enterprise) and peasants represented an exception. However, file autobiographies could be demanded from them later on when joining the CPSU, being nominated for awards, being promoted to a leading position, or any number of other situations.

13. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Vostochno-Kazakhstanskoi oblasti (GAVKO), fond 1-p, opis΄ 1, delo 7855. Published in: Oni vozglavliali Vostochno-Kazakhstanskuiu oblast΄. Biograficheskii spravochnik (Ust΄-Kamenogorsk, 2009)Google Scholar, entry no. 42. The last names of the authors and of their family members in the autobiographies cited below in the majority of cases have been redacted.

14. A photocopy of the original is published on the site of the Krasnoiarsk local children’s library: http://kkdb.ru/index.php (last accessed September 19, 2017), which is reproduced in full above.

15. A photocopy of the original is published on a fan’s site dedicated to the life and work of the composer: http://kompozitor.moy.su/publ/ (last accessed September 19, 2017).

16. A photocopy of the original was published electronically by the Central City Library of Novokuznetsk, at http://www.gogolevka.ru/catalog/info/elkat14/73886 (last accessed September 19, 2017).

17. For the sake of brevity, other examples of the composing of file autobiography—on admission to the CPSU, before receiving distinguished titles and government awards etc.—will be omitted.

18. The most widely accepted practice is given below in a simplified form. Evidently, there were cases when the process was more complicated, especially as regards the selection of candidates for top positions, as well as low positions in the military industrial complex and state security services.

19. In conditions of a deficit of labor, a lack of attention to the professional qualities of candidates was a mass phenomenon, and in most cases the decision to take on a prospective employee was made at the first meeting.

20. Since for those entering work for the first time the “genre” of file autobiography was unfamiliar, they usually asked the officials questions of clarification, usually receiving as an answer verbal advice about what they should include in their life-account: “Write where and when you were born, what education you received, show the members of your family and so on.” In some rare cases, they were given a sheet of paper with printed questions as prompts.

21. In some cases after the checking of passport details with the questionnaire and other documents, the accuracy of data was authorized by staff department official with a stamp.

22. In accordance with the Federal Law № 125 of 13.05.2008 (paragraph 25, article 3), there is a temporal restriction regarding access to archival documents that contain personal information from the last seventy-five years (article 3.3). This is why at the moment (September 2017) personal files only up to 1942 are openly available in state and ministerial archives. In connection with this restriction the main corpus of documents reviewed in this study are texts that have previously been published in printed and electronic media.

23. In the present case by way of example the anketa of 1938 from Mikhail Andreevich Mishin, who temporarily fulfilled the duties of head engineer of the division of land-surveying of Narkomzem of the Autonomous Karelian Socialist Soviet Republic has been used (published on the forum “The surroundings of St. Petersburg”: https://tinyurl.com/nuchrmu, last accessed September 19, 2017).

24. Ibid. Here follows some of them: “8. Were you previously a member of any other political party, of which precisely, where, when, and reason for leaving? 9. Did you belong to anti-party groups, did you or your close relatives share their anti-party views? Which party organizations reviewed the question, when, and their decision? 10. Were you subjected to party searches, for what, when, by which organization? . . . 12. Did you serve in the old army, when, in which division, for how long, in what capacity, and were you commissioned? 13. Did you or your relatives serve in forces or institutions of the white governments (white armies), in which rank (position), where and when? 14. Were you or your relatives on the territory of the whites, where, for how long, and what were you doing?”

25. It has been cited and analyzed in an article by Peremyshlev, Evgenii, “Zaochnaia stavka: L. Ovalov i maior Pronin,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, vol. 80, no 4 (2006): 221–51Google Scholar.

26. With insignificant changes it continues today to remain a part of the personal paperwork in state institutions (minus questions about membership in the CPSU, VLKSM, and some others).

27. See the photocopy of “The personal file” of the Tartar Soviet poet Zaka Nuri (Zaka Sharafutdinovich Nurutdinov) on the site of the Archives of the Republic of Tartarstan (composed in 1968), available online at www.archive.gov.tatarstan.ru/_go/anonymous/main/?path=/pages/ru/3ipd/931vyst/46_zakinuri (last accessed September 19, 2017).

28. Having said that, when reading file autobiographies from the 1960–70s one should never forget that their authors were often people who had begun their professional career much earlier. This meant that years before they had already had to complete the old draconian questionnaires of the 1930s, which were held in the staff departments and were available to the respective “organs.” This is why in talking about themselves in later autobiographies they often continued to answer questions that had already lost their topicality for the state.

29. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 358.

30. XXIV S’’ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soiuza, 30 marta – 9 aprelia 1971 goda: Stenograficheskiĭ otchet, vol. 2 (Moscow, 1971), 232 Google Scholar and thereafter.

31. Though repressions based on accusations of “bourgeois nationalism” had vanished after Stalin, “nationalism” as a frightening term was not buried in oblivion in Soviet public discourse at all and steadily reappeared in different forms until the collapse of the Soviet Union. The official task of fighting against nationalism was identified at the Twenty-sixth Party Congress in a speech by Leonid Brezhnev: “The CPSU has fought and will always resolutely fight against such attitudes alien to the nature of socialism as chauvinism or nationalism, against any nationalistic aberration, be it, say, anti-Semitism or Zionism”— Brezhnev, Leonid, Report of the Central Committee of the CPSU to the XXVI Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union . . . (Moscow, 1981), 76 Google Scholar. And this task was later re-actualized in a number of studies by Soviet Marxist scholars, in particular Dzhunusov, Maskhud S., Burzhuaznyi natsionalism: Printsipy kritiki (Moscow, 1986)Google Scholar and Rymarenko, Iurii I., Burzhuaznyi natsionalism i klerikalism (Kiev, 1986)Google Scholar.

32. N.Ia. Moskovchenko, V.Ia. Frenkel΄, and G.A. Savina, eds., Fiziki o sebe, Sb. dokumentov (Leningrad, 1990), 24.

33. Ibid., 25. And further: “With the start of large-scale collectivization in 1932, I organized the Physico-agronomical Institute for the application of the achievements of physics in socialist agriculture. . . . In 1940 I entered as a candidate and in 1942 as a member of the CPSU. . . . In the first days of the war, A.A. Zhdanov appointed me chairman of the commission for military equipment under the city committee of the VKP(b). . . . During the evacuation in Kazan΄, I was the chairman of the Military-naval and Military-engineering Commissions.” The strategy of concealing one’s origins without any kind of “justifications” was nonetheless also possible, at least in the period of “developed socialism.” For example, Viktor Nikolaevich Kondrat΄ev managed to avoid them: the academician, laureate of the Stalin Prize and a cavalier of the Order of Lenin who came from a family of merchant Old Believers did not mention his social background in his autobiography of 1976. However, he could not leave out details about trips abroad, including the duration, purpose, and character of the trips.—Ibid., 297.

34. Ibid., 81.

35. Here he meant the armed revolt of Czechoslovak forces in May–August 1918.

36. Moskovchenko et al., Fiziki o sebe, 81–82. Komuch—Komitet chlenov Uchreditel΄nogo sobraniia, the first anti-Bolshevik all-Russian government. “Uchredilka”—pejorative name for Uchreditel΄noe sobranie (All-Russian Constituent Assembly). After this factual data follow attempts at self-justification: his being in the white army did not mean that he actively fought against the Soviet authorities. It was a mistake of his youth, which did not lead to any serious consequences: “Soon I began to understand clearly that there were no stimuli for me to fight against the Bolsheviks and that I needed to get out of the dirty history into which I had fallen due to my own lack of foresight. Using the news of the illness of my father (he died soon after), in the middle of August I managed to receive leave to go to Samara, where I arranged a transfer to a newly formed Ufa battery and, without travelling to Ufa, went (in September) directly to Tomsk, thereby deserting from the White Army.”

37. Ibid., 82. “Kolchakovshchina” – pejorative for the anti-Bolshevik movement under the leadership of Admiral Alexander Vasilyevich Kolchak.

38. Ibid., 84.

39. Ibid., 373.

40. Today we know that the reason of his arrest and exile was a “special operation” against “byvshikh” (former privileged classes), i.e. the author suffered due to his family background, about which he had spoken about so abstractly. See: Ivanov, Viktor, “V svetloe budushchee—bez ‘byvshikh,’” in Beliakov, L.P., Zablotskii, E.M., Orlov, V.P. et al. , eds. Repressirovannye geologi (Moscow and St. Petersburg, 1999), 419–22Google Scholar.

41. Moskovchenko et al., Fiziki o sebe, 373.

42. On the influence of the confessional practices of the Orthodox Church in shaping the individual self in Soviet Russia, see Kharkhordin, Collective and the Individual in Russia, 61–74. On differences between confessions in Russian Orthodox and Catholic traditions, see a recent historical overview: Nosov, Dmitrii, “Istoriia instituta ispovedi i ego vliianie na eticheskoe samosoznanie v katolitsizme i pravoslavii,” Filosofskie nauki, no 2 (2016): 61–73 Google Scholar. On parallels of early Soviet diaristic/autobiographical writing with Catholic tradition, see different sections of Unfried’s Ich bekenne, and on their comparisons with Protestant tradition see Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind, 37–38, and Halfin, Terror in My Soul, 49–51, referred to in note 2.

43. Polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii s 1649 goda, vol. 5 (St. Petersburg, 1830), 196 Google Scholar.

44. Antonov, Dmitrii and Antonova, Irina, “Massovyi istochnik: ispovedal΄nye i dukhovnye rospisi,” Arkhivovedenie i istochnikovedenie otechestvennoi istorii (Moscow, 2005), 283 Google Scholar.

45. Polnoe sobranie zakonov, vol. 17 (St. Petersburg, 1830), 346–47Google Scholar.

46. Antonov and Antonova, “Massovyi istochnik,” 284–85.

47. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks!, 102–13.

48. Protsess antisovetskogo trotskistskogo tsentra (Moscow, 1937), 177 Google Scholar.

49. Ibid., 126.

50. According to the evidence of Ol΄ga Bessmertnaia, the daughter of the well-known medievalist Iurii L΄vovich Bessmertnyi (1923–2000), in the 1970s her father warned her that every time she had to write a new autobiography she should make a point of writing exactly the same as before since otherwise there could be unpleasant consequences.

51. Confessing faith in diaries and other autobiographical writings mostly discussed by scholars of Soviet subjectivity, has a crucial difference with confessing faith in file autobiographies. In the first case, this is a conscious, deliberate, and private act of a person who decides to write his or her life-story on their own volition and to follow the narrative structure they choose; in the second—an involuntary public act of a person in the text with the given narrative structure, in which confessional discourse is not necessarily verbalized explicitly.

52. Kizenko, Nadieszda, “Written Confession and the Construction of Sacred Narrative,” Steinberg, Mark D. and Coleman, Heather J. eds., Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Bloomington, 2007) 93–118 Google Scholar.

53. Ibid., 95.

54. Ibid., 94.

55. Ibid., 112.

56. Voloshina, Svetlana and Litvinov, Aleksandr, “Anatomiia deloproizvodstvennoĭ avtobiografii v Noveishei istorii Rossii: Kompozitsiia i soderzhanie tekstov,” Tekst. Kniga. Knigoizdanie, no 1 (2016): 40–54 Google Scholar.

57. Ibid, 48–49.

58. Ibid, 49.

59. Ibid, 51.

60. Ibid, 50.

61. The Decree of the President of RF from May 30, 2005, N 609, Paragraph 16. There is no indication on the content the questionnaire, which suggests that it may differ from one governmental institution to another.

62. See the guidelines for processing the personal data in private business: http://svoy-business.com/organizatsiya-biznesa/dokumentatsiya/vedenie-lichnogo-dela-sotrudnika.html (last accessed September 25, 2017).

63. http://delo-ved.ru/obraztsy-dokumentov/kadrovye-dokumenty/avtobiografiya-obrazes-napisaniya.html (last accessed September 25, 2017).

64. For an illuminating discussion of these difficulties, see a forum for PhD candidates from 2004: http://www.aspirantura.spb.ru/forum/showthread.php?t=1412 (last accessed September 25, 2017). Confused questions about what to write in an autobiography reappeared on the forum eight years later: http://www.aspirantura.spb.ru/forum/archive/index.php/t-9710.html (last accessed September 25, 2017).

65. In some cases the Church authorities provide individuals with patterned questionnaires for their file autobiographies. One of such questionnaires from 2015, addressed to matriculates of the Moscow Orthodox Theological Academy, is published on the Academy’s website: http://www.mpda.ru/data/2015/06/08/1235707635/PRAVILA_PRIEMA_12.05.pdf (last accessed September 25, 2017).