In memoriam Arsenii Roginskii (1946–2017)
Today, on the 30th anniversary of the victory against German fascism, I want to repeat: forgetting about our own past means not only betraying the memory of the millions deceased and tortured, but also betraying ourselves and our children. The Nuremberg trial appears to me not as an act of revenge, but as a symbol of nationwide moral condemnation of fascism, its ideology, its practice. Sooner or later, such a trial must take place in our country as well. Thus I turn to you, citizen Andropov, with the question: is your organization ready to publish its archives, to grant open access to them?Footnote 1
This letter of protest was signed by the Soviet human-rights activist Larisa Bogoraz and addressed in May 1975 to the head of the KGB, Iurii Andropov. It was a follow-up to the “Moscow Declaration” of February 3, 1974, signed by Andrei Sakharov and a number of prominent dissidents demanding the publication of The Gulag Archipelago in the USSR and the opening of archives.Footnote 2 This time, Bogoraz renewed her call, threatening to collect and publish information about political repression if her demands were not met. Born into a family decimated by Stalin-era terror, herself a convicted dissident, Bogoraz had first-hand experience of political repression.Footnote 3 This, she claimed, gave her the “civil and personal right” to undertake such an activity.Footnote 4 An unexpected response to this letter came a few months later in the form of the visit from Sergei Dediulin, a young Leningrad teacher involved in a number of underground research activities with his friends Arsenii Roginskii and Valerii Sazhin. To Bogoraz’s bemusement, the young man invited her to partake in their project of samizdat historical publication—an offer she took up with enthusiasm, along with her son Aleksandr Daniel΄.Footnote 5 From their collaboration emerged the historical collection Pamiat΄ (Memory), encompassing memoirs, documents and original research on twentieth-century Russian history. Five thick issues of Pamiat΄ appeared in the west from 1978 to 1982, before the editorial team fell prey to repression.Footnote 6 This project was in many regards unique, and yet deeply symptomatic of the context in which it appeared.
Over two decades after Stalin’s demise, Soviet historical scholarship remained dominated by outdated ideological canons and strict political control over the production and publication of research. Although Khrushchev’s destalinization had opened up for discussion some hitherto taboo chapters of the recent past, his ouster in 1964 ended this limited debate and saw a tightening of censorship. Moreover, the Twentieth Party Congress had engendered a “crisis of faith” for the Soviet people towards its own history. Its symptoms were a sentiment of estrangement towards a historiography perceived as heavily falsified and a sense of dispossession of knowledge, confiscated by professional historians. The discrepancy between the glorious official narrative of uninterrupted progress towards the bright horizon of communism and traumatic individual memories of terror, torture, famine, forced collectivization, or deportation caused widespread malaise. But these disturbing memories, whose persistence was deemed a threat to Soviet social cohesion, were not the only ones suppressed. Any alternative interpretation, factoring in the complexity of the past, could be swept under the rug of ideology.
Polly Jones and Denis Kozlov have shown how the Thaw allowed for some of these painful memories to be processed through literary works, and through the letters of their readers.Footnote 7 The debate about the past could never be radically suppressed, and it did survive in a number of ways, either on the level of “permitted dissent,” exemplified by the liberal journal Novyi Mir, or in the underground world of samizdat.Footnote 8 And despite the traditional “literature-centrism” of Russian culture, these dark chapters of the past were not only processed by writers through novels and poems, but also became the object of independent historical research.Footnote 9 In 1971, Roy Medvedev’s study Let History Judge on the “origins and consequences of Stalinism” was published in the west, followed two years later by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973).Footnote 10 In their own ways, both works unveiled whole clusters of forgotten facts, supported by countless testimonies of witnesses.
The historical collection Pamiat΄ was a less well-known project of the late 1970s. Scholarly in form, yet resolutely independent from official Soviet historiography, Pamiat΄ echoed the dissident movement’s longtime call for the “restoration of historical truth.” Born from an ethical urge to save from oblivion whole swathes of the past ignored by official historiography, the collection was meant to fill some of the “blank spots” of Soviet history, with an emphasis on political repression. Yet the collection aimed at occupying a neutral ground, more rigorous in its adherence to scholarly norms and reflecting a broader spectrum of political orientations than either The Gulag Archipelago or Medvedev’s liberal Marxist research. Created by a group of young free-spirited minds involved in samizdat production and collection, Pamiat΄ stood on the margins of legality: as an uncensored product of potentially subversive content, it would have to be published in the west, adding up to the blossoming corpus of tamizdat literature.
The present research builds up on a corpus of primary sources and recent publications on the history of Pamiat΄. Footnote 11 A central concept of our analysis is that of liminality.Footnote 12 We posit that Pamiat΄ constituted itself as a liminal entity, marking the transition between the politicized dissident histories of the 1960s–1970s and a model of independent scholarship closely involving citizens in the production of a shared history. As such, the collection stood at the crossroads of historical scholarship and dissent, professional research and grassroots memory collection; it engaged with both past and present and existed in a liminal space between east and west, samizdat and tamizdat. How did the editorial team construct this unique position, but also navigate the contradictions at the heart of its endeavor? And, accordingly, how did the authorities shape their response to this liminal case of dissent?
We will argue that Pamiat΄’s fate was conditioned by the editorial team’s ambiguous stance, characterized by a somewhat utopian ambition of transcending politics, while embracing the human right movement’s ethos of activism. Remaining hostage to pre-existing power configurations, the editors knew that by consciously overstepping the strict boundaries to the expression of tolerated autonomous thinking, and in particular by publishing abroad, they de facto politicized their project, making repression predictable.
Between Dissent and Independent Scholarship
The Last Dissident Generation
Pamiat΄’s emergence as a liminal entity primarily derived from the liminal character of its founders’ generation, which could be described as “pre-post-Soviet” in its mindset, and yet remained inscribed within what appeared as an immutable system. In Everything Was Forever, Until It Was no More, Alexei Yurchak describes the posture of estrangement from Soviet ideology that he calls “being vnye” (literally “outside”), characteristic, in his view, of “the last Soviet generation.” He defines it as “a condition of being simultaneously inside and outside of some context—such as being within a context while remaining oblivious of it, imagining yourself elsewhere, or being inside your own mind. It may also mean being simultaneously a part of the system and yet not following certain of its parameters.”Footnote 13 Moreover, Yurchak draws a clear distinction between this posture and that of dissent: pro-regime activism and dissent were equally alien to “normal people” as they only represented two faces of the same coin. Both dissidents and activists acted upon an authoritative discourse that “normal people” no longer took at face value. Although Yurchak’s “last Soviet generation” did read oppositional samizdat, “this literature helped them to position themselves in relation to dissident and authoritative discourses.”Footnote 14
Benjamin Nathans and Kevin Platt have criticized Yurchak’s stark dichotomy and called for an exploration of the “historical affinities between dissent and ‘being vnye.’”Footnote 15 We agree with this criticism and would argue that Pamiat΄’s case points to the limits of Yurchak’s division. Indeed, the collection’s identity was constructed on a double rejection: not only of authoritative discourse, but also the counter-discourse of the shestidesiatniki (dissidents of the 1960s), perceived as overly politicized. Moreover, the younger members of Pamiat΄ evolved in a universe that was in many ways similar to their more “normal” peers. And despite their negative attitude towards the regime, they were less concerned with opposing it than carving out their own niches of reality sheltered from ideology.
Arsenii Roginskii (born 1946) was from the outset the pivotal figure of the group. As an experienced, albeit self-taught, historian, endowed with charismatic authority and a great aptitude for organizing resources and talents, he naturally took on the role of Pamiat΄’s informal editor-in-chief and became its most active contributor. Born in internal exile to a father who succumbed to his second arrest in 1952, the young man later moved to Leningrad, where he first encountered Gulag camp survivors in the 1950s and discovered a long forgotten history of resistance to the regime.Footnote 16 During his studies at Tartu University, in Estonia, he stepped into a realm of free-thinking, arguably unique in the Soviet Union.Footnote 17 Under the guidance of the talented literary scholar Iurii Lotman, he discovered the fascinating world of historical research. However, after failing to enroll as a PhD student, Roginskii moved back to Leningrad and took up a position as a Russian literature teacher at an evening school, dedicating his days to independent historical research on the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary movement.Footnote 18 Soon he recommended this arrangement to his new friend Sergei Dediulin (born 1950), originally a chemist by training. Dediulin had a passion for poetry and was an ardent collector of poems and materials related to Anna Akhmatova. Over time, he began compiling a bio-bibliographical dictionary of dissidents, and subsequently assembled an archive of samizdat texts and protest letters.Footnote 19
Increasingly estranged from official ideology and engrossed in their “parallel lives,” Roginskii and his friends experienced a breakthrough in 1974–75, after Solzhenitsyn’s forceful eviction from the country and their subsequent reading of his major opus. Overwhelmed by the “huge solar system of information” opening up before them, they realized that a lot remained to be explored; and potential sources were at hand, available from libraries, private archives, or as oral testimonies.Footnote 20 In the summer of 1975, Dediulin and his friend Valerii Sazhin, an archivist at Leningrad’s Public Library, drew a first sketch of their project, which they conceived as “scholarly proceedings.” After Roginskii agreed to supervise the project, they began to recruit friends to join the editorial team.Footnote 21
Dediulin introduced Roginskii to his university friend Aleksandr Dobkin (1950–1998), also a chemist, and to schoolteacher Feliks Perchenok (1937–1993). A decade older than the others, Perchenok was the son of an “enemy of the people” deported in the 1930s, and had grown out of his initial ideological conformism to embrace independent intellectual exploration.Footnote 22 Although Dobkin and Perchenok were no more historians than Dediulin or Sazhin, they shared the same enthusiasm for patient intellectual labor. With the inclusion of Larisa Bogoraz (1929–2004), a linguist by training, and her son Aleksandr Daniel΄ (born 1951), a mathematics student, the editorial team reinforced its “dissident” component. Although Bogoraz modestly claimed she did not mind playing a minor role, her real contribution was probably more significant than she acknowledged.Footnote 23 Over time, a number of new contributors joined Pamiat΄, from both Leningrad and Moscow, further blurring the lines of what always remained a very informal editorial board.Footnote 24
Remembering those times and the motives that had prompted them to create Pamiat΄, Dediulin recalled a period of “total death, total impossibility”: “This idea [of a samizdat historical collection] was in the air, to resist death itself.” They had neither the wish to emigrate—they “found it interesting here”—nor to provoke the authorities through open protests, but only wanted “Soviet power” to be less of a “hindrance” on their activities.Footnote 25
Neither Official, Nor Dissident
Pamiat΄s foundation meeting took place in January 1976 in Moscow. The discussions revealed three possible orientations for the publication, each of which left its imprint on the collection. Bogoraz conceived of Pamiat΄ as a sort of Chronicle of Current Events turned backwards, focusing on Stalin-era repression.Footnote 26 Dediulin proposed to emphasize the unofficial history of Soviet culture and literature. Finally, Roginskii wanted to create a “historical collection” (sbornik) of broader scope, combining primary sources and analytical material.Footnote 27
The first issue was introduced by a programmatic statement “from the editorial team,” which outlined the publication’s mission.Footnote 28 It began with the observation that “amnesia” had befallen Soviet society.Footnote 29 The authors carefully refrained from accusing the Soviet regime of this “societal ill,” however, laying the blame instead on an undefined “official historiography”—mirroring ideological orthodoxy in the historical field. Neither did they propose to cure this ill through a simple reversal of labels. It would be “sinning against truth” to present Soviet history as an uninterrupted list of victories, just as the “other extreme” would contradict facts.
In order to understand history, one has to abide by this strict rule: there is no, and there cannot be any events, any phenomena and processes, any human fates, that should not become the object of attention and study; there are no facts that anyone would have the right to cover up, to conceal from “the uninitiated.”Footnote 30
Yet official historiography violated this rule in relation to all historical periods, most blatantly concerning the Soviet era. Rather than being an occasional method, “forgetting” was a mandatory rule of any historical research, and a historian’s failure to abide by this imperative was duly punished. Hostages of a system they themselves perpetuated, historians were called on to monitor each other’s compliance and ensure the preservation of a “zone of silence.”Footnote 31 The result was the disappearance of whole strata of facts, but also of entire themes and research questions—all swallowed by myth. Cracks and fissures were showing, however, in what had once been an “integral mythological system.” The new generation had begun to see through these cracks and was animated by “a passion, an irresistible attraction for the authentic, for the rebirth of the forgotten and erased.”Footnote 32
In this context, Pamiat΄’s mission was expressed as a moral calling: the editorial team “consider[ed] it its duty to save from oblivion all the facts and names now condemned to death, to disappearance.” The intrinsic moral value of restoring this repressed memory was apparent in the emphasis on publicizing “the names of the deceased, the persecuted, the slandered, the fates of families, broken or exterminated down to the last, and also the names of those who executed, desecrated, denounced.”Footnote 33 The editors thus tacitly acknowledged that the state’s concealing of crimes was not neutral—nor could be the resurrection of this past. The affirmation that Gulag victims deserved the “great right to stand at the center of a reborn memory” was an implicit reminder that the adversary, in this struggle for the restoration of repressed memory, was the regime that had sent millions of its innocent citizens to the camps.Footnote 34
Pamiat΄’s introduction acknowledged The Gulag Archipelago’s influence “as a stimulation for further research, and not exclusively on the theme of camps and prisons.”Footnote 35 Standing both in continuity and in rupture with this heritage, the editorial team made the Gulag a central theme of Pamiat΄’s first volume. Nevertheless, they distanced themselves from Solzhenitsyn’s absolutist notion of “truth,” conveyed in his 1974 call to “live not by lies.”Footnote 36 Medvedev’s and Solzhenitsyn’s opposite political narratives, if anything, had shown that “truth” was multifaceted and could only be accurately represented by displaying all of its manifold reflections. Both Soviet official and dissident historiographies had been characterized by grand historical narratives, imposing on the reader a certain vision of the past. In Pamiat΄, the emphasis would rather be on the publication of documents and memoirs with commentaries, than on interpretation and generalization. The goal was as much a professionalization as a de-ideologization of dissident historical writing. This was emphasized by the claim, in the first volume, that Pamiat΄ “is neither a political, nor an ideological collection.”Footnote 37
In retrospect, Daniel΄ explained that “our plan was the continuation of [Solzhenitsyn’s] line of work” but “we saw our task to a large extent both in the continuation and in the polemics” with his “ideological construction.”Footnote 38 Roginskii, however, claims he “found it difficult both to polemicize and to agree with” the idea at the center of Solzhenitsyn’s work:
We did not wish to enter into any historiosophical debate and regarded as our task the presentation of facts, commented facts. Already in the first issue, we published documents by an intellectual with liberal democratic (okolokadetskie) views, an orthodox monarchist, a Socialist, and a loyal (pravovernyi) Communist; we were convinced that only from this polyphony could the truth emerge.Footnote 39
Therefore, from the beginning, Pamiat΄’s identity was constructed in reaction both to official historiography, as a biased and selective reflection of the regime’s ideology, and to the shestidesiatniki generation’s partial counter-histories. Beyond the editorial team’s ambition to strike an objective, middle course between these two extremes, however, Pamiat΄ was not a neutral entity, at least not from the Soviet regime’s perspective. Despite its members’ wish to shield themselves from the authorities’ inquisitive glance, Pamiat΄ did not exist in a vacuum: as a result of the existing power configuration, any independent initiative relating to such a core ideological interest as the historical field was automatically considered as potential dissent and had to contend with the regime’s claim to absolute control.
Nor were Pamiat΄’s editors “neutral”—that is, free from entanglements with the broader “human rights movement”—as individuals. Apart from the participation in the project of such seasoned dissidents as Larisa Bogoraz or Natal΄ia Gorbanevskaia (who became Pamiat΄’s representative abroad, following her emigration), the group was closely connected to a number of “suspicious” figures from the KGB’s perspective. Occasional open support of famous dissidents on Pamiat΄’s pages were only further evidence of these “anti-Soviet” links.Footnote 40
Moreover, a central theme of the collection was resistance to the regime in its manifold manifestations, from political dissidence to cultural and scientific resistance to the creation of a new communist society. Finally, by opting for a broad research timeframe spanning the years 1900–1968, the editors willingly blurred the boundaries conventionally used in Soviet historiography: Stalin’s death was no more a watershed in Soviet repressive policies than Sergei Kirov’s murder was. Instances of political repression covered included the early Solovki camps of the 1920s, but also Khrushchev and even Brezhnev-era political trials.
Bridging the Gap Between History and Memory
In modern times, history and memory have usually been set in opposition: while history became synonymous “with the written source and with the growing discipline of historiography,” memory, which had previously been “the very medium, indeed substance of history, became associated with imprecision and distortion.”Footnote 41 Despite the recent boom of interest in memory studies, the relationship of the two terms remains widely debated, but still tends to be characterized in evaluative terms, along the lines of objective versus subjective, authentic versus constructed, or elitist-oppressive versus marginalized-resurgent.Footnote 42 In this very polarized landscape, Pamiat΄’s ambition to combine history’s traditional scholarly research methods with a more grassroots approach to testimony collection, placing an emphasis on lived experience and human memory, further testifies to its posture of liminality. These objectives both derived from Pamiat΄’s “genealogy”: oral testimonies had been central to Solzhenitsyn’s and Medvedev’s dissident histories, and memoirs had long constituted the only uncensored sources about the Stalin era; yet scholarly standards of accuracy and reliability were also precisely what Pamiat΄’s editors felt was lacking in those accounts. This fundamentally novel commitment to syncretism was emphasized in the foreword.
As dissident researchers of the Soviet past, the editors identified both constraints and opportunities in their unique position. Faced with closed archives and reference books constantly rewritten to fit the latest “ideological fashion,” they were compelled to search for alternative sources. Nevertheless, they realized that “no historian ha[d] ever had such abundant material at his disposal,” for the secrets hidden from the people were known by millions of witnesses, many of them still alive, and often eager to share their testimonies.Footnote 43 “Treasures” were also to be found in private archives, through the copious paper trail each individual leaves in a lifetime—all of which constituted “enormous reserves of historical memory,” yet to be explored.Footnote 44 Therefore, Pamiat΄’s editors set as their priority to collect testimonies and to “bring [historical facts] into general scholarly and public use.”Footnote 45
Since the sources published were to be collected from private individuals, the editorial team called on its readers to play an active role, so that this material could be transformed from family folklore into scholarly documentation. The format of a periodical publication would allow readers to enter into a dialogue with the editors by submitting material for publication or offering their remarks, corrections, and comments. The only condition for publication was that new hypotheses be buttressed by convincing factual evidence.Footnote 46
Indeed, Pamiat΄’s editors insisted on the publication’s scholarly ambitions, despite acknowledging the limits of their situation: “By its lack of a publicistic orientation, and by the possibility of combining in one volume materials of the most varied [political] colorations, “Pamiat΄” aims at approximating a research-based (nauchnyi) publication. However, our collection cannot, unfortunately, become a scholarly (nauchnyi) publication in the real sense of the term.Footnote 47
The team explained this severe self-judgment by their lack of access to many sources necessary to verify the information they published. Because they selected texts barred from publication in the USSR, the sources relating to their topics were unavailable or located in closed archives or libraries’ “special sections” (spetskhran). Despite these difficulties, they reaffirmed their striving “for the authenticity and exactitude of the publication.”Footnote 48
Dissident Scholarship
Pamiat΄’s bid for objectivity, neutrality and integrity was both in line with its ethical foundations and yet slightly odd in the landscape of historical samizdat. “Subjectivism” had long been a line of political accusation levelled at non-conformist writers and historians. In reaction, many writers of the Thaw had embraced subjectivity, and dissidents had claimed a right to an attention to the self, the private, as opposed to the collective.Footnote 49 However, The Chronicle of Current Events represented an example of the opposite tendency: the adoption of a factual, objective tone, meant to inspire trust, not only to western readers but also to western observers.Footnote 50 For Pamiat΄’s editors, subjectivity was an intellectual flaw, and the team envisioned its approach as a counter-model to the various non-academic representations of the past circulating in samizdat and tamizdat. It might not have been a coincidence that many of Pamiat΄’s editors had a background in the “hard sciences,” and the crossing of disciplines was a common phenomenon in the dissident movement.Footnote 51 They abided by a strict “scholarly ideal” of their own definition, distinct from the canons of both Soviet and western professional historiographies—the latter more oriented towards narration. In some ways, it constituted a return to an idealized definition of historical scholarship, inspired by nineteenth-century canons, a prerevolutionary model Pamiat΄’s editors were familiar with and valued. In this conception, professional historiography fulfilled a crucial social function by offering objective knowledge about the past.
Nevertheless, there was an inherent tension between this scholarly ideal and the type of content published in Pamiat΄. According to Roginskii, the “ideology” of the collection came about easily: the various sensibilities and views of the team would all find a place on Pamiat΄’s pages; what really mattered was “safeguarding the testimony.” “What mattered most to us was the witness’s voice,” he recalled.Footnote 52 On the one hand, the choice of publishing memoirs and other kinds of ego-documents, mostly infused with suffering, created a particular connection between readers—many of whom had shared or witnessed such tales of woe—and authors. Commentary, on the other hand, restored the necessary distance between the interlocked subjectivities of author and reader.
Therefore, we would argue that, beyond seeking to create a viable alternative to official historiography, Pamiat΄’s editors primarily sought to restore a relationship of trust between their readers and the primary sources upon which any serious account of the past is based. By publishing memoirs and documents of the kind then circulating in samizdat, but accompanied by critical commentaries and introductions, they strove to present facts and voices in the most neutral form, while offering readers the tools to understand them. In this regard, they departed slightly from the dry style of the Chronicle of Current Events, which left it to the reader to draw conclusions from the documents presented.Footnote 53 Many readers valued this approach: a samizdat review thus noted that “the commentaries and notes to ‘Pamiat΄” are almost more interesting than the main text. … [C]ompiled according to the highest professional level attainable without access to archives … [they] read like a novel.”Footnote 54
Although Soviet historical journals also published commented documents, Pamiat΄ differed in its editorial strategy. While Soviet publications often failed to signal omissions and cuts in primary sources, Pamiat΄ pursued maximal transparency. A testimony to this distinctive approach was the publication of Vasilii Shul΄gin’s memoirs Years. In 1979, the Soviet Press and News Agency APN had published in the west a censored version of the memoirs of this famous early twentieth-century political actor. Pamiat΄ offered a fuller version of a few chapters, accompanied by a commentary mentioning Soviet censorship’s cuts. This blatant distortion of a primary source was a direct testimony to the mythmaking mechanisms of Soviet historical scholarship.
The goal of these “editorial precisions” is obvious: their function is to align national history with the scheme that is considered as “the only right one” today in “Soviet historical scholarship.” According to this scheme, everything is simple: the Tsar and his Court enjoyed the pleasures of life carelessly, the bourgeoisie was only concerned with enriching itself and [defending] its “bourgeois” liberties, and no one thought about the people, except for the Bolsheviks. Such a scheme leaves no place for complex debates about the future of Russia, for a diversity of nuances of public opinion, for dynamic games of social forces and moods, for all the tangles of national, religious, state, economic, and other problems, which became interlaced and tied up with such force on the eve of 1917.Footnote 55
This quote reflected the editors’ distinctive political philosophy and scholarly approach. Constructed in reaction to Soviet historiography’s simplifying Marxist schemes, Pamiat΄ lay the foundations for a different model of scholarship. Although it opened hitherto neglected fields of research and unveiled previously taboo themes, such as the history of political repression, independent social movements, and opposition to the regime, its goal was not to create a new grand narrative turning yesterday’s villains into new heroes. Rather, its aim was to draw a more complex picture of a “parallel” reality existing side by side with the fantasized feats and victories of official ideology: hence a shift in emphasis from “heroes” to ordinary citizens drawn into the whirlwind of history. This implied turning to new kinds of sources neglected by official historiography: oral testimonies, memoirs, and correspondences. A significant difference between Pamiat΄ and official Soviet historiography was thus the emphasis on non-heroic figures, acting not as “makers” of a Great History, but as witnesses or victims. Their particular “heroism” was perhaps their capacity to resist being trampled by History and survive to testify about the horrors witnessed—a more complex vision, clearly at odds with that propagated by official historiography. Incidentally, this political philosophy offered less ground for the regime’s characterization of Pamiat΄ as “anti-Soviet”: rather than propagating an anticommunist political vision, it offered multiple perspectives on a complex historical process.
Another way for Pamiat΄ to claim its place among professional publications was to engage in a dialogue with other specialists in its field, both across the Iron Curtain and in the Soviet underground. The fourth issue thus featured two reviews, of Richard Pipes’s Russia under the Old Regime and of Anton Antonov-Ovseenko’s Portret tirana (Portrait of a Tyranny), which testified in complementary ways to Pamiat΄’s ambition to be acknowledged as a professional historical publication. Footnote 56
The review of Pipes’ book criticized the historian’s conception of the formation of a “Patrimonial state” in Imperial Russia and its successive transformation into a “police” and then “totalitarian” state. Attacking this construct’s logical flaws, the reviewer failed to offer any alternative conception, only remarking on the need to compare Russia to other modernizing states (Turkey, Iran, and China).Footnote 57 As Pipes went out of his way to answer the review, Pamiat΄ could claim to engage in a dialogue with a most eminent specialist in the field.Footnote 58
The tone of the review of Antonov-Ovseenko’s Portret tirana was radically different.Footnote 59 The reviewer subjected the dissident historian’s book, based on oral testimonies of Old Bolsheviks, to a harsh critique, qualifying it outright as “anti-scientific” (anti-nauchnyi). Not only was the book’s main thesis unproductive, depicting Stalin as a mere criminal who triumphed over weak revolutionaries of the old Lenin guard, but the work also contained a large number of factual mistakes and contradictions. This review exemplified the kind of politicized samizdat writing in reaction to which Pamiat΄ positioned itself.
As a scholarly project, Pamiat΄ received generally positive appraisals from its Soviet and western public. In his enthusiastic review of the first issue, Lev Kopelev chastised the editors for their undue modesty: of course, the collection was “a scholarly publication, and not only in WHAT it contains, not only by the abundance and importance of new historical information, but also in HOW this information is published, in conscientious commentaries, with a reference apparatus of quality.”Footnote 60 Outlining a few errors made, Kopelev called on the editors not to be discouraged by mistakes or weaknesses in their work, but also not to consider them as “inevitable” or “unimportant ‘details’” either, “for it is often in the small deviations from truth that the great untruth begins.”Footnote 61
Some other samizdat readers, however, were perplexed by Pamiat΄’s lack of a clear ideological line. This appears most clearly in a polemical exchange between two recently emigrated reviewers, R. Blekhman and Iuliia Vishnevskaia. In his critique, Blekhman offered a mixed appraisal of Pamiat΄. Footnote 62 Although he had read the collection “with interest” and found it useful for its content, he judged that Pamiat΄ was nothing more than “an archive, a storage of raw material, a colorful collection of facts, memoirs, documents—of ‘everything,’” but lacking deep reflection and interpretation (osmyslenie).Footnote 63 Repression and emigration had bled Soviet samizdat white; bold political and theoretical reflections had given way to “forgetfulness” (bespamiatstvo); only this could explain Pamiat΄’s success with readers.Footnote 64 Vishnevskaia took issue with this interpretation, judging that Blekhman’s critique demonstrated “our general … disrespect for any form of mental work” and preference for “kitchen conversations on humanity’s fate” over scholarly analysis. Footnote 65
Why does R. Blekhman mention so condescendingly—in passing—“the huge work of research” (po dobyvaniiu) and so insistently the absence in the collection of “generalizations” or “programs”? Indeed, it would seem that if there is something we have aplenty, it is precisely generalizations (often based on thick ignorance) and various types of projects (generally on a cosmic scale). The only thing we have not seen until now is real work.Footnote 66
Another samizdat reviewer, Gr. Baida, was not impressed so much by the volume of material collected as by the impossibility of summarizing its content in a single thesis: “What we have before us is not a selection from a given point of view, not a sample selected along the lines of a ‘glorious,’ ‘dark,’ or ‘forbidden’ past, but the past itself … .”Footnote 67 Pamiat΄ contained countless deviations from the standard narrative opposing perpetrators and victims, which samizdat readers had conveniently accepted as an incontrovertible canon. After absorbing the hefty Gulag Archipelago, could the Russian reader fit into his brain memory itself?Footnote 68
These three appraisals reveal Soviet and émigré readers’ perplexity in the face of a dissident publication of a new type, characterized by the refusal to simplify, a striving for objectivity, and minimal editorial interference in the relation between the text and the reader. This circumstance probably made it equally difficult for the KGB to form an opinion on the publication’s content. Yet Pamiat΄ was not simply an ersatz of independent scholarship; its broader aim was to fulfill a widespread craving for the conservation of memory.
Salvaging Memory
Aleksei Korotaev, a Moscow-based member of the editorial team, insisted that the collection was not about “the ‘study’ [of the past]—there was the word ‘conservation’… conservation of history, conservation of historical testimonies.”Footnote 69 This involved an active search for witnesses’ accounts, memoirs and other sources otherwise doomed to disappear. In this regard, Pamiat΄ echoed a broader passion for rediscovering the past within Soviet society at large. As Denis Kozlov has shown, citizens throughout the country were seized by a curiosity for antiques, the conservation of old monuments, and history.Footnote 70 Unconvinced by official historical narratives, so often at odds with facts, they felt a need for personal exploration of the past. In this context, Pamiat΄ set out to unearth alternative narratives, but also forms of knowledge usually ignored by official historiography, from oral testimonies to little known family tales, verging on myth. An unstated goal of this endeavor was to strengthen the Soviet people’s weakened emotional bond to its own memory. While Soviet propaganda had sought to erase versions of the past that did not fit official narratives, Pamiat΄ reexplored stories connected to childhood memories or familiar tropes, disentangling fiction from facts.
An example of this practice was a section called “Varia,” containing short accounts and anecdotes about repression and camps, collected from acquaintances. In the first issue, Liudmila Alekseeva told the story of “The girl in the sailor’s top,” a little girl who had posed with Stalin in a famous 1936 photograph, and the sad fate that befell her family.Footnote 71 In the second volume, exploring further the theme of childhood myths, Iulii Daniel΄ told the real story of “Gubert in wonderland,” a famous children’s book about a young German boy saved from fascism to be raised in the USSR in the 1930s.Footnote 72 Not only did Gubert exist, but he and his foster family had shared the lot of many Soviet citizens in 1937: arrest and a Gulag sentence. The third issue contained a section entitled “Melochi,” devoted to smaller items such as “From the history of national aviation,” the absurd tale of a Soviet scientist forced to declare plausible that the heavy steam-powered winged ship invented by the Russian Mozhaiskii in 1880 could have been the first flying engine—so that the Soviet Union could claim to have been a pioneer in this field.Footnote 73
Larisa Bogoraz played a central role in collecting stories, testimonies, and manuscripts. Her extensive network of acquaintances proved as valuable as her ability to convince her interlocutors to entrust her with their life stories. She introduced her young colleagues to the famous Khrushchev-era political prisoner Revol΄t Pimenov, who offered material on his case and a book review.Footnote 74 She also recorded Mikhail Levin’s memoirs about his arrest for participating in an imaginary “youth terrorist organization” in 1944.Footnote 75 Moreover, her journeys and stays in Chuna, Siberia, where her husband Anatolii Marchenko was exiled, allowed her to meet many former prisoners and interesting figures. She was struck by her interviewees’ irrepressible desire to speak out:
People I interviewed never objected to the publication of their testimonies, even though they knew what consequences an ill-advised word could have. Founded on lies, the state could not admit that simple citizens threw light on what had really happened, and they designated our activity as anti-Soviet. But the desire to tell was stronger than anything else: my interlocutors wanted people to know, here in the USSR and even more so in the West, so that [people] would stop supporting the Kremlin.Footnote 76
Bogoraz also occasionally went on “missions” to collect materials: her travels took her as far as the Kemerovo region in Siberia, where she met a community of tolstovtsy. Footnote 77 “Everywhere I went … I was met with trust. My name was known to these people from Western radio broadcasts.”Footnote 78 Far from lacking material, the editorial team could even afford to order pieces, for instance from former Khrushchev-era political prisoners Iurii Gastev and Veniamin Iofe about their famous trials.Footnote 79
However, these connections, which soon stretched across the Iron Curtain, could also draw unwelcome attention from the KGB. Bogoraz resorted to carefully thought-through strategies when she joined the editorial team for editorial work in Leningrad. Still, she expressed her astonishment that despite “all the intensive and broad communication that the collection of material imposed, we managed to keep this work secret.”Footnote 80
The Dangerous Liaisons
Conspiracy networks
Indeed, a crucial element of Pamiat΄’s functioning was the creation of a broad network of readers-contributors, primarily in Moscow and Leningrad. Starting from the second issue, Pamiat΄’s editors started reaching out to older generations. For instance, the journalist Mark Popovskii, whose son Konstantin had contributed to the first issues, agreed to the publication in Pamiat΄ of three chapters of his book on the repressed scientist Nikolai Vavilov, accompanied by an interview with him.Footnote 81 Among the new contributors were also Aleksandr Khrabrovitskii, a renowned expert on the works of Vladimir Korolenko, a writer critical of the Soviet regime, or Evgenii Gnedin, a former cadre of the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs in the 1930s, repressed during the Great Terror.Footnote 82 David Batser, a member of socialist underground circles in the 1920s, became particularly enthusiastic about the project and contributed actively to Pamiat΄, also taking part in editorial work.Footnote 83 Informal contacts with professional historians played an important role as well. The most supportive was the retired dissident historian Mikhail Gefter, who gave precious insights to the group and became “virtually a member of the editorial committee.”Footnote 84 Roginskii also appealed to the historian of literature Iakov Lur΄e, whose son Lev was a contributor to Pamiat΄, and Vladimir Pugachev, from Saratov University, Roginskii’s friend and mentor since 1965.
Despite the outwardly apolitical orientation of their work, Pamiat΄’s editors knew from the outset that they engaged in a dangerous venture, not specifically illegal and yet punishable: “I said that I am ready to participate … although I understood that this was not a harmless (nebezopasnaia) thing,” remembered Dmitrii Zubarev from Moscow.Footnote 85 Security measures were central to the collection’s survival. To avoid identification by the KGB, the team resorted to a number of tactics, from the use of pseudonyms and “conspiracy apartments” to the strictest secrecy in relation to their channels of communication with the west and manuscript caches.Footnote 86 Sometimes, secrecy imperatives forced the authors not only to hide behind pseudonyms, but even to “encode” sensitive data about documents, such as authorship or conservation location, which could give away the editors or endanger the authors. Communication of sensitive information within the editorial team was restricted to the bare minimum: Zubarev was thus dismayed when he accidentally overheard a conversation about Pamiat΄’s channels of transmission through the French embassy.Footnote 87 Foreigners who served as couriers to the west were also instructed to take the strictest precautions. Such advice appears in a letter to Gisela Reichert-Borowsky, a West-German philologist who repeatedly helped the Pamiat΄ team: initial contact with Roginskii had to take place through a common acquaintance, no information should be given on the phone, and in order to avoid wiretapping, meetings should happen outside, or in a neutral space, with communication taking place exclusively in writing.Footnote 88
In retrospect, Roginskii expressed his satisfaction that these security measures had borne fruit: no material related to his informants among elderly oppositionists was ever found during house searches. As for his visits, he kept them as discreet as possible, even from his fellow editors. He feared that, should a penal case be instigated against Pamiat΄, the KGB would begin “to hassle the old men (triasti starikov),” but the KGB’s evidence was restricted to surveillance data.Footnote 89 In her memoirs, Bogoraz compared these conspiracy measures to a “game,” speculating upon the reasons of the KGB’s delayed response: they could have identified the whole team earlier but, visibly, waited for more substantial proof or simply decided at a certain moment to crush any independent activity within Soviet society.Footnote 90
We would argue that the KGB’s response was also directly related to Pamiat΄’s liminal nature: while political dissent could easily be qualified as anti-Soviet, the collection did not fit any clear-cut categories. As he was being questioned in 1979, Aleksei Korotaev was told that it was “not an anti-Soviet publication, but it undermines the Soviet Union’s interests.”Footnote 91
Between East and West
The Doctor Zhivago affair following the attribution of the Nobel Prize to Boris Pasternak, and the trial against the writers Iulii Daniel΄ and Andrei Siniavskii in 1966, had clearly demonstrated that the Soviet authorities regarded uncensored publication abroad as reprehensible, if not outright treasonous. These affairs showed the porosity of the line separating arts from politics.Footnote 92 Although the content of tamizdat works was not necessarily directly political, publication across the Iron Curtain, sometimes with direct involvement and financing by western governments and intelligence agencies or by anti-Soviet groups such as NTS, was regarded as potentially hostile to the Soviet regime.Footnote 93
Yet tamizdat had also become the most efficient vehicle to counter censorship and reach audiences on both sides of the Iron Curtain.Footnote 94 Although the related phenomena of samizdat and tamizdat are usually regarded as distinct, by the end of the 1970s, they had come to overlap significantly in the USSR. With the mass smuggling of printed copies and photocopies of tamizdat books, the typed manuscripts of the 1960s had lost currency. Not only did tamizdat allow for the circulation of longer texts, but it simplified large-scale reproduction. With the emigration of a significant portion of the samizdat-reading community, publication abroad increasingly became a staple of the Soviet unofficial sphere, uniting readers within a “transnational literary community” stretching across the Iron Curtain.Footnote 95 Given these circumstances and its considerable volume, Pamiat΄ could only exist by reaching out to Soviet and émigré audiences through tamizdat.
Pamiat΄’s journey to the west involved a number of new actors, starting with Natal΄ia Gorbanevskaia, famous dissident and founder of the Chronicle, who had accepted to act as the collection’s representative abroad upon emigrating to Paris in late 1975. By the following fall, the first issue of Pamiat΄, consisting of a thick, six-hundred-page volume, was ready to be sent for publication. However, it took two years until the tamizdat version appeared at “Khronika Press” in New York, a publishing house directed by Valerii Chalidze, a recently-emigrated human rights activist. The team’s interactions with the publisher testified to the difficulties of monitoring a complex publication process from afar, with only sporadic—and initially erratic—postal communication. Unsatisfied with the publication’s format and a number of omissions in the final version, the editorial board was definitely outraged by Chalidze’s arbitrary decision to publish separately a key text from Pamiat΄’s second issue.Footnote 96 In January 1978, the team asked Gorbanevskaia to find a new publisher, insisting that “for those who live here, P[amiat΄], being published from here, has enough of a cultural and moral significance” to justify their expectations of respectful mutual relations with their editor.Footnote 97
Once steady underground channels of communications were put in place, the editorial team turned to Vladimir Alloi, a Paris-based friend of Dediulin’s, who offered to publish the collection at YMCA-Press, the publishing house of The Gulag Archipelago headed by Nikita Struve.Footnote 98 An agreement was reached in time for the second issue and Alloi edited the four last volumes of the collection, first at YMCA-Press, and then at “La Presse Libre.”Footnote 99
The three reviews of Pamiat΄ published by Michel Heller, a Russian émigré historian, testify to the warm reception of the collection by anti-Communist émigrés.Footnote 100 Heller’s reviews emphasized Pamiat΄’s contribution to the history of Soviet political repression, noting in addition that the project was in itself “a form of spiritual resistance.”Footnote 101 Pamiat΄ was not always affordable for its Russian émigré target readership, however, many of whom were in a difficult financial situation. One reader, who had recently emigrated from the USSR to New York, recounted spending a large portion of his first three weekly immigrant allowances on three issues of Pamiat΄, after finally locating a few copies in a Russian store.Footnote 102
Unsurprisingly, the collection’s publication was not a lucrative venture either. Once, Bogoraz appealed to Gorbanevskaia to look for donors to help support the editorial board financially. The editors covered their own expenses, and benefited from the help of a few hired samizdat typists, but their modest means were insufficient to cover the purchase of typewriters, a tape-recorder for interviews, train tickets for frequent trips between Leningrad and Moscow, as well as numerous expenses linked to the typing of thousands of pages.Footnote 103 Additional help came from sympathizing academics, as well as from petty income sources, such as the sale of coffee table books sent by friends from abroad.Footnote 104
Another advantage of tamizdat was to offer new spaces of dialogue. Wishing to go beyond the one-way communication from author to reader through text, Pamiat΄’s editors called on readers to send contributions, indicating Gorbanevskaia’s address in Paris. The call was thus ostensibly addressed, albeit not restricted, to Russian émigrés from the “third wave” of emigration, among whom were many former dissidents. Ann Komaromi has identified Pamiat΄’s call for reader participation as a feedback mechanism ensuring a greater reliability of the information published. She concludes that this “feedback loop” could not be “realized on a large scale,” as the collection’s circulation was limited “to the circle of the intelligentsia in Moscow and Leningrad who knew the editors and their work.”Footnote 105 While we agree that this original ambition of the team remained largely unrealized in the USSR, where the collection’s circulation was limited, we would argue that the call itself was directed less to Soviet readers than to émigrés. Admittedly, the team probably underestimated the difficulties of secret communication between Paris and the USSR, the considerable time lapse between publications, and their limited pool of readers.
Nevertheless, this feedback mechanism did work on a small scale: the fourth volume contained a small section entitled “Correction to the previous issues of Pamiat΄,” based on a letter from Boris Weil.Footnote 106 Sometimes, feedback could even come prior to final publication, as Vladimir Alloi started publishing advance excerpts from the future volume in the Russian émigré press. In January 1980, Russkaia Mysl΄ thus published some advance “Excerpts from the Diaries of Z.” Temira Pakhmus, a literary expert from the University of Illinois, promptly wrote to the journal to identify what she recognized as Zinaida Gippius’s “Petersburg diaries.” She was unaware that the editorial team had deliberately removed Gippius’s name to avoid betraying their source (the Leningrad Public Library Manuscript Section, where Sazhin worked).Footnote 107 As Pakhmus’s letter appeared in Russkaia Mysl΄, Alloi was forced to reproduce it in the introduction to Gippius’s diary in Pamiat΄’s fourth volume.Footnote 108
Moreover, we would argue that the editorial committee’s stake in reader involvement was not limited to this feedback mechanism, and also took inspiration from The Chronicle of Current Events, which collected new information through its readers.Footnote 109 They expected readers to actively contribute to the publication by sending new material, and they were arguably successful. For instance, in March 1979, Gorbanevskaia received a letter from Sergei Sigrist. This former Professor at Leningrad University was one of the accused in the “Academic Affair,” which led to the arrest of dozens of scholars in 1930. Condemned to five years of internal exile, he was sent to the front in 1942. A fierce anti-Communist, Sigrist went over to the enemy and became a propagandist of the Vlassov Army in Europe. After the war, he moved to Rome where he lived under the name “Sergio Grotoff,” teaching at a Catholic university and publishing in various émigré journals under the pseudonym “Aleksei Rostov.”Footnote 110 Having read an article by Voznesenskii (Perchenok) on the history of repression in the Russian Academy of Sciences, Sigrist sent Gorbanevskaia his own article on the history of the “Academic Affair.”Footnote 111 His text appeared in the fourth issue, along with a memoir by Antsiferov, also accused in the Academic Affair, and introduced by new materials by Perchenok on the history of the Academy of Sciences.Footnote 112
However, those who contacted Pamiat΄’s editorial team in later years often came too late: the historian Iurii Fel΄shtinskii offered in 1983 to copy documents from Lev Trotskii’s archival fond at Harvard University—but by then Roginskii had been arrested.Footnote 113 Corrections and additions sent to Gorbanevskaia in reaction to publications also came mostly after 1982. Indeed, the article that raised the most reactions from readers appeared in the fifth—and last—issue of Pamiat΄. Probably the first historical study of postwar opposition, it was authored by Khrushchev-era political prisoner Veniamin Iofe and entitled, “Materials for the history of autonomous political associations in the USSR after 1945.”Footnote 114 Written on the basis of testimonies from their participants, it provided an overview of the most famous “political affairs” of the 1950s–60s. Many readers expressed their interest and added precisions and new information. Alla Tumanova wrote from Canada about a youth dissident circle founded in 1950 in which she had participated, unknown to Iofe but well-known in the west.Footnote 115 George Ben, a witness at Viktor Trofimov’s trial, offered to meet the article’s author and put him into contact with other witnesses living in emigration.Footnote 116
Late Soviet Unofficial Scholarship on Trial
These extensive contacts across the Iron Curtain and the unwelcome attention Pamiat΄ received among émigré circles was not to the Soviet authorities’ liking. Even before the publication of the first issue, in 1977, Roginskii was subjected to a house search. Two years later, in March 1979, the whole team was under fire. Except for the seizure of a portion of Dediulin’s archive unrelated to Pamiat΄, these searches and subsequent police interrogations yielded little.Footnote 117 They were, however, only one of many scare tactics and served as a convenient pretext to dismiss Roginskii from his teacher’s position—a decision that he attempted to contest in front of a tribunal, to no avail.Footnote 118 Dediulin also had to resign “of his own accord.” Contacts with the KGB became a common occurrence: Sazhin remembered being called for interrogations “almost every ten days” at some point, as a KGB agent tried to recruit him to inform on the group.Footnote 119 Conspicuous tailing and surveillance increased.
Fearing an increasingly likely arrest, the group decided to use the weapon of publicity. Bogoraz and Gorbanevskaia thus launched a campaign in Dediulin’s support in the west after his house search, seeking to protect him and, indirectly, Pamiat΄, through maximal publicity.Footnote 120 Although Dediulin took his distances from the editorial board, his apartment was searched twice again in 1980. He eventually yielded to pressure, emigrating to the west in March 1981.Footnote 121 Roginskii, who was presented with a similar ultimatum in April 1981, refused to obey. The consequences were soon felt: in June, he was excluded from the Leningrad Library under the pretext that one of the documents he had consulted had been published illegally abroad in a “foreign anti-Soviet publication.” On August 12, 1981, he was arrested. The official charge held against him was the “falsification of accreditation letters” to get access to archives.Footnote 122
Despite a considerable campaign of support for Roginskii in the west, orchestrated in particular by Dediulin from Paris, the trial conducted in December 1981 resulted in a sentence of four years in detention. Roginskii did not attempt to contest the accusation of falsification of accreditation letters, although several key witnesses at the trial appeared suspiciously supportive of the man who had allegedly forged their signatures, and only a third expert was able to “demonstrate” Roginskii’s culpability.Footnote 123 Pamiat΄ itself was hardly mentioned at the trial and not explicitly linked to the Roginskii affair, which had been labelled a criminal rather than a political case.Footnote 124 Yet the accusation contained the ambiguous mention that Roginskii visited archives to get access to manuscripts “in order to publish them in Soviet and foreign publications.”Footnote 125 And in an article denouncing Roginskii’s “crookery” in the Soviet media, Pamiat΄ was explicitly designated as a “collection of articles” published by an American press, containing documents copied by Roginskii from the Leningrad Public Library.Footnote 126
Why was Pamiat΄ not targeted as such? Was it by lack of substantial evidence? Although one may only speculate, it is likely that the case for Pamiat΄ being “anti-Soviet” was not strong enough, and the authorities trusted that “decapitating” the editorial committee would be sufficient to stop the publication.Footnote 127 As for Roginskii’s fellow editors, they were again subjected to KGB interrogations, clearly with the goal of intimidating them. Nevertheless, Dobkin took up Pamiat΄’s editorship and, with Perchenok’s help, prepared a sixth volume. However, in 1985, as the KGB threatened to renew Roginskii’s sentence if the new issue came out, they set the project aside, transferring some materials to the Paris-based journal Minuvshee, created by Alloi on Pamiat΄’s model.
We have argued that Pamiat΄ represented a liminal entity, and as such it was not only connected to a previous stage of politicized dissent, but also heralded a new era of mass reappropriation of a suppressed past. This appeared most strikingly in Roginskii’s “Last Word” at his trial. In this eloquent text written in prison, he pleaded for the liberation of historians from the shackles imposed by the state on historical research. Contesting that documents published in the west could be used for anti-Soviet aims, he argued that “a document, if it is reproduced faithfully and commented on objectively, remains a document, independently of where and by whom it is published … and only the free study of these archives and their free publication will help us learn the truth about our past.”Footnote 128 His main message, however, was to call for a greater opening of archives, not simply to professional historians, but also to common citizens with an interest for historical research.
A demonstration of the porosity of the official and unofficial fields was the publication just a month later in Sovetskaia Kul΄tura of an article by the famous literary scholar Marietta Chudakova strikingly similar to Roginskii’s “Last Word” in content.Footnote 129 Although Roginskii never expected this speech to bring him fame, he believed that “the problem of access to information, to archives, is becoming a central issue.”Footnote 130 This conviction would become central to his involvement, starting from 1989, in the creation of the organization “Memorial,” which emerged during Perestroika as a nation-wide movement for the commemoration and study of the history of Soviet-era repression. Creating a dedicated public archive and library where citizens and researchers could study various sources on the past was one of the objectives of this organization, which elected Roginskii to its head in 1998.Footnote 131
